Serraglio 

After the sustained media frenzy of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, most people are probably ready to move on. I offer this question as a starting point for the next 10 years: "Sure, but move on to what?"

Based on the past 10 years, we can expect more wars that have little to do with Sept. 11, but will sacrifice the lives of far more Americans than the 3,000 who died that day, as well as the lives of many, many more foreign civilians. Our government will continue to justify and codify torture as an indispensable element of U.S. foreign policy and subvert the civil liberties upon which this nation was founded. And we'll face the harsh reality that such actions cause suffering and resentment that generate more terrorism.

Excuse me for jumping to the conclusion that we're moving in the wrong direction.

Here's an alternative: Why not start with a real investigation of the events of Sept. 11? I mean a full-on, independent criminal investigation, with prosecutors, subpoenas and the whole nine yards, not the half-assed, politically constrained nonsense churned out by the 9/11 Commission. I think we owe the victims of this massive crime nothing less.

A lot of the groundwork for such an investigation has already been laid by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a group devoted to the scientific study of the physical evidence of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

I spoke with Peter Morse, a Tucson engineer with a lot of experience in the construction of large, steel-framed buildings and a former board member of AE 9/11 Truth. Like 1,600 other colleagues in the group, Peter hardly fits the profile of "conspiracy theorist" that is so commonly used to dismiss anyone who questions the official story of Sept. 11. The group is packed with luminaries and true experts, including National Medal of Science winners, a professor emeritus of physics at Brigham Young University, and the former director of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

It's a highly qualified group, but most of them came to the issue through simple common sense. Like Peter, they watched video, read the official explanation of the towers' collapse, scratched their heads and asked, "How could that have happened?" The closer they looked, the clearer it became that the government's fanciful theories were unsupportable, and the more these professionals were drawn, however reluctantly, into the fight to establish the truth. "It goes against the psyche of engineers in general to invite conflict," as Peter put it. "But we took an oath to protect the public."

If you want to talk conspiracy theories, the official explanation for the collapsing towers is a whopper. It posits that skyscrapers specifically designed to withstand the hottest fires and direct impacts from airplanes somehow succumbed to those stresses and collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, straight down into their own footprints. Never before had such a thing occurred—despite other skyscrapers hit by planes and beset by fires far hotter than those present at the World Trade Center—but on Sept. 11, it happened three times in eight hours.

Subsequent testing of WTC dust samples established the presence of thermite, a high-powered incendiary that cuts through a steel beam like a lightning bolt through a stick of butter. This evidence is hard proof of the most-likely collapse scenario, one that was completely ignored by NIST, which did not even test for explosives, despite eyewitness testimony of more than 100 New York City firefighters who heard and saw explosions on Sept. 11.

I remember network news anchor Peter Jennings, mesmerized by video of the collapse, observing, "Almost like a controlled demolition." Indeed, thousands of buildings have collapsed straight down at virtually free-fall speed over the years, and every one of them resulted from controlled demolition.

I'd say Mr. Jennings' journalistic instincts were correct. Kudos to Peter Morse and the rest of the patriotic citizens of AE 9/11 Truth for picking up where he left off. Check out their website for yourself at www.ae911truth.org.

When a formal criminal investigation determines who planted those explosives and why, then maybe our nation can start figuring out where it's headed in the next 10 years.