The blind flagwaving is receding into the rearview mirror of history. So too is the righteous rage over suspicious questions about government behavior in the midst of tragedy.

My friend spoke out in a supermarket checkout line the other night that he didn’t believe what U.S. political leaders were saying about 9/11. To his surprise, everyone in the crowded market was eager to agree. This would not have happened a year ago.

Much of the thinking American public already knows something is very wrong with the official government version of what happened on September 11, 2001.

The glib declarations that Muslim hijackers did it, now let's go bomb the hell out of them continues to ring tinnier as more and more American kids return home in flag-draped boxes, and the screams of dying Iraqi women and children become louder despite the blackout of such inconvenient noises by the disgracefully deceptive American media.

The official commission of political functionaries continues to belabor trivial points of bureaucratic procedures rather than tackle the obvious anomalies in the accepted version of events: the tiny hole in the Pentagon, the way the Twin Towers fell as if demolished, the fact that most of those cellphone calls couldn't possibly have been made the way they say they were made, the suspicious investments, the flip-flop stories by government officials.

The flames of the American public discontent are fanned by an unending series of stories about U.S. atrocities overseas. 4,000 Iraqis have been raped by the invading American forces. U.S. soldiers are returning home with bizarre and fatal symptoms attributed to depleted uranium ammunition. Or returning home in boxes which are not allowed to be photographed.

But ironically, as a growing segment of the public thirsts for a deeper analysis of what surely is a coverup by the Bush administration and its lackey Kean Commission, the 9/11 truth movement appears to be losing its focus; many major researchers appear to be going in different directions.

Cheerleader groups like the 9/11 Visibility Project and the 9/11 Truth Alliance do the best they can recruiting supporters to help ask the unanswered questions, and the general public finally seems ready to hear them, dissatisfied as they are by the continuing government coverup and the dissembling triviality of the official commission.

But ironically, as the public becomes more receptive to allegations their government was involved in the treasonous mass murders of 9/11, the small cadre of researchers devoted to exposed official lies and anomalies in the government’s stories seems unable to come up with a universally recognizable smoking gun — a real blockbuster — that the public can rally behind, and demand an honest accounting of the government’s dishonest behavior.

A recent 9/11 conference in San Francisco was really subverted into a discussion about peak oil, leaving some observers worried that the more famous researchers in the 9/11 truth movement were actually and inadvertently working to justify Bush's war policies. One of the top researchers early on has now become a shill for Israel, casting doubt on all the comprehensive research he did on the military standdown that purportedly enabled the attacks to happen.

Many of the other major 9/11 sites have focused on small specific items that tend to confuse the public with an endless repetition of theoretical suppositions.

After all, if one fact in the official version is found to have been deliberately false — Was the flight over Pennsylvania shot down? Did a missile hit the Pentagon? What if the so-called hijackers never got on the planes? Were bombs planted in the World Trade Center? — then the whole story is false, and should come crumbling down, just like the towers.

But the paid-off political functionaries comprising the Kean commission aren't pursuing the important questions. Instead, they're locked in this pre-scripted political vaudeville with Condi Rice and Richard Clarke debating the finer points of presidential briefings. It's a classic distraction. The contemporary term is limited hang-out.

I mean, Osama bin Laden was declared guilty at the outset of the commission’s deliberations on the basis of no evidence that would hold up in a court of law. Nothing much has been said about hijackers ever since.

Can you say Lee Harvey Oswald?

The real problem seems to be that law enforcement has no interest in actually investigating 9/11, only in assuring that the official story holds up, that the designated culprits remain targets, thereby justifying new totalitarian laws against freedom and validating a new U.S. foreign policy that seems aimed at making large amounts of money for government contractors rather than pursuing actualized justice.

Which is why the FBI can come out and say there was nothing suspicious about pre-9/11 trading activities when the whole world knows that there was. There hasn't been a single peep about this red-flag issue from the official commission.

Recent weeks have brought two major revelations among the minor details of 9/11. First, a new website revealed footage that appears to show the jetliner that hit the South Tower firing a missile just before impact. You can only see this in slow motion, but it's there, if you look carefully.

The other shocker actually showed up in an e-mail to me that recounted a "power-down" situation on the upper floors of the WTC on the very weekend before 9/11, providing a window of opportunity to plant bombs in the towers, had anyone so desired.

And yet, something is missing. Perhaps it's just the media blockade. Just like they won't tell you that American soldiers are being outmaneuvered and slaughtered by the Iraqi resistance (they're not "insurgents," they're ordinary people defending their homes against American sociopaths — who incidentally now have no legitimate reason to even be there — now that Saddam has been captured — not that they ever did).

As far as 9/11 goes, we seem to still not have a truly significant smoking gun, at least as recognized by the media and disseminated to the general public, even though we have many smoldering guns, many mentioned above. But what Americans really believe and what action is taken is all shaped by the media, which refuse en masse to admit that everything Bush and his accomplices say about practically every topic is a false story designed to deceive the public.

So in the face of this media mindlock, the 9/11 truth troops are rattling, reverberating in frustration in the echoes of their own rhetoric. They've presented plenty of compelling arguments, but can't fight through this blanket of corporate censorship.

A couple of fertile areas for new 9/11 revelations continue to be investigated by tireless researchers who don't do things for money like those highly paid anchormen and reporters do. The researchers simply want the truth; the so-called reporters who regurgitate Pentagon press releases and call it news simply want their money.

One interesting factoid was unearthed by Gerard Holmgren, one of the truly legendary 9/11 sleuths, who found out by checking FAA records that two of the so-called death flights never even existed, never took off, so they couldn't have crashed into anything, despite all the official hype about flight times and radar tracking.

To be clear about this, the flights Holmgren pinpoints USUALLY fly every day, but the FAA logs reveal they didn’t fly THAT day.

The other provocative tangent being scrutinized by several researchers (including me) seem to indicate that many of the names on the airline passenger death lists don't appear to be real people. There are plenty of names, for sure, but they don't seem to be matching up with birthdates in available records. Further, certain foundations created to honor a couple of very famous names in the mythology of the fatal day appear to have ties to neocon businesses.

Though the state of this research is still in its infancy, the thought that motivates this work is that if the names on the passenger lists were not actual individuals, and at least two of the planes never took off from their points of departure .... well, that would be another rack of smoking guns in a situation that already has plenty.

I’ve done a lot of radio over the past year, trying to plant the seed among the general populace that the sheer number of lies told by the government about 9/11 merits more than a passing outrage by a majority of U.S. citizens.

Back along the trail, when I was chatting with Bill Boshears on WLW-AM in Cincinnati, we received a phone call from somebody known as The Webfairy, who tried to tell us that no planes were involved in the 9/11 attacks. I must admit I was caught off guard.

My objective on the show was to present the basic fundamental facts — the most understandable ones — to try to get people who hadn’t comtemplated versions of events other than the government’s to at least recognize there were some basic parts of the official story that were preposterous, and many others that were very questionable.

So I wasn’t very receptive to The Webfairy’s perspective, and frankly, we gave her the bum’s rush out of the door (if you can do that on the telephone).

However, I always check back on people I disagree with, to make sure I haven’t deceived myself. What got me started on my search was something totally unrelated.

I’ve always been puzzled by the apparent metamorphosis of the Emperor’s Clothes website from the vanguard of 9/11 alternative versions right after the terrible day to what it has become now — a blatantly pro-Israel website that is always yowling about what bad people the Palestinians are. In my mind, it just didn’t compute that a site that could so concisely enumerate the flaws in the U.S. government’s story and have such incredible reporting about the so-called military standdown that enabled these supposedly hijacked airliners to wreak so much damage could suddenly turn and become predictable Zionist public relations of the same stripe as Fox news and the rest of that fascist network joke.

Since I remain convinced that Israel played a major role in the 9/11 attacks (simply because through its neocon double agents it has almost total control over America’s foreign policy), I mulled over how a pro-Israeli reporter could have done so well itemizing the flaws in Washington’s official story.

Then, the thought dawned on me. What if there were no planes? And I took a harder look at what The Webfairy had to say.

Basically, her comprehensive analysis of the video footage of the two WTC crashes has led her to believe that no plane hit either structure.

Why? Because planes don’t cut into buildings like butter. They splinter and explode on contact. Parts go flying everywhere.

In the case of the Pentagon crash, for instance, the government argues that the jetliner that supposedly hit it completely disintegrated in a fire so hot it melted every trace of the airplane and its passengers. Disintegrated into invisibility. This opinion made preposterous the later report that government officials were able to extract enough DNA from the scene to identify every passenger on the ill-fated plane.

However, in the case of the WTC, we are supposed to believe that the facade of the Twin Towers was so flimsy that the planes could cut into the walls like a finger into a chocolate cake without losing a single part. Hmmm?

And then there are the videos themselves. The only view of the first impact is known to most by now, the famous Naudet brothers video. Two French filmmakers were supposedly filming a random event of the New York Fire Department, and just happened to swerve their camera skyward to serendipitously capture the final moments of the flight that hit the North Tower.

Except that you can barely make out the plane, because the image is so fuzzy. Is it a plane? Was it added to the film? Were there any eyewitnesses who actually saw the impact? I don’t know of any.

And then there’s the way the plane disappears into the building. There seems to be an explosion before it hits. The image of the plane, fuzzy as it is, looks square-winged, not like the jetliner the government said it was.

Even more enigmatic is the plane everyone “saw” hit the South Tower, the one that now turns up with an apparent extra fuel tank on its bottom, and in one recent film analysis apparently fires a missile an instant before impact.

But what is most curious is the impact itself. On the famous Fairbanks video, taken from the street below, there is not only no sound of the plane hitting the building, there is also no evidence of anything breaking — not the wall, not the plane — just a silent, smooth entrance of a very solid airliner into a very solid building that at that moment evinces the solidity of marshmallow.

And what really piqued my suspicions were a couple of comments made by The Webfairy when we were on the radio together the other night. It is her suspicion that the Naudet brothers weren’t in the position they were in to film a documentary on the fire department. She believes they were there to film the apparent crash.

And further, she claims to have discovered that the so-called Czech video of the South Tower crash was nothing of the sort, because her frame-by-frame analysis shows, by carefully examining the reflections in incidental windows on the film, that the camera was riding in a fire engine, not in a car as some claim. A fire engine in which all the crew died in the WTC collapse, by the way.

Two more little smoking pistols to be filed away for that rainy day when freedom of speech and government integrity are finally restored in America. I know, I know — dream on.

Now, I’ve heard the arguments against holograms. How could they possibly be projected so as to be visible from so many different angles? Don’t know. I’m not a scientist. And what happened to all the people on the planes? Don’t know that, either. I’m not a police detective, or an FBI agent.

But I do know that the government has lied about so many aspects about 9/11, and that the reporting of the standdown was best done but someone who did not remain true to form.

I suggest everyone take a look at http://www.thewebfairy.com/

Look carefully at those film clips. Tell me it was a plane, and not a trick. If you can ...

Some observers have claimed that all this talk about holograms is just disinformation meant to throw people off the track of the real story.

Yet just today I received another e-mail talking about the advanced holography of the military that could disguise a missile as a jetliner. But that will be tomorrow’s story.

In the meantime, I’d just like to say, if we were a truly free country, we could all get Al-Jazeerah on our cable TV, and then we would really see what America is doing to the rest of the world. It’s only a matter of time, on the present course, before they do the same things to us here in America as well.

John Kaminski is the author of “America’s Autopsy Report,” a collection of his Internet essays seen on hundreds of websites around the world, and also “The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the Official Version of What Happened on September 11, 2001,” a 48-booklet written for those who still believe what the U.S. government says about 9/11. For more information about both, go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/