“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”—Oscar Wilde


I’ve never been a big fan of Rosie O’Donnell. Some of my best friends are portly lesbians. I've just found her sometimes to be abrasive and mean.

But I would add to that list of adjectives, brave. Almost six years after 9/11, it’s still dangerous to even ask questions about what happened on that day. If you do, you’ll get painted as looney tunes, a conspiracy theorist, or just hopelessly naïve.

As a journalist, and as an American citizen who still has faith, in this faltering democracy, in democratic ideals, and as a person who values reason as the best path towards the resolution of humanity’s problems—reason and empathy—I have a bedrock belief in the importance of asking questions, and then asking them again, when the answers are inconclusive. I also have an impulse to come to the defense of people who have been treated unfairly. As I think ol’ Rosie has been in the last few days.

I have been, in the past, a fan of the New York Times writer Jim Dwyer; I posted his long piece on the NYPD spying on protesters at the Republican National Convention on this blog (see Rosebud #81 in the March archive); it was great reporting, about the abuse of power and the cover-up of government lies.

And so I was surprised by his piece in the Times today, on the whole Rosie-9/11-Building 7 thing, which was incomplete, seemingly biased and ultimately just sad, because it could lead people to believe that the case of Building 7 and 9/11 in general is closed.

Which it is not; as many people already know from doing their own research, in the absence of satisfying news coverage. (I won’t go into all the Building 7 details which were left out of his column, which is available at www.nytimes.com—like, for starters, the on-air confession of developer Larry Silverstein that the building was "pulled," i.e. demolished—but you can get more information at www.wtc7.net and many other sources available online or by watching "9/11 Mysteries, Part 1: Demolitions," available at amazon.com.)

I'm always stunned by the refusal of otherwise intelligent and well-meaning reporters to use reason and logic when it comes to 9/11. It's all shrouded in emotions they won't even admit are there. Journalists are supposed to be skeptics, but when it comes to 9/11, skepticism goes out the window; they stand there insisting on the veracity of the so-called official story (which has changed numerous times, and which is full of well-documented omissions) like a woman insisting her husband can't be cheating even though it's four o'clock in the morning and he isn't home yet and hasn't called (and later tells her he "didn't have a quarter").

I don't think I know what happened; I don't think any of us do yet, because there has been no serious investigative journalism attacking all the uanswered questions (for a run-down of some of them, see Rosebud #1, in the July, 2006 archive).

Why? Because if you even ask a question someone will call you a lunatic.

Thank you, Joseph Heller.

But take, as one example, the question of why we have never seen a video of a plane hitting the Pentagon. I am not saying I don't think a plane hit the Pentagon; I am asking, where is the video of it? There must be hundreds of cameras surrounding as national security sensitive a building as the Pentagon. So where is the video footage? Don't you think we have a right to see it? It is of historical importance, at the very least. (And don't tell me the few seconds of blurry red explosion the Pentagon released some time ago shows a plane hitting the building, because you know you can't see a plane in it.) Why aren't we demanding, as journalists, as a nation, to see it?

The other night I was at a party with some other reporters and we sort of got into the whole 9/11 thing, and one of them actually said, "Oh come on, we know they attacked us because they hate out way of life!" Straight out of the George W. Bush playbook. And yet if you told this person he was politically biased, he would be offended.

But it’s no big secret anymore that the Bush administration has told a few lies. And it’s no secret that the media has often gone along with them—even the Times itself, in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Did you see Bill Moyers' “Buying The War”? Check it out: www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html.

But the Times and nearly every other mainstream publication in this country would have us believe that, when it comes to 9/11, the truth and nothing but the truth has been told; we have nothing more to ask, nothing more to know. And if you think differently, well, you’re just kind of nuts.

But people know better. Americans are fortunate for so many blessings, including a great deal of horse sense. The polls showing that the percentage of people who think the government lied or covered up something about 9/11 runs high; we know something's rotten in Washington and Riyadh. And now we watch, as 9/11-in-mythic-form remains the basis for war, for laws restricting our freedom, for new government agencies with unprecedented powers (which cost an exorbitant amount of taxpayer money), for spying and torture and now for presidential campaigns, and for—well, for almost everything that is tearing our democracy apart.

And when we object to any of this, they tell us we're not patriots.

"Oh come on" is right.

Read, for starters:
Debunking 9/11 Debunking, by David Ray Griffin
The New Pearl Harbor, by David Ray Griffin
9/11 Revealed, The Unanswered Questions, by Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall

Watch:
9/11 Mysteries, Part 1, Demolitions (this is probably the best)
Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11
9/11 Press For Truth
Loose Change
9/11 Eyewitness

Search:
www.911truth.org
www.scholarsforttruth.org
www.911blogger.com