The decade since the hijacked 747s rammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon hasn't changed one thing. Millions of Americans still fervently believe that the 9/11 terror attacks were part of a well-conceived, well-planned, diabolical, staged act. A poll commissioned by the BBC found that one in seven Americans still thinks that 9/11 was a staged act. And even worrisome, one in four 16- to 24-year-olds thinks it was staged. The disbelief that 9/11 was the ghoulish handiwork of anti-American, hate-filled, foreign terrorists has been fed by a loud and pesky pack of professional conspiracy theorists who perennially see a sinister government hand behind any and every assassination, terror attack and even natural disaster.
The 9/11 attack, though, is the jewel in the crown for the conspiracy nuts. They've managed to convince the credulous that the carnage was part of a Machiavellian plot by a parade of the usual suspects -- George W. Bush, the GOP, the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Justice -- to wipe out civil liberties, impose a national security state, create a pretext for the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorize the American people and strengthen the hand of the pro-Israel lobby in U.S. politics. Some of the more whacked-out theorists with an anti-Semitic bent even claim that the terror attack was part of a decades-old web of intrigue woven by international Jewish groups to dominate global politics.
Conspiracy theorists allege that explosives were planted at the WTC; that Jewish and Israeli Tower workers and occupants were warned the day before, supposedly by the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) to stay away; that a missile slammed into the Pentagon; that the government hid the wreckage of the United Airlines plane that terrorists crashed in Pennsylvania. Every one of these theories has been debunked.
Yet as evidenced by the BBC poll, millions of Americans aren't convinced. And that's easy to understand. The American woods swarm with groups that fervently believe that government, corporate or international Zionist groups busily hatch secret plots and concoct hidden plans to wreak havoc on their lives. The Manchurian Candidate idea, popularized in books and countless movies and TV shows, has firmly implanted the notion that shadowy government groups routinely topple foreign governments, assassinate government leaders and brainwash operatives to do dirty deeds.
There are two other undeniable reasons that 9/11 conspiracy theories have so easily infected the popular imagination. Government agencies, such as the FBI, the CIA and INSCOM (Army intelligence), with the connivance of presidents, have often played fast and loose with the law and the rules of democracy. They have spied on, harassed and jailed thousands of Americans, from Communists to anti-war activists. The biggest, juiciest and most relentless target for government spymasters during the past decades has been African-American political groups, from the moderate NAACP to the radical Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam. In 2007 a fresh batch of publicly disclosed FBI documents showed that the agency waged a kinder, gentler, but no less illegal spy campaign against Coretta Scott King. The sordid and relentless campaign the FBI waged against her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is well documented.
The other reason for the paranoia about 9/11 was the fury that many Americans had, and still have, toward Bush. Many Americans are still convinced that the GOP hijacked the White House by rigging the votes in Florida in 2000, and that the GOP repeated the ploy in Ohio in 2004. This makes it easy to believe that government agencies will say and do anything to cover up and shield wrongdoing and misdirect Americans.
Bush, as other presidents who have found themselves in hot water with the American people for their domestic and foreign policy fumbling, was hardly averse to beating the war drums and fanning national security jitters to boost his poll ratings, secure public allegiance and increase his party's political standing. Bush may have done this with well-timed color-coded terror alerts. But bottom-of-the-barrel poll ratings at the end of his term, the wholesale back-turn that millions of voters did on the GOP in the 2008 presidential election, and the polls that show that a majority of Americans want out of Iraq and Afghanistan and are squeamish over further erosion of civil liberties are resounding proof that even if Bush had staged 9/11 to clamp a vise grip on power, it didn't work.
But, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the conspiracy theorists will again busily spin their well-worn 9/11 conspiracy myths. They will fall on fertile ground again because of government officials' long and at times disgraceful penchant for covering up and flat-out lying to the public about their misdeeds, conduct and spying. This is enough to insure that 9/11 conspiracy fantasies remain alive and well today, and likely will remain alive for years to come.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of "The Al Sharpton Show" on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly "Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour" on KTYM Radio Los Angeles, which is streamed on ktym.com, featured as a podcast on blogtalkradio.com, and presented as an Internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com. Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter @earlhutchinson.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson
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Why would a group who historically do bombings of crowds, suddenly change and target symbols of wealth to impact something other then people such as finance? It's not like there weren't lots of typical targets from their past, crowds of people but in a massive increased way. It was the beginning of football season. Their idea of striking a blow is to hurt the unsuspecting crowds. If this was the same people why are they now doing exactly the same thing as they did prior which is bombing crowds. What they only had one wild notion in the last 20 years?
And to that I'll say" Bullsh*t.
"explosives were planted at the WTC"
Who, where, how and when was this actually "debunked"?
Wouldn't the debris from the collpases need to be checked for any residue or traces of explosives to actually debunk that theory?
Funny, no ones done that, but it's been debunked?
I'm not aware of who this writer is, but a first year drop out from Columbia could've done a better job, without the ad hominem attack and false logics.
When I see those, I also see the axe that's being ground...
Vote Democrat if you value Freedom.
Never underestimate the stoopidity (spelled wrong to pass moder.ators) of the American voter.
Just one such example is the phone calls made from flight 93 to friends and family member who were aboard those flights, the family members who drove those passengers to the airport to board flight 93, those who were waiting to pick those passengers up at the airport when they were scheduled to have arrived.
If just some significant part,e especially the phone calls from flight 93 are to be believed to be credible then one can't very well claim that the other 3 flights were part of a conspiracy separate from flight 93 which I think we can agree is beyond credible on its face. And if flight 93 is a part of whatever sort of "theory" one might concoct the we would have to believe that all the passengers, the crew and the friends and family of flight 93 all agreed to participate in a hugely elaborate conspiracy.
Now consider that if more than two people are party to the same secret, especially one of this complexity and magnitude, then there is a near 100% chance the secret gets out, much less an entire plane load of people, their friends and family!
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/debunking-911-myths-pentagon
F&F
Still, the conspiracists assume the government is too competent. It's somehow easier, comforting, I think, believing in an evil, but hyper-competent government capable of orchestrating incredibly complex conspiracies and doing such a good job of it that only a few would ever know of it and then be reviled as crazies, than to believe that a powerful, invasive government is still is unable to stop 19 Arabs with boxcutters when they've been warned in advance. Some would rather believe that someone, anyone, even the Bad Guys, know what they're doing, than confront the banality of human evil.
The policy on all airlines was to not fight back if hijackers were trying to take over a plane , presumably because the hijackers would safely land the planes . If the pilots, crew and the public knew what would happen if they were hijacked , people would have prevented the takeover of these planes.
Bush and Rice REFUSED to testify under oath and when Rice eventually did she skirted most of the questions asked of her. By accepting the official version of events (and the disgusting parade that was NORAD) without question, you are accepting a conspiracy theory that is more insidious than the alternative. Considering that the American government uses terror and fear as a basis for many of its reasoning to go to war and introduce new legislation we should really have a concise understanding of the events of September 11.
We like to simplify things, to put them in categories so they make sense to us.
Any evidence that doesn't fit the model just lays off to the side, uncomfortably. We don't know what to do with it, so we don't do anything with it.
The point of being a truthseeker is not to inflate one's own ego with some sense of belonging to a proud group of "truthers," it is to be honest in acknowledging where there is evidence that doesn't fit in previously held conclusions, even if only to acknowledge that you don't know.
We don't know what happened on that day.