CHAPTER NINE

9/11 Controlled Demolitions

All 9/11 conspiracy theories can be summed up with one phrase: “9/11 was an inside job,” the implication being that it was not some outside adversary (al Qaeda) that committed the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center, badly damaged the Pentagon, and crashed a fourth plane into a field. It was instead some elements operating within the upper reaches of power, people inside the US government and the military–industrial–financial complex that is actually running the country.

This simple “inside job” descriptor covers a wide range of very different theories. Of any conspiracy theory, 9/11 has perhaps the broadest and most detailed spectrum of variations. At the bottom end of the spectrum there are the most trivial forms of “let it happen,” where the Bush administration simply ignored some warning signs of some kind of attack. In this lightest version the Bush administration is guilty of little more than negligence. It’s hard to call it a conspiracy at all.

Slightly further along the conspiracy spectrum is the idea that the attacks were not planned by al Qaeda, but instead by various other actors. Typically, these will include elements within Saudi Arabia, then Israel, and (as we go further up the spectrum) the United States. These theories are based largely on circumstantial evidence and it’s rare for people to be deeply invested in them. Generally, you’ll find these stay in the realm of “just asking questions” and “where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

At the far end of the spectrum are people who think that the attacks never actually happened, that what we saw on TV that day were computer generated animations. They think there were no planes and that the towers were destroyed with explosives, possibly nukes, or space energy beams. The evidence for these theories is generally highly specious and depends on deep misunderstandings of physics and a significant disconnect from reality. There are many rebuttals to these theories even within the core 9/11 community because the average 9/11 Truther does not want their theory to be associated with the “nonsense” on the other side of their demarcation line.

But squarely in the middle is the most common form of the “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy, and the one you are most likely to encounter with your friend: it’s the idea that there was some kind of controlled demolition. In this theory, the towers were not brought down simply by being hit by planes and the subsequent fires, they were supposedly pre-rigged with explosives, all the way from top to the bottom, and these explosives were carefully detonated in sequence, in an attempt to make it look like a more natural collapse.

The root reasoning behind the controlled demolition theory is quite simple: the collapses of the towers just didn’t look right. Indeed, if you look at footage of the two collapses of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (WTC1 and WTC2), they do look very strange. It seems almost like one continuous explosion making its way down the tower. There’s what looks like huge plumes of material being ejected out sideways, and then this wave of “explosions” just comes straight down, the building disintegrating and exploding before your eyes.

There are numerous objections and rebuttals to the controlled demolition theory, some more technical than others. But the bottom line is that the extraordinary events of 9/11 were simply something none of us had ever seen before, so it’s easy to rely on our limited personal experience and say, “buildings just don’t do that!” The challenge in helping your friend out of the 9/11 rabbit hole is largely composed of explaining to them exactly how buildings can do that.

The first challenge you are likely to encounter on this road is one of symmetry of perception between you and your friend. You think you are right. You think you understand that planes flew into the buildings, badly damaging them, and that the buildings burned. You understand that steel was weakened by the fire, that columns failed, and that the structure below could not stop the falling mass as it gathered speed. Perhaps you know these things when you start out trying to explain them to your friend, or perhaps they will come up later. Regardless, at some point you are going to think you have it figured out, and what remains is to explain it to your friend whose mind has simply been brainwashed into these strange beliefs.

Unfortunately, your friend has exactly the same idea about you. They have done their research. They have watched many videos, and they have read many web pages, perhaps even read several books on the subject. They are deeply convinced they have the science on their side. They feel that the controlled demolition conclusion is both obvious and irrefutable because they know that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and they can see explosions going off in the videos, and they can see the concrete being pulverized and multi-ton sections of the building being thrown sideways by explosions. They think that you have been brainwashed, and their challenge is to explain things to you. They think you have a mental block in seeing the obvious truth, and it’s your terror of the implications of being wrong that keep you pushing what seems to them to be a blatantly false narrative.

Here’s a Facebook comment made about someone discussing 9/11:

Is this discussing a 9/11 conspiracy theorist? No, that quote was actually about me, and was written by someone who thinks that it’s blindingly obvious that the World Trade Center tower collapses were controlled demolitions. Despite the fact that I’m reasonably intelligent, with a good grasp of basic physics, people constantly tell me I’m stupid when I question a particular piece of 9/11 evidence. This isn’t limited to 9/11 either—one of my TV appearances to discuss Chemtrails only came about because the Chemtrail believer they first interviewed suggested the hosts interview me. He later told me that this was because I was so stupid, he hoped I would come across badly.

It’s very important that you realize the depth of your friend’s belief, the degree to which they reject criticism, and that you try to figure out what his perception of you is. What does he think motivates you? Does he think you’ve just been misled, or that you are stupid, or crazy? Some in the 9/11 Truth community go as far as to suggest a psychological basis for your rejection of their theory, like a mental illness. In the 2012 video “9/11 Explosive Evidence—Experts Speak Out,” a number of supposed experts are interviewed about the usual things like explosives and physics, but they also interviewed psychologists who had found their way down the rabbit hole (nobody is immune). Psychologist Fran Sure said:

Also, from licensed clinical psychologist Robert Hopper, PhD:

Similar sentiments were expressed on Facebook,2 in rather more colorful language:

This belief in the “mental dysfunction” of skeptics arises from a serious problem for people in the 9/11 Truth movement: why don’t more people believe them? From their perspective the conspiracy is crystal clear. They think they have the evidence, and indeed that the evidence is so blatant, so obvious, that the only way someone intelligent could possibly examine it and then deny it would be if they were either in on the conspiracy or if they have some kind of mental block, some pathological subconscious terror of upsetting their worldview.

This is what your friend will almost certainly end up thinking of you at some stage in the process. At first, they will simply assume you don’t know what the evidence is, it’s just not been explained to you, or you’ve not done your research. But if you persist in trying to help them out of their rabbit hole, then at some point they are either going to label you as a shill or brainwashed and incapable of facing the truth.

This problem exists in all conspiracy theories, but it’s particularly strong in 9/11 theories. A big part of the reason why is that they feel that they have the authority of science on their side, and this itself is largely due to an organization called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Architects and Engineers, Experts?

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911 Truth) was founded in 2006 by a practicing architect, Richard Gage. The goal of the organization as stated on their website is to “Build a better world with sound scientific research into the destruction of the World Trade Center.”3 The year of foundation (2006) comes after NIST’s 2005 report on the collapse of the Twin Towers, but well before the 2008 report on Building 7 (a common piece of evidence promoted by conspiracists). An early (2007) version of their website presents what is inadvertently perhaps the most accurate summation of their core problem.

AE911 Truth is very important to most people who think that there was a controlled demolition of the three World Trade Center buildings, and it’s important precisely for the reasons that Richard Gage identified—the physics of the impacts, the fires, and the collapses themselves were all events of a type and a scale that were unprecedented in our experience. Very few people have the scientific background to understand the physics of the events, so they turn to others to help them understand it. While Gage starts out acknowledging this, he quickly notes in the same paragraph that now he thinks the task is not outside the scope of his training and experience:

Where was AE911 Truth getting this evidence? The first three set of linked websites back in 2007 (911Truth.org, WTC7.net and 911research.wtc7.net) were created by Jim Hoffman—a key figure in the history of the 9/11 Truth movement, but not exactly someone with training and experience in the field of controlled demolition. Hoffman, a software engineer, has spent many years theorizing about 9/11. In one article he proposes, in all seriousness, that the Twin Towers’ high speed progressive collapses were facilitated by a thin layer of explosives hidden inside 1.8 million ceiling tiles, combined with a layer of explosives literally painted onto the core columns and other explosives hidden inside fire extinguishers.

This illustrates two things. Firstly, the incredible fixation that Truthers have on the idea that the collapses were impossible from fire and gravity alone. So strong is this belief that eventually they come to think of the towers as nearly solid blocks that need to be blown up with explosives on every floor. A huge part of debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories is simply getting past this idea. In Hoffman’s case, the belief is so strong that it requires literally millions of individual explosives for the observed collapse to seem plausible in his mind.

Secondly, the fact that Hoffman is one of the primary sources of evidence for AE911 Truth shows the flaw in their appeal to authority. Your friend will likely bring this group up with a question like, “How can so many scientists think that 9/11 was controlled demolition?” The implication is that we are supposed to trust AE911 Truth because they are experts, and there are a lot of them.

Yet the foundational evidence of AE911 Truth came not from structural engineers or demolition experts with skyscraper experience. It came largely from people like Jim Hoffman, or Steven Jones (a retired physicist), or even David Ray Griffin (a theologian). If we look at the position statements of the people who make up AE911 Truth we do not find sophisticated analyses; instead we find people who had initial suspicions, who read the websites and watched the videos, and for the most part are no different to ordinary people who have been sucked down the rabbit hole. Here are a few representative statements from the AE911 Truth petition signatures page.