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The 9/11 Conspiracy

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Infomaniacs Anonymous

Tie-dye shirts, creationism, Ouija boards — some things just refuse to die … Punch Buggies, Fidel Castro, the Halloween movie series … They linger long after their time has come and gone, somehow escaping their rightful place in history’s dustbin. And today — six years after the bloodiest terrorist attack ever — we can add yet another item to the list: 9/11 conspiracy theories.

By now, you’re probably aware that some Americans are convinced George Bush, not Osama bin Laden, was behind 9/11. The widely accepted account of that day’s events, according to countless books and the schlocky Internet flick Loose Change, is but a pack of lies our government and its media stooges have heaped upon an ignorant American public.

You thought those were passenger planes you saw hitting the World Trade Center? They were clearly military jets! The Twin Towers collapsed due to a manageable fire and a little structural damage? Nonsense — there had to have also been a controlled demolition! That plane that struck the Pentagon? It was a cruise missile, goddamnit! Those Flight 93 heroes who fought their hijacked plane to the ground? They were really landed in Cleveland and probably killed quietly. Oh, and the 19 alleged hijackers? Alive and well.

Delusions of this sort, while imaginative, are nothing new. Conspiracy theories are as old as paranoia itself. After every major historical event, there’s always a handful of nuts with a theory — usually involving the CIA and/or the Jews — about what really happened.

The “moon landing”: Staged inside a studio.

Lee Harvey Oswald: A pawn of the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, the KGB, the Mafia et al.

Princess Diana’s death: What do you expect from the MI5?

And the so-called “Holocaust”: The most elaborate hoax in history.

It wasn’t the initial cloud of suspicion amid the smoldering rubble that surprised me; we all speculate at the scene of a crime before the facts come in. When I, for one, heard that religious extremists had hijacked airplanes and killed thousands of people, my gut told me that they had to have been Quakers. (My friend knocked some sense into me; it was clear what religion these hijackers were and it started with an “M” — they were obviously Mormons!)

What has surprised me is that six years later, after the facts have come in, “alternative” theories about 9/11 are growing, not dying. A Google search of “9/11 conspiracy” turns up 3.85 billion hits. (The famed “Jewish conspiracy” gets only 2.18 billion; “JFK conspiracy” clocks in at 1.8.)

This relative success of 9/11 conspiracy theories is perhaps to be expected among the Muslim world’s paranoid masses (according to the 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Project, a majority or plurality of Muslims in all 10 countries polled said they did not believe that “Arabs carr[ied] out the 9/11 attacks.” In America, though, I assumed the conspiracy theorists had long since lost the battle until one day this summer, when I encountered a Boston demonstration of these intrepid crusaders and later went out with a girl who told me that her father, too, was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist — or, as she put it, a member of the “9/11 Truth movement.” Movement?! The only movement I’m reminded of is a bowel movement.

It’s not conspiracy theories, per se, that warrant our scorn and laughter — only the vigor with which their advocates defend them in the face of the most incontrovertible evidence. “Conspiracy theories are nearly impossible to defeat because they’re inherently unfalsifiable,” I remember being told a couple years ago by Douglas Feith (the Pentagon’s former #3 man, the father of a friend and — if you believe the theories — one of the primary architects of the 9/11 hoax). “For the conspiracy theorist, any information that helps his cause is held up as evidence, and anything that disproves it is summarily written off as part of the cover-up.”

The pieces of plane debris recovered at the crash sites: Planted by government agents.

The video of bin Laden gloating over his successful plot: Staged with a bin Laden look-alike.

Confessions of senior Al Qaeda operatives captured by America: Tortured out of them.

The frantic cell phone calls by United 93 passengers: What calls?

Another thing you’ll notice about conspiracy theorists is that they prefer poking holes in the official account to constructing their own because, well, it’s a lot easier. Like the Intelligent Design theorist who searches for gaps in the fossil record to question evolution, the conspiracy theorist spends his spare time (of which he clearly has too much) finding holes in the historical record to disprove the commonly accepted account. Each manages some success because in both cases, we don’t have — and can never have — perfect knowledge, leaving ample room for the conspiracy theorist to fill with conspiracy (as the I.D. theorist does with God). Asked on a radio show what had really happened to the unfortunate souls who boarded those four planes that morning, Loose Change creator Dylan Avery responded, “I don’t claim to have a definitive answer … I just know that the official story is wrong.”

Loose change or loose screws? You decide.

I don’t have the space, the time or the desire to summarize the voluminous research done by experts in engineering, aviation and other fields to disprove this latest round of conspiracy theories — read Popular Mechanics’ Debunking 9/11 Myths if you want answers — but frankly none of it would change certain minds. You’re about as likely to convince the diehard conspiracy theorist that he’s spinning his wheels as you are to persuade a Christian fundamentalist that the world is more than 6,000 years old.

And it’s not just evidence that the conspiracy nuts wall themselves off from: it’s common sense.

George Bush is arguably the least intelligent president in U.S. history — his administration, one of the most incompetent. One area in which Bush-Cheney et al have exhibited that incompetence time and again is the ability to keep secrets. Let’s assume that the facts did allow for a conspiracy: Ask yourself whether the same team that bungled the Iraq War and the Hurricane Katrina aftermath could’ve staged the 9/11 attacks, made it look like Al Qaeda’s fault, then prevented a leak from one of the thousands who would’ve had knowledge of such an elaborate plot.

If you still think this was all a conspiracy, please see a doctor — I give up.

It seems that some find the thought of millions of Jihadists bent on killing Americans so terrifying (or the thought of fighting them so distasteful) that they’ll tell themselves anything to deny it. And it’s not just the conspiracy theorists who are doing it anymore — it’s all of us, to one degree or another. Six years without an attack has allowed us to believe that 9/11 was somehow an aberration. We do so at our own peril.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri or the countless other Jihadists still at large. They’re candid about their plans — if only we would take them seriously this time.

Ben Birnbaum is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at bbirnbaum@c­or­ne­llsun.­com. Infomaniacs Anonymous appears Tuesdays.

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