The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts

You trip over one fundamentalidiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts—the ones who say Bush and Cheneymasterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—in thefirst paragraph of the opening page of the book by one of their high priests,David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. "In many respects," Griffin writes,"the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involvesthe events of 9/11 itself… In light of standard procedures for dealing withhijacked airplanes… not one of these planes should have reached its target,let alone all three of them."

The operative word here is "should". One characteristic ofthe nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in Americanefficiency, thus many of them start with the racist premise that "Arabs incaves" weren’t capable of the mission. They believe that military systemswork the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work.They believe that at 8.14 am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio andtransponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the National MilitaryCommand center and NORAD. They believe, citing reverently (this is from highpriest Griffin) "the US Air Force’s own website", that an F-15 could haveintercepted AA flight 11 "by 8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30".

They appear to have read no military history, which is too badbecause if they did they’d know that minutely planned operations—let aloneresponses to an unprecedented emergency—screw up with monotonous regularity,by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality, weather and all the other whims ofprovidence.

According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic AirCommand, an impending Soviet attack would have prompted the missile silos inNorth Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets.The tiny number of test launches actually attempted all failed, whereupon SACgave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defensecontractor venality or… CONSPIRACY? (In that case, presumably, a Communistconspiracy, as outlined by ancestors of the present nuts, ever intent onidentifying those who would stab America in the back.)

Did the British and French forces in 1940 break and flee aWehrmacht capable of only one lunge, because of rotten leadership, terribleplanning, epic cowardice, or … CONSPIRACY? Did the April 24, 1980 effort torescue the hostages in the US embassy in Teheran fail because a sandstormdisabled three of the eight helicopters, because the helicopters were poorlymade, because of a lousy plan or because of agents of William Casey and theRepublican National Committee poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet anotherCONSPIRACY?

Have the US military’s varying attempts to explain why F-15sdidn’t intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes stemmed from absolutelypredictable attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because of CONSPIRACY?Is Mr Cohen in his little store at the end of the block hiking his pricesbecause he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or because theJews want to take over the world? August Bebel said anti-Semitism is thesocialism of the fools. These days the 9/11 conspiracy fever threatens to becomethe "socialism" of the left, and the passe-partout of many libertarians.

It’s awful. My in-box overflows each day with fresh"proofs" of how the WTC buildings were actually demolished, oftenaccompanied by harsh insults identifying me as a "gate-keeper" preventingthe truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking me "what Ithink about 9/11". What they are actually trying to find out is whether I’mpart of the coven. I imagine it was like being a Stoic in the second centuryA.D. going for a stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, withseeming casualness, whether it’s possible to feed 5,000 people on five loavesof bread and a couple of fish.

Indeed, at my school in the 1950s the vicar used to urge on usFrank Morison’s book, Who Moved The Stone? It sought to demonstrate, withexhaustive citation from the Gospels, that since on these accounts no human hadmoved the stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it must beyondthe shadow of a doubt have been an angel who rolled it aside and let Jesus out,so he could astonish the mourners and then Ascend. Of course Morison didn’tadmit into his argument the possibility that angels don’t exist, or that thegospel writers were making it up.

It’s the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts, who proffer whatthey demurely call "disturbing questions", though they disdain all answersbut their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences theydeem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce onimagined clues in documents and photos, torturing the data— as the old jokegoes about economists—till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitnesstestimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem tonourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines theirtheories— like witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon—iscontemptuously brushed aside.

Anyone familiar with criminal, particularly death penaltydefense—I had such an opportunity for a number of years— will know thatthere are always anomalies the prosecution cannot account for and that thedefense teams can exploit, in hopes of swaying a jury either in the guilt orpenalty phase of a trial. Time and again I would see the defense team spend daysand weeks, even months, back-checking on a possibly vulnerable link in theevidentiary chain that could be attacked, at least to the all-important level ofcreating "reasonable doubt" in the mind of a juror. Expert witnesses wouldbe imported at great expense— unlike states such as Texas, the justicesystem of California is generous in the provision of money for death penaltydefense—to challenge the prosecution’s forensic evidence. Such challengesweren’t hard to mount. Contrary to prosecutorial claims, there is far lessinstrinsic certainty in forensic evaluation than is commonly supposed, asregards fingerprints, landing marks on bullets and so forth.

But minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one suchweak link often leads to a distorted view of the whole case. I remember morethan one case where, after weeks of interviewing witnesses at one particularcrime scene, the defense’s investigator had collected enough witness reportsto mount a decent attack on this aspect of the prosecution’s overall case. Atleast this is what I thought, hearing the daily bulletins of the investigator.But when, in such instances, the camera pulled back, so to speak, and I saw theprosecution’s whole case – chain of evidence, cumulative witness statements,accused’s own movements and subsequent statements— it became clear enoughto me and, in that case to the juries , that the accused were incontestablyguilty. But even then, such cases had a vigorous afterlife, with the defensetrying to muster up grounds for an appeal, on the basis of testimony andevidence withheld by the prosecution, faulty rulings by the judge, a prejudicedjury member and so on. A seemingly "cut and dried case" is very rarelybeyond challenge, even though in essence it actually may well be just that,"cut and dried".

Anyone who ever looked at the JFK assassination will know thatthere are endless anomalies and loose ends. Eyewitness testimony— as so often—is conflicting, forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or justmissing. But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost allessentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had itright and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository. Theevidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios ofthe conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course— as the years rollby, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast,CIA-related scenarios—the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions asunflagging as ever.

Naturally, there are conspiracies. I think there is strongevidence that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the northPacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt thought itwould be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green lightto get the US into the war.

Of course it’s very probable that the FBI or US militaryintelligence, even the CIA, had penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11attacks; that intelligence reports— some are already known— piled up invarious Washington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught and eventhe manner in which it might be carried out.

The history of intelligence operations is profuse with exampleof successful intelligence collection, but also fatal slowness to act on theintelligence, along with eagnerness not to compromise the security and futureusefulness of the informant, who has to prove his own credentials by evenpressing for prompt action by the plotters. Sometime an undercover agent willactually propose an action, either to deflect efforts away from some graverthreat, or to put the plotters in a position where they can be caughtred-handed. In their penetrations of environmental groups the FBI certainly didthis.

Long before the Yom Kippur war, a CIA analyst noted Egyptianorders from a German engineering firm, and deduced from the type and size ofequipment thus ordered that Egypt was planning an attack across the Suez canal.He worked out the probable size of the Egyptian force and the likely time windowfor the attack. His superiors at the CIA sat on the report. When the Egyptianarmy finally attacked on October 6, 1973 the CIA high command ordered up thelong-buried report, dusted it off and sent it over to the White House, marked"current intelligence". Was there a "conspiracy" by the CIA high commandto allow Israel to be taken by surprise? I doubt it.

Bureaucratic inertia and caution prevailed, until the momentcame for decisive CYA acitvity. The nuts make dizzying "deductive" leaps.There is a one particularly vigorous coven which has established to its ownsatisfaction that the original NASA moon landing was faked, and never tookplace. This "conspiracy" would have required the complicity of thousands ofpeople , all of whom have kept their mouths shut. The proponents of the "fakemoon landing" plot tend to overlap with the JFK and 9/11 nuts.

One notorious "deductive" leap involves flight 77, which on9/11 ended up crashing into the Pentagon. There are photos of the impact of the"object"—i.e., the Boeing 757, flight 77—that seem to show the sort ofhole a missile might make. Ergo, the nuts assert, it WAS a missile and a 757didn’t hit the Pentagon. As regards the hole, my brother Andrew—writing abook about Rumsfeld and the DoD during his tenure—has seen photos takenwithin 30 minutes of Pentagon impact clearly showing outline of entire planeincluding wings. This was visible momentarily when the smoke blew away

And if it was a missile, what happened to the 757? Did theconspirators shoot it down somewhere else, or force it down and then kill thepassengers? Why plan to demolish the towers with pre-placed explosives if yourconspiracy includes control of the two planes that hit them. Why bother with theplanes at all. Why blame Osama if your fall guy is Saddam Hussein? Why involvethe Israeli "art students".

The nuts simultaneously credit their targets— the Bush-Cheney"conspirators"—with superhuman ingenuity and grotesque carelessness. InWebster Griffin Tarpley’s book 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA hewrites that "in an interview with Parade magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeldalso referred to the object which hit the Pentagon as a ‘missile’. Was thisa Freudian slip by the loquacious defense chief?" (And, a nut might add, is itmere coincidence that Webster Griffin Tarpley shares one of his names with DavidRay Griffin?)

The demolition scenario is classic who-moved-the-stonery. TheWTC towers didn’t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence ofcorruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority, and becausethey were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, they fell because DickCheney’s agents methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days.It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom—party to mass murder—have held their tongues ever since. The "conspiracy" is always open-ended asto the number of conspirators, widening steadily to include all the peopleinvolved in the execution and cover-up of the demolition of the Towers and the onslaughton the Pentagon, from the teams acquiring the explosives andthemissile, inserting the explosives in the relevant floors of three vastbuildings, (moving day after day among the unsuspecting office workers), then on9/11 activating the detonators.

Subsequently the conspiracy includes the disposers of the steeland rubble, the waste recyclers in Staten Island and perhaps even the Chinesewho took the salvaged incriminating metal for use in the Three Gorges dam, whereit will submerged in water and concretye for ever. Tens of thousands of people,all silent as the tomb to this day.

Of course the buildings didn’t suddenly fall at a speedinexplicable in terms of physics unless caused by carefully pre-placedexplosives, detonated by the ruthless Bush-Cheney operatives. High grade steelcan bend disastrously under extreme heat. People inside who survived thecollapse didn’t hear a series of explosions. As discussed in Wayne Barrett andDan Collin’s excellent book GrandIllusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed warningsnine minutes before the final collapse that the South Tower might well go downand, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before the North Tower’s fall.

What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corruptconspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled thefiremen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority toskimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years before9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified emergency command that would havemeant that cops and firemen could have communicated; that many firemenwouldn’t have unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towerswouldn’t have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and thatfiremen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messagesthat prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.

That’s the real political world, in which Giuliani and othershave never been held accountable. The nuts disdain the real world because, likemuch of the left and liberal sectors, they have promoted Bush, Cheney and theNeo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, insteadof being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more thanusual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally favor in imperialleaders.) The Conspiracy Nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction, justas Danny Sheehan did with his Complaint, that mesmerized and distracted much ofthe Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and which finally collapsed ina Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the Towers.

* Footnote: I should add that one particular conspiracy nut,seeing that Roosevelt’s grandson Ford— a schoolteacher in Los Angeles— was for a while, some years ago, on the board ofCounterPunch’s parentnon-profit, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity— wrotean enormous onslaught on CounterPunch a while ago, "proving" to his ownsatisfaction that CounterPunch was a pawn of the Democratic Party, the CIA andkindred darker forces. I suppose the fact that CounterPunch attacked theDemocratic Party and the CIA on a weekly basis was just one more example of ourcunning in deflecting suspicion away from our true sponsors. The fact that fromtime to time that we also quite regularly attacked FDR — and posited hisforeknowledge of Pearl Harbor— should again be taken as evidence of ourcunning in deflecting suspicion away from Ford’s supervisory role in ouraffairs. In fact we’d put Ford on the board in the hopes (vain, as they turnedout to be) that he would persuade film stars to give CounterPunch money.

Alexander Cockburn is the joint-editor of CounterPunch.A much shorter, earlier version of the column ran in the print edition ofThe Nation that went to press last Thursday. Courtesy, Znet