From the time of Bush's inauguration, they were trying to figure out a way to justify an invasion of Iraq and the establishment of a military presence in the Middle East.   Some sort of Pearl Harbor would have been very handy. This is known.

And, yes, it is also known that the Bush administration was indeed warned ahead of time about suspicious activity and indications that there would be some sort of attempt at a terrorist attack within the United States. Several people, including Richard Clarke, have appeared on national television and written books about how they tried to warn the Bush administration ahead of time. But the Bush administration wasn't interested in hearing any of it.

Of course not. Nor did they need to cobble together some Rube Goldberg conspiracy that could end in getting the whole bunch of them both hanged and recorded in the history books as some of the most vicious traitors in the history of the world.

All they had to do was sit back, look careless dumb and happy, twiddle their thumbs—and wait.

That could still get them hanged. The real question here is a fairly standard one:    What did they know and when did they know it?

Instead of running around like a collection of headless chickens and wasting time, energy, and brain-power concocting all this Baroque silliness, we should be agitating for a genuine investigation asking that question.

Don Firth