The Bush administration has given groups like the Scholars For Truth credibility by doing so much of its work in secret and by giving the public so many fake stories. A good example is that President Bush finally admitted in September, nine months after he had solemnly denied it, terrorist suspects were being secretly held in interrogation centers outside the jurisdiction of the United States. The result is the paranoia of groups like the Scholars For Truth are fed by the arrogance of those around President Bush.
More certain is that those members of the Bush administration in power on that September 11, 2001, overreacted to the destruction. The official exaggeration began with the initial reports of casualties being estimates as high as twenty thousand. The number, thankfully, would turn out to be under three thousand. In the weeks after 9/11 dozens of innocent “terrorist suspects” were imprisoned without charge. The administration did nothing to deny rumors that Iraq was preparing to launch an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein became the new Hitler. President Bush, like his father, was cast in the role of the fighter pilot ready to lead his nation to victory against the evil forces of al-Qaeda. No wonder the president readily admitted that the Hollywood movie
A Mossad analyst, a veteran of many years of cool and careful judgments, said to the author:
The best argument against a conspiracy within the Bush administration is the profound incompetence of what followed. The same people who are now making a mess of Iraq and Afghanistan simply do not possess the skills, and deviousness, to stage a complex assault on two narrow towers of steel and glass standing alongside the Hudson River. The truth is that the attacks were the work of desperate men ready to die and with a goal that was clear. It was Osama bin Laden, an engineer of standing, and his brightest pupil, Mohamed Atta, who understood the best way to collapse the World Trade Center was not by targeting the base, but by undermining the upper levels of each structure. But this has all been discounted in the search for something more sinister at the very heart of American democracy. The very real danger is that the conspiracies will encourage the world to take its eye off the reality that the further we are away from the last catastrophic terrorist attack, the closer we are to the next.
