Oh boy. No there's no chance I'm on board with the "NIST is BS" thing.
Tell you what though, something did happen when I was in basic training, and I've told this story before but it bears repeating, because it shows that Afghan-Iraq was not just a reaction to 9/11, but a plan waiting for an opportunity (yes in addition to PNAC stuff).
It was April 2001, and we were a bit more than halfway through AF basic. They brought all of the training flights to the base theater, and had a "production" set to "Die Motherfucker Die" with war footage and lots of bombs dropping. It was disgusting (and of course most of the kids loved it). Then after the motivational video, one of the training instructors got on stage to talk.
He went through a slideshow showing Saddam and Bin Laden, and was telling us how they were going to attack us any day now, and we were going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq (and that they had all these chemical weapons and nuke programs, etc). I shit you not.
That stuck has with me for a very long time. It was actually reading PNAC-related stuff that helped me come to terms with that. Otherwise, there would be no explanation and I would be a lot more paranoid. I would try not to hold it against anybody who went through that specific propaganda program and believed we orchestrated things.