The 9/11 Truther movement wants you to know it's doing fine

Eleven years after its birth as a strange stepchild of the response to the attacks on 9/11, the 9/11 Truth movement remains firmly confined to the political fringe. But the truthers retain the ability to rile people up, and on Tuesday a half dozen of them took their case to the Lower Manhattan neighborhood in the shadow of the rising Freedom Tower. …

“I think the movement is definitely speeding up,” said Alex K., a reedy young protester who didn’t want his last name used. Alex hails from Ohio but lives in New York now. “A lot of people go comment on news stories online — that’s what I do. We try to wake people up.” Alex said it was his first time visiting the area where the towers fell on the anniversary of 9/11, though he became heavily interested in truther theories two years ago. …

In fact, polling has shown that many people believe the government either bungled the run-up to the attacks or was hiding something, but relatively few believe that it was a staged event from top to bottom. A New York Times / CBS News poll from 2006 showed that 53% of Americans believed Bush administration officials were “mostly telling the truth but hiding something” about what they knew before the attacks, while 28% believed they were “mostly lying.” A Scripps Howard poll conducted by Ohio University in 2006 showed that 77% of respondents thought it “unlikely” that bombs had already been planted in the Twin Towers, and 59% found it unlikely that “federal officials either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to prevent them because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.”