For the past year or so I have been following the 9/11 Truth movement. Because I live in New Jersey and my step-father used to work in the Towers I was naturally concerned about what happened on that day. I remember seeing a commercial about Bldg 7 and thought to myself "Something fishy is going on." The more and more I looked into the issues the more I came to realize that I had been lied to. However I am not referring to the government, I'm referring to the "Truth" movement.

To date there is no evidence to support that 9/11 was either a MIHOP (Made It Happen On Purpose) or LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) job. I disagree with a multitude of President Bush's policies and I have a general dislike of politicians. However, unlike other people our age I don't let this angst cloud my judgment. If you look into the issues brought up by conspiracy theorists they have no merit. If your still reading this I congratulate you for your willingness to hear both sides of the issue. Please allow me to provide evidence to support my claims. What follows are excerpts from your article.

"Sure, the tower might distort or shift its weight to compensate for the chunk you just took out of it - visible in the form of shaking, or teetering - much like the redistribution of forces of stress in the steel columns of skyscrapers."

It is interesting that you mention this because that is exactly what was seen in Bldg 7 before it collapsed. This is a quote fromDeputy Chief Peter Hayden on that very topic.

"...also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse."

Though Bldg 7 was not hit by an airplane on 9/11 it suffered severe damage from the collapse of Tower 1. Photographic evidence can be seen here:

http://www.911myths.com/assets/images/WTC7Hit1.jpg

A 18 floor chunk of the south west corner was dug out by the collapse of Tower 1 as seen here:

http://www.911myths.com/assets/images/WTC7Corner.jpg
Also there was a large chunk about 20 stories high missing from the south side of Bldg 7. This is a quote from Firehouse Magazine:

"Captain Chris Boyle
Engine 94 - 18 years

Boyle: ...on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.

Firehouse: When you looked at the south side, how close were you to the base of that side?

Boyle: I was standing right next to the building, probably right next to it.

Firehouse: When you had fire on the 20 floors, was it in one window or many?

Boyle: There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we’ll head back to the command post. We lost touch with him. I never saw him again that day."

Conspiracy Theorists would have you believe that WTC 7 suffered little damage and that it was a shock that it fell. However this is far from true. a combination of fires that raged unchecked for hours as well as severe structural damage from the collapse of Tower 1. The evidence that I posted was just a fraction of the information available on the subject of WTC 7. More evidence can be found here

http://www.debunking911.com/pull.htm

"But even if a Jenga tower does indeed fall, it will topple over and to the side - it will NOT neatly collapse straight down without resistance into its own placement, and in a beautifully symmetrical fashion, like a certain cluster of humanity's finest feats of structural engineering in Lower Manhattan were somehow wont to do on a crisp, clear morning nearly five and a half years ago."

It must be noted that using Jenga blocks to describe the Twin Towers is a poor analogy. A Jenga Tower is full of blocks and is not hollow. The Twin Towers were hollow in the form of a "tube in a tube design". A hollow structure will not behave the same as a rigid and dense structure. Understanding the design of the Towers is paramount if you want to understand how the collapse mechanism works. Jenga Towers after all are not made of structural steel and they don't utilize trusses to hold each floor up.

"This unprecedented depiction of instantly initiated and perfectly executed total uniform collapse of unbelievably massive steel skyscrapers from proportionally isolated impacts and similarly localized fires is precisely what the U.S. government and mainstream media have attached to the rapid obliteration of three of the world's strongest buildings on the same day of Sept. 11, 2001 - World Trade Center towers 1, 2 and 7, the last structure never even touched by a plane" -

This is a very limited way of explaining the events of Sept 11. There are thousands and thousands of relevant experts who have spent countless hours working on what happened on that day and there are tens of thousands of pages of documents that spell out precisely what happened. You must remember its not the government or the mass media that is explaining what happened, its thousands of experts in relevant fields with years of experience. Not only that but this evidence has been reviewed by academia outside of this country. It must be noted that even they don't think that there was any foul play on 9/11.

"Despite a mountain of suspicious forensic structural evidence indicating controlled demolitions and thousands of questions being repeatedly raised by hundreds of academics and scientists the world over."

As I pointed out above there is no evidence to support a controlled demolition of WTC 7. I would also like the names of these hundreds of academics and scientists. These academics wouldn't be "Scholars for 9/11 truth" would they? I don't want to sound like a jerk but I would much rather have a structural engineer review what happened as opposed to a philosopher or theologian. The top experts in structural engineering, physics, and controlled demolitions agree that there was no controlled demolitions that day.

"Knocking out a few Lincoln Logs in the side of the middle of the stack doesn't turn the whole damn cabin into exploding sawdust, does it?

I apologize for the elementary metaphors, but in this no-brainer of an instance, even the crayon is mightier than the sword."
As I mentioned before Lincoln logs and Jenga towers are not apt ways of describing the global collapse of a building.

"For many, doubts about the physical characteristics of the Twin Towers' collapse began as it occurred before their very eyes."

Not to be rude but honestly it doesn't really matter what something looks like to the average person. If they are not familiar with controlled demolitions or engineering then it doesn't matter what they think it was. Once again experts should be used for these kinds of things, not Joe Anybody off of the street.
"It was clear that mere moments before their respective virtual implosions - nine to 10 seconds before in each case, actually - the 110-story steel structures had shown no signs of imminent collapse, such as characteristic sagging or tilting."

I wouldn't call collapses that led to massive amounts of collateral damage and loss of life a "virtual implosion." It must also be noted that the buildings did show signs of imminent collapse. However these were only visible from a close proximity. The majority of television coverage would not show this. Photographic evidence of sagging trusses and other parts of the collapse mechanism can be found here:

http://www.debunking911.com/collapse.htm

Then, suddenly, the buildings came roaring down, each floor exploding into dust one after the other, in roughly the same time it would take to drop a billiard ball from the roof of one of the towers and wait for it to hit the ground in free fall with only air resistance (calculated as 9.22 seconds by Dr. Judy Wood of Clemson University in 2005).

When looking at the collapse of the Towers you will see a great deal of debris arch out and travel to the ground faster than the highest point of collapse. If the building was collapsing at free fall speed then that debris would be traveling faster than free fall! There is also a great deal of video evidence that supports that the collapse took longer than free fall.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5370762387415552903&q=what+we+saw

If you look closely at that video you can see portions of the tower still standing momentarily after the collapse initiated. This is NOT what you would see in a controlled demolition.

Overall there is a great deal of evidence to support that 9/11 was an act of terrorist and not that of the government. I understand that there are issues that I did not bring up but if you go to some of the sites that I will list below they should be able to answer your questions. Thank you for your time.

http://www.911myths.com/index.html
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/
http://911debunker.livejournal.com/
http://calan8.livejournal.com/
http://www.implosionworld.com/wtc.htm
http://www.jod911.com/
http://www.debunk911myths.org/
http://www.debunking911.com/