By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

"Truthers" are the people who believe the 9/11 terror attacks were an inside job. That the Bush administration had advance knowledge of them and let them occur. In the more extreme version of an already extremist theory, truthers believe the U.S. government itself carried out the attacks as an excuse to take the nation to war.

At the very least the truthers question the official version of events and want the government to reopen the investigation. In a way, they have a lot in common with those who to this day refuse to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shot in Dallas.

One prominent truther is former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga. Another is former Obama White House aide Van Jones (whose resignation late Saturday came after it was learned his name appears on a truther petition demanding further investigation of the events surrounding 9/11). Another is, believe it or not, actor Charlie Sheen, who currently stars on just about the only comedy left on CBS that anyone watches. And Sheen wants a face-to-face meeting with President Obama so he can ask him to personally order an investigation into the "9/11 cover up."

Sheen's request, says syndicated radio host Alex Jones—on whose program Sheen is scheduled to appear Wednesday and Friday—"takes the form of a letter to the President in the context of a fictional meeting between the two entitled '20 Minutes with the President,'" that Jones says he has published "exclusively" on his Web site.

According to Jones, Sheen's letter "cites evidence, backed up by a substantial online bibliography, that alleges to prove the official story behind 9/11 is a fraud and that this conclusion was also reached by the majority of the 9/11 Commission members, a fact that mandates President Obama to reopen the investigation into the terrorist attacks."

In a release published Monday, Jones says the actor is now urging "grass roots political organizations and individuals across the country to go to press conferences and other public events and demand answers about the truth behind 9/11."

"We cannot allow governments to continue to advance their political agendas by exploiting forged pretexts," Sheen is quoted saying, "and the fact that big budget hit pieces against 9/11 truth are still being rolled out proves that the establishment is upset that the population is waking up to false flag terror."

For several months now, a number of liberal writers—including several of my bloleagues here on Thomas Jefferson Street—have challenged the Republicans to repudiate the "birthers." These are the folks who believe Barack Obama was born someplace outside of the United States and, as such, is constitutionally ineligible to hold the office to which he was elected in November 2008. To them, and I am speaking of my colleagues in journalism now, the birthers are an illegitimate political force who refuse to recognize reality.

Fair enough. But the truthers are at least as much of a fringe element as the birthers. They are, perhaps, just as influential—in an intellectual and political sense—as the birthers and the Democrats need to deal with them.

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