I’m sick of tin-foil-hat wearing idiots.

If you’re one of those morons that believes that 9/11 was somehow staged and planned, and you buy into the conspiracy nonsense that’s been oozing its way across the Internet like some bad sludge, then please listen up.

You ask questions. How could WTC Building 7 possibly have collapsed when it wasn’t as close to the towers as other buildings that did not collapse? Never in the history of the universe has a steel building collapsed from fire, blah blah blah…

Listen to me. Just because you are ignorant of the answer, does NOT mean there is none!

Allow me to let that sink in for a moment.

…

There, done? Good. Now, here we go.

The popular belief is that WTC 7 contained explosives, since fire alone has never felled a modern skyscraper.

The facts? Well, several critical factors compromised WTC 7’s structural integrity. Among those are: damage to the south face, unusual structural design to accommodate a Con Edison substation, extreme weight bearing on the floors, and long-burning diesel fuel leaked from large emergency generators.

That’s it! Now seriously, folks, tell me where the conspiracy lies. And don’t give me that “controlled demolition” bullshit either. None of the towers collapsed in a way even remotely similar to actual, real demolitions.

“No! Explosives brought down the Twin Towers! Look at the pattern and timing of the dust and debris blown out from the floors! The vertical fall of the towers! There were two seismic tremors that coincided with their collapse!”

Sigh. The impact of the rather large Boeing 767s damaged support columns and steel floor trusses. This, my friends, caused the inward collapse of perimeter columns, which pulled floors straight down. A misquote of a demolition expert (a popular action among conspiracy theorists) propagated the explosives theory. Seismic spikes, caused by debris hitting the ground, were recorded 10 seconds after each tower started to fall.

Wow, it’s all starting to make some sense now, isn’t it?

“But noooo!!! The holes in the Pentagon! A missile or smaller plane… most certainly not Flight 77… struck the Pentagon! The size of two holes in Rings C and E were wayyy too small to have been made by a 757! A 757 has a wingspan of nearly 125 feet! Explain that, bucko!”

Gladly. Witnesses saw the 757 hit the Pentagon. The plane lost its wings when one hit the ground and the other slammed into the building’s west wall before the Boeing’s fuselage tore a 75-foot hole in the outermost Ring E. The jet’s landing gear caused the 12-foot hole in inner Ring C. But to question Flight 77’s demise is to question the fate of the 64 people onboard; the remains of all but one have been identified!

Anymore? I’m sure there are…

“Noooo!! Fighter jets in range of the hijacked planes surely must have been under orders to stand down! No fighters from the 28 Air Force bases in the area were scrambled!”

You see, there are seven alert sites on the U.S. mainland. Each has two active aircraft that can scramble fighters. The 9/11 commission itself concluded that F-15s were scrambled within 6 minutes of notification of the hijacking of Boston’s Flight 11. Because the hijackers had dismantled the planes’ transponders, the F-15s could not identify the endangered aircraft.

“Ah hah! What about Osama Bin Laden? A few Arabs in the desert could not have possibly pulled this off!”

To say that is to underestimate an enemy… a fatal mistake that should never occur. I won’t even mention the fact that that statement is utterly racist and ignorant. Arabs can pull off anything that Americans, Japanese, or even Canadians (if they were so inclined) can.

Furthermore, who says the hijackers made it crystal clear that they had a bomb, as well as box cutters? They were perfect for this crime. Not only did Bin Laden go to school for civil engineering right about when the towers were under construction, but the US actually used him to hold off the USSR in Afghanistan. Most of the hijackers had college educations, as well as flight experience and simulator training.

In fact, our government probably thought that “a few Arabs in the desert could not have pulled it off” as well. Their underestimation of the hijackers and Bin Laden allowed 9/11 to occur. If there is any conspiracy, it was on the part of the hijackers, waiting until our guard was down enough. That’s it.

And what about the fore-warnings of terrorist threats before 9/11? If there really was some grand conspiracy, wouldn’t early warnings be counterproductive to making it all happen? Why would some parts of our government warn of a threat, while the other parts made it happen? Doesn’t make much sense to me.

Instructing pilots not to open the cockpit doors under any circumstance, plus fitting the airliners with better cockpit doors, may have stopped the attacks. Pilots were under the old rule of doing as the hijackers say. Our experience with hijackers until 9/11 had told us that doing what they said usually resulted in the plane landing after giving them money or whatever it was they wanted.

We had no experience with religious radicals who wanted to cause damage, even at their own expense.

Saying that they were “only” a few Arabs from the desert appeals to the racist in us. Any small group with the same ideals could have done what the hijackers did.

I didn’t even mention the fact that Bin Laden confessed to planning the 9/11 attacks.

“But…but… the towers were the first steel high rises to fall from fire in history! Explain that!”

Again, omission of relevant information fuels the fires of paranoia. There were a lot of “firsts” for the WTC that fateful day. In all the history of high-rise fires…

• not one has ever been hit with a plane traveling over 500 miles per hour.
• not one has ever had its fireproofing removed from the trusses as a result.
• not one has ever had its steel columns (which hold a lateral load) sheared off by a 767.
• not one has ever been a building that had the vertical load bearing columns in its core removed by an airliner.
• not one has ever been left for 6 to 7 hours with its bottom floors on fire with structural damage from another building collaps, like WTC 7.

The list could go on, but hopefully it’s penetrated through that thick skull of yours. Saying that the WTC buildings were the first high-rise buildings in history to fall from fire is a deceptive statement, because it purposely leaves out the above circumstances.

As for the fact that the towers fell straight down, which looks like a controlled demolition, keep in mind that the towers were steel without concrete. The towers’ permieter steel walls were held in place by the trusses that were connected to the perimeter column by small bolts.

It’s impressive that the WTC towers held up for as long as they did after being attacked full speed by 767s. They were design to only withstand a crash from the largest plane at the time of their construction, the smaller and slower 707. The 707’s fuel load was never considered at the time!

Jet fuel + collision = tower collapse

If you’re not a scientist, please don’t debate this point without scientific evidence to back you up.

It’s like taking a car accident apart and saying the car shouldn’t have skidded off the road because the factory claimed the car could grip up to 0.97 Gs. Although true, it doesn’t take into account other factors, such as rain, dirt, gravel, etc.

You tin-foil hat morons deal in disinformation. You KNOW that the above factors cannot be separated. Yet you do just that, and manipulate information to make your point!

I want to mention one final thing. In order to pull off this massive conspiracy, thousands of people would have had to be involved: the Bush Administration, the NYC firefighters, the courts (for imposing a gag order), the NYC Police Department (who lost over 20 lives), the NYC Port Authority (who lost personnel), all the people in the Pentagon (many of whom are liberal and centrist), the more than 1,600 widows and widowers of 9/11 (who would rather have investigations of the decisions which led to the terrorists getting away with this), the media (who doesn’t follow up on the biggest mass murder and conspiracy in American history), the photographers worldwide (who took pictures of the towers that clearly show bowing of the perimeter columns), Popular Mechanics (who debunked these sites), PBS Nova (who created a documentary explaining in detail how and why the buildings fell), everyone in the NIST (who obviously doesn’t have a moral person in hundreds of employees for covering this up), NY Governer Pataki (who sold steel from the WTC for the construction of the USS New York), the NY city scrap yards (who also sold steel to China before all of it was tested…right), every structural engineer in the world (since laymen know everything from watching videos and reading interviews out of context), the liberals who don’t believe the towers were brought down (like me), the CIA, the FBI, FEMA, the American Society of Civil Engineers (who have produces peer reviewed papers showing how the supposedly impossible is indeed possible), NORAD, the FAA (who saw planes that supposedly never existed), the Silverstein Group (who must have helped for insurance money), Silverstein’s Insurance Company (who didn’t question the collapse and paid out billions to Silverstein), American Airlines (for the Pentagon), United Airlines (same reason), Logan Airpoint, Newark Airport, Dulles Airport (for losing the planes), scientists and engineers (who supposedly developed remote control plane technology), installer of the remote control devices in the planes, remote controllers of said planes, scientists and engineers who developed the new demolition technology (that defies what we know of current demolition technology), installers of said demolition devices, people who worked at the company(s) the installers used as cover, airphone employees who got calls from passengers, fake friends and relatives of the fake passengers, people who detonated the buildings, and anyone who thinks the conspiracy is a diversion to take liberal activist focus off of real crimes.

Man, that’s a long list, huh? Even if half of those people were misled or lied to, that’s still quite a lot of people to be in on something this big.

Even conspiracies with only a handful people are doomed. Look at Enron and Watergate! The more people you involve, the more likely the conspiracy will fall apart. The amount of people needed for even the most basic of conspiracy theories is enough to fill one of the towers. It’s absurd to think this many people could keep a mass murder for Bush a secret this long.

ABSURD.