Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2003-2004

By Mike Ward, AlterNet. Posted May 18, 2004.

On August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas, George Bush received an intelligence briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It included revelations that al Qaeda members were conducting "surveillance of federal buildings in New York"; the World Trade Center was mentioned in the first paragraph, the prospect of terrorist "retaliat[ion] in Washington" in the second. According to the briefing, Osama bin Laden's organization was acting in ways "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

But Bush must have had headphones on, because 36 days later when he saw Flight 11 fly into the World Trade Center, he claims his first thought was, "There's one terrible pilot." Even after the second crash Bush assures us he was unsure what was going on: "I grew up in a period of time where the idea of America being under attack never entered my mind."

The attacks of 9-11 have since been used to justify two military actions that the government has chosen to call "wars," the more recent of which -- a "pre-emptive," which is to say unprovoked, assault on Iraq -- has yielded American soldiers their bloodiest two weeks of combat since 1971. Odd, then, that every expressed reason for the Bush administration's massive and deadly undertaking in Iraq, most conspicuously Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, has evaporated under scrutiny. In fact, the only thing we know for sure is that the invasion isn't about oil. Tony Blair, among others, has been quite clear on this: any attempt to explain the war in Iraq as an oil war is a "conspiracy theory."

This makes one wonder whether other so-called conspiracy theories might be more worthy of consideration than we've been led to believe. Some months ago I wrote an article originally published in Popmatters magazine about this. In light of subsequent events, the time was right to revisit it -- particularly since the political climate in America, with its indefinite detentions and pointless color-coded alerts, has taken a more Orwellian turn than anyone ever imagined possible.

1. Prior Warnings.

Right after September 11, rumors began floating around that World Trade Center employees of the Jewish faith had been mysteriously alerted to stay home that fateful morning. This racist fantasy had an equally ugly counterpart among anti-Islamic reactionaries: that Muslims the world over knew of the 9-11 attacks in advance and managed, en masse and in their millions, to keep it a complete secret.

Such bizarre hearsay about collective foreknowledge has many unpleasant effects, not the least of which is to delegitimize an otherwise worthy question: was anyone told beforehand that something shocking might happen on or around 9-11? It turns out quite a few people claim to have received such warnings. Although the mainstream press tends to mention these accounts in isolation or attribute them to uncanny serendipity, when taken together they cry out for further explanation.

The airport security service for San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, for example, had contacted him eight hours prior to the strikes and warned him not to fly, and controversial author Salman Rushdie also claims to have gotten warnings before September 11 not to take to the tarmac. As reported in the Sept. 24, 2001 issue of Newsweek, several employees at the Pentagon cancelled their flight plans the night of September 10, citing "security concerns." And last but not least, Justice Department head John Ashcroft had stopped flying commercial aircraft two months before 9-11. Why? The FBI cited an unfavorable "threat assessment" -- but after September 11 has been unwilling to elaborate on this.

2. What Was With That Handshake, Anyway?

As I write a scandal is unfolding at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where American soldiers are accused of torturing and brutally humiliating prisoners, possibly at the behest of military intelligence officers. In a particularly bitter irony, Abu Ghraib was once a favored torture chamber of Saddam Hussein, a fact that leads some to ask whether there are actually any good guys in the U.S.-Iraq conflict.

There are more reasons than this to wonder. Where Iraq's human rights violations are concerned, U.S. foreign policy has long been sterner in rhetoric than in deed, dating back at least to the 1980s -- when many Bush administration figures were dealing with Iraq on behalf of then-president Reagan. Among these were Mideast envoy Donald Rumsfeld, whose 1983 meeting with Hussein resulted in a videotaped handshake that has since crossed the world countless times on the Internet. Speculation abounds as to what may have transpired at this meeting, but one thing is certain: at the time Hussein was employing chemical weapons almost daily in his hideous war with Iran. In 2003 the Bush administration referred to these gas attacks as part of its justification for invasion, but for whatever reason it has taken 20 years for Rumsfeld et al. to discover their own outrage over these horrific crimes.

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