I've been following the 9/11 conspiracy theories -- as much as one can be said to "follow" anything as disjointed as that -- ever since they raised their empy heads on this board.
And I've checked out their Web sites, their YouTube posts, their boards and blogs.
And sure, it's true that they argue from ignorance, that their experts have no expertise, that they make unsupported and often unsupportable claims, that some of their statements are contrary to fact. Yadda yadda yadda. So what?
That's not the primary problem.
The primary problem is this:
Even if their claims regarding the motivations behind, and the goals of, the alleged conspiracy were accurate....
And perhaps they are. After all, just this week we've seen long-buried evidence come to light demonstrating that the military, under the Kennedy administration, developed plans to bomb US targets and blame it on Cuba.
And there's ample evidence that this administration was planning war with the Musulman as early as January of 2001, and their willingness to lie is beyond question.
But even if they had these motivations and goals, here's the trick, boys....
No one would ever have thought to propose such a complex, resource-intensive, high-risk plan as what the CTers are proposing, when there are any number of cheap, quick, low-risk, low-cost alternatives that could be devised.
And even if anyone had proposed such an ambitious, expensive, and likely-to-fail plan which required involving so many contractors in an ultra-sensitive scheme, no one with the power to give a green light would have approved it.
And even if someone had approved it, it would never have passed muster and made it to the planning stage, much less gone through to execution. (Note that the Kennedy-era military plans -- which were simple and low-resource -- were squelched and never made it past the drawing board.)
Hell, even Liddy's Watergate plan -- which cost a couple hundred K, posed very low risk, and involved a mere half dozen outsiders -- was only approved after at least 2 previous plans, which were more costly, complex, and ambitious (but still nothing near what the CTers are describing) were flat-out rejected. And Nixon had no scruples at all.
So you see, all this back-and-forth over details (which the CTers have never been able to push beyond "coulda been" in any case, and which they are demonstrably wrong about in all other cases) is a bunch of sound and fury over nothing.
Their very premise reveals them to be utterly ignorant of how such decisions are made, or else willing to ignore that reality for the sake of a good story. And of course, the elaboration of the theory reveals them to be utterly ignorant of just about every other issue relevant to the event, or else willing to lie.
It's a non-starter, folks.
