It is a distinctly American pathology, this denial that 9/11 occurred.  Sometimes it takes on ridiculous and circus-like attributes, as with Professor Steven Jones:

Yet five years after the terrible event, some believe there is more to the story — that the official version of events is wrong. Just days before the anniversary, Steven Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University in Utah, was suspended on paid leave because he argued explosives brought down the towers.

Conspiracy theories, many accusing the United States government of orchestrating the attacks, grew in popularity. A documentary called Loose Change, collecting these theories and stating them as the truth, became a underground hit on Google’s online video website and YouTube.com.

The fact that there is no dispute on the technical details of the failure modes of the WTC is unconvincing to the crackpot purveyors of wild stories of U.S. complicity and pre-planted explosives.  I am sitting at my desk studying again the FEMA document “World Trade Center Building Performance Study: Data Collection, Preliminary Observations, and Recommendations,” FEMA 403, September 2002, co-sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers.  I am as impressed now as I was when I first received this document in the mail at how much detail is contained in the document, how much study it took to put this mammoth tome together, and how conclusive it is as to the failure modes and overall comprehension of the accident sequence.

Further, there are other such studies available.  The NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has performed an extensive study of the same sort of thing I discussed above in their report “Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers.”  This is part of a larger effort to catalogue and archive issues (mostly technical) pertaining to the WTC and its collapse.

For those who believe that they know how buildings are supposed to collapse, you need to study the design reports of the WTC.  Ironically, the innovation in the structural design that made it possible to construct such a behemoth structure to begin with, was the undoing of the structure upon the crash of the airliners into the building.  There was no structural steel, per se (in the usual sense of the word, i.e., beams).  Both the axial stiffness and lateral stability were provided by the skin of the building.  Unfortunately, while the structure was designed to withstand the direct crash of an airliner into the building, the designers failed to consider the addition of heat due to the payload of jet fuel.

The intense heat generated by the burning of the jet fuel caused a reduction in the yield strength of the metal skin, causing it to buckle and be unable to sustain the mass of floors above.  When one floor began to relocate to the floor beneath it, the problem ceased to be static and became hopelessly fatal, with dynamic loads that the structure was entirely incapable of supporting.  Since the structural support was provided by the very skin which was buckling, there was no recovery, and the building was doomed.

Soon after this event, professors of engineering at various institutions produced calculations very quickly which demonstrated that the structure was not able to withstand the temperatures generated by the combustion of the jet fuel.  As a side note, it has been suggested by the naysayers that the fire was caused by the combustion of diesel fuel.  Not only is this false, it is absurd.  Diesel fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to cause the temperatures seen by the structure, and there wasn’t enough of it to cause the weakening and collapse of the building.

But there is a different kind of denial.  While it is deadly for Europe to deny the influx of Muslim extemism, it is at least understandable that stolid and comfortable people would fail to heed the warnings of 9/11.  What is so troublesome is that many in the U.S. still do not understand those warnings, and the U.S. is still, it seems, not on a war footing.

I was recently discussing with someone the nature of the war we are in, attempting to explain that Iraq was, if we were able to sustain the motivation to win the war, a foothold in the middle east.  To the east is Iran, to the west, Syria.  Both were and are state sponsors of terror, and unless and until we tackle the problem of these two states, the GWOT will not be won.  Syria must be confronted, perhaps militarily, perhaps not, depending upon the power of our state diplomacy.  Iran must be confronted, more than likely militarily.  Saudi Arabia must be confronted for their financial support of terrorism, and Afghanistan must be won.  Finally, Pakistan must be dealt with over the Madrassas and schools of terror still allowed in the region.

The war will encompass military action, and that, far more than anyone has been willing to admit as yet.  It will require a State Department that is engaged and actually an ally of the policy of the war rather than an enemy of it.  It will require more police action, more border security, more special forces black operations, more CIA human intelligence, and more homeland security for ports.  It is — by my estimations — a 25 year war.

Iraq is only the beginning.  Yet the U.S. is suffering fatigue, due in part to the failure to learn the lessons of 9/11.  We engage in irrelevant talk of the relationship of Iraq to Al Qaeda prior to the war, and handwring over WMD that at the moment lack germane application to what is happening in the Middle East.  We pretend that we are in a world of 9/10.  So if we fail to learn the lessons of 9/11, what honor and tribute have we paid to the immediate victims of 9/11 and the subsequent deaths of U.S. troops who fight on our behalf trying to defeat radical, facist Islam?

Are rememberances of any avail if we refuse to admit what 9/11 means?