The US government is trying to get facts out to rebut some of the conspiracy theories that swirl around 9/11. Of course, the conspiracy theorists simply won't listen to it. But maybe some hard facts will keep the more rational folks from going off the deep end.

According to a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll carried out in July, more than one-third of Americans suspect U.S. officials helped in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could later go to war.

The State Department responded this week with a rebuttal of World Trade Center demolition theories and doubts about other events of the day that abound on the Internet.

It listed some of the most prevalent September 11 myths, led by claims the twin towers were destroyed by secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets.

"This is how the collapses may have appeared to non-experts, but demolition experts point out many differences," said a department "special feature" available at http://usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html.

Demolition professionals always blow the bottom floors of a structure first, while the collapses began at upper levels — where the hijacked Boeing 767s hit, it said.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11. The Bush administration responded by leading an invasion of Afghanistan and, in 2003, of Iraq.

'CORRECTIVE' EFFORT

The State Department was providing "corrective information" in response to misinformation in the media and on the Internet, said Joanne Moore, a department spokeswoman.

The information in the rebuttal was not new, she added, but drawn from public sources.

In a similar vein, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology posted a "fact sheet" on its Web site on Wednesday in question-and-answer format responding to alternative theories about the fire and the collapse.

NIST, which carried out a three-year investigation, concluded the towers collapsed after being hit by separate, fuel-laden aircraft flown by hijackers.

The resulting fire, which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees C (1,800 degrees F), led to an inward bowing of perimeter columns and subsequent collapses, NIST found in 43 volumes that comprise a final report issued last October.

Of course, because it is coming from the government, the zealots dismiss it out of hand (along with the laws of physics, of course). But the folks at Reuters provide a bit too much credibility to the critics, too:

"NIST is a group of government scientists whose leaders are Bush appointees, and therefore their report is not likely to veer from the political story," said Kevin Ryan, an editor of the online Journal of 9/11 studies.

Ryan says he was a former site manager of a division of Underwriters Laboratories, an independent, not-for-profit product-safety testing and certification organization.

Sounds impressive, no? "Former site manager of a division of" UL. People reading this would get an inflated sense of Mr. Ryan's credentials. He was actually former Site Manager for Environmental Health Laboratories in South Bend, Indiana according to Wikipedia. Not exactly a credible voice on things to do with structural engineering.

As I have mentioned before, I know of exactly one engineer and one professor of physics who are part of the group. All the rest are either "soft" science types or have no engineering background whatsoever. I have also mentioned the NIST report before and noted that steel loses 80% of its yield strength at 600° C. There is nothing on this earth that could have prevented the towers from collapsing when two fuel laden aircraft were intentionally flown into them. By al Qaeda terrorists. Who take full credit for the attack.

UPDATE: The New York Times also has an article. They also have one detail I was not aware of, but that completely demolishes the 9/11 nut's arguments.

The report brought to light one little-known detail about the morning: a private demolition monitoring firm, Protec Documentation Services, had seismographs at several construction sites in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Those machines documented the tremors of the falling towers, but captured no ground vibrations before the collapses from demolition charges or bombs, according to a separate report by Brent Blanchard, the director of field operations for Protec. It is available online at www.implosionworld.com.

Asked for comment, Mr. Ryan said that his online 9/11 journal would soon publish an article on those seismic recordings. He also maintained that the Protec paper did not adequately address why puffs of smoke were seen being expelled from some of the floors. However, the federal investigators said that about 70 percent of a building’s volume consists of air, and what looked like puffs of smoke were jets of air — and dust — that were pushed ahead of the collapse.

That and the impossible logistics of the planting of explosives pretty much wipe the theories out. But never fear, now they are developing a theory of "super-thermite". They won't give up this lunacy.

(Cross post from main site Blue Crab Boulevard where there are many more daily posts)