The 9/11 deniers

Conspiracy theorists often respond to criticism by expanding the conspiracy to include their critics. Both Avery and Rowe, without naming names, say they suspect some who've heaped scorn on their movie might be secretly working for the government. "I'm pretty sure our movement has been infiltrated," Avery says. Rowe argues that "the government puts out disinformation agents within the movement to splinter it. This is what they do, they try to create dissension between head members." Both say they've looked over the rebuttals, but stand by their film's major claims.

Ironically, Hoffman levels the same charge of government complicity at Avery. Indeed, here's where the conspiracy theories grow even stranger: Hoffman argues that the 9/11 planners specifically engineered the attacks in a way that would lead some people to embrace flimsy 9/11 theories. Avery, Hoffman says, has fallen into the government's trap; the government wants people to say that an airplane didn't hit the Pentagon, because the claim makes 9/11 skeptics look silly. In the movie, Avery wonders why the government hasn't released surveillance videos captured near the Pentagon that would show definitively whether an aircraft crashed there. (The Pentagon recently put out a couple of videos that don't at all settle the matter.) Hoffman says he knows exactly why the government is being stingy with the videos -- not because it has something to hide about the Pentagon, but because it wants to feed the no-plane theory. It's all part of the plan to "divert attention from the core fraud of the attack -- the Big Lie that the Twin Towers collapsed due to impacts and fires."

Two official structural engineering studies of the World Trade Center collapse -- one conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the other by the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- have concluded that the towers fell due to uncontrollable fires sparked by the plane crashes. NIST, which created a computer simulation of the crashes, found that the aircraft dislodged fireproofing material in the buildings, leaving the trusses that held up the floors vulnerable to extreme temperatures. The sagging trusses pulled in each building's perimeter columns, which consequently weakened its inner core; when the floors above each crash site gave out, the towers came crashing down.

Hoffman has written several technical papers criticizing this theory. I spent a few hours one afternoon reading them very slowly, and I also pored over the work of Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University who argues that there's little evidence to support the official structural engineering explanations. "Everybody has an intuition of what things should look like when they're falling," Hoffman explained to me one afternoon. The trade towers seemed to violate the natural way things fall. For instance, just as the South Tower began to collapse, the top 30 stories of the building tipped 15 degrees to the side. "If you have an object in rotation it tends to stay in rotation unless operated on by a torque. So it should have toppled faster and faster," he explained. "But instead of that happening, it just stopped toppling. The top actually stopped rotating." As Hoffman saw it, the way it stopped rotating indicated that something -- something explosive -- was forcing the structure to fall straight down. (Feeding Hoffman's suspicion, the NIST and FEMA studies did not examine what he calls the curious manner in which the buildings fell. But in its report, NIST "found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001 ... Instead, photos and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward.")

Then I watched what are perhaps the most compelling images supporting the notion of a forced demolition -- the many videos showing the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 at 5:20 p.m. on 9/11. The collapse, which FEMA also pinned on the fires started in the neighboring twin towers, is extraordinary; the building simply disappears into itself, disintegrating like it had been planned for weeks. In one shot from CBS News, Dan Rather, narrating the scene, says the sight is "reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen when a building was deliberately destroyed by world-class dynamite to knock it down." His immediate reaction seems just right -- the building falls so gracefully, so cleanly, it's mystifying.

Hoffman offers a theory of the attacks that seems more simple and straightforward than the one presented by "Loose Change." He agrees with the main points in the official story: Hoffman thinks that hijackers did board the planes (though they were patsies, he says), and he believes the airplanes actually crashed into the buildings (though he suspects Flight 93 was shot down). In Hoffman's scenario -- which he stresses is speculative, because of course you can never really know for sure -- ground-based attackers used some kind of gas to render everyone on board the planes unconscious, and they subsequently controlled the aircraft through remote control. The real work occurred in the Trade Center, where Hoffman believes a small team could have secretly planted "thermobaric" explosives in the elevator shafts of all three buildings in the weeks before the attack.

While the no-jetliner theory "Loose Change" presents assumes a vast conspiracy (just imagine how many people you'd need to replace the real aircraft with drones, to handle all the passengers, to secure that airport in Cleveland), Hoffman says a relatively small team of a few dozen or so people could have carried out his plan. Yet when you dig into his theory, it turns out that Hoffman, of course, is proposing something grand. Like many in the movement, he questions the loyalties of members of the 9/11 Commission and other panels that have investigated the attacks. Hoffman doesn't believe that commissioners were involved in the attack, but he says they were certainly part of the coverup. If you search the commission's report for an explanation of Building 7's collapse, you won't find a thing. Why is that? Hoffman believes they weren't really interested in the truth. "They created this vast myth about the hijackers," Hoffman says of the commission. "It was a mass diversion, steering attention away from all these burning unanswered questions."

Next page: Will the 9/11 Commission have a second investigation?