Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, Already

At almost every progressive gathering where there's a question and answer session, someone or other vehemently raises 9/11 and espouses a grand conspiracy theory. If you haven't had the pleasure of enduring these rants, please let me share.

Here's what the conspiracists believe:

• 9/11 was an inside job.
• Members of the Bush Administration ordered it, not Osama bin Laden.
• Arab hijackers may not have done the deed.
• On top of that, the Twin Towers fell not because of the impact of the airplanes and the ensuing fires but because the Bush Administration got agents to plant explosives at the base of those buildings.
• Building 7, another high-rise at the World Trade Center that fell on 9/11, also came down by planted explosives.
• The Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77 but by a smaller plane or a missile.
• And the Pennsylvania plane did not crash as a result of the revolt by the passengers but was brought down by the military.

I'm amazed at how many people give credence to these theories. Everyone's an engineer. People who never even took one college science course can now hold forth at great length on how the buildings at the World Trade Center could not possibly have collapsed in the way they did and why the Pentagon could not have been struck by that American Airlines jet.

Problem is, some of the best engineers in the country have studied these questions and come up with perfectly logical, scientific explanations for what happened.

The American Society of Civil Engineers and FEMA conducted an in-depth investigation of the World Trade Center. The team members included the director of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the senior fire investigator for the National Fire Protection Association, professors of fire safety, and leaders of some of the top building design and engineering firms, including Skidmore Owings & Merrill in Chicago, Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire in Seattle, and Greenhorne & O'Mara in Maryland.

It concluded that massive structural damage caused by the crashing of the aircrafts into the buildings, combined with the subsequent fires, "were sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures."

The National Institute of Standards and Technology did its own forty-three volume study of the Twin Towers. "Some 200 technical experts . . . reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, [and] performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations," the institute says.

It also concluded that a combination of the crash and the subsequent fires brought the towers down: "In each tower, a different combination of impact damage and heat-weakened structural components contributed to the abrupt structural collapse."

Popular Mechanics, first in its March 2005 cover story and now in its expanded book, Debunking 9/11 Myths, after interviewing scores of other experts in the engineering field, takes apart the most popular contentions of the conspiracists. "In every case we examined, the key claims made by conspiracy theorists turned out to be mistaken, misinterpreted, or deliberately falsified," the book says.

I made a few calls myself, including to Gene Corley, who conducted the American Society of Civil Engineers/FEMA study, and to Mete Sozen, structural engineering professor at Purdue, who was one of the principal authors of "The Pentagon Building Performance Report" of January 2003, which was done under the auspices of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Structural Engineering Institute. I also contacted engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the country, and none of them puts any stock in the 9/11 conspiracy theories. In fact, they view them as a huge waste of time. They are busy trying to figure out how to prevent buildings from falling in the future.