September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City: View of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. (Image: US National Park Service ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Since September 11, 2001, two different stories have emerged about the attacks on that fateful day.
Story 1: The attacks were the planned and organised solely by Al Qaeda Islamist terrorists, headed by Osama Bin Laden. 19 terrorist operatives boarded armed with little more than box-cutter knives, boarded 4 passenger jets, overpowered the flight crews, and sent their planes towards New York and Washington DC, where two airplanes hit the World Trade Center, one plane crashed into the Pentagon, and another plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, having failed to reach its intended destination. The Twin Towers collapsed as a result of structural weaknesses caused by the impacts and burning jet fuel. The US authorities failed to prevent the attacks due to lack of co-ordination between intelligence authorities and insufficient information about the terrorists’ objectives.
Story 2: The attacks were planned and coordinated by Israeli and/or US authorities, mainly as a pretext for war against Iraq and Afghanistan and extending American hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East. The World Trade Center collapses were caused by controlled demolitions. According to some accounts, no plane hit the Pentagon – instead it was caused by a missile shot at close range.
Clearly, most people accept the former story, but a small redoubt of people fervently believe that the leadership of the free world tried to pull a fast one on them, and that there is plenty of evidence in this regard to disprove the official account. These people have spent an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to unpick the established narrative.
Which story to believe?
Story 1 has a number of points in its favour. 9/11 was set in the context of increasingly audacious violence from Islamist terror groups, from Kenya to London to Bali. The 9-11 Commission Report recounts, in excruciating detail, the level of miscommunication, discord, lack of communication and underestimation that took place between intelligence authorities in the days up to and including September 11th. Members of the military and intelligence communities were themselves targeted and killed in the attacks. The US Government had to invest in a massive overhaul of security. It embarked on two colossally expensive foreign wars to protect its interests. There are multiple lines of evidence: tracing the movements of the killers, the actions of the different intelligence communities, senior government decisions, airport security, flight crews, passenger phone calls, Islamist leaders and many more – all adding to an overall narrative of events on the day. Few individuals from the thousands of people, who were players in the events of the day, ever registered any major dissent from the narrative. Neither has any major media organisation, at home or abroad, seriously contested the story. It’s a story of terrorists getting lucky against a security system that was less than watertight.
To accept Story 2, you must replace incompetence, discord and pot-luck with a tale of near perfect planning and co-ordination, on a vast scale. At each stage up to the attacks themselves, alert airport officials, brave passengers or crew members could have disrupted the government’s putative plans. The implication is that they would need to have been tipped off in some way – that they were in on the conspiracy. Only a handful of companies in the world could have staged a controlled demolition on the order of the World Trade Center. To do so covertly would have been even more challenging – taking months of meticulous planning. Why didn’t the world media investigate these demolition companies? What of the (surely abundant) evidence of the products of controlled demolition among the wreckage of the buildings? The clearance teams must have been truly excellent. If the Pentagon was not hit by a jet plane, what happened to all the passengers of Flight 77 and who helped clear up (or plant) the evidence? To accept this story, you must accept that an army of specially trained, and potentially psychopathic government operatives, were in place to maintain a subterfuge on this scale. The aftermath of Iraq and Katrina, and the sheer ineptitude of many officials at that time, does not help the conspiracy theorists’ case.
It is worthwhile reminding ourselves that mass collusion does occur and has occurred in the past. The history of the 20th Century provides us with many examples: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, the Cambodian killing fields, Pinochet’s Chile. However, these examples all had a common refrain: the hatred of a particular class of people to the point that eliminating them was seen as a good thing by the perpetrators. How the ordinary traders, administrators, managers and support staff of the World Trade Center fitted the mould of non-people is something the conspiracy theorists need to properly establish. Then there is mass-collusion within organisations such as the Catholic Church and Scientology. But these organisations, by their nature, value absolute adherence to dogma, stifle freedom of speech and are contemptuous of dissent: again, hardly prototypes for the loud, free-speaking, most in-your-face country on the planet.
Conspiracy theorists will scream that the devil is in the detail, so if you are truly bothered, far better brains than I have pulled the detailed claims apart. Popular Mechanics did a full deconstruction of the Truther claims, there are a few grassroot sceptical sites and Ryan Owens has put together some good debunking videos also. Skeptic Magazine also ran an article on 9/11 debunking that’s worth a read.
So, if you believe that the 9/11 attacks were the result of an inside job, the weight of evidence is completely against you. You are not a skeptic, you are a denier; the burden of proof is on you. The focus should be on the many issues and developments that arose out of the attacks – some of which have that often have had a huge impact on personal freedoms and government power – and not on this bullshit.
Passive Impressions 
Of course the 9/11 conspiracy theory is bunkum but what is interesting is the amount of otherwise intelligent people who believe it. Why do they do so in spite of the (to the rest of us) obvious evidence to the contrary?
Invariably, people who subscribe to it also believe other conspiracy theories as well such as it was the CIA who killed JFK, not Lee Harvey Oswald; the Americans did not land on the moon in July 1969 – instead it was all staged in a studio in Nevada; the Holocaust never occurred; and so forth.
Usually, such theories appeal to people with a fixed ideological view of history be it through the prism of right-wing or left-wing political philosophies, Islam (the most political of all the religions), white supremacy, and the like. (There are also of course those sad souls for whom the most inane conspiracy theories hold an appeal for some psychological reason such as a need to be seen to be part of a select few with special knowledge not obvious to the common herd.)
They need to continually reconcile events with their world-view and in particular events that are downright inconvenient – or directly contrary – to what they hold to be true. So, for those to whom American foreign policy is the root of much of the world’s evil, 9/11 was a singularly inconvenient occurrence: an attack on the US by its Islamic enemies. It needed to be reconciled to the conspiracy theorists’ view of life and the story that it was an inside job perpetrated by Washington and its ally Israel fitted the bill. The American government was really the aggressor just as it continues to be the aggressor on the world stage. It eliminated the dissonance between fact (an attack by Islamists) and theory (American is the aggressor, not Islamists who are the victims of US and Israeli policy.) Thus explained, it allows believers to continue happily with how they see the world.
In Islamic countries where conspiracy theories abound there is a glaring chasm between what the Koran teaches – the superiority of Islam not only in the spiritual sphere but in the political as well – and the fact the the vast majority of Islamic countries lag far behind the West. How to account for that? It’s all a vast conspiracy by the Great Satan, America and its ally Israel. Destroy those evils and the Islamic world will prosper and the long wished-for Caliphate will become a reality. .
Likewise with Holocaust deniers: admirers of Hitler and the Nazis and their doctrine of Aryan superiority, products of the German nation that produced Bach and Beethoven, could not square the fact that they were responsible for the signature evil of the twentieth (or any other) century. So, it couldn’t have happened. It was all a lie to discredit the Germans.
And of course we have plenty of conspiracy theories of our own and they usually involve Perfidious Albion in some shape or other. So, for instance, Roger Casement and his Black Diaries – his account of his homosexual adventures in Africa and South America. For years it was alleged that they were forged by the British in order to smear his reputation. Books were written backing up that contention. After all, how could a great Irish patriot like Casement possibly have been homosexual let alone have written about his sordid liaisons in such detail? It had to be a conspiracy,right? Wrong. There is now no doubt but that they were genuine.
At root, all conspiracy theories try to reconcile the difference between what is and what believers would wish to be. They are essentially infantile in that their believers refuse to accept the brute fact that however much they want things to fit in with their political or religious philosophies “wishing don’t make it so.”
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