Dear Mr. Manjoo,

Regarding your statement that "I've spoken to many members of the the 9/11 'truth' movement, and aside from the supposed evidence they marshal, their argument against the official story inevitably comes around to plain disbelief."

No one I know of has ever sufficiently explained how a 110 building can collapse at free-fall speed (10 seconds from start to finish), disintegrating into dust in mid-air, creating a volcano-like pyroclastic flow and leaving behind absolutely nothing solid except 6-inch thick H-beams sheared off at perfect 45 degree angles, traces of thermate, and molten steel that continued to burn for a month after the collapse. Jet fuel, also known as kerosene, could never accomplish this phenomenon--if it could, then it would obviously melt the steel jet engines that burn it for fuel. Also unexplained is the video footage showing irrefutable evidence of explosive demolition "squibs" going off on main support floors well below the boundary of the upper collapse. For your information, no steel building in the history of the world has EVER collapsed from fire, including the World Trade Center towers, which sustained longer burning,more intense fires in the past than those that occured on 9/11. If you look at any actual building collapse (as opposed to intentional demolitions) you see an irregular, lopsided buckling--not a symmetrical crash that falls into it's own pre-demolished foundational footprint as in the case of the WTC--and the result is a stack of crumbled floors one atop the other, often tilting off to one side, not a pile of ash and molten steel.

Leaving aside any contemplation of the parties responsible for this atrocity, these facts are not "supposed evidence," they are scientific truth, and until you and other so-called journalists recognize the HARD evidence of the case, then, yes, you offer a condescending tone on the matter, not to mention the very worst in misinformation.

Thanks MadderHattie for pointing out the author's IGNORANCE in mechanics and material science that allows the "9-11 Official Conspiracy Hypothesis" to exist when we have pictures that PROVE the WTC buildings did not "fall" down..

I studied mechanical engineering in college and am a member of http://www.ae911truth.org/ where we cover what you mentioned in further detail, so it was easier for me to see thru the flimsy LIE.

But you don't have to be an engineer nor architect nor even know what the "law of conservation of momentum" means, to know that the WTC buildings were EXPLODED!

You simply have to look at the following pictures which is no way depict buildings "falling" and have a strong enough psyche to come to terms with what these pictures imply.

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The fundamental fact about the 9/11 attacks is that they could never have happened if they were carried out by amateurs. The 9/11 attacks were a huge operation (the scale is vast) and this was a military operation from start to finish. Even if you leave aside all the scientific facts, which are damming enough, you're still left with the basic problem that no bunch of students who could barely handle a cessna could have done it. We don't know what happened, we only know what COULDN'T have happened: namely that amateurs with virtually no flying hours could take jetliners over and fly them with such skill into highrise buildings, that the US airforce was having an off day and just couldn't be bothered to respond, that not one plane sent out a hijacker alert even though the button is practically under the pilot's nose, that the anti-aircraft batteries around the Pentagon which are programmed to shoot down any plane in Pentagon airspace that doesn't have a military transponder on board didn't shoot down the 'plane' which left no evidence that it had ever been there, that flight 93 was flown into the ground, even though numerous eyewitnesses saw it shot down by F-16 jet fighters, that a 'terrorist' would conveniently leave a suitcase full of United Airlines uniforms and a list of the names of all his accomplices at an airport where it was not loaded on the plane and just happened to be found by the FBI, that building no 7 'fell down' even though Larry Silverstein admitted it had been demolished, that all the people (including reporters) who heard bombs going off in the Twin Towers were wrong, that all the insider trading that went on on Wall Street during the attacks was just a blizzard of lucky guesses, that all those vans lined up under building number 5, one of which was stacked with stolen gold bullion were just a figment of someone's imagination, that the 3/4 of a billion in gold, silver and precious stones that vanished from the vaults under the Twin Towers was just another figment of someone's imagination, that the BBC could have intuited that building number 7 was going to 'fall down' 26 minutes before it did and put the story to air as some kind of prediction, that all the government officials who were warned not to fly on 9/11 are lying, that people made calls with cell phones from planes at altitudes that meant they would never get through, that the coroner, the fire chief and the mayor of Shanksville are all lying for some obscure purpose when they say no plane crashed at Shanksville and that there were no bodies and no wreckage at the site..I think you get the picture. We know who did it, they're sitting in the White House and while this was the most spectacular of their crimes it wasn't the last and they continue to break the law to this day. All the Manjoos in the world can't change facts.

If someone wanted to blow up the WTC, why arrange for a bunch of crazed Islamists to hijack planes and crash them into the buildings to cover up the job? When the towers fell, where were the sounds of the explosions? How would these explosive charges be reliably detonated in a building that was on fire? Why leave time bewteen the two "coverup" crashes to allow lots of video recordings that would uncover the consipiracy.

Okay, that's four problems. There are about 100 more, but the main point is this: Why not just drive cars under the buildings, as they did in 1993, but use enough explosives this time? Everybody would buy that, because it's exactly what happened before. There would be no video of anything, no food for hungry conspiracy theorists.

What you guys suggest happened is enormously complicated and way too much effort to be a coverup. Now, if you want to say somebody knew in advance about the planes, and had explosives ready as a backup, you might have something. I still would be very skeptical, but at least it would make some sense. I would still need to know why burning jet fuel wouldn't do the job, since I don't believe your assertion about the towers being able to withstand that much heat. (The jet engines are cooled by moving air.)

Finally, there seem to be some "indisputable facts" that are just plain made up. The towers endured longer, more intense fires than those of 9/11? Are you serious?

The Author is obviously misinformed or worse is in Denial.

Many people find it hard to believe their goverment is this evil.

Based on the physics, I agree with the Truthers - Investigations must begin.

The 911 Comission was a farce and even the Chairman Kean admitted it.

In 1973 the North Tower of the Twin Towers burned for much longer (on 9/11 the Towers only burned for around 90 minutes) and showed absolutely no signs of coming down. In Madrid a building just like the towers (the Windsor) burned for 24hours and did not come down. The Twin Towers were engineered specifically to withstand a plane hitting them because in the forties during world war II a wayward bomber lost in fog hit the State Empire building (guess what, it didn't come down). In fact the Twin Towers could have withstood the force of multiple planes and were designed to withstand the force of a hurricane. I'm sure those involved in the planning of 9/11 had done their homework and knew all this. They knew the towers wouldn't come down without a lot of help. As to the bombs: huge steel girders were thrown outwards from the towers with such force that they were speared into the sides of other buildings, human bones were found on the roof of the Deutsche Bank a considerable distance from the WTC. No bone was more than half an inch long. I've seen the news reports with journalists from CNN and Fox talking about the 'bombs going off'' in the Twin Towers. Are they conspiracy theorists too? Bearing in mind that they were there and you weren't I'm more inclined to trust eyewitnesses who were, in some cases, inside the Twin Towers and heard the bombs or were injured by them. Perhaps you have some other explanation for how huge slabs of marble were blown off the walls in the lobby of one of the towers. Jet fuel burns up and evaporates and the fire was in any case on the upper stories. Many of the explosions were going off at the base of the building many stories BELOW where the fires where. I believe the janitor who described the force of the bombs going off under the floor he stood on. Again, you weren't there -he was. How would these charges be reliably detonated? It's called a demolition wave: a precisely timed wave of explosions which prevent the sides of the building from bulging which would cause it to topple. Any demolition expert can tell you all about it. It's very reliable, they use it all the time to bring multi-storey buildings down safely. You say the video recordings have uncovered the conspiracy but it doesn't seem to have had any effect on you. I don't think anything would make you see the truth, even though it's staring you in the face. You don't want to believe your government is capable of such a crime but believe me, they are. They've done it before and if they're not held accountable they'll do it again.

I still need a motive, guys. I'll accept everything you say about how buildings fall, whether or not the jet fuel would have done the job, bones and stones being flung far and wide, janitors hearing explosions, and all the rest of it. I don't buy all of it, but I'll assume it's all true. That doesn't tell me why a terrorist attack would be used as a coverup for a government-sponsored inside job to demolish the World Trade Center.

If you're proposing our own government created the WTC collapse to enrage the citizenry and motivate them to support the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, okay. That's a plausible theory, I suppose.

If the conspirators knew terrorists were going to fly large planes with heavy fuel loads into the twin towers, why not just allow them to do it and let it go at that? The towers would have been gutted by fire, at the very least, and might have fallen down altogether. Loss of life would have been hundreds instead of thousands. Air travel would have been shut down just as it was. We would have exactly the same security laws and agencies we have now. The results would have been quantitatively different, but qualitatively the same.

Then there's the small matter of the other planes, one of which hit the Pentagon, and one of which crashed in a field.

Why attack the Pentagon? Why have a plane come down in an empty field? To make the whole thing more credible? To create a more effective coverup? Completely not necessary. The mere fact of the WTC attack, all by itself, would be sufficient to serve the purpose of the conspirators, whoever they were, and justify any actions they sought to take.

Any conspiracy theory makes sense up to a point. The FBI purposely overlooked the flight lessons and other indicators. The CIA had crucial information it intentionally held back. Fighters were scrambled and ready to shoot down the airliners, but were called off. Air traffic controllers cooperated by intentionally losing track of the planes. And so on. All that can be presented in a plausible light.

But the "Plan B" with the explosives in the buildings, or missiles fired from the airliners, depending on which Plan B you favor, doesn't make much sense. Sure, it's possible in the theoretical sense, but it's very, very complicated. Many persons in many agencies would have to be involved. Many persons would know where the bodies were buried. People and video tapes and sound recordings would have to mysteriously disappear to cover up Plan B. The risk would not be worth the effort, since Plan A would accomplish the same purpose.

They would not have been gutted None of the other buildings of the same type that caught fire were ever gutted. Larry Silverstein needed the towers to be destroyed completely so he could pick up his $7 billion insurance payout. Rudi Giuliani needed the towers to be completely destroyed because the Port Authority was facing a billion dollar payout to remove the asbestos in the buildings, put there in the seventies when it was still legal. That's why Rudi's friend Silverstein stepped forward and bought the entire WTC for $100 million and insured it for 'terrorist attack'. He was handsomely rewarded for his altruistic act. More importantly, removing those towers from the landscape was a psychological attack on America. That gap on the skyline was a constant reminder of the attacks. You may have noticed that it has still not be filled and won't be until Bush and Cheney are out of office. You seem to think they had no motive to carry out these attacks but they had plenty of motives: most important were the invasion of Iraq to get control of its oil and to get rid of Saddam Hussein (in order of importance) and the passing of the Patriot Act which gave the secret service and the government virtually unlimited power. The 9/11 attacks were the entire impetus for the 'War on Terror' which basically gutted the 'human rights' aspects of the US Constitution which these predators had taken an oath to protect.

But their agenda was much bigger. Under the umbrella of the War on Terror they intend to expand their activities to imprison and silence American 'liberals'. They regard anyone on the left or even the middle ground as a potential threat to their power and their political agenda. To them anyone to the left of their neo fascist beliefs is a traitor. In 'Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason' Chapman Pincher analyses terrorism and states that, 'The terrorist has no justifiable moral argument beyond his specious claim that because he is at war all military methods are justified'. Ring any bells? Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, War on Terror? In other words the War on Terror is itself a product of a terrorist doctrine. Pincher's definition of treason is also interesting and very appropriate:'Treason in its fullest sense involves betraying one's own fellow citizens to their death'. I have no doubt that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the CIA, the Pentagon and a raft of neo cons are guilty of treason. You need to splash your face with cold water and wake up before it's too late instead of arguing the toss over arcane details of the attacks carried out by your own government and involving the deaths of thousands of American citizens.

You're proposing motives that are too sweeping and a conspiracy that involves too many people. It's so dangerous and so over the top, particularly considering the payoff. There would be less complicated, less risky, simpler ways to accomplish the same objectives.

The one that springs immediately to mind is allow the terrorists to succeed by not interfering with them, a low risk strategy with a high probability of the desired outcome. To add in all the other players and some kind of Plan B would add some benefits, but not nearly enough to justify the risk of discovery or something going wrong.

Sure, I believe there are people in our government who would stage a terrible tragedy with thousands of deaths to further their own interests. I just don't think they could arrange what you claim they arranged without being exposed.

Even if Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to organize such a thing themselves, the people, resources and secrecy they'd have to coordinate would be huge. The chance of the plan being exposed would be too high, not at all worth the risk.

Let's suppose the explosives had never gone off and the towers had not collapsed. We would still have hundreds of people burned to death, jumping as they held hands, killed by falling debris, and so on. The people at the Pentagon would have been killed. The people on Flight 93 would still be dead.

More importantly, the administration would still get the same benefit in terms of curtailing civil liberties, getting Congress to write a blank check for the Iraq invasion, domestic spying torturing prisoners, and all the rest of it. And all of that would require no conspiracy at all, no worries about trusting anyone with any information, no problems recruiting people to plant and detonate explosives then keep quiet about what they did. The only requirement would be to sit quietly and wait for the terrorists to do what they spent six or seven years planning to do.

I've heard your argument many times and I've heard the 'incompetence' argument many times too. All the facts as reported by eyewitnesses disprove both. There were explosives in the Twin Towers and in building number 7. You say they didn't need to do it but maybe THEY thought they did for the reasons I've described. Unless they tell us how can we know? It's futile to talk about things you can't know when there are so many things we do know. Just as it's foolish to refuse to believe our own eyes and accept the official version which doesn't serve the truth but the neo con/Republican agenda. But let's accept for the sake of argument that all they did was arrange a black op with gullible Saudis and Pakistanis and then just stand back and let it happen: don't you understand that it's still treason which is a capital offence? Even if that's all they did they still killed thousands of their own citizens in an act of breathtaking cynicism and cruelty. Which is how they treated the 'Jersey Girls' and the so-called 9/11 Commission (which was a transparent whitewash), and Steven Hatfill and now Bruce Ivins. Their record speaks for itself. Unfortunately. In many instances they're condemned out of their own mouths. I still can't hear Rumsfeld's infamous 'Known knowns and unknown knowns' without a shudder or watch Dick Cheney on 'Meet the Press' talking about a trip to 'the dark side' without feeling incredibly angry. Who the hell do these ghouls think they are? I know who I think they are - monsters from the aforementioned 'dark side'.

"It's futile to talk about things you can't know when there are so many things we do know."

Yes, and I think the next question you pose is the one worth investigating. Did people in the government know about the 9/11 attacks and intentionally allow them to happen? There are people who suggest all the incompetence could not have been accidental, and they have some pretty good arguments.

Just to warn you, the Roosevelt administration faced similar charges (not official charges, of course) that they intentionally ignored the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to pull the United States into World War II. Almost 70 years later, nobody has been able to prove the charges, but they persist.

Probably the same thing will happen regarding 9/11. The Bush administration, along with the FBI and other agencies, will be accused of engineering a scheme to intercept and hide information so that the al Qaida hijacking plot could go forward. "There's no way so many people could be so incompetent," will be the basis for these charges.

Although that's an appealing argument, it is quite possible so many people could be so incompetent. Look at FEMA, the organization that couldn't even scratch its own ass. We have a government filled with stupid, selfish, incompetent persons who got their jobs through political cronyism and nepotism. Although the incompetence argument is not as interesting as a conspiracy theory, it deserves serious consideration in this administration.

"Jet fuel, also known as kerosene, could never accomplish this phenomenon--if it could, then it would obviously melt the steel jet engines that burn it for fuel."

Bull. Your "what if" is total crap. The change in temperature of any object can be found knowing 1) heat input into, 2) heat output from, and 3) heat capacity of the object. It is well known that the physical propterties of metals can change drastically with changes in temperature. Knowing the consequences of high temps., nearly every combustion engine that is worth the fuel put in it relies on dumping heat to the environment. If cooling is lost and the system is still put under load, damage can occur.

Most jet engines out there are high-bypass, meaning a large, if not majority, portion of the air taken into the engine bypasses the combustion stage. The engine is cooled by this bypassed air. I don't believe that jet fuel burns hot enough (since the heat input is a function of difference in temperature between the fuel and the engine) to melt the engine, but high temps (meaning above spec) with high loads will lead to engine failure.

Jet fuel burning in a building isn't a comparable scenario to it burning in a jet engine. It is not "obvious." It is easily conceivable that metal supports with no real cooling system could reach much higher temperatures than a cooled engine, both burning the same fuel. Furthermore, I'd bet my next paycheck you could expose one side of a metal specimen to a temperature higher than its melting point, while cooling the other side and have nothing other than superficial melting on the specimen, if any at all!

Jet engines also frequently use different materials for the hot parts of the engine than for the cooler parts.

What did we learn? That the temperature of the combusting material is only one part of the "how hot does it get" equation. [For more complete exploration, expand this to take into account time-variance, and if doing so, the conductive ability of the material.]

All fires are not created equal. The temperature of a fire depends mainly on what fuel is being burned.

Jet fuel burns at a temperature between 3000-4000 degrees F.

A candle flame is around 1800 degrees F.

A fire fueled by wood/paper/cloth burns at a temperature lower than this, say between 800-1500 degrees F.

Carbon steel, such as that used to manufacture all structural steel shapes used in building construction, megins to melt at a temperature around 2000 degrees F, and becomes completely molten by 2400 degrees F.

Clearly then, where a fire fueled by wood/paper/cloth does not burn hot enough enough to melt carbon steel, a fire fueled by jet fuel does.

Why don't jet engines melt? Because they are made of titanium-nickel-aluminum alloys, which have melting points in excess of 3000 degrees F. In addition, they often have ceramic coatings, and cooling systems are also in widespread use.

Don't talk about those fires without having all the facts.

Anyone who believes this conspiracy garbage should be locked up in a loony bin. There is ZERO evidence to support a conspiracy that would've involved thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide. "What if...?" Yeah, what if. When a plane hits a building, the sound boom takes a second or two to reach your ear, especially if you're 80 floors below impact on street level. The fact that the area is not rebuilt yet is a function of LOCAL government bureaucracy in NYC and the pleas from victims' families, not a federal conspiracy to not build up the area until the next President is elected. It is sheer lunacy to think that the jet fuel couldn't cause a building collapse with the impact knocking the fireproofing off of the steel. Have mechanical engineering degrees all you want, you still don't know a thing about this. This is the real world, things don't always go by the book, especially when the infrastructure holding the building up was on the outside of the building (hence the facade that looked like an exoskeleton).

My question for all the conspiracy theorists out there is simply this: Who benefits from a conspiracy? Not Bush or Cheney...we haven't gotten any al Qaeda leaders, nor have we gotten Iraq's oil. Nothing to gain there. Silverstein/Giuliani? The legal battles over insurance money are still ongoing, since they were NOT insured for terrorist attack, etc. The victims/gov't workers? C'mon, get real. Any conspiracy of this magnitude would involve more people on the inside than on the outside. What's the purpose of damaging lower Manhattan? Stock insider trading? When did THAT happen? Another blatant falsehood.

It's a tragedy that occurred nearly 7 years ago. For anyone to degrade the people that lost their lives is DISGRACEFUL. No one gained anything by having this occur, and your conspiracy arguments are all bull. No facts, just "what if". Frankly, it's been long enough...get over yourself and move on to something new. If you don't like the President, do something productive...don't just create fabrications that he created the whole conspiracy. Otherwise, your dumber than he is. I'll bet you think the moon landing, JFK assassination, etc. are all fabrications too, right? Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. To dwell on this topic for 7 years....pathetic. Instead of doing theoretical stuff with your mechanical engineering degree, how about GOING OUT IN THE REAL WORLD and finding that things don't always go to plan. You're a disgrace. If you don't like our country, MOVE OUT!

2005 Popular Mechanics article:

"Why couldn't ATC find the hijacked flights? When the hijackers turned off the planes' transponders, which broadcast identifying signals, ATC had to search 4500 identical radar blips crisscrossing some of the country's busiest air corridors. And NORAD's sophisticated radar? It ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward. "It was like a doughnut," Martin says. "There was no coverage in the middle." Pre-9/11, flights originating in the States were not seen as threats and NORAD wasn't prepared to track them."

"Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength — and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."

"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.

But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.

"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down." "

"Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all the floors above the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing force on the highest intact floor. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail, transmitting the forces to the floor below, allowing the collapse to progress downward through the building in a chain reaction. Engineers call the process "pancaking," and it does not require an explosion to begin, according to David Biggs, a structural engineer at Ryan-Biggs Associates and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) team that worked on the FEMA report.

Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air — along with the concrete and other debris pulverized by the force of the collapse — was ejected with enormous energy. "When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled demolition, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception." "

"Blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and helped coordinate the emergency response. "It was absolutely a plane, and I'll tell you why," says Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers PC, Washington, D.C. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box." Kilsheimer's eyewitness account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside and outside the building. Kilsheimer adds: "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?" "

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