9/11: Wild Conspiracies and Rational Concerns

According to a recent Zogby poll, less than half of all Americans agree that "the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly investigated and that any speculation about U.S. government involvement is nonsense."

You could almost hear a wail of frustration rising up from the gatekeepers of acceptable discourse.

Just after the Zogby poll was released, William Arkin, the Washington Post's normally circumspect military affairs columnist, had a fit of apoplexy over some e-mail from 9/11 skeptics. "National security is men's work," he wrote -- absurdly bringing gender politics into a debate that's already quite muddled -- and conspiracy theorists are, presumably, not real men, but "predatory and devious, seekers of polarization and not light, abusive of the political system [and] contemptuous of anything that even resembles the 'truth.'"

One wonders what he really thinks.

Outside of the world of punditry, the 9/11 conspiracies should come as no surprise, especially when you consider how ripe the events of 9/11 are for "alternative" analysis.

That begins with the basic premise that underlies the most common conspiracy theories. I, for one, have no problem accepting the notion that a small group of true believers -- people like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the neocon "cabal" -- used the attacks of 9/11 to seize and consolidate power. And I'm comfortable accepting that they view liberal democracy as a threat, their political opponents as a national weakness, and American militarism as the best hope for humanity.

They've proved, to my mind, that they're happiest when governing in secrecy -- a prerequisite for a conspiracy. Think about the administration's obsession with classifying everything under the sun, or Dick Cheney going all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid divulging who, exactly, crafted America's energy policy.

The administration's hardliners also represent a nexus between the more authoritarian end of our political spectrum and the anti-egalitarian business Right; the administration and its backers, allies and former partners are making an unprecedented fortune in all corners of the "war on terror," and that goes to motive.

It's a group of ideologues that knows its prescriptions aren't popular. The Project for a New American Century, where a "White House in waiting" of hard-right operatives weathered the Clinton years, urged a massive "rebuilding" of America's military capabilities (PDF), but warned that it wouldn't be easy unless there was a major attack on the American homeland. "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor," they wrote.

And while Arkin might consider the preceding paragraph evidence of the most "predatory and devious" kind of fringe thinking, I’d say it’s simply naïve to dismiss the many occasions in history when exaggerated or false external threats were used to rally a nation to a war footing (and abridge civil rights at home) -- from the explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor to the Reichstag fire to the Gulf of Tonkin.

So you have suspects and motive, and they accord more or less with some distinctly mainstream progressive analyses. That's not, however, evidence of anything. So, to repeat, while there's a pretty clear record of Bush Republicans taking advantage of 9/11 - think Rudy Giuliani's 2004 GOP convention speech that mentioned September 11 four score times - there's nothing concrete to suggest that they were behind it.

Indeed the place to start considering the events behind 9/11 is to look at the federal government's official version of what happened and see if it's accurate. If there are holes or serious flaws -- and there are -- then we should try to get an accurate version of what happened and proceed from there.