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The trumpet call followed those seventy-one minutes which began at 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001, in the blue sky over New York. That was the moment when American Flight 11 gouged into the North Tower, and ended at 9:57 A.M. when the doomed passengers on United Flight 93 tried, but failed, to regain control over their plane before it crashed into the Pennsylvania soil. After 9/11 the calumny took root, nurtured by the new freedom of the Internet and ironically supported by the words of then U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld: “We know what we know; we know there are things we do not know; and there are things we know we know we don’t know.” That classic Rumsfeldism—which had actually referred to the need for a regime change in Iraq—was seized upon by the extremists as proof America had something to hide over 9/11.

The official 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence that office equipment in the towers had been “pulverized down to the last computer microchip.” Lee Hamilton, the former vice chairman of the Commission, felt compelled to say (to the author): “A lot of people I have encountered believe the U.S. government was involved. Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course the evidence does not lead that way at all.”

So why is it that many millions of people in the United States and Europe continue to embrace the accusation of a vast conspiracy? Is it possible—as a Mossad psychologist told the author—that what he called “the reality of terror” had become “dulled by the constant replaying of the television images so people saw it subconsciously as another kind of computer-generated game?”

The apologists for al-Qaeda filled the airwaves across the Arab world with claims that the 9/11 attacks had been a gigantic conspiracy by the Bush administration as an excuse to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006, five years after they had first surfaced while smoke from the Twin Towers rose from the world’s largest funeral pyre, those claims had been given a new legitimacy. Seventy-five American academics, who called themselves Scholars For Truth, claimed things were not as officially presented. Some go so for as to speculate that a shadowy group of neo-conservatives, many of them embedded in the Bush administration, knew of the attack in advance and conspired with the CIA to topple the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the hope such unprecedented attacks would gain overwhelming support for a U.S.-led war in the Middle East. The last time such an attack had aroused the collective fury of Americans had been Pearl Harbor, when Japan had launched its assault on the U.S. fleet. The decision to do this had been to give Tokyo a clear geopolitical advantage in the Pacific and paved the way for an attack on the United States. That dream had finally died in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, sixty-one years later, the Scholars For Truth—professors, lecturers, and academics of all kinds—claimed the decision to secretly launch 9/11 was also rooted in geopolitics, its objective to give the Bush administration control over the oil fields of Iraq.

A founder and leader of the group, Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at the Brigham Young University in Utah has said: “There is the clear possibility of thermite-based arson and demolition. The planes seen crashing into the Twin Towers were just a distraction. We don’t believe that nineteen hijackers and a few others in a cave with bin Laden pulled this off acting alone. We challenge this official theory and, by God, we’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.