36%

That’s how many Americans think it is “very likely or somewhat likely that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them ‘because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East’,” according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

Wow. That’s certainly higher than I would have expected. Although, that said, my parents recently had a plumber who overheard them talking about some news story that elicited a mention of 9/11, and he stopped his work to go into my dad’s den and tell them all about how it was “an inside job.” He was a conservative of the form-a-militia-because-the-government-is-coming-to-get-you variety, not a Lefty, with which 9/11 conspiracy theories have been mostly associated. So there are people on both sides of the political spectrum who fall into that 36%, which I guess makes the number more understandable in some way.

54% also responded they “personally are more angry at the government than they used to be.” And that number is lower than I would have expected.