Excellent - two contrasting views about 911 from two intelligent people, only one of which can be right.

Unfortunately, the argument that ‘I was 99% certain that it was bin Laden, after all he’d failed in a previous attempt on the same building, why not have another go?’ suffers from a fundamental flaw.  If you fail once, chances are you will fail again - the circumstances of each attempt are so different that I fail to see how you can relate the events (except for the assumed perp).

I will use an analogy to show how utterly implausible the official version of 911 is.

Imagine a petty thief who plans a heist at the richest and most prestigious bank in the world (” Bank 1″).  His plan is to steal the contents of all 1000 safety deposit boxes in the basement.  He will do this by using cheap fireworks to force the 10 inch steel safe doors open.   Unfortunately, his plan was always doomed to fail; the bank has state-of-the-art security systems, 200 security guards in place, automatic warning system in case of intrusion.  Our petty thief (trained by the bank in our analogy) gets as far as an anteroom on the first floor before he is intercepted by a guard.  Somehow, the petty thief manages to make one of the fireworks explode, hurting the guard, and he escapes.  No real damage is done to the bank…the plan was a total failure, a real amateur job.

A few years later the petty thief sends 19 of his friends to raid Bank 1 and this time the plan is a total success.  All 1000 of the safes are blown open with cheap fireworks (catherine wheels, bangers, rockets & a few sparklers) even though the safes were built to withstand pretty much an atomic bomb.  People will rightly wonder how mere fireworks could possibly damage such sturdily built safes, particularly since the fireworks exploded outside the bank and not next to the safes.  Official investigators will ask people to ignore common sense and simple science and trust them when they say that  ’bangers’ can cause tremendous damage in an enclosed pace.  They will also ask people to ignore the fact that the bank had been warned on many recent occasions that a heist was planned.

All 19 of the petty thief’s associates die in the attempt (or did they?). 

The petty thief was fortunate in his choice of the day of the attack.  Totally unbeknown to him, on that day all 200 security guards were elsewhere in the country on simulation exercises.  The bank’s entire alarm system failed to function either.

In order to stop any further attacks on banks in the area, the police close the streets and impose a total ban on all traffic (except for close members of the petty thief’s family)

A few minutes after the bank raid, international media broadcast that another bank (”Bank 7″) a few hundred yards away had been attacked and all cash, jewels etc stolen.  This broadcast is made a full 23 minutes before Bank 7 was attacked…except that Bank 7 wasn’t actually attacked at all.  However, the owner of Bank 7 (who , realising the financial loss at Bank 1 goes on record as saying he approved the plunder of his bank).  Fortunately, this owner (who also owned Bank 1) had had the foresight to take out a massive insurance policy on the bank (which building, by the way, posed a real headache due to asbestos problems that would have cost a LOT of money to address)

Meanwhile, police were able to discover the identity of some of the petty thief’s associates.  Although the bank and everything near it was reduced to fine toxic dust (and strange molten metal that was 7000 degrees centigrade and took weeks to cool down…remember, kids, fireworks are dangerous!), by miracle the thief’s associates’ passports survived completely intact and were found in the locale.

The petty thief goes on record as denying he was responsible.  A little while later, a lookalike (but much fatter) produces a film saying he did do it after all.

A commission to investigate the incident formed of individuals with links to the petty thief will find that everything is as described above and it will be considered unpatriotic for anyone to say otherwise.  For good measure, a repressive piece of legislation (prepared many months before the attacks) is issued that congress is required to approve without even being allowed to read it first.