"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." —Thomas Jefferson, 1786.

A word, below, from Karen Kwiatkowski, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force (retired 2003, after a 20-year career). Kwiatkowski was in the Pentagon on 9/11 and doubts the building was hit by a plane; she viewed the blast site minutes after the impact. "The scene was not what I would have expected from a strike by a large airliner," she writes. "It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon."

I urge everyone to read her essay, “Assessing the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory” in the newly released “9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out” (Olive Branch Press; ed. David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott)—particularly those journalists I know, and also those who think of themselves as "open-minded," "informed," “liberal” or “left-wing," who, for reasons I can't understand, fully, refuse to contemplate the many, still unanswered questions about what happened on September 11.

Kwiatkowski: “Honesty is a strange and debatable thing. What is truth, and what is reality? How can we know? In the case of 9/11, this most human of challenges is made even more complicated. Average people, interested citizens, or even trained researchers of the journalistic or scientific variety are not encouraged to inquire about what happened on that day, what had happened in the months and years preceding it, or about what came afterward. This work was to be done, of course, by the president’s appointed commission. After I read the report, it semeed to me to be a complete waste of time. None of my own personal questions about that day had been answered. Most of them were not even addressed. Why would the difficult questions, and also some very easy ones, be avoided by the 9/11 Commission?…

“How might we think of 9/11—the event itself and its significance in American political history? I have been told by reporters that they will not report their own insights or contrary evaluations of the official 9/11 story, because to question the government story about 9/11 is to question the very foundations of our entire modern belief system regarding our government, our country, and our way of life. To be charged with questioning these foundations is far more serious than being labeled a disgruntled conspiracy nut or an anti-government traitor, or even being sidelined or marginalized with an academic, government-service, or literary career. To question the official story is simply and fundamentally revolutionary. In this way, of course, questioning the official story is also simply and fundamentally American.”