I said I'd never do it -- say what I think about that terrible morning of September 11, 2001. I've seen what happens to those who question the elaborate, tangled explanations the Bush administration offers about what happened, how it happened, who did it, and why they did it. It doesn't matter if those who dare speak truth to the lies are professors, investigative reporters, eyewitnesses, scientists -- "conspiracy theorist" is immediately tattooed on their foreheads. They are jeered at, ridiculed, spat upon and swift-boated right out of the room. They are banished to the outskirts of civilized society.

But my friend Bernie says we're way beyond asking questions about 9-11 and, since nobody listens to me anyway, I might as well get it off my chest. "Besides," Bernie said, "George Bush never shuts up about 9-11. He's obsessed with it. No matter what anybody asks him, he spouts September the 11th. Bush never says September 11; he never says 9-11," Bernie groaned, "he just keeps chanting over and over -- September the 11th, September the 11th, September the 11th, Sep--"

"I get the picture!" I interrupted, shuddering at the loathsome image of Bush cavorting around September "the" 11th, pointing to it in every public appearance with masturbatory delight, reveling in the knowledge that "history will show" they got away with it. "You know, Bernie," I sighed, "it's like he's bragging about a grand accomplishment. You'd almost think it was an inside job."

"Of course it was an inside job," Bernie snorted. "Anyone who can connect even two dots without ramming one up his nose and the other into his forehead knows that. And anyone who's ever flown a Cessna 172 is roaring with laughter at the thought of those Muslim guys Bush fingered emerging from a dusty Florida airport, climbing into the cockpit of a Boeing 757, looking at the flashing lights, bells and whistles on its control panel, and know which button to push to even talk to the passengers, let alone get that 100-ton beast in the air. HAW HAW...

"We know they did it," Bernie said, suddenly sober. "Every single one of us. We know it now -- and we knew it then." He rose and started toward the door -- "All you gotta remember is...if something is something, it can't be anything else but that something. No matter how they dress it up, no matter how much lipstick they smear on it, it's still that something. It ain't never something else. Everything that's happened in the last five years, and everything that'll happen in the next five," Bernie said, "is a result of that one day Bush keeps throwing in our faces -- September the 11th."

I sat there, trying to wrap my mind around Bernie's string of "somethings," when it suddenly occurred to me. Of course! Bernie instinctively hit upon the universal law called dharma, a simple principle that brings order to chaos -- things are what they are, and a thing cannot be other than what it is. Universal laws cannot be broken, even by the genocidal warmongers running rampant within this administration, no matter how hard they try. Knowing Bernie, however, I suspect he was channeling Sherlock Holmes who skillfully used the critical dharma tool Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him to solve crime -- "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

For four and a half years, questions about 9-11 have swirled through the Internet with tornadic force, yet caused scarcely a breeze within the mainstream media. The sheer number of heroic questioners helped to keep the door of truth open just a crack in spite of a relentless effort of the Bush men, the media and the Congress to force it shut. It hasn't been easy. Americans' psyches were shattered on 9-11 when, with no warning, they suddenly came face-to-face with raw, fiendish evil. They were incapable of handling the truth.

Americans are waking up. They have been told one -- or one hundred -- too many lies. They instinctively know there are only three areas of questions about 9-11 whose answers, however improbable, reveal the truth.

One -- Who, or what, flew the four hijacked planes on 9-11? Certainly not the inexperienced, box-cutter-armed bunch of rag-tag Saudis -- most of whom are still alive -- whose photographs the FBI plastered on our TV screens and in our minds immediately after the attack. There were no Arabs in the air on the morning of 9-11, performing astonishing feats of acrobatic maneuvering -- spinning and snap-rolling and pulling 180's (scroll down to see flight paths) into the World Trade Center and Pentagon -- nor were any listed on the manifests of the four flights. The only proof of their presence is the passport of one Salem Suqami that fluttered through the chaos of explosions, a raging inferno and collapse of buildings and landed, undamaged, on the sidewalk below.

Actually, we need go no further into the 9-11 morass than the planes. What we witnessed on that ghastly morning was a carefully planned, perfectly orchestrated PSYOPS attack on a citizenry by its own government. The first victim of this brutal assault was possibly the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which was juggling a minimum of five training exercises that morning and, at any one time its radar screens showed up to 22 hijacked aircraft. Much has been written about NORAD "standing down" on 9-11. I don't buy that for one minute.

But NORAD is guilty. It is guilty of assuming the mass confusion was a result of multiple war games it was playing that morning of crashing planes into buildings. It is guilty of trying to cover its ass when it realized the destruction was real-world. According to an in-depth report by retired theologian Dr. David Ray Griffin, who also wrote “The New Pearl Harbor” and “The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," both General Richard Myers, then acting chair of the Joint Chiefs, and Mike Snyder, NORAD spokesman, reported that "no military jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon."

Griffin says when this admission started raising eyebrows, a second story appeared on Sept. 14 that "contrary to early reports, jets were scrambled while the attacks were underway, but they arrived too late to prevent them." Four days later, NORAD released a timeline so jumbled it failed to pass muster in any venue. Finally, unable to get out of the hole, both the FAA and NORAD stopped digging. The FAA destroyed the tapes of activity that morning, to include conversations between the hijacked planes and air traffic control personnel, said, "oopsie, sorry about that," then just shut up and took its licks.

Two -- Nothing reveals the truth of 9-11 as clearly as the in-your-face controlled demolition of the World Trade Center's twin towers and building 7. They all fell down. According to a NYC fireman on the scene, they fell -- "just like that -- boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom" -- In 10 seconds flat. Well, that's not exactly true, because it took the 47-story No. 7 only 6.6 seconds to pancake into its own footprints. But if ever there was a classic case of "don't believe your lying eyes," it is the deliberate destruction of these three WTC buildings.

Nothing reveals the truth as clearly as the breathless, on-the-scene initial reaction by network and cable TV -- "There are explosions going off everywhere!" ... "We just heard another huge explosion!" ... "A huge explosion, raining debris on all of us...we need to get out of here!" ... "This almost looks like a -- a controlled demolition..." CNN's Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McEntyre, blurted this "Breaking News" item -- "There's no evidence that a plane crashed into the Pentagon or anywhere near it and in fact, the only pieces left were small enough that you could pick them up in your hands --and no large sections -- tail sections, fuselage sections..."

By the next morning, the media monkeys had come to their senses and were dutifully droning administration talking points while ominously reminding Americans that questioning what happened was nothing short of criticism of the president, or how unpatriotic can we be at a time when we all need to hang together. However, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld apparently agreed with McEntyre and conspiracy theorists when he told Parade Magazine on Oct. 13, "Here we're talking about plastic knives, and using an American Airlines flight filled with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building, and similar (inaudible) that damaged the WTC."

Nothing reveals the truth more clearly than the implosion of No. 7, which was not hit by a plane. WTC owner Larry Silverstein publicly acknowledged that they "pulled" No. 7 and, although he made out like a bandit on the whole 9-11 holocaust, he did not explain nor did the media ask him when the explosives needed to "pull" the 47 stories were put in place. Interestingly, the 9-11 Commission did not think it important enough to question either Silverstein or the fire department about the No. 7 collapse, nor did it even mention the building in its bogus report.

Three -- The truth is what it is. As Bernie says, it ain't never something else. A search for the truth about 9-11 is much easier if all that cannot be true is tossed out. Why waste time considering the impossible?

For example, if you're reading Michael Chertoff's massive May 2002 FEMA investigation into 9-11, "World Trade Center Building Performance Study," you need go no further into its 262 pages than this conclusion -- "...as each aircraft impacted a building, jet fuel on board ignited. Part of this fuel immediately burned off in the large fireballs that erupted at the impact floors. Remaining fuel flowed across the floors and down elevator and utility shafts, igniting intense fires throughout upper portions of the buildings. As these fires spread, they further weakened the steel-framed structures, eventually leading to total collapse."

Toss it, as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report, which uses its 292 pages to "describe how the aircraft impacts and subsequent fires led to the collapses (sic) of the towers after terrorists flew jet fuel laden commercial airliners into the buildings..."

While you're at it, you can trash the March 2005 Popular Mechanics hit piece -- a regurgitation of FEMA's fantastical explanation, to wit --"Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all the floors above the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing force on the highest intact floor. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail, transmitting the forces to the floor below, allowing the collapse to progress downward through the building in a chain reaction."

And the Pentagon? PM had that all figured out too. It quotes Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University as shrugging aside the nagging conspiracy that a Boeing 757 did not hit the Pentagon, ". . .one wing hit the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon's load-bearing columns," Sozen said. "What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass."

I could be wrong, but I doubt even the zany, fun-loving Rumsfeld would try to run THAT one by us. The PM piece is little more than an attack on those who question the events of that dreadful morning, and is replete with unattributed "facts." It is the work of Michael Chertoff's cousin, 25-year-old Benjamin Chertoff, who was given free reign after a shock-and-awe coup at the magazine wherein PM editor-in-chief Joe Oldham was given 90 minutes to clean out his desk. Other staff members, including the creative director, were also fired.

The 9-11 Commission Report should be discarded as well. And set afire. It differs from the above attempts to cover up a government's attack on its own people only in length and breadth. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton entered into a "contract" with the American people; they swore to get to the bottom of the tragedy; inventory its causes and put the blame where it rightfully belonged. They betrayed us. And they charged us only ten bucks a copy.

In his hard-hitting article in Harper's Magazine, Benjamin DeMott writes that the Report is "a shrewdly conceived and sustained equity-of-blame argument that becomes the fulcrum of the entire document and has a single principle at its center -- any blame that might be apportioned to the behavior of the sitting administration is easily counterbalanced by the behavior of preceding authorities -- and by historical 'fact' as interpreted in accordance with current presidential and commissarial need."

Bush made clear that his "presidential need" was to not have a Commission blaming him for what happened. When an investigation was forced on him, Bush undercut it, underfunded it and agreed to meet with Commission members only in the Oval Office, only if Dick Cheney was there, only if he was not under oath, only if his remarks were not recorded and only if no notes were taken. DeMott tells us that the more than 600-page document was nothing more than "a weapon in a major domestic conflict: the war on incisive, sometimes rudely disruptive thought -- thought that distinguishes the democratic citizen from the idolatrous fool, the sucker, the clueless consumer, the ad person's delight."

Rather than tell the people the truth as promised about 9-11, Kean and Hamilton used their Report as a PSYOPS weapon against them. Bill Clinton is to blame. With the FAA riding shotgun. Shut up and move on.

Homework assignment

After eliminating the impossible, we are left with ghastly images of death and suffering. With brutal malice aforethought, on 9-11 this administration murdered 2,823 human beings. Only 1,102 victims have been identified, although 19,500 body parts were "collected." More than 100 Americans were pulverized in the explosions, their remains mingling with tons and tons of cement into fine dust, and just disappeared into the air, perhaps into the lungs of those working feverishly at Ground Zero to save them. Each of us with any connection to reality knows that the only explanation for 9-11 is that the entire holocaust was a deliberately planned, orchestrated, controlled demolition of our way of life.

If you want to know what happened on 9-11, watch Korey Rove, Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas' critical film, "Loose Change, 2nd Edition." Surely the Truth is worth 1 hour, 21 minutes and 50 seconds of our lives..

If you want to know why 9-11 happened, read the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)2000 report, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century," which calls for a "new Pearl Harbor" to establish US military preeminence throughout the world as well as unending war to seize and control the world's resources. It's only 90 pages, and should take even less than 1 hour, 21 minutes and 50 seconds to peruse.

If you want to know the truth about the attack on this country, watch and read the above as if your life depended upon it. Because it does.

We have the crime. We have the criminals. The time has come to indict them. Try them. Convict them. Punish them. Then, and only then, can we move on.

That's what I think.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net.