Are those my options?
Obviously! It was either a conspiracy or a plot!
Here's a fun read about conspiracies.
Complexity
"Osama Bin Ladin, sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, could never have pulled off something of this complexity."What complexity? You put 19 guys on four airliners on the same day armed with box cutters, after first giving a few of them enough flight training to allow them to perform some rudimentary maneuvers. Any travel agent who couldn't book 19 people on four separate flights on the same day needs a new job. The complex part would have been gaining and keeping control of the passengers and crew once the hijacks were in progress.If Bin Ladin had known what would happen, he would certainly have had the hijackers hit the buildings lower. That would have trapped far more people while increasing the load on the heated steel, resulting in faster collapse. So if it wasn't Bin Ladin, why didn't the alleged conspirators do it? More outrage, more backing for the War on Terror. Why did they miss such an obvious opportunity?
Suppose It Was A Conspiracy
What was the intent? If it was to bring down the Towers, why demolish from the top down? That's not how any other controlled demolitions are done. Why not strike low, maximizing the number of casualties and more fully galvanizing the country for war?If the intent was to collapse only part of the Towers, keeping casualties limited but providing a pretext for war, then the total collapse was unanticipated. Or maybe the intent was simply to crash planes into the Towers and produce casualties but not cause building collapse at all. In either case, if the building collapses were unexpected, they happened through structural weakening and gravitational collapse and all the alleged "evidence" for sequential explosive charges and so on becomes worthless.Why use planes at all? Why not simply stage a bigger and better remake of the 1993 attack? Why not claim the terrorists detonated a large truck load of explosives at the central core of the building, or smuggled explosives into the core? Instead of passenger planes, why not have the terrorists steal a FedEx or UPS cargo plane and fill it with explosives?Why have a time gap between the plane crashes and building collapse, and why did the South Tower, which was hit
later, fall
first? That makes perfect sense in the conventional scenario, because the South Tower was hit lower and thus the load on the damaged structural members was greater. It makes no sense at all from the standpoint of a conspiracy.Like all conspiracy theories, the 9-11 conspiracy idea suffers from the fatal flaw of having the conspirators engage in a complicated Rube Goldberg process to do something a rational person could do more effectively in a much simpler way.
Since a lot of people have begun to catch on to conspiracy theories, 9-11 theorists have begun putting their own spin on the term. Just like creationists have begun using the word "pseudoscience" to brand evolution and blur the distinction between their own ideas and those of science, 9-11 conspiracy theorists have begun using the term "conspiracy theory" to label the conventional view of 9-11. So you get 19 guys, give some of them rudimentary flight training, they board airliners, hijack them, and fly them into buildings. Yup, that's a conspiracy all right. So the term "conspiracy theory" is entirely accurate.On the other hand, government operatives spent days planting explosive charges in the towers, then crashed the airliners or flew them to a secret location, brainwashed, imprisoned, or killed the passengers and crew, and that's
not a conspiracy theory? Or the videos of the airliner crashes are
all fake and some exotic particle beam or energy weapon disintegrated the towers into dust and that's not a conspiracy theory, either?Well, they're both conspiracy theories, so they're both on the same plane, so you get to pick whichever one you like. This is the classic relativism of the pseudoscientist.Fortunately, there's a way to sort through the conflicting claims. Which of the two is more consistent with well known facts? Do Middle Eastern terrorists hijack airplanes? Check. Do Middle Eastern terrorists target civilians? Check. Do Middle Eastern terrorists deliberately cause mass casualties? Check. There's absolutely nothing in the standard picture of 9-11 that conflicts with these facts. Number of previous cases where U.S. government operatives have hijacked airliners? None known. Number of previous cases where the U.S. government has collapsed a building full of innocent people? None known (apart from artillery or bombing in war). Number of previous cases where the U.S. government has collapsed a building full of its own citizens? None known. So one conspiracy theory has a host of historical precedents, and the other has none at all.Fascinating, isn't it, that the fact that no steel frame skyscraper had ever collapsed due to fire is touted as ironclad proof that planes couldn't have brought down the World Trade Center, but the total absence of historical precedent for the government doing it counts for nothing?
