Today, the media is abuzz with the headline broken by CBS last night: that the Republican chairman of the 9/11 commission announced that 9/11 was preventable--and should have been prevented.

Did I say the media is abuzz? I must have been mistaken. CNN doesn't have anything on it--not even a story buried on their second-page Politics or U.S. sections. The LA Times has nothing.. The NYT is MIA. The AP is silent. All across the SCLM, there is a deafening silence on this story--the story that the tragedy of 9/11 was preventable, and that our government /should/ have been able to prevent it.

The saddest part of this is that it's not really news. The only thing "new" about it is that now we have confirmation from the Republican chairman of the For two years questions have demanded answers. Glaring inconsistencies in the official story, the unheeded warnings of the CIA and the outgoing Clinton administration, and the inexplicable stonewalling have demanded accountability. Many of us on the left have been saying for two years that the official line of the Bush administration doesn't add up, and for this we are branded as crazy conspiracy theorists, traitors--or worse.

The notion that the Bush administration deliberately engineered 9/11 /is/ fairly ludicrous. That they had adequate foreknowledge and allowed it to happen for political and foreign policy reasons is only slightly less so, but has traction if you assume they didn't know just how bad it would be. However, there is nothing incredible or ludicrous about the assertion that the Bush administration--through a combination of hubris, short-sightedness, Bush's personal policy stances, and plain incompetence--failed to prevent a tragedy which was ultimately very preventable.

"I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.''
- Henry Kissinger, 13 Dec 2000

If your local paper or affiliate doesn't have anything by tomorrow morning, I recommend you write them and demand to know why a story of this magnitude isn't being covered. We're not in tinfoil hat territory anymore, people.