YouTube has recently suggested a lot of 9/11 conspiracy videos to me. If I click on one of them and watch it, YouTube mines that and suggests more. As I watch them, one thing is pretty clear: few people buy all the way in to the “official” story of the day, which says that 19 Islamists simultaneously hijacked four airliners on the east coast, flew them for some distance without effective official countermeasure, then successfully flew three of them into symbolic structures. Two of those structures, very tall skyscrapers, then collapsed in an identical fashion, and later that day a similar nearby skyscraper also collapsed in a nearly identical fashion.

The problem with the conspiracy theories is this: as implausible as the events of 9/11 seem, no one seems to be able to suggest either a more passable scenario or explain why powers that be would create scenarios that seem so inconsistent.

So, let’s break it down 9/11’s most implausible items…

• Steel skyscrapers collapse due to impact plus fires. I’ll grant you that this is a pretty hinky occurrence, and what the theorists say most often, that no modern high-rise has ever collapsed in its footprint after being damaged or destroyed by fire, is true.
• Airliner wings and engines “melt” into the side of a steel structure like the WTC towers or the side of the Pentagon. I suspect this one is related to speed; bullets go into stuff all the time and seem to melt, despite being much softer than the materials they strike.
• Airliners flying near the ground at very high airspeeds. A lot of conspiracy videos assert, and even cartoonishly illustrate, that wings of airliners would be torn off at 500 knots at sea level. As a pilot, I know a few things about speeds, and they are talking about Vne, or Velocity Never Exceed, the bug on the airspeed dial the represents sound advice from the engineers who designed and built the aircraft: if you go faster than this, we can’t guarantee the airplane will fly a like it should or even hold together. While it’s true that on the flight decks of the jets that struck the WTC, there were probably audible and visual warnings going off, and that flying a jet at these speeds would mean taking it out of service for inspection, it is not a guarantee that the wings and empennage would fly off.
• No black boxes found/black boxes found by the FBI and/or not released. This is probably a consequence of the FBI being in charge of the investigation. Only the NTSB knows how to collect and interpret such devices. A more marginal explanation might be the desire to “spare” the families the horror of reenactments.
• The planes were actually missiles that were switched for the actual planes that ended up somewhere else. Even if this were the case and for some reason you needed to shoot the WTC with a missile, why not just put it onto a 767?
• That airliners would be able to shut off transponders at a certain time of day. Actually, Occam’s Razor favors this one, as a bunch of teenage boys with walkie-talkies could have done it.

One way to measure the logic of a scenario is to examine what it accomplishes.

Certainly if you wanted to commit 9/11 from the inside, the hijacking scheme is one way to do it, but why would you? If you wanted to burn records or destroy specific buildings, a far simpler way would be to stage a fire or explosion. Or a more straightforward terror attack, like a successful version of the failed 1993 WTC attack.

Or turn it around: what did 9/11 accomplish for the U.S. government? Specifically? That’s really the biggest hole in the 9/11 conspiracy scene: what did 9/11 accomplish for the insiders?

Somebody please talk some sense to me. I certainly can’t find it from the internet’s so-called Truthers.