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"There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics," Chomsky added, "but it doesn't work like that … There's a reason there are graduate schools in these departments."

November 27, 2013

In Blog

Anybody Who Still Buys Into 9/11 Truther Stuff

The Huffington Post  |  By Ashley Alman Posted: 11/26/2013 5:53 pm EST

 

MIT linguist and peace activist Noam Chomsky has delivered what ought to be the coup de grace to what’s left of the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

During a “Policy and the Media Prism” lecture at the University of Florida several weeks ago, 9/11 truther activist Bob Tuskin asked Chomsky what he had to say about Building 7, the third structure to collapse on Sept. 11, 2001. The media, in Tuskin’s opinion, has ignored evidence about the building’s collapse.

Chomsky shut down Tuskin’s claims. If scientists had strong evidence to support 9/11 conspiracy theories, he said, they would have presented their discoveries to other architects and engineers, would have published their arguments in scientific journals and attempted to persuade other professionals that they’d found something worth investigating.

“There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics,” he added, “but it doesn’t work like that … There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.”

Chomsky said the Bush administration had little motivation to identify the hijackers as Saudi, since that country is a U.S. ally, when they could have pointed a finger at Iraq, a nation they’d been hoping to invade.

“There is just overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration wasn’t involved. Very elementary evidence. You don’t have to be a physicist to understand it, you just have to think for a minute,” he said. “The conclusion is pretty straightforward: Either they’re total lunatics, or they weren’t involved. And they’re not total lunatics.”