Clearly, the corporate media are promoting a flurry of 9/11 Truth hit pieces for a reason. What that reason is exactly, I don't know. Of course, Paula Zahn tried to smear 9/11 Truth with the brush of anti-semitism. CBS recently added a template hit piece, complete with references to aliens and Tom Cruise's baby. The CBS piece prompted a reply from Jim Fetzer.

Fetzer's response is as bizarre as the hit piece is typical. Consider his comments that appear in the first two paragraphs of this so-called news release:

“It [the CBS report] is chock full of false assertions, even including misidentification of Steven Jones, my former co-chair, as the society ’s founder.”

“That is rather rich,” Fetzer said. “Steve and I have had a parting of the ways over differences in our attitude and approach toward the science and the politics of 9/11 research. But if he had been ‘the founder’, he should have been conducting a ‘house cleaning’, not abandoning ship.” The split between them, Fetzer added, has had a beneficial effect. “A cult-like atmosphere had developed around him, which I considered to be bad for scientific research on 9/11.”

Fetzer seems more obsessed with a minor mistake, CBS' naming of Jones as "founder," than he is with substantive issues about 9/11. A man as schooled as he is knows that a press release should foreground the most important information in the first paragraph. Is this what Fetzer considers most important in the CBS story?

Note the bitter tone in the use of the words "abandoning ship" and "cult-like atmosphere." Sorry, Jim, but that "atmosphere" you sensed is called "vigorous disapproval of your ideas" and "vociferous support for Steven Jones."

The CBS report feels especially desperate, because it appears even though there is no visible reason for it to appear. There was no recent news item related to "what happened on 9/11," so this "report" feels contrived.

Also, I'm especially sick of seeing professor Mark Fenster's name in these hit pieces. He's the go-to guy when you want to ascribe public disbelief to an indeterminate paranoia and not a laundry list of evidence.

Michael Barkun, a poli sci prof from Syracuse, gets his day in the sun for this "insight": "Barkun credits the end of the Cold War with destroying our vision of the world being neatly divided into good and evil. What conspiracy theorists do, he says, is provide a simple view of an increasingly muddled, dangerous world."

This is a common meme in 9/11 hit pieces: 9/11 skepticism provides a "simple view" of a complicated world. This argument is particularly absurd, given the simplicity of the 9/11 Commission Report and the black-and-white worldview of Bush and his minions.

There is nothing about 9/11 Truth that gives one a false sense of security or a "simple view" of the world. If anything, 9/11 Truth forces one to confront the true complexity of 9/11, the vast array of geopolitical criss-crossing behind the scenes, the "deep politics" where morally ambiguous figures congregate. That doesn't comfort me in the least.