Unhealthy skepticism

It was less than 48 hours after the 9/11 attacks when a friend of mine suggested to me that the U.S. government was really behind it all. Ever since, one cannot research Sept. 11 without coming across a flood of commentary from the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement, which questions every official explanation of the attacks and substitutes explanations of its own. Why? To support the pre-conceived fantasy that 9/11 was really a hopelessly large and convoluted government plot to generate support for some other plot just as large and convoluted.

Calling 9/11 an inside job is like saying the British Crown engineered the Boston Tea Party so it could justify sending more soldiers to the Colonies. It just doesn’t make sense or stand up to any informed scrutiny, and neither does the 9/11 Truth movement. These conspiracy theories are insulting tripe fueled by people unwilling to accept 9/11 for what it really is: the act of a few brazen terrorists upon a nation that did not take their threats seriously enough until it was too late.

There is a wealth of information to be had that supports the official explanations of 9/11, but it would seem that Truthers either don’t bother with actual research or they simply dismiss obvious explanations as part of the conspiracy. If ever there was a deep, dark rabbit hole of circular logic, it is 9/11 conspiracy thinking.

Sadly, there persist some falsehoods about the insurance aspect of 9/11, also. One is that WTC 7 was intentionally destroyed in order to collect the insurance on it. This theory overlooks a lack of contract certainty on said coverage, and modern claims management practices, which both relegate the insurance angle to the realm of poorly written paperbacks.