Debunking Paranoia: '9/11 was not an inside job'

Today is the 13th anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Since that tragic day, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in a terrorist attack, a cottage industry of conspiracy theories has embedded itself into our collective imagination--like a flea might embed itself into a dog's hide. Wild speculation about inside jobs and pseudo-science about controlled demolitions have become commonplace.

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Yet nothing beyond supposition exists to suggest anyone other than 19 Arab terrorists working for al-Qaeda were responsible for hijacking and crashing four domestic commercial airliners on Sept. 11, 2001.

As for claims that airplanes could not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers without assistance from "controlled demolitions" and similar assertions, well, the clear scientific record as laid out in the NIST report and Popular Mechanics' "Debunking 911 Myths" report demonstrate clearly how the crashes led to the tragic collapses that took so many lives 13 years ago.

"Never forget" remains the national sentiment about the 9/11 attacks. However, to truly never forget, we cannot allow seductive fictions to obscure the reality of that day's events in our collective memory.

If you aren't much for reading, here is a short video explaining the science of the World Trade Center collapse.

Debunked

And here is an explanation of what happened to World Trade Center Building 7, the building that collapsed though it wasn't directly hit by a hijacked airliner.

Tower 7

Conspiracists are often more confounding than their conspiracies. In this video, Noam Chomsky, no shrinking violet when it comes to criticizing powers-that-be, explains why these conspiracies make little political and no scientific sense.

Chomsky

If you'd prefer a shorter rebuttal, here's former President Bill Clinton answering conspiracy theorists. Clinton said it plainly: "9/11 was not an inside job, it was an Osama Bin Laden job."

Bill Clinton

And then there is the late, great Christopher Hitchens simply dismissing such foolishness--quite appropriately--the way one might dismiss a flat-earther.

Hitchens