Too bad Salon treats those with doubts about the official 9/11 story to be crackpots, despite not having one run thoughtful article examining the evidence that gives us doubts. I'm not sure what happened on that day, but I've seen enough interesting holes in the official story to welcome the possibility that Bush's story is fishy.

I wish Salon and other progressive news sources had the guts to look at the evidence, however the chips fall. The counter evidence to the official story is apparently convincing enough that a former Bush White House official believes the Trade Center collapses were a result of a professional demolition job.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reynolds/reynolds12.html

I was present for this attack, but I did not see the plane or the explosion. I was seated at a desk in the Pentagon City tower where I heard and felt the blast. I am surprised by this video. What I remember of that day is arriving to work a few minutes before the attack and nervously talking with a friend in front of a window overlooking the Pentagon about the likelihood of an attack. After seeing the carnage unfold in New York, my immediate feeling was that we were being set-up. I grew up in a military town, so I know what a military presence in the air looks and sounds like. The sky over Washington D.C. was empty that day. A half hour after the attacks in New York and there was no protection in the sky.

Minutes later, the attack occurred. Military planes arrived as my building was evacuated and I went home. In the days following the attack, I managed to catch some never-repeated news coverage that included a dialog with someone close to Dick Cheney who was telling the story of the Vice President's minute-to-minute updates on the location of the missing plane that day in terms like "Mr. Vice President, the plane is 500 miles from Washington D.C." They all knew goddam well what was about to happen.

When I returned to work a few days later, there were "trauma counsellors" on hand and I sat down with one of them. What I received in that profound state of grief was an obvious de-briefing by someone from the government who led me on a detailed guided-imagery of the attack, repeating details over and over again and manipulating ME into repeating them along with him. I have never spoken with anyone else about the attack in any detail since that day. I don't even know what to think after watching the video. That doesn't look like a jumbo jet to me.

There's as much evidence to support the fact that a plane crashed into the Pentagon and two planes took down the WTC, as their is to support the fact that NASA actually went to the moon.

Both conspiracy theories require the dutiful silence of scores, if not hundreds of participants, which is simply implausible.

And, for what it's worth, there are former and current Bush Administration officials who are convinced that Noah got two of every animal on earth into that big boat. The fact that one or more of them are convinced that 9/11 was a con-job, infinitely more complex than the way it was reported, should compel no one.

I'm surprised Salon posted headlines proclaiming that this video depicts Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon. This video is too grainy to depict anything. Can you really identify a plane in this video? I can't.

Regardless, the whole exercise is a farce. I don't know if a plane hit the Pentagon, and I don't care. Surely the most surveilled building on earth has a better video of the biggest security breakdown in its history? You mean to tell me that the only camera working on 9/11 was the one in the parking lot used to read license plates?

At best, this video proves nothing. At worst, it is being used by the Pentagon to draw attention away from the real anomalies on 9/11:

If a plane hit the Pentagon, how did it avoid being shot down while soaring through the most defended airspace on the planet?

If steel-reinforced highrises have never collapsed due to fire, how did three of them collapse at near-freefall speed into their footprints on 9/11 (WTC 1,2,7)?

Why were multiple warnings of terrorist strikes against the WTC, from within the FBI and from foreign governments, go ignored by US intelligence agencies? Not only were these warnings ignored, they were deliberately suppressed.

On and on the list goes.

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041221155307646

Let's not parse this argument as one between people who are right and people who are crazy. Let's look at this as an opportunity to recognize that 9|11 was a watershed day in American history, particularly American political history. American domestic and foreign policy have largely been informed by that day and the resulting War on Terror. In the name of those that died that day we invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq. In the name of 9|11 we signed the PATRIOT Act and had surveillance take place on our own civilians and our journalists by the NSA. In the name of 9|11 nearly 2,500 US soldiers, and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Additionally more than 15,000 US soldiers have been injured. We rack up mounting debt and exist on an economic policy that consists of eliminating taxes for the rich. All of this has been perpetrated in the wake of 9|11 and has largely become politically possible because of 9|11.

Due to this overwhelming shift in how American perceives itself in the world it makes rational sense to ask questions about that day. Saying "that doesn't look like a 757 to me" is not conspiratorial - it's a legitimate observation. The problem many people have, myself included, is that our doubts have not been satisfied. Furthermore, all indications from our government lead to the conclusion that the only reliable data to be had is from leakers. Rumsfeld knows where the WMDs are. Iraq was seeking yellowcake in Niger. Nobody could have predicted that people would have flown planes into buildings. This is the information we get from our leaders.

I would say that the only sane reaction to 9|11 is to carefully question what happened that day. It is regularly the case that we go to war over sketchy pretenses. We now know through documents declassified in 1995 that we knew ahead of time that the Japanese were coming to attack Pearl Harbor. Before that moment the American people didn't want to get involved in WWII. Pearl Harbor changed all of that. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743201299/sr=8-1/qid=1147825344/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6619397-8053638?%5Fencoding=UTF8) We know about the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War. We know that the official story is often not the true story.

So please, ask questions. Be curious. Ask to know where the film the FBI confiscated from the Citgo station outside the Pentagon is. It was within the line of sight of the attack trajectory and ran at a higher frame rate than the camera that took the footage released today.

Let's find out what really happened - be it the official version, the crackpot version, or something different entirely. Let's do so without regard for personal politics. But let us have our full account. The 9|11 Commission is widely known to have been stonewalled and limited in what they could uncover. This does not qualify as the whole truth.

When you can't trust your government and that government is open about its desire to be secretive - to the point that it wiretaps journalists to learn who leakers are - there is no reason to believe what they say is true. This is why transparency in government is good. The fact that today's tape release is done under the guise of being transparent, let's not automatically assume that this is so. There are many people who still have legitimate questions. To shoot them down or to lump them as conspiracy theorists is dismissive and antithetical to open debate and fact finding.