Was 9/11 a government scam?

Did our government lie to us about 9/11? The WaPo throws some fuel on the fire with an article today on the problems the 9/11 commission had with the official narrative. It's rather damning stuff.

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

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, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel punted, and referred the matter to Inspector Generals at the Defense and Transportation departments, rather than taking it to the Justice Dept. But after fighting to obtain the NORAD tapes, it became clear the Pentagon lied to them. Now the question is reduced to whether they deliberately lied for two solid years or whether this was just the result of incomptency.

John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.

"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me."

It didn't make sense to hold the government responsible for misleading us? You'll notice he was the Republican on the panel and of course back then, Bush was enjoying high approval ratings so who was going to push it?

I've had my doubts about the official version of events on 9/11 practically from the beginning and since then the conspiracy theories have bloomed like dandelions in the spring. I've read most of the evidence they proffered and the questions they raise have not been answered. Why did Building 7 go down when two closer buildings didn't. Why did the collapse of the buildings so perfectly mirror controlled demolitions? Why didn't they recover the black boxes from the planes yet miraculously found the passport of one of the hijackers intact on the ground? Why wasn't there the customary plane debris at the crash sites? Why was the hole in the Pentagon inconsistent with being struck by an airplane? Where are the bodies from the plane that went down in the open field? Why weren't the planes intercepted by our Air Force?

My guess is the questions will never be answered but I have little doubt that this could have been the result of a black-ops mission designed to give the PNAC crowd their "Pearl Harbor moment," especially since the same thugs that brought us Iran-Contra were in charge of the chicken coop again. But we'll never know for sure.

Meanwhile, mikevotes has an interesting discussion on the subject going in the comments at his post and some additional links. Check it out and decide for yourself. My take is we've been had.