In the aftermath of the attack,
many ideas were advanced to help to explain the
collapses of the Twin Towers.
While these efforts served the cover-up of
the controlled demolition of these buildings,
the diversity of their origins leaves little doubt that,
by and large, they were volunteer efforts
rather than part of an orchestrated cover-up.
That observation speaks to the
genius of the attack's design:
by appealing to people's prejudices and desires,
the attack planners recruited legions of unwitting servants to their cause.
A theme of vagueness and
handwaving
runs throughout the explanations of the collapses,
including that by the
The National Institute for Standards and Technology,
(NIST),
which spent more than $20,000,000 ostensibly to study the collapses.
The extent of NIST's explanation of the total collapses of the Twin Towers
(which is identical in both cases) is the following:
Once the upper building section began to move downwards,
the weakened structure in the impact and fire zone
was not able to absorb the tremendous energy of the falling building section
and global collapse ensued.
NIST's theory is only the most recent and refined of
a menu of theories advanced since the attack
to defend the core tenet of the official story
that the collapses were the result of the jetliner crashes.
Every one of these theories relies on handwaving as a substitute
for quantitative analysis of the collapses.