The Nation
September 25, 2006

THE 9/11 CONSPIRACY NUTS

by Alexander Cockburn

You trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts in the
first paragraph 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 central characteristic of the
nuts
is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous, belief in American
efficiency, and hence 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
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 had 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 and 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 toward Moscow and kindred targets. The
tiny number of test launches actually attempted all failed, whereupon 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 Tehran fail because a
sandstorm
disabled three of the eight helicopters, or because agents of William
Casey
poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet another conspiracy?

Do the military's varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn't intercept
and
shoot down the hijacked planes stem from 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 fools. These
days the 9/11 conspiracy fever is fast becoming the "socialism" of the
left.

My in-box overflows each day with fresh "proofs" of how the towers were
demolished. 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 is like being a normal Stoic in the second century AD
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 the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison's book Who
Moved the Stone? It demonstrated, 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 have been an angel who rolled it
aside,
so Jesus could exit, astonish the mourners and then ascend. Of course,
Morison didn't allow the possibility that angels never existed or that the
Gospel writers were making it up.

It's the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts. There are photos of the impact
of
the "object" that hit the Pentagon--i.e., the Boeing 757, Flight 77--that
seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, it was a missile
and a 757 didn't hit the Pentagon. As regards the hole, my brother
Andrew--writing a book about Rumsfeld--has seen photos taken within thirty
minutes of impact clearly showing the outline of an entire plane,
including
wings. This was visible as soon as 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?

The demolition scenario is classic who-moved-the-stonery. The towers
didn't
fall 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, they collapsed
because
***** 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.

Of course, the buildings didn't suddenly pancake. People inside who
survived
the collapse didn't hear a series of explosions. As discussed in Wayne
Barrett and Dan Collins's marvelous Grand Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani
and
9/11, helicopter pilots radioed warnings nine minutes before the final
collapse of the South Tower that it might well go down, and similar
warnings, repeatedly, as much as twenty-five minutes before the North
Tower's fall.

What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show are the actual corrupt
conspiracies on Giuliani's watch (see also their article in this issue);
the
favoritism to Motorola, which saddled the firemen with radios that didn't
work; the ability of the Port Authority to scrimp on fire protection; the
mayor's catastrophic failure in the years before 9/11 to organize an
effective emergency command, meaning that many lives could have been
saved,
cops and firemen could have communicated and firemen could have heard the
helicopter warnings and the Mayday messages that saved most of the police.
That's the real world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held
accountable. Instead, the conspiracy nuts have combined to produce a
ludicrous distraction.