When 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Go Bad

Please stop sending me those emails. You know who are. And you know what emails I mean ... Okay, I'll spell it out -- those forwarded emails suggesting, or flat-out stating, the CIA and the U.S. government were somehow involved in the horrific September 11 attacks.

There are emails about a fellow imprisoned in Canada who claims to be a former U.S. intelligence office and who supposedly passed advance warning of the attack to jail guards in mid-August. There are emails, citing an Italian newspaper, reporting that last July Osama bin Laden was treated for kidney disease at the American hospital in Dubai and met with a CIA official. There are the emails, referring to a book published in France, that note the attacks came a month after Bush Administration officials, who were negotiating an oil deal with the Taliban, told the Afghans "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."

Get the hint? Washington either did nothing to stop the September 11 attacks or plotted the assaults so a justifiable war could then be waged against Afghanistan to benefit Big Oil.

One email I keep receiving is a timeline of so-called suspicious events that "establishes CIA foreknowledge of [the September 11 attacks] and strongly suggests that there was criminal complicity on the part of the U.S. government in their execution."

I won't argue that the U.S. government does not engage in brutal, murderous skulduggery from time to time. But the notion that the U.S. government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or, worse, conspired to kill thousands of Americans to launch a war-for-oil in Afghanistan is absurd. Still, each week emails passing on such tripe arrive. This crap is probably not worth a rational rebuttal, but I'm irritated enough to try.

It's a mug's game to refute individual pieces of conspiracy theories. Who can really know if anything that bizarre happened at a Dubai hospital? As for the man jailed in Canada, he was being held on a credit card fraud charge, and the only source for the story about his warning was his own word. The judge in his case said, "There is no independent evidence to support his colossal allegations." But a conspiracy-monges can reply, wouldn't you expect the government and its friends in Canada to say that?

So let's start with a broad question: would U.S. officials be capable of such a foul deed? Capable -- as in able to pull it off and willing to do so. Simply put, the spies and special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough to mount this operation. That conclusion is based partly on, dare I say it, common sense, but also on years spent covering national security matters. (For a book I wrote on the CIA, I interviewed over 100 CIA officials and employees.)

Not good enough: Such a plot -- to execute the simultaneous destruction of the two towers, a piece of the Pentagon, and four airplanes and make it appear as if it all was done by another party -- is far beyond the skill level of U.S. intelligence. It would require dozens (or scores or hundreds) of individuals to attempt such a scheme. They would have to work together, and trust one another not to blow their part or reveal the conspiracy. They would hail from an assortment of agencies (CIA, FBI, INS, Customs, State, FAA, NTSB, DOD, etc.).

Yet anyone with the most basic understanding of how government functions (or does not function) realizes that the various bureaucracies of Washington -- particularly those of the national security "community" -- do not work well together. Even covering up advance knowledge would require an extensive plot. If there truly had been intelligence reports predicting the 9/11 attacks, these reports would have circulated through intelligence and policymaking circles before the folks at the top decided to smother them for geopolitical gain. That would make for a unwieldy conspiracy of silence. And in either scenario -- planning the attacks or permitting them to occur -- everyone who participated in the conspiracy would have to be freakin' sure that all the other plotters would stay quiet.