Scorpio69er quotes Russ Wittenberg, a former fighter pilot:

I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11... Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower. I don't believe it's possible for... a so-called terrorist to train on a 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding it's design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns,.. pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's... I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it.

Well, as has been reported earlier, most recently by Patrick in a previous letter, the pilots did not simply jump from a light plane to a jet: they also got simulator training. So Wittenberg's premise is false to start with.

Scorpio69er writes:

Without going into some sort of 9/11 debate,

What is it you're doing here, if not going into some sort of a 9/11 debate?

my own questions about what happened are more philosophical in nature. For example, the 2 guys who flew into the WTC could not have known that the buildings would collapse, so, clearly, that could not have been their objective or expectation as they allegedly committed suicide.

And what is your point here? Maybe they didn't expect the towers to collapse -- and so? In that video of a gathering of al-Qaida leaders, linked to by Dave the Engineer, bin Laden said that the collapse of the buildings surprised him, too. Simply hitting both towers, without causing a collapse, would in itself have been a spectacular coup for the terrorists, and as Dave points out, would have killed hundreds of people, a very respectable yield for any terrorist attack.

Not only would the 2nd WTC suicide pilot have had no reason whatsoever to believe that the buildings would collapse, but it would have been quite reasonable for him to believe that, given what had happened to the first WTC, everyone would have already been evacuated from both buildings.

It would have been reasonable? Would it now? The first plane hit at 8:46, and the second at 9:03. Had the second tower been completely evacuated in the intervening 17 minutes? No, it hadn't. (And no one above the burning floors could have been evacuated from the first tower.) As, in reality, everyone had not been evacuated in 17 minutes, and as it would be difficult to do so from such huge buildings in the best of circumstances, what makes it reasonable for the second pilot to have believed so?

As I pointed out in my last comment, the government's offical position is that 9/11 was a conspiracy. Does the government therefore make you sick?

Well, duh. Obviously any terrorist plan encompassing more than one person is, by definition, a conspiracy, unless the planners were so incompetent as to broadcast their plans publicly. The 9/11 plotters had a secret plan to hijack airplanes and to fly them into notable buildings. How do we know this? Because the plot necessarily became public when it was executed. How do you 9/11 truthers know that the conspiracy was planned and executed, even partially, by the US government? You don't; you're simply engaging in the usual, tired conspiracy-theorist blather, by deliberately overlooking data (as Wittenberg does above), by believing each other's hyperbole, by dismissing every piece of evidence that goes against your convictions, and by interpreting every shadow as monster. Not that pointing out your false premises and your theories' internal inconsistencies ever slows down you serious conspiracy theorists.

I find you people sad and pitiful. You so want there to be big machinations behind the scenes to explain every ill in the world, and no doubt get a wonderful frisson when thinking you're the ones that have glimpsed behind the curtain. It's more difficult to actually engage with the world as it is, and accept the conclusions that the available evidence leads to. There's a good application of Occam's Razor that says: Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incomptence.

Enough about this from me. You, no doubt, will keep on cranking the handle on that old gramophone. Have fun.

So, Andrew, you just had to mention the 9/11 truthers? Sigh.... here we go again....