Twenty-five years.
Apparently that’s how long it takes the United States government to answer a fairly simple question:
What the hell happened on September 11, 2001?
Before somebody warms up the keyboard and starts typing TIN FOIL HAT!!!, calm down, Skippy. I’m not telling you that Dick Cheney was hiding behind Building 7 with a plunger marked ACME.
I’m saying something simultaneously less exciting and considerably more disturbing:
Twenty-five years later, there are important parts of the 9/11 story that we still don’t fully understand.
And questioning them isn’t conspiracy theory.
It’s history.
Because some of the things Americans were originally told turned out to be incomplete, inaccurate, or flat-out wrong.
That isn’t my opinion. That’s what subsequent investigations established.
The CIA knew about future hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi before 9/11. Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. Hazmi entered the United States. Information that might have allowed the FBI to locate them wasn’t effectively shared.
They weren’t hiding in a cave in Afghanistan communicating by carrier pigeon.
They were in America.
One of the greatest intelligence apparatuses ever constructed managed to know enough about future terrorists to be worried about them while simultaneously failing to put the pieces together before they participated in the largest terrorist attack in American history.
That’s not conspiracy theory.
That’s the 9/11 Commission.
Then there’s Saudi Arabia.
For years the discussion was usually reduced to the simplistic question, “Did Saudi Arabia do 9/11?”
That’s not actually the interesting question.
The interesting question is:
Who helped the hijackers after they arrived here?
Hazmi and Mihdhar received assistance in California from Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national with connections to Saudi government institutions. Later-declassified FBI material made the relationship considerably more interesting than the reassuring version most Americans heard in 2004.
Does that prove the Saudi government ordered 9/11?
No.
Does it justify asking what Bayoumi was doing, whom he worked for, what he knew, and whether his encounter with two future hijackers was really just one of history’s most unfortunate coincidences?
You’re damn right it does.
That’s called investigating.
We used to encourage that.
Then we arrive at perhaps the strangest skyscraper in American history.
World Trade Center Building 7.
No airplane hit it.
Nevertheless, at 5:20 that afternoon, the 47-story building collapsed.
Mention Building 7 and everyone immediately divides into two tribes.
One side screams:
“CONTROLLED DEMOLITION!”
The other screams:
“NIST EXPLAINED EVERYTHING! SHUT UP!”
Congratulations. You’ve both turned engineering into professional wrestling.
NIST eventually concluded that uncontrolled fires caused thermal expansion and a cascading structural failure beginning around Column 79. It was an extraordinary sequence and, according to NIST, represented the first known complete collapse of a tall building primarily because of uncontrolled ordinary-content fires.
Could that happen?
Apparently yes.
Is that an extraordinarily unusual event worthy of continued technical examination?
Also yes.
Those two statements can coexist.
You don’t have to believe somebody planted explosives in Building 7 to watch that enormous building descend and say:
“I’d like to understand that better.”
That’s not irrational.
That’s literally how science is supposed to work.
Then there’s United Airlines Flight 93.
This one actually demonstrates why skepticism needs to work in both directions.
The story that Flight 93 was secretly shot down is fascinating.
There’s just one rather annoying problem:
The evidence doesn’t support it very well.
The cockpit voice recorder, flight-data recorder, radar information and timeline strongly support the conclusion that passengers attacked the cockpit and the hijackers deliberately crashed the airplane rather than lose control of it.
More importantly, NORAD wasn’t informed that Flight 93 had been hijacked until approximately four minutes after it crashed.
That makes shooting it down somewhat challenging.
Even the United States Air Force has not yet developed a fighter capable of intercepting yesterday.
So Flight 93 demonstrates something important.
Question everything.
Including the conspiracy theory.
But here’s where things get uncomfortable again.
The government’s original descriptions of the military response weren’t entirely accurate either.
The 9/11 Commission reconstructed the timeline and discovered that some earlier accounts created the impression that NORAD had considerably more warning about the hijacked aircraft than it actually did.
So consider the absurdity.
People became suspicious partly because official accounts changed.
Then investigators discovered that some official accounts really were wrong.
And somehow the lesson Americans were expected to take from that was:
Stop asking questions.
Brilliant.
Nothing builds public confidence quite like changing the story and then becoming irritated when the public notices.
And that is the part of 9/11 that bothers me most after a quarter century.
Not thermite.
Not missiles.
Not holographic airplanes.
Not some guy on YouTube rotating a grainy Pentagon video until he discovers Bigfoot riding the Loch Ness Monster into the building.
It’s the boring stuff.
The documents.
The intelligence failures.
The missed warnings.
The compartmentalized information.
The inaccurate testimony.
The foreign connections.
The records that took decades to declassify.
The fact that two future hijackers connected to al-Qaeda were living inside the United States while pieces of our intelligence establishment possessed information about them that never became an effective domestic manhunt.
That story is already unbelievable.
We don’t need to invent another one.
And perhaps that’s the greatest mistake made by the 9/11 conspiracy industry.
Every ridiculous theory gave government agencies an easy escape hatch.
Ask a legitimate question about Saudi contacts?
TIN FOIL HAT!
Ask why intelligence wasn’t shared?
CONSPIRACY THEORIST!
Ask about Building 7?
CONTROLLED DEMOLITION NUT!
Ask why testimony changed?
JET FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL!
And suddenly serious questions got tossed into the same dumpster as holographic airplanes.
That’s convenient.
Because governments don’t need elaborate conspiracies to screw things up.
Anyone who has served inside a large government bureaucracy knows something much more terrifying:
Twenty people can produce something that looks exactly like a conspiracy simply by failing to communicate with the other twenty people.
I’ve worked for the federal government.
Trust me.
Sometimes incompetence deserves its own grassy knoll.
Maybe that ultimately explains most of what happened before 9/11.
Maybe bureaucratic stovepipes, institutional arrogance, interagency rivalry, legal restrictions and sheer bad luck aligned catastrophically.
That’s entirely possible.
But there’s an enormous difference between saying:
“We have not found evidence proving a conspiracy.”
and saying:
“Therefore you aren’t allowed to ask any more questions.”
Science doesn’t work that way.
Intelligence analysis doesn’t work that way.
History certainly doesn’t work that way.
Twenty-five years later, the families of nearly 3,000 murdered Americans deserve something remarkably simple:
Everything that can responsibly be declassified should be declassified.
Every remaining foreign-support connection should be investigated as far as the evidence allows.
Every contradiction should be acknowledged instead of explained away.
Every legitimate technical question should be answered with evidence instead of ridicule.
And every conspiracy theory should be subjected to exactly the same ruthless examination.
Because the goal isn’t proving that the government lied.
The goal isn’t proving that the government told the truth.
The goal is finding the truth.
Maybe when every remaining document is opened, the final answer will be disappointingly mundane.
Maybe we’ll discover that 9/11 wasn’t the product of some gigantic hidden conspiracy.
Maybe it was something even more frightening:
Nineteen determined terrorists exploited an immigration system, aviation-security system and intelligence bureaucracy that repeatedly failed to recognize what was happening directly in front of it.
And maybe foreign-connected individuals helped some of them without the United States ever completely determining who knew what.
If that’s the answer, fine.
Put the evidence on the table.
Because after twenty-five years, Americans shouldn’t have to choose between blindly trusting Washington and believing a guy on YouTube named PatriotEagle1776 who has discovered that if you multiply the number of windows in Building 7 by the longitude of Dallas you get Lee Harvey Oswald’s birthday.
There is a third option.
Show us the damn records.
Let engineers argue engineering.
Let intelligence professionals examine intelligence.
Let historians examine history.
Let skeptics challenge assumptions.
Let evidence kill bad theories.
And wherever legitimate questions remain, keep asking them.
September 11 belongs to American history now.
Not the CIA.
Not the FBI.
Not Saudi Arabia.
Not Tucker Carlson.
Not Alex Jones.
Not NIST.
Not the Truthers.
And not the people who think saying “conspiracy theory” is some magical incantation that makes inconvenient questions disappear.
It belongs to the American people.
We buried nearly 3,000 of them because of what happened that morning.
Twenty-five years is long enough.
Open the files.
Answer the questions.
Let the evidence speak.
And wherever the evidence doesn’t provide an answer?
Keep digging.
Because “trust us” isn’t history.
It’s a press release.
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