In the first installment of this series, we looked at the Origin of Conspiracy Theories, and came to the tentative conclusion that such things are typically generated in a swirl of misinformation, or from a lack of credible facts, and propagated for various, political, or deep-seeded psychological reasons.
The specific question of "Was 9/11 a Government Conspiracy and Cover up?" was left unanswered. Personally, I do not believe that the U.S. Government was the perpetrator of the September 11th Attacks, but then again, I'm not in possession of all the facts, either. I don't believe that anyone ever will be in possession of absolute truth regarding 9/11; the scope of the event is vast, the underlying causes too varied, the waters made murky by emotions, politics, and war, to believe that a full reckoning of 9/11 will ever be possible.
The saddest part of the entire "Conspiracy or No?" debate is that has become politicized, and often personalized, to such a large extent; we all, in our own ways, have projected motivations, phobias, and emotions, against the backdrop of September 11 in such a way as to make an effort to ever get a day-by-day, minute-by-minute historical accounting of the event an impossible endeavor.
There will always be those -- even if the Absolute Truth should be sent from Heaven above, carried on the Wings of Angels -- who would never believe it, in any case. Some are preternaturally stupid, some obstinate, others contrarian for the sake of being so, a great many others simply have some axe to grind -- political, intellectual -- that makes accepting the truth problematic for them. My intent here is not to dissuade those people from these beliefs, only to suggest that they just might have it all wrong.
In this post, we'll be looking at a few popular aspects of the "The Government Did it" school of thought, and poke some holes in them.
The first argument against 9/11 having been a government conspiracy for the purposes of (pick one or more) get us into decade-long-super expensive wars, steal Middle Eastern oil, serve as a casus belli for George W. Bush's warmongering-phallocentric fantasies, avenging the death threats against Poppa Bush, or to provide the fig leaf behind which a new Western Imperialist Age would begin, is simply....the nature of the attack, itself, as it is often envisioned by the Conspiracy Theorists!
Assuming some nefarious plot, one must imagine that it was something which involved a great number of people, working from some well-organized and well-thought-out plan of attack. One must assume that the greater mass of people involved are simply too stupid to question authority and will do whatever they are told without giving it any thought. You must also assume that the same dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers people were able to maintain a level of operational security so airtight that to this day, not a single whisper of such a grand scheme has ever reached anyone's ears. You must believe that this secret has been kept in the midst of the Information Age, where data has often become something like a pile of dogshit: it's just laying around everywhere, just waiting for someone to step in it accidentally. And all that with a government that leaks information like an incontinent leaks after a bowl of fiber and a six-pack breakfast.
No Wikileaks. No intrepid newspaper reporters tenaciously digging. No lost or stolen government laptops. No loose threads to threaten to unravel the entire plot. Not a single doofus advertising his/her involvement on AOL, Facebook, or a blog. The security on this thing is so good that one imagines that it's entirely possible that one part of the conspiracy was completely in the dark about what another was up to, and that by some neat trick, both ends managed to stay out of each other's way and avoid working at cross-purposes.
You need to believe that a variety of government agencies -- the FAA, CIA, FBI, Pentagon Types, just to begin with -- are all in on it, to one extent or another. There will, by necessity, be other elements involved to deal with public relations and press matters, communications, funding, training, and finally, there must be another conspiracy within the conspiracy, the real Masterstroke of the entire operation:
Someone, somehow, convinced 19 Al Qaeda doofuses to undertake a suicide mission on behalf of the United States Government, in such a way as to make their organization the patsies for 9/11, while still maintaining the fantasy that the Jihadis are acting on behalf of Al Qaeda and the Worldwide Jihad, striking a blow for Muslims everywhere. And even better; leaving them convinced that it was all their own idea in the first place, and eager to put Usama Bin Laden in front of a television camera to claim credit for it all.
Oh, somehow also leaving Al Qaeda to pick up the tab for the whole shebang -- the training, the flight schools, the airline tickets, hotels, rental cars, walking around money, and even Mohammed Atta's last Las Vegas bachelor-party-like fling -- too.
Seriously?
Secondly, if you were to assume that the evil cabal of Bushhitler and Darth Cheney put this thing together for their own, questionable ends, one must marvel at the speed with which this flawless operation came together. George Bush is inaugurated on January 20, 2001, the attacks take place in a little under 9 months. It would probably have been the single most efficient endeavor ever undertaken by the American Government, surpassing the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project. It would have been the most-perfectly planned and executed clandestine plan in history, a series of independent, secret, and complex operations coming together in so short a time as to astound.
Can you imagine just how many people would, by necessity, be involved in such a thing? How many moving parts, as it were, there are to the entire operation? This, in itself, is the most effective argument against 9/11 having been a U.S. government conspiracy. To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the percentage chance of a secret operation being blown or discovered is equal to the square of the number of people involved in it.
Think about this: airport security personnel need to look the other way while 19 guys -- most on a terrorist watch list -- are allowed to board airliners. Any law enforcement types who might be on to Atta and his confederates need to lay off, and leave them un-arrested long enough for them to do their worst. If the World Trade Center, as has been alleged, has been rigged with explosives (to initiate a controlled explosion), then this requires the activities of scores of people, with specialized training, planting at least hundreds of charges in strategic places, often in broad daylight and in front of thousands of witnesses, over a prolonged period of time (that kind of work cannot be rushed if it isn't to detonate prematurely or fail altogether).
All this requires the activities, connivance, or convenient stupidity of, literally, hundreds of people. That's hundreds that one must assume never, ever questioned a single thing, never noticed anything untoward; if they were directly involved, you must believe that they were so single-minded of purpose (obeying their orders) that even while placing boxcutters in a Halal meal pak, or planting explosives on strategic steel girders within an office building containing tens of thousands, that the reason why they should do these things never once aroused anything like suspicion, guilt, confusion, or triggered anyone's conscience. There's not one dedicated cop, not a single airport security screener, an FBI agent, who raised an eyebrow at being told that Atta and Company must be allowed access to an airport, or that planting explosives was just a routine thing?
No one, not a single supposed operative, not a solitary disgruntled government employee (sorry, that's redundant), no hero whistleblowers, no Air Force officer who questions his order to (allegedly) shoot down unarmed airliners, no Air Traffic Controller who was there the day the Mysterious Man in the Dark Suit from Whoknowswhere instructed everyone to go braindead at exactly such-and-such a time, on such-and-such a date. Not one person, of the hundreds we must assume were involved, has ever stepped forward or leaked information. There's not even the hint of water-cooler gossip or pillow talk between perpetrator/facilitator and the Missus.
Here is where 9/11 Conspiracy Theory falls flat on it's face: the bigger the conspiracy, the more people who must be involved. The more people involved, the greater the chance that the conspiracy will quickly unravel. The faster the thing unravels, the more information that becomes available. It is virtually impossible for any organization, even the richest, most powerful and technologically-advanced government on Planet Earth, to undertake a project of this scale and with this level of precision, with that sort of Fort Knox-like security. American Intelligence is good, BUT NOT THAT GOOD. Then again, if American Intelligence was that good, there may never have been a September 11th in the first place!
Another reason why the government could not be the mastermind of 9/11: in the normal course of dally life, when the average citizen interacts with agents of his government --the woefully-misinformed agent on the IRS helpline. The clerk at the Passport Office that gave you the impression of being unable to find her own ass with both hands and a flashlight. When you've filed a Change of Address package with the Post Office, but somehow your mail is still being delivered to your old address, or your local newspaper runs a story of how the Department of Education bought 200 times more paperclips than it needed, and paid 15 time the going rate for them, and no one noticed for eight years. How is it that the same government which routinely fucks up by the numbers, an organization which employs complete boobs for mostly political reasons, how is it possible that that inept and inefficient system suddenly morphs into the most calculating, sinister, and deadly efficient organization in human history, just when (according to Conspiracy Theorists) it needs to?
The greater mass of the American Government consists of an amorphous blob of lowest-common-denominator-clock-watcher types, who's main talent is an ability to learn their jobs through sheer, mindless, repetition and an uncanny ability to fill-in forms in triplicate, rubber-stamp, and then pass on little bits of paper (this is the 21st Century, you know) to higher authority for future misfiling and/or eventual loss.
Yes, there are, indeed, some very bright and highly-motivated people working in government employ, but these are few and far between. And if we accept this extraordinarily low level of realistic expectation from the typical bureaucratic type, then we must also accept that the same model is genuinely incapable of pulling something like 9/11 off. The people with the talent to have perpetrated this crime, kept it all quiet and managed public perceptions about it (we must assume) would probably be working in the private sector and getting stinking rich.
The government simply could not have idiot-proofed an operation this big when the when the Federal, Unionized, Bureaucracy has dedicated itself to evolving a species of new-and-improved idiots on a daily basis, and which recruits it's breeding stock from those whose career prospects were either "Do you want fries with that?", or determined by their ability to guess correctly on a multiple-choice examination mostly written by illiterates, for illiterates (take a civil service exam, and see for yourself).
The explanation that 9/11 was the result of 19 or so committed jihadists, training within the borders of a country mired in the Mud Age, utilizing flight simulator software and laptops, perhaps finagling a few actual flying lessons in Western Schools, and operating, for the most part, in the open, beneath a screen of Political Correctness and Civil Liberties, all of it directed via satellite phone from a cave in Tora Bora, is a far more likely -- and far more believable -- explanation for 9/11 than the alternate theory of a U.S. Government plot against it's own citizens.
To sum up this government conspiracy theory, you must believe that hundreds of mindless robots from a dizzying array of government agencies undertook a program of often-questionable activities, that they did so without asking why they should do what they have done, or what the ultimate purpose is, with the assumption that the very few who might not be completely braindead would deliberately be derelict in their duty, that criminal investigations and intelligence operations were deliberately interfered with or engineered so as to allow the hijackers freedom of movement and action, that the hijackers were somehow coerced or seduced into turning themselves into kamikazes on behalf of their enemy, and that all of this was done by people who were "just following orders" -- with no curiosity or conscience at all -- for the purposes of killing thousands, for...
...I guess whatever your political outlook or mental state requires you to believe. Because there's certainly no logic behind it all, other than Al Qaeda hates us and wants us all dead.
A government that could pull of the sort of precision operation that the Conspiracy Theorists insist 9/11 was, would, one would think, also be able to solve the problems of poverty and World Hunger, cure AIDS, genetically engineer a unicorn that craps jellybeans and rainbows, and perhaps answer the Eternal Question of how is it that someone shot John Lennon five times, but didn't even bother to aim at Yoko Ono.
A government that good, that smart, and that efficient, also would have avoided saddling it's taxpayers with a $14 trillion debt. Right?
Next time, we'll look at some of the more-persistent 'facts' of most 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, and how what some say is Bible Truth is nothing of the sort.
The collapse of the Twin Towers played a huge psychological role in how the American people perceived 9/11. What really had me confused over the years is how the towers just crumbled to the ground like sandcastles.
