Edward Jay Epstein has an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal that deals with details of the alleged Al Qaeda plot on 9/11 and the CIA's contention that the plot was contained to a small group of Al Qaeda insiders, contrary to what a Spanish investigation into an alleged Madrid cell is saying. It's complicated, but consider this sliver of skepticism that concludes the piece:

"Yet if Mr. Garzon is correct about the Spanish connection to 9/11, it is not only the effectiveness of the CIA's interrogation of its al Qaeda prisoners that is called into question. The information from Binalshibh, KSM and other detainees was used to fill in the missing pieces of the jigsaw, and those gaps concerned the contacts the 9/11 conspirators might have had with others wishing to harm America. By saying that no one else was involved--not in Spain, Iran, Hezbollah, Malaysia, Iraq, the Czech Republic or Pakistan--these detainees allowed the 9/11 Commission to complete its picture of al Qaeda as a solitary entity.

Yet to come to its conclusion on this most fundamental issue, the commission was prohibited from seeing any of the detainees whose accounts it relied on. Nor was it allowed even to question the CIA interrogators to determine the way that information was obtained. The commission's joint chairmen themselves later acknowledged that they "had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information." So when Judge Garzon comes up with evidence that runs counter to detainees' claims, cracks begin to emerge in the entire picture."

Naturally, Epstein and his readers in the WSJ feverishly want to imply that Iran (and everyone else in the Middle East) was somehow connected to the 9/11 plot. This produces a rather perverse paradox: Epstein acknowledges, as most 9/11 skeptics already know, that the alleged hijackers probably had help outside of Al Qaeda, as the Spanish investigation suggests. Epstein won't acknowledge that the help may have come from a plethora of sources close to home (CIA, ISI, Mossad, etc.).

But I do find it interesting that an editorial in the WSJ acknowledges "cracks" in the official story (even if its ostensible purpose is to impute Iran).