A brief note to all who are concerned about misconceptions regarding the attacks of 9/11:

Go to the Free Encyclopedia at www.wikipedia.org or to a scientific source and look up the term "thermite."

Put simply, thermite is the combination of aluminum and rust. That may sound innocuous, but the accidental combination of the two in industry produces some of the hottest fires in the universe. Once the thermite ignites a building around it, temperatures reach extreme highs not equalled by any other building fire, and not extinguishable by water or any ordinary means.

This is the cause of the collapse of the WTC buildings on September 11, 2001. The innovative design of the buildings with a steel carapace involved miles of webbing of steel cable. The cable rusted, as steel cable always does.

In construction, when an aluminum-clad drill bores through walls or materials where rust is in the mix, a thermite fire can break out. When the aluminum of the jumbo jets struck through the buildings of the World Trade Center, like a huge drill, they also came into explosive contact with miles of rusted steel cable. The result was what we saw.

No, this is not "thermite bombs." There was no need for bombs in the building. There was no need for thermite bombs anywhere, just as there was no need for gasoline or fuel "bombs" aboard the fully-tanked-up jumbo jets. The attack had the successful element of simplicity.

Whether the hijackers themselves knew about the deadliness of thermite is anyone's guess. Perhaps some of those with engineering training did. I would hypothesize that whoever planned the attacks knew about it.

More to the point, there are U.S. citizens today with sufficient expertise to reason this way. I wish they could come to the forefront and rebut the preposterous and unnecessary theories of bombs stuffed in the WTC.

Like the ludicrous stories of no plane hitting the Pentagon, those spurious notions serve only one purpose: to confuse and impede genuine investigation into 9/11. Maybe that's why they're hanging around so long. The two youngish men I've met who were most intent on pushing these particular theories had some interesting attributes in common: youngish, male, single, childless, and apparently financially able to travel and spend time pushing said theories.