9/11 must have been assisted by the US government

I shall be arguing that there is no truth whatsoever in this meritless conspiracy theory. I will address my opponents points one at a time: "Unanswered Questions" 1. Dick Cheney was in charge on 9/11 since the President could not be reached due to the fact that the communications were down. There is nothing sinister about this. No one wants a leader that doesn't take action during a crisis for fear of being impeached. This is called American leadership at it's finest regardless of whether or not people agree on the Bush Administration's actions in the subsequent months. 2. My opponent will have to clarify what he means when he say that NORAD mislead investigators. It's fighter jets were physically not in the vicinity of the hijacked planes. Communications were down, orders could not be properly transmitted. 3. Once again my opponent will have to explain himself. On flight 93, the passengers bravely tried to take back the plane which caused the plane to crash into a rural field instead of the White House. There are black box recordings that support this series of events. 4. The hijackers were identified quickly in a number of ways. http://www.911myths.com... goes into great deal about this area. Most apparent (or so I should think) is the fact that people were able to call the police from the plane via the pay phones and describe the hijackers to the police. 5. From my understanding of the 9/11 case, the initial "flight manifest" that was reported was actually a list of the victims. This point is frequently mis-cited by conspiracy theorists. 6. I cannot find anything about Mayor Giuliani sending WTC rubble to China and India from a reputable source or anything that cites one so he will have to provide a link of some sort before I can address this point. 7. Once again, I cannot find anything reliable on the task force being dismantled before 9/11. My opponent will need to provide a report from AP or something. B.WTC Collapse. 1. It is obvious that my opponent lacks an adequate understanding of basic physics; one that is required to debate this aspect of the case. Jet fuel burns at various temperatures (up to 1800 degrees F) that depend mostly on the amount of oxygen that is available. Now it is true that those temperatures are insufficient to melt steal which melts at roughly 2750 degrees F but that does not mean that it is incapable of compromising a building's structural integrity. Let me use a the example of a blacksmith hammering a piece of iron to illustrate my point. The iron is not in a liquid form but it is still red hot. That temperature is required to weaken the iron just enough so that it can be hammered into the desired shape. The force of the hammer striking the iron can be represented by the weight of the building. So think of the WTC as a straw that when pressed from both sides remains firm but once that initial buckling occurs there is nothing left to prevent that force from collapsing the rest of the structure 2. There is no evidence of any controlled explosion from a reputable source that I am aware of. If there is, copy a link to this debate. 3. Not sure about an explosion heard. The sound of a steel instantly being forcibly crushed may resemble that of an explosion though. 4. The same thing could be said about the debris. The resulting energy released when a building of that size comes crashing down could easily resemble the effects of an explosion. Uninformed people are jumping to conclusions when they suggest that only an explosion can cause such an effect. The Pentagon 1. The planes where not shot down before they reached the Pentagon because no one saw this coming at all. You must remember that before 9/11 that belief was that mainland America was protected by the two oceans on either side of it. 2. The plane did not fly directly into the Pentagon. The plane hit the ground and then bounced into the side of the building. The initial strike with the ground took away most of the planes energy as well. That is one of the reasons why it was not as bad as it could have been. 3. The reason that there were so few fatalities was because The area was under construction. This is a well known fact now that can be found anywhere online. If it were open then you can be sure that there would be many more fatalities. People who believe in such nonsense as that the US planned the worst attack in its history on itself, fly in the face of all of the facts. There is a reason why no well respected scientist or forensic expert would vouch for such a story. There is no solid evidence. Any information that my opponent may present will probably be from a website called something like 9-11thetruth.com. The President isn't capable of covering up a story as juicy as this one. For God's sake, he couldn't cover up the fact that soldier's were humiliating POWs at Abu Ghraib. Leaks of information always reveal such abuses of power. You can be sure of one thing though, if the President or any other part of the government was involved we would know about.