On 911blogger.
My answer to him stands alone, I feel, so I give you it uncensored and invite you to follow the link to his thoughts.
this is a worthy essay (meaning GW's)
Which means attempt in French.
But I'm somewhere else and for me it all leads to a different answer: (with regard to the question of possible elite rationalizations and motives for 9/11):
Maintaining the global empire of capital against its own self-generated downfall for as long as it can last. No doubt rationalized by the planners of 9/11 and the global war as a necessity of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of (western, white-identifying) people.
In detail that means:
Seizing the petroleum resource base directly as collateral to maintain the air-dollar's hegemony against a bubble-popping that will come anyway. Confronting a future of diminishing returns, depleting resources and ecological disaster on behalf of the super-rich in their fortified enclaves. (Many 9/11 truth heads have been conditioned to reject the science behind resource depletion but it's happening.)
Mobilizing the psychological reserves of the middle classes on behalf of perpetual war through shock, re-programming and fear. Enacting the transition from a polity based on carrot and stick to one relying nakedly on force. Following the stagnation of capitalist growth economics, ushering in the "new-new" economy of biometrics, nano, daily micro-war, surveillance and security, counter-insurgency and the reach for physical immortality by the lords and ladies of the world.
A reaction to the fear of worldwide democracy and capitalist economic failure by a multi-headed global spook octopus that has been anticipating this endgame for decades, and thus bringing it closer with each new attempt to control through covert operation.
A certain self-defeating but oft-brilliant analyst who's played a role as a vandal in the local news lately said it well:
False-flag (or call it shock doctrine) is class war by an oligarchy that resorts to this means of attack in the absence of other politically feasible alternatives.
Class war.
Not war of civilizations, that is the cover, and it's more flexible than you seem to admit.
China? You mean the manufacturing sector of the American/Western centered world economy? Please. Their system made its accommodation and integrated itself into the global system long ago. Almost as much a phantom as "Islam," a very big bogeyman with none of the designs on world domination falsely attributed to it. They're busy enough feeding themselves, man, (and dealing with their own version of ecological collapse), they're not going to fight World War Six. They will be the last to sell their dollars, and I guarantee you the oil will not stop flowing to them long as they can pay. They are essential to the overall system for the labor and production they provide. Many other places will be cut off from the pipeline before China is expended, as far as the empire is concerned it is one of the most reliably functional pieces.
Israel? I know a lot of people here will react like tail-wagging felines to anyone who doesn't give that as the first, middle and last answer to all riddles, but it's an unruly colonial satrapy that is wagged at the Arab states just as much as it tries to wag back (at the Americans). A limb with its own ganglion, like many others, but a limb nevertheless. A reserve mercenary force for a good share of the dirtiest work, hence its reputation as some kind of superpower. The over-rated center of apocalyptist wet-dreams shared by a spectrum running from the true-bluest Zionist to the hairiest Jew hater.
"Christianity" and other fundamentalist religion? The wildcard, to be certain. The true-believing soldiers, some of them probably packing private nukes. But at the top as thoroughly a scam as ever invented. Absolutely no different from the drug lords. You think the popes and grandees and mullahs and TV bozos believe that shit?
Class war, General Washington. What you and your fellow founders waged on your own people and on all those less lucky, from 1786 forward, out of fear it would one day be waged on you.
And it is being fought back - just not in this doped-up country of money junkies and lonely voyeurs. Want to know where the empire is being challenged politically? Look no further than the countries to your south. The ones so many 9/11 heads have now been conditioned to view as the foot-soldiers of a fictional plan for world empire that they think will be toppling the real-existing world empire that they cannot see.
You want to know why 9/11 was done? To save the Old World Order.
"Truth is not measured in mass appeal." summeroftruth.org
For the thoughts of George Washington that prompted the above rant follow the link.