October 27, 2007

Today I received an email from a Chicago-area high school student, D. Parker, who asked, with a tone of urgency and concern, about my opinion on 9/11 conspiracy theories. He was particularly curious to know what I thought about the much-touted thesis that the World Trade Center’s Building 7, which fell around 5 p.m. on September 11, 2001, was deliberately dynamited – leading theorists to speculate more broadly that the 9/11 terror plot itself was part of a grand plan aided and abetted by the Bush administration.

I continue to field emails and questions at speaking engagements from people who are agitated. Angered by the persistent lies of the Bush team and confounded by how the Congress and the American people seemed to endorse the administration's rush to war in Iraq, they have bought into the notion that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the neocons, and their cohorts were not only facilitators but active participants with al Qaeda and/or Israel and/or certain Arab governments in planning the 9/11 attacks, possibly as an excuse to invade Iraq.

I address 9/11 conspiracy theories at length in Watching the World Change (pages 241-247 and page 291). And I’ve written extensively about the subject on this blog, citing convincing anti-conspiracy evidence offered in The New York Times by writer Jim Dwyer, co-author of the acclaimed September 11 chronicle, 102 Minutes.

As a direct response to D. Parker’s email, I'd like to reprise the following, which I posted on this site ("Reality as a Cover Story") last March and last May:

Conspiracy theorists, in the main, are looking at the trees--even the chinks in the leaves of the trees--and missing the forest.

In my opinion the people spending time concentrating on side-shows -- the fate of Building 7 (7 WTC, which collapsed after 5 pm on September 11); the size of the Pentagon plane’s impact hole and would-be phantom passengers of that plane; the theories of secret demo teams pre-rigging the towers with dynamite in the days before 9/11; and various mis-statements or misperceptions or unsubstantiated accounts by eyewitnesses, journalists and public officials in the hectic hours after the attacks -- are missing what I see as the four main themes of the Bigger Picture.

1. Al Qaeda took the towers down. They attacked the towers once before, in 1993, and had vowed to do it again. They pre-videotaped the hijackers who intended to do this. They left a paper and video path across the northeast corridor as they planned the mission. They trumpeted it and heralded the martyrs on their Websites. Metallurgists, architects, structural engineers, demolition experts, and an impressive study by a team from Popular Mechanics have stated that this is precisely what buildings would do -- implode -- if hit with such force and with this amount of fuel. If one were to have rigged such structures with dynamite, as has been theorized, then the buildings, as all dynamited buildings, would have been rigged to fall from the bottom first, not from the top. And it would have taken days to do the rigging, with many, many witnesses crying foul in the aftermath of having survived the 1993 attacks. What's more, there is nothing to support the theory that no buildings like this have ever fallen. First, no one has ever smashed jumbo jets into 110-story buildings; so there are no literal precedents upon which so-called experts can make such statements. Second, previously ‘impervious’ buildings actually do fall in wartime. We have only to look at images from WWII. The Titanic, remember, was thought to be indestructible. But its builders had not bargained for an iceberg of that size or an impact of that force.

2. The Bush administration was too inept to have somehow been in league with or complicit with the terrorists. They were intellectually and systemically incapable of coordinating this -- and keeping it leak-free. Instead, as we've known for ages, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing in an intelligence bureaucracy rife with turf wars and in an administration weakened by the stress fractures of internal power struggles. The Pentagon did not bomb the Pentagon.

3. Many misguided and unconscionably distracted officials (such as Condoleezza Rice, who repeatedly ignored or mis-prioritized the warnings of her counterterror chief, Richard Clarke) downplayed or misread a threat that was staring them in the face. And because of the weak-kneed 9/11 Commission recommendations, put out by a Republican-controlled Congress and watered down in the spirit of bi-partisanship, no one on the Bush team has ever been reprimanded for his or her roles in these truly tragic lapses. In fact, most of them have been promoted or given presidential medals of honor! This has been a consistent behavior pattern of this so-called C.E.O. president.

4. Often, people who spend a good portion of their days or nights theorizing on the Internet have too much idle time on their hands. They can sometimes fall into the trap of pondering murky videoclips and digital photographs, coming up with grand theories to explain away complex physical events, even if they're basing their theories on technical flaws or on glitches in the images themselves. They are dancing on the head of pins. This sort of 'stove-pipe' intelligence and this accumulation of 'soda-straw' snapshots of misperceived data, events, and motives (to borrow phrases from Pentagon analysts, quoted in The New Yorker in the magazine's Iraq War coverage) constitute precisely the same sort of juiced-up, bogus-case justification that led us into the Iraq confict in the first place. In this instance, we are doing it on our laptops and desktops.

IN CONCLUSION. While it certainly makes good sense to be skeptical of this administration in light of its six-year record of obfuscation, and while healthy debate in a democracy requires that we ask hard questions, it is foolhardy to be delusional and to lose site of the fact that al Qaeda is still on the mend, regrouping, and primed to attack us. As sensible as these convenient little myths may sound, they are distractions, and dangerous ones at that.