Rocky Mountain News: CAMPOS: Very serious 9/11 untruths...The respectable version - the version that was more or less accepted by all Very Serious People at the time of the invasion of Iraq - goes like this: The 9/11 attacks were merely an early strike in a war against the United States. This war is being carried out by something called Radical Islam, of which the al-Qaida terrorist network is only one small branch...
This, I repeat, was (and to a significant extent still is), the respectable interpretation of the meaning of 9/11. When anyone questioned the evidence for this view, Very Serious Politicians like Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice would say things like "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Meanwhile, Very Serious Opinion Makers like Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post argued (and continue to argue) that America must also go to war against Iran because we could wake up one day to the news that nuclear weapons have been detonated in several American cities, by order of suicidal mullahs who turned over their soon-to-be- acquired nuclear arsenal to the vast shadowy global jihadist network.
That the respectable interpretation of 9/11 remains respectable in so many important places should not obscure the fact that it is a paranoid fantasy of the first order - one as utterly unhinged from reality as the most extravagant imaginings of the 9/11 Truthers...