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Jan 23, 2010  
Live Debate: Architect Richard Gage, AIA, vs. Explosives Expert Ron Craig, Round Two
— Graham Pardun
 
"We've got to follow the truth, no matter where it leads us." – Richard Syrett

Once again, Richard Syrett of AM740 Zoomer Radio graciously hosted a duel between AE911Truth founder Richard Gage (American Institute of Architects) and Ron Craig (International Society of Explosives Engineers) on January 10, 2010. Once again, the topic of the debate was "What caused the World Trade Center towers to collapse?" and, once again, Mr. Craig faced a tsunami of scientific evidence which left foundationless his assertion that no explosives were used in the destruction of the WTC buildings on 9/11.

Mr. Craig, a twenty-five year Hollywood veteran, is a guru of special effects, having worked on over fifty feature films, including Cybermaster (1999), Striking Poses (1999), and, most recently, Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy (2004). He is also a university lecturer, and, in his own words, "an expert in homemade explosives and booby-traps."
Mr. Craig's use of homemade logic in the debate unfortunately got him stuck in his own rhetorical booby-traps. We were surprised, for example, to hear him deny outright the existence of molten metal at the base of the three WTC towers. He said that molten metal "did not occur" and that its existence would have been "physically impossible" – and he said this in the face of the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses, and photographic and physical evidence to the contrary (which Mr. Gage pointed out again and again, and urged him to consider, to no avail). Surprisingly, Mr. Craig also rejected the US Geological Survey's findings of iron-rich microspheres pervasive in WTC dust. Mr. Gage affirmed USGS's statement that these can only be the result of previously molten iron that is airborne, and explained how this is direct evidence of an explosive force in combination with an aluminothermic (thermite) event – but since Mr. Craig wouldn't even accept the existence of these microspheres, the point fell on deaf ears.

Unable to accept this body of evidence, Mr. Craig was forced to make a flowing series of nonsensical statements, hoping that the listeners would accept his tone of voice as a substitute for facts or reason. (And here we point out that Craig implicitly acknowledges that the official explanation for the destruction of the WTC buildings is unable to account for the evidence.) Strangely typical of his side of the debate was this bizarre, but calmly and confidently stated, opinion: "Fire, when it attacks the connections to a building, is actually causing a building to deconstruct. And that was what was occurring in buildings 1, 2 and 7." Whatever world Ron Craig is living in, it's not the world in which Richard Gage and AE911Truth's professional signatories have thousands of years of combined building design and construction experience. Craig made no attempt to account for the many features of the destruction of all three high-rises that only occur in controlled demolitions: their speed, their evenness, their explosiveness, and their thoroughness, with (in the case of WTC 7) virtually all of the building mass falling through the path of greatest resistance. He merely waved his magic wand and said that fire can cause all these things, even though it would have been completely unprecedented for it to have done so to overbuilt tall steel-framed structures (most of which were not on fire!) even once, much less three times on the same day.

If Mr. Craig could be said to have had a core criticism of our side of the debate, it was this:

1) If he himself had engineered the destruction of the WTC buildings using explosives, he would have done it a certain way, and the destruction would have exhibited certain specific features (half the windows in Manhattan would have been blown out as a result, to quote one feature Mr. Craig highlighted).

2) The destruction of the WTC buildings did not exhibit those specific features.

3) Therefore, no one engineered the destruction of the WTC buildings using explosives.

In his own words: "If the amount of explosives that were required to bring down [Building] One or [Building] Two [were used], the signature would be completely different than what we saw. That's science, the math doesn't lie. There's a certain amount of explosives required to bring down the buildings, if you use explosives on every beam, and if you did that you would use explosives on every beam and that would be completely different than what we saw."

This, of course, is nonsense. Mr. Craig's proposed method of demolishing a building is not the only conceivable one. The question at hand is not: "Did the perpetrators of 9/11 destroy the WTC buildings using Ron Craig's technique of blasting every single column and beam with conventional high explosives?" The question is, rather: "Can all the forensic evidence, and the manner in which the buildings collapsed, be accounted for without supposing the use of explosives?" The answer is a resounding No – and that's why we're calling for a real investigation.

Mr. Syrett, at the beginning of the show, lamented how the heated rhetoric on both sides of the wider 9/11 debate often makes it very difficult for the typical newcomer to get information that he or she can easily and accurately evaluate. We could not agree more, and we sincerely thank Mr. Craig for his calm, polite, and civil manner of debate. But we need to go beyond merely polite discourse. We need to work from the same body of evidence, using the same laws of physics, and the same principles of logic. Only then can we help one another walk further down the path of truth.

Listen to the debate