9/11 Was an Outside Job: Conspiracy Theories, Molten Steel & The Usual Suspects
On the anniversary of 9/11, a minor but definite annoyance is when people on your Facebook feed start posting links to videos and arguments about “Truther” conspiracy theories about the twin towers. (That is why I am not writing this in September.)
I will start by saying what I think is the obvious: there is a huge amount of evidence that four jets were hijacked by members of al Qaeda, whose identities we know, many of whom had lived in the States for years, took flying lessons, and crashed into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field, killing thousands of people.
After the attacks, there was a videotape where Osama Bin Laden talked about planning the attacks and being surprised that the WTC towers collapsed as they did. There were warnings in the lead-up to the attack. National Security Adviser Richard Clark spent much of 2001 warning everyone from W. Bush to the head of the CIA that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were a serious threat, but was ignored.
In hindsight, it is easy to see what was overlooked, but in the moment, plenty of false alarms that go off all the time.
There had been an unsuccessful attempt in 1993 to blow up the World Trade Center, but closer to 9/11 there had also been a series of al Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies throughout Africa (which had killed mostly Africans) as well as an attack on the U.S.S. Cole on October 12, 2000, when a small boat full of explosives had been used to blow a hole in the side of a US Navy destroyer in Yemen. Bin Laden and al Qaeda had already definitively been linked to the attack on the Cole, because he boasted about it in a videotape.
The fact that Bin Laden was behind the Cole was mainstream news. In June 2001, I was a freelance writer and designer living in Toronto. I was trying to get a job writing with Canada’s major weekly, Macleans’ magazine. I sent them a pitch package, that included a suggested story about the U.S. obsession with “Star Wars” missile defense, when the real threat seemed to be terrorism. Why, I asked, was the Bush administration so obsessed with stopping nuclear missiles when (at the time) there was no other nuclear superpower, the system was expensive, had never worked, and Osama Bin Laden could take out a billion-dollar destroyer with a dinghy full of dynamite?
If such a question was obvious to unemployed Canadian freelance writer living in Toronto, it should also have been a question raised by US intelligence. (Macleans’ never answered my pitch, BTW).
The idea of a US navy destroyer being disabled by a small attack vessel packed with explosives is important. We don’t have a problem believing it, even though a destroyer is a fast moving, well-armed, incredibly sophisticated ship that can attack planes, boats and submarines. It is very powerful, both in what it can do in offense, as well as in defense. But terrorism works by exploiting vulnerabilities, which are often human vulnerabilities (either fear or trust) rather than physical weaknesses. The USS Cole was working under rules of engagement that prohibited firing until fired upon.
Conspiracy theories generally happen because we have made assumptions about the way the world works, or that people act, and when observed facts don’t fit those assumptions, we discount (or distort) the facts and evidence, not the assumptions.
One of the most common hidden assumptions in conspiracy theories is that we equate status with power and control, both with people and with countries.
When we think of someone who is high-status and “powerful” that power is associated with strength, influence, control, perception (being all-seeing or all-knowing through surveillance) and even, to some degree, invulnerability. They can seem unbeatable.
People who are lower status are seen as weak, powerless, trapped, and lacking in agency — the ability to control or influence events.
These assumptions are made based on our assumptions about status, which may include class, race, gender, ethnicity and poverty. In effect, it denies people who are considered “weak” as having agency or even capacity to plan or execute a scheme that could successfully harm someone who is powerful.
Take the example of the JFK conspiracy theory. The US President is the most powerful man in the world, a person of tremendous status and the ability to command hundreds of thousands of troops or launch a nuclear attack. He has the FBI and the CIA under his command, and the Secret Service to protect him.
There is a hidden assumption that only a Goliath can beat a Goliath: that assassination is more like boxing, and that opponents need to be closely matched in a weight class.
So, the implicit reasoning in JFK assassination theories is, in part, that Oswald — a loser with no status — a nobody — could not possibly have the resources it would take to kill the most powerful man in the world. It seems impossible that they “acted alone.”
The JFK conspiracy only comes into play because the victim was the President. If an ordinary person — of average social status — was shot while riding in a slow-moving open car without protection, no one would feel the need to invoke various plots. The fact is that guns are great equalizers, which is exactly why they are so important in U.S. politics.
This same implicit snobbery — that people of higher social status are stronger and lower social status weaker is the basis for conspiracies around Shakespeare’s identity.
There is a long-standing theory that the person we know as William Shakespeare could not have written all his plays and poetry: that it must have been someone else, the two candidates being Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
The arguments in favour of Shakespeare not being Shakespeare are based on the idea that an ordinary middle-class writer, born in the sticks (Stratford) couldn’t possible have written such great plays. Instead, it is suggested that only a superior man with a superior education from a superior city could do such a great job — an aristocrat, the Earl of Oxford, not some schlub.
The phony Shakespeare arguments are of two kinds. First, they start by “reverse engineering” what kind of person the Bard must have been based on his plays, then contrasts these assumptions with the biography of the real Shakespeare, and find him wanting, because the assumptions are ignorant of history and the evidence.
Actual contemporary evidence (other poets and writers praising Shakespeare, copies of his plays) are ignored in favour of tell-tale signs and “giveaways,” and coded messages.
They argue that the Shakespeare they think is phony had a scribble of a signature, grew up in a small town, didn’t have a classical education, and couldn’t possibly have known so much about Italy, or ancient Rome, or courts, or have invented so many words.
Many of these assumptions are wrong for simple reasons: Shakespeare (like so many creators) was almost never writing stories out of whole cloth: he was adapting already existing stories or plots or established plays. The folios and different versions of his plays were never printed as books by Shakespeare — they were scribbled down by people at the back of the theatre. Even the idea that Shakespeare invented thousands of words is wrong — when dictionaries were first being written, he would be put down as having originated the word, because he was a great writer and it was in his plays, not because he coined it.
None of these arguments stand up to evidence or scrutiny, so “Oxfordians” rely on a different kind of fallacy: the appeal to authority, which is a list of famous people, experts and not, from Mark Twain to US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia don’t believe that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Experts of some kind they may be, but it doesn’t mean they know anything about Shakespeare’s actual history.
With the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, several of these assumptions and arguments are at work.
One is the tinfoil-hatted idea of the U.S. or its intelligence agencies essentially being godlike — literally — in their omniscience and omnipotence. “Truthers” think the whole thing was planned ahead of time (murdering thousands in the process) in order to precipitate a war. The accusations suggesting that Israelis and the Mossad knew about the attacks ahead of time and left the building is outrageous, on many levels, and not just because it is false.
Like the idea that the US must be behind the attacks because it is an omnipotent lone global superpower, the idea that Israel — or Jews — were involved has deep anti-semitic roots, because it is based in often explicitly racist and anti-semitic conspiracy theories about Jews being part of a global elite. It is a mistake to assume that that anti-semitism is necessarily Islamic: Ron Paul, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2012, said that he thought Mossad was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
There were some Muslims who did not want to accept that al Qaeda was behind the bombing for the same reason that people of any religion, or nationality, may struggle with a member of their community doing something terrible. People want to think of themselves as good and their cause as just. They can recognize that 9/11 was a horrible event that killed thousands of people, but they do not want to be attached through some guilt by association. This is generally true of any group that, whether in present day or in history, committed violence against another.
Someone might argue, well, isn’t that what people who deny that 9/11 was an inside job are doing? The answer is no, because it is not a question of feeling bad one way or the other: it is a question of evidence, and there is ample evidence — documents, investigations, videotape, confessions (extracted under questioning, not torture) that the people who committed 9/11 were the 19 hijackers.
One of the stranger elements of conspiracy theories is often that, even as they seek to criticize the powerful, their assumptions actually reinforce negative stereotypes about class or race. It denies the hijackers agency, that is to say, it suggests that because of who they are, they don’t have the will and the ability to actually get organized to commit the act.
The irony is that most revolutionaries (and many terrorists) were not poor or downtrodden, they were bourgeois or middle class. Bin Laden’s father was a well-connected billionaire Saudi construction mogul; the current head of Al Qaeda, Alman Al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian doctor. Che Guevara was a doctor as well, and Lenin was born to a wealthy middle class family. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from well-to-do families and went to university. The idea that they are incapable of exploiting holes in security (even when many were on watch lists) because they were constitutionally incapable from doing so is ridiculous.
But the arguments that relate building collapses in 9/11 site are also based in people’s false expectations about engineering and structures, which are grossly uninformed.
“Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth” start off with the implicit appeal to authority: that architects and engineers must be experts in structures and the forces that might bring them down. A closer look at the signatories on the list reveals that many on the list are not building architects or structural engineers: they include landscape architects and chemical, computer and mechanical engineers. These truthers focus less on presenting positive evidence of a conspiracy and more on raising doubts. They suggest that “Building 7” was brought down in a controlled demolition, and cite all sorts of evidence that suggests that its collapse was orchestrated.
The arguments entirely based on two strategies: either making assumptions about the way such a building is supposed to fall, and then complaining that it doesn’t, or making claims that certain things have been found that could only appear in a building that was being demolished on purpose, and not in one that is collapsing.
Both arguments are a rhetorical device designed to force challengers into arguing only on the conspiracy theorists’ terms, when the very assumptions they are making are wrong.
Many of the arguments are based on ideas about melting points of steel.
I am not a structural engineer, but I have read two books, Structures and The New Science of Strong Materials by a truly great engineer, J.E. Gordon, both of which, fortuitously, were written decades before 9/11.
One of the most important lessons that Gordon talks about is how surprisingly weak many structures are. He gives countless examples of structures (bridges, buildings, ships, aeroplanes) built by teams of trained engineers and construction firms that suffered disasters with much less than a fuel-filled plane crash, or, in the case of Building 7 having both World Trade Center buildings collapse next to them.
One of the arguments put forward by 9/11 Truthers is that the fire in the buildings could not burn hot enough to melt steel. This in itself is a colossal mistake: steel, like many other metals, does not have to be heated to its melting point to fail. “Melting” steel means it is liquid enough to pour. It will be too soft to bear a load at a far lower temperature.
Metal is more like butter than it is like ice. At zero degrees, water turns from solid to liquid, but metal gradually grows softer. If you freeze a chunk of butter, it can be very hard. It melts at something close to body temperature. But it can be quite soft and malleable at room temperature. If it is melted, you can’t even spread it because it is liquid. Iron or steel in a building does not need to be anywhere near liquid before it will all collapse.
Steel doesn’t have to liquid to be worked or bent, as any blacksmith (or anyone who has seen a blacksmith in a film) should know. The melting point of iron is 1535 C (2,795 F), but many steels cannot be used over 300C, which is 572 F — is not much hotter than a pizza oven.
What’s more, if the joint is being stressed while being heated, it is even more likely to fail, and Building 7 had a multi-storey internal area supported by relatively few beams supporting a very large space. The point that is most likely to fail in a structure is the joint. Not only is it where the stress and weight is concentrated, but it is, by the nature of being a joint, weak: it may be connected by rivets or welding that is inevitably weaker than the unbroken material of an I-Beam. Beams will bend, joints break.
When structures fail under great load, they can not only do so explosively, but the shockwave of load transfer can travel incredibly fast — at the speed of sound. As each joint fails, the load that is relieved is passed on to the remaining joints, which start to fail in turn, so the building collapses straight down — where the gravity is coming from.
It’s hard to know why people push these ideas so hard. One possibility is that their sense of the natural order of things overwhelms their reason. They see that certain people are in charge, and are seemingly all-powerful and even invulnerable.
A conspiracy theory, offers a degree of comfort and order that the truth does not. They would rather believe that that their own government would kill thousands of office workers, police and fire personnel, because at least it still means that someone is in charge and everything is still under control.
Accepting that Al Qaeda committed 9/11 means accepting that we are less safe, and less powerful than we thought, and our opponents are stronger that we thought. This, too, is the wrong conclusion.
Conspiracy theories preserve that sense of order and total control, because if something terrible happens, it is only because the powers that be orchestrated it or allowed it. It suggests that someone somewhere is still in full control, and that everyone else is just a pawn. As Karl Popper said of the “Conspiracy Theory of Society,” it is when people think the role of God has been replaced by the CIA.
The assumption was that if Al Qaeda had the capacity to wreak such extraordinary destruction, that they must be somehow be in the same geopolitical weight class as the U.S. The Times of London created a graphic of Bin Laden’s supposed compound in Tora Bora, a hollowed-out mountain worthy of a James Bond villain, totally fictional and, in retrospect, ludricrous.
In the end of course, Bin Laden was found in a suburban mansion in Abbotabad, Pakistan, a military town that was home to Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point.
Two things that are very important to realize about 9/11, which means the world is actually safer than we think: that it was a strategy that was new, and because the whole world saw it, almost impossible to repeat.
Before 9/11, there was an assumption on the part of airlines and intelligence services that passengers would be held hostage and used as bargaining chips, which is what hijackers did since the 1970s. Security experts’ advice — like that in the SAS survival guide was to cooperate as much as possible and not draw attention to yourself, because once the ordeal was over, they would be safe.
In 9/11, the hijackers did something that hadn’t been done before: instead of taking hostages, they killed everyone on board. As a result, they have made that kind of attack almost totally impossible from happening again.
If a hijacker or terrorist tries to take a plane, passengers will assume they are going to be killed, and a handful of hijackers do not stand a chance when they are vastly outnumbered by passengers. For all of the TSA scans, gels, and shoe removals, the biggest difference in airline security today is that passengers will attack and overwhelm anyone who tries to take control of a plane or set off an explosive. That is exactly what happened to the fourth plane on 9/11, United Airlines Flight 93.
It also happened with Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” who was interrupted mid flight, and passengers acted to intervene, removing their belts and headphone cords so he could be trussed up like a turkey. Passengers and crew intervened with the “underwear bomber”.
Thinking that the strong in a social structure are infinitely so, and the weak have no agency has important consequences in the way that we think about blame and responsibility, and it is not limited to conspiracy theorists. It is reflected in both legal and academic circles, and is part of political discussions whenever people want to allocate blame.
There are real advantages that confer to people in power who want others to believe that they are invincible. If the people in power start believing their own PR, it can be dangerous.
If the person of low status lives in a system where they have no agency — no ability to come up with their own ideas or take action on their own initiative, it seems to follow that they should not be held responsible for their actions. There are two parts to any crime — the intention and the act. If someone has no “free will” and are essentially a tool of someone else, or a cog in the system, it is the person in charge who is responsible, not the person committing the act.
The Usual Suspects
One of the clearest ways of seeing the way we think about conspiracies is how we assign blame. The person who actually commits the crime is basically let off the hook, while the “real culprits” are almost always individuals or groups who are traditional enemies or opponents: in the case of JFK, people have blamed the CIA, Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy, the Mafia, and Fidel Castro: in other words, spies, a Republican villain, a Democratic Villain, organized crime, and a Communist.
This may seem weird, but this kind of argument is advanced all the time when people argue about who is “really to blame” when something terrible happens. When someone commits an atrocity — like a school shooting — bad parenting, cheap psychoanalysis, religious motivations, and taste in fashion, music and literature will all be dragged in as influences that are “to blame.”
In the case of 9/11, the “real blame” was also pinned on “traditional opponents” rather than the people who actually did it. Everyone just rounds up the usual suspects: Conservative commentator Mark Steyn, writing on 9/12, blamed not the murderers who hijacked the planes, but the “West’s Moral Failure” — right down to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed the “ACLU, abortionists, feminists, gays, and the People For the American Way.”
“Truthers” tend to be people who are anti-government, so they blame the government. Fox News blamed the Clinton administration.
Others blamed immigrants, and immigration. American officials thought Canada, “failed to take the terrorist threat seriously, especially by (their) failure to properly control and monitor its immigration policies.” That false Canadian link was reinforced by a “very special episode” of the West Wing, that aired after 9/11 which made a double mistake — that said that terrorists had crossed into the US from Canada, over the Ontario-Vermont border. (There is no Ontario-Vermont border).
Canada has had issues with terrorism — the bombing of an Air India jetliner killed 329 people, and the investigation was totally bungled. There was an Al-Qaeda member who lived in Montreal who was stopped at the border on his way to bomb New Year’s Eve celebrations in L.A. at the millenium.
But the 9/11 hijackers had lived and trained in the U.S. — in places like Florida and California, not Ontario.
In all these cases, there are arguments about who is “really” to blame are not about who actually did the act, but who “let it happen.” Again, there is a presumption of total control.
There are real things to complain about
There was a conspiracy in 9/11: it was an Al Qaeda conspiracy.
There really are terrorist groups like Al Qaeda who are still trying to kill people.
Our governments have also done things that are objectionable, that are worthy of investigation and public exposure, injustices to be addressed.
9/11 being an inside job isn’t one of them. It’s a giant, delusional distraction from real problems, that puts the blame on the wrong people while letting the actual culprits off the hook. Aside from the idea that we should have some duty to and interest in the truth, it is a disservice to the people who were killed that day.
There are real things to complain and criticize about that are not only bad policy, but are bad for human rights and are counterproductive in reducing terrorism.
There is no need to complain about an imaginary conspiracy around 9/11 when there are ample REAL issues to be critical of: waging the Iraq War based on lousy intelligence; Vice-President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff playing a role in blowing the cover of a CIA agent because her husband was critical of the Iraq War; the use of “extreme interrogation” waterboarding against the advice of army interrogators; the choice to treat terrorists as “enemy combatants” instead of having trials; the use of extreme rendition, black sites, and intelligence obtained through torture, or disappearing people, mass surveillance, drone attacks where there is no war declared and more.
Canada has now passed a law that allows for the use of information obtained from torture. We have passed a law that allows people to have their constitutional right to “habeas corpus” suspended so that they can be detained without charge. They do not have the right to remain silent: they can be compelled to testify in front of a judge, and, like the US Grand Jury system, they can be jailed for up to a year if they do not testify.
Some of these measures were in a post-9/11 Canadian equivalent of the Patriot Act that was allowed to expire, but are now being renewed, but with less reporting and oversight.
All of these are violations of foundational principles of justice. Habeas Corpus — the right to know why you are being detained is in the Magna Carta. The fact that England was ignoring it was cited as one of the reasons for the American Declaration of Independence.
There are people who just don’t care about the moral aspect of torture, detention without trial or setting up a surveillance dragnet. They just want to be safe. The fact is that there are better alternatives to these practices that are less costly and more effective, and don’t involve suspending basic rights or going against our fundamental moral code.
The assumption of supporting these measures is that only bad guys will be affected. The problem is that, inevitably, someone who is innocent will be detained in this manner. The whole concept suffers from “Noble Cause Corruption.” In a free society, no government should have these powers on an ongoing basis.
Expert interrogators can get information from suspects in ways that are more effective than with “extreme interrogation techniques”; treating terrorists as criminals — putting them on trial and jailing them — can be more effective than treating them as “enemy combatants” and leaving them in legal limbo. And both reduce the risk that someone who is innocent will be picked up and treated terribly and tortured or detained, unable to give up any information because they didn’t actually do anything. That is why we have due process: it isn’t there to protect the guilty, it’s there to protect the innocent.
These are not just matters of “principle.” Whether or not we adhere to any of our own moral codes actually affects our ability to win — not just for members of the armed forces or intelligence services and citizens who to have to ask “what are we fighting for?” but for opponents who can see that we live up to our own code.
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DF Lamont
Originally published at wholebuffaloreview.tumblr.com.
