What's up with that?
What official story? Nobody ever told me any "official story", and harping on the word "official" doesn't make me go all paranoid.
I think this is yet another demonstration of sloppy thought and argumentation. Often, when truthers attack "The Official Story", they're actually referring to the majority accepted historical narrative of that day. The problem is, they tip their hand strongly by trying to attach the word "Official' onto it. They attempt to make the strawman that everything "we" know is from the government, the insinuation being that what we know could have been slanted or outright manufactured from the government. That betrays a serious and fundamental misunderstanding of all the sources of information regarding the event.
Yes, there are indeed "Official" reports. The NIST report is one. The 9/11 Commision Report is another, although I'd note that much of what was in that work was simply taken from already available sources, so it's much more an aggregation of existent knowledge rather than a generation of such. Regardless, it was assembled by a congressional body, so it's as official as it gets. But that doesn't make the entire narrative single-sourced; even the "Official" reports here aren't single sourced, but rely on a large foundation of other group's individual efforts (look at the citations in either work for validation of this).
But the
narrative of 9/11 is built on much more than that. It goes back to pre-2001 reports of radical Islamic terrorism, and extends laterally out from just government sources. Original information producers, such as NEADS in NORAD, and the information distributer (in this case,
Vanity Fair) is one example. Eyewitnesses who were quoted for news stories is yet another. The recipients of passenger calls from the hijacked airliners is a third (and BTW, this is what I mean by "official" reports not being single sourced. The government via FBI interviews did indeed report what the victims relatives said, but they didn't
originate it. That's an important distinction). And so on, and so forth, from historians who've covered Bin Laden in the 90's, to first responders who talked to reporters, across groups like RJ Lee and the UC Davis Delta group who did independent research, to groups like Worcester Polytechnic's bunch who were contracted by NIST to study a specific issue that arose from the rubble piles (the sulfidation eroded steel). And more.
The tendrils that make up a historical narrative are far more numerous and complex than what the conspiracy narrators like to portray it as. It may be convenient for them to cast their claims as contradicting a monolithic, composed and controlled narrative, but the reality is that the real history is anything but.