The Psychotic Discourse of 9/11 Truth

In a 2004 poll conducted by Zogby international, 49.3 percent of New York City residents said that some US leaders “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001 and that they consciously failed to act” (“Americans Question Bush on 9/11 Intelligence” 2006). According to a New York Times–CBS News poll carried out in October 2006, only 16 percent of those surveyed thought the Bush administration was telling the truth about what it knew prior to September 11 about possible terrorist attacks on the USA (“Half of New Yorkers Believe” 2004). Fifty-three percent of respondents said that they thought the administration was hiding something. Twenty-eight percent thought the administration was mostly lying. A Scripps Survey Research Center-Ohio University poll carried out in July 2006 asked the more pointed question as to whether respondents thought 9/11 was an “inside job.” Thirty-six percent of respondents found it very or somewhat likely that “federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them ‘because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East’” (Hargrove and Stemple 2006). The press release for the poll notes that this 36 percent is slightly less than the 40 percent convinced that a lone gunman was not responsible for the death of President John F. Kennedy and the 38 percent who believe the government is withholding proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life. It also reports that those suspecting 9/11 was an inside job are more likely to get their news from the internet than from mainstream media sources, which is hardly surprising given the hundreds of websites devoted to investigating the day’s events, criticizing the official account, and finding patterns in facts scattered throughout and virtually ignored by the mainstream media.