It is depressing how even name-brand columnists in the leading national newspapers of the country now stoop to ad hominem attacks to dismiss the very real worries of a majority of the population regarding what happened on 9/11. In the six years since that fateful day, curious facts, intriguing evidence, and scientific speculation has mounted to the point where a re-examination of the conspiracy theory propagated by the White House beginning that very day, and unchanged since, is by now fully warranted. Yet Rex Murphy, writing in the Globe and Mail on the anniversary of 9/11 equates even the most passing curiosity and most healthy skepticism with evidence that “some part at least of North American education has completely collapsed.” “It passes all powers of astonishment and depresses one’s faith in simple human rationality,” Murphy writes, “how many spend their days and nights conjuring the curdled fantasy that the American government . . . attacked its own citizens.”

It would seem to pass all of Rex Murphy’s powers also to simply read about well-documented post-WW II American history. From mind-control experiments involving LSD in hospitals in the US and Canada, to nuclear bomb tests in Nevada creating fallout over populated cities in tests to see how public health would be affected, and many more instances between and throughout this period of time, there clearly is no moratorium in the US federal government against secretly doing intentional harm to US citizens if the purpose is justifiable.

The very existence of the free press Murphy appears in, and would, I am guessing, defend to his death, is predicated on deep and abiding suspicions of state motivations. Yet, while on every other issue, he and his colleagues regard press releases by state authorities with a great deal of salt, on the biggest announcement by the biggest state in a half century, Murphy is disturbed to see any questioning at all in any press.

Willing to freely and frequently entertain notions that the White House might lie about such matters as productivity figures, housing starts, or the inclinations of foreign states, when it comes to normal, healthy, free press doubt about White House statements about 9/11, commentators like Murphy cease and desist completely.

What is the source of this malignant paralysis among commentators like Murphy and in papers like the Globe and Mail? Murphy is not alone. Otherwise gravely suspicious figures on the global scene, like Noam Chomsky, George Monbiot and Robert Fisk have also, in this one lone instance, dropped their pens and averted their gaze. The paralysis strikes even while the most facile evidence points to reasons for skepticism.

Several official inquiries into the weaknesses and failures of all branches of US intelligence to detect or avert the 9/11 disaster have documented the massive cataracts that have, over the decades, clouded America’s ability to see around the world. And yet, the story made available by the White House to the press almost immediately after the towers were struck remains the same six years later. If intelligence available to the White House was so blind prior to 9/11, how is it the White House got the story absolutely correct in a mere few hours during what must have been utter chaos?

There is scarcely a breaking story in the press from the simplest car crash to the most consequent assassination where the initial story is not to some lesser or greater degree later revised as facts and first cracks at analysis come to light. Yet this story, surely the most complex and mystifying one in half a century, and certainly the most consequent of all, has remained completely impervious to even the slightest revision from the initial description in the very real heat of the moment to today. How can it be that police at an accident scene and investigators going over an assassination attempt, and press writers dogging their steps all the way, change and modify their descriptions of what happened almost in every story there is in the papers, yet in this instance, not one element of the original story has been subject to revision?

That alone would normally cause the typically skeptical and curious commentators in the media to raise an eyebrow, to have a closer look. And indeed they do and have, on matters to do with White House statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, on the real goals of Tehran, on Israeli claims in clashes with Palestinians, and in absolutely every other claim made by the White House—particularly this White House, described in Alan Greenspan’s recent memoirs as grievously ideological and surprisingly incurious.

Yet, writers like Murphy shutter themselves tight against the slightest breeze of curiosity about 9/11, apparently content with a story line emanating from a White House they know to be filled with congenital liars on just about every other major topic. It can be nothing less than some mass psychosis that has gripped the minds of writers like Murphy, possibly triggered perhaps by the sheer scale of the event in both a physical sense and in an intellectual sense. And possibly more because of the scale in the intellectual sense.

Consider how just about everyone who writes for newspapers has reported in great detail their fascination with the physical spectacle of the grand towers being hit and collapsing, and yet few have ventured into reporting in any detail at all their feelings about what the event means in the parallel world of intellectual history.

By definition, no psychotic person is able to diagnose their own psychosis. Far less would a psychotic person be able to detect their psychosis if everyone around them is also psychotic. But we can detect the psychosis; it is evident in writers like Murphy who lash out in broad swipes at the whole education system, for example, or in his mad round-house swings at “the despicable conspiracy-mongering of various obsessional Bush-haters, rabid anti-Americans, and assorted monomaniacs,” all part of his angry blinded attempt to find the source of the bugs running around his brain.

It is an intellectual psychosis, brought on by a staggering intellectual crisis. One has to be aware on an intellectual level of the myriad ramifications of 9/11 to be at risk of tripping over into intellectual psychosis because of it. Among the majority of the population, the questioning of official versions of events of 9/11 is not so burdened; the average person is able to see on face-value problematic holes in the official explanations. But writers in newspapers, usually cut from the intellectual cloth, cannot so easily admit what is before their very own eyes because they can more easily trace out what ominously flows from the facts forward and backward and up and down.

On the intellectual level, 9/11 is simply too big for most intellectuals to analyze. Too much of the house of cards would fall were that one to be yanked from the very base where it stands. And so as evidence of a different story from the official story mounts, and as implications of those changed parts of the story multiply, as the risk to a whole way of thinking grows exponentially, the solution to the increasingly irrepressible urge to intellectually scream is found with the sock in the mouth that psychosis provides.

Relax, I want to tell Rex Murphy. I know the stress he is under, I grasp the enormity of what is being asked of him, and the difficulty someone of his intellect would have in taking a step back and dispassionately and disinterestedly having a look at some of the evidence that is fresher than what was on offer on the first day. I want to assure him the implications, though surely great, are not as insurmountable as they might appear. Many intellectuals have over time come to grips with the truth that elements in the US government (whose cabinet, after all, unlike all other modern democracies in the world, is entirely unelected), may not have the best public interest in mind, and that sometimes, for those elements, massive death, even, can be justified. (Recall, for example, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s comment that 500,000 deaths of children in Iraq due to US sanctions in the 1990s, a figure she did not dispute, was justified in the cause of containing Hussein’s weapons program—even after she acknowledged that most of the suspected weapons programs did not actually exist.)

Murphy will find, when he comes in from the cold, that nothing really changes when you finally throw suspicion on the White House account of what happened on 9/11. Instead, a lot of disparate facts fall into place with a resounding click within a well-established pattern when you do. Recovery from the psychosis infecting all the media today begins with a reminder that the free press has always been predicated on a simple, constant skepticism toward all official statements. Remember, Rex?