Now hear me out! I’m not looking to rekindle any Loose Change defending/debunking or Truther hooey-- I’m sure we’ve all seen enough of that.
First a comment:I find it strange that 9/11 “truthers” are so fixated. Investigations into the JFK Assassination, for example, yielded lots of information and theories on connections with CIA spookery, Mafia plots, Cuban exiles, Cold War policy, corruption, etc… and generally didn’t insist the Prez’s head spontaneously exploded or something.
My question is this: has there been any in-depth investigations into the actual 9/11 conspiracy, the one more or less described by the 9/11 Commission, but done independently of the gov’t? And I mean something detailed, such as starting with the germs of Al Qaeda as Mujahadeen blowing back, the hijackers themselves, its planning, and the Deep-politics context that might bring some of this out of the shadows.
In terms of the mechanics of the Towers falling down, I think there have been a few. Now if you want to delve into something like “Bush paid them to do it” or “Bush knew what was going to happen and let them do it anyways (a la FDR and Pearl Harbor)” I don’t think so.
Ultimately, only one set of investigators can have first crack at the evidence; after that, there’s always (in some minds) the lingering doubt that the first set contaminated it, or removed key pieces, or… did something such that any subsequent investigation is flawed.
There are similar problems with the rest of your question, in that not long after 9/11, key players such as Osama bin Laden were wanted men, and nobody could reasonably interview them because no neutral parties knew where they were.
It isn’t reasonable to have a huge number of people trying to investigate a homicide at the same time, let alone a major terrorist act. No matter what you do, it would amount to a thundering herd moving through the evidence and suspect list, everyone getting in everyone else’s way and nobody getting the evidence or people they need in a reasonable amount of time, not to mention the contamination sure to ensue.
Probing the various theories for physical and logical plausibility is different. A lot of theories have been probed like that, and none of the conspiracy theories (an idiomatic phrase meaning “a theory which posits a large secret conspiracy which controls the world or large parts of it without becoming known”) have held up: They’ve all failed some basic test, often in a fairly simple analysis. That’s why conspiracy theorists have moved on to Just Asking Questions, or JAQing off: Trying to imply the existence of flaws in the consensus story by asking loaded and leading questions without attempting to posit a consistent alternative explanation of their own.
My point is, in the face of such dishonesty, what’s the point? Nothing anyone could ever do would satisfy the people who JAQ off, and the people who are honest have already been satisfied, or at least accepted that their dissatisfaction stems from the usual uncertainty sure to result whenever people try to probe into a complex event after the fact. (Or even not so complex: Try to get a fully-consistent account of a car wreck from eyewitnesses a few minutes after it happened.)
I’ve known a handful of people who had doubts about the official explanation but had simply learned to stop expressing them, because every time they would bring them up folks would mistake them for …
I observed a law of the universe a few decades back: no matter what the issue is, and no matter which side of it you are on, there will be people who agree with you who you wish did not.
You know the people: the ones so self-evidently insane or stupid that they can undermine your position just by agreeing with you. My brother and I call them the “Fish are people too” crowd, because a show we both liked had an episode where a marine biologist was trying to stop a development that would disrupt the habitat of a dolphin pod he was studying. He had valid points about the value of his research to raise, but there were a lot of people protesting the development chanting “Fish are people too!”. He finally snapped and yelled at them “Dolphins aren’t fish!”, so they started chanting that instead.
So anyway, I know a couple of people who feel that certain things that happened on 9/11 have not been adequately explained to them, and certain parts of the official story don’t add up, but they have learned that saying so in any kind of public forum just gets them mistaken for some tinfoil hat nutjob or inbred moron, and getting called names by intolerant jerks wears thin really quickly, so they just keep their mouth shut.
Seems like what you’re asking for is the historical info on who did what, when, and why. Some of that can be gleaned from public actions and record.
For the why, that’s a little harder on dead people. We can only go by what they’ve said and done. Recordings and writings are preferred over what someone else says they heard.