Speak of the Devil...

So one side of me just asked "how much you wanna bet ol' Bushie will engineer a security crisis sometime between now and November?"

Apparently the thought has more than crossed Donald Rumsfeld's mind.
A year and a half ago, the man ostensibly in charge of the defense of America was caught on tape all but yearning for another attack.
Nor is he the only one to have suggested this. Former Senator Rick Santorum suggested in July 2007 that "a series of unfortunate events" will occur "within the next year" and change American perceptions about the war on terror.
Hmmm.
The site I directed you to takes this information and makes a leap to claim that 9/11 was an inside job. Nuts to that, I wrote on a different blog--oh, as it turns out, nine days after Rumsfeld publically suggested another terrorist attack might wake America up, as it were.

I still have a lot of trouble believing that the American government would do such a thing, and especially get away with it if it did. Conspiracies with more than three living principals are all but impossible to keep secret. But even without getting into the whole shooting match of controlled demolition, phantom planes, faked cellphone transmissions and all that, there's a compelling case to be made that the government knew about 9/11 before it happened. Certainly there were enough people trying to warn them...right up until the night before. Add in the war games being conducted on September 11, 2001 (one simulated a hijacking; a separate simulation involved a plane crashing into the National Reconnaissance Office) and you have a tailor-made recipe for confusion should anything "real" happen...which, of course, it rather conveniently did...involving hijackings and planes crashing into towers. What are the odds on that, I wonder?

There are literally terabytes of information out there on 9/11 conspiracies, most of which could well be bunk. But it's kind of like ghosts, or aliens...there've been so many sightings, so much conjecture. It's hard to believe America would act in this way. But then it's getting hard to believe that absolutely all the conspiracy theories are 100% total bullshit.

Search "9/11" on snopes.com and of the dozens of conspiracy theories posted there, not one addresses explicit U.S. government involvement. Frankly, I find that odd. There's no shortage of sites scattered all over the Internet on this very topic, after all, and snopes prides itself on being an exhaustive compendium of urban legends.

Be that as it may. I've been researching this off and on over the past couple of years...it's like an itch I can't quite scratch. If you're interested, and please understand I'm not endorsing any given piece of material on any of these sites, here are some places to start:

Senior Military, Intelligence, and GovernmentOfficials Question 9/11 Commission Report

Top 40 reasons to doubt the official version of what happened on 9/11. [Ken adds: any five of these raise doubts in my mind...as I said, there are just so many questions raised...it's like buckshot. ]

Wikipedia's entry on 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Many of the rebuttal sites (Google "9/11 conspiracy rebuttal") focus in on the 'controlled demolition' aspect, the allegation that explosives were planted in the World Trade Center to make damn sure the towers fell. Popular Mechanics thoroughly debunked this theory here...or so I thought.

It makes for interesting (if exhaustive) reading. As always, make up your own mind. But I will say this: should another terrorist attack occur sometime between now and November, my mind will make itself up right quick.