‘Dissent is Patriotic” sign overlooking the World Trade Center.

I took an eye-opening cab ride on a business trip to New York several years ago. It wasn’t the driving that raised my hair as much as the topic of conversation. My cabbie, a native English speaker, had a tale to tell about the 1996 attack on the World Trade Center. It was his opinion that someone higher up had allowed that bombing to happen, since a gigantic security rule was broken when the van that was detonated was allowed to enter the parking deck.

“I drive my cab there all the time,” he told me. “I know where we people are allowed to park and where they’re not allowed to park.”

I challenged the cabbie on this but he was insistent. “No way. That couldn’t have happened in a million years without someone higher up approving it,” he said.

At the time I chalked it up as a tale from an overly imaginative cab driver, but it wasn’t long before news broke that the FBI was deeply involved in a supposedly botched sting operation in which fake explosives were to be switched in at the last moment. Whoops!

Here’s Dan Rather’s report on CBS the night of October 28, 1993:

I don’t recall hearing that any FBI agents lost their jobs after fucking up a sting operation, bombing a building, and killing six people. Do you?

Fast forward to today. Another 9/11 anniversary has come and gone and even 13 years after the event I can’t help but feel awkward pausing for a moment of silence. It isn’t that I’m not saddened by the loss of lives on that terrible day, it is the way that event is continues to be described as a terrorist attack. There has never been any doubt in my mind that the official narrative of 9/11 is complete bunk, and I must admit that every year my certainty grows.

We lost a lot more than 3,000 lives that day, in my opinion we lost the republic. That truly deserves a moment of silence.
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