Friday, July 1, 2011

Charlie Veitch, WTF???



The latest person to be branded a shill by fundamentalist truthers is Charlie Veitch of The Love Police who recently announced to all his followers that he no longer believes 9/11 was an inside job. This is especially weird because no less than two weeks ago he said the scientific evidence presented by Richard Gage had fully convinced him that the towers were demolished. In the above clip he explains why he's changed his mind.

I'm assuming Charlie didn't know this was being recorded because he revealed something I'm guessing he wasn't supposed to. Apparently the BBC are making a program called "9/11 Conspiracy Roadtrip" about five 'truthers', including Charlie, touring the states investigating 9/11.

Update:

Conspiracy Road Trip Reactions

Now I wanna know who these other four 'truthers' are, because Charlie is not a prominent person in the 9/11 truth movement. He's just a general activist who has only mentioned 9/11 every now and then. I expect it will be the same with the other four. No doubt one of them will also be a crazy no-planer or something. If so, it's not really a program about truthers. He also mentioned visiting family members. Again, I expect these were carefully selected family members who disagree with us. But what about the family members behind the BuildingWhat campaign?

Edit: More info on the BBC piece from WideShutUK

The game the BBC are playing here is obvious. Their intention is to get these five so-called 'truthers' to recant their conspiracy views so the viewer thinks this is all BS. And it seems with Charlie they have succeeded.

Alot of what he says in the above clip I actually agree with. I agree that there is a sort of cult-like mentality with regards to things like Pentagon no-plane theories and fake phone call stuff. But this is not the real 9/11 truth movement. Most real truthers have abandoned these theories. It's only the conspiracy theorists who ascribe to them. Veitch seems to have lumped the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the 9/11 truthers together. They are not the same.

And his comment about the psychology is right on. 'Awakened' people can be just as guilty of becoming emotionally attached to an idea as the so-called sheeple. And the furor of comments he has recieved the last few days proves that.

I respect differing opinions, but he seems to be parroting alot of typical debunker denialism here. He states flatly that he 'saw no evidence of controlled demolition', as if he's forgotten about all the science he saw from Richard Gage's presentation in Cambridge. And he parrots the 'impossibility' canard. As if he's forgotten everything people like David Icke (he's seen David Icke live) say about compartmentalization.

He also said he spoke to a demolition expert, who I assume was probably someone like Brent Blanchard, and I'm guessing they told him it would be impossible to demolish those buildings. While there are many demolition experts who disagree with us, the problem with their counter arguments is that we are not saying these buildings were destroyed using the conventional methods that most demolition experts are familiar with. In fact, we are saying the exact opposite. These were very unconventional demolitions. It doesn't matter how impossible you believe such a thing to be, the science is there. To say "I can't imagine how these buildings could be covertly demolished, therefore I'm going to deny all the hard science that proves they were covertly demolished" is an argument from incredulity, a logical fallacy.

At 5:15 in the above video he says he was given a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of 'nanothermite'. But John Cole has demonstrated that crude thermate-based devices can be quite effective at cutting steel. It all depends on how it's used.



But even if he's right, and nanothermite is ineffective at cutting steel, it was still found in the dust. And it still shouldn't be there! Regardless of how it was used, it's very existence in the dust proves fowl play.

I don't like calling people shills, and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but still ... it's very strange how someone could completely change their opinion so suddenly. I think it may be that he was shown evidence that a plane hit the pentagon and evidence which refuted alot of the other fringe stuff, realised those ideas were all crazy, and then applied this assessment of 'crazy' to all the 9/11 truth arguments. And the tidal wave of rabid comments he has recieved from so-called 'truthers' have reinforced that assessment.

I'll assume this is just him mistaking fringe 9/11 conspiracy theorists for 9/11 truthers and thinking in black and white and not due him being 'got to'.