In his May 22 “On Point” column, Rocky Mountain News editorial page editor Vincent Carroll misleadingly cited the response to a Rasmussen Reports poll question to support his assertion that Americans increasingly “consider their elected leaders murderous criminals.” In fact, as Colorado Media Matters has noted, the flawed question -- “Did Bush Know About the 9/11 Attacks in Advance?” -- was subject to misinterpretation on the part of respondents who were aware that before September 11, 2001, President Bush had received a CIA briefing about possible terrorist attacks.

Carroll cited the poll in criticizing author and political activist Howard Zinn, stating that Zinn “may be the most influential left-wing intellectual in America” and asserting that “authors such as Zinn” are “poisonous.” Carroll noted that Zinn was quoted offering support for questions posed by author David Ray Griffin in Debunking 9/11 Debunking (Interlink Publishing Group, March 2007), which posits that the official explanation for the 9-11 attacks represents a Bush administration-orchestrated conspiracy.

From Carroll's column, “A baleful influence,” in the May 22 edition of the Rocky Mountain News:

Howard Zinn may be the most influential left-wing intellectual in America. If not, he certainly gives Noam Chomsky a run for his money given the remarkable reach of Zinn's People's History of the United States, a staple on numerous reading lists for high school and college courses (including one in which my daughter is now enrolled).

Maybe some of those professors and teachers will want to reassess their infatuation with the Marxist Zinn now that he has penned a blurb for a new book by a leader of the “9/11 truth movement” -- those fickle folks who refuse to believe that al-Qaida brought down the Twin Towers.

“I believe that David Ray Griffin's provocative questions about 9/11 deserve to be investigated and addressed,” Zinn writes on the back of Griffin's Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory. (Members of the “truth movement” helpfully keep me stocked with their latest salvos in case my resistance to paranoid fables happens to dissolve.)

In case you couldn't guess, the “official conspiracy theory” mocked in Griffin's book is the idea that hijacked planes brought down the towers, smashed into the Pentagon and crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The “truth movement” thinks it knows better than to accept this straightforward version of history. “The evidence that 9/11 was an inside job is overwhelming,” Griffin declares.

[...]

Will this theory someday worm its way into the best-selling People's History, too? The 2003 hardback edition still accepts the hijackers as 9/11's culprits. But since Zinn seems to blame the United States for most of the world's maladies anyway, he might as well point the finger at it for 9/11, too.

And a gullible populace

Then again, maybe a People's History that declared 9/11 an “inside job” would actually sell better than the previous editions, given the increasing tendency of Americans to consider their elected leaders murderous criminals.

As hard as it is to believe -- hard for me, anyway -- a recent Rasmussen Reports survey found that “Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39 percent say he did not know, and 26 percent are not sure. ...”

“Overall, 22 percent of all voters believe the president knew about the attacks in advance. ... Young Americans are more likely than their elders to believe the president or the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.”

Of course young people are more likely to believe such claptrap: They've spent more time in the poisonous company of authors such as Zinn.

According to Rasmussen Reports, respondents were asked, “Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?” Twenty-two percent replied that he did, 55 percent that he did not, and 22 percent were not sure. According to the poll, “Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.” The poll further states:

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Rasmussen Reports conducted the poll April 30-May 1; it had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.

As Media Matters for America pointed out, National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg in his May 15 nationally syndicated column noted the relatively high percentages of Democrats who responded affirmatively to the poll question and admitted that it was ambiguous. “Many Democrats are probably merely saying that Bush is incompetent or that he failed to connect the dots or that they're just answering in a fit of pique,” Goldberg wrote. In other words, respondents merely could have been saying that Bush received ample warning of possible attacks.

In fact, Bush received a briefing on August 6, 2001, titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US,” which indicated that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden wanted to launch terrorist attacks on U.S. cities, that members of his terrorist network had lived in or traveled to the United States for years, that bin Laden had previously said he wanted to hijack an American aircraft, and that “FBI information ... indicate[d] patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” Investigative journalist Ron Suskind wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon & Schuster, June 2006) that Bush responded to the report by telling the CIA briefer, “All right, you've covered your ass, now.”