My Take on 9/11
I’ve had this discussion many times, in many forums, so I’d like to say one thing right off the bat. There is a difference between being shouted down and proven wrong. I do not feel I’ve ever been proven wrong. 9/11 was an inside job.
I don’t intend to dwell too long, in this article, on the fact that Marvin Bush, the president’s brother, was director of security for the World Trade Center, which had been shut down a few times for the weekend in the months before the attack, long enough for bombs to be planted by a young, fit, dedicated group of right wing CIA fanatics, I don’t want to dwell on what temperature steel melts at, the structural differences between WTC 1 and 2 and WTC 7, the fact that even pancakes don’t always pancake that precisely, the lack of photographic evidence at the Pentagon, the fact that Larry Silverstein, the buildings owner, pretty much confessed when he said “as for building 7, we’d already decided to pull it,” or the swift removal of all evidence from the site.
We’ve been through all that, and I know how people are going to react, so I intend to address the objections, to rebut the rebuttals, so to speak.
1. How dare you say that! I was in Manhattan that day! I lost friends!
Sorry. I understand that you’re upset, but that does not mean you know what you are talking about.
2. I just can’t believe that our own government would do something that horrible.
Why is that even hard to believe? These are the people that overthrew governments in Chile and Iran (they don’t even deny that), these are the people who have never seen a war they didn’t like, who openly excuse torture, who still think that Henry “sometimes, in a democracy, the people vote wrong” Kissinger was a great man, the people who constantly say “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Well, this was a pretty major omelette, but that’s all it was to them, and 3,000 dead just so many eggs.
3. Occam’s Razor!
First of all, like Murphy’s Law, Occam’s Razor is a handy dandy rule of thumb but it’s not a scientific principal. Sometimes the more complicated theory is correct. However, in this case I think Occam’s Razor actually supports the inside job theory. After all, who had the resources and the connections to make it all work – the U.S. government or 11 guys with boxcutters?
4. It’s impossible to keep a secret that large. Somebody would have spilled the beans.
Oh, really? Look what happened to David Kelly. Besides, like Occam’s Razor, that whole business about how two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead is not a scientific principal. How many people knew about Operation Overlord before it happened? I’m guessing hundreds.
5. The 9/11 Commission Report said it was definitely Arab terrorists
The 9/11 Commission happened during the Bush administration. There is absolutely no reason to believe what they say.
6. Popular Mechanics said the buildings collapsed because of the planes
Popular Mechanics said it was physically possible (and I respectfully disagree) They set out to prove the government theory and they presented a fairly convincing case. But, they waffled like crazy over WTC 7, saying “some combination of fire and structural damage” could have caused the buildings to collapse. They didn’t say WHAT combination, and they didn’t say DID.
I’m pretty sure we’ll never know. But I, for one, remain convinced that it was an inside job.
Yes, I am serious. No, I’m not crazy.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
Hey there,
Came to your blog from Wonkette. You’re a good writer and obviously intelligent, so I have to say that it was a bit of a disappointment, after reading your most recent posts and agreeing completely with them, to then seeing this one and finding out you’re a “truther”. I’ve tried to argue against the “inside job” POV in the past and it never ends well.
But since you’ve already been through the usual arguments, and you’re obviously sincere, I guess I took it as a challenge, because I thought about your questions for an hour or so and here’s what I came up with in response.
I don’t think I could ever “prove you wrong” if you are determined to believe that 9/11 was an inside job. Speaking as someone who has been fascinated all my life with “conspiracies” of various sorts and really interested to know for myself which were the real ones and the fake ones, I would agree that this is the sort of thing that the U.S. Government and/or some sort of non-government Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/? cabal could conceivably have pulled off. But in this case, the “official” story has the far stronger pull for me, with Osama bin Laden as the ringleader, and here’s why.
First, there is the evidence of the intertwined backstories behind Osama bin Laden, his co-conspirators, and the other hijackers. These backstories have been investigated by a number of journalists, who pieced together biographies of all of them. From the various books and news stories that I’ve read, I’m convinced that Osama bin Laden and the other hijackers were real people, who really sincerely wanted to immortalize themselves through these acts of terrorism, and had the means, motive, and opportunity to pull it all off, barely. The hijackers had roommates, ex-girlfriends, parents, former schoolteachers, landlords, ***flight instructers***, strippers from the strip club they visited the night before, etc.
So in my mind, I have enough evidence to believe from the history that al-Qaeda existed as a real terrorist organization, one that the Clinton Administration was actually trying to track down, but with little success. They were able to stay just under the radar, avoid getting caught by the several agencies that were trying to find them, and actually managed to pull it off. Once in a million situation, even far rarer than the few would-be “shoe bombers” who have so far been thwarted in their attempts. No-one will ever be able to pull off that particular stunt ever again.
And we also know that the Busy/Cheney Administration was quite evil and committed a lot of evil acts during their time in office. I would even say that if you tried to convince me that a Richard Nixon or a Henry Kissinger type character was the force behind the 9/11 attacks instead of Osama bin Laden, I would agree, if I thought that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld were like the Nixon administration. Instead, I see Osama bin Laden as the Richard Nixon figure and Bush/Cheney as something else.
Much was made about George Jr. being the first “CEO President”, whatever that meant. Unfortunately, he was shitty in the business world, and he made a shitty CEO-President, bu I’ll try to make the case that this is a good analogy for looking at 9/11, and I think there are three different types of CEO personality, in my experience.
I’m a software engineer, currently at Google, and previously spent an incredibly terrible year working for Microsoft after they acquired the company I originally signed up to (Danger Inc.), where they forced us to work on that godawful Pink/Kin phone that sold so miserably. So I’ve seen a lot of institutional evil in my recent experience, vis-a-vis Microsoft, which I’ll come back to in a second.
From that experience, I would argue that there are two different ways a company (via its leadership) can be evil, “ruthless-evil” and “stupid-evil”, with the third path being the literal “don’t be evil” and surviving by making really good products/services, finding a good way to make money off of them, and then basically acting like Girl Scouts (or Boy Scouts, take your pick). So far, my experience with Google has been that it really is a company run by Boy Scouts and we try to be ruthlessly good at what we do, do what we say we’re doing, be incredibly secretive about how exactly we’re doing it all, but the secrecy is all about competitive advantage, and not a sign that there is something sinister going on underneath. It’s like the Girl Scouts, it’s all about selling those cookies, or in Google’s case, the ad revenues.
Not being evil might seem like the most difficult path, but the larger the company, the forces generally push towards the right path also being the simplest path, due to the horrendous negative consequences of being found out. One problem with hiring a lot of ideologically minded engineers with a passion for doing the right thing, if you wanted to do evil, with us being told and believing that we aren’t, I can guarantee to you that if there really was something sinister going on (like secretly forwarding all your emails to the NSA, or China, or something like that), I’m pretty sure that proof of such fact would be leaked out to Wikileaks and the New York Times in short order. But there’s no way I can prove this to you. I could simply be lying to you, after all. So it’s something you have to judge for yourself, with every company or government or person you are judging.
Back to the subject at hand. In order to believe that Bush was in on 9/11, I would have to believe that they were actually ruthless-evil, when all of the evidence to me indicates that they did what they did because they’re actually “stupid-evil” and fucked up in a particularly corporate way that, honestly, it would seem hard for me to believe was possible (to be so collectively incompetent) had I not been immersed in a similar culture first-hand from working at the mad-house that is Microsoft (see minimsft.blogspot.com for the evidence from the disgruntled employees who comment there regularly).
Bill Gates was ruthless-evil. I probably wouldn’t have worked for that Microsoft, even by way of an acquisition, if they were up to their old games of squashing the competition through illegal monopoly tactics. But by 2008, even though Bush let them off with no punishment for what they did, they had still been somewhat defanged by the EU and the DOJ, and yet I didn’t take into account that they still had many years of fail ahead of them, because Steve Ballmer is truly a stupid-evil man. George Bush and Dick Cheney? Stupid-evil. Osama bin Laden? Ruthless-evil.
Big, stupid, failing corporations have an agenda that doesn’t make any sense from the outside (and often from inside, from the troops’ perspective), but the lines of communication have been poisoned by yes-men and lackeys to the point where the ship’s direction can’t be changed. Too many have invested too much into the current course and its associated world-view. The U.S. Government was like that under Bush/Cheney, I believe. We know now that the majority of their foreign policy from even before the inauguration up to 9/11 was consumed with missile defense (or “let’s kick off a new arms race so we have an excuse to build some new nukes, yee-haw!”), being even more extra super pro-Israel than standard U.S. foreign policy, and trying their damnedest to find an excuse to get into a war with Iraq and kick Saddam out of office, and maybe even Kim Jong-Il if the Saddam thing went well.
We know Richard Clarke, who was the chief counter-terrorism official under Clinton and Bush Jr., testified that he tried to warn Condoleezza Rice on numerous occasions about the danger of Al-Qaeda, and she wasn’t paying attention. Of course if she knew it was going to happen, then of course she would blow off his warnings.
My point is that they didn’t see it coming, and the reason they all reacted as suspiciously as they did after the fact, which you seem to have interpreted as them trying to hide their culpability, I instead interpret as them trying desperately to hide their negligence. Now we know they did a lot of evil things subsequently, using 9/11 as an excuse. They passed stuff, like the PATRIOT ACT (stupid acronym and all) and the authorization to go into war with Iraq, because those were the items they were trying to do anyway, and they suddenly had an excuse. In other words, the typical corporation response, panic and then try extra hard to force through whatever agenda you were already trying to push.
In the end, I think you’re giving the Bush junta far more credit than they deserve. I know that stupid evil can do a whole lot of damage, because I witnessed it first-hand at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. Floundering around and doing the wrong thing constantly is never pleasant to watch, but it gives the wrong impression when you try to assume that the people in charge are as intelligent as you and actually have some master plan behind it all. Nixon and Kissinger, LBJ and JFK, and others from that era, seem to have had that crazy factor where plotting a scheme like a terrorist attack on our own soil was actually proposed by the crazier elements of that era. But we don’t live in those times.
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld? They weren’t doing evil out of ruthlessness. They were doing evil because they didn’t know any better. Rumsfeld and Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, all those clowns, they all thought the Iraq War and the occupation would be easy and simple. That was just retarded. How could they be simultaneously so stupid and yet so brilliant as to pull off the greatest act of terrorism on U.S. soil with absolutely nary a trace of evidence? I don’t want to get into the explosives vs. no-explosives argument at this hour, because we know there were real planes that crashed into the buildings, I don’t buy that there is ANY evidence that there were explosives, or that burning jet fuel and the impact couldn’t have knocked off the insulation, softened the steel, and then it catastrophically collapsed on itself at nearly the speed of gravity. Find a single civil engineer or structural engineer who wants to stake their reputation that it couldn’t have happened without explosives and I’d be very surprised. Either way, it’s not even necessary for your argument. I just can’t believe that Bush was anywhere near the action, because if he was “in the loop”, they would’ve done much better at acting heroic and movie-like and cool in the immediate aftermath instead of scared and confused and in full-on CYA mode, as they were in reality.
We live in corporate times and we have corporate CEO presidents. Clinton was the first, Obama is the current model of a competent but conservative CEO, trying to do the right thing but also not embarrass himself or the company by doing anything risky. A good CEO doesn’t rock the boat in the first year or two unless the company is in serious trouble and he has the confidence of the board. The U.S. might be in serious trouble, but Obama has the Democrats behind him, and we know what flakes they are, and the Fox News types are running around convinced he’s the devil. So he has to be super conservative.
CEO’s don’t often have the leverage to steer the ship around that one might hope, or they don’t take advantage of it. Not everyone can do a Steve Jobs, come in, make a quick 180 degree turn, and start taking off. But wouldn’t Clinton have done more or less the same thing? She, like her husband, are also of the CEO mold. It’s all about the corporate dollars and doing the safe thing, not rocking the boat too much. It’s frustrating that the right-wing is so nutty that they see these characters as socialist communist anarchists, when both parties are cut from the same corporate cloth. We might dislike Obama for being Warren Buffett instead of Steve Jobs, but that’s his style and almost any Democrat would be constrained to the same narrow window of opportunity that we saw with the first Clinton. Part of that is the corruption from the corporate lobbyists and the corporate media, and the impact that has on the Congress, the Parties, and the President too. That’s the system we have.
Bush Jr. was a shitty CEO President, and not some clever terrorist plotter pulling off crazy shit with explosives and also in league with real live known Al-Qaeda terrorists with real backstories. Osama bin Laden was the clever terrorist. He pulled off a crazy scheme that our home-grown domestic terrorist types like Timothy McVeigh and the author of the Turner Diaries could only (and did) dream of. Those guys were trying to start some sort of race war against the liberals, and bin Laden was trying to set off a war between the U.S. and the Muslim world. McVeigh utterly failed to achieve his effect, because his attack was too small and he was caught too quickly. But we saw the Bush gang stupidly and completely fell into Osama bin Laden’s trap and we responded, stupidly, foolishly, by launching the war against Afghanistan that bin Laden wanted us to be drawn into, and on top of that, a war with Iraq as a bonus. So he got what he was looking to accomplish.
But Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice and the gang ultimately got nothing out of 9/11. They spent the entire rest of their terms trying to dig themselves out of the hole that the 9/11 attacks got us all dragged into. In the end, they all look like fools and incompetents. If there was some sort of benefit to them being in on the 9/11 plot, I just can’t see it. You’re a smart person, and certainly cynical enough, to be able to see the merit in my point of view. I think you are giving the Bush gang far too much credit by claiming they had anywhere near that level of control over the situation.
In a stupid-evil scenario, nobody *really* has control of the ship but everyone thinks that it’s in good hands and going in the right direction, and the farther off course, the more desperately people pretend that the Emperor has clothes and things are going according to plan. Obviously the PNAC crowd thought that going to war against Iraq would be a piece of cake, and knew that it would be a hard trick to pull off, but I’m pretty sure they would have tried to sell us on that idea either way. In fact, I would suspect that they would’ve had if anything a slightly easier time achieving their real and original goal of invading Iraq and taking out Saddam if they could’ve focused their entire efforts on “rolling out that product” (i.e. scaring us with the WMD accusations) in peacetime, rather than after a major terrorist attack that diverted us into Afghanistan and got the Bushies big-time into trying to spy on everyone to try to stop the next one from happening. They also did an excellent job, to all appearances, of taking down Al-Qaeda… after they pulled off an attack that was quite literally too big for anyone to ignore. After all, they did successfully pull off a few bombings including the 1993 WTC bombing, and the general public really didn’t think too much of them as a real threat until after 9/11, just like the Bushies finally did.
So I’m sorry, but I couldn’t buy into the “inside job” theory with all of the evidence that I’ve found convincing, knowing that Osama bin Laden, his associates, and the hijackers, were real people who followed a real path through history with real goals that made sense to them. We even know about the would-be hijackers who screwed up in flight school, or whatever, and didn’t get to be part of the plot. We know that the Bush Administration followed their own stupid-evil path that went in the particular direction that it took because of this terrorist attack, but I think that evidence confirms that it was an attack from outside, rather than a terrorist attack that they were in any way in control of or responsible for. Even the “LIHOP” theory doesn’t hold because, like I said, they just acted too unprepared during the event if they knew what was up. Cheney and Rumsfeld might have pulled it off, but Bush just isn’t that good of an actor. He was using all of his acting talents trying to pretend to be competent and in charge and winning the “War on Terra” that they created out of the 9/11 attacks after the fact. Up until then, I believe that all of their energies (from all accounts I’ve read) were concentrated on saber-rattling with Russia and China, Israel/Palestine, and trying to go to war against Saddam, and they were perfectly happy doing that without 9/11 in their way. Osama just made it a whole lot harder for them to actually succeed, and if anything, screwed up their original agendas, at least vis-a-vis Cold War stuff against Russia. They were barely able to convince enough people to go to war against Saddam as it was, and if they were really behind 9/11, I would think that they could easily have shifted the evidence so that Saddam was the person who was implicated rather than bin Laden.
So anyway, that’s my serious answer. I don’t think you’re crazy but I just think that all of the evidence points the other way, and like I said, you’re making Bush and Cheney out to be bigger than they really are. I quite like the narrative that they were mediocre fuck-ups rather than super-terrorists pretending to be mediocre fuck-ups. Occam’s Razor and everything. The super-terrorist LIHOP/MIHOP narratives make sense for a Nixon or Kissinger, or even for Reagan’s gang and Bush Sr., but I can’t picture Bush Jr. and the others being able to create this entire phantom universe of pretend narratives and secretly planting explosives in the buildings and all of that other stuff that the inside job theory entails. I would have to believe in some sort of Truman Show type Universe where they could create the appearance of this entire cast of characters who weren’t what they appeared to be, and yet so incompetent that they fucked up everything else that they touched in office. Doesn’t compute.
tl;dr version: any administration competent enough to pull an entire terrorist organization out of thin air (or activate some sleeper agents, if you prefer) to commit an unprecedented terrorist attack on American soil, knowing the risk that it would entail if they were ever found out, with all the power that entails, would also have had the power to make the aftermath come out far better than it did. If the Bushies had actually managed to catch Osama bin Laden in the last days of the administration, I would’ve said, okay, maybe there’s something fishy here. But I refuse to believe that any of them would willingly participate in an outcome that ended up making them all look like stooges of some two-bit terrorist boogeyman (up until 9/11) that most Americans had never heard of. They would’ve been able to frame up Saddam instead, or managed to “miraculously” catch bin Laden. Instead, they gave the impression of utter ineptitude and stubborn shortsightedness from beginning to end.
Giving credit where it’s due, my entire argument owes a great deal to Matt Taibbi’s book, The Great Derangement, which has a section about his experiences with the 9/11 Truth movement. I tried to hit on the same major points that he did, because those were the points I thought you would find most compelling. You can read Taibbi’s book in case you thought I didn’t make the case strongly enough and want to read it really pounded into the ground.
Taibbi writes out an entire multi-page imagined dialogue where Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Silverstein (the WTC property owner), et al are having a secret meeting and discussing their plot and explaining how what they are all plotting is insane and crazy and makes no sense but they’re going to do it anyway. If you want to convince others that 9/11 was an inside job, I’m afraid you would have to write out an equally convincing dialogue or counter-narrative where the Bush crew was in on the plot and yet still did all the stupid stuff that they did, before, during, and after.
Whoa, sorry about the duplicate post. I typed up a different second post, but WordPress (or my browser) ate it. Hopefully this one will go through.
Short version of my follow-up post: read Matt Taibbi’s book, the Great Derangement. My entire argument is based on his experience with the 9/11 Truth movement, filtered through my own experience.
Sorry for the dup posts. I have been trying to write a much shorter follow-up and WordPress keeps posting my original huge one. Let me try posting this from Firefox instead of chrome and see if it works.
I keep trying to write a short follow-up post, not spam you with the same long one over and over. Something is messed up with your WordPress I think.
Never mind again. I see all of my posts went through but I was reading in the wrong order. Time to go to bed…