One thing that isn’t often mentioned by those who are just positive that the entire event was a government job is whether they feel the same way about the first attack on WTC in 1993. If so, it’s a much less vocal crowd. But it was the ’93 bombing informed the 2001 attack from the air. Ramzi Yousef’s bomb was detonated with the goal of knocking the North Tower into the South Tower resulting in both being destroyed. Despite six fatalities and over a thousand injuries, his goal was not realized. But they learned. Less than a decade later, Yousef’s maternal uncle KSM came up with the plan carried out on September 11th.

This narrative requires nothing fantastical. It’s a fairly straightforward timeline to a horrendous day. Asking questions is natural. Creating complicated conspiracies that would have required thousands of people to pull off highly improbable events is something altogether different. We should reject the latter and learn from the former. Doing so will make preventing future attacks more likely. Wasting time on fiction just slows such efforts.

One element of the 9/11 conspiracy movement has always stuck me as particularly stupid: Those who believe that the Pentagon was struck by a missile presumably do accept that it was planes that hit the World Trade Center. Thus, they believe that the government (or whatever unknown forces they blame) did have the ability to use planes for the attack, but decided to just fire a missile at the Pentagon instead of using a plane, for no apparent reason.