YOU KNOW, LIKE, DON'T THINK I'm not aware, if these pictures indicate that there was no airplane crash at the Pentagon, that it's the biggest news story in the Whole Wide Universe.

If this is so, don't think I'm not aware that it's being, well, ignored by the media. Which is the story, or a whole lot of the story, so we can't expect MSNBC to cover it. This issue is, conceivably, bad for the reputation of any reporter who starts asking about it, if he wants people to think he's got a grip on reality. It sounds like lunatic fringe territory, crackpot message-board stuff, the shot fired from the Grassy Knoll, and the Vince Foster-Marilyn Monroe-UFO connection all in one, with chemtrails and the Philadelphia Experiment thrown in for good measure.

Why, it's downright kooky. Most of my editors are reasonable, well educated men. They would be embarrassed to take this seriously. I admit that somebody has a lot of explaining to do, and it ain't me.

Could you imagine the correction in The New York Times?

Or how about a screaming headline in The New York Post being sold by paperboys at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel:

Like most scandals I have trodden, I am aware that this whole concept of a hoax (in official government terminology, "simulated") airplane crash raises more questions than it answers. Big questions. Be assured that I am aware that it's all extremely strange, since this strongly suggests that the entire media is pretending that something that did not happen did happen, and that something else that did happen did not happen.

Rest with confidence that I have made careful note of the fact that this has serious implications for where our socks ultimately go.

I am aware, most acutely, of how this affirms how we all have our heads up our asses.

And where is Michael Moore? Where is Mother Jones and Adbusters and Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting?

Where are Moulder and Scully? Rod Sterling? I'll even settle for Shaggy and Scoobie.

Where is Flight 77?

What happened to the Pentagon?

Who is the president, really? Hey man, Denial R. Us. Bigger stories have been ignored. Does anyone remember that election, the one where Al Gore won, but George Bush became president? I know it was a long time ago.

About one day into this project, I figured out that there were two competing realities when it came to assimilating this information. One of them involves the visual data that is apparent in the photos of the purported crash. I am calling that Column One. As you will see, it includes only information or questions that can be discerned from the photos.

Then there is Column Two. This is the list of indirect questions raised if what appears in Column One happens to make sense. Column Two is about the implications. If we don't like the implications, we can't, logically, use that as justification for going back and pretending that what we see in Column One is not there. I know this is difficult for adults, who are used to making up all kinds of bizarre rationales to sustain their world-view. "The coverup would be too big" is no excuse to claim that the airplane is sitting there or that the jet fuel evaporated, or to explain why the walls of the offices next to 7,000-plus gallons of fuel exploding are still white. "I already ate my ice cream" is not an excuse for thinking that you have a full bowl of ice cream. This is all simple enough for little kids to understand. We would do well to go to our children for advice in these matters.

"You are not an airplane crash expert." I have heard this a few times in my career, and this week, in various forms. But the whole expert business is always used to make people who notice something obvious feel like idiots.

Oh, one last. "There must be something else. This can't be right." Remember, saying this is easier than rearranging your whole view of reality.

Anyway, here are the two columns.

One hump that it's difficult to get over is the extent to which people are capable of lying. Most of us just don't get it. People, especially if they are trying to preserve power or save their ass, will lie all they need to. They will say they never wore clothes they wear all the time, and you can show them a picture of them wearing -- in court, in front of a judge, and they will only grudgingly admit it. People will tell you a contaminated building has no vents just to make sure you don't find out that the vents are contaminated. People will lie and say desperate companies are highly profitable. They will conceal that they know that cigarettes, asbestos, dioxin, PCBs and morning sickness drugs are all perfectly safe. All over Germany, citizens denied the knowledge of the concentration camps, even when the reek soaked their lives for years. Some people are bad liars. Some people are good liars. The lies come in all sizes, but Hitler told us in his autobiography that the best lies are the biggest ones.

This would qualify as a big lie.

But when we look straight at one of them, the problem is that the questions in Column Two tend to drown out the voice making the observations in Column One. The "intellect," as it's popularly known, tries to take over what the senses see, and interpret it out of reality.

We have all done it. A response such as "The airplane must be there because it can't not be there" is one form of this.

Anyway, there are plenty of historical precedents for this kind of crazy thing happening, and we would prefer not to believe it.

Body of Secrets by James Bamford (Doubleday, 2001) tells the story of how, in the 60s, the National Security Agency (NSA, the parent agency of the CIA) planned to create terrorist attacks in Miami, or hijack American passenger airliners, and blame the Cubans. ALERT: This is a secondary source. It is a book, but I trust it.

Salon.com writes in its review of this book, "Among the more shocking things Bamford learned is that in 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff approved something called Operation Northwoods. Fortunately never implemented, it involved committing random acts of terror on Americans in the United States and then blaming them on Cuba. Most of the documents detailing this Bamford found in the National Archives, among the thousands of papers the Joint Chiefs of Staff released about the Cuban missile crisis. "

The idea behind these actions was to basically justify a total military takeover of Cuba, which threatened us because it was a communist country, which has far better literacy and public health than does the US. (It still is communist, and we are still blockading Cuba, though no takeover plot has ever succeeded.)

"We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," Bamford quotes one NSA document as stating.

"We could develop a communist Cuban Terror campaign in the Miami area and other Florida cities, and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking refuge in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the united states even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

Nice guys!

"We could create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enrouye from the United Stares to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any groupings of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."

The same document continues with the rather interesting details of the plan.

"An aircraft at Eglan aircraft base would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone, a remotely controlled unammed aircraft. Takeoff times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft would be scheduled to allow a rendez-vous south of Florida. From the rendez-vous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglan Air Force Base, where arrangements would have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft, meanwhile, will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba, the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a mayday message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the western hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to 'sell' the incident."

Hey -- wanna buy an airplane crash? ++