9/11 conspiracy theories

This morning I spent several hours digging through a bunch of sites dealing with 9/11 conspiracy theories and creating a response to a reader's question about whether I believed the official story behind the 9/11 attacks. In short: I do.

In a slightly longer answer: while its depressing to acknowledge that such a phenomenal chain of errors occurred in the systems designed to prevent such a catastrophe, I believe that kind of thing happens all the time - albeit with far less severe consequences. Think about it: almost all "human error" disasters are diagnosed to be the consequence of a system that failed in an unpredicted way, or through a chain of errors that "should never have occurred". Occam's razor predicts that a cascade of human errors or cascading systematic failures is far more likely to be the cause than hundreds of government agents working in concert and absolute secrecy to pull of the same outcome and succeeding with no discernible trace.

While looking at counter 9/11 conspiracy opinions I found an article by David Corn that basically said the same thing. He also echoed my opinion that basically when it comes to complex covert plots the government has been demonstrably incompetent and it far rather prefers simple schemes like funding foreign dictators and insurgents to do its dirty work for real. Could the US government have secretly funded Al Qaeda to carry out the plots? Well it undoubtedly did fund Al Qaeda at one time, that's an undisputed matter of fact. That it lead to blowback against the USA, well they should know better, but apparently they never learn from dozens of prior blowback cases. Put that down to repetitive stupidity disorder. Did they deliberately engage Saudi's to destroy the WTC and a wing of the Pentagon? It's just possible, but very, very improbable. So much so that I don't intend to spend any time worrying about it.

If there's anything I worry about as a consequence of 9/11 its the important questions it raised regarding the structural failure following fire of the WTC buildings (North and South towers, and WTC 7) that deserve much more thorough investigation for the safety of all people living in steel frame buildings. Similarly I worry about the failure of systems to extinguish the fires, correctly inform and evacuate the building of people, and failure to correctly deal with the pollution consequences following the collapses. With more and more of these buildings being constructed its only a matter of time before more WTC like events occur whether triggered by natural or external causes. I personally believe that its only a question money saving that leads to insufficient provision for safe and effective egress systems for people trapped in skyscrapers.