Not Alone On 9/11

Let me be very clear about my position on 9/11. Over two thousands individuals lost their lives on that day in the Twin Towers in NYC, plus more in the Pentagon and in the airplanes involved. This was not an accident, obviously. Someone intentionally caused the collapse of those buildings and the damage to the Pentagon. Someone murdered those innocent people going about their business.

It was a terrible tragedy and indeed, a horrendous crime. I watched it on the television like millions of other Americans and like others, felt myself to be in a state of shock. I helped lead a prayer vigil at church, preached sermons on it, and in general joined in the national grieving.

The question is, who did it? Most of us automatically assumed it was Arab terrorists whose pictures were broadcast on air rather quickly after the event itself. I know I did. Only years later did I begin to rethink that conclusion, based on accumulating evidence that just didn't seem to make sense. I have to admit that it took some time to pierce through my well-formed and hardened view, but once I opened my mind to the sickening possibility, some otherwise ill-fitting facts began to fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

I am not alone. Read this account of how one of the most prominent and respected 9/11 experts, Rev. Dr. David Ray Griffin, went down the same path I did.

It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why Bush listened to a child's story while the nation was attacked and how Osama bin Laden, America's Public Enemy No. 1, escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora.

He wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Commission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded, much less cashiered.

"To me, the report read as a cartoon." White-haired and courtly, Griffin sits on a couch in a hotel lobby in Manhattan, unspooling words in that reasonable Presbyterian minister's voice. "It's a much greater stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the alternatives."

A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found that 36 percent suspect the U.S. government promoted the attacks or intentionally sat on its hands....A Zogby International poll of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3 percent believed the government "consciously failed to act."

No, I am not alone.

There are still things that don't make sense to me in this alternative explanation. Did President Bush know about it, or was he simply a pawn in Cheney's plan? How could someone implement such a demented plan without being discovered, even to this day? How could the perpetrators have been so confident they wouldn't be caught? How many people would have had to be involved in the planning and execution of such a mission?

Most people can't bring themselves to believe that their government would ever do such an evil thing. I guess I have come to believe that a government/military/intelligence/corporate establishment that has not hesitated to kill millions of people in wars throughout the 20th century, in Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, among other places, at the cost of many hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, might be willing to sacrifice a few thousand people at home in order to, in its mind, save many times that many in the future. That makes sense to me.