Read this entertaining exchange between 9/11 truth activist and scholar David Ray Griffin and Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who thinks anybody who questions the official story of 9/11 is "stupid"—apparently unlike him. It's too bad that Griffin, who's a theology professor, an old guy and a serious person, had to put up with Taibbi's frat boy sarcasm and rhetorical rudeness, but other than that, it's a pretty interesting (if long) look at two sides of this ongoing debate... Taibbi and Griffin debate...

According to various polls, the majority of Americans—including renowned writers like Gore Vidal (who appears in the excellent Italian 9/11 truth documentary, Zero)—question the government's official story. It certainly has a lot of contradictions, and there is a lot that is still unexplained (let's begin with why none of the alleged hijackers appeared on any flight manifests). The 9/11 Commission was compromised by politics—as New York Times writer Philip Shenon laid out in his book The Commission—and rendered incomplete by the inaccessibility of crucial testimony and information which the Bush administration stonewalled on, in typical fashion. At this point it's become clear to most Americans that there is significant risk in believing anything the Bush administration has told us about virtually everything.

There simply needs to be a new, independent investigation. Nobody—not Matt Taibbi, not David Ray Griffin—knows what really happened that day, because there has never been a proper forensic investigation. Indeed, the Bush administration blocked a 9/11 commission for months and months, caving in only under intense pressure from the victims' media-savvy families. Ground Zero was never treated as a crime scene. Why? We need to know the truth. We owe it to the victims. And how can we move forward in the so-called "war on terror" without knowing every agonizing detail of what happened on 9/11? What lies behind the impulse of some to insist on "case closed"? What's wrong with asking questions? Certainly that should be the impulse of any good journalist.