Ive been having a discussion with a woo woo about WT7 and 911 in general and hes come up with "argue with these guys Firefighters for 9/11 Truth and tell them they are wrong". I admit i don't know much about Firefighters for 9/11 Truth and don't really have a lot of time on my hands at the moment. Has anyone got any good pointers to where i should start in tackling his Firefighters for 9/11 Truth?
Thanks for any help.
I wrote the following for another forum in April 2009 so the numbers are a bit out of date but the rest still holds:
Firefighters for 9/11 Truth and its supporters believe that firefighters are better qualified than the general populace to evaluate the collapses of the WTC buildings. Truthers and I are rarely of one mind about anything 9/11 related but in this case I couldn’t agree more, fire fighters are uniquely qualified to judge whether the fires in those buildings were infernos as most people accept or weak as truthers allege and weather or not fire could lead to structural failure.
According to the US Fire Administration the “estimated number of [career and volunteer] firefighters [in the US] in 2007: [was] 1,148,800”. “Career firefighters included here work for a public municipal fire department; they do not include career firefighters who work for state or FEDERAL government or in private fire brigades.” Also not included are volunteers not involved in firefighting.
According to a 2007 Zogby poll sponsored by a truth.org 4.6% of “likely voters” chose MIHOP as the explanation for 9/11 they though most likely. Most firefighters are high school but not college graduates. 9.6% of H.S. graduates (with no college education) chose MIHOP. A 2006 Scripts-Howard Poll found that 16% thought MIHOP or LIHOP were “very likely” and 20% thought those theories “somewhat likely”, 6% thought it very likely the WTC was felled by controlled demolition and an addition 10% though this was “somewhat likely”. If the truthers theories had any merit to them I would expect firefighters to be more likely than the average American to believe them but even if we calculate for the same proportion 4.6% - 16% of them would believe or at least suspect the towers were brought down, that would come out to about 53000 – 18300 firefighters.
FF9/11T’s support among their colleagues however is infinitesimally small. Their petition has only 47 signatures but even that over represents their support among the firefighters counted by the USFA. Eight of the signatories classify themselves as retired or FORMER firefighters, one is a nurse another is the brother of a deceased fireman, one is Canadian, two are with the Marines which leaves us with 34. Even accepting their claims the people on the list have been verified 8 of the 34 give little or no information about themselves so only 26 – 34 would count among the 1.15 million estimated by the USFA. Thus even if all the signatories are real and none of the 34 “forgot” to say the are retired they only represent one out of 33788 to 44185 firefighters (0.002 - 0.003%) and are an almost equally tiny fraction of their expected support.
Notably none the signatories said they were on Ground Zero on 9/11 and only one claims to be a member or the FDNY and it isn’t clear if he believes the towers were demolished he said "There is more behind this story than the public is being told. I wasn't working that day but went to the site many times afterwards; I know many guys who have respiratory illnesses due to what happened at the WTC on 9/11. L35."
Obviously just as not every one who believes 9/11 was an “inside job” has joined a group or sighed a petition not all firefighters who believe this signed the petition but what faction is reasonable to expect? One in 10, 20, 100? Even if only 1/1000th they believe this at rates lower than the general populace. Firefighters are people not easily intimidated they routinely risk there lives to save the lives, property and pets of strangers. More than anyone other than survivors or the next of kin of victims they have a stake in the truth being told. New York City firefighters rioted the search for human remains at GZ was called off sooner than they liked and protested about unsafe conditions at the Bankers Trust building.
So how can such low support by fire fighters for FF911T be explained, support apparently at levels lower than the population as a whole? Simple FF911T is right firefighters are better qualified than the general populace to evaluate the collapses of the WTC buildings and 99.997% of them have not signed up.
This is not of course unique to firefighters, architects and engineers especially structural engineers, pilots and the people who were in the WTC that morning are also better qualified than others to reach an informed conclusion but the factions of those groups to publicly support the truth movement are in one out of tens of thousands range. Pilots for 9/11 Truth for example lists about 54 US pilots as being members, many are military pilots who don’t need FAA licenses for they jobs (but do if they want to fly civilian aircraft), but in 2006 there were 610,000 pilots licensed by the FAA.
Sources
1] USFA Firefigthers statistics -
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/statistics/firefighters/index.shtm, the CDC and BLS, two other government agencies, came up with similar numbers. (See sources 2 & 4)
2] CDC firefighter statistics -
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5516a3.htm
3] 2007 Zogby poll -
http://www.911truth.org/images/ZogbyPoll2007.pdf page 5
4] Firefighters education -
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos158.htm#training
5] 2006 Scripps –Howard poll -
http://newspolls.org/question.php?question_id=714
6] FF9/11Truth petition -
http://firefightersfor911truth.org/?page_id=469
7] Pf9/11T membership -
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/core
8] 2006 testimony of FAA administrator -
http://www.faa.gov/news/testimony/news_story.cfm?newsId=7140
