Photo Credit: Jan Hoyer, www.digitalstyledesigns.com

IN THE THIRD YEAR AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the U.S. government still has not answered the most important questions about what really happened. And the official 9/11 Commission has failed to ask.

Fighter planes were not dispatched in a timely manner to intercept the 9/11 flights - in blatant violation of longstanding, standard operating procedures. Why? Why did the U.S. chain of command (Bush, Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers) by their own admission remain inactive during the actual attacks?

On the morning of Sept. 11 itself, the U.S. military conducted scheduled wargames to rehearse scenarios that included plane hijackings and an "errant aircraft" crashing into a government building (AP, Aug. 2002).

Even granted this was a coincidence: How can high officials like Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld get away with testifying that "no one could have imagined" planes would be used as weapons against buildings?

Why won't the government identify who made profits by short-selling the stock of United Airlines, American Airlines and the WTC re-insurers in the week before the attacks? Where did the many known advance warnings of the attacks originate? Were these warnings really missed?

The Kean Commission (the official 9/11 investigation currently making headlines) was called to life only after Sept. 11th families lobbied stubbornly for 14 months. The same families have demanded the resignation of theCommission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, for his evident conflicts of interest. Although Zelikow frames the Commission's agenda, he was on the Bush 2000 transition team, worked closely with Condoleeza Rice under both Bushes, and co-authored a book with Rice in 1999. Why hasn't this story made the headlines?

For millions of people around the world, the timing and convenience of 9/11 gave rise to dark suspicions about the true origins of the attacks. These werefed by a level of government stonewalling that can be described only as a cover-up.

The terror of September 11th, 2001 gave the holders of power in the U.S. a pretext to redefine the world - to roll back the unalienable rights of American citizens - to shift trillions from butter to guns - to launch a perpetual "war on terror" - and to go ahead with invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that had been planned years before 2001.

Now, in the third year after the crime, a 9/11 Truth movement has risen in the United States and across the globe. It aims to take the dangerous ideological weapon of 9/11 out of the hands of those who have abused it - and to open the door to the hidden truths of U.S. and world politics. For too long, we have allowed the government to operate in the shadows. What has it been doing, in our name?

How can you rule yourself, when you don't know where you stand? Democracy is impossible without an informed populace. The time for merely demanding disclosure about 9/11 has passed. The government has refused to provide answers and engaged in a whitewash. Now it falls to the people to take responsibility and face what really happened on September 11, 2001.