"mostly based on a strong desire not to believe in a world where such tragic and stupid and pointless things can happen."

Royston, let's assume that the official report is correct and that Osama Bin Laden and various people in Al Qaeda planned and carried out the 911 attacks all by themselves...with no domestic assistance from American sources in the US government or its covert agencies.

If so, the results definitely were tragic. But they weren't pointless! Osama Bin Laden's whole reason for wanting to strike at the USA has always been clearly explained in things he has said when issuing his statements. He is angry at the USA because of:

1. the presence of American military forces in Saudi Arabia
2. the presence of American military forces in other parts of the Arab world, which he sees as a form of colonialism
3. the USA's continual support of Israel, and the unresolved plight of the Palestinians

He wanted to strike back privately at the USA over those issues, since the Arab governments will not do so. He wanted to do major financial damage to the USA, since he felt that would be the most effective way of eventually getting the USA to pull its forces out of the Middle East. He wanted to provoke the USA into a series of extremely costly wars in various places, wars which would eventually bankrupt the USA.

He's fighting an empire. He has concluded that the American empire's weakest link is not its military, which is the world's strongest by far, but its financial structure.

For him to have attacked the WTC buildings would not be pointless at all. The destruction of those buildings would do major financial damage in the first place and would most definitely provoke the USA into a series of costly foreign wars.

*****

Now, suppose instead that 911 was a plot hatched in the USA by people in the Project for a New American Century...people like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Bushes, etc...

They wrote a paper in the 90s on the need for a "Pearl Harbour-level event" which was what they felt would be required in order to take the next steps in establishing the USA as the undisputed superpower and boss of the whole world. Such an event would be needed in order to get the American public onside to support at series of foreign wars aimed at securing control of various oil-producing areas in the Middle East and the Caspian Sea region. The countries which would need to be attacked included Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and possibly Syria...perhaps Pakistan, depending on how things went there.

There was no way the American public could possibly be persuaded to support such a series of wars unless the USA were first openly attacked by someone.

But by whom???? No one out there is stupid enough or suicidal enough to openly attack the mainland USA on the level that Japan did in 1941 at Pearl Harbour, because such an attack would doom any government which carried it out.

So no Muslim government was going to do it. A bit of a problem there for the people in the PNAC!

They had to instead get some non-governmental outfit to either do the attack...or take the blame for it. So they decided upon Al Qaeda...a very small and not very capable group of people gathered around Osama Bin Laden.

They may have made it easy for Al Qaeda to set up the attack by just keeping an eye on their preparations and not stopping them...in which case the guys in Al Qaeda would just think, "Gosh, things are going well there. I think we're going to pull this thing off!"

That's one possibility.

Another possibility is that Al Qaeda personnel didn't do any of it...though I doubt that...but it is possible. You can remotely control a modern airliner or other large plane and fly it into any building you want using computers, and you can knock out its crew with gas in the cockpit, etc. There are ways to do that.

You can further prepare the buildings by placing exposives in them over a period of several weeks prior to the attack so that a controlled demolition can be done after the airplanes make the highly visible public hits on the buildings.

The purpose of the airplanes would be to give people a visual foreign "enemy" to blame for the attack, namely Al Qaeda. If the airplane hits themselves were not enough to bring the buildings down, then the pre-placed explosives would do the rest.

The control center from which radio signals would be sent to the detonators would be Building 7, which would itself be destroyed to remove all evidence after Buildings 1 and 2 came down. The physical evidence would be removed from the site as quickly as possible after the attack (which was done).

Those buildings were losing money steadily. They were unviable in a financial sense. They had asbestos all through them which by law would have to be removed...at a gigantic cost! The handiest thing for the new owners to do, under the circumstances, was to insure the buildings for the maximum $$$ possible, then destroy them...supposedly by a foreign terrorist attack...and cash in.

All these are theories. I don't know which conspiracy theory is nearest to the truth...the government's or various others...but there was certainly a conspiracy.

Any one of those conspiracies would have been far from pointless. It makes sense from Bin Laden's point of view to knock down those buildings and get the USA embroiled in financially devastating wars. It makes sense from the PNAC's point of view to knock down those buildings and get the imperial expansionist policy they wanted in the world. It makes sense from the WTC's new owners to knock down those buildings, get rid of a financial sinkhole, and cash in on the insurance.

It makes sense any way you look at it...if you are an ammoral son of a bitch who doesn't care how many people die in order to advance a plan that you think benefits you.

Now, watch this video:

Firefighter speaks on 911 coverup.

Watch it and give it fair consideration. This guy is a firefighter. He speaks on behalf of himself and many other firefighters who were there on 911, and who feel there was a coverup of a controlled demolition of the 3 buildings which came down. Those are eyewitnesses. They are professionals. Like you, they feel well qualified to judge the evidence of their own eyes, but they see it differently from you.

There are many qualified and intelligent people on both sides of the argument. Neither side can just be casually dismissed as "tinfoil hat" people. One has to consider all the evidence, all the eyewitnesses, and all the opinions.

I don't know for sure what happened on 911. I can only wonder, and continue to read whatever I can find about it. I don't consider the case "closed".