Patrick Curley on The Truthers and 9-11:

"The Truthers ignore facts which don't fit into their beliefs"

The Truthers start with the assumption that the official story is wrong, and grab for any inconsistency in the official story as evidence that they are right. But the sensible way to investigate any incident is to examine the evidence and see where it leads.

In the case of 9-11, there were four to five men of Middle Eastern extraction who were on each of the planes, and in each case one of those men had a commercial pilot's license.

It is not a leap of logic to assume that the men with the pilot's licenses were the pilot hijackers and the men who trained in close quarters fighting were the muscle hijackers. We know from history that fanatical Muslims are willing to give their own lives in an attempt to kill those they perceive to be their enemies, from the suicide bombers in Israel and in London, to Richard Reid (the shoe bomber), or most recently to Major Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter (who survived, but must have considered it likely that he would lose his life in the attack).

We know it is unlikely that Westerners would similarly be willing to kill themselves, and so the Truthers have come up with elaborate scenarios as to how the attacks occurred without suicide-minded pilots. Maybe the planes involved were not the ones we were told, perhaps they were substituted for with un-piloted military drones.

Maybe the planes were taken over by remote control and flown into the buildings. Or, in the most ridiculous scenarios, maybe there were no planes at all, and the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated on the American public with CGI graphics inserted into TV coverage.

Truthers believe that the towers were destroyed by controlled demolition. But in fact, controlled demolitions in the US and elsewhere start at the base of the building to be demolished. In the cases of the WTC towers the collapses started at the stories where the planes crashed.

What about Building 7? Truthers will often point to "mysterious" collapse of WTC-7, a nearby 47-story building that was not hit by a plane on 9-11. But in fact WTC-7 was pelted with flaming debris from the collapses of the Twin Towers, and caught on fire.
Since there were no people in WTC-7 (it was evacuated shortly after the first plane hit the North Tower), and since the firefighters wanted to concentrate on rescue operations in the Twin Tower rubble, a collapse zone was set up around WTC-7, and no firefighting operations were taken to save the building, which collapsed after about 7 hours of extensive fires. There are numerous accounts by firefighters and other rescue personnel that WTC-7 was in danger of collapse, so there is really no mystery.

In regards to the Pentagon attack, Truthers will often note that there is no videotaped evidence of a plane hitting the building. This is true, although one camera (at the guard shack) caught the explosion. However, the Pentagon is close to several highways, and there were hundreds of witnesses to the plane crashing into the building. Truthers will sift through these accounts, saying that we can't trust anybody who worked for the government, or the military or the news media. Not surprisingly, people in those lines of work are disproportionately represented in the Washington, DC area.

Ultimately, the Truthers are wrong because they ignore all the evidence which does not confirm their beliefs.

Why are these theories dangerous?
People have a hard enough time making solid decisions even when they have an accurate understanding of history. How much less likely is it that they will make sensible choices, when their knowledge is inaccurate and when the "facts" they use to make those decisions are false.

For example, a currently popular belief is that the world is going to end in 2012 because that is when the Mayan calendar supposedly ends. If you believe that is true, why would you work hard and save for the future? Why would you send your children to school, or get them inoculated against disease?

And, on a purely personal level, belief in conspiracy theories can result in the breakup of families. Richard Gage, who founded a group called Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth was divorced from his wife over his obsession with the conspiracy theories. Sherry Clark, a self-described "Trophy Wife" became an embarrassment to her husband and her church when she began talking about conspiracy theories.

A 9-11 filmmaker named "Lucus" wrote a few years back:
"Before I went full blast on 911 truth, I had a career at a place I loved to work on the beach in Corpus Christi, Texas. I had a beautiful fiancé that I was supposed to marry on March 17th who I had been with for 7 years.
I left her on Jan 1st of this year because I did not want the powers that be coming down on her for something I was doing. She was trying to finish school and I did not want to do anything to ruin that. To my great and utter regret she has now met someone else and is moving on without me which was the final nail in my coffin. That has hurt me in ways I can't even express right now."

Patrick Curley
American blogger on Screw Loose Change, a blog that debunks 9-11 conspiracies

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