Twelve years later, the date still brings a feeling of dread. The most effective terror operation of our time was wildly successful in creating a climate of fear, hatred and racism. It provided a simple script targeting a single religion. It created a cult of security in which civil rights were surrendered in the face of overwhelming danger. It opened a road map to war in the wider Middle East that has destroyed the lives of millions of people and toppled the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, with Syria now in the crosshairs.
After 12 years, the legacy of 9/11 is a perpetual state of manufactured war and a police state security complex in which western governments spy on their citizens in the name of protecting them.
But there are indications that the people are getting wise to the game. Maybe it's because the U.S. and its European allies are now openly supporting Al Qaeda in Syria, just as they did in Libya two years ago. Even such a nebulous concept as the "war on terror" can't stand up to that kind of contradiction.
In Britain, the public resistance to another trumped-up invasion stopped the government's planned Syrian misadventure in its tracks. In the U.S., public sentiment is also strongly against another war, and the White House has had to back down, at least for now, from its abhorrent threat to use military force against yet another sovereign nation. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper predictably endorsed Washington's war plans while ruling out direct military involvement, in apparent recognition of Canadians' unwillingness to commit to more death and destruction overseas.
Amid this souring of public will toward western militarism, the calls for a genuine 9/11 investigation continue. Lawyers for 9/11 Truth are calling for it. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth - some 2,000 of them - are calling for it, as are medical professionals, media professionals, patriots, political leaders, religious leaders and scholars for 9/11 Truth.
A poll this month found that one in two Americans question their government's official account of the events of 9/11. Considering the media's terror of conspiracy theories and complicity in the official one, that's an amazing statistic.
Why does it still matter? Apart from the age-old search for truth and justice, perhaps the biggest reason is to restore sanity and reason.
At the very crux of this issue is the question of what physically took place on Sept. 11, 2001. To the architects and engineers who have risked their careers to speak out on the issue, the official account is patently false because three steel-frame high-rises simply could not go down the way they did in New York that day without controlled demolition. If explosives were planted in the World Trade Center targets, the official story goes up in smoke.
It comes down to the laws of physics, basic science.
If the world has been led to believe that miraculous things happen when planes hit buildings, then we are no better off than our ancestors who believed the Earth was flat and inhabited by mythical beings.
By focusing on the science, an independent inquiry could at least sort out whether we've all been sold a heap of rubbish.
