AMERICAN SOFTWARE consultant David Rostcheck did much like everyone else on the morning of September 11th, 2001. He spent his time glued to the television, watching the amazing events unfold in New York.
But, after a while, he sat down to write an e-mail which he sent to USAttacked@topica.com, an internet forum set up by a now defunct outfit, list-a-day.com. Having committed his thoughts to keyboard, Rostcheck hit the send button at 3.12pm.
“Ok, is it just me,” his e-mail began, “or did anyone else recognize that it wasn’t the airplane impacts that blew up the World Trade Center? To me, this is the most frightening part of this morning. I hope other people actually are catching this, but I haven’t seen anyone say it yet, so I guess I will. I guess being an engineer may make one more conscious of these things. . .”
And then, in a further 600 or so words, Rostcheck went through the sequence of events, raising all sorts of questions before four concluding paragraphs.
“There’s no doubt that the planes hit the building and did a lot of damage. But look at the footage – those buildings were *demolished*. To demolish a building, you don’t need all that much explosive but it needs to be placed in the correct places (in direct contact with the structural members) and ignited in a smooth, timed sequence. Someone had to have had a lot of access to all of both towers and a lot of time to do this.
“This is pretty grim. The really dire part is – what were the planes for? If you’re going to demolish the building, what’s the point of the flashy display?
“The way they’re cutting the footage on the news now makes it look like the buildings crumbled soon after being hit by the planes, which is not true. They’ve also started slowing the clips from after the demolition explosion starts, so you don’t see the top of the building go first – but those who taped it, go back and look at the early first-run clips.
“If, in a few days, not one official has mentioned anything about the demolition part, I think we have a REALLY serious problem.”
And so, within just a few hours of the atrocity, the conspiracy genie was out of the bottle.
Rostcheck's role in the birth of the very many conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 is detailed in a new book, The Eleventh Day – 9/11 the Ultimate Account,by Ireland-resident authors, husband and wife team Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan. Rostcheck's e-mail can be read at serendipity.li/wot/davidr.html.
Since that day, conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 have spread through the internet like wildfire. Type “9/11 conspiracy theories” into Google and you get 13.5 million results, as of yesterday. There is a blizzard of websites and bloggers, both proselytising conspiracies and debunking them.
The people who advance the theories (for which no supporting evidence has ever been adduced) appear to be an eclectic mix of academics, professionals (experts and so-called experts), amateurs and, quite simply, nuts. They are active and persistent: one of the most prominent, David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at the Claremont School of Theology in southern California, has written numerous articles and several books, including The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11.
ONE OF THE most virulent in terms of spreading doubt about the official version of events (which is supported by several investigations, including that of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission) is a film, or rather a series of films culminating in the 2009 version, entitled Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup.
Loose Changebelieves the US government was behind the attacks and has lied about its involvement all along. Despite the fact that the film's assertions have been refuted, with verifiable facts, by the commission's report and by other independent investigators, including scientists and engineers, journalists and the testimony of eyewitnesses, the 2006 version of Loose Changewas watched by more than four million people online within four months of its release.
As Summers and Swan note, the conspiracy theories fall into two broad groupings. One has it that everything that occurred on September 11th, 2001, had been planned by the US government and its agencies, and was executed in meticulous, perfect detail. The other postulates the notion that, having allegedly become aware an attack was coming, the government sat back cynically and allowed it happen.
The explanations as to why the US government would act in either of these ways range from the improbable (it wanted a dramatic event so citizens would be meek as it whittled away their freedoms at home and waged war abroad), to the off-the-wall, ludicrous and offensive (the world is in the grip of a Zionist conspiracy; human remains were “planted” at each of the terror attack sites).
In books and articles, a favoured conspiracy theorist tactic is to plant an idea by raising a query, as opposed to advancing evidence. Thus Laura Knight- Jadczyk (co-author of a book entitled 9/11: The Ultimate Truth) and Arkadiusz Jadczyk, who run the "Cassiopaean Experiment", something they describe as "not your usual 'metaphysical' website", have suggested no aircraft passengers died at the Pentagon – because there was no plane. "For all we know, human remains from two different sites could have been combined by FBI and military personnel."
“For all we know” – a possibility is raised without any evidence; “could have been” a suggestion is advanced, again without any evidence. Could have been? Yes, but was it? No evidence is advanced but, as with most conspiracy theories, a seed has been planted.
The fact is that from moments after the aircraft ploughed into the Twin Towers and to this day, a substantial number of Americans believe their government is, to put it at its mildest, implicated in the 9/11 atrocity – the mass murder of its own people.
In August 2004, 49 per cent of New York city residents said they believed the government knew in advance of the attacks and failed to act. A July 2006 poll by Ohio State University found 36 per cent of respondents thought it “somewhat or very likely” that US officials participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them.
Even today, fully one-third of 5,000 Americans polled this month by Zogby disagreed with the statement “the US government and its commissions have fully investigated the attacks of 9/11”. Fifty eight per cent agreed with the assertion; 9 per cent said they were not sure.
So, what are the theories?
The main one is that the Twin Towers collapsed not because the fires started by fuel from the crashed aircraft fatally weakened the structure but because of controlled explosions. According to the conspiracy, the explosives were placed in advance by US government agents and detonated according to plan.
The next significant theory has it that no aircraft crashed into the Pentagon. What did, according to the theory, was a cruise missile fired by the US government.
United 93, the aircraft that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania when brave passengers rushed the hijack pilots, was actually shot down by a US government missile, goes the theory.
Further theories suggest insider trading in airline shares, thereby betraying prior knowledge of the attacks; that 4,000 Jews also had prior knowledge and did not turn up for work in the Twin Towers that morning; and that what people saw flying into the towers were remotely controlled, unmanned planes.
FOR ANY OF these to be true, one has to accept the idea that the US government would conspire to murder an unknown number of its own citizens – some 3,000 as it turned out – and that those involved, a huge number on any estimation, all maintained absolute secrecy. Experience suggests that while conspiracies do indeed occur, governments and bureaucracies are notoriously incompetent and prone to leaks. Someone, somewhere will always tell.
In the face of the massively improbable conspiracy scenario, some advocates go further: they say the body parts found in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania were not the remains of genuine victims but pieces of human flesh placed there by government agents. And for this to be true, the grieving families who lost loved ones in 9/11 have to be liars, have to be part of the conspiracy.
Interestingly, the sceptical views in the US, albeit held by a minority, have an echo in Muslim countries, as recent research by the Washington-based Pew Institute found.
In this year’s Pew survey on attitudes to 9/11, few among the Muslim publics surveyed believe the atrocity was carried out by groups of Arabs. The highest percentage – 28 per cent – who believe Arabs were culpable for the 9/11 attacks is found in Lebanon. A similar proportion of Israeli Muslims (27 per cent) also say groups of Arabs conducted the attacks.
“In the other predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, fewer than one in four Muslims accept that Arabs conducted the attacks on New York and Washington,” Pew notes. “Pakistanis and Turks are the most sceptical, with just 12 per cent and 9 per cent respectively, saying that groups of Arabs carried out the 9/11 terrorist acts.”
In several of the Muslim nations for which there are recorded trends, scepticism has grown since 2006. Among Jordanians, the percentage of Muslims who believe Arabs were responsible for the terrorist acts has fallen 17 percentage points compared with five years ago. Over the same period, the percentage of Muslims in Egypt who accept that groups of Arabs carried out the attacks has declined 11 points, while in Turkey it has shrunk by 7 percentage points. In the case of Indonesia and Pakistan, opinions on the matter have changed little since 2006.
WHY IS IT that a substantial number of people simply do not accept what most others, certainly in the West, believe to be true, based on what they can see and on assertions supported by verifiable evidence?
Michael Shermer, one of America’s leading champions of science and a dedicated debunker of pseudoscientific and supernatural claims, has tried to provide an answer.
"Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies?" he wrote two years ago in Scientific American. "In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency.
Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe)
and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.”
Of course, the ultimate problem for those who question a conspiracy, is that such scepticism is proof positive, for the advocate of the conspiracy, that the sceptic is himself part of the conspiracy. . .
