OK Folks I have had it up to HERE with this DRIVEL !!!!

I am in an ongoing debate with a very smart man with whom I attended 11 years of school back in my hometown. He is a very smart guy. He is worldly, intelligent, knowledgeable, bright, a good communicator, a professional speaker and professional musician, with a beautiful wife and kids. He lives in the Los Angeles area after coming from Smalltown USA in central Texas, population 5,000 country folks.

He has moved up in his life. He has famous friends, is politically very active as an Independent, and has an internet weekly radio show. He's not a dumb guy, and far from it. Far more accomplished than I am, for sure.

Here's the problem:

He believes the US Government is responsible for the 9-11 attacks.

(long, long, LONG head-shaking sigh)

Along with thousands, maybe millions of misguided souls, he has fallen into the crevasse of those who believe our government is capable of:

1. Killing thousands of Americans and international visitors ON PURPOSE.
2. Doing so as a prelude and a precursor for authorizing an attack on Iraq so all the BushCo Oil guys and the Haliburton guys could get rich.
3. Doing so as a prelude to start spying on Americans in America.
4. Hiding such a HUGE HUGE "conspiracy" secret from the people.
5. Covering it up to an extent where no one other than the fringe people who believe it have ANY idea.

Now, this is SO RIDICULOUS in SO MANY WAYS that it's hard to even find a place to start attacking the idiocy of the idea. But I'm going to try to start anyway - that's just me :)

Let's start with one of their BIG premises:

The towers were IMPLODED and DEMOLISHED from within by explosive charges planted by the "Conspiracy Guys."

OK, first of all, explosions of the sort they talk about would have been VISIBLE to the naked eye to the MILLIONS of people watching the towers fall on TV. Dust and debris would have flown out of the building at the instant the "rigged bombs" would have been exploding within the building. Did anyone see that? Nope.

Secondly, the police and fire who were in the area would have HEARD or SEEN something that keyed them to the fact that interior implosions were taking place. They were THERE, onsite, within hundreds of feet of the area. They would have known. SO, based on that inescapable fact, it did not happen that way.

In addition: All the THOUSANDS of people who were involved in the debris cleanup. Did any of them EVER report seeing any "planted explosives debris" during the cleanup? For the "Conspiracy Guys" to have blown the buildings down, and left NOT A SINGLE PIECE OF TRACE EVIDENCE behind, well that would have been the most incredible feat of explosives engineering in the history of mankind !! AND, on top of that, they had to KNOW they would not leave a trace, because if not, the "Conspiracy Guys" would have had to been in control of the cleanup, making sure any evidence of implosion equipment was quickly "hushed up" and hidden away. Not possible, with THOUSANDS of RANDOM VOLUNTEERS doing the job.

And - what about the thousands of workers who reported to work that day - did any of them report seeing any explosive charges rigged around the building? Nope.

And - in most demolition jobs, they cut through the main support beams of the building, usually about 90% through them, to make for a clean collapse. Obviously, the implosion was one of the CLEANEST in history, right? Could this beam-cutting have been done SILENT and UNNOTICED by the INVISIBLE DEMOLITION NINJAS too?

Also: There are seismologists and earthquake equipment all over NYC. If there had been explosions of that kind, someone would have noticed them and reported them to SOMEONE, SOMEWhERE, right? That did not happen. (after further review of this statement, there ARE apparently conspiracy proponents who have seismic readings that day which of course COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE BY THE HUGE BUILDINGS FALLING DOWN. NO, it MUST have been explosive charges in the buildings !!!! ((Puh-Leeze)) )

Lastly on this subject: One of the TV channels, I think A&E, had a special show where they detailed how the towers collapsed. They spoke to the designers and engineers of the building, and the NYC building inspectors, and they came up with a perfectly logical explanation of the collapse. It is based on how the steel cross beams for each floor were attached. They were held by one weld at each end, and when the steel SOFTENED, Not MELTED, the weight of the floor above pushed the beams down, and the weight from the above floor caused the lower floor joists to collapse, and it collapsed on itself like an accordion. It's very simple. It was based on the fact that the fireproof spray was scarce in many places and had fallen off, and the force of the explosion blew the rest of it off, so the building had no fire protection for the steel beams. Simple. Obvious. Conclusion.