9/11 Anniversary: Still so many unanswered questions

"9/11 changed everything" – so we are told. But does that include eliminating our common sense? My common sense tells me that would be pretty stupid.

And yet, we still have not had a real, independent investigation of the crime, the first sensible thing to do. From the start, all we got were misguided "reasons" to go to war (but of course, no actual declaration of war, as the constitution mandates).

"But I don't believe in conspiracy theories," I hear some of you saying. Well, if you believe the government's official story on the event, you believe a conspiracy theory, because that's what it is. And it's a theory with holes so huge you could fly hijacked jetliners through them.

The questions still being asked are posed by mainstream, intelligent people with degrees in physics, etc., not necessarily just by nutcases wearing tinfoil hats posting to conspiracy blogs. They are asked by seasoned fire fighting veterans like Bill Manning, editor of Fire Engineering Magazine, who called the so-called investigation a "half-baked farce" in the January 2002 issue.

The list of unanswered questions is probably familiar to many of you, but I feel it is worth reiterating some of them on this sixth anniversary of the terrible event:

1) Why were fighter jets not scrambled immediately after it became clear that jetliners were off course, with their transponders turned off? This is Standard Operating Procedure, and has happened hundreds of times in recent years, but not on 9/11.

2) Jet fuel, even when burning at optimum temperatures (like through an engine, and certainly not in the open air), does not get hot enough to melt steel. When New York Fire Department Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer reached the impact zone of the South Tower on the 78th floor at 9:48 am, as a recording of his radio transmission shows, he reported, "We've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines." No steel frame structure in history has ever collapsed due to fire, and there have been much hotter fires, burning for much longer than these fires. So, how can we believe all these huge steel beams melted at the same time, to allow for a "pancake" collapse?

3) All the concrete in the buildings was completely pulverized to fine dust, causing a pyroclastic flow, similar to those caused by volcanic eruptions. There were no chunks of concrete in the wake of the collapses. There were large pools of molten metal in the basements of the towers that took weeks to cool off. How can a gravity collapse cause this? Physicists have shown that the amount of energy it takes to pulverize 90,000 tons of concrete is immense, and not explainable by fire or gravity. Numerous eyewitnesses, captured on videotape at the time, broadcasted by local and national tv, reported huge explosions throughout the building. What was the cause of such destructive force?

4) The biggest smoking gun is this: WTC Building 7, another steel-framed structure, 47 stories high, 300 feet from the nearest Tower and not significantly impacted by debris, collapsed in classic demolition style later in the day, perfectly falling into its own footprint. It had only a few small fires in it, of unknown origin. If this had happened on any other day, there surely would have been a thorough investigation of the collapse. Instead, it is virtually ignored, completely unmentioned in the so-called investigation published in the 9/11 Commission Report. Something brought down that building, and it wasn't fire. What then?

There were so many other strange anomalies that day. And yet, the mainstream media ignores the story, satisfied to regurgitate the government line, over and over again. The U.S. population, traumatized as it was on 9/11, trusted its government and the media to tell the whole story. Our trust was misplaced.

Yes, a lot changed on that day. We began to lose our civil rights, our cowed Congress acquiescing to fear and an overzealous executive. We went to war, but not against the country the hijackers were from, and based on a pack of lies. Our government started ignoring the Geneva Conventions, our civil rights and even Habeus Corpus. We started looking less and less like a country devoted to real freedom, and more and more like the countries run by dictators that are our supposed enemies.

We began to fight the enemy by becoming like them, helping them to attain their goals of destroying our country. My final question today: Does that make sense?