Babar

Well, yes, Robin Cook fell for the story, like so many others, but those who have studied the matter more deeply disagree. Take Jason Burke, for instance, a major contributor to the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares". In his book "Al Qaeda", he wrote the following: It is often said that bin Ladin was funded by the CIA. This is not true, and indeed it would have been impossible given the structure of funding that General Zia ul-Haq, who had taken power in Pakistan in 1977, had set up. A condition of Zia's cooperation with the American plan to turn Afghanistan into the Soviets' 'Vietnam' was that all American funding to the Afghan resistance had to be channeled through the Pakistani government, which effectively meant the Afghan bureau of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the military spy agency. The American funding, which went exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers [bin Ladin's groups], was supplemented by Saudi government money and huge funds raised from mosques, non-governmental charitable institutions and private donors throughout the Islamic world. Most of the major Gulf-based charities operating today were founded at this time to raise money or channel government funds to the Afghans, civilians and fighters. In fact, as little as 25 per cent of the money for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states. Page 59, Al Qaeda: The true story of radical Islam. Jason Burke but we are moving rather far away from science here.

In reply to a number of points that have been made: There is no evidence whatever that the CIA funded al Qaeda at any stage, given OBL's hatred of America it is very unlikely he would have accepted such help, even if he needed it, which as a very wealthy man, he did not. The huge clouds of dust produced when the towers fell were probably mostly gypsum which crumbles very easily, rather than concrete. The story of molten metal beneath the rubble is hearsay anyway, and certainly no one could tell what metal it was.

Actually OBL claimed responsibility in a video sent to al Jazeera in November 2004, transcript available at http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive?ArchiveId=7403. al Jazeera obviously think it is genuine. Interesting that conspiracists think 9/11 was inside job by the US government but that government cannot get the FBI to ascribe it to OBL on their website!

And significantly that stream of whatever was pouring from the building just where the plane debris would have piled up inside, ie opposite the entry point.

There were of course tens of thousands of tons of gypsum wallboard (=plasterboard in the UK) in the towers. Gypsum is calcium sulphate.