JIM HOFFMAN: A critique of Ryan Mackey’s essay
Posted by Anders den mai 18, 2008
Jim Hoffman / 9-11 Research:
Maintaining the Mirage: A Foray Into the Fallacy Factory of the Demolition Deniers
A critique of Ryan Mackey’s essay: “On Debunking 9/11 Debunking: Examining Dr. David Ray Griffin’s Latest Criticism of the NIST World Trade Center Investigation”
Introduction
In early 2007, Dr. David Ray Griffin published his fourth book on the crimes of September 11, 2001, Debunking 9/11 Debunking the third chapter of which is titled The Disintegration of the World Trade Center: Has NIST Debunked the Theory of Controlled Demolition? That chapter is the subject of Ryan Mackey’s lengthy article reviewed here.
Someone reading just the Introduction or Discussion of Mackey’s 180-page article might easily conclude that that the entire article is composed of insults, straw-man arguments, innuendo, and appeals to authority. However, the article contains a range of types of arguments, from the obviously falacious ones to cleverly misleading ones to superficially persuasive ones having some didactic value. This review will put Mackey’s arguments in context, reframed by the physical reality of the event.
This review is not a comprehensive critique of Mackey’s article. If it were it would be a sizable book, given the article’s length, and the number of counter-arguments its many arguments — valid and fallacious — invite. Instead, I will step back to take a broader view of the question of what destroyed the Twin Towers, while focusing on some of the arguments made by Griffin and Mackey pertaining to that question. I will treat NIST’s investigation only peripherally, having addressed it in some detail in Building a Better Mirage and A Reply to the NIST’s Answers to Frequently Asked Questions.
For this critique I use an organization that departs from both that of Griffin’s chapter and Mackey’s article, in order to bring the focus back to the core issue: what caused the swift and total destruction of the World Trade Center. Mackey’s long-winded article, like most reviews professing to debunk the case for controlled demolition, conceals that issue by redirecting readers into a bottomless well of exaggerated details and a variety of fallacies that depart ever further from the core evidence that speaks to the question at hand.
This review first outlines a series of arguments for controlled demolition, examining arguments by Mackey in relation to those arguments; then provides a “global analysis” of Mackey’s methods. This organization is intended to extract Mackey’s substantive and relevant arguments from his abundant unsupported and gratuitous assertions and characterizations regarding Griffin’s work, and to highlight and address those arguments.
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