Eh… I’m no 9/11 conspiracy theorist* but there’s one little hole in that logic: There are only a few demolition companies in the world that could do it safely, and it would have taken hundreds of workers and engineers to do it safely. But if you don’t care about killing a few thousand people in the process and causing major damage to other nearby buildings, maybe then the job gets a lot easier.

Not really, successful planned demolitions are definitely a legitimate engineering feat. Safety of course requires a ton of planning and work, but that’s mainly because you have to issue temporary evictions to anyone living in the surrounding area.

Even planned demolitions where you don’t really have to worry about collateral damage go tits up all the time. Which ends up being an expensive mess to clean up afterwards. You really have to know what you are doing to make sure there just isn’t a partial collapse, and as I said there aren’t many companies that specialize in it.

Either because they were grossly incompetent … or in the more sinister version, they were deliberately ordered to ignore it, allowing the attack to happen

I mean, there’s been plenty of evidence of just how incompetent us intelligence agencies were behaving before 9/11. It’s one of the reasons they created the department of homeland security afterwards. The agencies were to busy fighting for funding and getting caught up in dick measuring contest to actually do there jobs.

I think it’s just a case of a politician “not letting any good tragedy going to waste” rather than someone allowing something to happen. The risk vs reward of that scenario is just too unpredictable for someone like Cheney or Bush to be on board.