9/11: Here it comes again

The last time I checked my stack of screeners, I did not see a single television special being produced to observe the sixth anniversary of the attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

That has not stopped another group of highly creative people from generating their own commemoration of the events of 9/11. I refer, of course, to conspiracy theorists.

This morning I found an email in my inbox from a googler who identified themselves as a graduate student in classics at Rutgers University, arguing that 9/11 "was an inside job." I think it was the classics part that got me — that was my major in college, too, and I've always thought it helped develop my critical-thinking skills, which seem to be missing, or underutilized, among the 9/11 conspiracy crowd.

**UPDATE 1-23-09:** The person whose letter is quoted below informed me today by email that s/he no longer "belongs to the 9/11 truth movement" and requests that our exchange be deleted. I'm deleting the person's identity ... but I worked too hard on this to simply erase it from my site.

Hello,

I am a graduate student at Rutgers University in the Classics. I am writing to urge you to give a fair and balanced cove

rage of the tragic events of 9/11.

I urge you to refrain from the one-sided and misleading slur "conspiracy theory", as applied to views that take exception to the Bush administration"s claims about what happened on 9/11. If, as the Webster-Merriam dictionary says, a conspiracy is "a combination of persons banded secretly together and resolved to accomplish an evil or unlawful end", then the claim according to which Osama bin Laden and 19 hijackers attacked us on 9/11 is also a conspiracy theory. I repeat: the official story is a conspiracy theory. You should either refrain altogether from the phrase, or use it for both parties.

I urge you not to follow in the foot steps of the completely biased and propagandistic "documentary" that was recently aired on the History Channel. In it, Popular Mechanics" David Coburn and James Meigs were hailed as "experts", systematically given the final word and allowed to get away with such egregious lies as the claim that it was "possible" to make cell phone calls below 40000 feet. By possible, they failed to specify that for three successful phone calls to be made at half that elevation, i.e. 20000 feet, there is less than one chance in a million (see p 295 of the following book).

Having dispassionately read what I"ve read, i.e. both sides of the story"the 9/11 Commission Report, The NIST report, Debunking 9/11 as well as reports by 9/11 Truth researchers"the shocking conclusion I've reached is that the theory with the most amount of verifiable evidence is that of an inside job.

I urge you to read the most comprehensive and up-to-date work on the subject:

Debunking 9/11 Debunking
By David Ray Griffin

Every American citizen and every intelligent person should read it.

Thank you for your time.

And I replied:

Hi. With all of your important graduate work going on, I can't help but wonder why you are so interested in 9/11 that you take time to email journalists about it.

As a journalist interested in history (also a classics major, Northwestern 1987), I simply have to go with the big story. Not the official story, which pretty much begins and ends on 9/11, but the big story that begins with Qutb and persecution of radical Muslims in the 1950s. That's the story that leads to OBL and Zawahiri, two psychopaths whose obsession, commitment and instincts led to this dramatic and horrible act. Lawrence Wright spent five years of his life documenting those guys and I find The Looming Tower a convincing account of al Qaeda and how it was able to go about its work.

So unless you convince me that the men of al Qaeda were completely unlikely perpetrators of the acts of 9/11 — which means discrediting 50 years of data establishing their motives and means — your fixation on whether people can make cell phone calls in the air or not isn't just laughable, it's pointless.