Gore Vidal is America’s most controversial writer and a ferocious, often isolated, critic of the Bush administration. Here, against a backdrop of spreading unease about America’s response to the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, we publish Vidal’s remarkable personal polemic urging a shocking new interpretation of who was to blame. On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark for freedom's land. That was the day the British captured Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the White House. President Madison took refuge in the nearby Virginia woods where he waited patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what might have been a Day of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza for the DC building trades and up-market realtors. One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta. Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting some answers to the question: why weren't we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001, but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19 September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was 'learning to fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'.

It blew in like a hurricane from hell, pouring by 8 a.m. when the victims’ family members began reading off the names of their lost, often losing it themselves. Perhaps it was a rain of tears, a storm whipped up by a wind of fury that the ache of loss had not washed away with tears or the rain or the eight years passed since 9/11/01, on that loveliest of cloudless, sunny, cool fall mornings, accentuating the irony and pain of remembrance still more.

An article in the journal, Sociological Inquiry, ["There Must Be a Reason": Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification, Vol. 79, No. 2. (2009), pp. 142-162. [ PDF] casts light on the effectiveness of propaganda. Researchers examined why big lies succeed where little lies fail. Governments can get away with mass deceptions, but politicians cannot get away with sexual affairs. - Paul Craig Roberts

The Obama administration has effectively ended the efforts of families of victims of the September 11th attacks to bring lawsuits against members of the Saudi Royal family for financial links to the conspiracy. The Supreme Court today ruled that it will not allow any lawsuits to go ahead, just a few weeks after the government filed a court brief asking that the case be quashed.

The senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission - John Farmer - says that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11, echoing the assertions of fellow 9/11 Commission members who concluded that the Pentagon were engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack. Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), and is also a former New Jersey Attorney General.

Patrick Leahy has a point when he urges President Obama to open investigations about the Bush administration. However, he’s not pointing at the issue that we need to start with. Namely, September 11th. What really happened? More than a few people know - and I am not alone in calling for those who know to start talking and fess up. Let’s not let this go the way of the JFK assassination - and whether with subpoenas or on their own volition, I demand that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush - both of whom refused to testify under oath during the 9/11 Commission proceedings — Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Larry Wilkerson, George Tenet, Robert Mueller and the rest - as well as Bill Clinton and Al Gore (both of whom also refused to testify under oath) — start talking, and in a public arena. And I’m calling on the Obama administration to open up a probe and unravel the web of deceit. BY Melissa Rossi

Giant flames engulf every floor of 44-story building and it remains standing, yet limited fires across just 8 floors of WTC 7 brought down building within 7 seconds on 9/11. How can NIST’s “new phenomenon” explain this one? A fierce fire consumed all 44 floors of a skyscraper in Beijing today, shooting 30 foot flames into the air, but unlike the similarly-sized 47-story WTC 7, which suffered limited fires across just eight floors, the building in China did not collapse.

As the departing Bush administration frantically attempts to shore up its place in history, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann stands ready to kick the props out from under it again. A renewed claim that “no one could have anticipated” the attacks of 9/11 attracted his scorn in particular on Thursday’s Countdown. -David Edwards and Muriel Kane

On Thursday, 9/11/08, WeAreChange.org and the ncy911 Ballot Initiative group joined forces at Ground Zero. Read all about them at the above links. I joined them about 11:30 a.m. for the march and speeches that would begin around noon. The young WeAreChange leader Luke Rudkowski (a force unto himself) and the indefatigable Ballot Initiative leader Les Jamieson were there to kick off events.

On September 10, 2002 I asked 35 questions regarding war with Iraq. The war resolution passed on October 16, 2002. Now today, as some of my colleagues try to reestablish credentials regarding spending restraint, I want to call attention to my 18th question from six years ago: by RON PAUL