The 9/11 anniversary was almost impossible to live through. It made me thank God, or Russia, again, that I'm not living in America. If you were moved by any of those articles or retrospectives, or if you thought that Americans really reflected on things, you're just wrong. 9/11 is no longer a tragedy -- it's a fiction, a thing. The patent is owned by someone else .

What was most remarkable and terrifying about the American media retrospectives was not just that they dished out all the sentimental patriotic crap we all expected. It would be strange, even scary, if they didn't. What's really disturbing is considering everything that they DIDN'T write about, and still won't.

There are so many stories out there connected with 9/11 that have still barely caused a blip on the media screen, stories that should rattle every decent American's insides, shake up his concept of the world, of good and evil, of who is really "with us" and who is "against us"... But everyone is getting stupid and crazy right at the point when, in previous crises in American history, Americans used to get smarter and meaner. It's all personified in the American president Bush -- dumb, corrupt, unintentionally reckless, and totally convinced of his moral righteousness.

For example, we know that the Bush Administration lied, just flat-out lied to the public, when they told us over and over that they had no idea and no warning that a terrorist attack of this type would happen. They said that such an attack couldn't even have been conceived of -- it wasn't humanly possible for a decent American to imagine that "such evil was possible." That was a lie. They knew that these very attacks were planned, ready and coming. They lied, and they knew that they lied when they told us. And when the lie fell apart this spring, when the FBI agents came forward and the intelligence reports were leaked about how they did expect this sort of attack, they lied again and jammed the airwaves with warnings of impending nuclear terror attacks. And the most amazing thing of all was how this was met with a collective shrug. We're not talking about a simple corruption story -- we're talking about the biggest attack ever on America, about war and our potential destruction.

The press seemed oddly cowed by the whole thing -- by the public's collective shrug (they STILL trust Bush!), and perhaps by the fear that they were onto something a little too scary. Fear is the only reason I can think of that the American press didn't push that story, the story of how the Bush people, our supposed friends, lied to us in the days and weeks after the attacks, and then scared the shit out of the country to cover up the lies when they were exposed.

In this special post-9/11 press review, rather than going through the depressing exercise of picking apart all that was grotesque and deluded in the press coverage of the anniversary, I'm instead offering a 9/11 anniversary story that has received far too little coverage than it deserves. I assumed that this would be a big story in the 9/11 retrospectives, because it's certainly one of the most bizarre stories about 9/11.

Of all of the bizarre circumstances and personages tied to the September 11th attack, no single character throws the official American version more into doubt than former FBI counter-terrorism chief John O'Neill. His fate is so strange that it seems to have been scripted by a B-movie director or a first-time spy novelist. And yet it's true. Perhaps the only thing stranger than O'Neill's fate is the mainstream American media's near-total reluctance to pursue the story of their former counter-terrorism chief.

The story really begins in 1993, when O'Neill, a lifetime FBI agent, was brought out from the Chicago field office to New York City as one of the FBI's six lead investigators of the World Trade Center bombing, which left six dead and over 1,000 injured. His success in the investigation into the first WTC bombing -- he coordinated the Pakistan arrest of Ramzi Yousef- -- propelled him two years later to head the FBI's counter-terrorism section in Washington.

In 1997, O'Neill continued his ascent, moving to the FBI's National Security Division office in New York where he became the special agent in charge of counter-terrorism. His specialty was Islamic extremism.

In a speech about terrorism that year, O'Neill said: "A lot of these groups now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the U.S. to attack us here, if they choose to."

In 1998, O'Neill headed the FBI's investigation into the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were blamed on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. O'Neill was already familiar with bin Laden from his investigations into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 American servicemen died.

Barry W. Mawn, assistant director of the F.B.I. in charge of the New York office, is quoted as saying that from the time O'Neill set up in the New York division, he was single-mindedly obsessed with pursuing bin Laden. He became the government's leading expert as well as its lead investigative weapon in the fight against al Qaeda. On the eve of the millennium, the government, acting on information gathered by the FBI, issued warnings that al Qaeda was planning large terrorist acts. At least two plots, one at Los Angeles International Airport and another in Jordan targeting Americans, were foiled.

In another millennium plot, Islamic terrorists tried to blow up a U.S. warship docked in Yemen's port. The attack narrowly failed when the rubber dinghy sank due to the weight of the explosives before it could reach the ships.

Ten months later -- despite all the warning a terrorist could give -- another al Qaeda suicide bomber succeeded in getting his rubber dinghy up to the side of another American warship, the USS Cole, in Yemen's harbor, killing 17 US sailors.

O'Neill led the investigation into the bombing of the Cole, which again was blamed on Osama bin Laden. And this is where the story starts to get very weird.

As O'Neill and his team probed deeper into the Cole bombing, his investigation was abruptly thwarted by, of all people, the United States ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine. In the official version reported in the American press almost a year later, O'Neill's team was booted out of Yemen in November, 2000, because Bodine objected to O'Neill's "heavy-handed style." Another State Department source at the time confirmed that Bodine refused to allow O'Neill and his team to return to continue their investigation because his team was "too large" and many of the agents carried "heavy weapons" -- automatics -- that she found objectionable.

This account of how a local ambassador was able to thwart the single most important investigation to America's national security just because she didn't like the lead investigator's manners is impossible to swallow. What's more incredible is that the FBI allegedly wasn't allowed to return to Yemen to continue their investigation until Bodine left her ambassadorship in August 2001. Keep that date in mind, August 2001. A lot of people seemed to retire right around then. But I'll get to that later.

Bodine is an interesting character herself. She had served as the State Department's Political-Military officer for the Arabian Peninsula, as Deputy Principal Officer in the embassy in Baghdad and then moved to Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990. She was one of the last Americans to leave Kuwait. In 1997 Bodine, after serving as the State Department's associate director in counter-terrorism, was appointed ambassador to Yemen, birthplace of bin Laden.

Clearly Bodine wasn't your typical rich-donor ambassador. Yet just as clearly, she couldn't have stopped O'Neill's, and the FBI's, investigation, all on her own. The move must have been blessed by then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and/or others at her level. The coincidences in Bodine's timing should alone raise eyebrows: the FBI's lead al Qaeda expert barred from investigating the terrorists' attack from November 2000 until August 2001 -- that is, until the next attack. If it's not strange, it is at the very least infuriating as hell that the investigation was thwarted due to bad manners. It's possible that information from the Cole investigation could have led to information about the 9/11 plans. Why wasn't this ever mentioned in press accounts? Why don't they care enough to push it further? I WANNA KNOW!

The Seige: Another example of careless plotting and low-rent coincidence

What's even more interesting is that in early 2001, an Associated Press article about Yemen says this of Bodine: "Bodine [...]worked on the negotiating team that eventually found a way for the Americans to participate actively in the [USS Cole] probe despite Yemeni sovereignty concerns."

In August 2001, a clearly-coordinated smear campaign against O'Neill in the press changes this neutral version of events. In fact, up until August 2001, probably no one in the press even knew that the FBI had been banned by Bodine from investigating the USS Cole. In August, as you'll see, the campaign to blame it all on John O'Neill's character began in earnest.

O'Neill offered his explanation to a French journalist, Jean-Charles Brisard, as to why he had been barred from continuing his investigation: "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia." During interviews in June and July of 2001 with Brisard, published in his book Bin Laden: Hidden Truth last fall in France, O'Neill complained that his investigations into bin Laden were thwarted from above by senior American government officials and oil interests who didn't want to embarrass the Saudis or those American officials and companies tied to the royal family.

Now the O'Neill story gets even weirder. On August 19th of last year, the New York Times ran a story clearly leaked by the FBI accusing O'Neill of having lost a highly sensitive briefcase during an FBI conference. Two days later, a similar article appeared in the Washington Post. The events in the article are so totally absurd that the article needs to be quoted here in its original:

By Cheryl W. Thompson Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 21, 2001; Page A06

The head of the FBI's counterterrorism division in New York is under investigation for leaving his briefcase filled with classified information that was later stolen and found in another hotel, FBI sources said yesterday.

John P. O'Neill, a 31-year veteran of the agency with a reputation as a top-notch investigator, was attending an FBI conference last year in Tampa when he was paged. Surrounded by FBI employees, O'Neill left the soft-covered case near his chair and went to return the page, sources said. When he returned, the group had broken for lunch and the briefcase was gone.

"He didn't say to any employee, 'Keep an eye on this until I come back,"' an FBI source said.

Are you laughing? This is the classic story that every 8-year-old tells his teacher to explain why he didn't bring his homework to school: "My dog ate it." The source's excuse for why it wasn't his own fault or that of the hundreds of other senior sheriffs was equally childish: "My boss didn't tell me I had to watch his brief case." If an FBI agent, after all his training, has to be explicitly told to watch his boss's briefcase while he goes to the toilet, then frankly, America may as well surrender now.

And yet nothing could be less funny. The briefcase contained perhaps the single most important document that a terrorist planning to attack New York would want, according to the August 19th New York Times account:

Officials identified one document in the briefcase as a draft of what is known in the bureau as the Annual Field Office Report for national security operations in New York. The closely guarded report contained a description of every counterespionage and counterterrorism program in New York and detailed the budget and manpower for each operation. The document, submitted to bureau headquarters, is used as a central planning tool each year.

Let's go back and get this straight. O'Neill, the nation's top counter-terrorism (and bin Laden) expert, has his briefcase, packed with top secret documents detailing anti-terror security operations in New York City, stolen at an FBI conference, in a room full of super-cops? And the reason is that O'Neill, one of the government's brightest and most meticulous employees, just done plumb forgot cuz he got all excited about a page and left it there? And not one agent in the entire conference hall had the common sense to watch their boss's briefcase because they weren't specifically ordered to? And none of THEIR heads rolled for letting a crime take place right in front of their eyes?!

First of all, what thief or spy would be crazy and stupid enough to slip into a brightly lit conference and steal the counter-terrorism chief's briefcase? Moreover, since the source (if you believe it) claims O'Neill got up from his seat during the conference to answer a page; this implies that it would have been rude for O'Neill to call from where he was -- probably a speech was taking place. If that was the case, any movement in the room full of the country's top cops and spooks would have been easily recognized, particularly if the intruder wasn't on the guest list (how does a thief, or anyone, just "slip in" to an FBI conference and walk away with the counter-terrorism chief's briefcase?!). Who could possibly believe that such a high-ranking official wouldn't have a detail around him who would watch his things in the extremely unlikely event that he would leave his briefcase behind to answer a page? Cheryl Thompson, her editor at the Washington Post, and everyone who read it, apparently.

Reading this again reminds me why I do believe more and more in conspiracies: in America you can get away with literally anything, so long as you're not having sex or taking drugs -- that is, so long as you're not enjoying yourself! Any conspiracy, it seems, can be hatched right in front of the American public's faces, and they wouldn't believe it or wouldn't care.

This account stinks. It's unbelievable. That it's a plant is obvious; the bigger question is, why would whoever planted this story not even bother coming up with a believable plot?

The answer is evident in the Post''s story. If you have a mainstream press as obedient as America's, you don't even need to bother being clever when you plant stories. Thirty years ago, the Post brought down President Nixon. That scared the American elite, including the publishing magnates. Ever since, journalists have been trained to worship and respect power, and those who question official versions of events are labeled "conspiracy theorists" and "lunatics," relegated to marginal publications and poverty. Serious people seriously believe that there are no conspiracies in the US government; governments around the world are constantly hatching conspiracies, and through history we know that politics has been a conspiracy Olympics. American business, particularly at the higher levels, is nothing but plots and conspiracies. Yet for some reason, you'd have to be crazy to believe that American officials hatch conspiracies, cuz, you know, it would like, get out in the press, and, like, people would be really upset.

Go back and read this story again and tell me you can read the Post or the Times with a straight face. These days, when a government official wants to plant a story, he doesn't even have to be clever -- he can be sloppy, and it'll still get in the press, no questions asked.

Only that could explain how the Washington Post could continue with this account and not fear for its own reputation:

The thief, who has never been caught, took the briefcase to another hotel, left it and stole another case, sources said. When the owner of the second briefcase returned, he opened it and found documents he didn't recognize and called hotel security. Hotel security then reviewed the contents and realized the information was confidential and notified the local FBI.

"It probably looked to someone like a laptop," an FBI source said.

John O'Neill.

O'Neill's case was returned to him within 90 minutes after it was taken, sources said. "Nothing was tampered with," an FBI source familiar with the matter said. "I'm fairly confident the thing was retrieved intact."

[...] O'Neill, 49, began at the FBI as a civilian and became an agent in 1976, an official said. He announced last week that he was retiring at the end of this week, officials said.

O'Neill investigated the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last year and the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, in 1998. He also investigated Osama bin Laden, who allegedly operates terrorist camps in Afghanistan.

Whoever planted this story had complete contempt for the journalist, the newspaper, and the readers. And why not? Who has given a flying fuck since?

But the eeriest part is the segue to the end: and in other unrelated news, O'Neill is said to be quitting next week. Oh yeah, and he "investigated Osama bin Laden, who allegedly operates terrorist camps in Afghanistan." End of story. No question into why a story about the chief of counter-terrorism's stolen briefcase full of super-sensitive documents about how the U.S. protects New York City appears in the Washington Post one full year after the incident...and three weeks before 9/11!

August 2001 is full of coincidences too bizarre to be overlooked: Yemeni ambassador and State Department counter-terrorism expert Barbara Bodine left her post, finally allowing the FBI back to investigate bin Laden; Prince Turki, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency with close ties to the Taliban and bin Laden, was fired; John O'Neill was forced out through a coordinated smear campaign; and Bush was holed up in Crawford, after, as we now know, he'd been warned of an expected large terror attack on the U.S.

From here, the John O'Neill story ends as only a first-time, second-rate spy novelist would end it.

Just as the Post article "predicted," O'Neill tendered his resignation the very week that the article came out, and left the agency a week later, near the end of August 2001. In order to take a job as -- are you ready for this? -- the chief of security for the World Trade Center!

At the end of the month, O'Neill spent a weekend in the Hamptons, the upscale New York vacation spot made famous in The Great Gatsby, with ABC television investigative journalist Christopher Isham. Isham later claimed that O'Neill had left the FBI not because he'd grown frustrated that his investigation into bin Laden was hampered by senior officials above him who were barring his investigations and planting absurd smear stories in the press, but rather because "privacy laws preventing FBI access to e-mail accounts terrorists used to communicate" -- something that O'Neill wouldn't have to worry about today.

Interestingly, in 1998, Isham helped arrange one of the few interviews Osama bin Laden ever granted to an American news organization, in this case with John Miller of ABC News. The interview took place in May 1998, just two months before the embassy bombing. In Miller's narration to the interview, which presumably would have been scripted with Isham, he claimed that one of bin Laden's aides was cooperating with the FBI, a "leak" which, officially at least, left the FBI furious. It is likely that O'Neill helped Isham arrange the contacts for this story.

According to a New Yorker article published earlier this year, Isham quipped during this last Hamptons meeting that at least O'Neill wouldn't have to worry about another bombing of the WTC when he started work there, to which O'Neill reportedly replied, "They'll probably try to finish the job."

Get one thing straight: FBI counter-intelligence chiefs don't go around talking to journalists, not even after they retire. O'Neill, however, spent two months, in June and July, while still on the job, talking extensively and candidly not even to American journalists, but to a French journalist who preparing a book about bin Laden, a journalist who had worked for French intelligence, no less! This simply doesn't happen. At all. It's as if O'Neill was trying to build an alibi for himself.

On September 10th, 2001, O'Neill started his first day on the job as head of security for the World Trade Towers. He worked on the 34th floor of the North Tower. According to the New Yorker article published earlier this year, an article whose agenda seems designed to destroy O'Neill's character by painting him as a brutish, womanizing, arrogant villain spinning increasingly out of control, O'Neill spent the last night of his life partying like it was 1999. He gathered some of his best friends and went drinking first to Elaine's, a famous bar, and later to the China Club. That was where he gathered his friends and, according to one friend, "John made the statement that he thought something big was going to happen." He didn't get home until 2:30 A.M., even though he had to get to work the next morning at 8. Not bad for a 49-year-old.

On the morning of September 11th, just after the first passenger jet slammed into the North Tower, O'Neill is said to have called his son and a friend in the local FBI branch to tell them that he was alive and fine. He is said, in some accounts, to have called from his office, and in others to have left the building first, then called. All agree that he did leave the office building, and all say that after phone calls or consultations, he disappeared back inside. That is the last anyone saw him alive.

When O'Neill was subsequently reported to be one of the victims, it barely made news. One would have thought that the irony alone -- no other single death comes close to O'Neill's in terms of irony, significance and cinematic quality -- you'd think the story of bin Laden's most ardent pursuer getting killed by bin Laden's soldiers in his first day at his new job would have kept the O'Neill story on the front pages for months. Yet it barely made the margins of the mainstream press. That irony might not only have depressed Americans in the weeks following the attacks, but also raised some disturbing questions. Like, why was America's top bin Laden weapon fired a few weeks before 9/11? Why was he barred from investigating the Cole? What the fuck was he doing in the World Trade Center?!

Even the year-old lost briefcase farce got better billing in the mainstream press than O'Neill's spectacular death.

Incredibly enough, his body was found and identified in the rubble just over a week later, when Ground Zero was still smoldering. His funeral was held in Atlantic City, the New Jersey gambling oasis where he was born and raised, at the end of September. The department in charge of the disaster site is FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency). FEMA's head, Joe Allbaugh, who served in Oklahoma's state government at the time of the bombing of the Federal Building, was Bush's campaign manager during his run for president and his chief of staff during his second terms as governor of Texas. Along with Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, Allbaugh is considered the third part of the "iron triangle" that essentially runs Bush's political life.

The bizarre and impossible death of the one American who knew more about bin Laden than anyone else raises so many potentially disturbing questions that few in America -- where total indifference to anything beyond the cubicle and remote control are the rule, and the rich and powerful are loved and trusted more than the poor and struggling -- have dared question it. One would have to be completely dulled to accept this version. It doesn't add up. If this isn't a big story, a story to anchor one's 9/11 anniversary spread, I don't know what is.

Insane, or, like most American journalists, afraid of sounding like a "conspiracy theorist" to your boss and colleagues. If you don't write this story, it's one less problem in your life -- better to rely on government sources rather than poke them. That fear of standing out or appearing "weird" has worked far better as a censorship cudgel among mainstream American journalists than any ham-fisted Soviet tactic.

In fact, the only two in-depth accounts of O'Neill that I could find (except for some truly inane conspiracy theories that rank up there with the CIA and Mossad theories) -- an article in the New York Metro by Robert Kolker published last December, and another by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker earlier this year -- seem to have been borrowed from the same source, with the same intention: to paint O'Neill as an amoral hedonist who had spun out of control, an arrogant prick who was not to be trusted and who got what he deserved.

In the Metro article, much is made of O'Neill's womanizing: "'He was living with Valene, he had another girlfriend in Washington, and he was dating someone else here in New York,' says one close friend."

The New Yorker hits harder on another side of his supposedly bad character: "'I am the F.B.I.,' John O'Neill liked to boast."

In a country where presidents are elected based on the public's deluded perception of their character over anything else, this smear job matters.

Barbara Bodine.

Until August of 2001, O'Neill was portrayed as the hard-working, effective, dedicated FBI agent; afterwards, he was given a character grotesque enough to quash all questions into the incredible coincidences in his life. No article more definitively cemented this new biography of O'Neill than Lawrence Wright's "The Counter Terrorist" in the New Yorker's January 14th issue. And all too fittingly, Wright was also the author of the screenplay to the Bruce Willis/Denzel Washington thriller The Seige, a 1998 film about... yep, Arab terrorists who set off bombs in New York, using the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 as its inspiration, according to the film's web site. The movie focuses on overzealous American officials who use the bombings to indiscriminately round up Arab-Americans (sound familiar?); the president declares martial law and sends General Willis to lead the Army into a seige of New York in order to root out terrorist cells. Denzel Washington plays an FBI investigator; Annette Benning plays a CIA agent. It's ridiculous, I know, but it's true.

The film drew such heated protests from Arab-American groups that it was singly responsible for ushering in the return of Russian and neo-Nazi terrorist-villains in Hollywood. That is over now, of course, and not surprisingly, Wright sold the rights to his New Yorker article to MGM in February. For those who don't read highbrow magazines, the O'Neill story will forever be framed by Wright's version on celluloid as well, a version that relied very heavily on FBI insiders.

Why would top FBI people choose Wright? Put it this way: Wouldn't you, if you were the FBI, assume you'd find a friendlier ear in the guy who wrote The Seige than someone more, let's say, potentially ambitious? That the FBI and Wright came together on the definitive O'Neill story is no coincidence. Just look at their briefcase story again: the sloppy B-quality of the plot, the assumption (correct) that the audience won't question the story's holes. The FBI and Wright were made for each other, aesthetically and ideologically.

Wright certainly didn't let his FBI sources down: in his article, he achieves the impossible by portraying the briefcase incident with a straight face, placing it in the context of a series of other sloppy events which Wright's sources say occurred near the end of O'Neill's career. This pattern included an incident in which O'Neill forgot a cell phone in a taxi, which the New Yorker thought was a significant event foretelling the eventual downfall of the world's top bin Laden investigator. Paint O'Neill this way, publish it in the world of serious magazines, and you'll stop anybody from asking questions.

Wright sometimes confused B movies and reality.

Wright was given unprecedented access to the cast of otherwise top-secret players in O'Neill's life, the top echelon of the FBI, and particularly their counter-terrorism sections. This means that Wright was chosen at least as much as he chose the story, for every journalist knows that his sources and their agenda are as much of the story as the story itself. Any journalist who knows how sources like Wright's are courted (or rather, how sources choose which journalists they leak their stories to in order to shape the public perception) and doesn't have a lot of disturbing questions racing around in his head should, after reading this article, rush to his lawn, unhook the garden hose, sprint to the garage, close the door, attach the garden hose to the exhaust pipe of his Lexus SUV, sit in the car, pop in Sting, and scrawl a note saying, "Don't mourn, I was already dead!"

Few Americans can bring themselves to confront the horrible possibility that our leaders knew about the attacks in advance. Even after the evidence came in. Russians, who have openly debated the possibility that the FSB was behind the apartment bombings in 1999, might find the Americans to be comparatively squeamish and willfully ignorant when it comes to confronting painful truths. Russians as a rule seek out the painful, awful truth with as much energy as Americans avoid it.

Even the release of evidence that FBI field officers and others had warned their superiors of impending hijackings and air attacks failed to push America into asking the hardest, darkest truths about our government's role in September 11th. Instead, the debate centered on the much safer issue of incompetence, connecting dots, and communication between agencies. When an American is confronted with what is obviously an evil act by one of his leaders, he will always choose the "incompetence" excuse over the "they intended to be evil" explanation. Incompetence is the perfect alibi, as the Iran-Contra conspirators found out. Americans buy it. They want to believe it.

For Russian readers, using the supposedly-objective press to smear an important figure is nothing unusual. Tell an American that their press is used to smear, and most will argue that "it's not possible" because "it would get found out." Found out?! By whom, our press?! Are you fucking nuts?!?!

But the really difficult thing is explaining to a Russian audience is why the American press is so afraid of questioning those in power and their official version of events -- even after they've been exposed as lies. Russians, although no less traumatized by their apartment bombings in 1999, nevertheless have seriously debated and investigated the possibility that the FSB may have played a role in it. Novaya Gazeta suffered a series of bizarre and sometimes brutal attacks when it investigated the FSB's role in the Ryazan apartment bomb "hoax."

It took an FBI whistleblower from Minneapolis, not an investigative journalist, to first crack the government's lie that it had absolutely no idea that such an attack as 9/11 would, or even could possibly take place. It's taken Congressional sources, not investigative journalists, to keep the story alive. The media, rather than taking apart the rest of the government's version of events to see what else might crack, have instead helped them shore up the surviving parts of the official version of September 11th, using the "incompetence" palliative to keep the rest from falling apart. You stop asking questions about people's motives and actions once you all agree that people were "incompetent."

Even today's revelations from Congress about specific intelligence warnings last summer about hijacked airliners used as weapons won't rattle the American public or the media out of its slumber. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican senator on the intelligence committee, was quoted in a September 10th New York Times article that there are "a lot more bombs out there" that will be revealed. The media pried no further.

The official version of 9/11 that we were fed in the weeks and months after didn't make sense at the time, yet everyone swallowed it. Some of the more obvious lies have been exposed.

The John O'Neill story is even more ludicrous, and full of more holes. A cub reporter poking this story could easily stumble onto something bigger. Otherwise, we're all stuck with this B-movie spy thriller version that we've been fed, written literally by a B-movie screenplay writer.

The Siege was a failure at the box office, nearly ruining Willis's career, responsible for steering him away from action star to New Age hack for M. Night Shyalaman. If this war against terror is just that -- a bad, expensive investment in a sloppy plot -- then we're in for something much worse than the national equivalent of a box office failure.