I thought conservatives prided themselves on substantive responses and fact-based argumentation rather than baseless emotional retorts. Jonah Goldberg writes on NRO:
Morgan Reynolds has lost his marbles. Reynolds used to do great work at NCPA. Now, he’s peddling the idea that Bush orchestrated 9/11. Of course, the large tinfoil hat community in Madison is giving him a welcome reception. What a shame all around.
So, we’re supposed to believe that the same institution which orchestrated the Maine, the Lusitania and the Tonkin Gulf incident, which lied to the American people about its intentions to enter WWI and WWII and still asserts that TWA 800 spontaneously combusted, was somehow incapable of perpetrating a similar fraud on the American people in 2001?
We are supposed to believe that an institution which murdered American citizens at Ruby Ridge and Waco would never dream of harming Americans in in New York City?
Now, when a member of the administration openly asserts that the organization to which he belonged was responsible for a lethal criminal act, the conservative commentariat’s reaction is to plunge their heads into the sand while warbling that the man is crazy. It’s not only cowardly, it is irresponsible. The shame lies with Goldberg and company, not Reynolds, even if Reynolds is incorrect.
[Morgan] Reynolds, the former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the ex-top economist for George W. Bush’s Labor Department, charged the Bush administration with gross malfeasance, and proposed the prosecution of top administration officials.
Normally, if a prestigious UW alumnus and ex-Bush administration official were to come to the Wisconsin Historical Society to spill the beans about a Bush administration scandal, it would make the news. The local TV stations would cover it, and it would merit front page headlines in The Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal….
Despite the prestigious speaker and venue, and the gravity of the charges aired, for most Americans indeed most Madisonians the event never happened. Why? Because it was censored, subjected to a total media blackout. Not a word in the State Journal. Not a word in The Capital Times. Not a word on the local TV news. Not a word on local radio news. And, of course, not a word in the national media.
Why the blackout? Because Reynolds violated the ultimate U.S. media taboo. He charges the Bush administration with orchestrating the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for launching a preplanned “long war” in the Middle East, rolling back our civil liberties, and massively increasing military spending.
When a former Bush administration insider makes such charges, how can the media ignore them? Is Reynolds a lone crank? Hardly. A long list of prominent Americans have spoken out for 9/11 truth: Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Sen. Barbara Boxer, former head of the Star Wars program Col. Robert Bowman, ex-Reagan administration economics guru Paul Craig Roberts, progressive Jewish author-activist Rabbi Michael Lerner, former CIA official Ray McGovern, author-essayist Gore Vidal, and many other respected names from across the political spectrum have gone on the record for 9/11 truth.
Are the media ignoring all these people, and dozens more like them, because there is no evidence to support their charges? Hardly. Overwhelming evidence, from the obvious air defense stand-down, to the nonprotection of the president in Florida, to the blatant controlled demolition of World Trade Center building 7, proves that 9/11 was an inside job. As noted philosopher-theologian and 9/11 revisionist historian David Griffin writes: “It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government.”
I don’t know who was responsible for 9/11. And neither do you. There are a whole range of possibilities, from the entire operation being a nefarious internal plot to it genuinely being an Islamic terrorist action that was passively observed – although the standing-down of the air defense system does suggest at least a degree of government complicity. Given how police and federal agents often allow petty criminals to act in the hopes of catching the more important ones, it does not seem unreasonable to consider the possibility that none of the complicit government observers expected the towers to collapse, without which the administration would have been given the chance to go after al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein at a lower cost than in most of the previous incidents now known to have been orchestrated.
In any case, Mr. Reynolds likely knows rather more about the situation than any individual outside the administration. Furthermore, American history clearly indicates that whatever the U.S. government’s official story might happen to be, it is a false one.