Which 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Do You Believe?

An lengthy (and excellent) report from the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

[T]the most disturbing thing about the 9/11 truth movement, something you learn when you really dissect their most compelling evidence, is that the activists are raising critically important questions about the Bush administration's lies, cover-ups, and geopolitical strategy – questions that are being almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media. ... To not try to put the pieces together is to be incurious about the most profound event of this new American century.

The Bush administration offered its conspiracy theory while the buildings were still ablaze, has done little since then to deviate from it – and has done almost nothing to prove its veracity beyond a shadow of a doubt. ...

To believe [the Bush] theory, you must accept that, despite receiving an unprecedented flurry of intelligence warnings about imminent terrorist attacks on the United States, the military was caught so off guard that it couldn't even pull the commander in chief out of his elementary-school photo op or get fighter jets in place during the 34 minutes between when the second tower and the Pentagon were hit – even though everyone knew that the United States was under attack and that Flight 77 was known to have been hijacked and was being tracked on radar the entire time it barreled toward the nation's military headquarters. (Each of these facts is from the official 9/11 Commission Report.) ...

You have to believe, in other words, that one of the most secretive and manipulative administrations in U.S. history is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth about an event it has aggressively exploited to implement long-standing and far-reaching political plans ...

Republican Thomas Kean was picked to head the commission, and for executive director, he chose one of Bush's own staffers, Phillip Zelikow, a neoconservative hawk who had cowritten a book with then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice – a key figure in the intelligence breakdown – who has since been promoted to secretary of state. Oh yeah, and she just recently hired Zelikow as a member of her staff.

Zelikow and Kean were also nice enough to let Bush and Cheney – both of whom 9/11 activists accuse of culpability in the attacks – testify together, in private, and without being placed under oath. ...

The 19 hijackers were identified by name on the morning of 9/11, names that were taken from the passenger logs and haven't changed since. But in the days after 9/11, several of those identified hijackers contacted a variety of reputable news outlets – including the Guardian of London, the London Telegraph, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, Arab News, and Asharq al-Awsat – to say they were alive and innocent. ...

[W]hat's amazing is that the 9/11 Commission never even addressed the issue and stated the identities and backgrounds of the hijackers ... as if they were incontrovertible facts.

I hope to address some of these points, including the IDs of the hijackers, in the next few weeks. In the meantime, go buy this book.