Was 9/11 an Inside Job?

They say every American remembers the exact moment when they heard the news about the attacks on September 11th. They vividly recall where they were, what they were doing, and the sinking feeling in their gut as they realized the magnitude of what was happening. It’s as if they all had the memory of that dreadful day seared into their minds forever.

Well, except for me. I was only a year old. But growing up in the US post 9/11 meant that I heard about it all the time, especially on its anniversary—which was when schools would show students footage of the attacks and talk about it extensively. They probably went a bit over the top when they showed a bunch of 11-year-olds videos of people jumping out of the towers, but I guess it did its job because I definitely haven’t forgotten about it in the years since.

Come to think of it, maybe that was just my school, I’ve never really asked anyone else.

One thing it certainly accomplished though was getting me to do a bit of research on my own outside of school—and boy is the internet a wonderful place for an impressionable young mind—I quickly came across the vast conspiracies surrounding the 9/11 attacks, and as I delved deeper and deeper, I became more and more convinced that they must have been true. The government and media were a bunch of liars, the public were a bunch of mindless sheep, and I was among the only enlightened, free-thinking intellectuals who knew the truth.

Thankfully, I’ve distanced myself from conspiracy theories since then, and these days I don’t place very much faith in any of the major ones. But even without me, in recent years conspiracies about 9/11 have only gotten more popular, with one survey a couple years ago showing that as many as half of all Americans believe the government is hiding something about that infamous day. I personally don’t think the number is that high, but it’s definitely up there, so there’s a big chance that some readers even hold some of the beliefs we’ll go over in this article.

Today we’re going to crack open the huge can of worms that is 9/11, covering everything from the more common ‘CIA planting bombs in the towers and George Bush planning the whole thing’, all the way to the more ridiculous ones like alien involvement and, of course, Nostradamus. We’ll do our best to leave no stone unturned, and hopefully put some of these mysteries to bed once and for all. So, is there more to 9/11 than meets the eye? Let’s find out.

The Official Narrative

Before we get into the supposed plot holes, let’s start with the story of what happened that day, what some would call the ‘official narrative’.

Between about 8:00 AM and 8:40 AM, four passenger jets, two Boeing 767s and two 757s take to the skies, on what probably feels like a fairly normal day. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and the temperature is nice and cool. The two 767s are American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175—both take off from Boston and are expected to arrive in Los Angeles. The two 757s are American Airlines Flight 77, taking off from an airport in Virginia, also heading for Los Angeles, and United Airlines Flight 93, taking off from New Jersey and heading for San Francisco.

Within an hour and a half, all four of these planes will be hijacked by a total of 19 members of Al Qaeda, armed with an assortment of box cutters, pepper spray, and mace. Bomb threats are also made, but it has never been determined if the bombs were legitimate or not.

At 8:46, Flight 11 crashes into the north face of the North Tower, at an angle that smashes through multiple floors, between the 93rd and the 99th. Traveling at around 500 miles per hour and loaded with tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel, the explosion is equivalent to 480,000 pounds of TNT. A huge fire erupts, and first responders start heading for the site.

Then, just 16 minutes later, the South Tower is hit by Flight 175, crashing between the 77th and 85th floors, resulting in a similar explosion and an equally massive fire. Evacuations are now underway in both towers, but between the thousands of people fleeing, fire, smoke, and debris, many people are either trapped on their floor or slowly making their way out with the crowds. People above the impact points have little chance of escape—in the North Tower, not a single person makes it out from these doomed upper floors, and in the south tower, only 18.

As the nation watches the towers burn on the news, another target is struck: At 9:37, Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon. At this point, US airspace is completely shut down, most incoming flights are grounded and all aircraft in the sky are ordered to land at the nearest airport, but it’s already too late. Just before 10:00 AM, the south tower begins to crumble, and completely collapses, forever disappearing from the New York City skyline, followed soon by the North Tower just 30 minutes later. As the North Tower collapsed, heavy debris smashed into another nearby building, 7 World Trade Center, also known as Tower 7, causing fires and serious structural damage that led to its collapse later that day.

Just before the North Tower falls, the last hijacked plane, Flight 93, is heading for the final target, which was later determined to be either the White House or the US Capitol. But as the jet cruises over Pennsylvania, the passengers, who had heard about the other attacks when calling their loved ones, decide to take matters into their own hands. While they’re fighting to regain control of the plane, Flight 93 goes down, crashing into a field, killing everyone on board.

In total, 2,996 people died in the attacks, around 6,000 were injured, and, in the years since, well over a thousand people have developed cancer as a result of the dust and toxins inhaled when the towers collapsed. It is the single deadliest terror attack in history, and one of the deadliest days for the United States since the country’s creation. Civilians of 102 different countries were among the dead, and as of September 2021, there are still over a thousand bodies that have yet to be identified.

After examining the passenger list and identifying the hijackers, it was determined that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks, and the United States demanded that the Taliban extradite Osama Bin Laden and the other perpetrators out of Afghanistan to be tried for terrorism. The Taliban refused, and so the United States led a coalition of allies to remove them from power and hunt down Al Qaeda. This would lead to twenty years of combat in Afghanistan, kicking off the global war on terror, and would pull the US and allies into several more military conflicts. The world would never be the same.

That’s the official story, but even just a few months after the attacks, people were already questioning everything. Early websites, books, and radio stations started throwing their support behind the ‘9/11 Truth Movement’, demanding that the government respond to accusations of involvement. One documentary was particularly successful: Loose Change, which was released in 2005, and was quickly spread throughout the internet. In fact, this is one of the documentaries I stumbled upon when I was younger, or, at least, so I thought. It turns out that the original Loose Change had so many flaws in it that the creators ended up releasing three newer versions of it, each time updating their narrative and taking away some of the stuff that had been thoroughly disproven. But even after several segments had been cut out, the 2007 version was still more than two hours long.

But don’t worry, this article won’t be two hours long. And we’ll do a much more honest job of covering what really happened that day. So, without further ado, let’s dive in:

Absurdity

We’re going to start with the theories that are so insane that I’m not even going to bother debunking them, because if you actually believe these you probably need to see a psychiatrist. We’ll just read them off and let you make your own conclusions:

Number One: It wasn’t planes that hit the twin towers

Believers of this theory posit that instead of planes hitting the towers, it was actually missiles, presumably launched by the US government. Videos and photos we’ve seen of them were doctored to make them look like passenger jets, and people on the ground were fooled by advanced hologram technology surrounding the rockets. And, of course, a plane didn’t hit the pentagon, but instead a long-range missile fired from a US military base, but we’ll get into the pentagon later. This is broadly known as the “no plane theory”, and it’s actually so ridiculous that it has been banned from the more serious conspiracy sites.

Number Two: It wasn’t terrorists that hijacked the planes: it was aliens.

This theory suggests that the reason the government never released the cockpit recording of the hijacked jets is because they were speaking in an alien language. I can’t for the life of me understand why aliens would fly thousands of lightyears through interstellar space just to steal a few American planes and crash them into some buildings. Though, I guess if it’s true we have them to blame for the creation of TSA.

Number Three: 9/11 was destined to happen because it fulfilled prophesy.

I tried to find the original Nostradamus prediction that supposedly describes the attacks, but every time I found a credible-sounding quote, I would find another website debunking it as a fake quote. There’s even a quote signed, “Nostradamus, 1654”, but this wasn’t possible because he would have already been dead for more than 80 years by that time, so I think we can safely write off any of his vague, obnoxious prophesies this time. One of his most widespread 9/11 visions was even put out there by a Canadian graduate student to show the world how easy it is to spread fake garbage on the internet.

But Nostradamus wasn’t the only clairvoyant to leave his mark in our story. I’d like to introduce you to Baba Vanga, a Bulgarian woman who lost her eyesight at age 12 when a tornado chucked her into a field. Apparently, her eyes crusted over with dirt, and she never regained the use of them.

This lady honestly deserves her own article so we’ll keep this brief, but she supposedly left predictions for the next 5000 or so years, ending with the time when she believed the universe will end. I don’t speak Bulgarian, so I don’t know how her legacy has held up in her home country, but I do know that she’s an incredibly popular topic among the Russian equivalents of the History Channel, where “experts” say that her prophesies have had about an 85% success rate.

So, what did she have to say about 9/11? Well, here’s a quote from 1988:

Horror! Horror! The American brethren will fall after being attacked by the steel birds. The wolves will be howling in a bush, and innocent blood will be gushing.

I can feel the eye-rolling already, so let’s move on from the prophesies and get into something equally ridiculous: antisemitism.

There indeed exists a conspiracy that the Jewish population in New York was warned of the attacks before they happened, giving them ample time to avoid the towers or get out of them before they were hit, especially the financial workers that had offices there. I’m seriously not making this up. Thankfully, it’s easily disproven when you look at the data: based on the victims whose religion was known, an estimated 10-15% of the total victims were Jewish, meaning that 300-400 of them were killed. Clearly, they weren’t warned ahead of time or that number would be zero, right?

Come on, this took me a simple Google search.

And apparently the Jews that were warned to not show up to work that day were told directly by Israeli intelligence, who were actually the true masterminds behind the whole attack, hoping to frame their enemies and get the US to go back to war in the middle east. These theories gained serious popularity in places like Iran, where news articles have randomly thrown around numbers between 500 and 10,000 Jews skipping work that day. Their source: trust me bro. These theories are nothing more than a convenient way to stir up antisemitism.

The Pentagon

Now that we’ve gotten those out of the way, let’s tackle some of the more serious theories, ones that at least attempt to bring forward some kind of evidence.

First up, let’s talk about the Pentagon. The attack on the pentagon is often overshadowed by the catastrophic tower collapses, but it’s one of the main arguments in the shadowy world of conspiracies.

The official narrative says that American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the pentagon, damaging one of the wings and starting a few fires. There are two main alternative theories on this one, but both agree that Flight 77 never crashed. The first theory says that it was instead a remote-controlled fighter jet that caused the damage, and the other, slightly more popular, theory states that an air-to-surface missile was fired from the wing of the passenger jet before it flew away, or that a missile was fired from a military base.

A lot of this boils down to the impact on the building compared to the aircraft. As one author put it:

How does a plane 125 ft. wide and 155 ft. long fit into a hole which is only 60 ft. across?

It’s a great question on the surface, because a quick glance at the hole in the pentagon shows that it isn’t quite as wide as a Boeing 757. The other piece of evidence is the grainy CCTV footage showing the moment of impact. The plane is too fast to get caught in a single frame, all we see is a clear, blue sky, and then suddenly in the next frame there is an explosion.

However, if you look very closely, in the frame just before the explosion, a small, thin, white object protrudes from the right. This is apparently the nose of the plane poking in for just a brief moment, but theorists believe this is inconclusive, and more likely to be a missile. Other suspicious pieces of evidence include an alleged difficult aerial maneuver that the inexperienced hijacker pilot would have been unable to pull off while flying that low, streetlamps that were knocked down without bringing down the plane, and no remains of the aircraft ever located at the site.

And this is where the theorists largely end their observations and begin drawing their own conclusions, but we can debunk all of this rather easily. First of all, there definitely were pieces of aircraft debris recovered at the crash site, including the black box, the landing gear, and the cockpit. DNA evidence was also gathered that matched the missing passengers, and even the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed the death of one of their citizens on the flight. If this was actually a conspiracy, I’d really like to know why China would want to help the United States.

As for the shape of the impact site, that is pretty easy to explain as well. Professor of Civil Engineering Mete Sozen said, “A crashing jet doesn’t punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building. When Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, one wing hit the ground and the other was sheared off by the Pentagon’s load-bearing columns.” This makes a ton of sense when you remember that the pilot probably wasn’t experienced enough to avoid scraping the ground in the few seconds before impact.

But I think there are two other serious issues with any pentagon conspiracies. If Flight 77 didn’t crash into the building, then where the hell did it go? Was it landed elsewhere, and the passengers disposed of? Was it flown into the ocean?

It doesn’t make any sense—if you already have the plane hijacked, you might as well use it instead of setting up some elaborate scheme to hide it before using a missile instead. Not to mention, many passengers on board called their family members to tell them their plane had been hijacked, and why would they have any reason to lie about that? Along with the passengers, plenty of people on the ground gave eyewitness testimony of the plane crash, but conspiracies just simply say that these people were “confused”.

As for a missile, I’m not in the military, but wouldn’t launching one from a base be pretty obvious to everyone stationed there? I have a hard time believing that every single engineer and soldier on a base would keep their mouth shut for that long. And there’s no way it was fired from the plane either—you can’t just hook an air-to-ground missile onto any vehicle that takes your fancy, you need the proper rail attachments, and these have to be connected to the cockpit so you can launch it with the press of a button.

Am I supposed to believe that the hijackers hurried and set all that up before take-off with no one noticing? I know airport security was pretty minimal before 9/11, but surely they would have noticed someone sneaking in 2000-pound laser-guided munitions.

I think we can safely say that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. There’s probably a reader right now that’s frustrated at how quickly I brushed off the Pentagon theories, but I feel that they simply fall apart the moment you look deeper into them.

Flight 93

Next up is Flight 93, the one that crashed into a Pennsylvania field when the passengers fought back against the hijackers.

The first theory we’ll cover is that Flight 93 was shot down by the United States Air Force once they learned what was going on. I’ll be honest, this is probably the most believable conspiracy theory in this article, but it still doesn’t have any evidence to back it up. Fighter jets were indeed scrambled to intercept the aircraft, two F-16s, but they didn’t have time to get armed before taking off.

The pilots were actually prepared to ram the hijackers—they’d already agreed that one of them would ram the tail and the other would hit the cockpit to take the plane down and hopefully minimize collateral damage. They never got the chance, though, as Flight 93 went down before they got anywhere near it. So yeah, it’s honestly possible that they shot it down and covered it up, but it’s pure speculation.

Theorists also point out that a standard crash doesn’t account for how spread out the debris was at the crash site, with chunks of metal flying for over a mile and some smaller pieces making it several miles before falling back to the ground, but multiple experts have shown that this is not only possible but actually expected. One of the engines, for example, flew for about 900 feet, or 275 meters. Its location is completely consistent with the direction the plane was traveling, and with its airborne speed it would have only needed to fly forward for a few seconds after impact to make it so far.

And yes, the engine was found only 900 feet from the rest of the fuselage—don’t listen to the many conspiracy websites I found claiming that it was found several miles away in the opposite direction, it’s just a straight up lie. Among the sites that don’t lie though, it still seems odd to me that they expect a heavy, fast passenger jet to crash into the ground and stay neatly put together.

Additionally, the black box recorders for the plane were located two days later, and a fair amount of human remains had to be picked out of the wreckage.

Some explanations state that the real Flight 93 actually landed in Ohio, and that a second dummy plane was crashed into the field in its place, and that the passengers were disposed of or hidden away. But this runs into the same problems as the plane that hit the pentagon. Why would you go through all of the trouble to set up a fake plane crash if you plan on killing all the passengers anyway?

Let’s not forget, Flight 93 also had passengers make phone calls to loved ones and the police when they realized what was happening. According to the FBI, a total of 37 phone calls were made, during which the passengers learned of the unfolding situation and described their plans to storm the cockpit. So how do you explain that away? Were they also just “confused”?

Or was it an elaborate government plot with voice modifying software as some have suggested? I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty pissed if I sacrificed my life to take down some terrorists only to learn that everyone thought I’d actually landed at a secret NASA base and been disposed of.

The Twin Towers

We’ve finally arrived at the most commonly held beliefs: those surrounding the collapse of the twin towers and tower 7.

Let’s start with the twin towers. At its core, the conspiracy theory states that the collision of the passenger jets and the burning of the jet fuel is insufficient to explain the complete collapse of the buildings. This is the origin of the ‘jet fuel can’t melt steel beams’ meme, because steel’s melting point is 2750 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1510 Celsius, while jet fuel burns between 800 and 1500 degrees Fahrenheit or 420 and 815 degrees Celsius, so the burning fuel is allegedly insufficient to explain the melting of the towers’ structural beams.

So then how did they collapse? This brings us into the controlled-demolition theory—the idea that the real cause of the collapse were bombs placed in the basement of the towers, and that the planes were just a distraction. Eyewitnesses supposedly heard shaking and ‘booms’ from the lower floors before the collapse, and, on several videos, you can see that windows near the base of the towers explode before those above them do.

The lobbies were also visibly damaged long before the towers fell, which is odd considering that the impacts were more than 80 stories up. On top of all of this, the way the towers fall down does indeed look like a controlled demolition would, with minimal damage to nearby structures as they collapse straight downward, falling at near free-fall speeds.

The backers of this theory aren’t all crackheads though, and there are actually some pretty intelligent people that stand by it. Take, for example, Steven E. Jones, who has a PhD in Physics and is known for his work in muon-catalyzed cold fusion. In 2005, Jones published his findings, saying that after analyzing the dust from the collapse, he had found traces of red and white flecks, apparently byproducts of thermite explosives, as well as iron-rich microspheres.

I found one of his papers from 2007, detailing his analysis of the collapse. I was able to follow along during his explanations of how photos of dripping, molten metal have been seen and how white puffs of smoke coming out of the building are indicators of thermite explosives. He also takes a sample of dust and runs a magnet along it, pulling out the metallic bits so he can take a closer look at them under a microscope, leading him to find the iron-rich microspheres I just brought up.

I’m no chemist, but apparently the existence of these spherical iron bits mean that the metal was at one point molten. Jones goes on to say that only thermite explosives could have brought the iron and steel to sufficient temperatures to create these microspheres found in many dust samples. By the way, if you’re wondering, the dust samples he analyzed were mostly gathered by a woman living down the street when the towers collapsed—apparently dust flew through some of the holes in her window and she collected them in a jar.

This is one of the first times in a conspiracy that someone has brought forward legitimate evidence, or at least legitimate enough to someone like me who isn’t an expert, so obviously I needed to keep digging. While reading more about Jones, I found out that he was a professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, and as I happen to live just a couple hours’ drive from there, I wondered if I might get the chance to ask him a few questions in person. Unfortunately, it turns out that he went into early retirement from his professorship quite a long time ago, and the receptionist I spoke to didn’t have a way to contact him. After looking into it a bit, it turns out that he accepted early retirement under some serious pressure after being put on paid leave by university administrators once he had started posting his 9/11 papers on the school’s official website.

So, while I would like to bring you more analysis on those thermite byproducts and microspheres, we’re going to have to move on.

To start with, reports of ‘booms’ and shaking in the ground before the towers went down are simply incorrect. Seismographs placed 21 miles north of the towers picked up the whole event. On their graphs, you can clearly see the impacts of the planes register as a sudden bump in the graph, and then, a short while later, you can see the much larger spike of each of the crumbling towers. Conspiracy theorists say that a collapsing skyscraper wouldn’t bring about such sudden, intense seismic activity, and that the only explanation for this abrupt shaking is explosives.

But this right here is a classic way to misrepresent data. Notice at the bottom of the graph—the X axis shows us that this chart covers a whole 30 minutes of data, but the collapse of the towers only took 8 and 10 seconds each, so of course in comparison it looks like a single spike. Take a look instead at a graph with a shorter timeline, this one of only 40 seconds: here, we can clearly see the expected seismic activity. No sudden, massive spikes indicative of explosions.

Showing the longer timeline that squishes the results is outright deception.

As for the whole ‘jet fuel can’t melt steel beams’—well, you’re right. If you place a steel rod in burning jet fuel it’s not going to turn into a liquid. It will, however, get really, really hot. Well over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

And for a structure to collapse, its support beams don’t need to turn into molten lakes, they simply need to lose enough structural integrity to fail. At 1100 degrees Fahrenheit, steel loses nearly half of its strength, and by the time the fires raged at their maximum temperature, at least 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, and, in some pockets, up to nearly 1900 degrees, the steel support beams that were directly exposed to the flames could have lost as much as 90% of their strength. And remember, fuel wasn’t even the only thing burning. The fuel that remained after the explosion was merely the ignition for everything else in the building:

Carpet, rugs, thousands of desks, furniture—everything remotely flammable in those offices was quickly engulfed in flames, letting the fire advance at a rapid pace. And it wasn’t just localized to the impact point—as burning fuel seeped through vents and elevator shafts, the inferno was quickly raging on dozens of floors, pushed around by the wind blowing through now shattered windows, weakening the steel around it at every point. Fireproofing spray was either scraped off during the collisions, damaged in the explosion, or was simply insufficient for the immense heat that it was now facing.

The steel floors begin to sag, sinking under their own weight, pulling the walls in and putting immense strain on the steel bolts holding each floor in place. Then, a chain reaction: as one floor near the impact site gives in and collapses, it slams into the floor below it, which immediately caves in and falls to the next floor. A fast, powerful process, known as pancaking, which brought down the entire structure.

This also explains the white puffs of smoke that people saw shooting out of the windows—this is dust and concrete being blown out as the floors collapse onto each other. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was commissioned by the US government to officially investigate the structural failure, and their report identified flaws in the fireproof coating as one of the main reasons why the fire was able to deal so much damage.

There are probably people already typing furious comments about how none of this is possible and I’m a traitor that’s fallen for the lizard peoples’ lies, but study after study shows that this is likely what happened in the building that day. And yes, those studies are peer reviewed, unlike anything you’ll find on a 9/11 truther site.

But wait, they’re still furiously typing, what happened to the black boxes? You know, the indestructible flight recorders placed on every passenger jet. After all, these were never located. Well, you’re right, they were never found, but they’re far from indestructible. Even the ones found in the wreckage of the other flights, the pentagon and the one that crashed into a field, were both partially damaged, and they weren’t even the ones to get crushed under a million tons of steel and concrete.

BUT WAIT, they continue, if the black boxes were destroyed then how was one of the hijackers’ passports found on the street? Surely that would have burned. Well, that’s not always the case. First of all, the passport wasn’t found inside the collapsed rubble, where it would have likely been squished, it actually fell to the street after the impact.

Light, paper debris actually survives a plane crash more often than you’d expect—Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashed into a mountain in 1985, killing 520 people on board. In fact, it was a rather violent crash, with one wing clipping the ground causing the aircraft to flip over and explode on the mountainside. But, miraculously, many of the handwritten farewell notes written by terrified passengers were later found, because they were able to blow far enough away from the crash site to avoid being burned.

Anyways, we can’t cover every single talking point in this article, so here’s a few rapid-fire debunkers:

• The molten substance visibly dripping in some photos cannot be proven to be steel, or any other metal. It could just as easily have been glass.
• The surgical-seeming cuts in the base of the towers are exactly that: surgical. Rescue teams used thermite torches to burn through steel supports in an attempt to save the people trapped underneath. These were made after the fact, and were not a cause of collapse.
• US Geological Survey examined dust samples and found that the red and white ‘thermite material’ was likely flakes of primer paint. And, according to other experts, thermite explosives would be too slow to be useful in a controlled demolition regardless, and there would have needed to be so much of it used that someone surely would have noticed it being planted ahead of time. It’s also possible that the use of thermite in the cleanup process contaminated dust samples that were later examined, which is why they contained said iron microspheres. And while we’re at it, there is actually not a single shred of evidence provided to prove that these dust samples were actually taken from the WTC, we’re just supposed to take people’s word for it, which is ironic.
• The WTC attacks are not comparable to the time a WWII era bomber hit the Empire State Building. That plane was a B-25, significantly smaller, significantly slower, and carrying far less fuel than the Boeing 767s that struck the towers. And yes, it was a B-25, not a B-52 Stratofortress, which is an absolutely massive plane. If you have heard that it was the much larger B-52 you probably watched the original cut of the Loose Change documentary that I mentioned earlier, because in their first edition they mixed up the planes when talking about this event and apparently didn’t notice before release. Kinda sloppy if you ask me.
• Structural engineers argue that the reason the towers fell in such a straight manner is because it is the only way possible. One of the towers actually had a bit of a tilt at the top, but a skyscraper that massive can’t possibly lean very far, as this would put so much stress on the building below it that the supports would give out and it would simply collapse like it did anyway. It’s just too heavy to tip over sideways and take out half of Manhattan.
• At the time, these were the only high-rise steel towers to collapse due to an internal fire, but it has since happened to two more notable structures: The Wilton Paes de Almeida Building, a Brazilian 24-story building that collapsed in 2018 due to an electrical fire that started on the fifth floor. And the Plasco Building, an Iranian 20-story building that collapsed due to a fire originating on the ninth floor.

Anyways, I could go all day on this one, so let’s wrap things up with the last tower.

Tower 7

Lastly, we have Tower 7, which was unfortunate enough to get damaged during the attacks and collapsed later that day.

A lot of the conspiracy points here are similar to the twin towers, so we’ll run through this one briefly. First of all, Tower 7 wasn’t hit by a plane, so people were already super skeptical of its collapse. This was made worse by the fact that the BBC accidentally reported its destruction twenty minutes before it actually happened, and that the building’s owner, Larry Silverstein, was recorded saying to the fire department, “We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it”…”They made that decision to pull”…“and we watched the building collapse.”

People cite this as him agreeing to detonate the bombs and bring the building down as well. To add to the suspicion, the CIA, and various government agencies, had field offices in the tower, so was this simply a convenient way to destroy evidence of planning the attacks?

Well, no. The collapse here was similar to the towers. After being struck by falling debris, the building caught fire, and several floors burned for nearly 7 hours. The collapse of the other towers had disrupted the water source for Tower 7’s sprinklers, and the quote about making the decision to “pull” was actually about pulling firefighters out of the building and deeming it a lost cause.

Thousands of people watched the building go down, and none of them heard any explosions. The only eyewitness report of explosions is from one man who was exiting the building when he heard them, so should we believe the one single guy or everyone else who was there and saw the whole thing happen?

The fire weakened the steel supports in the center of the building, and, in a similar way to the other two, one of its floors gave in, causing the whole thing to come crashing down. This was made even easier by the fact that falling debris carved out 10 floors on the center facing side so deeply that the center of the building was exposed. If you watch a video of the collapse, you can clearly see that as cracks form across the building, the east side begins to slump, and as it collapses, it pulls the west side down with it. This one actually did tip a little bit to the side as it fell, hardly what would be wanted in a controlled demolition.

Wrapping Up

At the end of the day, we are left with three conclusions:

The US government initiated the attacks.

The US government was aware of the attacks ahead of time and let them happen.

Or,

Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and there is no conspiracy.

If the US government did it, we are left with more questions than answers. Sure, they allegedly did it to go to war in the middle east, but think of how many people had to be involved in order to pull the whole thing off. You’d need planners, recruiters, pilots to train the hijackers, explosives experts, people to move thousands of pounds of bombs into the world trade centers, people to set them off, all while keeping the whole thing a neat little secret.

We’re talking potentially thousands of people, and no one said a word. Also, if we’re buying into this conspiracy theory, how far are we going? Was it planes that hit the twin towers, but a missile that hit the pentagon?

Did the twin towers fall from the planes, but only tower 7 had to be brought down with explosives? The problem with these elaborate conspiracies is that there isn’t a straight story. There’s just an enormous amount of suspicious talking points, but not all of them are compatible in a single narrative.

I will give them this though, one of the reasons this theory is so popular is because not many of us would be shocked to hear that the US government had done such a thing—the CIA has a pretty bad track record since its inception.

And also, let’s not forget that Al Qaeda did take responsibility for the attacks. Initially, they denied involvement and begged the US to not invade Afghanistan, but later took back what they said, and their English propaganda magazine Inspire has even featured articles debunking conspiracy theories. Another point I’d like to bring up here is that in the days after the attacks, there was a vicious attempt within the government to pin them on Iraq, but every trail kept leading back to Afghanistan. If the US government’s plan was to invade Iraq, why would they set up some super complex conspiracy that points at Afghanistan? They could have just easily said the hijackers were Iraqi and gone from there, but the evidence always led back to Al Qaeda.

Option 2: maybe the government knew about the incoming attacks, and simply let it happen. In my opinion, this is far more plausible than believing they carried out the attacks themselves. What most people will bring up here is that the US actually received intelligence of the planned terror attacks earlier that year, and ignored them. The daily briefing handed to the president on August 6th, 2001, just a few weeks before it all went down, was titled ‘Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US’, warning that Osama Bin Laden had operatives in the US that were planning a major attack. On top of this, a few of the hijackers had already been flagged by the CIA as Al Qaeda members, but they had made their way into the country anyway because apparently no other departments had been informed. The government’s response to all of this was a series of statements talking about how yes, they were anticipating an attack, but no one expected passenger jets to be used as weapons.

But this actually isn’t true—anti-terrorist organizations had already foiled a similar plot in 1995, known as the Bojinka Plot, where terrorists planned to blow up 11 planes over the pacific, assassinate the pope, and crash a jet into the CIA headquarters in Virginia. Ambitious for sure, and they were very close to carrying it out. In fact, they were in the process of making their bombs when their plot was uncovered.

Coincidentally, Osama Bin Laden helped to fund and plan this attack, and it’s clear that some of the ideas of the foiled plot made their way into the 9/11 attacks. In addition to the Bojinka Plot, a joint inquiry found that there had been twelve reports in the last 7 years warning of terrorists using planes as missiles.

Egyptian, Jordanian, Italian, Israeli, and British Intelligence all reported to the United States throughout 2001 that Al Qaeda was planning something huge, involving aircraft, as many as 20 terrorists, and large-scale American targets.

So yeah, the government was very much aware that such a thing could happen, and that there were people actively thinking of doing it. Whether this constitutes prior knowledge or not, I’m not sure, but we can at least accuse them of being incompetent by letting known terrorists into the country. You also need to keep in mind that the CIA operates on a massive, worldwide scale, and these threats probably blended into the background noise of thousands of other reports, wiretaps, and intelligence leaks. It’s just thanks to hindsight that they stand out to us now.

Though conspiracy theorists will be quick to point out that it wasn’t just the government who had knowledge ahead of time, and all you have to do is look at the stock market. It was later noticed that in the weeks leading up to 9/11, an unusual amount of ‘put options’ were placed on airline companies. These are options that will be profitable only if the company stock plummets, so it seems like a clear mark of insider trading.

A peer-reviewed study from the University of Illinois and a group of Swiss financial experts have also come to the same conclusion. I don’t really have a way to disprove this, but I feel like if someone had told a bunch of business dudes on Wall Street that 9/11 was going to happen, someone would have spoken up. But let’s clear one thing up: a big part of the foreknowledge conspiracy revolves around the owner, Larry Silverstein, getting a massive payout for terrorism insurance, which he purchased just months before the attacks.

He even took the insurance company to court, arguing that he should get paid double, as the separate towers should count as separate cases, and won 4.5 billion dollars in the settlement. Sounds ultra-suspicious but let’s break it down. First of all, Larry Silverstein purchased a 99-year lease for the twin towers in June 2001 and was immediately contractually obligated to insure it.

The insurance plans that he and his investors chose automatically had terrorism coverage included, because back then this came with pretty much every all-risk commercial insurance plan—after all, the idea of a devastating terror attack seemed far-fetched. It’s not like he went out of his way to hurry and add a terrorism clause—it was just the nature of the policy. And remember, the WTC was bombed in 1993, and its owners were also fully covered then, but nobody bats an eye about that one.

Finally, we have option 3: That Al Qaeda, in their blind hatred for the United States, and western civilization in general, planned the most devastating attack they could envision, and carried it out on September 11th, 2001. The towers collapsed from the weakened structural steel, not bombs, the pentagon was hit by a plane, not a missile, and Flight 93 went down in a field when the passengers revolted, not because it was shot down by a fighter jet.

You can decide which of these narratives to believe—just remember, if your whole argument is based off of stuff you’ve seen on 4chan and Reddit, perhaps it’s time to consider investigating some more credible sources.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the official narrative of the 9/11 attacks?

The official narrative states that four passenger jets were hijacked by 19 members of Al Qaeda, who crashed two planes into the Twin Towers, one into the Pentagon, and one into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

What are some of the more absurd conspiracy theories about 9/11?

Some absurd conspiracy theories include the idea that missiles or holograms were used instead of planes, that aliens were involved, and that Nostradamus or other prophets predicted the attacks.

What evidence is there that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon?

Evidence includes recovered aircraft debris, DNA evidence matching passengers, and eyewitness testimonies. The shape of the impact site is explained by the plane’s wings hitting the ground and being sheared off by the Pentagon’s load-bearing columns.

What are the main theories about Flight 93?

The main theories are that Flight 93 was shot down by the U.S. Air Force or that it was a dummy plane crashed to cover up the real Flight 93, which supposedly landed in Ohio.

What is the controlled-demolition theory regarding the Twin Towers?

The controlled-demolition theory suggests that bombs were placed in the basement of the towers, and the planes were a distraction. This theory is supported by eyewitness accounts of ‘booms’ and shaking, and the appearance of controlled demolition in videos.

What is the explanation for the collapse of the Twin Towers?

The collapse is explained by the weakening of steel support beams due to intense heat from the fires, which caused the floors to sag and collapse in a chain reaction known as pancaking.

What are the main conspiracy theories about Tower 7?

The main theories suggest that Tower 7 was brought down by controlled demolition due to the presence of government agencies and the owner’s comments about ‘pulling’ the building. However, the collapse is explained by fires weakening the steel supports.

What are the three main conclusions about 9/11?

The three main conclusions are: the U.S. government initiated the attacks, the U.S. government was aware and let the attacks happen, or Al Qaeda was behind the attacks with no conspiracy involved.

What evidence suggests that the U.S. government was aware of potential attacks?

Evidence includes a daily briefing titled ‘Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US’ and intelligence reports from various countries warning of potential aircraft-based attacks.

What is the significance of the ‘put options’ placed on airline companies before 9/11?

The ‘put options’ are seen as a sign of insider trading, suggesting that some people had foreknowledge of the attacks. However, there is no concrete evidence linking this to a broader conspiracy.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Was 9/11 an Inside Job?
• Hero image source by Anthromesimages / openverse, by-sa.