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FOR 20 years, the website Tradition in Action** has insisted Americans are living through a holy war with Islam similar to the Crusades. The opening salvo of this war, according to TIA, was the alleged attack by Muslims on the World Trade Center in 2001.

TIA argued for war with Iraq both before and afterward. (See here, here, here, here, and here.)

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11 last week, the ostensibly Catholic website was unchanged in its position: The 9/11 attack was the work of nineteen Muslims with box cutters in hijacked planes. Pete Riehm wrote:

It has been twenty years since the cowardly sneak attacks on 9/11, 2001. Americans were shocked when Islamist terrorists crashed airliners full of innocent passengers into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – and incredibly, some unknown heroes forced the terrorists’ evil designs down into a remote field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. About 3,000 people were murdered that day on American soil. It was horrific!

The United States vowed to defeat this vile enemy and root out all the terrorists around the globe who mean us harm. Much American blood and treasure has been shed the past two decades, and we have been largely successful in the primary objective of preventing any large-scale attacks on our homeland.

I do not mean to suggest that Islam is not truly dangerous, but this description is disturbingly cartoonish, especially at this late date.

It is a glaringly off account given that never once has TIA — a site which I have linked to before for its valuable articles on Catholic life — publicly examined the voluminous evidence that contradicts this official, government-sanctioned story. It is as if this evidence doesn’t exist even though, despite intense censorship, it is still easy to find.

The website has never addressed independent investigations (such as here and here) of the collapse of World Trade Center 7, a building never hit by a plane and farther from the Twin Towers than buildings unaffected. TIA has never publicly looked at the evidence that there was no significant plane wreckage at the alleged crash sites in Shanksville, Pensylvania or at the Pentagon. Nor has it publicized the testimony by thousands of architects and engineers that the Twin Towers fell in free fall, a fact consistent with planted explosives in the buildings.

These omissions would be understandable if TIA was a mainstream publication bound by the official script, but it is an ostensibly Catholic* website which advocates a counter-cultural position.

Despite its defense of the principles of Catholic patriotism, TIA has not followed a patriotic line on 9/11, taking objective evidence where it leads, despite the consequences. Looking at the website’s coverage of 9/11, one can’t help but suspect that TIA is somehow invested in the narrative of a holy war.

The publication Crisis, also ostensibly Catholic and publishing commentary on major issues, has similarly never addressed the evidence above. Last week, the 20th anniversary passed without comment. Last year it reprised an essay by Fr. George Rutler,  of St. Michael’s church in New York City. I personally find Fr. Rutler’s writings to be pompous, but perhaps his erudition impresses others. He waxes philosophical on 9/11:

The fall of the towers quaked modern man’s third error: his contempt for objective truth. The whole world said that what happened on September 11 was hideously wrong, and suddenly we realized how rarely in recent times we have heard things that are hideous and wrong called hideous and wrong.

He forgot to mention that the story the government was telling us showed great contempt for objective truth.

At The Remnant, Michael Matt reprises for the 20th anniversary his essay describing his experience in New York City in November of 2001, two months after 9/11. Much to his credit, Mr. Matt opposed the Iraq War (I regret that I privately believed it was justified at the time). However, he has never, as far as I know, acknowledged that one of the major reasons why the war was unjustified was that 9/11 was not an attack by nineteen Muslims with boxcutters.

In light of the ongoing lies, his essay on praying the rosary at Ground Zero now seems especially self indulgent.

Mr. Matt wrote in the reprised essay:

A sudden crash of the wrecking ball felt like someone had punched me in the chest. Tears burned in my eyes, as a frigid breeze whipped along those shattered streets between those pulverized buildings. The experience was similar to going along Anzio or Omaha Beaches in Normandy—your mind can think of little else save how many died in this spot.

But here in New York, the bodies are still present, lying torn and burned and buried somewhere beneath thousands of tons of unforgiving steel. How many children lost their mothers here? How many wives lost their husbands? How many families will never be the same? How many babies will never be born at all because of what happened here on Manhattan Island on September 11, 2001?

While Mr. Matt cried, honest researchers were bullied and ostracized for pointing out that fires cannot bring down fortified steel towers in explosive free fall. People have lost their jobs and their families for speaking the truth about 9/11. Many people lost their lives in a war Mr. Matt rightfully opposed, but Americans cannot come to terms with that war unless they come to terms with what happened on 9/11.

I thought Catholics were supposed to suffer for the truth.

May the most just, the most high, and the most lovable will of God be in all things done, praised and evermore exalted.

**Note: I am not a regular reader of these well-funded websites because I do not support the position that it is acceptable to attack relentlessly a man one believes to be a true pope. I presume, however, the sincerity and good intentions of their writers and realize they include many worthy articles on Catholic beliefs and daily life.

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