Maybe a Cigar Really Is More Than a Cigar...

As a rule, I don't hold much stock in the so-called "9/11 Truth Movement." This motley bunch claims that there was a deliberate government conspiracy to pull off the 9/11 attacks, either by standing back and letting it happen or by staging it themselves. Generally, the bigger an event is, the more conspiracies tend to crop up around it - for example, just look at the number of people who even today are convinced that the moon landings were faked.

I tend to take the 9/11 conspiracy theories with a very large grain of salt for several reasons, including:

• The Bush crowd has proven themselves to be so inept at everything they touch that there's no way in the world they could have put together something like this. The job would have been farmed out to Halliburton, been overcharged by 500% on a cost-plus contract, and the wings would have fallen off the planes long before reaching their targets.
• The circle of people who would have to have been involved in such a scheme is so large, encompassing the Pentagon, the FAA, NORAD, the National Transportation Safety Board, etc, etc, that someone would have talked by now. A secret this big and involving so many people simply cannot stay hidden for a long time.

Of course, the Bush Administration didn't help matters; they gave rise to much of this speculation all by themselves. After all, they fought both the Congressional and 9/11 Commission investigations tooth and nail until they were publicly shamed into complying by the victims' families, then stonewalled them any way they could. Almost thirty pages, redacted from the Congressional 9/11 report, were almost instantly described as concerning al Qaeda connections to the Saudi royal family. And they rushed to take political advantage of the attacks with truly obscene haste, turning 9/11 into just another weapon with which to bludgeon their electoral opponents.

But once in a while, something happens to make me wonder. After all, the Pentagon and the FAA both deceived and refused to hand over documents to the 9/11 Commission, covering up their actions on that day.

And now, ABC is reporting that according to a new book by Philip Shenon, 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow was in secret cahoots with the White House:

9/11 Commission co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton hired former Condoleezza Rice aide Philip Zelikow to be executive director, Zelikow failed to tell them about his role helping Rice set up President George W. Bush's National Security Council in early 2001 – and that he was "instrumental" in demoting Richard Clarke, the onetime White House counterterrorism czar who was fixated on the threat from Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, according to Holland's version of Shenon's tome.

Not only that, Zelikow routinely talked with Karl Rove - despite a strict ban on such contacts - and ordered his assistant not to log such conversations. Was he working behind the scenes with the Administration to sabotage the Commission's work? Maybe he was "just" trying to protect his boss Condoleezza Rice, who was National Security Adviser at the time, from being exposed as a staggeringly incompetent political hack. We'll see what develops.