On
September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial
passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the
airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York
City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the
buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying at
least two nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a
third airliner into the Pentagon and a fourth plane crashed into a field
near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after the passengers and flight crew
revolted.[13]
The 9/11 Commission Report disclosed prior warnings
of varying detail of planned attacks against the United States by
al-Qaeda. The report said that the government ignored these warnings due
to a lack of communication between various law enforcement and
intelligence personnel. For the lack of inter-agency communication, the
report cited bureaucratic inertia and laws passed in the 1970s to
prevent abuses that caused scandals during that era. The report faulted
the Clinton and the Bush administrations with “failure of imagination”.
Most members of the Democratic and the Republican parties applauded the
commission's work.[14]
Within the context of 9/11 conspiracy
theories, the terms 'mainstream account,' 'official account' and
'official conspiracy theory' all refer to:
The reports from
government investigations — the 9/11 Commission Report (which
incorporated intelligence information from the earlier FBI investigation
(PENTTBOM) and the Joint Inquiry of 2002), and the studies into
building performance carried out by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency[15] (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST).
Investigations by non-government organizations that
support the accepted account — such as those by the National Fire
Protection Association, and by scientists of Purdue University and
Northwestern University.[16][17][18]
Articles supporting these
facts and theories appearing in magazines such as Popular Mechanics,
Scientific American, and Time.
Similar articles in news media
throughout the world, including The Times of India,[19] the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC),[20] the BBC,[21] Le Monde,[22] Deutsche
Welle,[23] the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC),[24] and The
Chosun Ilbo of South Korea.[25]
U.S. President Barack Obama's
June 2009 speech to the Muslim world where he said "I am aware that some
question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al-Qaeda
killed nearly 3,000 people on that day."[26]
Since the attacks, a
variety of conspiracy theories have been put forward in web sites,
books, and films. Many groups and individuals advocating 9/11 conspiracy
theories identify as part of the 9/11 Truth movement.[27][28][29]
Within six hours of the attack a suggestion appeared on an internet chat
room suggesting that the collapse of the towers looked like an act of
controlled demolition. "If, in a few days, not one official has
mentioned anything about the controlled demolition part," the author
wrote, "I think we have a REALLY serious problem."[30] The first
theories that emerged focused primarily on various perceived anomalies
in the publicly available evidence, and proponents later developed more
specific theories about an alleged plot.[9] One allegation that was
widely circulated by e-mail and on the Web, is that not a single Jew had
been killed in the attack and that therefore the attacks must have been
the work of the Mossad, not Islamic terrorists.[9]
The first
elaborated theories appeared in Europe. One week after the attacks the
"inside job" theory was mentioned in Le Monde. Other theories sprang
from the far corners of the globe within weeks.[31] Six months after the
attacks Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11 exposé L'Effroyable Imposture (published
as 9/11: The Big Lie in English) topped the French bestseller list.[32]
2003 saw the publication of The CIA and September 11 by former German
state minister Andreas von Bülow and Operation 9/11 by the German
journalist Gerhard Wisnewski; both books are published by Mathias
Bröckers, who was at the time an editor at the German newspaper Die
Tageszeitung.[9]
While these theories were popular in Europe,
they were treated by the U.S. media with either bafflement or amusement,
and they were dismissed by the U.S. government as the product of
anti-Americanism.[33][34] In an address to the United Nations on
November 10, 2001, United States President George W. Bush denounced the
emergence of "outrageous conspiracy theories [...] that attempt to shift
the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the
guilty."[35]
The 9/11 conspiracy theories started out mostly in
the political left wing but has broadened into what New York Magazine
describes as "terra incognita where left and right meet, fusing sixties
countercultural distrust with the don’t-tread-on-me variety".[36]
By
2004, conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks began to gain
ground in the United States. One explanation is that the rise in
popularity stemmed more from growing criticism of the Iraq War and the
newly re-elected president George W. Bush than from any discovery of new
or more compelling evidence or an improvement of the technical quality
of the presentation of the theories.[9] Knight Ridder news theorized
that revelations that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq,
the belated release of the President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001,
and reports that NORAD had lied to the 9/11 Commission, may have fueled
the conspiracy theories.[9]
Between 2004 and the fifth
anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2006, mainstream coverage of
the conspiracy theories increased.[9] Reacting to the growing publicity,
the U.S. government issued responses to the theories, including a
formal analysis by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) of the collapse of the World Trade Center[37] and a revised 2006
State Department webpage to debunk the theories.[38] A 2006 national
security strategy paper declared that terrorism springs from
"subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation," and that "terrorists
recruit more effectively from populations whose information about the
world is contaminated by falsehoods and corrupted by conspiracy
theories. The distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts
that would challenge popular prejudices and self-serving
propaganda."[39] Al-Qaeda has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the
attacks, with chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri accusing Shia Iran and
Hezbollah of denigrating Sunni successes in hurting America by
intentionally starting rumors that Israel carried out the
attacks.[40][41][42][43][44][45]
Some of the conspiracy theories
about the September 11 attacks do not involve representational
strategies typical of many conspiracy theories that establish a clear
dichotomy between good and evil, or guilty and innocent. Instead, they
call up gradations of negligence and complicity.[9] Matthias Bröckers,
an early proponent of such theories, dismisses the official account of
the September 11 attacks as being itself a conspiracy theory that seeks
"to reduce complexity, disentangle what is confusing," and "explain the
inexplicable".[9]
Just prior to the fifth anniversary of the
attacks, mainstream news outlets released a flurry of articles on the
growth of 9/11 conspiracy theories,[46] with an article in Time stating
that "[t]his is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political
reality."[47] [48] Several surveys have included questions about beliefs
related to the September 11 attacks. An August 2007 Zogby poll
commissioned by 911Truth.org[49] found that 63.6% of Americans believe
that Arab fundamentalists were responsible for 9/11 while 26.4% of
believed that "certain elements in the U.S. government knew the attacks
were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political,
military and economic reasons" and 4.8% of them believe that "certain
U.S. Government elements actively planned or assisted some aspects of
the attacks".[50] In 2008, 9/11 conspiracy theories topped a "greatest
conspiracy theory” list compiled by The Daily Telegraph. The list was
ranked by following and traction.[51][52] A study conducted by
journalist Elizabeth Woodworth for the Center for Research on
Globalization concludes that the increased presence in mainstream media
reflected an improved professional approach within the 9/11 Truth
movement.[53]
In 2007 for the sixth anniversary of the attacks
ZDF broadcast the sympathetic documentary “September 11, 2001: What
Really Happened.” In a 2010 ZDF online poll, 67 percent of the
respondents identified "George W. Bush" (27 percent), "U.S. Authorities"
(25 percent) or the "Armaments Lobby" (15 percent) as having been
behind the attacks. Only 25 percent choose Osama Bin Laden while the
issue of surveillance was resonating with the German 9/11 Truth
movement.[32] Conversely, however, a 2008 international poll found that
64% of Germans believed al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks, with
only 23% of Germans blaming the US government.[2]
In 2010, the
"International Center for 9/11 Studies", a private organization that is
said to be sympathetic to conspiracy theories,[54] successfully sued for
the release of videos collected by NIST of the attacks and
aftermath.[54][55][56] According to the German daily Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, the videos which were published shortly before the
ninth anniversary of the attacks provide "new food for conspiracy
theorists". Many of the videos show images of 7 World Trade Center, a
skyscraper in the vicinity of the WTC towers that also collapsed on
September 11, 2001.[55] Eyewitnesses have repeatedly reported explosions
happening before the collapse of both of the towers, while experts
consider these theories to be unreasonable.
|