9/11 should never have happened

* one of the commercial teeve stations here showed "911 in plane site' " last night at midnight. funny. i think i saw that another was going to show Loose Change!

* josh holland (via kath):

"The War on Terror is a miserable failure. The problem it was supposed to address, according to the White House, was Islamofascist terrorism. The proximate cause of that terrorism was that "they hate us," and the root cause of that hatred was supposedly "our freedoms."

OK. Here we are, five years in, and last year there were three and a half times the number of terror attacks worldwide than in 2001. "They" -- the Islamic world at large -- didn't hate us before we launched the war (at least a majority didn't), but they sure do now. And, to top it off, we've had to accept fewer freedoms because of that "war." Most of all, we're losing because, with an assist from our Commander-in-Chief, we're still terrified -- Al Qaeda's mission is accomplished.
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Just think about that on Monday. Katrina is always held up as the best evidence of this administration's great, avoidable disaster, but the truth is that 9/11 should never have happened."

* raimondo:

" Given the above, we can say, with fair certainty – and a certain rectitude in our voice – that bin Laden was allowed to get away. Not inadvertently, as an unintended consequence of a mistaken policy, but as the result of a conscious decision that made the invasion of Iraq a higher priority than the capture of the terrorist leader. It was more important to carry out the neoconservative agenda in the Middle East – to raise the flag of the president's "global democratic revolution" – by force of arms.
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Bin Laden? 9/11? Forget it, buster – that was just a pretext, a catalyzing event that allowed a well-organized network with a preexisting agenda to move quickly and with determination to implement its plan. The recently issued "phase two" of the Senate Intelligence Committee report – see here – shows how this administration bent the facts and twisted the intelligence to lie us into war. It turns out the CIA warned the administration that there were no links to al-Qaeda, which we knew already, but the really devastating part of the report is the section dealing with the role of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress . That the INC was simultaneously an Iranian intelligence asset and an American client, and that we knew this and still sponsored Chalabi & Co., tells us all we need to know about this administration and its Bizarro World mindset.
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Our State Department routinely refers to Iran as the world's number-one exporter of terrorism, and yet here we have solid evidence of an American-INC-Iranian axis of convenience. We pride ourselves on never negotiating with purported terrorists, and yet we are apparently not above allying with them. If this is supposed to be some sort of Machiavellian deviousness, then it seems the Americans outwitted themselves: they are fighting a monster of their own creation.
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The problem with the 9/11 Truthers is not that they question the conventional 9/11 narrative, but that their alternative explanations defy common sense – and divert attention away from the core mystery of 9/11, which is: how in the name of all that's holy did a conspiracy envisioned on such a large scale, and stretching over at least five years, go undetected?
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The suspicions many Americans have about the official 9/11 narrative don't seem all that unreasonable to me. What does seem unreasonable is the attempt to deride any effort to put 9/11 in its full context as "conspiracy theory" and worse. The unsolved mysteries of 9/11 continue to haunt us, and will remain with us as long as the real history of that signal event is shrouded in murk and protected by taboos."