CONSPIRACY THEORIES

American fascination with mystery is boundless.

Whether it is Harry Houdini’s remarkable tricks of legerdemain, the claimed sightings of UFO’s, the Kennedy assassination, an alleged complicity of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the ‘real truth’ about Mitt Romney’s income taxes or Barack Obama’s academic record, we seem to have an insatiable appetite for juicy narratives based on speculation and inference.

I’m sort of a common sense, practical kind of guy. Time spent in the judiciary has steeled me against snap judgments, and infused a benign skepticism into my skull.

I try not to jump to conclusions, especially when we’re speaking off the reservation about something mechanical, electronic, technical, scientific or just plain hokus pokus.

And there’s a theory in the law that public officials are presumed, at the outset at least, to do their jobs.

Whatever the faults of the Warren Report, I tend to believe that Chief Justice Warren and his colleagues gave it their best shot and honestly believed their conclusions were accurate.

So, I suppose, should the folks who authored the so called 9-11 Report be given a nod that they did the best they could.

Still.

Still, I get this email from a friend who insists that I visit:

http://www.wtc7.net/articles/kimball/thirdskyscraper.html

And so I did. He also sent me some links to video taken on 9-11 in which the building known as WTC 7 is shown imploding into its own footprint.

You’ve seen implosion footage I’m sure. When they brought down Kerns or the J.L. Hudson Company building. Those are big events for the gawking public.

A whole building falling right down into its own basement. BOOM. Just like that.

WTC 7 was a 47 story steel and concrete office building. It was a part of the World Trade Center complex, located about 300 feet from the twin towers.

It was not hit by an airplane.

Tenants in WTC 7 included offices of the Department of Defense, the Secret Service and the CIA as well as other government agencies.

The South Tower collapsed just before 10 AM. The North Tower went down at 10:28 AM.

There were scattered fires in WTC 7 caused by the intense heat and falling debri from the Towers. New York firefighters were in the building, trying to contain them and evacuating all civilians.

Mayor Giuliani had a crisis office on the 23rd floor of the building, but he had set up his operations down on the street, closer to the Towers. If he had any staff in WTC 7, they were evacuated.

At 4:20 PM all firefighters were called out of the building. It was being reported that building 7 was in danger of collapse. Fire department leaders established a safety perimeter around the building and kept everyone away from it.

By 5:30 PM there was no one in the building. At that moment, more than seven hours after the Towers had collapsed, WTC 7 came down.

It came down in 6.6 seconds, just six tenths of a second longer than an object would take to free fall from the 47th story.

In the demolition industry, it would have been a perfectly executed implosion.

Experts tell us that to do a thing like that would take weeks of preparation. It’s not the kind of event that can be orchestrated in six or seven hours of panic.

Conspiracy theories abound. I don’t subscribe to them. I like to think there is a perfectly logical explanation.

But it does seem a little curious that the so called Nine Eleven Commission, which was supposed to tell us what the heck happened that day never even mentioned WTC 7.

Perhaps it was, as they say, unrelated collateral damage.

But still….