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While there are a number of theories that surround the central 9/11 “Truther” mythology – namely, that the American government was involved in making 9/11 happen – one of the more widespread ones is the claim that the WTC was brought down with explosives. The theory goes that a plane crash couldn’t bring down one of the towers, and that additional explosives had to have been set and used in order to create the collapse that we saw.
Not being a Truther, I reject this theory. There’s ample evidence to back me up, which has, of course, been “debunked” by the Truthers, and their debunking has been counter-debunked, then counter-counter debunked, and so on. The net-net at the end of the day is a lot of people arguing over the internet about what “is” means, invoking Godwin and Poe, and reminding us about that very insensitive joke about the Special Olympics.
But here’s a question I’d like answered, because I think it gets to the heart of the matter: if 9/11 was an inside job from start to finish, why did they bother to put explosives in the WTC at all?
Think about it: the central thesis is that 9/11 was launched in order to whip up an excuse to go to war in order to achieve a battery of goals that satisfied a number of secret, ulterior motives. Now whether these motives were getting oil, protecting Israel, ushering in a reign of evil fascist mind control or some combination of the above depends on which stripe of Trutherism you belong to (anti-corporate, anti-Zionist/anti-Semite, anti-reality). But the basic kernel of “truth” is that the American government faked a terrorist attack, or greased the wheels to let it happen, in order to give us a war, and thereby make those hidden desires a reality.
Why, then, did they have to go to so much trouble?
I mean, come on: a terrorist outfit to blame it on is all ready to go, you have a cover story ready, a convenient fiction, and all the people in place to nod, go “yessir” and start bombing Afghanistan, and then start blaming Saddam Hussein and start making ready to bomb Iraq. You just have to make the terrorist attack happen.
So why, why, why bother to line the WTC with explosives? Isn’t crashing a plane into each tower, the Pentagon and the Capitol* (though it never got there, thankfully) enough of a casus belli? Why go to the extraordinary step to ensure the towers came down at all?
This is part of what sounds so weird about the whole Truther mindset: the towers couldn’t have come down by themselves, like that, so therefore it had to have been an inside job and the Government did it for X reason. But wouldn’t it have just been so much simpler to just have their Al-Qaeda proxy agents ram the planes into unadulterated towers?
I mean, if they came down or stayed up, what’s the difference? Either way, we got attacked by terrorists. And it’s not like they were going to get any incriminating evidence from what was left of either plane, were they?
So yeah, we can argue back and forth about whether Dr. Jones found thermite in the debris, as is once more being claimed. But that doesn’t explain why the government would have gone to the extraordinary lengths it would have taken to have used it effectively to bring down the WTC, when all they really needed to do for a war was crash the planes into them.
* this is, of course, not taking the “no planes” theory into account, which has it that a missile hit the Pentagon and there was no plane that hit in Pennsylvania. But it further adds into the complication problem: why go to the trouble to send a missile into the Pentagon and claim a plane hit Shanksville if a plane apiece into the WTC towers would have been enough?
