"Conspiracy theories challenged in the main stream"

[Peter Presland]

Some more follow-up to the NG piece. The NY Times previewed it which is interesting in that it gives more space to a 'Truther' - and a fairly credible one too - than you might expect - that's Murdoch no less! - do I smell somthing going on here? Now the following has appeared on David Steele's 'Public Intelligence' Blog - he of 20 years service with US military intelligence and a fierce critic of the official narrative:

The 9/11 Official Story Runs Out of Steam?
NY Post's Best

by Sander Hicks (pictured in insert by Post at right)
(NEW YORK) You know the world is really coming to an end when the New York Post lets this reporter, a leading 9/11 Truth investigator, be the lead source in their review of the new anti-Truther documentary. The National Geographic Channel’s “9/11: Science and Conspiracy” debuts tonight, Monday, August 31. It is so pathetic, it should be scored a victory for the truth movement.
“9/11 Science and Conspiracy” is fundamentally-misconceived, half hearted, poorly planned, slapped together, badly written, mis-cas, and self-defeating. It contains four scientific “experiments” pulled off in the New Mexico desert by a bunch of pyrotechnic geeks, the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC).
Should we gloss over EMRTC’s ties to defense contractors, FEMA or
Homeland Security? EMRTC Executive Dennis Hunter is the liaison to southern California military psy-ops producer SAIC. (Yes, kids, that SAIC, the one where right-wing anthrax suspect Steven Hatfill labored away alongside Jerry Hauer, who later became Giuliani’s mysterious “bioterror expert.”)
Yet, on camera, EMRTC come off as hapless and inept. They can’t get their rocket to hit the broad side of a concrete board structure. When it does, it teaches us nothing about what hit the Pentagon anyway. Appropriately enough, EMRTC then blow up the concrete board structure with a powerful little bomb, to show what a “missile” at the Pentagon
might have done. (If that missile was a bomb inside a concrete board box in the New Mexico desert. Get it? No?)
EMRTC then do “tests” with materials that are purported to be sort-of World Trade Center-related, but they don’t use the right stuff here either. To disprove that nano-thermite could have been used in the destruction of the World Trade Center, they choose to use the much milder material, plain thermite. They light it on fire and try to damage a steel pillar. When the pillar is still standing, the doc cuts to 9/11 truth leader Richard Gage who says something like “well that
experiment was asinine. What a waste of time.”
I love this part: the arrogant, British sounding female narrator then intones, “Instead of accepting the facts presented by experts, truthers continue their search for elusive answers.” But this documentary never presents any controlled demolition “experts.” They promised to interview Chemist Kevin Ryan, a real scientist fired for standing up against the 9/11 cover-up at Underwriters Laboratories in 2004. But the Ryan interview never happened. And Ryan recently wrote at 911 Blogger about Brent Blanchard, the documentary’s one controlled demolition “expert”: “As a photographer for Implosion World, Blanchard is often consulted for these tabloid programs when a ‘demolition expert’ is needed. But no evidence has ever been given that the real experts allow photographers to plan and implement their high-rise demolitions.
Hopefully, the N.G. Channel will feature interviews with experts who actually have planned and implemented such operations, like Danny Jowenko, who stated that WTC 7 was a demolition.”
Four years ago, I was attacked in the NY Post for writing “Big Wedding” and opening a fair-trade coffeehouse that dared discuss taboo topics. I was labeled THE 9/11 JAVA JACKASS in a big headline across the page. But today, I was given a generous amount of space to denounce the 9/11 cover-up. Rupert Murdoch owns BOTH the New York Post and the National Geographic Channel. Could it be that he wants to support 9/11 Truth a bit now, as an experiment in destabilizing Obama? After all, Obama’s recent denunciations of 9/11 Truth have gone beyond Bush’s. Obama is closer to Wall Street and is such a media darling, he brazenly attended the elite Bilderberg summit during the campaign.
Do they know the truth? Let’s assume they do. The media are full of smart professionals who have made a choice not to rock the boat. They know that the truth movement has real science on our side: red nano-thermite chips found in four out of four samples tested. Those results were published in a peer-reviewed paper, by respected scientists like
Kevin Ryan, Stephen Jones, Niels Harrit, et. al. This nano-thermite study is the 500 lb. gorilla in the room. It’s suffering a total media blackout in the US. Yet you feel its presence if you read between the lines of the New York Post review. I spoke about the Harrit paper often with the reporter, but it didn’t survive the editor’s cut. In the documentary, the producers never mention the peer-reviewed nano-thermite study. When you can’t win with science, you chose pseudo-
science.
There’s plenty to get angry about here. But wait. Perhaps we need to not be so quick to judge the behavior of Murdoch’s media machines. Perhaps this is the closest that we can expect them to come to the truth. If they can’t look at the science dead-on, perhaps the best they can do is the gambit of sending up a weak resistance.

Some good stuff in that - though personally I'm so long-in-the-tooth with it all by now that I think I prefer Ed's wit on the NG thing