Fox News apparently employs a pair of 9/11 "Truthers": Geraldo Rivera, host of FNC's "Geraldo at Large", and, we've recently discovered, Judge Andrew Napolitano, who hosts "Freedom Watch" on the Fox Business Network.
Both Napolitano and Rivera have, er, raised questions about the "official" (read: commonsensical) explanation for the collapse of the WTC7 building on September 11, 2001. This conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked a number of times. Apparently Geraldo and the Judge are not convinced.
Geraldo left his Truther endorsement a bit more open-ended. "I'm certainly much more open-minded about it than I was," he said in his eight-minute segment on the issue a couple weeks ago.
Judge Napolitano was a bit more explicit in his discussion with Truther guru and ubiquitous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones:
It's hard for me to believe that [WTC7] came down by itself. I was gratified to see Geraldo Rivera investigating it. I'm gratified to see the people across the border interested.
I think 20 years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way they look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us.
The physics of the incident (see links above) and moral repugnance of the suggestion that the American government would deliberately slaughter thousands of its own citizens as a pretext for war are generally enough to dissuade thinking Americans from these sorts of theories.
Beyond those facts, the whole common sense element should belie any such claim about Building Seven. Allahpundit explains:
Why, oh why, oh why would the nefarious neocon junta that’s supposedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks have bothered with Building 7 in the first place? Never mind the huge number of government operatives they would have needed to plant explosives in the various buildings damaged or destroyed that day, or the fact that somehow not a single one of them has leaked anything about the plot more than nine years later despite that information being worth untold millions. Just ask yourself: If they were going to bring down the Towers as a pretext for war in the Middle East, why the hell would they have brought down Building 7 too? The structure’s collapse adds nothing to the already severe trauma of the day, and taking the time and effort to plant explosives would only increase the odds of detection. It would have been a wholly needless risk. And if, for whatever insane reason, the goal was to take down the Towers plus some other random building, why was Building Seven chosen instead of the far more iconic World Financial Center right next door?
Just so Fox is clear about the people whom they've given soapboxes, Geraldo and the Judge are apparently unconvinced by physics, common sense, and the simple human decency of their elected officials.
Let's hope they don't actually believe this tripe.
