9/11: History or mystery?

It's sobering to realize that eight years have passed since New York and Washington, DC, were attacked on September 11, 2001. Something that happened that long ago, and is already the subject of numerous documentaries, is history.

The more time passes, the more the official version of events is accepted, and the less plausible any alternative version becomes. This fact contributed to a prominent adviser to Barack Obama being pressured into resigning last weekend.

Anthony "Van" Jones, best-selling author of The Green-Collar Economy, had been the special adviser for green jobs in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. A lot of noise had been made about how, in 2004, he'd signed a petition for 911truth.org that had raised 12 questions, including:
· Why were numerous advance warnings ignored?
· Why was the Pentagon not defended? and
· How were the FBI and CIA able to identify the attackers within hours?

In America, such questions are more politically charged than they are in Europe, which has some distance to 9/11. German documentarians tend to note that truth is stranger than fiction, and that the extreme physics of collapsing skyscrapers and exploding airplane fuselages can produce very unusual results. An Italian documentary, Zero: An Investigation into 9/11 — shown on Austrian television earlier this week — takes a very different approach, questioning the conspicuous behavior of the alleged hijackers in the days before the attacks.

Americans, however, tend to let their own emotions color their view of 9/11, presupposing either that the government would never lie or that it must have lied about everything.

United 93

Where is the middle ground? The most plausible depiction I've seen is that in the film United 93 (German: Flug 93), which recreates September 11 in an air-traffic control tower and on board one of the hijacked planes. Odd things, like the phone calls that passengers "impossibly" made from the air, and the mid-air breakup of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, are explained in a way that I, with my degree in physics, can accept.

However: what the film also depicts is that on the morning of September 11, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was conducting several exercises, one of which included a simulation of aircraft being hijacked. When the real hijackings happened just before and during the simulation, confused military air-traffic controllers had to ask, "Is this real-world or exercise?" The handful of fighter planes guarding the entire East Coast stayed on the ground until it was too late.

Having heard about this in the 9/11 Commission hearings, United 93's associate producer, Michael Bronner, asked NORAD for a copy of its recordings of air-traffic conversations. You can listen to parts of them online in his long, but eye-opening, article in Vanity Fair.

Truth be told

The amateur armchair investigators of the "9/11 truth movement" have given themselves a bad name by focusing on distractions (Why would a controlled demolition of the World Trade Center be necessary if there were hijackers? I ask) and inventing even stranger scenarios (Why imagine the passenger planes landing and drones hitting the buildings instead?). These only obscure the real crux of the matter: that, even with the facts we've got, we don't know the whole story.

We can say that about Van Jones as well. In his case, 9/11 was only a pretext. He was pressured to resign because he, an African-American activist for black causes, had engaged in a feud with a racially sensitive white radio commentator whose listeners include a lot of Palin supporters. I'll have more on that in a future column.