I'm pretty sure there were two fighter jets scrambled from an air force base here in Massachusetts..I forget the name maybe it was Otis but I know they were on their way to NYC when the second plane hit. It's tough to consider 9/11 an inside job at all. I guess it's hard to accept that al-Qaeda pulled off this job.

I won't pretend to know, but I do have a hard time swallowing a lot of things surrounding 9/11, especially when Bush so quickly used it to further unrelated goals.

Opportunity knocks. There are some smart people on his team.

My reply to this is here:
http://www.defendingthetruth.com/viewtopic.php?t=1247

I really don't think the planes alone would have caused the towers to collapse. Even in the videos you can see explosions before the towers collapse. It wouldn't have been hard to place explosives inside hte building beforehand, adn there's n oreason why smoe terrorists couldn't ahve done that prior to the attack. I still don't see how that contradicts the theory about us being attacked, and why people insist the planes were the oly thing that caused the buildings to collapse.

From what I have read the towers were built so well that they should have held the weight of the top 10 stories that collapsed even with the added weight of the planes and the extreme temps produced by the fire. The fire would NOT have weakened the main steel structure.

That's my point. I mean, maybe the fires softened some extraneous metal and crap, but the the fact that the main support columns in the center of the building were gone as well suggests that bombs were placed within the WTC. How does this contradict anything people say about planes being the cause? The planes obviously didn't help things, but they weren't the reason the towers fell (which we agree on anyway).

The most logical reasoning for this is simple: Had the planes caused the collapse, one would expect the towers not to pancake, but to rather tilt to the side where the hole is since naturally that would be the weaker area. Besides, even if just that section of tower tipped, I think it would have done much more damage than the towers pancaking as they did.

They are saying that the towers main steel support structure was weakened by the planes and that the weight of all the stories falling on each other (like a domino effect) was enough to bring down the whole towers in a pancake manner.

From what I have read the steel structure below where the planes hit should have been able to support those 10-15 stories even with the additional plane weight and fire.

Correct. That's what I think as well, although the planes certainly did not help things. and IF the planes were the sole cause of collapse, the buildings would have toppled from those floors, rather than pancaking. I think explosives caused the actual collapse, both higher up in the building and at hte base of the support columns. Otherwise, you would have still had large chunks of the 5 support pillars that run through the center of the building.

Don't take the can from the middle of the stack!