riemannszeros

Lots of questions, here are the quick answers. Obviously any one of these would require alot of effort to "thoroughly" go through with well sourced evidence. Let's use this as a jumping off point for more discussion.

1. It was before 9/11 when doing-what-you-were-told was the way you dealt with hijackings. I doubt it would work again.
2. I've dealt with this elsewhere in the thread. It is fairly "lucky". Paper does and will survive impact so its survival doesn't surprise me at all. The fact that it was found so "quickly" is what is alarming. The problem for the conspiracy theorist is that this is a completely unnecessary detail. Why plant it? Even w/o the passport, the case is rock solid.
3. What about it? Donald Rumsfeld is a warmongering asshole. This type of stuff runs the risk of puzzle-piecing more than actual legitimate inquiry. It's impossible to say Bush/Cheney/et-al engineered 9/11 just because of how convenient it was for invading Iraq. That's just wishful thinking. You need actual positive evidence to make a claim like that.
4. The CIA, you mean? It is well known that Bin Laden and other members of the mujahadeen had contacts in the CIA from the Russian-Afghanistan war. A full discussion of Sibel Edmonds is pages of work (and you can add her to my list, somewhere else, of things I'd like more fully explained).
5. There have been several semi-conflicting answers to this question. The most likely "official" answer is that the evidence tying Bin Laden himself to other attacks is stronger and a conviction would be more likely. Bin Laden was not the "mastermind" and was no believed to be directly involved with 9/11 like other attacks. He was, however, the head of the organization that did it -- Al Qaeda.
6. NORAD had already scrambled fighters to try to intercept these planes. No one was ever in position to shoot any of them down. Cheney's involvement is irrelevant. The pilots were launched and flew to a waiting area and waited for targets. NORAD couldn't provide targets because they were waiting on the FAA to give them. The FAA was confused as all fuck because the transponders were off. Dick Cheney's and his orders had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. NORAD never had anyone in position to do anything about the planes -- with our without an order to shoot them down.
7. The FDNY knew WTC7 was in imminent collapse danger. They had cleared an area already, they had moved people back, they were making announcements over loud speakers. Everyone in the immediate vicinity of WTC7 knew that the FDNY was telling them it was collapse risk. It is not surprising that reporters made the mistake of announcing it had ALREADY collapsed when the warnings was that it was going to eventually collapse.
8. None of the calls made from high altitudes were from cellphones, but from airphones. The only calls from cellphones occurred at low altitudes which is perfectly plausible. You can align the call times with the FDR data to see when they were made.

Sourcing all this is alot of work, if anyone wants to call bullshit on something in particular, go ahead, and I'll dig up some links.

Yes. As I've said elsewhere, there are places where the government explanation leaves alot to be desired.

The mistake, however, is claiming that since the government is not 100% forthcoming, that you can discard any explanation as fabrication and insert whatever fanciful story you want.

I have a mate who's a structural engineer for steel and concrete clad factory units ( not dissimilar to the construction of The World Trade Centre )

You should tell your mate that the WTC was not a steel/concrete construction but a pure steel construction. The dissimilarities are staggering. In fact, it's been highly studied and seriously suggested that if the WTC had been built with steel-reinforced concrete, not just steel, that it would have survived (at least for orders of magnitude longer). In fact, concrete construction companies have been using it as an example of their method of construction's superiority.

However, none of that gets to the point. The point is we can both line up 100 people with various levels of expertise, show them the video, ask them what happened, and take a vote. At the end of the day, that doesn't mean much.

The people at NIST wrote a very long and detailed report explaining exactly what they think happened after alot of study. Has your mate read that report? What flaws did he find it? The scientific process is one of studying, finding conclusions, and peer-review. All of the "my buddy is an engineer and watched the video" in the world doesn't overturn scientific consensus.

The reason we invented the scientific method was because our intuition fails. Even expert intuition fails. That's why we do science.

Do you see any resemblance at all to a controlled demolition in the way building 7 fell?

Of course there is a resemblance. However, in order for you to say that is WAS a demolition, you'd have to say that ONLY demolitions can look like that.

What kind of evidence would it take for you to change your mind on this subject?

For starters, an explanation for the fact that the audio evidence is completely inconsistent with a controlled demolition.

What's the wildest theory you've seen thus far?

I don't like laughing at people who are obviously mentally ill but fuck me I've seen some crazy shit.

1. One of the "architechs for 9/11 truth" believes the towers came down with nuclear weapons.
2. Some rather "prominent" people have floated the ideas that the planes were holographic... so called no-planers
3. Some even crazier people have said that TV footage of the impacts of the towers were faked! That the planes never flew into the buildings.. all the people who say they saw it are plants...
4. Judy Wood, a PhD in engineering, thinks they were brought down by space-borne laser weapons.

Take your pick.

What's your motivation for debunking the theories?

I am a skeptic a la Carl Sagan. The motivation here is the belief that pseudoscience is dangerous and poor thinking should be combated. I started off by getting into evolution/creationism but eventually got sidetracked into 9/11.

You can learn a tremendous amount by digging into a conspiracy theory and convincing yourself it is wrong. I cannot tell you how much I've learned about physics, politics, the world, and everything else.

Have you found anything that you can't come up with an answer for yet regarding the attacks?

No, not really. I have many unsatisfying answers and places where the public record isnt' as complete as I'd like... So sometimes it comes down answers such as "I cannot disprove what you are saying, but if it was true, all of this must also be true, and that theory is more ridiculous than my theory, so mine is more likely".