By Kevin Potvin

We’ve just witnessed, if not participated in, a massive conspiracy. Tens of millions of people every winter conspire in a flat out lie to fool millions more of society’s most gullible members when they all agree to keep silent about the truth about Santa Clause. Sure, you're laughing, that’s a funny example of a conspiracy, but there it is: those who deny there could possibly be massive conspiracies involving thousands of people or even millions, are wrong.

Hannah Arendt, among so many others, wrote about how the German people were swept up in a conspiracy of lies about how the Jews among them were not human, and so deserved to be exterminated. When professional standing, personal prestige, working incomes, even ordinary, seldom-examined personal belief systems, are at stake, millions will engage in the common telling of lies if they find it necessary to do so to sustain their place in life. According to authors like Arendt, they don't even necessarily know they are telling lies.

The conspiracy of 9-11 and the related conspiracy of its cover-up can never be compared to either Santa Claus or to the Holocaust. But these examples can serve to show that many people can be involved in a conspiracy, that many can be motivated to do so by base, ordinary concerns, and that many may not even be consciously aware of their participation in a conspiracy. For obvious reasons, the realization and admission by anyone with official authority to speak on the matter that some arm of the US government was responsible for the crimes of 9-11 would involve so much destruction of belief systems, not to mention security, incomes, and reputations, that blind instinct dictates the official version be upheld.

Popular Mechanics magazine some time ago published a special issue that purported to destroy all versions of events of 9-11 besides the official version. Last week, the editor of the magazine wrote a newspaper editorial documenting the results: hilarious and disturbing attacks on him and his magazine by the so-called conspiracy theory industry.

But what if, after launching its investigation, the magazine’s editors found that 9-11 was in fact an inside job, and reported this. Where do you think the scientists who made that conclusion, and the magazine's editorial staff who reported it, would be today? When we see the level of vitriol leveled at any questioning of the official version of events that creeps into mainstream media, with accusations of anti-patriotism, treason, and anti-Semitism, it is no surprise few mainstream newspapers will touch 9-11 conspiracies. The lack of reporting on alternative versions of 9-11 in the mainstream press is no evidence of their weaknesses. If anything, the lack of mention of strong alternative theories, except to laugh at the least plausible of them, attests to their strengths.

In a book called Hitler's Scientists, we find personal diaries where German scientists caught up in Third Reich politics express serious misgivings about their work, misgivings that were nowhere evident in their published work, some of it very crucial to horrifying medical experimentation, mass murder systems, and nuclear science the Nazis were carrying out. Scientists who were sure there was nothing but dangerous hubris to Nazi theories about racial intelligence and other pillars of Third Reich philosophy nonetheless signed off on published documents extolling the virtues of those "scientific" claims. This was not some backward savage place, but the leading educated and scientific nation on the planet. Those who ask, How is it all those engineers, metallurgists, physicists and material scientists who produced both the Popular Mechanics 9-11 issue, as well as the official US government 9-11 report, could get it all so fundamentally wrong, need only remind themselves of the broad popular, as well as corporate and scholarly support, the Nazi regime engineered in Germany. 9-11 is an event that registers nowhere on the scale of something like Nazi Germany and its Holocaust. But that is a fact that makes the 9-11 conspiracy an easier thing to imagine than Germany in the 1930s.

The basic known facts of 9-11 need to be reviewed, beginning with the most beguiling of them all: World Trade Center building number seven fell straight down later on that fateful day but registers in mainstream media as almost a forgotten footnote. This building was the same square footage of one of the towers, half their height but twice their footprint. It was huge, one of the biggest buildings in the world, and it was not struck by a plane nor badly hit by debris from the falling towers. It may have had a diesel fire on its lowest floors, a fire that could never burn hot enough to make the steel frame of the building melt. Yet the building fell down as though every one of its steel columns, back to front and side to side in this massive building, melted and collapsed all at once. The official Congressional investigation, as well as Popular Mechanics, simply said of building seven's collapse that no known theory explains it, and moved on.

The best explanation, assuming we wish to have at least one, is to theorize that it was brought down by controlled demolition. And that means it must have been pre-wired to be brought down, and who would or could do that but someone with regular access, such as members of the many US government overt and covert agencies that maintained offices in this very building? And of course, a plan and the means to bring down building seven presupposes foreknowledge of 9-11 as a whole, and foreknowledge means participation.

It is the fate of building seven that has generated most of the legitimate questioning of the official version of events of 9-11, and it was that incessant questioning that lead to both the official Congressional investigation and the special issue of Popular Mechanics magazine. Yet both investigations, after clouding the issue with brain-numbing detailed examination of the fate of the two towers, completely passed over and ignored questions about building seven.

Five-and-a-half years later, the controlled demolition theory still remains the best theory about why building seven collapsed. Every scientist always goes with the best theory available on any phenomenon, and never accepts no theory at all. Every good scientist does, anyway.

You decide how much it's worth to you: