What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
A Just Settlement
for the Middle East
Our new CounterPunch newsletter,
just out, offers Michael Neumann's plan for a just settlement
in the Middle East. Manuel
Garcia concludes his widely applauded primer on the laws of physics
and the myths of conspiracists by explainging the not-so-mysterious
collapse of WTC 7. But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
The
9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Anmerican Left
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Where was the American left in the campaign
that ended in recapture of both houses of Congress by the Democrats
on November 7, 2006? Was it in the streets, fomenting opposition
to the war in Iraq? Not at all. The antiwar movement has been
inert for months. When I was asked to give the keynote speech
at a rare antiwar rally in my local town of Eureka, northern
California, in early October, three of my five fellow orators
didn't deign to mention the war at all. Instead they numbed the
audience and sharply diminished its size with interminable dissections
of the 9/11/2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers and
the Pentagon. Their aim? To argue that the attacks were an "inside
job", organized by Bush and Cheney or (a frequent variation
on the theme) darker powers, for whom Bush and Cheney are the
mere errand boys.
Five years after the attacks,
9/11 conspiracism has now penetrated deep into the American left.
It is also widespread on the libertarian and populist right,
but that is scarcely surprising, since the American populist
right instinctively mistrusts government to a far greater degree
than the left, and matches conspiracies to its demon of preference,
whether the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, Black Helicopters or the Jews.
These days a dwindling number
of leftists learn their political economy from Marx via the small,
mostly Trotskyist groupuscules. Into the theoretical and strategic
void has crept a diffuse, peripatic conspiracist view of the
world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises
of capital accumulation, or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial
competition, but in locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley,
Davos) or supposedly "rogue" agencies, with the CIA
still at the head of the list. The 9/11 "conspiracy",
or "inside job", is the Summa of all this foolishness.
One trips over a fundamental
idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists 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". A central characteristic
of the conspiracists is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous
belief in American efficiency. Many of them start with the racist
premise--frequently voiced in as many words in their writings
-- that "Arabs in caves" weren't capable of the mission.
They believe that military systems should work they 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 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 by-the-book responses to an unprecedented emergency --
screw up with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity,
cowardice, venality and all the other failings, not excepting
sudden changes in the weather.
History is generous with such
examples. According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic
Air Command, an impending Soviet attack would have prompted the
missile siloes in North Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc
towards Moscow and kindred targets. The four test launches actually
attempted all failed, whereupon the SAC gave up testing. Was
it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defense contractor
venality or conspiracy?
Did the April 24, 1980 effort
to rescue the hostages in the US embassy in Teheran fail because
a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters, or because
the helicopters were poorly made, 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 take over the world? Bebel said anti-Semitism is the
socialism of the fools. These days the 9/11 conspiracy fever
threatens to be the dominant politics of the left.
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 conspiracists, 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.
There are some photos of the impact of the "object"
-- i.e. the Boeing 757, flight 77 -- that seem to show the sort
of hole a missile might make. Ergo, 757 didn't hit the Pentagon.
It WAS a missile. It wasn't smoke in some photographs obscuring
a larger rupture in the fortified Pentagon wall.
.
On this last matter, Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of
brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon's budgetary
outrages, tells me that "there ARE pictures taken of the
757 plane hitting Pentagon -- they were taken by the surveillance
cameras at Pentagon's heliport, which was right next to impact
point. I have seen themboth stills and moving pictures. I just
missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just
got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see
the terrified faces of passengers in windows. I knew two people
who were on the plane. One was ID'd by dental remains found in
the Pentagon."
This won't faze the conspiracists.
They're immune to any reality check. Spinney worked for the government
They switched the dental records The Boeing 757 was flown to
Nebraska for a rendez-vous with President Bush, who shot the
passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney's
friend's teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers
amid the debris in the Pentagon.
In fact hundreds of people
saw the plane -- people who know the difference between a plane
and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was hauled out
from the site. Why does the obvious have to be proved? Would
those who were wounded or who lost friends and colleagues that
day would assist in the cover up of a missile strike? Why risk
using a missile, when you had a plane in the air and - to
take the bizarre construct of the conspiracists -- had successfully
crashed (by remote control!) two into much more difficult targets--the
Trade Towers?
How difficult is it to learn
how to fly the jetliners if you didn't have to land them on a
runway? The short answer from commercial pilots is: not very
difficult. In fact, you can learn about all you need to know
from spending a few weeks in front of the Flight Simulator computer
program.
What do we make of Osama taking
credit for the attacks? That he's still on the CIA payroll? And
so it goes, on and on into the murk. But to what end? To prove
that Bush and Cheney are capable of almost anything? Actually,
what Bush and Cheney Bush haven't proved is the slightest degree
of competence to pull anything like this off. They couldn't even
manufacture weapons of mass destruction after US troops had invaded
Iraq, and when any box labeled "WMD" would have been
happily photographed by the embedded U.S. press as conclusive
testimony.
At least what these recent
elections may help to do is remind the left that Bush and Cheney
are not that much different from the politicians and overlords
of U.S. foreign policy who preceeded them or who will follow
them. There was already a bi-partisan consensus about Israel,
Iraq, et al.
Ultimately, the 9/11 conspiracists
want us to believe that the Bush/Cheney gang is a new breed
of evil. This might be the most dangerous deception of all, for
it fosters the fantasy that a new adminstration, a Hillary or
Gore administration, would pursue more humane policies
The WTC didn't fall down because
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, shout the conspiracists,
they "pancaked" because Dick Cheney's agents--scores
of them--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.
Michael Neumann, a philosopher,
and CounterPunch contributor, at the University of Trent, in
Ontario, remarked in a note to me:
"I think the problem of conspiracy nuttery has got worse,
and is part of a general trend. There really were serious
questions about the Kennedy assassination, an unusual number
of them, and it wasn't too crazy to come to the wrong conclusion.
There wasn't a single serious question about 9-11. But this
is the age of angels, creationism, corpses all over Kosovo, Arabs
suspiciously speaking Arabic, Satanic child abuse, nucular Eyraquees,
and channeling. The main engine of the 9-11 conspiracy cult
is nothing political; it's the death of any conception of evidence.
"This probably comes from
the decline of Western power. Deep down, almost everyone,
across the political spectrum, is locked in a bigotry which can
only attribute that decline to some irrational or supernatural
power. The result is the ascendency of magic over common sense,
let alone reason."
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 Texas,
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 intrinsic 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 whenthe 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 is conflicting, forensic
evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or just missing. But
in my view, the Warren 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 conspiracists
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 conspiracists keep on toiling
away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever.
Of course 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. It's quite possible 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.
Indeed 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 Washington
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 1973 Yom 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. Why
else would the Egyptians suddenly be ordering bridging materials.
From the amounts being purchased and shipped 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, dusted it off
and sent it over to the White House, marked "current intelligence".
Was 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
"cover your ass" activities.
The conspiracists 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 crowds.
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 submerged in water and concrete for
ever. Tens of thousands of people, all silent as the tomb to
this day.
The conspiracists simultaneously
credit their targets--the Bush-Cheney "conspirators"
-- with superhuman ingenuity and grotesque carelessness. In Webster
Griffin Tarpley's book 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA he
writes that "in an interview with Parade magazine, Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld also referred to the object which hit the
Pentagon as a 'missile'. Was this a Freudian slip by the loquacious
defense chief?"
The physicist and engineer
Manuel Garcia Jr (whose explications furnish the bulk of our
9/11 file) reminds us that if the evidence allows for several
explanations to a given problem then the hypothesis with the
fewest assumptions is most probably correct. This principle is
called Occam's Razor, named after the 14th-century English logician
and Franciscan friar William of Occam.
There is not the slightest
need to postulate pre-placed explosive charges to explain why
the towers collapsed at near free fall speeds. Engineer Pierre
Sprey--who designed the F-16 and A-10 -- points out a few practical
aspects of explosive demolitions that make the explosive charge
hypothesis improbable to the point of absurdity:
"1. Any demolitions expert
concocting a plan to hit a tall building with an airplane and
then use pre-placed explosives to UNDETECTABLY ensure the collapse
of the building would never place the explosives 20, 30 and 60
floors below the impact point. Obviously, he would put the explosives
on one or more floors as close as possible to the planned impact
level.
"2. It is inconceivable
that our demolitions expert would time his surreptitious explosions
to occur HOURS after the aircraft impact. He couldn't possibly
be absolutely certain that the impact fires would even last an
hour. Quite the opposite: to mask the booster explosions, he'd
time them to follow right on the heels of the impact.
"3. To ensure collapse
of a major building requires very sizable demolition charges,
charges that are large enough to do a lot more than emit the
"puffs of smoke" cited as evidence for the explosives
hypothesis. I've seen both live and filmed explosive building
demolitions. Each explosion is accompanied by a very visible
shower of heavy rubble and a dense cloud of smoke and dust. Just
that fact alone makes the explosives hypothesis untenable; no
demolitions expert in the world would be willing to promise his
client that he could bring down a tall building with explosions
guaranteed to be indistinguishable from the effects of an aircraft
impact."
Herman Soifer, a retired structural
engineer, summarize the collapse of Buildings 1 and 2 succinctly,
in a letter to me, remarking that since he had followed the plans
and engineering of the Towers during construction he was able
to explain the collapses to his wife a few hours after the buildings
went down.
"The towers were basically
tubes, essentially hollow. Tubes can be very efficient structures,
strong and economical. The Trade Center tubes effectively resisted
vertical loads, wind loads and vibrations and could probably
have done very well against earthquakes. However, the relatively
thin skin of the hollow tube must be braced at intervals to prevent
local buckling of the skin under various possible loads, otherwise
the tube itself can go out of shape and lose its strength.
"For their interior bracing,
the thin-walled tubes of the Trade Center towers depended primarily
on the interior floors being tied to the outer wall shells. These
floor beam structures were basically open web joists, adequate
for the floor loads normally to be expected. These joist ends
rested on steel angle clips attached to the outer walls.
"As the floors at the
level of airplane impact caught fire, the open web joists, which
could not be expected to resist such fires, softened under the
heat, sagged and pulled away from their attachments to the walls.
Their weight and the loads they were carrying, caused them to
drop onto the next lower floor, which was then carrying double
loads also becoming exposed to the heat. Then that floor collapsed,
and so it went. But as the floors dropped, they no longer served
as bracing for the thin-walled main tubes.
"This loss of bracing permitted the walls to buckle outward
in successive sections and thus the house of cards effect.
"There was no other major
bracing as would be encountered in a more conventional type of
structure, or as might have been introduced in the design if
one feared the potential loss of the floors. There were no stiff
horizontal trusses in the perimeter to act as bracing ribs every
few floors. There was no system of vertical trusses to provide
any integrity, not was there anything that could be considered
a frame or "skeleton" of columns and attached girders
to keep the tube intact."
In our 9/11 file Manuel Garcia
devastates with conspiracists' theories with patient explanations
as to why their schemas flout scientific laws and the observed
facts of the disasters of that day.
The conspiracists' last card
is the collapse of WTC building number 7 some hours after the
morning attacks. But here again, as with the other two buildings,
the explanations offered by US government agencies (preeminently
the National Institute of Standards and Technology and, for Building
7, FEMA) are more than adequate, as Manuel Garcia points out.
The blast of hot debris from WTC 1 kindled fires in WTC 7 and
caused an emergency power system to feed the burning to the point
of building collapse.
One of the building's major
bridging supports was heated to the point of exhaustion by the
burning of an abundant store of hydrocarbon (diesel) fuel, pumped
from the sub-basement by the back-up system and spraying through
a torn pipe into the fire next to two of the building's three
major structural truss. The types of steel used in the WTC Towers
(plain carbon, and vanadium) lose steel lose half their strength
when heated to about 570 C , and even more as temperatures rise,
as they did in WTC 1 and 2, to 1100 C. In building 7, Garcia
calculates that the diesel fuel spraying at a rate of 75 gallons
a minute ultimately released energy equivalent to that of an
explosion of 367 tons of TNT.
What is the goal of the 9/11
conspiracists? They ask questions, yes, but they never answer
them. They never put forward an overall scenario of the alleged
conspiracy. They say that's not up to them. So who is it up to?
Who do they expect to answer their questions? When answers are
put forward, they are dismissed as fabrications or they simply
rebound with another question.
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. 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 Tower might well go down and, repeatedly,
as much as 25 minutes before the North Tower'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 Towers;
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 Towers.
That's the real political world, in which Giuliani and others
have never been held accountable. The conspiracists disdain the
real world because 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 conspiracists 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 Towers.
There are plenty of real conspiracies
in America. Why make up fake ones? Every few years, property
czars and city government in New York conspire to withhold fire
company responses, so that enough of a neighborhood burns down
for the poor to quit and for profitable gentrification to ensue.
That's a conspiracy to commit ethnic cleansing, also murder.
It's happening today in Brooklyn,
even as similar ethnic cleansing and gentrification is scheduled
in San Francisco. Bayview Hunters Point is the last large black
community in the Bay Area, sitting on beautiful bay front property.
So now it's the time to move the black folks out. As Willie Ratcliff,
publisher of the Bay View newspaper writes, "If
the big developers and their puppets, the mayor [Democrat Gavin
Newsom] and his minions win this war, they'll have made what
may be the largest urban renewal land grab in the nation's history:
some 2,200 acres of San Francisco, the city with the highest
priced land on earth."
That's an actual conspiracy,
even as many in the Bay Area left meander through the blind alleys
of 9/11 conspiratorialism.
Machiavelli points out that
every conspirator you add to the plot has less chance of preserving
secrecy than the previous one. The 9/11 group in fact did tell
people about their plans in various ways but the prevailing belief
that Arabs couldn't do it prevented any of the revelations from
being taken seriously. The view that a bunch of Arabs with box
cutters couldn't do it was precisely the cover they needed.
The conspiracy virus is an
old strand:
The Russians couldn't possibly
build an A bomb without Commie traitors. The Russians are too
dumb. Hitler couldn't have been defeated by the Red Army marching
across Eastern Europe and half Germany. Traitors let it happen.
JFK couldn't have been shot by Oswald -- it had to be the CIA.
RFK couldn't have been shot by Sirhan--it had to be the CIA.
There are no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians,
Arabs, Viet Cong, Japanese, etc etc couldn't possibly match the
brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians.
It's all pathetic but it does save the trouble of reading and
thinking.
Yet some discover a silver
lining in the 9/11 conspiracism. A politically sophisticated
leftist in Washington, DC, wrote to me recently, agreeing with
my ridiculing of the "inside job" scenarios, but adding,
"To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many
people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it
[the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If that
number or anything close to that is true, that's a huge base
of people that are more than deeply cynical about their elected
officials. That would be the real news story that the media is
missing, and it's a big one."
"I'm not sure I see the
silver lining about cynicism re government," I answered.
"People used to say the same thing about the JFK conspiracy
buffs and disbelief in the Warren Commission. Actually, it seems
to demobilize people from useful political activity. If the alleged
perpetrators are so efficiently devilish in their plots, all
resistance is futile. As Michael Snedeker, a lawyer who spends
much of his professional life trying to save accused murderers
from the death penalty, wrote to me about the 9/11 conspiracists:
"I completely agree with
your take on the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Of course, it would
be an outrage if such monstrous, complicated schemes were hatched
and carried out so smoothly, but it would be somehow worse if
no one at all was orchestrating the whole piece. There is definitely
a theological motor driving that train--a need for Order and
Design. The power of forces like Ineptitude, Sloth, Distraction
& Resentment are routinely overlooked. We all know them
in our own lives, but somehow, it is assumed by analysts of all
stripes that office-holders and Boards of Directors, etc., are
immune. Ha! At the risk of going all Freudian here, I think
such theories are another reflection of the deep desire for
an all-knowing Father, & the terror of being one of a band
of brothers and sisters, with no one other than ourselves to
guide us."
As for the theological motor,
note that Griffin is a theologian, and his latest book put out
by a publisher connected to the Presbyterian church--a fact which
does not sit well with many Presbyterians, though 9/11 conspiracists
have hailed the association as evidence that protestant America
is rallying to their standard. Maybe the Heavenly Father decided
to destroy Babel and start again. As Garcia wryly remarks at
the end of second essay, on the thermodynamics of 9/11: "In
the enormity of each rubble pile, with its massive quantity of
stored heat, many effects were possible in small quantities,
given time to incubate. It is even possible that in some little
puddle buried deep in the rubble, warmed for months in an oven-like
enclosure of concrete rocks, bathed in an atmosphere of methane,
carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and perhaps a touch of oxygen,
that DNA was formed."
9/11 conspiracism stems from
despair and political infantilism. There's no worthwhile energy
to transfer from such kookery. It's like saying some lunatic
shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be
a great orator. As Garcia suggests, the nearest thing to it all
is the Flying Saucer craze of the 1950s, born of fears of atomic
war. It's a Jungian thing.
Richard Aldrich's book on British
intelligence, The Hidden Hand (2002), describes how a
report for the Pentagon on declassification recommended that
"interesting declassified material" such as information
about the JFK assassination "could be released and even
posted on the Internet, as a 'diversion,'" and used to "reduce
the unrestrained public appetite for 'secrets' by providing good
faith distraction material". Aldrich adds, "If investigative
journalists and contemporary historians were absorbed with the
vexatious, but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they
would not be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome."
By the same token, I'm sure
that the Bush gang, and all the conspirators of capital, are
delighted at the obsessions of the 9/11 conspiracists. It's a
distraction from the 1,001 real plots of capitalism that demand
exposure and political challenge.
"The tendency to occultism
is a symptom of regression in consciousness", Adorno wrote
in Minima Moralia. . "The veiled tendency of society towards
disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated
phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look
their total doom in the eye and withstand it The offal of the
phenomenal world becomes, to sick consciousness, the mundus intelligibilis."
Footnote: I should add that
one particular conspiracist, 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 stratagems in trying to obscure 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.
CounterPunch
Special Report: Debunking the Myths of 9/11
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
