(NOTE: There is an error in the following. Please see the correction in the comments below.)

Andrew Cockburn, I was going to challenge you to a debate, but I see now you do an even better job of dismantling yourself.

One week you attack 9/11 skepticism using every cheap shot worthy of a Limbaugh, reducing it all to a laughable caricature that you yourself must recognize as unfair. (The families who lobbied for the 9/11 Commission ended up condemning it? Really? How would a busy fellow like you know that?)

The next week, you try to compensate - for the lost subscriptions, perhaps? - by reaching for the "Art Students," as though the only intelligence agencies who could have known that 9/11 was in the works would have had to be Israeli.

Now you present this great profile of Rumsfeld in the 1990s, the little emperor of a self-appointed Shadow Government who enjoyed nothing more than playing Strangelove in a bunker, firing off all his missiles and killing everyone. (READ MORE...)

Manuel Garcia, a national weapons lab scientist, has attempted to debunk 9/11 skeptics with a defense of the NIST appearing in Alexander Cockburn's leftist magazine, Counterpunch.
Garcia's analyses of the fall times and heat issues in the trade center collapses is quite skimpy and mostly irrelevant. I have talked with more than one physicist who is extremely skeptical of the government claims and hence wary of Garcia's analyses.
Cockburn also writes a column for the progressive magazine The Nation, which recently ran a lead article by English professor Christopher Hayes accusing 9/11 skeptics of fomenting paranoia. Physicist Josh Mitteldorf has publicly questioned Hayes' reasoning.
Garcia, who has championed the cause of Wen Ho Lee and fought polygraph testing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has a PhD in aeronautical and mechanical engineering from Princeton University and has done plasma physics research for the weapons lab, where he has worked since 1978.
Previously, the noted scientist and socialist Noam Chomsky has pooh-poohed 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Further details are posted on my blog at znewz1.blogspot.com.
A relevant post is found at