Truthers tend to maintain an uneconomical hypothesis. They insist that the World Trade Center was prepared for demolition, even though  airliners flying into the buildings were a sufficient cause for them to collapse, and the airliners' flight was witnessed by thousands of people.  This means that the Truthers get caught up in arguing with obviously  qualified engineering  opinion.  I think it is useful to think of Truthers as primitive rebels, in  Eric Hobsbawm's sense of the term, that is,  people who want to  put the  clock back to an idealized past. Airport security is the largest intersection between the  national security state and the average  citizen. It is not as intrusive as the process of getting a government security clearance, of course, but that applies  only to a minority of the population.  Since 9/11, airport security has not been run  according to actual risk analysis (see the writings of Bruce Schnier), but as  "security theater." That is, it has  been used as a kind of device of forced indoctrination. This gives the Truthers a kind of counter-investment in insisting that an airliner could not possibly be a flying bomb. Here's  where the primitive rebel aspect comes in. The Truthers do not start promoting high-speed electric trains, which are much more inherently safe, and don't use oil, besides. Instead, they keep trying to put the clock back.

Economical Trutherism would assert that Mohammad Atta was really a Cuban-American Special Forces sergeant named Gonzales or Hernandez or whatever, and that the CIA had murdered the actual Mohammad Atta in order to borrow his identity. Economical Trutherism would further assert that  this "Manchurian Candidate" was given a floppy disk to put in the airplane's computer; that he expected the  disk to cause the airplane to fly to a secret base ("Area 51") and land  there; but that his double-crossing bosses had actually programmed the disk to take over the airplane's controls, computer  virus fashion, and cause  it to fly into the World  Trade Center instead. This scenario is loosely drawn, in technologically updated form, from the plot of an old James Bond  novel, Ian Fleming's _Thunderball_, a proven media success.  That  kind of argument would be much harder to refute.

The Truthers would be better advised to look at the Anthrax Attacks, which might legitimately be called "Anthraxgate." The basic undisputed facts are that the anthrax in question came from a government laboratory,  and that the intended targets were the  president's political opponents and critics. Further, it is more or less self-evident to any reasonable person, though not  of course to the official FBI investigators,  that the  purpose was to secure the passage of the USA Patriot Act. All but one of the  persons killed were random innocent  bystanders, because  the perpetrators were so incompetent that they couldn't even aim properly.   Bob Stevens, the sub-editor at the  National Enquirer, was an intended target, apparently for lese-majestie in publishing scandal about the president's daughters. The combination of recklessness, dishonesty, and incompetence found in the  Anthrax Attacks  is utterly characteristic of the Bush  II administration. Probably,  millions of people were frightened, and their anger, properly fanned, might be very much to be feared.  However, Anthraxgate does not appeal to the  "primitive rebel" mentality of the Truthers. Like everyone else, they like e-mail just fine, and don't feel any compulsion to go back to snailmail. The fact that snailmail letters to congressmen get routinely sent through a zapping machine is of no political consequence-- on the contrary, the congressmen all decided to start accepting e-mail. How can  you hang nostalgia on an institution with such an undignified name as snailmail?