The senior senator from Wisconsin, Republican Ron Johnson, is posing fresh questions about the deadliest attack on the United States in history, feeding into paranoid and dangerous conspiracy theories. Johnson asks as though they’re open questions: “What actually happened on 9/11? What do we know? What is being covered up?”
In an interview we’re loath to amplify, Johnson asserts that an investigation of World Trade Center Building 7 was “corrupt” and suggested its collapse was the result of a “controlled demolition.” He expresses the desire to hold Senate hearings on the topic.
We get that it’s high time in our history for conspiracy theorists to peddle nonsense, like Health Secretary Bobby Kennedy does, but as people who had friends and colleagues perish on that day, and following on editorials in this space that won a Pulitzer Prize for championing the very real health crisis faced by first responders who worked The Pile in the days and weeks after the attacks, we take this particular set of lies a bit personally.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are probably the most extensively studied events in the history of this nation. A joint congressional inquiry held 22 hearings, reviewing a half-million pages of documents, interviewing 300 individuals — and producing an 800-page report.
An independent commission to investigate the attacks held 19 days of public hearings, reviewed 2.5 million pages of documents, interviewed more than 1,200 people in 10 different countries and produced a 567-page document.