Sad, isn't it? - Jon

Bill Lueders: Journalists under no obligation to please Barrett, '9/11 truth-seekers'

Source: madison.com

A letter to the editor — 8/22/2007 11:58 am

Dear Editor: Even before I read Kevin Barrett's gratuitous swipe at Isthmus in his Aug. 11 letter, I was inclined to defend The Capital Times against the attacks being leveled by the so-called 9/11 truth-seekers.

Focusing on an interesting and revealing moment -- an expression of pure paranoia by a presenter at a recent conference -- is not, as Barrett and others claim, an abdication of journalistic responsibility. It's what a good reporter should do.

As these critics noted, anyone with access to the Internet can obtain uncritical and comprehensive coverage of this conference, and the far-fetched theories that underlie it. The reporter was quite right to call attention to a moment that cut through the facade.

Last year, when Isthmus -- "to its eternal shame and perhaps its eventual prosecution," asserts Barrett -- ran a fair, balanced look at the 9/11 conspiracy mongers, the response was similar. Barrett, perhaps the state's leading beneficiary of tolerance for free speech, threatened the paper and harassed the writer, disseminating his home phone number.

And now Barrett invokes Nuremberg to vent his disapproval of The Capital Times' coverage, saying "journalists who act as propagandists for war crimes may one day find themselves on the scaffold." Yikes.

News flash: It is not the obligation of journalists to please people like Kevin Barrett. A journalist's responsibility is to the story. And when it comes to "9/11 truth-seekers," the story is that these people -- at least some of them -- are as crazy as they are mean.

Bill Lueders, Isthmus news editor

Brian Marx: Barrett and cohorts ignore simple, plausible 9/11 explanations

Source: madison.com

Dear Editor: I have finally reached the point where I cannot be silent and I must speak out about these 9/11 conspiracists. As a daily reader of the Cap Times, I have seen numerous articles by Kevin Barrett and other 9/11 conspiracists. The complete foundation of their conspiracy theory is false, misleading and most of all unscientific.

Kevin Barrett has said that World Trade Center Building 7 is the smoking gun. All the evidence his fellow conspiracists provide are pictures of the collapse and a story. The explanations provided by U.S. government agencies are more than adequate.

In the case of WTC 7, the blast of hot debris from WTC 1 kindled fires in WTC 7 and caused an emergency power system to feed the burning to the point of building collapse. One of the building's major bridging supports was heated to the point of exhaustion by the burning of an abundant store of hydrocarbon (diesel) fuel, pumped from the sub-basement by the backup system and spraying through a torn pipe into the fire next to two of the building 's three major structural trusses.

It has been calculated that the diesel fuel spraying at a rate of 75 gallons a minute ultimately released energy equivalent to that of an explosion of 367 tons of TNT. I see no smoking gun here.

Another common argument of the conspiracists is that no planes crashed into the Pentagon. Well, besides the fact that many people witnessed this and video exists of the planes hitting the buildings, why is it that several of the passengers on the plane were identified via dental remains found at the Pentagon?

It is unnecessary to search for supernatural and make-believe stories to explain real phenomena.

The personal attacks on the Cap Times by the 9/11 conspiracists are ridiculous and are the result of a lack of both evidence and a sane story about the true causes of 9/11.

Brian Marx, Madison