The conspiracy mindset

David Wong of Cracked has a remarkable article that debunks the 9/11 Truthers and looks into the mindset of why someone would think in such a foolish way.

Huge teams of demolitions experts, who had no problem wiring a building full of innocent New Yorkers to explode, hired in secret, worked every night for what had to be a year (and that's only if they had a big enough crew) placing maybe 10,000 separate charges in each tower and another few thousand in WTC 7 (the smaller WTC tower that also collapsed, later in the day on 9/11).

And nobody notices.

That's right. That's the theory they're putting out there. 100,000 DVD's they've sold with this.

...

That includes hundreds of private researchers and government employees who prepared gigantic reports about the collapse of the towers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Also, officials in the New York City Fire Department.

All were written fat checks, say the conspiracy guys, to cover up the murder of 3,000 New Yorkers. Keep in mind, some of them were New Yorkers themselves - all of the FDNY guys were - and some of them had friends who died in the towers.

...

Because there are hundreds of thousands of civil engineers and structural engineers in the world (people who are experts in what makes buildings fall down) and lots of demolitions experts. Approximately zero of them say the 9/11 attacks looked like bombed buildings. All of them either say outright that the demolition theory is asinine, or are silent in the face of what the Loose Changers say is video proof of mass murder so obvious even an uneducated jackass off the street can spot it.

The conspiracy guys' explanation?

You guessed it. They were paid to stay silent. Hey, why not? Probably half a million people there, but, you know. Since we've got the checkbook out anyway...

Also, think of all of the friends and family of these paid conspirators, who suddenly see all this mysterious wealth... Wouldn't some rumors get started?

He's shown the magnitude of how insane their proposition is, then he breaks out the Math.

Let's say they wrote 500,000 checks (hell, you've got more than 120,000 people in the American Society of Civil Engineers alone, and they'd be the first ones to speak out). Say the average payout was ten million (barely enough to live rich the rest of your life, but let's just say). So that's 500,000 times ten million which is...

...Five TRILLION dollars.

He then goes to the last part

And here's the kicker...

100% of the people who were offered the deal, took it.

After all, we don't have a single person who has come running into the offices of the New York Times, waving a check and saying, "look! Here's a check for ten million smackers that the government gave me to be silent about 9/11! Can you believe these assholes? Now give me my book deal!"

Not one.

Give the article a read.
It's useful to see how the conspiracy mindset works.

On the previous part of the article he looks into the FAME angle.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15740_was-911-inside-job.html
Basically the producers of Loose Change wanted to make their own, fictional, conspiracy movie but they didn't have the money. So, they simply cut up 9/11 footage, deliberately removing evidence of airplanes and the like. Their creation was found and they decided that a "documentary" would much better than a work of Alternate History Fiction.