Mr. Ford is careful not to espouse the "inside job" thesis, however his account of two Israeli "journalists" frothing at the mouth over the attacks is new to me

The author begins with his encounter with two Israelis on the banks of the Hudson River as the second tower fell at the World Trade Center, and proceeds through the brief euphoria at "victory" in Iraq, and subsequent reversals in U.S. fortunes. "9/11 may one day be viewed much like the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, in 1914: as an occurrence that merely served to ignite the inevitable. The Bush regime desperately wanted a global war, and it got one." But rather than ushering in an era of unchallenged American hegemony, the U.S. entered into irreversible decline.

9/11 and the Great American Decline

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

"9/11 was wielded as a kind of weapon to take down the planet."

"So, what do you think will happen now?" The question was posed by the taller of two young Israelis, my sole companions in this section of Liberty State Park on the Jersey City side of the Hudson River, the morning of September 11, 2001.

(NOTE: There is an error in the following. Please see the correction in the comments below.)

Andrew Cockburn, I was going to challenge you to a debate, but I see now you do an even better job of dismantling yourself.

One week you attack 9/11 skepticism using every cheap shot worthy of a Limbaugh, reducing it all to a laughable caricature that you yourself must recognize as unfair. (The families who lobbied for the 9/11 Commission ended up condemning it? Really? How would a busy fellow like you know that?)

The next week, you try to compensate - for the lost subscriptions, perhaps? - by reaching for the "Art Students," as though the only intelligence agencies who could have known that 9/11 was in the works would have had to be Israeli.

Now you present this great profile of Rumsfeld in the 1990s, the little emperor of a self-appointed Shadow Government who enjoyed nothing more than playing Strangelove in a bunker, firing off all his missiles and killing everyone. (READ MORE...)