Curiouser and curiouser

Most people's understanding of 9/11 snapped into place at some key moment, in most cases on that heart-wrenching morning as we watched the unspeakable tragedy unfold. We accepted the dominant story because the alternatives were too horrible to consider and we just haven't wanted to revisit it.

Yet why haven't the mainstream media raised the possibility of official complicity, or seriously questioned flaws in the official story?

"I think it's a good question, but I don't think we have a good answer," said Aly Colón of the Poynter Institute, a media foundation.

Modern standards of objective journalism make it difficult to raise speculative questions that reflect badly on official sources, but Colón said the galvanization of patriotism that followed the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made it even tougher for journalists to question the accepted reality of 9/11.

"It is more challenging now to raise these kinds of questions than it had been before," he told me.

But some items did break through the media filter, causing people to reexamine their beliefs about 9/11. One was the commission's only true investigative success: its overcoming of White House opposition to publicly releasing the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It mentions "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Bush was handed the memo at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, at the start of a monthlong vacation.

The other was the much-anticipated release of Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, which carefully avoided suggesting official complicity in the attacks, taking issue only with how the White House used the attacks to further its imperial agenda and with Bush family ties to Saudi interests that might have facilitated the attacks.

But the film did expose people to the infamous video of Bush continuing to read to schoolchildren even after being told by an aide that the second tower had been hit and that "America is under attack." We all got to watch our commander in chief do nothing for an unbearably long time as people were jumping from the Twin Towers, a hijacked plane was barreling toward the Pentagon, and Cheney was being whisked to a bunker by the Secret Service to take control of the situation.

Later, as the war waged in Iraq, it became increasingly clear the White House had lied about that country's weapons of mass distraction. And we learned from former White House terrorism expert Richard Clarke that the Iraq plans had been laid on 9/11 even though the officials acknowledged Hussein wasn't responsible.

People began to take note. A Zogby poll taken just before last year's Republican National Convention showed that 41 percent of New York State residents, and 49 percent of New York City residents, agreed with the statement that some U.S. officials "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around 9/11/01 and that they consciously failed to act."

A fragmenting movement

But as the public reached its pinnacle of being open to considering alternative views of 9/11, the truth movement fractured into disparate subgroups, each pushing its own pet theories, torn by internal divisions over strategy, and unable to mount a cohesive strategy that would break through the din of election-year politics.

Ruppert implored the attendees at last year's conference to keep it simple and break down their theories into 20-minute presentations based on direct evidence that U.S. officials had the motives, means, and opportunity, rather than on complex analyses of the physical evidence.

"We have to find the same sheet of music so we can sing the same notes," Ruppert told the crowd.

Yet against the backdrop of a bloody war in Iraq, a high-stakes presidential race, and new 9/11 revelations unearthed by the commission and independent researchers, his warning went unheeded. There was just too much juicy stuff coming from all directions.

And frankly, the Rupperts of the world weren't doing themselves any favors: their refusal to consider anything less than a grand conspiracy made it hard for the press to take them seriously. In the wake of the presidential election, Ruppert tells us he left the movement in frustration because "there's no other public forum. There's no other place to go."

But other 9/11 activists soldier on undeterred, just as their compatriots in the effort to uncover who really killed JFK still meet to pore over the yellowing evidence of that crime. Time may prove them correct – just as polls now show most Americans don't believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone – but justice is probably a long way off.

Bay Area residents Don Paul and Jim Hoffman recently met me at Café Abir in San Francisco to run through their evidence.

"Everywhere you probe, you find a hole, and the more you probe the hole, the more other problems come up," Paul told me, later adding, "Internal explosives must have brought down the Twin Towers."

Paul and Hoffman deeply believe this to be true, something they say is proved by the way the buildings fell – straight down, unslowed by their load-bearing steel frames – and by the way fine powder shot out the sides of the towers as they fell.

Having recently seen a PBS special and read the Popular Mechanics investigation that tried to debunk the explosives explanation and supported the government's "pancake theory" – the notion that the upper parts of the buildings crushed the lower floors into one another – I argued with them for a while: Why wouldn't the pressure of this collapse cause the dust? Why haven't any reputable structural engineers supported your theory? How could they have planted so many explosives without being noticed?

Pretty soon our heated conversation was drawing attention from people around us, and random people started jumping in. And to my surprise, all of them expressed doubts over the official 9/11 story.

"It did not go down the way they said," bystander Eric Basher said. "I don't know if Bush did it, but something isn't right here."

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