My initial encounter with the 9/11 Truth Movement was over this past summer when a friend of a friend decided that our first shared social interaction should cover his beliefs about the way things transpired Sept. 11, 2001. It was an odd first impression he made, but I can’t deny it was an interesting conversation. He began speaking about the resemblances between the way that the towers fell and the way a demolished building falls, and about the doubts expressed by theorists that an aluminum plane could penetrate the steel framing of the Twin Towers. At the time it piqued my interest, so I made a mental note to do some research on the subject soon afterward.

I had no idea these beliefs were so widespread until that point. According to Time magazine’s September 2006 issue, a Scripps-Howard poll of over 1000 U.S. citizens concluded that 36 percent of Americans think it’s either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the U.S. government had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks or planned and executed the attacks themselves. Most proponents of these theories call themselves members of the 9/11 Truth Movement and consider themselves on a mission to spread the belief that the US government was heavily involved in the Sept. 11 tragedy.

I had virtually meandered onto some very compelling arguments for these conspiracy theories and began to get sucked in. I ended up spending an exorbitant amount of time reading up on these theories and watching the videos associated with each one and checking into the responses left by viewers. One thing that was never really answered by any of the articles or the videos was where any incentive lay for the U.S. government to plan, execute or allow the attacks to happen. Dick Cheney’s connections with Halliburton are always brought up as incentive, or Bush’s desire to finish his father’s affairs in the Middle East, but there’s no incentive listed for the whole of the governing body. Those two men may or may not have had real incentive, but they certainly don’t have autonomous control of what happens in the U.S.

Ultimately, the belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories is a choice, and the same can be said of the belief that Osama Bin Laden planned and sent Al-Qaeda terrorists to bring the towers down. I much prefer the conventional way of thinking about the 9/11 attacks because I find it really difficult to imagine that anyone inside the U.S. government thought the 2000 captains of industry inside the World Trade Center were expendable. I refuse to believe that anyone in the White House consciously thought, “Americans don’t need to be safe nearly as much as we need to go to war in the Middle East.”

I would go so far as to say that the opposite choice offends me. The majority of the victims of the terrorist attacks were leaders of the business and economic communities and certainly not dispensable because of the value they had to the nation. Not to mention that whole “intrinsic value of every human being” thing. The belief that they could have been taken out by their own government so that two men could have a war that they wanted is despicable. It belittles the importance of each of the victims, and I find that to be disrespectful to the victims and their families. Even if they had not been important individuals, though, a belief that officials in the White House planned these events knowing that thousands would die is a belief in the moral erosion in Western Civilization, and that’s another thing I refuse to believe in. Making the decision to run planes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and a short distance from Camp David would involve consciously deciding to end the lives of thousands of people. It would take a hardcore utilitarian to believe that could be justified in any way, and even a hardcore utilitarian would need something much better than bringing a lengthy international conflict to justify those actions. I choose to believe that the U.S. government holds itself to a higher standard than that and hope that no matter what you choose to believe, you keep respect for the victims of Sept. 11, 2001 in mind.