Opinions - Distractions from awful reality US: the conspiracy that wasn’t (9/11)

[Benga]

This is an article by Alexander Cockburn on the 09/11/2001 events and conspiracies, from last month's edition of "Le Monde Diplomatique".
I found it insightful enough to think it might make worthwhile individual post.
I highly recommend le Monde Diplomatique as an intelligent monthly complement to daily newspapers, some very good articles in there and it is translated in quite a few languages.

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from http://mondediplo.com/2006/12/02conspiracy


Distractions from awful reality
US: the conspiracy that wasn’t

The left in the United States remains distracted by fantastic stories about conpiracies hatched by the Bush administration: in many of these, even the 9/11 attacks are believed to have been an inside job. Yet the chief, and most fearful, characteristic of the Bush administration has been its low level of practical management abroad and at home.

By Alexander Cockburn

Where was the American left in the recent campaign that ended in the recapture of both houses of Congress by the Democrats on 7 November? Was it in the streets fomenting opposition to the war in Iraq? No, 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 in October, three of my five fellow orators didn’t mention the war at all.

Instead they numbed the audience and sharply diminished its size with interminable dissections of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon. Their aim was to argue that the attacks were an inside job organised by President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, or (a frequent variation on the theme) by darker powers for which Bush and Cheney are mere errand boys.

Five years after the attacks, 9/11 “conspiracism” has penetrated deep into the left in the US. It is also widespread on the libertarian and populist right, which is scarcely surprising since the United States 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, the United Nations’ black helicopters (1) or the Jews.

These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatetic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale — the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos (2) — or supposedly “rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 “conspiracy” is the summa of all this foolishness.

You trip over a fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists in the first paragraph of a book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin: “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” (3).
A preposterous belief

The operative word here is “should”. A central characteristic of the conspiracists is that they have a devout, preposterous belief in US 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 the way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work. They believe that at 8.14am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the National Military Command centre and Norad. To quote Griffin, they believe, citing reverently “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 had they would 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, including sudden changes in the weather.

According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), an impending Soviet attack would have prompted missile silos in north Dakota to open, and their ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets. However, the four test launches attempted all failed, whereupon the SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defence contractor venality or . . . conspiracy?

Did President Jimmy Carter’s April 1980 effort to rescue hostages taken in the US embassy in Tehran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters or because the helicopters were poorly made or because agents of Ronald Reagan and the Republican National Committee (seven months before the US presidential elections) poured sugar into their gas tanks in a conspiracy? Does Mr Cohen in his store at the end of the block hike his prices because he wants to make a buck or because his rent went up or because the Jews want to take over the world?

Some photos of the impact of the “object” — the Boeing 757, flight 77, which hit the Pentagon — seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. A missile did. And in some photographs, that wasn’t smoke obscuring a larger rupture in the fortified Pentagon wall.

Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon’s budgetary outrages, told me: “There are pictures taken of the plane hitting the Pentagon — they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon’s heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen them . . . both 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.”
Immune to reality checks

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 rendezvous with Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave the teeth of Spinney’s friend to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.

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 from the site. Why does the obvious have to be proved? Would those who were wounded or who lost friends and colleagues that day 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 into far more difficult targets, the WTC Towers?

What do we make of Osama bin Laden taking credit for the attacks? That he is 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? Even though they haven’t shown the slightest degree of competence in anything? They couldn’t even manufacture “weapons of mass destruction” after US troops had invaded Iraq, when any box labelled WMD would have been happily photographed by the embedded press as conclusive testimony of the existence of WMDs.

The Democrats’ victory in the midterm US elections may help to remind the left that Bush and Cheney are not that much different from the politicians and overlords of US foreign policy who preceded them or will follow them. There was already a bipartisan consensus about Israel and Iraq. What the 9/11 conspiracists want us to believe is that the Bush/Cheney gang represent a new breed of evil, which might be the most dangerous deception of all, for it fosters the fantasy that a new administration, a Hillary Clinton or Al Gore administration, would pursue more humane policies.

The Twin Towers didn’t fall down because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority and because they had been struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, shout the conspiracists, they pancaked because scores of Cheney’s agents methodically planted demolition charges in the days preceding 9/11: a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom have held their tongues ever since, despite being party to mass murder.
Occam’s razor

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, after the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. There is not the slightest need to postulate pre-placed explosive charges to explain why the towers collapsed at near free-fall speeds. Practical aspects of explosive demolitions make the explosive charge hypothesis improbable to the point of absurdity (see “Conspiracy disproved”).

There are plenty of real conspiracies in the US. Why make up fake ones? Every few years, property tsars and the city government in New York conspire to withhold fire company responses so that enough of a neighbourhood burns down for the poor to quit and profitable gentrification to ensue. That is a conspiracy to commit ethnic cleansing, and also murder. It is happening today in Brooklyn, even as similar ethnic cleansing and gentrification is scheduled in San Francisco, where Bayview Hunters Point is the last large black community in the Bay Area, sitting on beautiful waterfront property: so now is the time to move the black folks out.

The conspiracy virus is not new. Let me recall. The Russians couldn’t possibly have built an A-bomb without Commie traitors. Hitler was a victim of treachery, otherwise he couldn’t have been defeated by the Red Army marching across eastern Europe and half Germany. JFK couldn’t have been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, it had to be the CIA. There is no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs, Viet Cong, Japanese, whoever, couldn’t possibly match the brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians.

Some discover a silver lining in 9/11 conspiracism. A politically sophisticated leftist in Washington DC wrote to me agreeing with my ridicule 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. “It seems to demobilise people from useful political activity.” For the conspiracism stems from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery.

Richard Aldrich’s book on British intelligence (4) 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”. He added: “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.”

I am therefore sure that the Bush gang, and all the real conspirators of Washington, 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. As Theodore Adorno wrote: “The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness” (5)

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Alexander Cockburn is co-editor of the political newsletter and website ‘CounterPunch’ and co-author of ‘End Times: the Decline and Fall of the Fourth Estate’ (CounterPunch, forthcoming 2007)

(1) In a 1987 television series the Russians, disguised as UN forces, were to occupy the US within 10 years.

(2) Bohemian Grove, name of the select club close to San Francisco where Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton and Tony Blair all met; the annual Bilderburg group meeting, from the name of its first venue in 1954 in the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands; Ditchley, an Anglo-American foundation named after its original English country house home; and Davos, home of the annual World Economic Forum.

(3) David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, Olive Branch Press, Northampton, Mass. 2004.

(4) Richard J Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, Overlook Press, New York, 2002.

(5) Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso, London, 1978.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Yes, yes and finally . . . yes. Proper perspective at last.

[BeetleJuice]

I think your missing the point, even if the 9/11 attacks where done by osama an his goons all the bush admin wanted was a reason to go to war, which they got.
whos benefited more out of the attacks? osama bin mumma, or top US companies? alot of the conspiracies are over exagerated but the basic reason is money and power.

follow the money!

[Benga]

Originally Posted by BeetleJuice

I think your missing the point, even if the 9/11 attacks where done by osama an his goons all the bush admin wanted was a reason to go to war, which they got.
whos benefited more out of the attacks? osama bin mumma, or top US companies? alot of the conspiracies are over exagerated but the basic reason is money and power.

follow the money!

no "point missed" in this article IMO, just a less usual stand, coming from a rich far left publication like LMD, which is again a very good read. The article implies that the conspirationist obsession is actually beneficial to the Bush administration, and in what way this tendency is actually starting to become symptomatic of opposition in the United States, and shifting the focus from other crucial issues at stake.
Upon re-reading I think you might find that "the point" is not actually missed but fragmented into other, less obsessive, focal angles.

b

[BeetleJuice]

ah i understand,(i think) kind of like mixing the truth with lies to distort the view and actions of reality??

[Benga]

"ah i understand,(i think) kind of like mixing the truth with lies to distort the view and actions of reality??"

Or focusing obsessively on one view of a supposed hidden reality and losing touch with the rest of the context and other more concrete "conspiracies", this might prove to be actually quite useful for the Bush and unfortunately other administration, as it drains energy, and in a way demobilises from maybe more "useful political activity", to quote Cockburn.

b

[BeetleJuice]

i get ya, Altho since i dont live in the us of a i donno how much official investigation and time has been spent from other political parties to looking into the theory, i thought it was more just leftist population n not so much official goverment peoples. anyways an interesting read an point of view.
On another note, what a name..cockburn, Ouch lol

[Woodman]

Oh Man!

This goes back a long way.

When you research the issue of leftist lunacy, you begin to find wacky liberal nut cases that go back for decades.

In 1988, Ted Danson claimed that the earth's oceans were warming so fast that we only had ten years to save the planet.

As far a Bush is concerned, it began before the 2000 election when a bunch of well known Hollywood celebrities (Ed Asner, Alec Baldwin, Julia Roberts, Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Elton John, etc.) made ridiculous declarations that they would go into self-imposed exile if Bush won the election. None of them ever did, of course, but while that kind of insincerity is typical among alarmist factions of all political stripes, it has become commonplace among the liberal left.
http://archive.salon.com/people/feat...ile/index.html

The close race only fanned the flame of this lunacy among Libs who already had it out for bush, pushing them over the edge at full steam into a what seems to be a permanently paranoid mindset.

After that there were claims of how "Bush rigged the elections!"

When 9/11 came and went, Liberals claimed that "Bush KNEW it was going to happen!"

When the UN failed to enforce sanctions against Iraq Bush took his case before the US Congress AND the UN urging the removal of Saddam. He received approval from both bodies, but was not enough to satisfy the conspiracy nuts on the left.

The new mantra on the left became: "Bush 'LIED' about weapons of mass destruction in order to facilitate a Bush + Cheney + Halliburton + Oil industry conspiracy" to lower the price of oil so that oil industry execs could sell more and make more money. Of course, when the price of oil went up (and stayed up) they blamed it on the same crowd.

On December 26, 2004, a tsunami hit Southern Asia and, again, the leftist nuts blamed Bush for not having an extended tsunami warning system that included countries outside of the US; this , of course, because "Bush is really a racist at heart and he wants to see Asian people suffer."

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and Mississippi, Libs blamed Bush TWICE, claiming;
1.) Bush caused the hurricane by allowing industry to pollute the atmosphere and cause global warming, and...
2.) Bush didn't mount a strong federal response because he is really a racist at heart and wanted to see black people suffer.

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Are you getting tired of reading all this stuff yet, because I'm getting tired of typing all of it.

Though it should be of great concern to know that these people have more credibility among the constituents of the liberal left than Pat Robertson has among constituents of the religious right.
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...and here's my personal favorite:

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Liberals claimed that Bush was given favorable treatment during the years that he spent serving in the National Guard. They submitted false documents as evidence, and had their best liberal media-man, Dan Rather, break the story.

When it was later discovered to that the document was a fraud, Rather apologized for the incident, but did NOT apologize to Bush. Instead he let one of his news directors take the heat, and (as I recall) she was soon axed from CBS News. Rather resigned several months later.

These people who would have everyone believe that they are the guardians of truth who champion fair play, are the same people who would lie, cheat, and scheme in an effort to destroy anyone who does not share their extremist views.


...just like Richard Nixon, only liberal.

[Nagognog2]

Sounds as though you'd likely claim that Bush demanding a "surge" policy in Iraq was a story invented by the "Looney-Left" to discredit the greatest military genius since Adolf Hitler.

Bush should be ground into raw goonburger-meat and served to a Komodo Dragon.

[Woodman]

Originally Posted by Nagognog2

Sounds as though you'd likely claim that Bush demanding a "surge" policy in Iraq was a story invented by the "Looney-Left" to discredit the greatest military genius since Adolf Hitler.

Not at all!

In fact on that particular issue I don't think that throwing more troops (under the bus) into Iraq is going to solve the problem, there.

Hell, I NEVER said that I supported Bush at all.

My whole point was that Liberal Leftists are so full of of hate for Bush that they are willing to jump on the bandwagon of support over any particular trend, issue, or circumstance that portends a negative impact for bush.

They do this without thinking or reasoning, and since much of the criticism of Bush is hearsay, when liberals take this tactic and make it into a regular practice it undermines their credibility in the eyes of reasonable people. It makes them appear like a bunch of empty-headed obstructionists with no real agenda other than stall their opposition through perpetual demagoguery.

I'll say this: At least conservatives have enough self respect to acknowledge that Nixon was a crooked kook to the point where they refused to support him (unlike liberals wouldn't dare say a word against Clinton to the point where even liberal women's organizations refused to support anyone who raised a claim of sexual harassment), and even among devout religious conservatives, all but a few zealots can easily see Pat (God Told Me a Great Tragedy Is Coming) Robertson is not playing with a full deck.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...801301_pf.html

http://www.theologywebsite.com/archi...ertson_g.shtml

http://blogs.chron.com/bluebayou/200..._for_help.html

That's not to say that they are to be trusted, nor any of their issues supported. I'm just saying that there's that much difference between the two.