We have striven in these chapters to recount what is firmly known. We have teased out detail, sorted the reliable from the dross, often gone back to original sources. Yet many would say our account is skewed, too close to the “official version,” or just plain wrong.
9/11 is mired in “conspiracy theory” like no previous event in American history—more so even than President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Doubt and disbelief as to what really happened on 9/11, a Time magazine writer noted in 2006, is “not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.” By the end of George Bush’s first term as President, a more iconoclastic writer—Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone—concluded that Americans had “no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea.… Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him. What story is he going to tell?”
Americans, University of California history professor Kathryn Olmsted has said, “tend to be particularly receptive to anti-government conspiracy theories.” Her study of conspiracy theory notes not only the evidence of the polls—that in 2006 a third of the U.S. population believed the Bush administration was involved in 9/11—but that a majority of that third were aged eighteen to twenty-nine.
Significant, too, given the continuing global upheaval, is the degree of 9/11 conspiracy belief among Arab Americans (of whom there are more than three million), American Muslims, and Arabs worldwide. Taibbi, doing interviews in Dearborn, Michigan, was shocked to hear “well-educated, pious Lebanese Americans regurgitating 9/11 conspiracy theories like they were hard news.” One woman he interviewed “could not be budged from her conviction that Bush had bombed the Twin Towers.” In much of the Arab world, the author and longtime Middle East resident Jean Sasson has written, “conspiracy theories dominate public opinion.”
As recently as 2009, persistent belief in such theories so concerned the U.S. government that it issued a fact sheet for global consumption, seeking to rebut “unfounded … popular myths” about 9/11. It was an acknowledgment that the authors of conspiracy theory, the “skeptics” as they like to be characterized, were a force hard to ignore. What are their principal theories and speculations, and is there substance to them?
AT THE CORE of conspiracy theory is the idea that we were all hoodwinked, that what we thought we saw on 9/11 was not the full picture. The Twin Towers may have been struck by airliners filled with passengers—though some doubt even that—but it was not the planes that brought them crashing down. Explosives, planted explosives, had been used to achieve that. The same went for the total collapse later in the day, the skeptics claim, of World Trade Center Building 7. As for the Pentagon, there were claims by some that it had been struck not by a plane but by a missile.
Why perpetrate such gross trickery? The overarching suspicion—for some the conviction—is that people at the heart of the United States government were behind the attacks. The doubters belong, essentially, to one of two schools of thought, broadly defined by the acronyms MIHOP—Made It Happen On Purpose—and, the alternative, LIHOP—Let It Happen On Purpose.
LIHOP proposes that elements in the Bush administration, aware that a terrorist onslaught was likely, and motivated by the opportunities for foreign intervention it might provide, turned a blind eye to warning signs and let the attacks happen. MIHOP adherents suspect—argue strongly—that elements in the U.S. government and military actually engineered the attacks.
Those, then, are the central planks of conspiracy theory. As late as January 2011, National Geographic Channel was rebroadcasting programming that covered the theories plugged by the people some call 9/11 “truthers.”
CONSPIRACY THEORIES are nothing new, in America and much of the rest of the world. The growth and durability of 9/11 skepticism, though, was inseparably intertwined with the rise and rise of the Internet. For better or worse and for the first time in history, the Internet permits citizens to propagate ideas faster than traditional media and beyond the control of government.
The electronic murmur that was to reach millions seems to have begun not six hours after the first strike on the Trade Center. Boston-based David Rostcheck, a software consultant with a physics degree, had spent the morning watching the drama on television. “Eventually,” he recalled, “I went to see what people were saying online. I belonged to the set of people who had been on the Internet for most of my adult life, before there was a Web and before the Internet became a household presence.… No one seemed to be commenting on the unusual aspects of the building collapses, so I wrote up an analysis and posted it.”
“Is it just me,” Rostcheck asked on the Net that afternoon,
or did anyone else recognize that it wasn’t the airplane impacts that blew up the World Trade Center? To me, this is the most frightening part of this morning … look at the footage—those buildings were demolished. To demolish a building, you don’t need all that much explosive but it needs to be placed in the correct places.… Someone had to have had a lot of access to all of both towers and a lot of time to do this.… If, in a few days, not one official has mentioned anything about the demolition part, I think we have a REALLY serious problem.
There it was, almost instantaneously, the very first hint at the theory that for many has long since become an item of faith—that the fall of the Twin Towers was in reality caused by explosives planted within the buildings. Rapidly, the Internet became the forum for a great flood of skepticism.
“What happened after September 11,” Rostcheck told the authors,
is that American society bifurcated into two groups—call them America 1 and America 2. America 1 makes up much of America. It is depicted by and shaped by broadcast media. It thinks it occupies what it would consider to be “conventional reality,” which is to say it thinks it “is” America. It is barely aware of America 2, if at all.
America 2, by comparison, is what I’ll roughly classify as the Internet domain. I don’t mean that America 1 doesn’t use the Internet—it does.… But America 2’s concepts originate on the Internet, which is a different domain.… The two Americas live together, work together, interact together, but they are not quite the same and they are not necessarily going in the same direction anymore. What happened after September 11 is that a whole group of Americans found themselves abruptly dumped into America 2 … the population of America 2 became huge—likely tens of millions.
America 1 is only dimly aware of America 2, and reflexively consigns any elements of thinking from America 2 that it becomes aware of into one bin marked “crazy,” then dismisses it.… By the standards of America 2, people from America 1 are profoundly and tragically uneducated—and reactionary.
Whatever one thinks of this concept of two Americas, the seeds of suspicion about 9/11 have flourished on the Internet ever since. Four years ago, it was said that almost a million Web pages were devoted to “9/11 conspiracy.” As of early 2011, entering the phrase “9/11 conspiracy” into the Google search engine returned almost seven million hits.
“I don’t believe the official story,” wrote Jared Israel, a veteran anti–Vietnam War activist who had earlier started Emperor’s Clothes—a website fired up by perceived American betrayal of the Serbs in Yugoslavia—within four days of the attacks. What he saw in “the semi-official New York Times,” he told his readers, raised grave questions. Why had President Bush gone on listening to a children’s story about goats when a third hijacked plane was aimed at Washington, D.C.? Wasn’t there something odd about the military response to the hijackings, or the lack of it? Israel said he smelled—and this may have been the first mention of the word in the context of 9/11—“conspiracy.”
Even to peer into the world we now enter requires suspending disbelief, giving houseroom to a mind-boggling range of views. It includes the “no-planers,” people who question whether commercial passenger jets crashed into the Trade Center and the Pentagon at all. Talk of that began just two days after 9/11 on a website run
by a man named Peter Meyer and intended—he told readers—“for thinking people.” Meyer and others would eventually be expressing doubt as to whether some or all of the planes involved on 9/11 really existed as genuine passenger flights.
By early October, one Carol Valentine was declaring that “there were no suicide pilots on those September 11 jets. The jets were controlled by advanced robotics.” Her account, which ran to twelve pages, suggested that air traffic controllers’ records had vanished, that the alleged Arab hijackers’ names were missing from airline passenger lists, and that an alleged hijacker’s passport—reportedly found in the street near the Trade Center—had been planted. She believed, moreover, that Flight 93 was “without a doubt” shot down, to prevent its “electronic controls” being examined and to ensure the silence of its crew and passengers.
A character named Joe Vialls, meanwhile, cast doubt on the belief that there had been air-to-ground phone calls from the “electronically hijacked” planes. How was it, a certain Gary North asked, that no names of Arab hijackers appeared on early published passenger lists? The omission was “very strange … peculiar.”
Over the years, the plot thickened. An academic named Alex Dewdney suggested in 2003 that the four aircraft were not really hijacked but “ordered to land at a designated airport with a military presence.” Two “previously-prepared planes,” painted to look like an American Airlines jet and a United Airlines jet, were “flown by remote control” along the designated flight paths of Flights 11 and 175 and on into the Twin Towers.
In Dewdney’s version, it was a “fighter jet (under remote control), or a cruise missile” that crashed into the Pentagon. The passengers from the three genuine Boeings were transferred to Flight 93, which “flies towards Washington and is shot down by a U.S. Air Force jet over Pennsylvania.” The three original Boeings were flown “by remote control out over the Atlantic,” and then scuttled.
That is but a taste of the sort of theory many could read and some apparently believed—though there are more, yet more bizarre. Who are the theories’ proponents? Dewdney is professor emeritus of computer science and adjunct professor of biology at Canada’s University of Western Ontario. North holds a Ph.D. in history. Vialls, now deceased, said he was a “British aeronautical engineer.” Valentine has described herself as a writer, researcher, and human rights activist. Meyer apparently holds a double honors degree in philosophy and mathematics from a leading Australian university.
There is more one should know about some of them. North describes himself as a Christian Reconstructionist and the magazine he edits as “an attempt to apply biblical principles to economic analysis.” Cuba, Vialls declared as late as 2004, would “soon be used as ‘point man’ in a grand plan to deny American warships and other vessels safe transit through the Gulf of Mexico.… America will collapse in six months.” The Southeast Asia tsunami that same year, he theorized, was a “nuclear war crime.”
Carol Valentine, who ran a “Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum,” claimed that Branch Davidian followers did not perish by fire in Texas in 1993. They had, rather, been secretly shot earlier, or shot while trying to escape, by the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command.
Peter Meyer, for his part, cheerfully acknowledges having indulged over a long period in the use of psychedelic drugs—including LSD. He developed computer software for “Timewave Zero,” a program illustrating a “theory of time, history and the end of history” as revealed “by an alien intelligence.” He reportedly “hopes to be present at the end of history in 2012.”
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AND THEN THERE ARE the books. As early as spring 2002 came one with a title that said it all—9/11: The Big Lie. This was the work of Thierry Meyssan, a Frenchman whose biographical note describes him as president of the Voltaire Network for freedom of speech and secretary of the Radical Left Party. According to the book’s cover, The Big Lie was “based exclusively on documents published by the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as statements by American civilian and military leaders.”
Meyssan’s book was a best-seller, reportedly selling more than 200,000 copies in France and half a million internationally, and eighteen editions in other foreign languages. It was largely lambasted by the media in the West—ignored at first in France—and praised elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In the United Arab Emirates, where Meyssan was invited to speak, he was introduced as a man “with the spirit of an investigative journalist, of a thinker.” Al Watan, a prominent newspaper in Saudi Arabia, trumpeted the book on its front page.
The idea that the Pentagon had been struck by a Boeing airliner on 9/11, Meyssan claimed, was “nonsense,” a “loony tale.” “Only a missile of the United States armed forces transmitting a friendly code,” he wrote, “could enter the Pentagon’s airspace without provoking a counter-missile barrage.”
The attacks on the World Trade Center had occurred “under the eye of the intelligence services, who observed but did not intervene.” And: “We are asked to believe that these hijackers were Arab-Islamic militants.… The first question that should be asked is ‘Who profits?’ ” Meyssan asked whether the ensuing FBI investigation was “meant to hide from view domestic American culpability and justify the military operations to follow.” The 9/11 attacks, he concluded, were “masterminded from inside the American state apparatus.”
That, the “truth” camp’s dominant message, has been gotten over—couched in beguilingly moderate tones—by a theologian. David Ray Griffin, professor of religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology in California for more than three decades, has churned out no fewer than nine books on 9/11. He has become known as the “dean” of opposition to 9/11 orthodoxy.
Griffin makes stunning leaps, slipped in amidst phrases like “the evidence suggests” and “the many reasons to” in his books. The evidence on the destruction of the World Trade Center and other factors, he has said, “show that the attacks must have been planned by our own political and military leaders.” He is evidently a full-fledged MIHOP man.
If the engine of the movement has been the Internet, it is the Web documentary film Loose Change—through its several incarnations since 2005—that has carried the message to a vast audience. The film is a fricassee of factoids, its ingredients largely clips from broadcast footage, laced with the voices of skeptics and served up over about two hours. While the film does not hand down a verdict in as many words, it makes no secret of its producers’ belief in MIHOP. It is Ministry of Propaganda stuff delivered, ironically, via the Internet, the ultimate medium of free speech.
By mid-2010, the producers say, 125 million people had viewed Loose Change on Google alone. In the words of producer Korey Rowe, who served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, “This is our generation’s Kennedy assassination.” Originally made for some $2,000 and available free on the Internet, the film has since gone into edition after edition. The latest update cost $1 million, and writer-director Dylan Avery moved to Los Angeles to write a feature film script.
In its most recent, 2009, edition, the makers of Loose Change no longer bothered to veil its message. They changed the title to Loose Change 9/11—An American Coup. “America was hijacked on September 11, 2001,” an earnest voice intones at the end, “by a group of tyrants ready and willing to do whatever is necessary to keep their stranglehold on the United States of America. A group beyond any one man [a picture of President Bush appears on the screen], or any one administration [a picture of President Obama appears]. Until there is a new investigation into the events, we will not go away. We will not be silent. Ask questions. Demand answers.”
David Griffin, usually careful to appear judicious, academically careful, at one stage acted as script consultant for Loose Change. He has, moreover, been quoted as saying he is doing what he can “to get the cabal who engineered 9/11 for imperialistic and plutocratic reasons stopped before they do still more damage to our country and our planet.” The “cabal” he had in mind
, Griffin had long since made clear, was the Bush administration.
Many who have voiced support for the professor, to one degree or another, have been educated, professional people. Richard Falk, Princeton University’s Milbank professor emeritus of international law—and currently the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories of Palestine—lent credibility to Griffin’s first book with a glowing foreword. Falk has written, “It is not paranoid to assume that the established elites of the American governmental structure have something to hide, and much to explain.”
PROFESSIONALS WITH IDEAS like Griffin’s have associated themselves with Internet groups reflecting their expertise—Scholars for 9/11 Truth, the Scientific Panel Investigating 9/11, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Veterans for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth, and so on. Such skeptics include men and women from differing fields of expertise, some distinguished, some even prominent. Here is a sample.
Scholars for 9/11 Truth, originally headed jointly by James Fetzer, now professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota—a specialist on the philosophy of science—and Steven Jones, professor emeritus of physics at Brigham Young University, focused specifically on the collapses. Following a series of disagreements and a split into two separate groups—with perhaps a thousand members between them—Fetzer and Jones offer differing perspectives.
According to Fetzer, members of his group “believe that the government not only permitted 9/11 to occur but may even have orchestrated these events to facilitate its political agenda.” Fetzer claimed that his group has “established beyond reasonable doubt that the Twin Towers were destroyed by a novel form of controlled demolition from the top down … and that, whatever may have hit the Pentagon, multiple lines of argument support the conclusion that it was not a Boeing 757.” Perhaps, he theorized, “high-tech weapons of the directed energy kind” were used against the Trade Center.