Sunday, May 21, 2006
9/11 Conspiracy Theories
The twin towers were secretly brought down by demolition charges, not by the impact of crashing jets… Photographs show that the plane which hit the South Tower had some kind of mysterious bulbous housing attached beneath its fuselage… An ‘X Team’ secretly removed aircraft parts and the black boxes from the crash sites…
Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan’s 9/11 Revealed: Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror (Constable & Robinson, 2005) sets the main conspiracy theories about 9/11 against the official conclusions of the Kean Commission report.
The book didn’t convince me. It’s well written and I’m sympathetic to what they say about a compliant corporate mass media but the idea that the events of 9/11 were in any way orchestrated by sections of the American military or intelligence or political establishment for their own nefarious purposes strikes me as highly implausible. They say that “Corporate TV, and later the Kean Report, depicted the presumed hijackers as bloodthirsty religious fanatics, but from the carnage point of view the 9/11 events were unsuccessful”.
Eh? Three thousand dead is failure? I think not. Now it’s certainly true that the hijackers might have ended up killing many more that day than they actually did, but their primary intention was not to kill the maximum number of Americans possible but to fly jets into symbolic targets of US economic, military and political hegemony. In that they were 75 per cent successful. They hit both the main towers at the WTC and they hit the Pentagon. In short, they hit major symbols and expressions of capitalism and militarism. They failed to hit the fourth target, which it seems likely was the White House.
The hijackings were surely a mixture of professionalism and amateurishness. Three planes were successfully hijacked and flown to their intended destinations. But I very much doubt that the hijackers who hit the WTC knew that the towers would subsequently collapse. Nor, I think, did they much care where they hit the towers. Had they flown the jets much lower into the towers they would surely have killed many thousands more. But they weren’t playing a numbers game.
Conspiracy theorists point to the absence of film footage of a jet hitting the Pentagon and put forward the theory that it was a missile. And why, they say, did whatever hit the Pentagon hit it at its strongest and least populated part? But if it was a missile, what happened to Flight 77 and its civilian passengers? Are we really supposed to believe that they were spirited away to a top secret airforce base where the plane was destroyed and the passengers either executed or kept as prisoners to this day? That’s not a scenario I find remotely plausible.
The time lapse CCTV footage of the impact on the Pentagon, says this book, shows “the white flash explosion consistent with a small missile warhead. There is no similar white flash in the WTC collision photographs”. But this simply invites the reader to share in an expertise that neither the authors nor the average reader has. The Pentagon was a very different structure to the WTC. I’m not persuaded that the terrific boiling surges of exploding fuel are really all that different at the Washington and New York sites.
Why didn’t the hijackers hit the Pentagon where it would have hurt most? The answer, I suspect, is that the hijackers didn’t know anything about the structural strengths and weaknesses of the Pentagon building. Nor did they know about the internal layout. They seem to have believed, falsely, that it would be more damaging to hit the building from the side rather than from above. But the primary objective was to hit it, and this was successfully accomplished.
9/11 Revealed is a lucidly written book and the authors aren’t fringe nutters. But ultimately all the major conspiracy theories assume that a section or sections of the American establishment were prepared to countenance the killing of large numbers of Americans and attacks on major sites on American soil for an ulterior, allegedly political motive. But Bush didn’t need 9/11 to launch a war on Afghanistan, though obviously it made it easier. Ditto ‘the war on terror’. Ditto the invasion and occupation of Iraq. At a bare minimum, and aided and assisted by the corporate mass media, you can certainly fool fifty per cent of the people most of the time, on just about anything.
Ultimately I just can’t believe that you could get enough American professionals to agree to a conspiracy on that scale, implement it and then cover it up afterwards, whether it involved finding out about the proposed hijackings in advance and letting them happen anyway, or being in some way directly involved on the day. I find it much easier to believe that the order of the day was bungling, dithering, complacency, incompetence, career rivalries, disbelief and a failure to grasp that such an attack was either possible or was taking place.
The US military and political establishment has, of course, a long record of conspiracies and mass murder, but these all involve operations in foreign lands. These actual historical conspiracies – in Indonesia, Chile, Iraq etc etc – were exposed years ago. But they attract no media coverage. The media would far rather concentrate on ludicrous death-of-Diana conspiracy theories than coups in foreign countries. American civilians or military personnel abroad are certainly expendable and the corporate media can be relied on to screen such events through a neutralising filter. But I simply don’t believe that these elites would countenance the mass killing of civilians on American soil, especially when so many of the victims were their kind of people – white, middle class professionals.
That said, there’s just one conspiracy theory that does cause me some niggling doubts. That’s what happened to Flight 93, which crashed at Shanksville, PA. Was it shot down? There appears to be eyewitness evidence that a USAF A-10 Thunderbolt was present at the time the jet crashed. It’s plausible that a hijacked jet heading for Washington D.C. would, in the circumstances of that morning, have been shot down, not least since the passengers would have been regarded as doomed anyway. But if so, would it really have been covered up? Would not a tearful President have told his fellow Americans that there really hadn’t been any alternative? The USAF took a tough heartbreaking decision and he recognised they had no choice. Politically, Bush would surely have got away with it. But cover it up and you risk the end of your career and reputation. The US armed forces are leaky places – it’s how Seymour Hersh gets to write his books. So on the whole, I finally go for the brought-down-by-a-fight-in-the-cockpit scenario.
The authors say that a one ton engine part from Flight 93 was found 1.2 miles from the crash site. “The FBI’s explanation was that the engine bounced this distance from the impact crater seems next to impossible.”
Is it? I’m not an expert in wreckage scatter from an airliner crash impact. Neither, I suspect, are Henshall or Morgan.
Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan’s 9/11 Revealed: Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror (Constable & Robinson, 2005) sets the main conspiracy theories about 9/11 against the official conclusions of the Kean Commission report.
The book didn’t convince me. It’s well written and I’m sympathetic to what they say about a compliant corporate mass media but the idea that the events of 9/11 were in any way orchestrated by sections of the American military or intelligence or political establishment for their own nefarious purposes strikes me as highly implausible. They say that “Corporate TV, and later the Kean Report, depicted the presumed hijackers as bloodthirsty religious fanatics, but from the carnage point of view the 9/11 events were unsuccessful”.
Eh? Three thousand dead is failure? I think not. Now it’s certainly true that the hijackers might have ended up killing many more that day than they actually did, but their primary intention was not to kill the maximum number of Americans possible but to fly jets into symbolic targets of US economic, military and political hegemony. In that they were 75 per cent successful. They hit both the main towers at the WTC and they hit the Pentagon. In short, they hit major symbols and expressions of capitalism and militarism. They failed to hit the fourth target, which it seems likely was the White House.
The hijackings were surely a mixture of professionalism and amateurishness. Three planes were successfully hijacked and flown to their intended destinations. But I very much doubt that the hijackers who hit the WTC knew that the towers would subsequently collapse. Nor, I think, did they much care where they hit the towers. Had they flown the jets much lower into the towers they would surely have killed many thousands more. But they weren’t playing a numbers game.
Conspiracy theorists point to the absence of film footage of a jet hitting the Pentagon and put forward the theory that it was a missile. And why, they say, did whatever hit the Pentagon hit it at its strongest and least populated part? But if it was a missile, what happened to Flight 77 and its civilian passengers? Are we really supposed to believe that they were spirited away to a top secret airforce base where the plane was destroyed and the passengers either executed or kept as prisoners to this day? That’s not a scenario I find remotely plausible.
The time lapse CCTV footage of the impact on the Pentagon, says this book, shows “the white flash explosion consistent with a small missile warhead. There is no similar white flash in the WTC collision photographs”. But this simply invites the reader to share in an expertise that neither the authors nor the average reader has. The Pentagon was a very different structure to the WTC. I’m not persuaded that the terrific boiling surges of exploding fuel are really all that different at the Washington and New York sites.
Why didn’t the hijackers hit the Pentagon where it would have hurt most? The answer, I suspect, is that the hijackers didn’t know anything about the structural strengths and weaknesses of the Pentagon building. Nor did they know about the internal layout. They seem to have believed, falsely, that it would be more damaging to hit the building from the side rather than from above. But the primary objective was to hit it, and this was successfully accomplished.
9/11 Revealed is a lucidly written book and the authors aren’t fringe nutters. But ultimately all the major conspiracy theories assume that a section or sections of the American establishment were prepared to countenance the killing of large numbers of Americans and attacks on major sites on American soil for an ulterior, allegedly political motive. But Bush didn’t need 9/11 to launch a war on Afghanistan, though obviously it made it easier. Ditto ‘the war on terror’. Ditto the invasion and occupation of Iraq. At a bare minimum, and aided and assisted by the corporate mass media, you can certainly fool fifty per cent of the people most of the time, on just about anything.
Ultimately I just can’t believe that you could get enough American professionals to agree to a conspiracy on that scale, implement it and then cover it up afterwards, whether it involved finding out about the proposed hijackings in advance and letting them happen anyway, or being in some way directly involved on the day. I find it much easier to believe that the order of the day was bungling, dithering, complacency, incompetence, career rivalries, disbelief and a failure to grasp that such an attack was either possible or was taking place.
The US military and political establishment has, of course, a long record of conspiracies and mass murder, but these all involve operations in foreign lands. These actual historical conspiracies – in Indonesia, Chile, Iraq etc etc – were exposed years ago. But they attract no media coverage. The media would far rather concentrate on ludicrous death-of-Diana conspiracy theories than coups in foreign countries. American civilians or military personnel abroad are certainly expendable and the corporate media can be relied on to screen such events through a neutralising filter. But I simply don’t believe that these elites would countenance the mass killing of civilians on American soil, especially when so many of the victims were their kind of people – white, middle class professionals.
That said, there’s just one conspiracy theory that does cause me some niggling doubts. That’s what happened to Flight 93, which crashed at Shanksville, PA. Was it shot down? There appears to be eyewitness evidence that a USAF A-10 Thunderbolt was present at the time the jet crashed. It’s plausible that a hijacked jet heading for Washington D.C. would, in the circumstances of that morning, have been shot down, not least since the passengers would have been regarded as doomed anyway. But if so, would it really have been covered up? Would not a tearful President have told his fellow Americans that there really hadn’t been any alternative? The USAF took a tough heartbreaking decision and he recognised they had no choice. Politically, Bush would surely have got away with it. But cover it up and you risk the end of your career and reputation. The US armed forces are leaky places – it’s how Seymour Hersh gets to write his books. So on the whole, I finally go for the brought-down-by-a-fight-in-the-cockpit scenario.
The authors say that a one ton engine part from Flight 93 was found 1.2 miles from the crash site. “The FBI’s explanation was that the engine bounced this distance from the impact crater seems next to impossible.”
Is it? I’m not an expert in wreckage scatter from an airliner crash impact. Neither, I suspect, are Henshall or Morgan.
# posted by Ellis : 7:50 PM
