There definitely seems to be a racial and economic component to the types of people who think “the government did it” (9/11) and those who don’t. “You know there’s something funny about all this,” said the guy who came to install my cable. He was African-American, about 35. “You telling me every man on those planes—and some of the women—wouldn’t be going after those hijackers? They didn’t even have guns!”
I talked to a cop who said he’d been down at Ground Zero for six weeks after the attacks. “I don’t have any symptoms yet, thank God,” he said. “But a lot of people are getting sick, so I’ve been going for my body scans.” He was a white guy, Italian, 45.
“The thing that got me,” he said, “was, there was no bodies. Almost 3,000 dead and no bodies. Just, like, parts. Fingers, stuff like that. It was like everybody was blown to bits.”
In fact the coroner’s report (which came out only last year), said that there were only a handful of identifiable bodies at the scene. Some of those poor people had possibly jumped. “They were finding body parts on the roofs of buildings blocks away,” the cop said. “How can they account for that?”
Meanwhile an editor friend of mine—a white guy, 35—says, “People have a psychological need to believe in conspiracy theories.” That’s what USA Today said, too. Another friend, a 40-year-old white woman who works in Hollywood, said, “Some people just hate Bush so much they can’t think about this rationally.”
According to Zogby, the polling company, people who are white, Republican, and/or have higher income brackets are less likely to suspect that the U.S. government is either involved in or covering up information about 9/11. African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people (under 30) are most likely to doubt the so-called “official story.”
I thought about this yesterday while reading a piece in the New York Times about the 17th century philospher Spinoza, entitled “Reasonable Doubt.” The writer, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, said that Spinoza “understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happen to have been born…. Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason.”
She was talking in general about Spinoza’s influence on the development of democratic ideals. It made me think about the many reasonable questions around 9/11 which are being dismissed by people who consider themselves very reasonable, perhaps even more reasonable than others.
Spinoza thought that “reason must stand guard," Goldstein wrote, "against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are.”
Every mainstream media outlet that has covered questioners of the official story—with the exception Vanity Fair, and CSPAN—has treated them with a certain, more-reasonable-than-thou attitude.
But how reasonable, really, is the assertion that 19 men with box-cutters foiled the 400-billion-dollar-a-year U.S. military? That not one among the countless fighter jets guarding this country could be scrambled to follow four hijacked planes that were in the air, all together, for hours?
How reasonable is the 9/11 Commission’s claim the mammoth, extraordinarily reinforced steel frames of the Twin Towers melted and collapsed in 6.5 seconds, due to some sporadic fires, which had been burning for only a short time (and which fireman at the scene said could be contained)?
How reasonable is its claim that a 255,000-pound Boeing 757, American Airlines Flight 77, disappeared into a 20-foot hole in a building—the Pentagon—leaving no mark of its 124-foot wingspan on the exterior?
And how reasonable is the claim that another Boeing 757, United Flight 93, crashed into a field, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, when “debris fields” were found three to eight miles away from the site? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to deduce that the plane was shot down? How reasonable is this official story, after all?
It reminds me of that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the apparition of Oz says, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Some people find it less scary to look. There are those who seem to look over their shoulders when you begin to question the official story. My first reasonable question to them would be: What are you afraid of?
“It’s a shame what they did to those people,” on 9/11, said a South American immigrant, a craftsman, I talked to. “A damn shame. But the worse shame is nobody’s going to do anything about it.”
A good place to start is The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions by David Ray Griffin, available at www.amazon.com; www.911truth.org and www.911blogger.com; and the documentaries Loose Change and 9/11 Eyewitness on Google Video. The Bush administration tells us to be afraid, very afraid; but another president, Franklin Roosevelt, of course, assured us more reasonably that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Over 12,000 hits to this web site since it went up this month, July, but unfortunately I can’t claim to be the draw. I have a piece in the current, August, issue of Vanity Fair on the 9/11 documentary Loose Change, and I think at least some of the people who are interested in 9/11 conspiracy theories in general must be winding up here. 42% of Americans now believe the U.S. government “concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks,” and that “there has been a cover-up,” according to a May, 2006, Zogby poll. I’m happy to share what I know. And kudos again to Vanity Fair for having the journalistic integrity to print something fair about questions around the “official story” of 9/11.
I learned a lot from reading Nafeez Mosadddeq Ahmed’s books, The War On Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001 and The War On Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism; David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions; and, more on background, Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud and John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (all available at www.amazon.com). There are a number of good web sites, including www.911truth.org and www.911blogger.com. I recently watched 9/11 Eyewitness (on Google Video); some of the footage in it is startling. Director Richard Siegal filmed the September 11 attack and the collapse of the Towers from across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, from where you can clearly hear and see explosions going off in the buildings. The film also delivers a thorough, scientific case for a controlled demolition of the Towers and Building 7.
People have asked me, how did you get into all this? I first encountered questioners of the government’s official story (I don’t like “9/11 Truthers,” which sounds like you’ve just been to the dentist) at a conference headed by Nick Levis in San Francisco in early 2004. I was there to cover a conference of activists gearing up for the Republican National Convention, at Berkeley; but all they wanted to talk about was protest’s “image” and "marketing protest” (rather than the real issues facing our country, say) and I became quite bored. I saw a flyer for a “9/11 Truth” conference, and that sounded like a much more interesting story.
Like others who’d heard Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the case against Iraq, in February, 2003, I’d initially believed the government’s story about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. It scared the hell out of me; I was a New Yorker and a single mother at the time. I’d even supported the invasion of Iraq, something which now fills me with revulsion and an uneasiness about my own passivity in the face of government lying. In 2005, Powell called that U.N. speech “a blot” on his record, admitting that he had actually "never seen evidence to suggest" a connection between September 11 and Sadaam Hussein’s regime. Tell that to the mothers of the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Iraqi children who have been injured, maimed or killed in this war.
Back to San Francisco, 2004: I took the bus back over the bridge from Berkeley, and for two days sat and listened to presentations by researchers, professors, activists, foreign journalists, analyzing and examining the government’s official story of 9/11, which it had never even occurred to me to do. I was most impressed by the detailed account given by former LAPD detective and 9/11 truth activist Mike Ruppert (author of Crossing the Rubicon) on the failure of the U.S. air defense on September 11. The government’s claim that it “just messed up” (to paraphrase) just didn’t add up, when you actually looked at the data from NORAD and the FAA, and considered the numerous war games going on, on that day. (The U.S. military was conducting a number of war games on 9/11—some of which simulated an air attack on the United States—which took fighter jets away from their posts and confused air traffic controllers.)
Any group of “9/11 Truthers” is not without the type of conspiracy loonies that the mainstream media likes to depict as the only questioners of the official story (erroneously, considering that 42% of Americans represents some 70 million people). So here I was listening to this stuff, looking around at some of these people, and I started to feel kind of funny, like I had to get some air.
By the time I got back to my hotel room I was feeling genuinely ill. I think it was a physical manifestation of dread—a dreadache. What if our government had been complicit in the attacks? It was just too horrible to contemplate—which is why I think so many people refuse to even consider it. I called an editor friend of mine in New York to tell him what I’d been learning; but he just laughed and said, “Yeah, meet ya in Roswell.”
I lay down and turned the TV on, and there was President Bush peeking under couches and beds in the White House, “looking for weapons of mass destruction,” to polite laughter, a few muffled gasps. It was a video for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I wonder if the president would find it so easy to be amusing if Jenna or Barbara Bush were in the military now and stationed in Iraq.
I went into the bathroom and hurled.

Check out my new story in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, August, 2006 issue, with Hillary Swank lookin’ swanky on the cover. It’s called “Click Here For Conspiracy,” and I’ll give you the deck which reads: “With $6,000 and a laptop computer, three kids from upstate New York made a documentary about 9/11 that spread across the Internet and threw millions for a loop.” The documentary, called Loose Change, can be viewed on Google Video, where it has been riding the Top 100 for months. The editors of Vanity Fair continue to amaze with their airing of issues which others have found too controversial for coverage. Things I couldn't get into the story due to space constraints: questions around the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, which fell at 5:20 p.m. on September 11th, after suffering only a few containable fires on the upper floors (the building also housed the New York offices of the FBI, CIA, the SEC, and the Department of Defense); questions around the numerous Pentagon-sponsored war games going on, on that day, which took the elaborate air defense system of the United States away from the attacks, confusing air traffic controllers and Air Force pilots alike. ("Is this real world or an exercise?" one distraught flight controller infamously asked after being told that hijacked planes were hurtling toward New York.) Everybody who's interested should read The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, by David Ray Griffin, a Professor of Religion and Theology at the Claremont School of Theology; it's a well-researched book. As we approach the 5th anniversary of September 11th, I remember Scott Saber, who died in the attacks at age 36 (he was an Executive Director of Equities at UBS Warburg in WTC 1); I went to high school with Scott at Exeter and can't think of him without remembering how he made me laugh, and made academy life infinitely more fun. His mother, Elaine Saber, is a signatory to the 12 questions in the "9/11 Truth Statement" published by 9/11truth.org on October 26, 2004 (other signatories include authors, politicians, and military officials along with more than 50 victims' family members; "9/11 truth" debunkers have taken to attacking the signers of the statement themselves, but still no one has provided satisfactory answers to all of their questions):

1. Why were standard operating procedures for dealing with hijacked airliners not followed that day?
2. Why were the extensive missile batteries and air defenses reportedly deployed around the Pentagon not activated during the attack?
3. Why did the Secret Service allow Bush to complete his elementary school visit, apparently unconcerned about his safety or that of the schoolchildren?
4. Why hasn't a single person been fired, penalized, or reprimanded for the gross incompetence we witnessed that day?
5. Why haven't authorities in the U.S. and abroad published the results of multiple investigations into trading that strongly suggested foreknowledge of specific details of the 9/11 attacks, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of traceable gains?
6. Why has Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who claims to have knowledge of advance warnings, been publicly silenced with a gag order requested by Attorney General Ashcroft and granted by a Bush-appointed judge?
7. How could Flight 77, which reportedly hit the Pentagon, have flown back towards Washington D.C. for 40 minutes without being detected by the FAA's radar or the even superior radar possessed by the US military?
8. How were the FBI and CIA able to release the names and photos of the alleged hijackers within hours, as well as to visit houses, restaurants, and flight schools they were known to frequent?
9. What happened to the over 20 documented warnings given our government by 14 foreign intelligence agencies or heads of state?
10. Why did the Bush administration cover up the fact that the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency was in Washington the week of 9/11 and reportedly had $100,000 wired to Mohamed Atta, considered the ringleader of the hijackers?
11. Why did the 911 Commission fail to address most of the questions posed by the families of the victims, in addition to almost all of the questions posed here?
12. Why was Philip Zelikow chosen to be the Executive Director of the ostensibly independent 911 Commission although he had co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice?

I hope you enjoy my piece and also the other great articles in the August issue of Vanity Fair (the best: Christopher Hitchens' devastating piece on the victims of Agent Orange, "The Vietnam Syndrome," with unforgettable photographs by James Nachtwey).