I asked several of my friends what they think. 

Friend 1 - PhD in Theoretical Physics. He was part of the first group who wasn't from US/China that won the MIT maths modelling competition:

''It's likely that the government was involved.''

Friend 2 - Lead Java programmer of one of our countries biggest online trading companies:

''Of-fucking-course!!!''

Friend 3 - Nuclear Physicist doing post grad in Space Physics:

''Stephen:  nah bush didnt dunnit

he too dumb

Steve likes playing dumb, but he sure as hell isn't.

You can tell me I'm biased, but the fact is that YOU'RE the one living in the US so you are more likely to be biased. Not only that, but sooo many people outside the US share the opinion with me. My fiancee is German and the people I met through her say the same thing.

Don't try to belittle my opinion by using the 'b-word'. At least give a good argument.

As a Canadian, I’ve seen countless other non-Americans who have an irrational hatred for Americans; and this hatred becomes far worse for American conservatives. I've had countless experiences with other Canadians (in particular people on the far left) who make ignorant comments about the United States that are on-par with the youtube videos you often see posted where some moronic individual justifies their voting ...

In other words, being from outside of the United States doesn't free you from bias; and depending on where you're from and your political leanings it may ensure you're biased.

Yeah sure, but he brought up the 'biased' issue first, and I would argue that he's more succeptable to it than someone half-way accross the world. In any case, I don't think it should factor at all - point is, many educated people do not think muslim radicals were the sole cause for the 911 attacks. The odds are just too small.

just because they are educated doesnt mean they cant be stupid and ignorant.  the answers are there for anyone actually willing to look at them, rather than go in circles with their repeatedly debunked conspiracy crap. 

So basically anyone in disagreement with you is automatically wrong? No point in this thread then is there? Actually, no point in having any discussion at all.

on this topic, yes, obviously.  i mean i dont see whats the purpose in having these discussions time and again, when all the evidence is there and these "truthers" just meander about in circles, ignoring whats been said to them or the links that have been provided to them.

quite frankly, when this event happened my first thought was something along the lines of "good. about time.".   so i was more than willing to believe these conspiracy theories when they started coming up.   in fact i had a science teacher that spent a class talking about why the war in afghanistan was all about oil.  Education can make you more likely to spread ignorance because you already "know" the answers.   The real problem is that most people tend to just question the story, find one these conspiracy whackos and then feel proud of themselves for having worked it all out.  They dont actually look at how or why things happened...everything in the video they watched must be the truth; completely factual and the whole story. 

ok guys, assumed that US is innocent, how the heavens did the WTC 7 collapsed!?

it is a damn 47 floor building, how can it collapse just like that, without any clue on what caused the collapse?

Larry Silverstein wasn't a new leaseholder on WTC 7.  He is the one who built it back in the 80's.  I'm sure he had been paying insurance on that for the previous 15 or so years. He was the new leaseholder on the rest of the WTC complex though.  Don't you usually get insurance when you acquire a new property?  Also he wasn't paid $7 billion.  That is what he was trying to get because he was trying to say the attacks consisted of two events.  Thus he should get double the $3.55 billion the policy was worth.  He eventually got a maximum of $4.577 billion.  He has also still been paying the port authority $102 million a year for the past 10 years for his lease on the rest of the WTC.  All of this had nothing to do with WTC 7, it was just 1, 2, 4, & 5.

WTC 7 was seperate and he was awarded $861 million for that.

I've seen the report from Jones.  There was no chain of evidence.  There is no way to verify that what he tested actually came from the WTC.  I mean seriously, make up your mind.  Was it thermite or explosives?  Because they aren't the same thing.  If people were hearing explosions it wasn't thermite.  It boggles my mind that people still try and use this theory.  Also thermite is never used demolitions.  It is pretty volatile and only cuts vertically.  Why would they choose that when they are going to ram a plane into the building?  What sort of casing was this thermite in that it could withstand the impact of the plane and the fires without going off?  Also, explosions in the basement before the planes hit?  You take a single eyewitness but ignore the fact that tens of thousands of people were around the ground floor of the WTC.  If there were actually explosions in the basement there would be much more concrete evidence.

Air moves like a fluid.  The majority of the building is filled with air.  When the top part of the building started collapsing that air was compressed.  It takes the path of least resistance which in many cases meant a window blowing out.  Take a beachball filled with air.  Now poke a hole in the bottom and squeeze the top.  The air will come out of the bottom immediately.  It isn't the air from the top coming out.  It is the air from the top pushing the rest and the bottom air shooting out.  Now take a beachball with no holes.  Keep squeezing it until it fails.  That was probably the weakest part of the ball, likely along a seam.  Just like the windows would be the weakest part of the WTC.

Do you not see how the comparison to the Manhattan project is bad?  Information on the project was released to the public just a few days after the Nagasaki bombing.  They didn't bomb NYC and then keep it secret for a decade.  In your fantasy, do you think the people who rigged the WTC for demolition didn't realize what they did after 9/11 (though it would be pretty damned difficult to not know as they were doing it)?  Or are you suggesting Bush and Cheney were pulling all nighters in the WTC planting explosive charges.  Since you claim only a select few people knew what was going on.

Shooting a plane down doesn't reduce it to ash, and plenty of debris was found that wasn't ash.  As for why a bandanna was found, who knows.  A plane crash is unpredictable.  There were likely thousands of items of clothing onboard that plane.  Does that one bandanna surviving prove anything?  Like I said NORAD wasn't notified until there was very little time left and these were not normal hijackings.  In all those other hijacking cases did NORAD simply shoot down the plane a few minutes after it was alerted of a hijacking?

It wasn't a 747 that hit the Pentagon.  It wasn't on the first page, and it isn't now.  It was a 757 which is smaller than the 767s that hit the WTC and MUCH smaller than a 747.  You're right, the plane didn't leave a cartoon cutout of itself in the pentagon, but it did cause severe damage to the area where the wings impacted the building.  They had much less mass and contained fuel.  They weren't just going to keep travelling as a solid piece.  You also have to ignore all the plane debris around the pentagon as well as the light poles and generator that the plane hit before impact.  This is just another case of you probably saw some video with a quote from somebody and one or two pictures and you then believe a wild theory based on nothing.  Where did all the plane debris come from?  What happened to the plane if it didn't collide with the Pentagon?  Where are the people?  Why fake a plane crash when they already crashed two of them?  You have to make crazy leaps in logic and ignore all the facts to believe only a missile hit the Pentagon.

I have to single this next part out.

Holy crap, did you not read a single word of my post that responded to all your points?  It was the very first part.

First of all, do you not see the difference between a plane flying slowly, low on fuel, and trying to land versus a plane moving at a high rate of speed, loaded with fuel, trying to crash into a building?  How does that support your case at all?  Different scenario, smaller plane, and Leslie E. Robertson even said they didn't know how to deal with a fire like that at the time.

Second, Frank A. DeMartini was FOURTEEN YEARS OLD when the World Trade Center complex began construction.  He had no part in the design of the buildings.  He wasn't associated with them until the company he worked for was hired after the 1993 bombing.  He was't "project manager of the WTC construction".  He was the construction manager at the WTC.  There is a big difference.  He handled construction like moving drywall or plumbing, not the engineering of the building.  He was an architect not an engineer.

The Windsor in Madrid was not all steel.  Even if it was, it didn't have the same design as the WTC.  Even if it was, it wasn't hit by an airplane.  The Windsor had a concrete core as well as concrete interior columns.  It also had reinforced transition floors which made the building stronger.  What your conspiracy videos probably didn't show you was the building did collapse.  At least partially.  The portion of the building that was held up by the steel curtain wall came down while the side with built with concrete and the bottom floors also built with concrete held up.  Watch this video, it shows the collapse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz-WVJ0zeXE#t=2m25s

Well I think I've covered pretty much everything.  Your stack of houses comparison is just bad.  You do realize a graph of time and distance fallen won't be linear right?  If you drop a rock from 1000 ft, it doesn't take twice as long as a rock dropped from 500 ft.

You claim to be using common sense, but you aren't.  You're using out of context examples, half truths, and just flat out lies to create this grand conspiracy that doesn't even make sense.  Do you not see how when you latch onto every theory it makes your whole argument worse?  Why would the government fly planes into the WTC, but also plant explosive charges, but not just that they used thermite too?  You have such a belief that anything the government says is a lie that you're willing to cling to any wild theory someone puts out just to dispute it.  Take flight 93, you were under the impression that the only debris was ash or microscopic and the flight recorder was never recovered.  Both of these things were untrue.  I think you've accepted this, but doesn't it cause you to sit back and think maybe all the bullshit you've been fed isn't correct?

I think I read that some former WTC employees actually remembered somewhat unusual building activities in the weeks before 9/11, but by the time they didn't really ask many questions about it. In practice it was probably completely unrelated, all I wanna point out is that for the right people, this probably wouldn't have been a huge problem.

As sad as it is, lots of people/companies benefit from wars. Haliburton & Co. are just the most prominent examples.

Bin Laden never really took credit for the attacks.

What you probably remember is an ultra-low-quality video with a guy looking somewhat like Bin Laden, talking in a language you didn't understand, and a translation that really sounded like he was behind the terror attacks.

But when independant experts of the language later analyzed the video themselves, they all criticized the translation given by the white house as being inaccurate and manipulative. Quotes: "I have carefully examined the Pentagon's translation. This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of Bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic." "The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but that cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it.". So quite similar to Ahmadinejad's "wipe Israel off the map" quote that was also later proven to be completely inaccurate and misleading.

What's interesting by the way is that even the FBI never considered him responsible for 9/11. Bin Laden's FBI wanted poster only made him responsible for an attack on a US embassy in the 90s. When a journalist asked the FBI for clarification why 9/11 is not mentioned on his wanted poster, an FBI spokesman said that this was indeed not an error, but that they really had no evidence that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.

As for me, I don't believe that the US government was actually behind the attacks, but I don't completely believe the official version tells the full story either. There really are certain details that are quite strange, like WTC7 or the 9/11 commission. All about this commission smells like it was never actually wanted to reveal the full truth. As at least one commission member later phrased it: the whole commission was "set up to fail". If, for example, you're wondering why WTC7 is never mentioned in the official 9/11 commission report: The commission members were able to veto any sentence from appearing in the report. So IF someone really wanted to remove certain information from the official report, all he actually had to do was get one single mole into the commission.

Personally, I could imagine that certain high rank people had been told very concrete details of the planned attack in advance, but for some reason they decided not to prevent the attacks, and instead even remove some obstacles that could prevent the attacks. (like the NORAD fighters)

Your avatar makes me giggle! *tee-hee!*