The Great 9/11 Conspiracy
The first notion that President Bush knew and did nothing, is similar to the conspiracy theory that Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance that the Japanese were going to hit Pearl Harbor and did nothing. Just as FDR needed an attack on the US Pacific fleet in order to justify entering World War II, George W. Bush needed an attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to initiate the secret Neocon plot to take over the world, starting by foisting democracy on unsuspecting Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Lack of any credible evidence that either FDR knew or George W. Bush knew does not deter people who are pretty sure that either or both knew. If one hates Roosevelt and/or Bush and if one hates the war against Japan and Nazi Germany and/or the war against the Islamo-Fascists, no facts, no evidence, no logic will deter one from believing anything about either President.
That leads us to the second 9/11 conspiracy theory that is talked about in certain academic circles and the seedier parts of the Internet. That theory is that the US government actually faked the 9/11 attacks. It was not Al Qaeda at all.
It seems that the thousands of people who actually saw the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in person and the tens of millions who saw them strike over and over again on TV were deceived. Don’t believe your lying eyes, the conspiracy theorists maintain, believe us.
This is where things get a little murky. On theory suggests that the three planes that slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were diverted and were landed in an undisclosed location where the passengers and crew were either executed or to this day are imprisoned. Another theory has the planes deliberately crashed into the Atlantic. Flight 93, on board which the heroic passengers fought back, did crash in that field in Pennsylvania, but was shot down. It could have been shot down by an A-10 (a ground attack plane, not designed for air to air combat) or an F 16.
Meanwhile the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by Predator drones. Or maybe they were hit by air liners flown by remote control by FBI agents. Or maybe they were just blown up by secretly placed C4.
What about the cell phone calls from the various air liners? All faked by government agents, suggest the conspiracy theorists. The government actually took the time to fake the voice patterns of some of the passengers.
And even cursory examining of all of these conspiracy claims would be sufficient for most people to conclude how absurd they are. Something of the sort might make a good episode of the X-Files, with Cancer Man arranging for alien mind control technology to fake the attacks. Mulder and Scully could waste endless time finding the truth that is “out there.”
Not that common sense will deter the conspiracy theorists. But if the reader wants to read further on how the conspiracy theories don’t hold up, pick up a copy of a book edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts.
Why do people believe such things? Why is it hard for millions of people to accept the fact that 9/11 was carried out by a cell of Islamo-Fascists led by Mohammed Atta on the orders of Osama bin Laden?
The attitude of the conspiracy theorists seems to be, “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” If one believes that 9/11 was carried out by Islamo-Fascists, then one must believe that the war against them has to be prosecuted to fullest. That means supporting military operations in foreign countries, an intrusive security regime at air ports and other places, and a tightening of law enforcement procedures that make some civil libertarians uncomfortable. It also means that one must believe that George W, Bush and his advisors are right about the threat of Islamo-Fascism and that his critics are wrong.
However, if one can believe that 9/11 was a secret government conspiracy executed to justify an evil Neocon plot to take over the world, then one can oppose war in the Middle East and Central Asia, pat downs at the air port, and the Patriot Act. More importantly, one can believe that George W, Bush is evil. Or that he’s stupid, but under the malign influence of the Neocons.
What are Neocons? Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, once quipped that Neoconservatism was a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, aided and abetted by the Christian right and led by Condi Rice. He was joking, of course, but there are people who actually believe that. Posts at left wing blogs such as Moveon.Org speak darkly of a conspiracy of Jews and “Christian Zionists” driving the war against Islamo-Fascism.
Neoconserrvatives, by the way, are actually former liberals who switched when it became apparent that liberals, and especially the Democratic Party, were in favor of appeasing the Soviet Union. It was a great case of these former liberals, who included Reagan Administration folks like Richard Perle and Jean Kirkpatrick, being mugged by history. Most of the original Neocons have applied the muscular foreign policy they favored against the Soviets to the new threat of Islamo-Fascism.
Despite the fact that not all Neocons are Jewish, there is more than a hint of anti-Semitism involved here. It manifested itself recently in the loss of Senator Joe Lieberman to an antiwar candidate in a Senate Democratic primary. Lieberman, albeit a reliable liberal, is considered too pro war on terror, too pro Israel, and-most importantly-too Jewish to be a Democratic US Senator by most Democrats. Lieberman may still win his seat, as an “Independent Democrat” with the votes of moderate Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. But the fact that a man who would have been comfortable in the Democratic Party of JFK and Truman is no longer welcome in the modern Democratic Party speaks volumes.
And that’s a pity. In World War II, Republican opponents of FDR did not spend time attacking him for the conduct of the war. No one wondered (openly at least) why we were fighting Germany when that country had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. No one called for the withdraw of American troops from Europe and the Pacific. This was despite the fact that the carnage of World War II was by orders of magnitude greater than the current war on Islamo-Fascism. The current number of killed in action in Iraq, the main theater of the war against Islamo-Fascism, is just over 2500 over three plus years. 2500 people was a day’s butcher’s bill on D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. But no one in 1944 flinched at the cost.
The fact that there are millions who are flinching at the cost of the current war and that some choose to believe the most outrageous and outlandish things to justify that cowardice should be a matter of deep concern to everyone. The stakes of the war against Islamo-Fascism are too great to be otherwise.
