I worked in the World Trade Center up until September 11, and I had just emerged from the subway a couple blocks away that morning when I heard a jet engine overhead, heard the crash of it into the South Tower (the building I worked in), and looked up to see the horrifying explosion. I didn't see the plane, but co-workers of mine were right under the building at the time and did see it, American Airlines on the side and all. I don't believe any of the mumbo jumbo about remote control planes, missiles, or planned detonation.

However, I do believe it's likely that people at the highest reaches of the Bush administration knew that an attack was imminent--and maybe knew the location and exact day and time it was planned--and did nothing to prevent it, thinking it would give them the perfect pretext to invade Iraq, something Cheney, Rumsfeld and their friends had been clamoring for for years. And as it's been documented, began even more actively clamoring for on Sept. 12.

Here is what I think: any Bushco officials who did know it was going to happen would maybe have been relying misguidedly on the original WTC specs (can withstand the impact of a 727) in thinking that planes hitting the towers wouldn't result in their total collapse. They maybe thought, 'This will make a great spectacle, kill a few people but not thousands, scare the markets but not kill the economy, and most importantly, give us the Pearl Harboresque moment we need to make our move in the Middle East.'

As for the argument that it was an inside job and actually planned by people in the government, for me the prime piece of evidence suggesting that might be true is the time of the attacks: before 9 a.m., when a lot of people wouldn't be at work yet. If this were a purely terrorist-planned operation, wouldn't they have gone for 12 noon or 2 pm or something, to maximize the casualties?

This is circumstantial evidence at best, but as Smith and others in the comment trail have said, given the outright lying, hiding of facts, manipulation of data and recklessness with American lives that Bush and his cohorts have displayed, it should not be surprising at all to anyone with a brain that they might be capable of something this nefarious. The Republican party made incredible gains in power after 9/11, and the president's friends and campaign contributors have profited smartly from the war in Iraq and the destructive environmental and economic policies that the American people have let Bush and the Republicans get away with.

As for those who've commented that it would take a lot of people to keep this secret, and given everything that's happened, one of them would surely have come forward, I say this: first of all, if you're the kind of person who can keep a secret like that in the first place, you are an amoral bastard and no subsequent travesty or injustice of the Bush administration is going to shame you into confessing what you knew. Second, if anyone did come forward and say, "I knew 9/11 was going to happen, and did nothing," they would probably be hanged in a public square by an angry mob. A rather strong incentive to not come forward.

When I saw the 7-minute Bush-in-the-classroom scene in Farenheit 911, he didn't look shocked or surprised when Andy Card gave him the news about the first tower, and then the news about the second tower. He just looked nervous. "What did I get myself into, and what exactly is going to happen now," is what I saw on his face. Certainly not, "Whoa, we're under attack, and I'm the president so I better do something about it." Having him out of Washington on that day was very convenient, maybe suspiciously so.

The problem here is that the cause of "what really happened" has been taken up by a plethora of conspiracy theorists--gullible people with overactive imaginations who like to believe outlandish things that can't be confirmed, and who will hitch their wagon to any stupid idea as long as it makes them feel "in the know" relative to the general population. There are legitimate questions to be asked, which unfortunately will probably never be answered. But given the cavalier nature with which Bush and Cheney have sent American soldiers to die, I don't think anyone should say it's unthinkable that they might have considered the lives of American civilians (and military people in the Pentagon) just as expendable on 9/11, as long as their ends were met.

As for Paul Wellstone: come on, that is not a crazy conspiracy theory. Consider that Mel Carnahan, a Democratic senate candidate leading a prominent conservative senator in the polls, was killed in a similar crash just two years earlier. And consider that Wellstone was the most outspoken senator in his opposition to the Iraq war. And consider that the balance of power in the senate at that time was much more precarious than it is now. One seat to the Republicans made all the difference. I have no doubt that agents of the Republican party were capable of killing Wellstone, and very little doubt that that is in fact what happened. Anyone who thinks it's beyond possible is a naive little Pollyanna.

There is, of course, another reason why so many people are willing to put stock in these conspiracy theories -- there is the uncomfortable resemblance to Pearl Harbor. And these days, thanks to the declassification of old files, the Freedom of Information Act and the published diaries of Secretary Stimson, reasonable historians will argue that the old paranoid conspiracy theories about our FDR allowing Pearl Harbor are, well, not so much conspiracy theories as confirmed history.

I myself am something of a conspiracy hobbyist. I don't believe most of the conspiracy theories I read, but I find them immensely entertaining nonetheless.

That said, there is one weird little media artifact, largely unremarked upon and unknown by most people, which made me really consider the idea that the plane was shot down.

"I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten – indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be."

-- Donald Rumsfeld, Friday Dec. 24th, 2004

Now, obviously this is just a slip of the tongue on Rumsfeld's part. He clearly didn't *mean* to say the terrorists "shot down the plane."

But it's hard not to raise an eyebrow at this particular slip of the tongue.