Extraordinary

Wow.

It's no secret that I have smelled a rat about the 9/11 attacks from the every evening the attacks occurred. For those unfamiliar with my history as what Marc Maron calls an "independent speculative investigator", here's how it started: In the evening of 9/11/2001, Mr. Brilliant and I were watching the various news coverages of the day's events. We happened to stumble on ex-cokehead pundie Larry Kudlow on CNBC. He was grinning from ear to ear and crowing about how these attacks were the final nail in the coffin of any talk of a Social Security lockbox." I turned to Mr. Brilliant and said, "Oh my God....THEY did it."

Now, I was predisposed to dislike George W. Bush from get-go, and certainly his campaign sending paid Congressional thugs to intimidate vote counters in Florida and his installation as president by a partisan Supreme Court, followed by his utter ineptitude in the first seven months of his administration didn't help. But what I was anticipating was a kind of tolerable bad dream, sort of like the Reagan and Bush I years. I mean, how bad could it be? We'd survived Nixon, we'll survive this guy too.

Silly me.

But since then, while I've tried to filter the obvious kooks like Alex Jones and Jeff Rense through the lens of a healthy skepticism, what I DO know is that too much of what we KNOW to be true -- the FAA waiver of the English requirement so that a hijacker could get a pilot's license; the Miracle of the Intact Passport at Ground Zero when desks and computers were pulverized; the way the government knew exactly who was responsible immediately; the odd meeting of Warren Buffett with the CEOs of a number of companies headquartered at the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11 -- near the military base in Nebraska where Bush flew after leaving Florida; the fact that the Pentagon plane hit the most reinforced part of the building; the the drills being conducted that morning; the airline put options that were never investigated. I weighed for a while the possibility of outright government complicity, as in my first reaction, but since then I've settled on Deliberate Negligence -- the Bush Administration and intelligence agencies knew something was going to happen, and instead of preventing it, allowed it to play out, for a number of reasons.

What could those reasons be? Well, there was the fact that Bush's approval ratings only seven months in were hovering at around 45% and some were speculating that this administration was over before it began. There was the Newsweek exposé about the thuggery in the Florida vote count that hit the newsstands the day before. And of course, we now know that these guys had a boner to invade Iraq even before taking office.

I don't think they figured on the iconic twin towers collapsing in real time on national television; I think they took a calculated risk, that a few hundred lives were the unfortunate price to be paid for salvaging this presidency and the PNAC agenda. Yes, even this sounds horrifically evil, but it is it any more evil than starting a war based on a lie and sending hundreds of thousands of American young people to die in that war? I'm not trying to paint the Powers that Be as complete monsters; I just think that some cost/benefit ratios were analyzed and a decision was made to just let it play out and see what happens -- and things went FUBAR far beyond what was calculated.

But it's one thing for me to speculate, and for the REAL tinfoilers to come up with Krazy Konspiracy Theories, but when the questions about what really went down on 9/11 leaves the blogosphere and the dark corners of the Web and start hitting New York Magazine, a seismic shift in public perception about this government is taking place:

They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this Photoshopped age of unreliable narrators, much remains the same. The assassination of President John Kennedy, the Crime of the Last Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands—yet exactly what happened remains in dispute. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald, fellow traveler of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission found that Oswald, who two days later would be murdered by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acted alone.

Yet, as with so many such events, there is the sanctioned history and the secret history—players hidden from view. In the Kennedy murder, the involvement of shadowy organizations like the Mafia and the CIA came into question. This way of thinking came to challenge the official narrative put forth by the Warren Commission. It is not exactly clear when the grassy knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window in the popular mind-set. But now, four decades after Dallas, it is difficult to find anyone who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.

But if Oswald didn’t kill the president, who did? So 11/22 remains an open case, an open wound.

Now here we are again, contemplating the seemingly unthinkable events of September 11. An official explanation has been offered up: The nation was attacked by the forces of radical Islam led by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda jihadists. Again, this narrative has been accepted by many.

But not all.

[snip]

Laying out his scenario, Tarpley touched on many of the “unanswered questions” that make up the core of the 9/11 Truth critique of the so-called Official Story.

Like: How, if no steel-frame building had ever collapsed from fire, did three such edifices fall that day, including 7 World Trade Center, which was not hit by any airplane?

And why, if hydrocarbon-fueled fire maxes out at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,700 degrees, did the towers weaken sufficiently to fall in such a short time—only 56 minutes in the case of the South Tower?

And why, if the impact destroyed the planes’ supposedly crash-proof flight-recorder black boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged American Airlines Flight 11 hijackers?

And how to explain the nonperformance of the FAA and NORAD?

How could they, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash, allow an obviously hostile airplane to smash into the Pentagon, headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex, for chrissakes? And why did the Defense Department choose to stage an extraordinary number of military exercises on 9/11—occupying matériel and spreading confusion about who was who on that day?

And why was it so important, as decreed by Mayor Giuliani, to clear away the debris, before all the bodies were recovered?

And what about the short-selling spree on American and United airlines stock in the days before the attacks? Betting on the stocks to go down—was this real sicko Wall Street insider trading?

There were so many questions. But when it came to the big “why” of 9/11, there was only the classic conspiratorial query: “Who benefits?”

[snip]

In his paper “What Is Your ‘HOP’ Level?” Nick Levis, who co-coordinates the N.Y. 9/11 Truth meetings with Father Morales and Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic narrative theories about September 11. The options essentially boil down to four.

(A) The Official Story (a.k.a. “The Official Conspiracy Theory”). The received Bushian line: Osama, nineteen freedom-haters with box cutters, etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, there was “no warning.”

(B) The Incompetence Theory (also the Stupidity, Arrogance, “Reno Wall” Theory). Accepts the Official Story, adds failure by the White House, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. to heed ample warnings. This line was advanced, with much ass-covering compensation, in The 9/11 Commission Report.

(C) LIHOP (or “Let It Happen on Purpose”). Many variations, but primarily that elements of the U.S. government and the private sector were aware of the hijackers’ plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.

(D) MIHOP (“Made It Happen on Purpose”). The U.S. government or private forces planned and executed the attacks.

This is truly mind-blowing stuff. Now, maybe these theories are all bunk. Maybe I'm wrong, and the 9/11 attacks really DID go down as per the official story. But when officialdom has lied to us so much over the last five years, how are we supposed to trust their narrative about this any more than we trust them about anything else?

Even the 9/11 families, who have been ill-served by the official practice of saying "We'll do better next time" and then giving those they claim screwed up the Medal of Freedom, are wondering:

“Conspiracy theories,” says Lorie Van Auken with a sigh. She’s one of the “Jersey girls” who pushed the Bush administration to convene the 9/11 Commission. Her husband, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was killed in the North Tower. She says, “That’s why we demanded the commission, so there wouldn’t be any conspiracy theories.

“Now, when I hear Philip Zelikow [the 9/11 Commission’s executive director] wrote a book with Condi Rice or was seen with Karl Rove, it drives me crazy. I feel like I’m trapped in a truth vacuum.”

One thing that has changed over Lorie’s “career as a 9/11 widow” is that she’s come to appreciate “these conspiracy nuts, or whatever you want to call them.

“At first, we widows didn’t want to be seen with conspiracy people. But they kept showing up. They cared more than those supposedly doing the investigating. If you ask me, they’re just Americans, looking for the truth, which is supposed to be our right.”

And that's all I want, really -- I want the truth. If the truth is the official story, I'll be the first to say I was wrong. But it's hard to look at all that we know about that day and the months leading up to that day and come to a conclusion that with our entire security apparatus, we had absolutely no advance warning at all that 19 guys with boxcutters managed to change this country forever.

(Thank you, Hoffmania!)