The Daily Collegian

Two planes slam into two towers, killing thousands of people. A third plane is in the air for almost an hour on a cannonball-course to Washington DC with nothing to stop it, not even the most powerful air force in the world. A fourth plane drops out of the sky with pieces of the engine ten miles down the road. As of today, there has been no formal investigation of why or how all this happened.

As the BBC and the Guardian began revealing pre-9/11 neo-conservative war drafts and blueprints of bureaucracy gutting, American news outlets had become nothing more than a tear-choking sideshow, allowing emotions and Patriotic fetishism to take precedent over hard facts and unanswered questions.

With the release of books like "Forbidden Truth," as part of America's new truth-movement, groups like Truthout and Unanswered Questions had become a popular alternative to the spoon-fed information of typical American media outlets.

As the debate for a 9/11 investigative commission heated up, the Bush administration had opposed the measure with the generic excuse of undermining the War on Terrorism. Dick Cheney even went as far as to comment that democrats who were making such inquiries were "unpatriotic." However, no matter how unpatriotic it seemed, the questions remained to be answered.

In an attempt to tranquilize the masses that began to inquire not only about the oddities, but also the absurdities of 9/11, the Bush administration hastily assembled a commission, naming Henry Kissinger in charge of the tainted investigation. The commission was started only after the Homeland Security Bill, with all its provisions, was passed. This bill is one of the reasons why this investigation is corrupted.

For example, one of the bill's provisions is designed to shield liability to airport security companies. While originally thought to be an innocent case of corporate protectionism, this provision will make it impossible to conduct an adequate investigation into security slip-ups and possible infiltration. Most of these companies are independent foreign entities with American contracts, and now that they are free from liability, have no obligation to cooperate in the 9/11 investigations.

There are more ways that this investigation has already been derailed. After Bush's executive perestroika in the name of protecting the Homeland, will there be any investigation into the FBI or CIA, considering most of the messing up was on their part? Will the Pentagon be investigated on why it failed to carry out its hijack protocol in which there was no air interception attempted at Washington for almost an hour? There probably will be, but expect Kissinger to ask more questions to the night janitors than anyone else. Even if he conducted as thorough an investigation as possible, it will be too little and too late anyway.

The investigation of 9/11 is given only 18 months to finish its work. Now, consider this: it took almost an entire year for Ken Starr to make his case about the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. That was a simple (and in retrospect, absolutely absurd) case of perjury.

Now, we are investigating a case of the largest breach of national security in the history of the United States. If you want to discuss priorities, the government spent months analyzing a stained dress. They're going to give it just six more months to come up with answers to a myriad of inconsistencies and murder in the homeland. (How patriotic!) I've seen car accidents with longer investigations than 9/11.

The gem of this investigation is Henry Kissinger himself. Kissinger, who came to the US from Nazi Germany in 1943, is one of the many new appointees to the Bush administration with questionable backgrounds. To let Kissinger investigate a massive-scale homicide, risking the accountability of the government, would be like letting Ariel Sharon investigate Israeli war crimes. Frankly, if he were a civilian, filling out a gun permit application, he would have a good chance of getting rejected.

Kissinger is especially known for his involvement in what the Pentagon would call the "collateral damage of soft targets" - or, in English - 600,000 dead peasants from "secret bombing" missions over Cambodia in 1969. In the Nixon years, he exonerated himself of accountability, claiming that the Cambodians had actually killed each other instead.

Overall, would it be unpatriotic to ask the president what he plans on accomplishing with a fruitless investigation, run by a rumored war criminal?

Actually, there are plenty of questions to ask Bush. I wouldn't mind asking Bush about his very exorbitant business dealings with the bin Laden family in the past 10 years.

Or am I just being un-American?

Mark Ostroff is a Collegian Columnist.

Information from CNN.com, www.unansweredquestions.org, and www.truthout.org; and "Forbidden Truth" by, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie were used in this column.

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