A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center. "In order to bring down this kind of mass in such a short period of time, the material must have been artificially, exploded outwards," says Richard Gage, a San Francisco architect and founder of the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Mr. Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, managed to persuade more than 1,000 of his peers to sign a new petition requesting a formal inquiry. "The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction. We are therefore calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials," Mr. Gage adds. –Washington Times

Dominant Social Theme: Something we, the mainstream media, need to mention at least in passing ...

Free-Market Analysis: We have no idea what happened on 9/11. But since 9/11 Commission members have reportedly disavowed the full government's story – and one has written a book claiming the commission was serially lied to by the Bush administration, the FBI, CIA, etc. – we have to conclude that there are elements of the official story that are not entirely accurate. We would think that the US government would want to get to the bottom of such a serious matter, in some way or other.

Now the Washington Times, a mainstream, beltway newspaper, is seemingly opening up the issue again. There was no need to cover yet another "trufers" story and yet the Times has done so – to the astonishment of the alternative blogosphere. We think, not to make a pun, that this is in fact a sign of the times. The pressure to understand what really happened on 9/11 simply won't go away. It is all over the 'Net and is in fact gaining momentum in our opinion.

After the Kennedy assassination there were many questions – and one grainy "Zapruder" film played over and over for decades. But the Warren Commission never disavowed its conclusion, that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman and a bullet that travelled in all directions at once. The 9/11 Commission (some of its members anyway) has.

Because of the Internet, there are literally millions of pictures and comments about the tragic attack. This is a matter of degrees, to be sure, but degrees matter. The impact of so much commentary – and conflicting information – seen by so many, gradually builds up. It becomes a force that cannot be traduced. The circumstances surrounding 9/11 are then qualitatively different than those around Kennedy's death.

We have, for instance, thought long and hard why law professor and Rutger's Dean John Farmer would want to come out with a book that basically accused the entire Washington establishment of lying about 9/11. It only occurred to us lately that Dean Farmer was WORRIED. The 9/11 Commission's conclusions are flawed. Farmer, perhaps sanguine at one point about his role, realized one day that he was right in the middle of what would appear to be a cover-up. So he set out to rectify his situation. Now he cannot be accused. He points his seasoned finger elsewhere.

There is a rude term that describes what Farmer has done. The point is, when your top people begin pointing fingers, the cover-up, whatever it is, is unraveling. Again, we don't know what people in Washington were – or are – up to. Farmer seems to think it was incompetence of a sort, and subsequent denial. But perhaps it goes deeper than that.

But, no, we don't know. And before we receive any feedbacks blasting us for accusing the government of organizing or orchestrating 9/11, we will state for the record that that is not our intention, nor our purpose. We have not a single clue about what actually occurred on 9/11! Nor is it our responsibility – even within the ambit of the alternative press – to "investigate." You try to investigate the CIA, Pentagon and FBI, dear reader. There are, to be sure, sensitivities there that are fairly beyond imagining. Here's an article excerpt about Farmer's book that appeared in the Salem-News:

The 9/11 Commission Rejects own Report as Based on Government Lies ... In John Farmer's book: "The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11″, the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version... is almost entirely untrue ... The 9/11 Commission now tells us that the official version of 9/11 was based on false testimony and documents and is almost entirely untrue. The details of this massive cover-up are carefully outlined in a book by John Farmer, who was the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission. Farmer, Dean of Rutger Universities' School of Law and former Attorney General of New Jersey, was responsible for drafting the original flawed 9/11 report. ... Farmer states..."at some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened... I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described. ... The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin." ... In 2006, The Washington Post reported..."Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission..."

9/11 has been the proximate cause for two major US wars. The Middle East is in flames and the conflagration may get worse before it gets better, with major implications for the entire world. Given what has occurred – and the nature of the stakes – doesn't it make sense to get a fuller and more accurate accounting of what REALLY took place on 9/11? Doesn't the US government owe it to the voters? Wouldn't any representative government want to give its citizens an honest accounting? There are so many questions beyond the fate of the buildings themselves. Perhaps these questions are based on flawed information! Perhaps they are the outcome of paranoid thinking. The way to put them to bed is with a thorough, impartial and transparent investigation.

The Internet is a process. Those within the US government that do not want to provide a more honest accounting of what took place should realize that there is no damage control (short perhaps of a nuclear war) that will put an end to the general public's need to know. It was too big a deal. And too much has happened since then – including the abrogation of civil rights in America, warrantless wiretapping, assertions of torture, rendition, etc. America has changed. The world has changed. But the official 9/11 story remains the same despite its obvious flaws.

The Internet is a great eroder of power elite memes – like the Gutenberg press before it. People may forget, or in some cases are unaware, that Roman Catholic Church leaders' of the time were confident that the Church's faux-liturgy regarding the purchase of various absolutions ("buying" one's way into heaven as Led Zeppelin has famously put it) would not be exposed. But once people began to read the actual Bible, the truth came out. One couldn't guarantee one's arrival in heaven by buying old bones of Saints. There was nothing in the Bible about it, despite what the Church might maintain or imply. Communication advances are merciless that way. Cover-ups developed prior to the technology tend to fall after the fact.

We've long held that dominant social themes would disintegrate (to a degree) as the Internet began to bite. We have been surprised, recently, how fast this seems to be happening. The themes having to do with 9/11 and the war on terror would seem to be the last to fall because they are among the most important to the elite and help protect the military industrial complex – in America especially. But what we projected might happen in five, ten, even twenty years time seems to be happening a lot more quickly now, perhaps because the economic crisis has so focused people's minds and made them more apt to question official judgments.

Conclusion: Yesterday, the Washington Times covered an important 9/11 story once again. It was supposed to be dead by now. As dead as Jack Kennedy. Yet articles and research regarding 9/11 are posted to the Internet every day. They are like drops of water that erode the hard shell of the established government narrative.

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