Six years later, and it’s still hard to believe it was real. Giant airplanes slamming into the sides of high-rise office buildings at 500 mph, leaving vaguely wing-shaped gashes behind. Twisted steel and aluminum wrenched open like busted metal sutures. Jet fuel exploding, fire orange and acrid black against a blue Manhattan sky. Invoices, chair legs, entire conference rooms, and –oh, my God.—people spewing from the wreckage and falling, falling, falling.
It’s the very definition of surreal, that day. It’s the day a scene reserved for far-fetched blockbusters became reality, when John McClane’s celluloid heroism fell to flesh-and-blood firemen and first responders.
But it was real. On that day, 19 young men—inhabitants of our country, recipients of our hospitality, beneficiaries of our prosperity, wearing modern clothes to cloak a primitive hatred—turned planes into missiles, passengers into war casualties, and a beautiful Tuesday morning into a day that changed the world forever. They were driven by a radical ideology, a charismatic leader, the funding of villains, and the protection of rogues. They killed 3,000 people that day.
But some people don’t believe that. A disturbing number of people, in fact, deride that version as the “official story,” ostensibly concocted by the American government and corroborated by a willing media to assuage a grieving public. There are different versions of the “real story”—the “Truth,” according to conspiracy theorists—but the crux of all of them is that the Bush administration and the American government planned 9/11, executed it, and covered it up with the story of radical Islamists in order to justify more military involvement in the Middle East.
The theorizing started long before the dust had settled on a national graveyard at Ground Zero. Six years later, the 9/11 “Truthers”—as they’re called—will be out in force at that very graveyard, on hallowed ground, peddling their theories, disseminating the “Truth.” The “Truth” turns out, upon examination, to be a half-cocked amalgamation of half-baked assertions and explanations that ignores any contradictory fact that dares get in its way, but that doesn’t stop people from believing it.
The most recent poll on the matter—a Zogby poll taken this month—showed that fully 42 percent of Democrats polled believe that Bush either caused 9/11 or let it happen. That the man they denigrate for his doltishness as he read “My Pet Goat” to a group of grade-schoolers was simultaneously the evil genius mastermind of the day’s happenings. This 42 percent is not entirely composed of all-out “Truthers,” but the volume, f