User:Cs32en/911/Sources/BBC/2008-07-04/content

"[...] The official explanation is that ordinary fires were the main reason for the collapse of Tower 7. That makes this the first and only tall skyscraper in the world to have collapsed because of fire. Yet despite that all the thousands of tonnes of steel from the building were carted away and melted down.

The way official bodies have investigated Tower 7 at the World Trade Center has made some people think they're hiding something. Its destruction was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. [...]

Inevitably the officials have been criticised for being slow and even of being frightened to publish. [...]

In April 2005, the first thousand DVDs of Dylan Avery's Loose Change movie were pressed. It cost just $2,000 to make. It was a critical moment for the development of the movement. The makers of Loose Change claim it has now been viewed by more than a hundred million people.

Steven Jones, a former physics professor at Brigham Young University, who has become the leading academic voice in the movement, first watched a video of the collapse of Tower 7 in the spring of 2005. But when he did, he said he was taken aback as a physicist.

The American architect Richard Gage's conversion came in 2006 when driving along he heard an independent radio station interviewing the theologian David Ray Griffin.

"I had to do some real soul searching and some research. And the more I discovered the more disturbed I became and realized I was looking for... the architects and the engineers."

Finding that they hadn't really entered the fray by then, Gage decided he had to act.

"It just came to me, I had to start an organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth."

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 was a huge moment for "truthers". Under the media spotlight protests intensified, websites were spawned and internet films proliferated.

With the publicity also came the "debunkers", challenging the "truthers" at every stage.

After Loose Change came a website called Screw Loose Change. And internet film 9/11 Mysteries was followed by Screw 9/11 Mysteries. [...]

And the "truthers" have fought back. When the US technology magazine Popular Mechanics launched a book called Debunking 9/11 Myths, it was countered with a book by David Ray Griffin called Debunking 9/11 Debunking. [...]

And over time schisms have opened up in the 9/11 "truth" movement.

So-called "no-planers" believe that commercial aeroplanes did not actually crash into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon or a field in Pennsylvania. Some have suggested lasers from outer space were used.

"Planers" believe aeroplanes were used but argue that only controlled demolitions can explain the collapses of the World Trade Center towers.

Then there are the LIHOPs and MIHOPs. Most "truthers" are MIHOPs - they think the government Made It Happen On Purpose, planning and orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.

But LIHOPs believe the government just Let It Happen On Purpose, to allow them to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a clampdown on civil liberties."