Asking questions about 9/11

Hat tip: Little Green Footballs.
Counterknowledge.com has some questions for the 9/11 truthers to answer:

One of the standard claims of 9/11 "truthers" is that they are merely sceptical individuals with a healthy and understandable desire not to swallow US government propaganda at face value. The mantra "just asking questions" allows them to pose as wary and intelligent souls too accustomed to the concept of duplicity in high places to accept the "official story" of Al Qaeda's role in planning and perpetrating the largest mass casualty terrorist attack in modern history. It also allows them to adopt an indignant tone when dealing with their critics, and to conflate attempts by debunkers to undermine their claims with both unquestioning acceptance of an "official cover-up" (irrespective of whether the debunker happens to be a supporter of the current US administration or not) and a systematic effort to deprive them of freedom of speech. It goes without saying that in the process the "truthers" set up two straw-men for them to knock down, but then they're not very good at dealing with tougher critics.
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...conspiracy theorists know that mud sticks: if you can make an accusation against an individual or group through innuendo and sly hints the latter has the hard task of proving the calumnies against them to be false.
...the claim that one is "just asking questions" is liberating, as it frees the truther of the obligation of actually constructing a coherent alternative theory - based on the evidence at hand - which is more convincing than the "official theory".

it makes the task of a truther an easy one: all he or she (there seem to be few female truthers around, which hopefully means that they won't reproduce) has to do is google to get the appropriate "story" from Prison Planet, 9/11 Blogger, What Really Happened or a similar website. Hey presto, they get what they want: "The FBI said there were no phone calls from AA77!"; "4,000 Jews didn't turn up to work at the WTC on 9/11!"; "Silverstein ordered the demolition of WTC7!" And so on and so forth. 

Any genuine sceptic dealing with truthers - whether online or in the flesh - then has to (1) work out what the hell his or her interlocutor is talking about, and (2) ask themselves how exactly they made this claim, and if it has any substance. Anyone lacking either patience or detailed knowledge of the events of 11th September 2001 may be tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Debunkers are left with the time-consuming task of researching the historical background, and trying to assemble the relevant technical and scientific information, before they can actually verify the facts for themselves.  In short, the truther can throw out a red herring or an outright distortion in a matter of minutes, leaving it up to other net users to take the time and trouble to verify their origin and accuracy.

(In debates over Evolution, this tactic is known as the "Gish Gallop" after Duane Gish's tactic of throwing out a multitude of red herrings for the evolutionist to refute.  Each one sounds impressive, and a claim that takes five seconds to make takes at least fifteen minutes to properly refute.)

Fortunately, yeoman work has been done by scores of individuals to actually put the record straight. Pat and James from Screw Loose Change, Mark Roberts, 9/11 Myths, Debunking 9/11 and 9/11 Guide in particular provide a valuable resource. The James Randi forum is particularly useful in that it provides commentators with specialist knowledge - military veterans, pilots, flight engineers, physicists, architects, forensic experts etc - with a platform to expose the anti-scientific claptrap and historical illiteracy of the truthers. This is the main reason why the JREF and its commentators arouse such hatred from the 9/11 conspiracy ghouls.

It's time to turn the tables on the truthers. Rather than accept a situation in which the nutjobs and kooks who subscribe to 9/11 conspiracies can make their accusations willy-nilly, it is high time that their critics decided that they can "just ask questions" too. This particular debunker has decided that maybe, just for once, the onus for actually demonstrating the validity of their theories on the basis of systematic and critical analysis of the evidence belongs to the truthers, not to those who wish to expose their fallacies. As someone whose academic bias is based on history, I would like to pose the following challenge to the conspiracy-mongers:

Let's take your thesis (that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush administration, and covered up by a coalition of US government agencies, allied powers, big business and the media) as read. The following questions point to logical and factual gaps within that thesis. It is now up to you to answer these questions and explain why your theories are still valid. For your answers to be credible, they need to be detailed and based on verifiable evidence. No suppositions, no speculation, no unsupported assertions, just the facts. Stop "asking questions", and provide answers. These fifteen initial questions will do for starters.

Go read the questions.