Many who deny government complicity in 9/11/01 maintain that some of the best evidence against official involvement in the crime of the century lies in the Bush administration's unbroken record of sheer incompetence, an argument bolstered by the perception that key members of the administration, notably The Commander Guy, spent that entire day running around like headless chickens.

On the contrary, they did no such thing. Rather, the administration was highly competent and enormously successful that day -- they just had different criteria for success than would sane people. And they've been highly competent ever since. You just have to adjust your standards for evaluating success, then view the past six years through the PNAC/neocon lens. Let's review some of their primary accomplishments -- on 9/11 and in the six eternal years since:

• They got the entire world to believe that a ragtag organization called Al Qaeda, fronted by a seriously ill guy in a cave armed with only a laptop and a phone, managed to orchestrate an unbelievably complex plan that had involved years of planning and training, much money, split-second timing and ridiculously good luck.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that four hijackers who couldn't fly single-engine Cessnas well enough to graduate from flight school suddenly became the Blue Angels when at the controls of large, twin-engine Boeing jetliners, and this during the most stressful moments of their short lives.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that the crime of the century was pulled off by 19 guys with box-cutters whose names (or any other Arabic names) don't appear on any passenger manifests and at least four of whom have been seen alive and well in the Middle East since 9/11/01, (this one even interviewed by the BBC).
  
  
• Better yet, they got the entire world to believe their evidence linking these 19 guys to the hijackings, using for proof a few cell phone calls that couldn't have happened with 2001 technology. Then there's the famous carry-on bag supposedly left behind by alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta containing, among other things, a copy of the Koran, a Boeing flight manual and his will (and that's surely something you'd take with you on a flight you knew was going to be vaporized). And then the kicker, a passport allegedly belonging to Atta that miraculously survived a massive explosion and temperatures we're told were high enough to soften steel and fluttered unsullied to the ground, where it was eventually found among the debris a couple of blocks away from what used to be the World Trade Center.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that the seriously ill guy in the cave had such vast control over US armed forces that he ordered four exercise scenarios -- Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, Northern Guardian and Northern Vigilance -- which diverted to northern Canada or Alaska many of the NORAD fighter jets that would have been scrambled per standard operating procedure in the event of a suspected hijacking in the northeast corridor.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that this same guy in the cave was able to insert at least 11 and as many as 21 false radar blips (according to FAA administrator Jane Garvey) onto air traffic controller screens throughout the northeast corridor. As a result, controllers had no idea which blips represented planes that had been hijacked, which ones represented non-hijacked flights still in the air and which blips were phantoms. They were thus incapable of following the actual moves of the four hijacked jets and/or coordinating with the FAA to relay warnings to NORAD interceptors (most of which, again, were screwing around over the arctic wastes).
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that the remaining NORAD forces -- which had been a perfect 67 for 67 in 2001 prior to 9/11 -- managed to fail completely in their missions four separate times that morning.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that it was only a coincidence that a fifth exercise was taking place at the same time, this one designed to test emergency response capabilities at the National Reconnaissance Office in the event that an off-course plane from nearby Dulles airport crashed into one of the NRO's four office towers.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe that two planes took down three skyscrapers, WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7, and that for the first and only time in history, fire brought down reinforced steel and concrete structures and caused them to collapse vertically rather than keel over sideways and take out a few blocks of the New York City financial district.
  
  
• They got the entire world to absolve them of any complicity in "the events of 9/11," even though the above list of "coincidences" is inexplicable without the knowledge, involvement, approval and direction of people high up in the federal food chain.

And that was only the beginning . . .

• Literally overnight, they and their mass media cheerleaders turned a quasi-literate simpleton who was already tanking in the polls into an heroic "war president" who enjoyed the approval of more than 90 percent of the American public and the support of just about the entire world community.
  
  
• Suggesting the presence of a script, the administration immediately used this new-found popularity to get the public to buy insane increases in Pentagon spending; invented a war on terror to further justify enriching cronies at banks, arms merchants and fossil fuels companies; and attacked Afghanistan, murdering tens of thousands of civilians but failing to find that omnipotent guy in the cave.
  
  
• They got the entire world to believe Condi Rice when she perjured herself at the 9/11 Commission hearings by saying, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
  
  
• They got the entire world to forget that at least 11 countries had issued warnings of an imminent attack against the US: Afghanistan, Argentina, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Russia and the UK.
  
  
• They got the entire world to forget that Bush slept on a US Navy ship in Genoa Harbor during the July 2001 G8 meeting because Italian intelligence services had intercepted communications indicating terrorists might try to use a hijacked plane to assassinate him by ramming it into his hotel.
  
  
• They got the whole world to forget about Operation Bojinka, a plot to hijack and blow up 11 flights from Asia to North America, which the CIA had rolled up back in the mid-'90s and which should have provided some hints of future activities.

And ever since, it's been the express train to hell for the US and the rest of the world. Anything's fair in the phony war on terror that 9/11 launched and sanctified.

It justifies preemptive civilian slaughter branded as "shock and awe;" blatantly looting the national historical treasures of a sovereign nation; commandeering its oil reserves for the exclusive profit of US and UK petrochemical companies; building forward bases from which to rule the Middle East militarily; privatizing everything that isn't nailed down; threatening or ridiculing any national leader who dares to differ with US hegemony; threatening Iran with nuclear weapons; the use of illegal torture to compel confessions (which are, of course, useless since they're obtained under duress) . . . all this and more cementing the US's richly deserved place as the world's most feared and despised rogue state. And that's just the foreign policy side.

Meanwhile, back at home . . .

Domestically, the official 9/11 story has justified an ever-expanding list of repressive legislation, executive orders and presidential directives; massive federal invasions of privacy regarding medical and financial records; monitoring US citizens' electronic communications; re-targeting spy satellites for domestic surveillance; the TSA cavity search specialists (for attractive young women only; the rest are presumed to pose no threat to the state); no-fly lists and terrorist watch lists; RFIDs in all new passports and in new national ID cards scheduled to be issued this year; new TSA "behavior detection officers" to spot those who don't "look quite right;" all this wonderful new stuff from the DHS; private armies featuring mercenaries from companies like Blackwater and SAIC springing up like mushrooms after a spring rain . . . All that and rendition and torture, too.

Thanks to "the events of 9/11," we no longer live in a democratic republic based on constitutional law and 220 years of legal precedent. There is no due process; there is no habeas corpus; there is no right to counsel; there is no right to privacy; there is no right to speak one's mind; there is no prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; there is no right to a speedy trial by jury.

This is the reality of America v2.0 post-9/11. Just because they're not wearing black uniforms decorated with swastikas and lightening bolts and goose-stepping down the Unter den Linden; just because Leni Reifenstahl isn't filming the sequel to "Triumph of the Will" and the boxcars are still carrying freight; just because oppression is still partly concealed under an eroding veneer of liberty while most people flatly refuse to pay any attention . . . Just because the jackboot has yet to kick in the door, we're not naive enough to believe that it can't happen here.

We look at stuff like this and can only draw one conclusion: All the pieces are in place to lock down this country like a time vault. They simply haven't gone fully operational yet.

There are dozens -- probably hundreds -- of additional outrages that have been justified by "the events of 9/11." The official 9/11 story is the lynchpin, the keystone, the catalyst for every single act of international aggression and domestic repression this administration has been able to get away with. Absent 9/11, or at least the official Bush administration version, they don't have a leg to stand on. Demolish the official coincidence theory and their entire rationale crumbles.

A united front

That's why attacking, discrediting and ultimately disproving the 9/11 myth is so critical to the continued survival of the republic. Even Ms. Nancy might find grounds to allow impeachment back on that infamous table once the 9/11 armor rusts away.

Ironically, instead of presenting a unified front to expose this preposterous lie and condemn the complicit US mass media echo chamber that has hard-wired it into the American psyche, the left/liberal end of the political spectrum is predictably fragmented on this issue and includes some of the more steadfast and adamant defenders of the official coincidence theory.

So when we see otherwise intelligent and perceptive people doing the administration's PR work for them, defending the official story with the tenacity of the religious zealot, we have to wonder at the level of internal conflict these people must experience in accepting this ridiculous official story at face value.

But fear is a powerful thing and shilling for the official 9/11 cover story -- while staunchly ignoring the most basic unanswered questions and obvious inconsistencies -- provides insulation against the cognitive dissonance and bottomless cynicism that would result from admitting that this administration is so utterly malevolent that it would plan and execute mass murder against its own citizens for purely political reasons.

There's always Operation Northwoods to provide a bit of historical perspective on governmental malevolence. Even US mass media managed to pick up on that one. Read it before it gets scrubbed.