The following excerpt comes from an OpEdNews article, entitled The IRD's Attack on My ''Silly'' 9/11 Theories, by David Ray Griffin:
Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, by contrast, have provided evidence -- an enormous amount of evidence, in fact -- showing that the official conspiracy theory is simply not believable. I will give six examples:
- Long before 9/11, the standard operating procedures for intercepting airplanes with in-flight emergencies had been finely tuned, so that planes experiencing such emergencies were usually intercepted within about 10 minutes. But on the morning of 9/11, we are told, these standard procedures failed four times in a row, even though the airliners were flying 20 or 30 minutes after they showed clear signs of experiencing in-flight emergencies. Especially unbelievable is the idea that the Pentagon, surely the most well-protected building on the planet, could have been struck by a hijacked airliner over 30 minutes after it had shown signs of being in trouble, and also over 30 minutes after both of the Twin Towers had been struck. If the Bush administration and the Pentagon had believed that America was under attack by terrorists using hijacked airliners as weapons, the airspace over the nation's capital would have been heavily protected by fighter jets.32
- The very idea that the airliners were hijacked is rendered unbelievable by a conjunction of many facts: First, all the evidence for the presence of hijackers on the airliners falls apart upon examination. For example, the best-known evidence consisted of the alleged phone calls from passengers and crew members, but the FBI now says that the two phone calls from Barbara Olson on American Flight 77 reported by her husband, US Solicitor General Ted Olson, never happened, and the FBI also now denies that any of those reported high-altitude cell phone calls occurred. Second, in addition to the lack of evidence for hijackers, there is even positive evidence that there were no hijackers: neither the autopsy report for Flight 77 nor the passenger manifests for any of the four flights contained the names of the alleged hijackers, or any Arab names whatsoever; and although it takes only about two seconds for pilots to use the plane's transponder to "squawk" the standard hijack code, not a single pilot did this, even though it supposedly took the hijackers some time -- about 30 seconds on United Flight 93 -- to break into the cockpit.33
- The claim that the planes were taken over by Muslim hijackers is further disproved by the absurdity of the claim that Hani Hanjour took control of American Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon. Hanjour was known to be a terrible pilot. One of Hanjour's instructors, reported the New York Times, said: "He could not fly at all."34 Only a couple of months before 9/11, moreover, a flight instructor refused to go up with Hanjour a second time in a single-engine plane, considering it too dangerous.35 According to the official story, nevertheless, Hanjour flew a giant airliner with almost superhuman skill. The trajectory reportedly taken by Flight 77 -- "execut[ing] a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver," said the Washington Post36 -- would have been so difficult for a Boeing 757 that pilots with years of experience flying these planes have said they could not have done it. Russ Wittenberg, who flew large commercial airliners for 35 years after serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot, says it would have been "totally impossible for an amateur who couldn't even fly a Cessna" to have flown that downward spiral and then "crash into the Pentagon's first floor wall without touching the lawn."37 Ralph Kolstad, who was a US Navy "top gun" pilot before becoming a commercial airline pilot for 27 years, has said: "I have 6,000 hours of flight time in Boeing 757's and 767's and I could not have flown it the way the flight path was described."38
- Although NIST claimed that it found no evidence that explosives were used to bring down the Twin Towers and WTC 7, what it really did was simply ignore a huge amount of evidence, including: (i) testimonies about explosions in the buildings by over 150 credible people, including police officers, journalists, WTC employees, and more than 100 members of the Fire Department of New York;39 (ii) particles of iron, molybdenum, and other metals in the WTC dust that could have been produced only by temperatures much hotter than the buildings' fires could have reached;40 and (iii) particles of nanothermite, a high-explosive, in the dust.41
- Even with all of that denial, NIST's explanations of the collapses of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 violate elementary laws of physics. A recent essay in one of our leading social science journals, discussing the fact that physicist Steven Jones was forced to resign because of his conclusions about the World Trade Center, says: "Professor Steven Jones found himself forced out of [a] tenured position for merely reminding the world that physical laws, about which there is no dissent whatsoever, contradict the official theory of the World Trade Center Towers' collapse."42
- NIST's most obvious violation of physical laws occurred in its final report on WTC 7, which appeared in November 2008. In the draft version of this report, which had appeared in August, NIST had denied the claim made by scientists in the 9/11 Truth Movement that this building had come down in virtual free fall. NIST claimed instead that its descent had taken "approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free fall time."43 NIST even explained -- while presupposing its own theory of the collapse, according to which it was caused by fire, not explosives -- why a free-fall, or even virtual free-fall, collapse would have been impossible.44 But after physicist David Chandler demonstrated, in a YouTube video, that the top floor had come down in absolute free fall for over two seconds,45 NIST acknowledged this fact in its final report, but without changing its theory.46 NIST thereby affirmed a miracle, in the sense of a violation of laws of physics -- a fact that NIST implicitly admitted by removing all its previous assurances that its explanation of WTC 7's collapse was "consistent with physical principles."47 The fact that Building 7 came down in absolute free fall for over two seconds, thereby forcing NIST to affirm a miracle, has shown, more clearly than any other feature of the official account of 9/11, that the government's conspiracy theory is the silly one.