A 9/11 Conspiracy Debunker’s Guide

Twenty-five years on, the truthers are still working. Here is what the evidence says — and what it doesn’t.

I spent thirty-eight minutes last week debunking September 11 conspiracy theories one by one with Shabbos Kestenbaum on PragerU’s The Brief. Many of you are familiar with the most popular ones: Jet fuel cannot melt steel; WTC 7 was brought down by explosive charges; a missile struck the Pentagon; dancing Israelis are evidence the Mossad was behind the terror attack.

I have had some variation of that conversation since 2003, when McGraw-Hill published my New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept. That book raised serious and some still unanswered critical questions about whether some senior Saudi royals and Pakistan’s air force chief might have had foreknowledge about the attack. At the same time, I made it clear that nineteen Islamist terrorists were solely responsible for carrying out the attack that day. The documentary evidence is overwhelming. All the hijackers had passports, visa applications, immigration records, flight school enrollments, rental car agreements, motel receipts, bank accounts, and ATM and credit card records establishing their movements across the United States for more than a year. There is airport surveillance footage, including Dulles CCTV of the Flight 77 hijackers passing through security and footage of Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari at the Portland, Maine airport on the morning of September 11. Real-time chilling phone calls from crew and passengers describe the hijackings in progress. Two flight attendants on AA11 reported during the hijacking the seat numbers for the hijackers that matched the actual seat assignments of the men on the manifest. There are recovered flight recorders, including the cockpit voice recorder from Flight 93 with Arabic audible in the cockpit. The martyrdom videos of the hijackers, recorded before the attack, were released over subsequent years by al-Qaeda’s own media arm, al-Sahab. Two of the plot’s real masterminds, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, gave a 2002 interview to Al Jazeera and boasted about the attack, as did Osama bin Laden in a videotape released October 29, 2004. Finally, there was forensic identification of hijacker remains at the Pentagon and at Shanksville.

Any inside-job theory must account for all of it and must explain what happened to the 246 passengers and crew aboard the four aircraft, all of whom had families, and most of whom were forensically identified.

What struck me in my conversation on The Brief is how little the truther theories have evolved over the years. They persist blithely in the face of overwhelming evidence. Truthers routinely refer to “the official story” as though it were a single document. It is not. It is a set of separately produced, methodologically distinct investigations, several of which contradict each other on points of detail — which is itself an argument against coordination. Still, an anniversary has a way of resurrecting their conspiracy theories, and on this 25^th year commemoration I see too many online.

So here is the short pocket guide I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. It would have saved me a lot of time. It is not a comprehensive long-form refutation of each theory and nuance raised in the past quarter century but is instead a primer that will hopefully serve as a starting point for rational debate about what happened on 9/11. Also, it is not a defense of the government’s account. I have spent a career criticizing that, and I’ll get to where it fails later. First, however, I want to provide a method for sorting the claims.

There are three categories, and almost all the confusion comes from failing to keep them separate.

One: Physically false claims

Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams so the fires could not have brought down the towers

The premise is true and irrelevant since no investigation has ever claimed the steel melted.

Structural steel melts at roughly 2,750°F (about 1,510°C). Jet fuel, essentially kerosene, burns in open air at about 800°F to 1,500°F. What is key to understand is that steel does not need to melt to fail. It needs only to lose strength, and it does that at temperatures the fires easily reached. Steel starts losing its strength around 750°F, has lost about half its strength near 1,100°F, and retains less than ten percent near 1,800°F.

The jet fuel ignited the fire. Investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology determined what happened by extensive subsequent testing in which they fired projectiles at fireproofed steel assemblies to model the debris field inside the towers. The conclusion? The jet fuel burned off within minutes of impact. The aircraft impact severed and damaged the perimeter and core columns and stripped the steel columns’ fireproofing. Unprotected steel in a large fire heats far faster than the code-rated assumptions. Structural steel also expands when heated, and expansion alone can destroy connections without any loss of strength. The raging fires were sustained by the office contents — paper, carpet, furniture, partitions, computers — across multiple floors.

The fires weakened the floor trusses. As they sagged, they pulled inward on the exterior columns. The visible inward bowing of the perimeter walls is documented photographically in the minutes before each collapse. When enough of the perimeter columns had bowed and buckled, the load redistributed to columns that could not carry it, and the section above began to shift. From that point the collapse was gravity-driven.

The hole at the Pentagon is too small so it must have been struck by a missile

Mete Sozen, the Purdue University structural engineering professor who modeled the impact, put it plainly: a crashing jet does not punch a cartoon outline of itself into reinforced concrete. What is left of the disintegrating plane flows in closer to a liquid than a solid. One wing hit the ground; the other tore away. The section of the Pentagon that was hit—Wedge One—had just been renovated with blast-resistant windows and steel reinforcement and Kevlar. It happened to be, by coincidence, the hardest part of the building that morning. The thin aluminum fuselage of the aircraft was no match for it.

But the engineering alone is not what ends this argument. Sixty-four people were aboard Flight 77, five of them the hijackers, and 125 more died inside the building. Scientific and forensic testing accounted for all 184 victims, though the explosion and fire left no identifiable or matching remains for five of them. For the “no-plane” theory to work, someone had to obtain those remains, transport them, plant them in a burning federal building, and run them through a military forensics laboratory. All but five of those families received a confirmed identification and buried someone.

At some point a theory becomes untenable simply for its size and complexity.

Two: True facts, false inference

This is where the real persuasive energy lives. It requires a careful examination of the evidence to determine what it means and how it fits into what happened that day.

Silverstein said “pull it” on WTC 7

Larry Silverstein was the New York real estate developer who had held the ground lease on World Trade Center 7 since the 1980s. Silverstein recounted in a 2002 PBS documentary a conversation with the fire department about Building 7 in which he said the fire department had made the decision to bring the building down. Truthers cite Silverstein as “proof” that WTC 7 was demolished.

“Pull” is real demolition vocabulary. It refers to bringing down a structure by attaching cables to it and hauling with heavy equipment, a technique used on small wood-frame and masonry buildings, never on a 47-story steel high-rise. Nobody “pulls” a skyscraper. Those who think that Silverstein was confessing on camera to a deliberate plan to demolish Building 7 ignore that it would be a confession to a method that does not exist at that scale.

Silverstein’s spokesman later said that by “pull it,” he meant withdrawing the firefighters. That is supported by the FDNY’s own contemporaneous accounts. Firefighter Richard Banaciski described being pulled back because everyone expected 7 to come down. There is one loose end worth conceding: Chief Daniel Nigro, in an offhand recollection given a year later, didn’t recall speaking to Silverstein that day. That happens with eyewitness testimony and recollections. The Fire Chief never had a more stressful day in his career than 9/11. It is not surprising that on a day the department lost 343 of its own, the brief conversation with a property developer was not at the top of what mattered that day.

Someone with advance knowledge profited by trading airline options just before the attack

Volume in United’s parent company spiked September 6, and American’s did so on September 10. Someone did profit. Here’s what nobody mentions. It’s not a mystery, not someone with advance knowledge cashing in with option puts and calls before the attack. The SEC opened its review on September 12 and meticulously traced and documented all the trades. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable tie to al-Qaeda or Islamic terrorists bought roughly ninety-five percent of the United puts. It was one leg of a strategy that also involved buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. That’s a hedge, not a bet on terrorism. Much of the rest of the volume on the American options was traced to traders acting on a recommendation in a subscription-only options newsletter faxed out on September 9. It recommended exactly that trade because of what it deemed financial headwinds facing the industry.

The BBC announced Building 7’s collapse before it happened, evidence of a scripted plot

That footage is real. Correspondent Jane Standley reported the collapse before it occurred; the building is visible over her shoulder. The BBC’s head of news, Richard Porter, addressed this publicly in 2007 and said it no longer had the tapes from that period. That predictably fed the theory although tape was destroyed or reused regularly in 2001-era broadcast operations. What really happened is banal. The FDNY had established a collapse zone hours earlier and was telling anyone who asked that the building was going to come down. That expectation moved through the press pool, onto the wires, and into a live newsroom operating with no verification loop on a day when reporters had already been told, correctly, that two 110-story towers had fallen.

Think about what the conspiracy version requires. An operation sophisticated enough to demolish three towers, fool every structural engineer on earth, and pass the whole thing off as a terror attack had somehow allowed a reporter to announce a collapse while the building was still standing behind her.

This incident is instead very good evidence of the chaos that day, a snapshot of what a newsroom looks like at four in the afternoon on September 11th.

The dancing Israelis

This one deserves the most care, because it has the widest global reach of any theory in a resurgence of post-October 7 mania that Israel is somehow behind every cataclysmic event in modern history, from the JFK assassination to 9/11.

It is true that five Israeli nationals were detained in New Jersey on the afternoon of September 11 after a witness reported men photographing the attacks and not appearing as shocked and dismayed as the witness expected. They worked for Urban Moving Systems, whose Israeli owner left the country after an FBI interview. FBI records released under FOIA included information that databases listed some of the men as having connections to Israeli security services. Although records systems of that kind aggregate raw and unevaluated reporting that is not verified, that got repeated a thousand times as a fact. The five Israelis were held about seventy-one days and deported on immigration violations.

Some context on the detention. Those five men were among roughly 762 people swept up on immigration charges in the immediate post-attack dragnet. The DOJ Inspector General’s April 2003 report on the September 11 detainees documents a policy of using every available statute to hold anyone of interest for as long as possible. Prolonged detention followed by deportation without charges was the norm for that population, not an anomaly requiring explanation.

The FBI investigated the five Israelis for any possible link to the attacks and found none. The Bureau’s investigation was not perfunctory. Its file on the five Israelis runs to hundreds of pages and includes searches, polygraphs, and database checks.

Now ask what a deep state intelligence operation to pull off 9/11 and make it look like an Islamist plot would really look like.

Operatives with foreknowledge of a mass-casualty attack do not park a van with their employer’s name painted on the side in a public parking lot, climb on the roof in view of an apartment complex, carry on where the neighbors can see them, and get stopped at a roadblock six hours later. Whatever those five men were doing, if they were Mossad they were the worst-run, most embarrassing operation in the agency’s history.

Some of the five gave interviews when they got home. Coming from a country where terrorism was a constant, even they were transfixed that morning on the scale of what was unfolding in front of them. They said they did not yet know there was an al Qaeda connection, but they knew that someone had put America under attack.

There is a companion claim, that 4,000 Jews were warned to stay home on 9/11. That is settled by arithmetic. Roughly ten to fifteen percent of the World Trade Center dead were Jewish — a Jewish Week analysis put the figure at 400 or more. That tracks the Jewish share of the New York area population almost exactly. If thousands had been warned off, the number would have been negligible. Where did the rumor start? The Jerusalem Post reported the day after the attack that Israel’s Foreign Ministry had received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the vicinity of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That was a routine consular accounting exercise. Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s satellite station, took that figure and concocted the story that 4,000 Jews had been given secret advance warning to stay away that day. It was then picked up by the Egyptian press before becoming front page news across the Arab media world.

Those who contend that Jews had advance knowledge also omit that five Israelis died in the 9/11 attacks. Three were in the North Tower, one aboard United 175 and one on American 11. The Israeli on AA11, Daniel Lewin, was an American-Israeli co-founder of Akamai, a former captain in Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s top tier special forces. He was seated in business class near the hijackers and is believed to have been killed trying to stop the hijacking. He was stabbed by Satam al-Suqami, which makes him almost certainly the first person murdered on September 11. An Israeli commando died fighting the plot in its opening minutes, not working as a conspirator to bring down the towers. The conspiracy theory is not just simply false, it is a grotesque inversion of what happened.

Those who see some Jewish plot behind 9/11 point often to Larry Silverstein, the real estate developer who was the leaseholder on WTC 7. They contend he only took the lease months before and skipped his usual breakfast at the Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106^th and 107^th floors of the North Tower, that morning.

The identical fact pattern involving a non-Jewish leaseholder would not have generated this theory. Silverstein did sign a 99-year lease in July 2001 but it was for the Twin Towers complex, WTC 1, 2, 4 and 5. Silverstein Properties had developed 7 World Trade Center in the 1980s and held it under a separate, much older ground lease. And he was contractually obligated to keep paying ground rent to the Port Authority and to rebuild. The insurance recovery funded a reconstruction obligation; it was not a windfall that he could pocket. And as for not showing up for his regular breakfast that morning, it turned out he had a medical appointment that had been planned for more than a month. Thousands of people who normally would have been in the complex were not there on September 11 for ordinary reasons — late trains, sick children, vacations, meetings elsewhere. I knew some of them who did not get there that day, and others who ended up in the Towers but survived. Survivorship generates coincidence at scale.

These accusations aren’t inferences drawn from September 11. They are a template — secret foreknowledge, the property owner who profits by fire, control of the press — applied to an event, the way it has been applied to every catastrophe for centuries.

Three: The questions that are open

There is a real, documented, evidentiary case about foreign government involvement in 9/11. It is not on YouTube. It is in a federal courthouse in Manhattan.

Two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, landed in Los Angeles in January 2000 speaking almost no English and were promptly helped to settle in San Diego by Omar al-Bayoumi. He assisted them with their apartment lease, bank accounts, the works. Bayoumi called it chance. He was ostensibly a student, living on a stipend from a Saudi aviation contractor while attending neither classes nor work. The FBI originally accepted the unwitting-bystander account. In documents declassified after 2021, the Bureau reversed itself and stated Bayoumi was an agent of Saudi intelligence.

Evidence the plaintiffs in the 9/11 litigation against Saudi Arabia obtained from Britain’s Metropolitan Police, which had seized Bayoumi’s belongings in Birmingham within two weeks of the attacks, included a 1999 video of him having himself filmed at the U.S. Capitol, recording entrances, exits and security posts. It was alongside a sketch of an aircraft and calculations an aviation expert identified as line-of-sight-to-horizon math.

In August 2025, Judge George Daniels found the evidence credible enough to deny Saudi Arabia’s motion to dismiss and send the case toward trial.

And then there is the failure nobody had to conspire to produce. The CIA knew in January 2000 that Mihdhar held a U.S. visa and that Hazmi had flown to Los Angeles. Neither was watchlisted until August 23, 2001. The FBI was not told until only weeks before the attacks, by which time it was too late to find the two, even though they were hiding in plain sight in San Diego. For roughly twenty months two known al-Qaeda operatives lived openly in this country under their own names — driver’s licenses, flight schools, a telephone listing, one of them briefly rooming in the home of an FBI informant.

George Tenet’s own phrase for that summer was that the system was blinking red.

Finally, I have my own stake in this. In Why America Slept, the final chapter is about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be one of al-Qaeda’s most senior figures. He was captured wounded in Faisalabad in March 2002, and I broke the story in my book about his questioning under a false-flag operation in which American personnel posed as Saudi security officers. Instead of being afraid of being in “Saudi” custody, he was relieved and asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. He gave them a private home number and a cell number from memory. That was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, King Fahd’s nephew and the head of the Kingdom’s largest media company. The telephone numbers were real. Pressed further, Zubaydah named two more Saudi princes and the chief of Pakistan’s air force as his high-level contacts. He again gave their telephone numbers from memory and said that two of the men had known that a major operation was coming against America. One investigator told me that Zubaydah’s monologue was the Rosetta Stone of 9/11.

Within roughly a year all four were dead. Prince Ahmed, 43, of a heart attack or a blood clot depending on the account, following surgery in Riyadh. Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, the next day in a single-car crash on the way to Ahmed’s funeral. Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, 25, a week after that — the Saudi Royal Court said he died “of thirst.” Pakistan’s Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir went down with his wife and much of his senior staff in February 2003, in an aircraft crash Pakistan has never publicly explained.

I am aware of the irony. I wrote an appendix in Case Closed dismantling the JFK “mysterious deaths” genre, and here I am in 9/11 with a cluster of my own. I don’t claim it proves anything. I know only that in twenty-three years no one in the United States government has been willing to explain it.

When I broke that story in Why America Slept—a book that got to #2 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list—the CIA began dismissing the account privately “on background only” to reporters. The line was that I had gotten it wrong.

My answer then to reporters who asked was that the government should release the interrogation tapes or transcripts of Zubaydah’s early days in captivity. What did the government do about my requests? In November 2005 the CIA secretly destroyed videotapes of detainee interrogations. CIA Director General Michael Hayden finally disclosed this publicly in December 2007, describing two tapes as the ones destroyed. He said the purpose was to protect the identities of undercover officers. The number of tapes destroyed turned out to be 92, disclosed in litigation in 2009. Most of them involved Abu Zubaydah. They were never provided to the 9/11 Commission, and they were never provided to the federal court hearing the Moussaoui case, the prosecution of the so-called twentieth hijacker, which had specifically asked whether such recordings existed.

Whatever Zubaydah said and however he was made to say it, the primary evidence no longer exists. He is one of a handful of detainees held at Guantánamo as what critics call a “forever prisoner” — never charged, never tried, never cleared for release.

Here is what I told Kestenbaum, and what I’d say to anyone who writes me this week.

The truther movement has been the best friend the genuinely culpable ever had. If you wanted to bury a serious question about Saudi officials, the most efficient thing you could possibly do is ensure that anyone raising a question about September 11 gets filed next to holograms and thermite.

Ask the next person who corners you at a dinner party for their positive account. Not what’s wrong with the official story but what happened, hour by hour, who did it, and what evidence would change their mind. Twenty-five years in, there still isn’t one. There is a list of anomalies. A list of anomalies is not a credible theory.

Nineteen al-Qaeda operatives, directed from Afghanistan and Pakistan, planned and executed those attacks. I have never seen a serious reason to doubt it. What remains in doubt — what has been in doubt since I wrote the book in 2003 — is whether they had help from people inside governments that were supposed to be our allies, and whether our own government has been straight with us about what it knew.

Those are different questions. The second one is still open.

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Readers asked for more detail on a few points I left out to keep the primer manageable. Brief answers below, added since publication

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Wasn’t World Trade Center 7 brought down by explosive demolition?
The building was unusual before anything happened to it. It was built over a Con Ed substation, which forced the designers to carry the upper structure on transfer trusses and use unusually long floor spans on the east side. Less redundancy than a conventional frame.

The North Tower’s collapse tore a roughly ten-story gash in its south face and started fires.

The water mains were broken. Nobody fought that fire. It burned for seven hours while the FDNY set a collapse zone and told anyone who asked that the building was coming down.

And the mechanism wasn’t the steel getting weak — it was the steel getting longer. Heated beams expand. On Floor 13 an expanding beam pushed a girder off its seat at Column 79, floors cascaded down to Floor 5, and that left a critical column unsupported over nine stories. It buckled. The interior failed before anything moved on the outside, which is why the facade came down looking uniform.

NIST said plainly it was the first known case of fire alone bringing down a tall building. Unprecedented is the finding, not a hole in it.

No demolition contractor, no explosives supplier, and no worker has come forward in twenty-five years. And finally, the insurers — who were on the hook for billions, who employ the best forensic engineers alive, and who litigated these losses for years — never once alleged demolition.

Why is there no clear video of the plane hitting the Pentagon?
The tapes exist, and most have been released — the Pentagon’s own gate cameras through FOIA litigation in 2006, then the Citgo station and Doubletree hotel recordings. What people mean is that none of them are any good.

Those were fixed cameras in 2001, recording at roughly one frame per second. A gas station camera watches the pumps. A hotel camera watches the entrance. The Pentagon’s two were parking gate barriers pointed at cars. None were aimed at the sky. Flight 77 was doing about 530 miles an hour — roughly 780 feet per second — and crossed any camera’s field of view in a fraction of a second. At one frame per second, the shutter almost certainly lands on empty sky.

We all carry 4K cameras now and assume 2001 worked the same way. It didn’t. And run the theory backwards: if someone could stage an airliner strike on the Pentagon, producing convincing video would be the easy part, and the most useful thing they could possibly have. The one thing a plot would want most is the thing that doesn’t exist.

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