Even among progressive news sources on the web, most sites will steer clear of 9/11 Truth. Huffington Post won't touch it. CommonDreams will occasionally flirt with the edges of "conspiracy theories"; Truthout has printed attacks on 9/11 Truth . OpEdNews is one of the few places where readers and authors who believe the outline of the Bush Administration's version of the events of 9/11 and those who think the Bush Administration was itself responsible for the attacks can hang out together and hold heated debates. (The Editorial Board here at OEN is also split. For disclosure, I've been the Board member leading the charge for more coverage.)



You may suspect the heavy hand of censorship, or you may think that these well-established liberal sources are sensibly avoiding speculation and superstition. But whatever your beliefs, you'd have to think that the Wall St Journal is the last place you'd look for revelations about a 9/11 cover-up.

The Wall St Journal? I would have thought I'd live to see my country pay reparations to Afghanistan before the WSJ would doubt the Kean Commission. I'd be less surprised if BP were to announce an end to ocean drilling than to see 9/11 Truth on the WSJ web site.

So what do you make of these two articles, published last week and the week before on the Market Watch page of the Journal? I'm flabbergasted.

Both articles report the work of the 9/11 Consensus Panel. The Panel was formed last September on the 10th Anniversary. Panel members are distinguished scholars, but there is no representation of "both sides". (You may take this as evidence that the Panel is working from pre-conceived conclusions, or you may believe that they simply had a hard time finding opposition figures who were willing to work with them.) Highlights of the findings reported at the MarketWatch site:

There is a conflict between The Kean Commission Report and official records of where Sec of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney were on the morning of September 11.

Scheduled Pentagon "war games" on the morning of the attacks were simulating and practicing for some of the same scenarios that actually came to pass that morning. "Although senior officials claimed no one could have predicted using hijacked planes as weapons, the military had been practicing similar exercises on 9/11 itself -- and for years before it."

The panel also found that "high-temperature incendiaries and explosives were planted throughout the twin towers and the lesser-known 47-story Building 7, also destroyed later the same day." This raises multiple question: Who ordered the buildings to be wired for destruction? What did Larry Silverstein, owner of the WTC complex, know ahead of time? And why did both the Kean Commission and the NIST report ignore the evidence for controlled demolition that was so compellingly obvious to the Consensus Panel?

The larger mystery is why these questions are appearing on a web site controlled by the WSJ. Is this a deliberate leak, the start of an effort gradually to defuse public outrage? (Public opinion polls regulary show that half the country disbelieves the government's account of 9/11 events.) Is it the work of a lone WSJ insider? Readers are encouraged to comment, or better yet, to investigate the origin of these WSJ stories and report results on these OEN pages.