911 Conspiracy not so Secret

Four planes were piloted by terrorists trained by Osama Bin Laden to fly into buildings on September 11, 2005. Two flew into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon, and one crashed in Pennsylvania. That’s what you think, isn’t it? If you look for it, you can find theories by the hundreds all over the internet that say the above description is not what happened. There are books for sale on Amazon.com that draw immense conspiracies totally aside from the common-held memory of reported events of 911. Enter “911 conspiracy” in the Google search box and you won’t have time to read all the results that come up.

Conspiracies are fun to contemplate, but they have their dark side. Wacko theories of an alternate explanation of an event, from something personal that happens to an individual, to a collective version that affects millions of people like the Kennedy Assassination, can put a haze over the truth and cause disruption of preparations for a similar calamity.

If the World Trade Center buildings collapsed because of fire and heat, and the official explanation is accepted, the design of construction of other edifices can take this tragedy into account and the next building can be made to avoid the same disaster.

Conspiracy theories can be informative. They can also be bizarre ruminations from the mind of anyone who wants to write down some ideas and have them looked at.

This is not the case with Morgan Reynolds, chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term. Dated June 9, 2005, Reynolds has put forth a lengthy, coherent description of what exactly happened, from an engineering standpoint, to the buildings that collapsed at ground zero on 911, titled, “Why Did the Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?”

The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms, but its blinkered narrowness and lack of breadth is the paramount defect unshared by its principal scientific rival – controlled demolition. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapses of WTC 1 (North Tower), WTC 2 (South Tower), and the much-overlooked collapse of the 47-story WTC building 7 at 5:21 pm on that fateful day.

The entire piece is worth reading, if not for the convincing discussion that what we all thought we saw and heard the morning of 911 on TV was not at all what happened, but for the implicit accusation that a “government” had to be behind the plan, not just, as Reynolds says,

the fantastic conspiracy theory that "19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan" caused 9/11.

The ramifications of Reynolds's position are clear: nothing about our government is as it seems, and there is a powder keg of options for each coming day that we as a nation are facing. We must constantly remain vigilant, and be aware of our elected officials and their policies. It’s really the responsibility of each and every one of us.