Is 9/11 Paranoia Bad for the Country?
by Christopher Hayes, The Nation
www.alternet.org, December 11,
The biggest threat posed by the 9/11 Truth
Movement is the danger that it will discredit the healthy skepticism
Americans increasingly show toward their leaders.
According to a July poll conducted by
Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government
either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them
to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle
East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because
if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government
was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens,
they seem remarkably sanguine about this fact. By and large, life
continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently
believe they are being governed by mass murderers. Unsurprising,
because the government these Americans suspect of complicity in
9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons
of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. What
else are they hiding?
This pattern of deception has not only
fed diffuse public cynicism but has provided an opening for alternate
theories of 9/11 to flourish. As these theories -- propounded
by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement -- seep toward the edges
of the mainstream, they have raised the specter of the return
(if it ever left) of what Richard Hofstadter famously described
as "the paranoid style in American politics." But the
real danger posed by the Truth Movement isn't paranoia. Rather,
the danger is that it will discredit and deform the salutary skepticism
Americans increasingly show toward their leaders.
The Truth Movement's recent growth can
be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary
Loose Change. A low-budget film produced by two 20-somethings
that purports to debunk the official story of 9/11, it's been
viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing Loose
Change are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers
and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11
Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin
and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven
Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's
canon. Videos of their lectures circulate among the burgeoning
portions of the Internet devoted to the cause of the "truthers."
A variety of groups have chapters across the country and organize
conferences that draw hundreds. In the last election cycle, the
website 911truth.org even produced a questionnaire with pointed
inquiries for candidates, just like the US Chamber of Commerce
or the Sierra Club. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth
may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt.
Truth activists often maintain they are
simply "raising questions," and as such tend to focus
with dogged persistence on physical minutiae: the lampposts near
the Pentagon that should have been knocked down by Flight 77,
the altitude in Pennsylvania at which cellphones on Flight 93
should have stopped working, the temperature at which jet fuel
burns and at which steel melts. They then use these perceived
inconsistencies to argue that the central events of 9/11 -- the
plane hitting the Pentagon, the towers collapsing -- were not
what they appeared to be. So: The eyewitness accounts of those
who heard explosions in the World Trade Center, combined with
the facts that jet fuel burns at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and
steel melts at 2,500, shows that the towers were brought down
by controlled explosions from inside the buildings, not by the
planes crashing into them.
If the official story is wrong, then what
did happen? As you might expect, there's quite a bit of dissension
on this point. Like any movement, the Truth Movement is beset
by internecine fights between different factions: those who subscribe
to what are termed LIHOP theories (that the government "let
it happen on purpose") and the more radical MIHOP ("made
it happen on purpose") contingent. Even within these groups,
there are divisions: Some believe the WTC was detonated with explosives
after the planes hit and some don't even think there were any
To the extent that there is a unified
theory of the nature of the conspiracy, it is based, in part,
on the precedent of the Reichstag fire in Germany in the 1930s.
The idea is that just as the Nazis staged a fire in the Reichstag
in order to frighten the populace and consolidate power, the Bush
Administration, military contractors, oil barons and the CIA staged
9/11 so as to provide cause and latitude to pursue its imperial
ambitions unfettered by dissent and criticism. But the example
of the Reichstag fire itself is instructive. While during and
after the war many observers, including officials of the US government,
suspected the fire was a Nazi plot, the consensus among historians
is that it was, in fact, the product of a lone zealous anarchist.
That fact changes little about the Nazi regime, or its use of
the fire for its own ends. It's true the Nazis were the chief
beneficiaries of the fire, but that doesn't mean they started
it, and the same goes for the Bush Administration and 9/11.
The Reichstag example also holds a lesson
for those who would dismiss the very notion of a conspiracy as
necessarily absurd. It was perfectly reasonable to suspect the
Nazis of setting the fire, so long as the evidence suggested that
might have been the case. The problem isn't with conspiracy theories
as such; the problem is continuing to assert the existence of
a conspiracy even after the evidence shows it to be virtually
In March 2005 Popular Mechanics assembled
a team of engineers, physicists, flight experts and the like to
critically examine some of the Truth Movement's most common claims.
They found them almost entirely without merit. To pick just one
example, steel might not melt at 1,500 degrees, the temperature
at which jet fuel burns, but it does begin to lose a lot of its
strength, enough to cause the support beams to fail.
And yet no amount of debunking seems to
work. The Internet empowers people with esoteric interests to
spend all kinds of time pursuing their hobbies, and if the Truth
Movement was the political equivalent of Lord of the Rings fan
fiction or furries, there wouldn't be much reason to pay attention.
But the public opinion trend lines are moving in the truthers'
direction, even after the official 9/11 Commission report was
supposed to settle the matter once and for all.
Of course, the commission report was something
of a whitewash -- Bush would only be interviewed in the presence
of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key
witnesses and just this year we learned of a meeting convened
by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza
Rice about Al Qaeda's plotting, a meeting that was nowhere mentioned
in the report.
So it's hard to blame people for thinking
we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government
has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out
this simple truth. Critics like The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann
might lament the resurgence of the "paranoid style,"
but the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the
complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press,
a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called
the credulous style. In the credulous style all political actors
are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are
made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence
from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power
advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe
in it. When their advocacy leads to policies that create misery,
it is due not to any evil intentions or greed or corruption, but
rather simple human error. Ahmad Chalabi summed up this worldview
perfectly. Faced with the utter absence of the WMD he and his
cohorts had long touted in Iraq, he replied, "We are heroes
For a long time the credulous style has
dominated the establishment, but its hold intensified after 9/11.
When the government speaks, particularly about the Enemy, it must
be presumed to be telling the truth. From the reporting about
Iraq's alleged WMD to the current spate of stories about how "dangerous"
Iran is, time and again the press has reacted to official pronouncements
about threats with a near total absence of skepticism. Each time
the government announces the indictment of domestic terrorists
allegedly plotting our demise, the press devotes itself to the
story with obsessive relish, only to later note, on page A22 or
in a casual aside, that the whole thing was bunk. In August 2003,
to cite just one example, the New York dailies breathlessly reported
what one US official called an "incredible triumph in the
war against terrorism," the arrest of Hemant Lakhani, a supposed
terrorist mastermind caught red-handed attempting to acquire a
surface-to-air missile. Only later did the government admit that
the "plot" consisted of an FBI informant begging Lakhani
to find him a missile, while a Russian intelligence officer called
up Lakhani and offered to sell him one.
Yet after nearly a dozen such instances,
the establishment media continue to earnestly report each new
alleged threat or indictment, secure in the belief that their
proximity to policy-makers gets it closer to the truth. But proximity
can obscure more than clarify. It's hard to imagine that the guy
sitting next to you at the White House correspondents' dinner
is plotting to, say, send the country into a disastrous and illegal
war, or is spying on Americans in blatant defiance of federal
statutes. Bob Woodward, the journalist with the most access to
the Bush Administration, was just about the last one to realize
that the White House is disingenuous and cynical, that it has
manipulated the machinery of state for its narrow political ends.
Meanwhile, those who realized this was
the White House's MO from the beginning have been labeled conspiracy
theorists. During the 2004 campaign Howard Dean made the charge
that the White House was manipulating the terror threat level
and recycling old intelligence. The Bush campaign responded by
dismissing Dean as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist."
A year later, after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge retired,
he admitted that Dean's charge was, indeed, the truth. The same
accusation of conspiracy-mongering was routinely leveled at anyone
who suggested that the war in Iraq was and is motivated by a desire
for the United States to control the world's second-largest oil
For the Administration, "conspiracy"
is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the
most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism
out of bounds. Responding to a question from NBC's Brian Williams
as to whether he ever discusses official business with his father,
Bush said such a suggestion was a "kind of conspiracy theory
at its most rampant." The credulous style can brook no acknowledgment
of unarticulated motives to our political actors, or consultations
to which the public is not privy.
The public has been presented with two
worldviews, one credulous, one paranoid, and both unsatisfactory.
The more the former breaks apart, the greater the appeal of the
latter. Conspiracy theories that claim to explain 9/11 are wrongheaded
and a terrible waste of time, but the skeptical instinct is, on
balance, salutary. It is right to suspect that the operations
of government, the power elite and the military-industrial complex
are often not what they seem; and proper to raise questions when
the answers provided have been unconvincing. Given the untruths
to which American citizens have been subjected these past six
years, is it any surprise that a majority of them think the government's
lying about what happened before and on 9/11?
Still, the persistent appeal of paranoid
theories reflects a cynicism that the credulous media have failed
to address, because they posit a world of good intentions and
face-value pronouncements, one in which the suggestion that a
government would mislead or abuse its citizens for its own gains
or the gains of its benefactors is on its face absurd. The danger
is that the more this government's cynicism and deception are
laid bare, the more people -- on the left in particular and among
the public in general -- will be drawn down the rabbit hole of
delusion of the 9/11 Truth Movement.
To avoid such a fate, the public must
come to trust that the gatekeepers of public discourse share their
skepticism about the agenda its government is pursuing. The antidote,
ultimately, to the Truth Movement is a press that refuses to allow
the government to continue to lie.
Christopher Hayes is the senior editor
of In These Times and a Nation Institute Puffin writing fellow.