The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts
The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts
September 11, 2006
By Alexander Cockburn
You trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts -- -- the ones who say Bush and
Cheney masterminded the attacks on the W orld T rade Center and the Pentagon -- in the first
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 involves the events of 9/11 itself... In light of standard procedures for dealing with
hijacked 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 of the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit
preposterous belief in American efficiency, thus many of them start with the racist premise that
"Arabs in caves" weren't capable of the mission. They believe that military systems work 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 and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called
the National Military Command center and NORAD. They believe, citing reverently (this is from high
priest Griffin) "the US Air Force's own website", that an F-15 could have intercepted AA flight 11 "by
8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30".
They appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because if they did they'd know that
minutely planned operations -- let alone responses to an unprecedented emergency -- screw up
with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality, weather and all the other
whims of providence.
According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command, an impending Soviet
attack would have prompted the missile silos in North Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc towards
Moscow and kindred targets. The tiny number of test launches actually attempted all failed,
as
whereupon SAC gave up testing. W it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defense
contractor venality or... CONSPIRACY? (In that case, presumably, a Communist conspiracy, as
outlined by ancestors of the present nuts, ever intent on identifying those who would stab America
in the back.)
Did the British and French forces in 1940 break and flee a W ehrmacht capable of only one lunge,
because of rotten leadership, terrible planning, epic cowardice, or ... CONSPIRACY? Did the April 24,
1980 effort to rescue the hostages in the US embassy in T eheran fail because a sandstorm disabled
three of the eight helicopters, because the helicopters were poorly made, because of a lousy plan or
because of agents of William Casey and the Republican National Committee poured sugar into their
gas tanks in yet another CONSPIRACY?
Have the US military's varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn't intercept and shoot down the
hijacked planes stemmed from absolutely predictable 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 prices
because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or because the Jews want to
because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or because the Jews want to
take over the world? August Bebel said anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools. These days the
9/11 conspiracy fever threatens to become the "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, often accompanied by harsh insults identifying me as a "gate-keeper" preventing the
truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking me "what I think about 9/11". What
they are actually trying to find out is whether I'm part of the coven. I imagine it was like being a Stoic
in the second century A.D. going for a stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, with
seeming casualness, whether it's possible to feed 5,000 people on five loaves of bread and a couple
of fish.
Indeed, at my school in the 1950s the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison's book, Who Moved
The Stone? It sought to demonstrate, with exhaustive citation from the Gospels, that since on these
accounts no human had moved the stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, it must
beyond the 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't admit into his argument the
possibility that angels don't exist, or that the gospel writers were making it up.
It's the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts, who proffer what they demurely call "disturbing questions",
though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into
sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined
clues in documents and photos, torturing the data –- as the old joke goes about economists -- till
the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical.
Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that
undermines their theories -- like witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon -- is
contemptuously brushed aside.
Anyone familiar with criminal, particularly death penalty defense -- I had such an opportunity for a
number of years -- will know that there are always anomalies the prosecution cannot account for
and that the defense teams can exploit, in hopes of swaying a jury either in the guilt or penalty
phase of a trial. Time and again I would see the defense team spend days and weeks, even months,
back-checking on a possibly vulnerable link in the evidentiary chain that could be attacked, at least
to the all-important level of creating "reasonable doubt" in the mind of a juror. Expert witnesses
would be imported at great expense –- unlike states such as T exas, the justice system of
California is generous in the provision of money for death penalty defense -- to challenge the
prosecution's forensic evidence. Such challenges weren't hard to mount. Contrary to prosecutorial
claims, there is far less instrinsic certainty in forensic evaluation than is commonly supposed, as
regards fingerprints, landing marks on bullets and so forth.
But minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one such weak link often leads to a distorted
view of the whole case. I remember more than one case where, after weeks of interviewing
witnesses at one particular crime scene, the defense's investigator had collected enough witness
reports to mount a decent attack on this aspect of the prosecution's overall case. At least 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 the prosecution's whole case -- chain of evidence,
cumulative witness statements, accused's own movements and subsequent statements -- it
became clear enough to me and, in that case to the juries , that the accused were incontestably
.
guilty But even then, such cases had a vigorous afterlife, with the defense trying to muster up
grounds for an appeal, on the basis of testimony and evidence withheld by the prosecution, faulty
rulings by the judge, a prejudiced jury member and so on. A seemingly "cut and dried case" is very
rarely beyond 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 that there are endless anomalies and
loose ends. Eyewitness testimony -- as so often -- is conflicting, forensic evidence possibly
misconstrued, mishandled or just missing. But in my view, the W arren Commission, as confirmed in
almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had it right and
.
Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository The evidentiary chain for his guilt is
persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course
persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracy nuts entirely unconvincing. But of course
-- as the years roll by, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast,
CIA-related scenarios -- the nuts keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever.
Naturally, there are conspiracies. I think there is strong evidence that FDR did have knowledge that a
Japanese naval force in the north Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt
thought it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to get the
US into the war.
Of course it's very probable that the FBI or US military intelligence, even the CIA, had penetrated the
Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 attacks; that intelligence reports -- some are already known --
piled up in various W ashington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught and even the
manner in which it might be carried out.
The history of intelligence operations is profuse with example of successful intelligence collection,
but also fatal slowness to act on the intelligence, along with eagerness not to compromise the
security and future usefulness of the informant, who has to prove his own credentials by even
pressing for prompt action by the plotters. Sometime an undercover agent will actually propose an
action, either to deflect efforts away from some graver threat, or to put the plotters in a position
where they can be caught red-handed. In their penetrations of environmental groups the FBI
certainly did this.
Long before the Y om Kippur war, a CIA analyst noted Egyptian orders from a German engineering
firm, and deduced from the type and size of equipment 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 window for the attack. His superiors at the CIA sat on the report. When the Egyptian army
finally attacked on October 6, 1973 the CIA high command ordered up the long-buried report,
as
dusted it off and sent it over to the White House, marked "current intelligence". W there a
"conspiracy" by the CIA high command to allow Israel to be taken by surprise? I doubt it.
.
Bureaucratic inertia and caution prevailed, until the moment came for decisive CYA activity The nuts
make dizzying "deductive" leaps. There is a one particularly vigorous coven which has established to
its own satisfaction that the original NASA moon landing was faked, and never took place. This
"conspiracy" would have required the complicity of thousands of people , all of whom have kept their
mouths shut. The proponents of the "fake moon landing" plot tend to overlap with the JFK and 9/11
nuts.
One notorious "deductive" leap involves flight 77, which on 9/11 ended up crashing into the
Pentagon. There are photos of the impact of the "object" -- i.e., the Boeing 757, flight 77 -- that
AS
seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, the nuts assert, it W a missile and a
757 didn't hit the Pentagon. As regards the hole, my brother Andrew -- writing a book about
Rumsfeld and the DoD during his tenure -- has seen photos taken within 30 minutes of Pentagon
impact clearly showing outline of entire plane including wings. This was visible momentarily when the
smoke blew away
And if it was a missile, what happened to the 757? Did the conspirators shoot it down somewhere
else, or force it down and then kill the passengers? Why plan to demolish the towers with pre-placed
explosives if your conspiracy includes control of the two planes that hit them. Why bother with the
planes at all. Why blame Osama if your fall guy is Saddam Hussein? Why involve the Israeli "art
students".
The nuts simultaneously credit their targets -- the Bush-Cheney "conspirators" -- with superhuman
ingenuity and grotesque carelessness. In W ebster Griffin Tarpley's book "9/11 Synthetic Terror Made
in USA" he writes that "in an interview with Parade magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld also
as
referred to the object which hit the Pentagon as a 'missile'. W this a Freudian slip by the loquacious
defense chief?" (And, a nut might add, is it mere coincidence that W ebster Griffin Tarpley shares one
of his names with David Ray Griffin?
.
The demolition scenario is classic who-moved-the-stonery The WTC towers didn't fall down because
they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the
they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the
Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, they fell
because Dick Cheney'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 as to the number of conspirators, widening
steadily to include all the people involved in the execution and cover-up of the demolition of the
Towers and the onslaught on the Pentagon, from the teams acquiring the explosives and the
missile, inserting the explosives in the relevant floors of three vast buildings, (moving day after day
among the unsuspecting office workers), then on 9/11 activating the detonators.
Subsequently the conspiracy includes the disposers of the steel and rubble, the waste recyclers in
Staten Island and perhaps even the Chinese who took the salvaged incriminating metal for use in
the Three Gorges dam, where it will be submerged in water and concrete 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 speed inexplicable in terms of physics unless caused
by carefully pre-placed explosives, detonated by the ruthless Bush-Cheney operatives. High grade
steel can bend disastrously under extreme heat. People inside who survived the collapse didn't hear
a series of explosions. As discussed in Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin's excellent book Grand Illusion,
about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed warnings nine minutes before the final
collapse that the South T ower might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before
the North T ower's fall.
What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani's watch: the
favoritism to Motorola which saddled the firemen with radios that didn't work; the ability of the Port
Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor's catastrophic failure in the years before 9/11/2001
to organize an effective unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen
could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn't have unnecessarily entered the T owers; that
people in the Towers wouldn't have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that
firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that prompted
most of the NYPD men to flee the T owers.
That's the real political world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held accountable. The
nuts disdain the real world because, like much of the left and liberal sectors, they have promoted
Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history,
instead of being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more than usual
stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally favor in imperial leaders.) The Conspiracy
Nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction, just as Danny Sheehan did with his Complaint,
that mesmerized and distracted much of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and
which finally collapsed in a Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the T owers.
* 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 of CounterPunch's
parent non-profit, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity -- wrote an enormous
onslaught on CounterPunch a while ago, "proving" to his own satisfaction that CounterPunch was a
pawn of the Democratic Party, the CIA and kindred darker forces. I suppose the fact that
CounterPunch attacked the Democratic Party and the CIA on a weekly basis was just one more
example of our cunning in deflecting suspicion away from our true sponsors. The fact that from time
to time that we also quite regularly attacked FDR -- and posited his foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor --
should again be taken as evidence of our cunning in deflecting suspicion away from Ford's
supervisory role in our affairs. In fact we'd put Ford on the board in the hopes (vain, as they turned
out to be) that he would persuade film stars to give CounterPunch money .
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-9-11-conspiracy-nuts-by-alexander-cockburn