9/11 and conspiracy

I consider myself a skeptic, before all else. "Left-wing", yes, and a pagan-atheist and a "progressive" and "humanist" and so forth, but before all else, I am a skeptic. It is my skepticism that has led me to my political beliefs - which I hold by default, the alternatives being worse - rather than the other way around.

I am especially skeptical of people who cobble together extraordinary narratives together out of suspect evidence, particularly when such narratives are glued together by a kind of nudging innuendo. This is why I found the "case against Saddam" suspect from the get-go, and why Colin Powell's WMD speech at the U.N. prior to the invasion of Iraq seemed to me so transparently desperate and baseless that I am amazed to this day it actually worked on anyone. It is also why I find myself growing queasy in response to some of the 9/11 conspiracy theories circulating through the blogosphere.

Before I get accused of being a plant for the Bush administration, let me first explain the following: I am willing to entertain the possibility that our government might have turned a blind eye - either deliberately or out of hubris or incompetence - thus allowing the machinations behind 9/11 to occur unimpeded. There is certainly a historical precedent for it. I am even willing to consider that a very small number of operatives within the administration may have provided, in some small way, a window of opportunity for the attacks to occur. Maybe. I call this the "weak conspiracy theory," and I consider it at least worthy of debate.

But many conspiracy theorists want me to swallow so much more. I am being asked to believe that an administration, whose operational incompetence demonstrates their consistent inability to organize even a decent clam-bake, somehow orchestrated a vast and complex conspiracy of evidence-planting and controlled demolitions to bring about the events of 9/11, and did so with the assured result that it would get the public behind a premeditated plan to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

No.

Let me first clarify something. I live in NYC. I saw the towers burn with my own eyes. I know someone who lost a friend on one of the aircraft, and another who lost their beloved in the WTC itself. I have friends who saw the planes go into the building. That part happened. There were planes, and those planes hit the towers.

I was not present at the Pentagon, but I've read a number of accounts by folks that the security camera does not show a plane hitting the pentagon. This was news to me. I recall very clearly watching the security cam video (the real one, not that piece of quackery from the parking lot that some bozo put up on You Tube) in slow mo. I saw something very interesting: a big jet plane going into the Pentagon.

I have also been told that United 93 must have been shot down, rather than having crashed. This I can believe, though I don't see why it points to a grand conspiracy. The plane was thought to be heading for the White House, hence the motivation for shooting it down. That the administration would not want to cop to this should hardly be shocking - the public prefers a tale of heroic sacrifice (again, I'm not making a claim for either scenario).

Let's go back to the World Trade Center. Here's what is always claimed - it was a "controlled demolition."

The World Trade Center Towers were not felled by a "controlled demolition". This is very easy to surmise by watching their collapse, side by side with a film of an actual controlled demolition. In a controlled demolition, explosives are placed at key points throughout the structure of a building. They are detonated in a carefully timed but very rapid sequence, allowing the building to fall straight downwards in a harmless cascade of liquid rubble. You can see, in such videos, little jets of debris shooting out along the edge of the building as these timed explosives detonate.

In the collapse of the WTC - which I had the misfortune of viewing roughly 30 or 40 times from as many angles as I was stuck in my Jersey City apartment the entire day of September 11 (I had made it outside that morning, and was able to see Tower One's fiery crown from the window of a commuter bus on Kennedy Blvd.) - this is not what happens. What you see is this: the building buckles at its weakest point, and collapses in an uncontrolled mess. The fact that the debris takes a more or less vertical trajectory (as they would in a controlled demolition) is not incriminating, since this was a modern skyscraper, and as such was designed to collapse in this fashion. The physical principles which make this possible are hardly a state secret.

So then, are we to believe that the explosives were placed only at those key joints, in the vicinity of the plane crash? That whoever planted the bombs knew roughly which floors would be impacted, that the pilots could be counted on to aim their altitude so precisely (for if one failed in this respect, the gig is up, big time)? Are we to believe that said explosives could be expected to remain in place following the impact, and that they would not be detonated before the "right time" by the heat of burning jet fuel? That the detonators, wires, and other requisite electronics would also survive impact and fire? That waiting 90 minutes so that everyone on the lower floors could escape would generate the greatest amount of "terror"?

Let's begin with a few observations, which, with a moment's reflection, should seem self-evident. First, if there was a conspiracy in which certain members of the Bush administration, Bush himself was not aware of it. At the very least, he had no foreknowledge. To believe otherwise would be to believe the following: that Bush felt the best way to rally the terrified public behind him would be to give a reading of "My Pet Goat" during the attacks, and then spend seven minutes frozen in indecision before rolling cameras, until prompted to action by his secret service men. This, he thought, will really get the People Behind Their Leader.

Even the best politicians cannot predict the future. Unprecedented acts (like massive terrorist attacks on American soil) cannot provide guaranteed outcomes. How could the administration have known what the effect on the public would be? It is easy enough for us to know what the effect was, but in the planning stages, does it seem likely that the conspirators would be certain that 9/11 style attacks would have the desired effect? Might they not just as easily turn the public against the administration that failed to prevent it? In fact, after the short-term gain in support for Bush, is this not what has actually happened?

Conspiracy theorists like to cite historical precedent, in which evidence exists that certain higher-ups may have had foreknowledge and/or involvement in an attack on American targets. They cite Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the sinking of the USS Maine. What is often overlooked is that every one of these incidents involved a country with which the United States has been in a publicly known state of heightened tension for an extended period of months or years previous to and leading up to the incident, and the pressures to go to war had been long mounting. To place the straw that breaks the camel's back, you must first have already placed a half-million previous straws (incidents of perceived belligerence), and you must also have a camel (public animosity and fear). Neither existed with Afghanistan, nor did it then exist in the public mind with Iraq. No one was going to rally the nation to war to prevent the imposition of strict Sharia, or the destruction of Buddha statues, or the old-hat reality of Saddam having used WMDs in the past.

We would therefore have to believe that the White House conspirators were going to bank this enormously risky and (compared to the aforementioned "conspiracies") complicated venture on a total non sequitur. If invading Iraq was the ultimate goal, might not our conspirators, in their great omniscience, have managed to find some willing Iraqi terrorists? Or Iranians? Would they really have willingly chosen as their ideal terrorist Osama Bin Laden, whose family ties to certain Texas oilmen would (and did) become all too unpleasant rather quickly? Try putting yourself in their place - it does not make much sense. In fact, it seems like the worst of all possible conspiracy plans.

And then you have the problem of scale. If we are going to assume a "strong" conspiracy, with all the requisite intricate planning implied by Loose Change et al, couldn't they have cut a much wider swath of destruction, and created a more fearful attack? People capable of sabotaging the WTC ahead of time could have just as easily smuggled a nuclear warhead onto one of those planes. They could've taken out major bridges. Why the cumbersome operation of substituting a plane for a missile at the last minute? Even assuming a missile was required to damage the Pentagon, would not the plane have done the trick? The theorists complain that the damage to the Pentagon was not severe enough to have come from a jet airliner. What, then, is the logic of hijacking a plane, and then substituting it for a missile at the last moment to minimize damage in a conspiracy whose goal is to terrify the public?

Why do I harp on about this?

Conspiracy theories about 9/11 are becoming increasingly popular with the public. As someone who is allied with "The Left" - though I myself would prefer a world where I'm not consigned by default to either "wing" - I don't want to see the case against Bush weakened by giving the Left a bad name. Our best defense against Bush or any president like him in the future is our capacity to reason, to demand a rational presentation of the facts. This requires a fundamental understanding of what separates theory from fact, and evidence from a conclusion.

But, unfortunately, the strong-conspiracy theorists on the Left are almost identical in their emotional stance and methodology to the creationists and the "Intelligent Design" crowd on the right. They require that all epochal events are the work of a master planner. They mistake gaps and incongruities in the chain of evidence - which is a fact of life in any complex historical event - for affirmation of a forgone conclusion. Even worse, they accuse anyone unwilling to follow them into the heart of their theoretical labyrinth of being close-minded, obstructionist, or even complicit.

The belief in a tidy universe is common fallacy of the Left and Right alike. Bush's Fundies and the conspiracy-theory segment of the Left are, it seems to me, different sides of the same coin. They both believe that The Leader is Powerful, and that his Influence is Vast. They both believe that Everything Happens for a Reason, and the search for Signs and Premonitions occupies their every effort. They both believe in a forgone conclusion about the material facts of reality, and no rationalization is too hyperbolic for them - bombs were planted, invisible missiles launched, and God placed the dinosaur fossils in the rocks to test our faith in his creation. I also wonder if there is not some old-fashioned American hubris amongst the conspiracy-mad Left - just as many Fox News viewers cannot conceive of the 9/11 attacks coming from anyone other than the world's most deadly enemy (rather than a few third-rate terrorists with a shoe-string budget), it seems certain that others cannot conceive of an event so significant as the 9/11 attacks that it is not invested with some other "higher" meaning. We have all been living in a bubble, and for many of us, it is inconceivable that such extraordinary things happened as a result of such mundane realities as incompetence and failure.

The danger here is manifold. The first and most immediate problem is that, if we are to accept that the strong conspiracy is true, we are obviously quite helpless. A government which can pull off such a complex hoax is not only diabolical beyond measure, it as also of virtually unlimited power. We would have to assume that many other aspects of our daily lives are, in fact, orchestrated by the OverBush, and that we may never know the depth of his power. Scary stuff. I'm sure Bush and Cheney would love to hear that we fear them so.

The other very significant problem is that the strong conspiracy theory blinds us to the crimes we know to be true - crimes we actually have a chance of doing something about if we keep or heads on and our senses intact. I am satisfied, for instance, that burning jet fuel is hot enough to weaken (not melt) steel girders to the point where they would buckle. It may be the case that, for many metallurgists and chemists and physicists, this explanation is not entirely satisfactory (though I doubt it). So what? I'm saving my skeptical powers for where they are needed right now - as the Bush administration wags its saber at Iran, as our media continue to distort and misrepresent virtually everything that happens in the Middle East, and as right-wing lawyers undermine our Constitution. In light of these pressing issue, is not the question of bending metals little more than a scientific curiosity?

Priorities, people. Priorities.