At 5pm on September 11, 2001 World Trade Center Towers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 were damaged but still standing. Nevertheless, earlier that morning the lower Manhattan skyline had changed forever. The smoke, fumes and dust of Towers 1 and 2 had already firmly established in American minds the smoke and mirrors affect designed and desired by the brainchildren of the attackers.

The two main objectives of any building demolition in populated areas are, one, to break up and pulverize the building into small manageable pieces of dust and debris, and, two, to put the building debris into its footprint. That’s why demolition experts can pull down buildings that stand close to other buildings without damaging them.

There was no question in the minds of the “planners” that it was crucial that the idea of “demolition” not be allowed to be planted in the public’s mind. It was essential that the idea of “collapse” was firmly planted and take root. The planners needed to buy valuable patriotic time and would deal with the obviousness of the demolition characteristics of the attack at a later time. The planners were banking on the patriotic gullibility and instilled fear and anger of most Americans to censor and demonize those who would disagree with the official report. The planners understood us better than we understand ourselves.

It’s easy to say that we were attacked from without. The reality is that we attacked from within and without.

It’s easy to write-off 9/11 theorists as conspiracy-nuts, but the people who attacked us had to be a part of their own conspiracy plan, otherwise they would not have been able to engineer an attack. Of course, no one calls the attack conspirators conspiracy-nuts. Only the people who question the “official story” are called that.

Such are the complications, obfuscations and deceptions of that day, that it’s no wonder too many people cannot see the forest for the trees. The obtuse thinking around Building 7 is a good example. At 5:20pm on September 11th, Tower 7 in an identical manner to Towers 1 and 2 was pulled into its “footprint” in ten seconds.  Yet, Tower 7 escaped a direct fireball impact. Could a planned special ops have wired those three towers for expert demolition to coincide with their advanced intelligence of an imminent low-tech plane-impact attack? You bet they could.

At the beginning of each year we resolve to make changes to better ourselves and our world. Of all the chances to change we have missed in life, it is terrible to think that, now when we are besieged by loss of freedoms and under surveillance beyond anything even Orwell could have imagined, that the naked truth of what happened that day escapes us in the shadowy mists of patriotism born of deception.

Vidda Crochetta is a longtime activist, writer and commentator. He is the author of “Boomers’ War,” a novel about the last three summers in the 1960’s antiwar, drug and bisexual culture in Greenwich Village, New York City, where the author spent most of his adult life. Crochetta currently lives in the foothills of the Wantastiquet river basin in Southern Vermont.