I have never been a full-fledged member of the tin-foil hat crowd who believed that Dick Cheney piloted the planes into the WTC by remote control, BUT...
I appreciated that they were there because they were the only ones who had been staying on top of all of the various news stories that were floating around, some of which were pretty interesting and were never really followed up.
There were a flurry of stories that came out right after 9/11, and then our press started taking dictation from the administration and all of those stories just fell through the cracks. Some of them may have been nothing, some of them may have been sloppy reporting in the chaotic aftermath, but some of them should have been followed up by our crack press.
In addition to Ashcroft not flying commercial, and Bush's complete aversion to Washington over that time, Willie Brown was warned by an anonymous caller not to fly. Salman Rushdie claims he was banned from flying internally in the North America.
When no one bothers to follow this stuff up, you can understand why the tin-foil hat crowd starts to try and connect the dots themselves. What else can they do?
UPDATE: The ORourkian objects to my claiming that the tin-foil hat crowd was vindicated. Of course my little headline was a bit of half-serious hype, but there's an important point here. In the aftermath of 9/11, anyone raising these questions was lumped into the tinfoil hat crowd. The tinfoil hat crowd ranges from those who:
-- Think our intelligence agencies made a colossal boo-boo, which it looks now as if they did. Call this low-level incompetence.
-- Think that higher-ups in the Bush administration had some information they failed to act on appropriately (Ah, Andy Sullivan's Blame Clinton piece looks funnier every day), which we now know is to some degree true. Call this high-level incompetence.
-- Think the Bush administration deliberately failed to act on the information (and there are reports they deliberately pulled back on terrorist investigations of the Bin-Laden family which may or may not be credible). Call this criminal negligence.
-- Think that Dick Cheney, fueled by a Caspian Crude IV, used his newly installed defibrillator/airline remote control device to personally fly the planes into the WTC in order to have an excuse to topple the Taliban and have Unocal build an oil/natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan to feed Dick's insatiable addiction to sweet sweet crude. Call this the Grand Conspiracy.
In any case, the tinfoil hat crowd, no matter where they fell in this spectrum, have been the only ones asking the questions.
