"[...] Zeitgeist the Movie makes a series of outrageous claims - and even says 9/11 was allowed to happen by the US Government to generate mass fear.

Since going online in 2007 the documentary has proved massively popular with conspiracy theorists - and has been viewed more than 150 million times.

It alleges that the US Government had advance knowledge about the 9/11 attacks, the military deliberately let the planes reach their targets, and the World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 underwent a controlled demolition. [...]"

Members of the 9/11 Truth movement have filed Requests for Correction to the NIST report. Only one of their requests resulted in a change to correct an inconsistency between two parts of the NIST report. An unsuccessful appeal was then filed.

For the final report in "response to comments from the building community" NIST ran additional analysis to "see if the loss of WTC 7’s Column 79—the structural component identified as the one whose failure on 9/11 started the progressive collapse—would still have led to a complete loss of the building if fire or damage from the falling debris of the nearby WTC 1 tower were not factors. The investigation team concluded that the column’s failure under any circumstance would have initiated the destructive sequence of events."

Preliminary investigations did not include the mechanics of the actual collapse, concentrating instead on the events leading up to it. However, the final draft report on the collapse of WTC7 by NIST provides a detailed investigation into the collapse timeline, starting with the failure of a critical column, Column 79 (initial failure event). 6 seconds later, the collapse of the East Penthouse on the roof was visible. The collapse of the core columns progressed from east to west for another 6.9 seconds (12.9 seconds total since the initial failure event). At this point, the report says, "all the interior columns had buckled" and "the remaining exterior structure above began to fall vertically as a single unit." To calculate the timeline of the collapse of the rest of the building, NIST focused on the time between the initial collapse of the roofline and the last position that the complete roofline could be observed before portions of it started to become obscured by dust, at the top of Floor 29. NIST calculated the timeline for this observable descent as 5.4 seconds and calculated the theoretical free-fall time for the same portion of the building as 3.9 seconds, and concluded that, "The actual collapse time of the upper 18 floors of the north face of WTC7 (the floors clearly visible in the video evidence) was 40 percent greater than the computed free fall time. This was consistent with physical principles."

Members of the 9/11 Truth movement have filed Requests for Correction to the NIST report. Only one of their requests resulted in a change to correct an inconsistency between two parts of the NIST report. An unsuccessful appeal was then filed.

Following the NIST final draft on Building 7 in August 2008, a group of demolition proponents submitted a response challenging several points of the draft.

"[...] You can watch clips of last month's "Boston Tea Party" for 9/11 truth at the Web site boston911truth.org. I saw a video of retired Brigham Young University physicist Steven Jones explaining that he had found chemical evidence of Thermate, "a high-tech incendiary that melts steel like a hot knife through butter" in World Trade Center detritus. A press release from architect Richard Gage announces that "the official explanation of the total destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers has explicitly failed to address the massive evidence for explosive demolition." [...]"

Proponents of the controlled demolition have questioned the "pancake collapse" theory originally suggested by FEMA.

"She also recently took up — without quite spelling out — a theory that one of the buildings at the World Trade Center, No. 7, was brought down by bombs late in the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. No. 7 was not one of the towers struck by the airplanes, she said, but a separate building “that got hit by nothing — 47 floors and dropped, 5:30, into itself.”

She also said: “I do believe that it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics that World Trade Center Tower 7 — Building 7, which collapsed in on itself — it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved.”"

"[...] The controlled-demolition theory is the sine qua non of the 9/11 movement — its basic claim and, in some sense, the one upon which all others rest. It is, of course, directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which held that jet-fuel fires distressed the towers' structure, which eventually collapsed.

The movement's answer to that report was written by Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University and the movement's expert in the matter of collapse. Dr. Jones, unlike Alex Jones, is a soft-spoken man who lets his writing do the talking. He composed an account of the destruction of the towers (www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html) that holds that "pre-positioned cutter-charges" brought the buildings down. [...]

It would even seem the Truthers are not alone in believing the whole truth has not come out. A poll released last month by Zogby International found that 42 percent of all Americans believe the 9/11 Commission "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence" in the attacks. This is in addition to the Zogby poll two years ago that found that 49 percent of New York City residents agreed with the idea that some leaders "knew in advance" that the attacks were planned and failed to act. [...]"

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — [...] But the collapse of 7 World Trade Center — home at the time to branch offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and the Giuliani administration’s emergency operations center — is cited in hundreds of Web sites and books as perhaps the most compelling evidence that an insider secretly planted explosives, intentionally destroying the tower. [...]

But S. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, based here in the suburbs of Washington, also rejected that theory on Thursday, even as he acknowledged that the collapse had been something of a puzzle.

“Our take-home message today is the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery,” Dr. Sunder said at a news conference at the institute’s headquarters. “It did not collapse from explosives or fuel oil fires.” [...]

Conspiracy theorists have pointed to the fact that the building fell straight down, instead of tumbling, as proof that explosives were used to topple it, as well as to bring down the twin towers. Sixteen percent of the respondents in a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll said it was very likely or somewhat likely that explosives were planted.

During the last four decades, other towers in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have remained standing through catastrophic blazes that burned out of control for hours because of malfunctioning or nonexistent sprinkler systems. But 7 World Trade Center, which was not struck by a plane, is the first skyscraper in modern times to collapse primarily as a result of a fire. Adding to the suspicion is the fact that in the rush to clean up the site, almost all of the steel remains of the tower were disposed of, leaving investigators in later years with little forensic evidence. [...]

The investigators determined that debris from the falling twin towers damaged structural columns and ignited fires on at least 10 floors at 7 World Trade Center, which stood about 400 feet north of the twin towers. But the structural damage from the falling debris was not significant enough to threaten the tower’s stability, Dr. Sunder said.

Normally, fireproofing on a skyscraper should have been sufficient to allow such a blaze to burn itself out and leave the building damaged but still standing. But investigators determined that the heat from the fire caused girders in the steel floor of 7 World Trade Center to expand. As a result, steel beams underneath the floors that provided lateral support for the tower’s structural columns began to buckle or put pressure against the vertical structural columns.

These fires might have been fed partly by the diesel from tanks and a pressurized fuel line, which were on the fifth to the ninth floors, Dr. Sunder said. But the analysis showed that even in the worst case, the diesel fuel-fed fire would not have burned hot enough or long enough to have played a major role in weakening the structure. The investigators determined that the fire that day was fed mainly by office paper and furnishings. [...]

Skeptics have questioned whether explosives were planted at the three towers at ground zero, and at the Pentagon as well, often contending that the Bush administration had planned the catastrophes to provide a justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. What started as a small number of such conspiracy theorists ballooned into a movement of sorts, largely fed by Internet sites and homemade videos.

Dr. Sunder said the investigators considered the possibility that explosives were used, but ruled it out because the noise associated with such an explosion would have been 10 times louder than being in front of the speakers at a rock concert, he said, and detectable from as far as a half a mile away. He said that interviews with eyewitnesses and a review of video taken that day provided no evidence of a sound that loud just before the collapse.

The skeptics — including several who attended Thursday’s news conference — were unimpressed. They have long argued that an incendiary material called thermite, made of aluminum powder and a metal oxide, was used to take down the trade center towers, an approach that would not necessarily result in an explosive boom. They also have argued that a sulfur residue found at the World Trade Center site is evidence of an inside job.

Dr. Sunder said the investigators chose not to use the computer model to evaluate whether a thermite-fueled fire might have brought down the tower, since 100 pounds of it would have had to have been stacked directly against the critical column that gave way, which he said they did not believe had occurred.

To the skeptics, it was a glaring omission.

“It is very difficult to find what you are not looking for,” said Shane Geiger, who contributes to a Web site that follows the topic and who had come to Maryland from Texas to quiz Dr. Sunder about his findings, with a bumper sticker on his laptop computer that says, “9-11 was an inside job.” [...]

Within moments after the news conference ended, leaders of a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth held their own telephone conference briefing, dismissing the investigation as flawed.

“How much longer do we have to endure the coverup of how Building 7 was destroyed?” said Richard Gage, a California architect and leader of the group. [...]

"A coming episode of the acclaimed FX drama “Rescue Me” will tackle what may sound like a far-fetched plot line: that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an “inside job.” The actor who espouses the theories on camera, it turns out, also subscribes to them in real life.

Claims that Al Qaeda terrorists were not solely responsible for the attacks have a lively following on the Internet, including on YouTube, but the second episode of “Rescue Me’s” fifth season, starting in April, may represent the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mainstream media company (FX is operated by the News Corporation). [...]"

"Reactive mixtures of aluminum (Al) and Teflon have applications in propellants, explosives, and pyrotechnics. This study examines the thermal degradation behavior of Teflon and nanometer scale Al particles compared with micron-scale Al particles. Differential scanning calorimetry and thermo-gravimetric analyses were performed in an argon environment on both nanometer and micron scale mixtures revealing lower onset temperatures and larger exothermic activity for the nanometer scale Al mixture. A pre-ignition reaction (PIR) unique to the nano-Al mixture is found. Experiments show the mechanism of the PIR to be the adsorption of fluoride ions from the Teflon polymer onto the aluminum oxide shell of the Al particles. The decreased alumina surface area inherent in larger Al particles lowers the exothermic effect of the PIR. The PIR may be the mechanism of ignition for nano-composite samples heated in air. Experimental results are discussed along with reviewed literature to explain the thermal degradation process of the mixtures. These results are helpful in the fundamental understanding of Al/Teflon degradation and particle size effects on the reactivity of Al/Teflon composites. The effects of Teflon particles on the sensitivity of thermite composites are also studied experimentally using a drop-weight apparatus. It was found that the addition of Teflon to an Al/MoO₃ thermite composite increases its sensitivity to impact."

"[...] Teflon is an ingredient that differs fundamentally from traditional oxidizers due to the fluorine content of the material. Teflon has been studied as an energetic component in micron-scale heterogeneous composites for some time; however, recent advances in technology have enabled the availability of nano-scale Al and Teflon particles, allowing for the study of such components in energetic applications. [...]

However, recent studies by Levitas et al. (2005) have revealed an alternate mechanism involved with nano-particle Al oxidation based on the tremendous mechanical stresses on the oxide shell unique to nano-particle Al. The stresses are brought about from the difference in thermal expansion between Al and Al₂O₃, and the enormous pressure of the interior molten Al. [...]

Poehlein et al. (2001) found that replacing various amounts of Mg in the Mg/Teflon/Viton (MTV) mixture with Alex (a nano-Al powder produced by the wire explosion process) resulted in higher burn rates and found that the total fuel loading of MTV may be reduced while maintaining burn rates similar to conventional fuel rich compositions without Alex. [...] A Department of Defense newsletter (Miziolek, 2002) recently identified nano-particle Al/Teflon as a metastable intermolecular composite (MIC) that has received considerable attention and defined MIC as, “mixtures of nanoscale powders of reactants that exhibit thermite (high exothermicity) behavior.” [...]

Al/Teflon produces a higher heat of combustion than the conventional solid propellant mixture AP-HTPB-Al (ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, hydroxy terminated polybutadiene binder, and Al fuel), determined by Tachibana and Kimura (1988) to be 8420 J/g and 5870 J/g, respectively. Also, Al/Teflon exhaust has a very low molecular weight, consisting of primarily AlF₃ (84 amu) and carbon. Koch (2002) stated that metal/fluorocarbon propellant systems have products (metal-fluorides) in the vapor phase at combustion temperatures in contrast to metal oxides in conventional propellants, and this adds to the specific impulse of the fuel. [...]

With 13 out of 15 of the thermite/Teflon pellets having a successful ignition event, it is established that a thermite pellet can ignite under drop weight conditions."

Physicist Steven Jones and theologian David Ray Griffin have published accounts of the theory. Proponents argue that the aircraft impacts and resulting fires could not have weakened the buildings sufficiently to initiate collapse and that the buildings would in any case not have collapsed as completely, and quickly as they did without an additional source of destructive energy to undermine their structure. Various sources of this energy have been proposed; a number of notable proponents suggest that thermite, explosives, or some combination thereof, has been used.^[1][2][3]

"[...] A new volume of scholarly essays on 9/11, The Hidden History of 9-11-2001: Research in Political Economy, Volume 23, addresses what authors think is a deep government cover-up. “Let’s examine objective evidence,” writes Paul Zarembka, the volume’s editor and an economics professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. [...]

David Ray Griffin of the Claremont School of Theology considers the shocking collapses of the World Trade Center twin towers and Building 7 (not hit by a hijacked plane). The official story of 9/11 holds that fire caused all three high-rise steel-frame structures to collapse.

But wait! “Fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse--never, whether before 9/11, or after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except in New York City--never,” writes Griffin. He argues, compellingly, that controlled demolitions caused the three buildings to topple at free-fall speed. Griffin cites more than 500 recorded observations from the New York Fire Department’s 9/11 oral histories, recently released. Firefighters, paramedics and police officers spoke of multiple “booms,” “pops” and multicolor flashes shooting out from inside the WTC towers. [...]"

Another Wall Street Journal reporter said that after seeing what appeared to be "individual floors, one after the other exploding outward," he thought: "'My God, they're going to bring the building down.' And they, whoever they are, had set charges. [...] I saw the explosions."

Following the NIST final draft on Building 7 in August 2008, a group of demolition proponents submitted a response challenging several points of the draft.

Hugo Bachmann and Jörg Schneider, professors emeritus of structural engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, believe that WTC 7 was intentionally demolished based on video footage.

Some of the steel from the Twin Towers was removed and sent to scrap yards before engineers were allowed access to the site on October 6, 2001. Webster Griffin Tarpley, an author, has criticized the official response to the crime scene, saying that the cleanup process resulted in the destruction of most of the evidence, identifying the New York City Mayor's office as a key player in this regard.

"[...] Una de ellas, la que sostiene que las torres fueron demolidas, la explicó en Madrid Richard Gage, fundador de Arquitectos e Ingenieros por la Verdad del 11-S. Una estructura de acero, explica, no puede derribarse a esa velocidad sin la desaparición de sus columnas.

Richard Gage representa a medio millar de arquitectos e ingenieros que exigen una nueva investigación sobre los atentados del 11 de Septiembre en los que las torres del World Trade Center de Nueva York cayeron ante los ojos de todo el mundo. [...]

Según Gage, el colapso "repentino y espontáneo" de las torres es imposible sin una demolición controlada. Hay muchos testimonios, además, sostiene este arquitecto, que hablan de explosiones en la planta baja un segundo antes del inicio del colapso. [...]

Incluso, se encontró la huella química del agente incendiario "Thermite", de alta tecnología incendiaria, dice, que aparecía en todas las muestras de los restos y polvo. [...]

La prueba definitiva es que las columnas aparecieron a 400 metros de distancia, según los datos de Gage, y fragmentos de huesos humanos aparecieron en los techos de los edificios colindantes al WTC. [...]"

"[...] A Scripps Howard poll of July 2006 (which measured belief in a Kennedy conspiracy at 40 per cent) had 36 per cent of respondents suspecting government participation of some kind in the attacks, with just over one in six believing that explosives had been used to bring down the twin towers. A summary of what a made-it-happen-on-purpose 9/ll Truth activist is likely to believe goes something like this. Certain forces in the Bush Administration wanted a pretext to use overwhelming military force in the Caspian area and the Middle East, either to procure oil supplies, to weaken opposition to Israel or both. Accordingly they or their agents organised a false-flag operation, which would accomplish what Pearl Harbour was supposed to have accomplished for the Rooseveltian war party in 1941, causing a large number of Americans to die on the territory of the United States itself with the blame wrongly being put on Islamist extremists. The plot they devised involved three airliners being flown into the World Trade Centre main towers and, possibly, a Washington target.

There were either no hijackers or the ones on board were patsies, and two of the planes were guided remotely into the World Trade Centre. What brought the towers down, however was a “controlled demolition” using explosives planted there at some earlier time. The same devices also brought down the structure called World Trade Centre 7, though no plane flew into that building. The Pentagon was not hit by an airliner but by a guided missile. The fourth airliner, United 93, possibly heading for the capital, was either shot down because the passengers threatened to land it successfully thus exposing the plot, or else it was never found. Various ruses, including faked mobile phone calls and fraudulent claims of such calls were used to disguise the true nature of the crime.

That was the basic theory, although different people in the Truth movement might agree or disagree with various parts of it. To accept it, you have to believe that elements of the US Government engaged in a conspiracy of exceptional complexity and enormous risk of failure. [...]"

In June 2008, Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson delivered a letter to the office of U.S. Senator John McCain asking him to meet with a group of professionals to discuss the events of 9/11.

In the PBS documentary America Rebuilds, which aired in September 2002, Larry Silverstein, the owner of WTC 7 and leaseholder and insurance policy holder for the remainder of the WTC Complex, recalled a discussion with the fire department in which doubts about containing the fires were expressed. Silverstein recalled saying, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it". "They made that decision to pull", he recalled, "and we watched the building collapse." Silverstein issued a statement that it was the firefighting team, not the building, that was to be pulled.

"[...] Black and gray clouds enveloped the buildings. An enormous rumble, described by one witness as sounding like thunder, only lasting longer, shook the ground. One of the buildings began to collapse. A few moments later, witnesses said, the top of the tower simply was not there. [...]

"I was sitting at my desk and heard the explosion and at first thought it was maybe the air conditioning ducts imploding or something. Then I heard people who were sitting by the window scream," Nessel said. "We saw things falling and thought it was debris but it wasn't. They were bodies."

Nessel hurried to his wife's office as one of the towers collapsed. [...]

"On the plaza, you could see all these bodies lying all over the place," Abel said. "The cops were like, 'Move it! Move it!' There's another explosion. I look back and I can see all this black smoke. I try to get into a police car, but I can't. I run into this building. I hear another boom. I can't believe it.""

"Unknown to the dozens of firefighters on the street, and those of us still in offices in the neighborhood, the South Tower was weakening structurally. Off the phone, and collecting my thoughts for the next report, I heard metalic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor, spewing glass and metal outward. One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces. It was the building apparently collapsing in on itself, pancaking to the earth."

David Ray Griffin: The Destruction of the World Trade Center. Why the official account cannot be true. pp. 79—122.

In 2007, a representative poll by Zogby International, commissioned by 911truth.org, found that 67% of Americans fault the 9/11 Commission for not investigating the collapse of World Trade Center 7.