‘The 9/11 Files’: Tucker Carlson treads cautiously in earnest attempt to spark new investigation

An in-depth look at Carlson’s series and where it leaves us on the path to a new 9/11 investigation.

By Piers Robinson and Ted Walter

Originally Published at IC9/11 here and at IC911’s Substack here.

In December 2024 — just days after the overthrow of the Syrian government by Western-backed, Al Qaeda-linked jihadists and one month before Donald Trump’s return to the White House — Tucker Carlson interviewed Professor Jeffrey Sachs about America’s disastrous post-9/11 foreign policy. Carlson’s unstated but clear purpose was to convince Trump to chart a more peaceful path than his predecessors. It quickly became one of his most watched videos, drawing over 36 million views on X.

In our analysis, published a few days after that interview, we praised Sachs and Carlson for their critique of America’s forever wars and its malignant deep state. But we also lamented that they stopped just short of confronting the fundamental question of whether 9/11, like so many other events used to launch wars throughout history, was a false flag. We concluded by imploring them to take the next step, suggesting that they too — and not just the incoming president — had the power to change the course of history with their influence.

In short order, Carlson did just that (whether he had read our piece or not). In late December, we asked a mutual contact to pitch him on interviewing former US congressman Curt Weldon, who had just launched an effort with Firefighters for 9/11 Truth and other groups to get President Trump to form a new 9/11 commission. Carlson agreed and three months later flew Weldon to his home in Florida to interview him.

Carlson’s conversation with Weldon quickly became another one of his most watchedand talked about videos. By any objective reading, it signified that the so-called “Overton Window,” or “sphere of legitimate controversy,” had finally and firmly opened wide enough to admit the once-taboo subject of 9/11 truth. The interview not only inspired Carlson’s documentary series but also prompted Senator Ron Johnson, chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to announce his intention to hold hearings on 9/11.

In turn, this surge of momentum led to the Turning the Tide conference in September (organized by our organization, the International Center for 9/11 Justice, together with five partner groups). The three-day event in Washington, DC, brought Johnson, Weldon, Dennis Kucinich, and several other more mainstream figures to the stage alongside many leading voices in the 9/11 truth movement. Carlson was scheduled to appear via livestream but withdrew following the assassination of his friend Charlie Kirk just hours before the conference began.

Rather suddenly — though built on a gradual uptick that started with public skepticism of the Covid narrative and grew with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza — the 9/11 truth movement reached an unprecedented level of acceptance in the mainstream. This development understandably raised questions, most notably and pointedly from writer and podcaster James Corbett, about how long-time activists should respond to the sudden embrace of 9/11 truth by prominent commentators who had once ignored or ridiculed them.

Corbett’s widely read first piece on this question urged vigilance about the risk that growing skepticism of 9/11 could be diverted toward a “limited hangout.” His more recent piece, by contrast, encouraged a “Yes, and” approach: Rather than reflexively dismissing late-arriving critics like Tucker Carlson or Ron Johnson for not going deep enough, we should welcome their contributions and expand on them with our own knowledge.

It is in the spirit of both approaches — vigilance and “Yes, and” — that we reflect on the important five-part series Carlson has released over the past month.

The starting point for The 9/11 Files is that the US government has been lying to the American people about 9/11. The question then is what exactly are they lying about? As we shall discuss, a central theme that courses through the series is the tension between several competing explanations for 9/11 (besides the one promoted by the 9/11 Commission). They can be delineated as follows:

1. That colossal failure on the part of the US government allowed the attacks to happen. Here, the untold truth is that a level of incompetence amounting to criminal negligence has been kept hidden from the American public. A popular addition to this explanation is that Saudi officials — all the way up to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US and friend of the Bush family — aided the alleged hijackers without the knowledge of US authorities.

2. That elements within the US government and allied foreign governments knew Al Qaeda was going to carry out an attack on the US and decided to “let it happen” — the so-called LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) explanation.

3. That elements within the US government and allied foreign governments knew Al Qaeda was going to carry out an attack on the US, decided to let it happen, and additionally took active steps to ensure it did happen. This explanation can be understood as one version of the so-called MIHOP (make it happen on purpose) theory. The late professor of peace studies Graeme MacQueen referred to this type of scenario as a “managed war trigger.”

4. That elements within the US government and allied foreign governments planned and orchestrated the attack and blamed it on Al Qaeda — the so-called “false flag” thesis. This thesis also fits the MIHOP categorization but clearly goes one step further than the third explanation by postulating that the entire attack was staged. MacQueen referred to this scenario as a “manufactured war trigger.”

For clarity, we will refer to these explanations, respectively, as the “incompetence,” “LIHOP” and “MIHOP” explanations. LIHOP and MIHOP obviously involve varying degrees of intentionality and indeed conspiracy.

How does the series navigate these competing explanations, which Carlson claims in his interviews to have no position on? Much to the disappointment of many in the 9/11 truth movement, the series decidedly errs on the side of incompetence — even though the facts presented weigh very much in the direction of intentionality and even though Carlson, as evidenced by the questions he poses at the end of the final two episodes, clearly suspects something far more deliberate. The net result is the impression that Carlson has chosen to tread very cautiously, defaulting to a politically safe narrative of incompetence while at the same time providing just enough information to open viewers’ minds to the possibility of the LIHOP and MIHOP explanations.

Despite the series predominately favoring incompetence, we suspect Carlson actually leans toward believing that 9/11 was an inside job — a remarkable transformation given his infamous attacks on truth advocates two decades ago — and that he genuinely hopes to bring about a new investigation, a goal we share. Therefore, we think the series should ultimately be judged by how much it actually contributes to that end.

With that criterion in mind, we will offer our take on what the series does and what impact it is likely to have.

Episodes 1, 2, 3 & 5: Incompetence versus Intentionality

There is little doubt that a good deal of the material shown in the series will be eye-opening for the millions of people who have given little thought to the veracity of the official story, which claims that the US was the victim of an unpreventable surprise attack by Al Qaeda. See one example below from noted British journalist Jonathan Cook, who historically has been hesitant to engage with 9/11 truth:

“Episode 1: The CIA’s Secret Mission Gone Wrong” focuses on events prior to 9/11 and devotes significant airtime to Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who worked in the Osama bin Laden Unit, also known as Alec Station, based at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Viewers learn that the CIA knew about and were following at least two of the alleged hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, while working hard to prevent the FBI from learning too much about them. The two men obtained visas to enter the US at the American Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and, according to one FBI agent quoted in a Guantanamo court filing that surfaced in 2023, these visas were issued “to facilitate the operation run by the Saudi’s GID [General Intelligence Presidency] and the CIA team at UBL [Osama bin Laden] station.” Viewers also discover that a Saudi intelligence operative, Omar al-Bayoumi, was in contact with both of these individuals, supplying them with finances and other support, and that he was connected to the aforementioned Bandar bin Sultan, who in turn was close to the Bush family (earning him the nickname Bandar Bush). In fact, it was Bandar’s wife whose bank accounts were used to funnel money to al-Bayoumi. The linkage between the alleged hijackers, the CIA, and a close US ally should disabuse anyone who still believed going into the series that 9/11 was somehow unpreventable or a complete surprise to US authorities.

“Episode 2: The Cover-Up Commission,” which turns to the post-9/11 investigations, encourages further questioning. Here, the series presents damning evidence showing that the 9/11 Commission was established with extreme reluctance by the Bush administration. The administration’s initial attempt to install Henry Kissinger as chairman folded after it emerged that he had conflicts of interest stemming from his business with the bin Laden family. Kristen Breitweiser, one of the “Jersey Girls”(the informal name given to the group of four 9/11 widows who courageously pushed for the investigation) recounts how when one of them confronted Kissinger about these conflicts at a meeting in his office, he spilled his coffee seemingly on purpose, dodged the question, and resigned the next day. He was replaced by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former US representative Lee Hamilton, who as chair of the 1987 House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran played a central role in preventing accountability for the Iran-Contra affair.

The commission’s executive director was a Bush administration insider, Philip Zelikow, who, as Episode 2 makes clear, maintained tight control over what was allowed to be investigated and tried to exploit the commission to build the case for the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. In an investigation “set up to fail,” as the commission co-chairs later wrote, Zelikow was the chief orchestrator of its corruption. By the end of the episode, viewers are left in no doubt that the US government had something — probably an awful lot — to hide.

“Episode 3: They Could Have Stopped It” documents how, time after time, both the Clinton and Bush administrations blocked plans to “take out” bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization. Michael Scheuer, chief of Alec Station from 1996 to 1999, recounts how he was instructed by CIA Director George Tenet to stop requesting information from John Brennan (CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) about bin Laden’s background. Scheuer then muses:

Just because I was the chief of operations on Osama bin Laden didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody else working on the same issue in the opposite direction. And as it turned out, the opposite direction carried the day, with the approval of presidents.

According to Scheuer, there were no less than ten opportunities during his time at Alec Station to either capture or kill bin Laden. The pattern of missed opportunities and inaction carried through to the summer of 2001, when multiple warnings and briefings were issued about an imminent attack.

This fact pattern inevitably paints a picture that is highly suspicious. CIA contact with the alleged hijackers, repeated inaction when the opportunity arose to take out the Al Qaeda network, and a demonstrably compromised investigation all point toward nefarious goings-on and ill intent. Even in the most conservative estimation, these facts must surely open the minds of many viewers to believing either a LIHOP scenario, in which elements within the US government knew about an imminent attack and looked the other way, or the “managed war trigger” version of the MIHOP explanation, in which elements within the US government took active steps to facilitate the attack.

However, the framing of these episodes, whether through their titles, or through Carlson’s narration, or through comments by the interview subjects, tends to avoid these avenues of thought. Instead, the audience is directed toward the idea that all of this might just represent one vast and epic blunder by US authorities and, in particular, the CIA. For instance, Mark Rossini is shown in Episode 1 angrily attributing blame to the CIA for bringing alleged hijackers Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar into the US in order to try and recruit them as sources. Another FBI source is quoted as saying that “the CIA’s operation may have spun out of control.” Kristen Breitweiser­ (to take nothing away from her monumental efforts while grieving the loss of her husband) refers to Dick Cheney’s “failures that day” and the perceived need to protect Bush’s reputation during his re-election campaign. Meanwhile, the perpetually thwarted Alec Station chief Michael Scheuer is left saying “to me it’s a mystery” when reflecting on repeated missed opportunities to “take out” bin Laden.

“Episode 5: From Tragedy to Tyranny,” which primarily features former high-ranking CIA official John Kiriakou, mostly reinforces the incompetence theme. The one exception is Carlson’s closing monologue, in which he asks a series of hard-hitting questions that a new 9/11 commission should seek to answer — all of which imply suspicion of intentionality. But most of the final episode is devoted to detailing the expansion of domestic surveillance (via the PATRIOT Act and PRISM) and the use of torture following 9/11. The tone is critical, of course, and the episode rightly emphasizes that the case against KSM, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, rests on evidence obtained through torture — making it entirely unreliable. However, the episode largely orbits around Kiriakou’s narrative that the attacks happened as alleged by the US government, with incompetence largely being the only vice on display. That Episode 5 mostly reverts to this narrative is unfortunate given where Episode 4 had just gone.

Episode 4: Evidence of Conspiracy

In “Episode 4: From Cover-up to Conspiracy,” the series departs from its default narrative of incompetence to explore a limited sampling of evidence that points more unambiguously toward the LIHOP and MIHOP explanations.

Carlson starts the episode by saying “If you wanted conspiracy theories to flourish after the 9/11 attacks, here’s what you’d do” and he goes on to list a series of actions that the US government actually took after 9/11 (for example, preventing a real investigation, immediately shipping rubble from Ground Zero overseas, and invading a country with no connection to the attack). It’s a clever and appropriately scornful way of saying that the public’s suspicions about 9/11 are entirely understandable — and perhaps even on the money — in light of the government’s actions.

Next, Carlson makes a seemingly related but actually quite separate point. He posits that officials may have wanted “conspiracy theories” to thrive in order to distract from more obvious truths, citing “directed energy weapons” as one such “far out” theory. Although actions such as destroying crime scene evidence clearly weren’t taken for the specific purpose of feeding far-fetched “conspiracy theories,” there is no doubt that certain theories have been disseminated to misguide the public.

Carlson then goes on to claim that the obvious truths being overshadowed by these misleading theories are “the government’s central role in facilitating the attacks” — no problem there — and “the extreme levels of incompetence that made it possible for bin Laden . . . to pull off the most sophisticated terror attacks in history.” This is an unfortunate assertion on Carlson’s part and the only time he makes it in the entire series. It’s also puzzling given that earlier this year he mocked the idea of bin Laden planning 9/11. It is as if he wants to make absolutely clear this is where he stands before he delves into more conspiracy-oriented territory.

Sure enough, despite having all but affirmed the official story seconds earlier, Carlson then opines, “On the other hand, not all of the wildest theories about 9/11 are crazy. Some of them raise legitimate questions about what happened” (questions which, when correctly answered, undermine the narrative that bin Laden planned 9/11).

The focus then turns to the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, where we spend fifteen minutes of the half-hour episode (a sizeable ten percent of the entire series). Although Carlson has only enough time to skim the surface and although he injects an unwarranted level of uncertainty about the cause of the collapse (see below), we must commend him for addressing Building 7 at all. Although the demolition of Building 7 has become more widely recognized in recent years, Carlson’s willingness to go there will undoubtedly bring the issue to millions more people and at the same time signal to those already aware that the topic is now fair game for public discussion.

Among the strengths of the Building 7 section is Carlson’s emphasis on the rapid removal and destruction of the debris, which made it impossible to conduct a proper investigation. One might suggest this was done out of incompetence or recklessness, but the record shows that investigators and victims’ family members urged the City of New York early on and repeatedly to stop recycling the steel, to no avail. The only logical inference is that there was intent to prevent the steel from being examined.

Carlson also does a good job of concisely explaining the collapse scenario put forward by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and asking why, if the collapse initiated with the failure of a single column, the building would fall so symmetrically. He cites the computer modeling study by civil engineering professor Leroy Hulsey at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which found that fires could not have caused the collapse, as well as the 2009 paper published in the Open Chemical Physics Journal documenting the discovery of unreacted nano-thermitic material in four independently gathered samples of World Trade Center dust. He also ends the section with what has proven to be one of the most salient arguments for the general public: the BBC reporting the collapse of Building 7 a full twenty-three minutes before it happened.

Notwithstanding the huge service the series does by covering Building 7, there are two key shortcomings where a “Yes, and” response is called for.

The first is that Carlson seems to go so far out of his way to avoid committing fully to the controlled demolition hypothesis that he invents a reason to question it. After laying out the case for controlled demolition in a reasonably fair and cogent way, he claims:

One issue with the controlled demolition hypothesis is that the widely circulated video of the building coming down is selectively edited. In fact, the building did not exactly collapse all at once. It came down in two stages. What you’re seeing now is the full video of the collapse. It shows the penthouse collapsing first and then very quickly the rest of the building going. The unedited video leaves more questions than answers. It calls into question the official NIST narrative, but it doesn’t conclusively show a controlled demolition either.

This is a grave misstep on Carlson’s part. First of all, the engineers and scientists who have studied Building 7’s collapse are certainly aware of — and pay considerable attention to — the collapse of the east penthouse. Second, the fact there were two stages to the collapse is not in any way inconsistent with controlled demolition. To the contrary, demolitions often involve taking down different parts of a building in sequence.

In the case of Building 7, the fact that the collapse of the east penthouse and the global collapse occurred eight seconds apart without any visible collapse or deformation of the structure between those two events strongly supports the controlled demolition hypothesis. Indeed, NIST’s own computer model (shown below) demonstrates that if the column underneath the east penthouse had failed low in the building, per NIST’s scenario, and set off a progressive collapse of the entire structure, it would have caused massive visible deformation of the exterior before the entire building began to come down. The only thing that can account for the clean two-stage collapse is the isolated removal of the columns below the east penthouse — probably high in the building, thus limiting the internal damage and stresses to a few upper floors — followed by the synchronized removal of the rest of the columns eight seconds later.

Figures 4-44, 4-45, 4-46 from NIST’s NCSTAR 1-9A show NIST’s computer model animation at approximately three seconds before global collapse, at the start of the global collapse, and two seconds into the global collapse, respectively, with massive deformation visible. In contrast, video of the collapse shows almost no deformation.

This scenario is corroborated by audio evidence of explosions a split second before the east penthouse begins to fall as well as by two seismic events that correspond perfectly with the start of the east penthouse collapse and the start of the global collapse, respectively (see Section 5 of “The Instantaneous Free Fall of World Trade Center Building 7 and NIST’s Attempt to Hide It”).

NIST attributes the first seismic event (at 17:20:42 in the table below) to the alleged cascade of floor failures in the northeast corner of the building, from the 13^th floor to down to the 5^th floor, that purportedly allowed the column below the east penthouse to buckle and precipitated the east penthouse’s collapse (see NIST’s computer model animations below):

However, it is preposterous to suggest that several floor sections falling onto a floor that is five stories above ground could transmit enough energy to the ground to generate seismic activity that would travel 34 kilometers to the nearest seismic station. Highlighting the absurdity of this claim, NIST makes the opposite claim for the seismic activity that accompanied the Twin Towers’ destruction, saying “a seismic signal . . . is not generated until a substantial portion of the building debris hits the ground.” (See Appendix B of NIST’s NCSTAR 1-9.) Similarly, it makes no sense that the second seismic event (at 17:20:50 in the table below) would occur at the start of the global collapse rather than later in the collapse when more of the debris began to hit the ground — unless, of course, it was caused by explosions.

Table B-4 from NIST’s NCSTAR 1-9 (abridged to exclude seismic events earlier in the day) lists two seismic events that correspond to the start of the east penthouse collapse and global collapse, respectively.

This misstep might have been avoided had Carlson and his team drawn on the knowledge of experts who have advanced the controlled demolition hypothesis. They also could have benefitted from advice regarding NIST’s dubious arguments surrounding the supposed lack of explosion sounds and the amount of thermite required to destroy the building, both of which the series presents uncritically. In fact, there is strong audio, seismic, and eyewitness evidence of explosions (not only earlier in the day, as reported by Barry Jennings and Michael Hess, but during the collapse). With regard to the amount of thermite needed, thermite cutting devices could have been used to weaken key points in the building without the need to apply 100 pounds of thermite around a single column, as NIST claimed.

It appears that Carlson and his team sought to come off as balanced and ultimately undecided on whether Building 7 was demolished, and so they injected an unwarranted level of uncertainty when the evidence strongly points in one direction. In an interview with Saagar Enjeti, Carlson acknowledged that his team concluded fire did not bring down Building 7. It seems likely, then, that they opted for a more cautious presentation in the documentary for strategic reasons.

The other notable shortcoming is Carlson’s avoidance of the Twin Towers’ destruction. This omission is underscored by his emphasis on the removal of debris, the majority of which came from the Twin Towers, and by the fact that he references the aforementioned paper documenting the discovery of nano-thermitic material in four World Trade Center dust samples. As he narrates, one of those samples was collected just minutes after the second tower went down, meaning it could not have come from Building 7. Another originated from an apartment south of the World Trade Center complex whose windows were blown in when the South Tower came down, filling the space with copious amounts of dust that almost certainly made up most of the sample. In all likelihood, most or all of the dust in the four samples came from the Twin Towers, making Carlson’s reference to the nano-thermite paper in connection with Building 7 misplaced. Given that he has cited the nano-thermite paper widely, we would encourage him to use it to begin discussing the demolition of the Twin Towers.

Putting aside his misapplication of the nano-thermite paper, the omission of the Twin Towers is unfortunate since the evidence for their demolition is just as strong as the evidence for Building 7’s demolition. Moreover, it was through this act that the perpetrators murdered the great majority of the victims and traumatized hundreds of millions of people watching on live television. A Tucker Carlson Network email blast announcing the release of Episode 4 asked the question, “Could whatever caused [Building 7’s] demise also be responsible for the more famous implosions hours earlier?” Regrettably, Carlson chose not to explore this question — perhaps deciding that a more gradual approach, outside the confines of the series, was the way to go.

The other two issues Carlson examines in any depth are the “Dancing Israelis” and the irregular spike in put options on airlines and other companies impacted by the attack. The former concerns the fact that five Israeli intelligence-linked men were seen celebrating as the Twin Towers burned and were then arrested and held in custody for 71 days before being quietly deported back to Israel. The latter concerns the fact that known individuals, whose identities remain secret, placed an unusually high volume of trading bets prior to 9/11 that the stocks of United Airlines and American Airlines would go down. Both of these matters are important, of course, but take us little beyond the LIHOP explanation (though the purchasers of the put options, if publicly revealed and investigated, could prove to be connected to the conspiracy or at least provide valuable information about it). Moreover, it is possible to see both of these examples of foreknowledge as compatible with the incompetence explanation. Specifically, Israeli agents and traders might have had foreknowledge of an event that US officials and intelligence agencies missed because of their incompetence, thus exonerating the US from complicity.

Other, stronger evidence for the MIHOP explanations comes from studying the actual events of that day and, in particular, what happened in the skies: the implausibility of the hijacking narrative, the demonstrably inauthentic phone calls describing the purported hijacking events, highly challenging flight maneuvers ostensibly being performed by amateur pilots, and “coincidental” military exercises, which evidently served to disrupt US air defenses on 9/11. In addition, the actions and behaviors of senior US officials, which indicate their involvement in coordinating or enabling the events of that day, provide powerful support for MIHOP explanations. Unfortunately, Carlson does not address these evidence areas, other than making a brief comment about the piloting of the planes, where he asks: “How hard, by the way, would it be for amateur pilots with only basic aviation training and no experience flying jumbo jets to navigate to lower Manhattan and crash into a building?” A very good question — and one we encourage him to explore based on the evidence being produced by our flight simulator study.

Expanding the ‘Sphere of Legitimate 9/11 Controversy’

Overall, then, owing to Carlson’s unique stature and position in the present political landscape — arguably standing at the borderline between legitimate and illegitimate discourse — The 9/11 Files serves to expand what might be called the “sphere of legitimate 9/11 controversy” further than ever before. However, because of his caution, perhaps calibrated to land the series where he sees the current boundaries of legitimate controversy lying, Carlson defines the boundary as a place where fact patterns consistent with intentionality still need to be packaged in a narrative of incompetence (Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 5), where ambiguous evidence regarding the LIHOP explanation is foregrounded (“Dancing Israelis” and put options), and where evidence pointing clearly to MIHOP must be undercut by an unwarranted level of uncertainty (Building 7) or left entirely unaddressed.

Working from the assumption that Carlson believes 9/11 was an inside job and that he sincerely wants to bring about a new investigation, it may well be that he has made the right calculation: In the long run, presenting a fact pattern consistent with intentionality together with evidence of Building 7’s demolition may be enough to push most of his viewers who aren’t already there into contemplating MIHOP explanations without alienating them or subjecting himself to being called a “conspiracy theorist.”

However, the risk, at least in the short term, is that by setting the boundary where he has Carlson either (1) creates a boundary that his peers are inclined to remain within, (2) leaves them confused about his central argument, or (3) simply underwhelms them. After all, how outraged can we really get 24 years later about 9/11 happening due to incompetence? This is one reason we suspect that Carlson’s personal position goes much further — for would he really go to the trouble of making this documentary and demanding a new investigation simply to expose incompetence? It may be that by exercising such caution and not presenting what he actually thinks — at least for now — he has not given his peers enough reason to be sufficiently outraged that they will join him in calling for a new investigation.

Indeed, we see evidence of all of the above in the interviews Carlson has done about his series — and, not incidentally, in the interviews we have done about his series.

For instance, in an interview with Glenn Greenwald, he and Greenwald dance gingerly around the frequency with which governments cover up mere incompetence versus more sinister acts. Carlson tries to make the case, though very gently and almost timidly, that the latter does happen. Also, in both the Greenwald and Enjeti interviews, Carlson boils down the core finding of his series to foreknowledge, which seems to be the midway point between the predominate narrative of the series and where he probably personally stands. Enjeti, already sympathetic to 9/11 truth from his youth, seems to sense where Carlson has set the boundary and goes with it. Meanwhile, Greenwald seems to exhibit all three responses: taking Carlson’s cue on where the boundary lies, being unsure about where Carlson actually stands, and seeming underwhelmed by the topic compared to the intensity he often exudes about issues of the day.

Meanwhile, one of us (Piers Robinson) has given two interviews about the series since its release — one with Jackson Hinkle and one with Jamarl Thomas. With Hinkle, who was already sympathetic to 9/11 truth, the effect of the series was straightforward: its very existence gave him a reason to speak more openly about 9/11 truth, which he had only rarely done before. With Thomas, the shift was more striking. In a previous interview with Robinson, he had resisted the issue, even interrupting to make clear his disagreement with Robinson’s comments on 9/11. This time, however, he reacted with openness and astonishment — both at the incompetence suggested in the early episodes and at the possibility of MIHOP. As Carlson seems to have intended, Thomas emerged with a new sense that something was profoundly wrong about 9/11 — and for the first time he was willing to put MIHOP on the table.

Therefore, on the whole, we should be encouraged by Carlson’s series and hopeful about its impact — in particular on people who are only beginning to question 9/11. It is worth remembering that the process of discovering the truth about 9/11 can be an arduous and painful journey, perhaps even more so for those who have resisted questioning it for so long. It may be that Carlson’s approach is exactly what was needed for the largest share of his audience to take the biggest step forward.

Perhaps Carlson’s most valuable contribution is simply his emphatic insistence that getting to the bottom of 9/11 still matters — and remains possible if the political will exists. He closes his final episode by saying:

It’s been more than 20 years now and we still don’t know the simple truth about 9/11. But we can know. A new commission could find out — an honest commission, a non-partisan commission, a commission dedicated to protecting the United States could find out. . . . The American people have a right, an absolute right to those answers. They should be outraged by the lying, and they should demand to know what actually happened on September 11^th.

Amid the never-ending frenzy of discourse on social media regarding more current topics and given the notable lack of interest in 9/11 from journalists and political figures whom you would expect to be the most concerned, Carlson’s message that 9/11 remains central to our society is urgently needed.

With Carlson having expanded the sphere of legitimate 9/11 controversy further than ever before, we find ourselves back where we were last year in December: once again urging him — and anyone with a platform, no matter how small or large — to take the next step.

As the 25^th anniversary nears, it is time to dispense with the boundaries entirely and to discuss openly and honestly whether elements within the US government and its allies planned and orchestrated 9/11.