Outrageous conspiracy theories: Popular and official responses to 9/11 in Germany and the United States

New German Critique

Volumn , Issue 103, 2008, Pages 165-193

  Knight, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 40449090160     PISSN: 0094033X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/0094033X-2007-024     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. For details on the polls see "Panoply of the Absurd," Der Spiegel, September 8, 2003, online edition, www.spiegel.de /international/spiegel/0,1518,265160,00.html.
2. See also "9/11 Conspiracy Theories Dominate Frankfurt Book Fair," October 10, 2003, www.dw-world.de/dw/article /0,,993523,00.html.
3. Zogby International, "Half of New Yorkers Believe U.S. Leaders Had Foreknowledge of Impending 9-11 Attacks and 'Consciously Failed' to Act," August 30, 2004, www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=855;
4. Thomas Howard, "Third of Americans Suspect 9/11 Government Conspiracy," Scripps-Howard, August 1, 2006, www.scrippsnews.com/ 911poll. Opinion polls recording belief in conspiracy theories are particularly unreliable, because they often function as a way for people to express a generalized suspicion rather than a hard-core belief. In the case of the Scripps-Howard poll, a figure that more accurately represents the full-blown scale of 9/11 conspiracy belief is the 16 percent who suspected that it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that the twin towers were brought down by controlled explosives.
5. President Bush speaking before the U.N. General Assembly, October 11, 2001, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html.
6. This trinity of conspiracy beliefs is discussed in Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
7. Posted on September 11, 2001, on www.conspiracy-web.com. Alex Jones, one of the most prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorists (and the host of a conspiracy-oriented talk radio show and Web sitebefore September 11, 2001), is keen to remind his audience that he predicted something like 9/ 11;
8. see www.infowars.com. Conspicuous by their comparative absence in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were conspiracy theories from the religious Right in the United States; most other contemporary events are instantly interpreted through the lens of a conspiracy-infused form of numerology and end-times prophecy, in which the Illuminati, the Antichrist, and the New World Order are the buzzwords.
9. On the (slow) development of such theories about 9/11 see Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy;
10. and Martin Durham, "The American Right and the Framing of 9 /11," Political Quarterly 75 (2004): 17-25.
11. Probably the first researchers to push the idea that 9/11 was an "inside job" were Jared Israel and Illarion Bykov on the "Emperor's New Clothes" Web site (aimed mainly at challenging mainstream media reports on Yugoslavia and the Serbs), www.tenc.net. Michel Chossudovsky (a Canadian who runs the Center for Research on Globalization) likewise published influential early articles alleging that the U.S. intelligence agencies had far more forewarning than they claimed.
12. See www.globalresearch.ca; some of his work has also been published in book form as America's "War on Terrorism": In the Wake of 9/11, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Hushion House, 2005). Some in the 9/11 Truth Movement are now interested in documenting the historical development of 9/11 conspiracy theories, voicing suspicions that later popularizers are plagiarizing early researchers;
13. see, e.g., membersdinet.net.au/%7Eholmgren/history.html.
14. The "four thousand Jews" account was echoed by some other rumors that had an anti-Semitic bent, such as the story that five Israeli art students had been arrested in New York for filming the events while laughing and the theory that Larry Silverstein, the owner of the World Trade Center with a conspicuously Jewish name, must have collaborated in a plot to bring the towers down because he stood to profit from the insurance claim. For a detailed account of these theories and their dissemination see Anti-Defamation League, "Unraveling Anti-Semitic 9/11 Conspiracy Theories," www.adl.org/anti_semitism/9-11conspiracytheories.pdf, and the follow-up report, "9/11 Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories Still Abound," www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic /911_conspiracy_theories.htm.
15. Most scholarly research on the rhetoric of conspiracy has concentrated on Europe, the United States, and the classical world. Exceptions include Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin's, 1996);
16. and Harry G. West and Todd Sanders, eds., Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
17. Thierry Meyssan, The Big Lie: The Pentagon Plane Crash That Never Happened (London: Carnot, 2002);
18. Andreas von Bülow, Die CIA und der 11. September: Internationaler Terror und die Rolle der Geheimdienste (Munich: Piper, 2003);
19. Gerhard Wisnewski, Operation 9/11: Angriff auf den Globus (Munich: Knaur, 2003);
20. Wisnewski, Mythos 9/11 (Munich: Knaur, 2004).
21. See also Mathias Bröckers, Verschwörungen, Verschwörungstheorien und die Geheinmisse des 11.9 (Berlin: Zweitausendeins, 2002), published in English as Conspiracies, Conspiracy Theories, and the Secrets of 9/11 (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive, 2006).
22. See, e.g., Ian Johnson, "Conspiracy Theories about Sept. 11 Get Hearing in Germany," Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2003, online edition, online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106479068042179 400,00.html.
23. Since Richard Hofstadter's and Bernard Bailyn's pioneering work in the 1960s on the "paranoid style in American politics," much of the discussion has had an implicit exceptionalist underpinning, shaped by the conviction either that the United States has a peculiar propensity for conspiracy or that, unlike other nations (such as Germany and Russia), it saw the paranoid style confined largely to the cultural realm in the twentieth century. See Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (London: Cape, 1966);
24. and Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). For a roundup of these positions see Peter Knight, "A Nation of Conspiracy Theorists," in Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, ed. Peter Knight (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1-17.
25. For strong arguments for an underlying connection between American ideology and conspiracy theory see, e.g., Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press, 2000);
26. and Jeffrey Pasley, "Conspiracy Theory and American Exceptionalism from the Revolution to Roswell," conspiracy.pasleybrothers.com/ CT∠d_American_Exceptionalism_web⋮rsion.htm.
27. See, e.g., Lev Grossman, "Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Won't Go Away," Time, September 3, 2006, www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,1531304,00.html;
28. Will Sullivan, "Viewing 9/11 from a Grassy Knoll," U.S. News and World Report, September 3, 2006, www.usnews.com/usnews /news/articles/060903/11conspiracy.htm;
29. and Nicholas Lemann, "Paranoid Style: How Conspiracy Theories Become News," New Yorker, October 16, 2006, 96-106.
30. On the Loose Change phenomenon see Nancy Jo Sales, "Click Here for Conspiracy," Vanity Fair, August 2006, www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/features/2006/08/loosechange200608.
31. For an outline of the two positions see Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions (London: Constable and Robinson, 2005).
32. For overviews of pre-9/11 conspiracy thinking see Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
33. and Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to "The X-Files " (London: Routledge, 2000).
34. Cf., e.g., David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Redford, MI: Olive Branch, 2004);
35. Edward J. Epstein, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (London: Hutchinson 1966);
36. and Sylvia Meagher, Accessories after the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967).
37. Staff on the 9/11 Commission were determined to prevent the kinds of conspiracy theorizing that had come in the wake of previous controversial commissions. Although they did make an effort to hold some open meetings (in contrast to the closed sessions of the Warren Commission), they also avoided engaging directly with conspiracy theories. As 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow explained: "When we wrote the report, we were also careful not to answer all the theories. It's like playing Whack-A-Mole. You're never going to whack them all" (Carol Morello, "Edgy Online Sites Feed Conspiracy Theories to a Distrustful Public," Washington Post, October 9, 2004).
38. See also the memoir by commission chairmen Thomas M. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, Without Precedent: Inside the 9/11 Commission (New York: Knopf, 2006).
39. For a summary of the JFK conspiracy theories see Peter Knight, The Kennedy Assassination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2007).
40. In a footnote to his classic article on the "paranoid style," Hofstadter reassured himself and his readers that "conspiratorial interpretations of Kennedy's assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States," with the suggestion that only a handful of unhinged and un-American writers would promote such a preposterous theory (Paranoid Style, 7). On the possibility that some of the early Kennedy assassination studies were the work of Soviet disinformation see Max Holland, "How Moscow Undermined the Warren Commission," Washington Post, November 22, 2003.
41. usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/ display.html?p=pubs-english&y=2006&m=August&x=2006082 8133846esnamfuaK0.2676355, and wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/ faqs_8_2006.htm.
42. usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jul/27-595713.html.
43. There is even the suggestion in a recently declassified policy document setting strategies for fighting terrorism that conspiracy theories themselves lead to terrorism: "The terrorism we confront today springs from: ... Subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation. 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.... In place of a culture of conspiracy and misinformation, democracy offers freedom of speech, independent media, and the marketplace of ideas, which can expose and discredit falsehoods, prejudices, and dishonest propaganda" (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nsct/2006/sectionV.html).
44. On the inner structural psychology of conspiracy theories see Dieter Groh, "The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory; or, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People . . . " in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (New York: Springer, 1987), 1-37.
45. For the conspiracy interpretation of the PNAC report see David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, 2nd ed. (Adlestrop: Arris, 2005). Although the conspiracy theorists have read the much-quoted passage ("Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor") as an admission that the Bush administration knew that a more aggressive, imperial foreign policy would not be achievable without a dramatic event stage-managed to engineer public support (for this is how conspiracy theorists have read Pearl Harbor), the report as a whole discusses the need for a "revolution in military affairs," a transformation of the armed forces from an overweight bureaucracy left over from the Cold War to a more agile organization led by information technology. Donald Rumsfeld was brought in precisely to oversee this transformation of the Pentagon along the lines of corporate restructurings of the 1990s. The other event that conspiracy theorists often invoke-erroneously-in their argument that there are historical precedents for 9/11 as a "false-flag" operation is the burning of the Reichstag.
46. Operation Northwoods was originally revealed in James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001). The declassified documents are now widely reproduced on 9/11 conspiracy Web sites.
47. Jim Marrs, Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies (San Rafael, CA: Origin, 2004);
48. Marrs, The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11, and the Loss of Liberty (New York: Disinformation, 2006).
49. For an example of Fetzer's JFK work see his edited work The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK (Chicago: Catfeet, 2003); his 9/11 work is available online at 911scholars.org (in late 2006 the Scholars for 9/11 Truth split into two factions, with Steven Jones establishing his own group).
50. On the accusation of disinformation campaigns within the movement see, e.g., www.oilempire.us/bogus.html;
51. and angieon911.com. The most prominent skeptic work is David Dunbar and Brad Regan, eds., Debunking 9/11 Myths: An In-Depth Investigation by "Popular Mechanics" (New York: Hearst, 2006).
52. The equivalent assumption in the Kennedy case-at the heart of Oliver Stone's JFK, for example-is that the tragedies of American history since 1963, such as Vietnam and Watergate, are all a result of a coup d'état that deviated the course of manifest destiny; see Knight, Kennedy Assassination.
53. In a similar vein, a relatively new Web site called Patriots Question 9/ 11 (www.patriotsquestion91l.com) seeks to publicize a roll call of respectable military and political leaders who have made comments that (in the eyes of the Web site) voice doubts about aspects of the official version. In my experience of attending a 9/11 Truth Movement public meeting in the United Kingdom in 2005, there were understandably few appeals to American values; instead, the mainly student-age crowd was made up in roughly equal measure of ecological and antiglobalization protesters (many citing the "Peak Oil" argument), antiwar activists, and the merely curious.
54. On the often questionable appeal to World War II in the official discourse of the war on terror see Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
55. Nor was Bush's an isolated comment. For example, Paul Wolfowitz, speaking on ABC News on December 9, 2001, about the recently released Osama bin Laden "confession" video, hammered home the message that blaming anyone other than bin Laden as the personification of pure evil was an affront to moral sensibility: "It's repugnant. I mean here is a man who takes pride and pleasure from killing thousands of innocent human beings. This confirms what we already know about him. There's nothing new or surprising in there. It's only a confirmation. And I hope it will finally put a stop to these insane conspiracy theories according to which in some way the United States or somebody else are the guilty parties" (quoted in Meyssan, Big Lie, 104). Although it is possible that Bush was talking about the "four thousand Jews" rumor and was therefore implicitly making a plea for ethnic tolerance in the Middle East, it seems that the main focus of his ire was any suggestion that the United States in general and his administration in particular might have been to blame for the attacks, either through misguided foreign policy or through the failure to heed warning signs. In effect, he was dismissing any critical view as a conspiracy theory, a rhetorical maneuver that ended discussion. (In contrast, Bröckers-finding a hidden, conspiratorial reason behind Bush's vehemence-suggests that it was an anxious, guilty reaction to a report in the Times of India that Mohammed Atta had received one hundred thousand dollars shortly before the attacks from General Mahmoud Ahmed of the ISI, the Pakistani secret services i Conspiracies, 115])
56. The Bush administration's angry rejection of anything other than total innocence was also shared, for example, by Americans responding to articles in the London Review of Books in the immediate aftermath that suggested that the reason for the attacks was not purely an effect of the United States' supposed identity as the embodiment of freedom but was partly a result of its foreign policy actions. For a detailed analysis of how a complete and bipartisan rejection of blame for 9/11 (to create a commitment to "national unity") was from the very beginning vital to the construction of a consensus on the war on terror see Stuart Croft, Culture, Crisis, and America's War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 2.
57. In their rejection of any strong statement of culpable negligence or move to prosecute specific omissions, the 9/11 Commission also followed the quickly established national consensus that no real blame could be laid at the feet of Bush, Clinton, or federal agencies. However, as the appeal to "national unity" has begun to collapse, it has emerged that the 9/11 commissioners were angry that they had been lied to by the Pentagon and were even considering recommending criminal prosecution as they wrapped up their inquiry in 2004. See Dan Eggen, "9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon," Washington Post, August 2, 2006, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article /2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html.
58. On the false dilemma in the Kennedy case see Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, chap. 4. Several commentators on the progressive left in the United States have lamented that although some of the accusations about official complicity are important, some of the energy of the antiwar movement has been sucked into the 9/11 Truth Movement. See, e.g., Christopher Hayes, "9/11: The Roots of Paranoia," Nation, December 25, 2006, www.thenation.com/doc/20061225/hayes.
59. Unlike the traditional statutes of criminal conspiracy that require evidence that the accused had actively conspired with the perpetrator of a crime, RICO makes it sufficient to prove merely that a suspect belongs to an organization that displays a pattern of coordinated, illegal activity. Since its initial application to the Mafia, RICO has been used in civil suits against anti-abortion terrorist groups and even the Los Angeles Police Department (see the entry on RICO in Peter Knight, ed., Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia [Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003], 619-20).
60. President Bush, address to a joint session of Congress, September 20, 2001, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.
61. The original book that propounded the terror network theory in the 1980s was Claire Sterling, The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981).
62. The argument about the network's status as a fabrication is put forward forcibly in Adam Curtis's documentary The Power of Nightmares, BBC Television, 2004.
63. There is by now, of course, a vast literature on al-Qaeda. Works such as Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), set out to debunk the idea of al-Qaeda as a centralized organization.
64. Books such as Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (London: Penguin, 2006), offer intriguing detailed evidence of the group's structure, describing, for example, how al-Qaeda "had developed a management philosophy that it called 'centralization of decision and decentralization of execution"' (318).
65. The best of these works are Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism;
66. Croft, Culture, Crisis, and America's War on Terror;
67. and Curtis, Power of Nightmares.
68. There is, of course, a fine but important distinction between capitalizing on the attacks after they happen to pursue political objectives that have already been articulated and deliberately allowing them to take place to promote a hidden agenda. Jackson and Croft are careful to distinguish their views from a more conspiratorial interpretation; Croft, for example, argues that "the 'war on terrorism' is an instance of a deliberately and carefully constructed discourse.... The fact that the construction of the 'war on terrorism' has meshed so closely with the pre-existing policy agenda of the neo-conservatives within the Bush administration also suggests it was deliberately formulated in pursuit of those goals. This is not to say that the Bush administration was necessarily being disingenuous or deliberately misleading - that there was some kind of conspiracy. We know from insider accounts that President Bush and his cabinet genuinely believe what they say publicly about terrorism.... It is not that there was some kind of plot to manipulate and deceive the public; rather, administration officials deliberately deployed language to try to persuade the American people of the logic, reason and rightness of their decisions" (Culture, Crisis, and America's War on Terror, 26-27).
69. Curtis likewise makes clear that his documentary does not put forward a conspiracy theory: "The use of fear in contemporary politics is not the result of a conspiracy, the politicians have stumbled on it. In a populist, consumerist age where they found their authority and legitimacy declining dramatically they have simply discovered in the 'war on terror' a way of restoring their authority by promising to protect us from something that only they can see" (news.bbc.co.uk/l /hi/programmes/4202741.stm).
70. Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 3-40.
71. What might be termed the "elitist theory of moral panics" has been articulated most powerfully by Michael Rogin, "American Political Demonology: A Retrospective," in Ronald Reagan, the Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
72. and Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
73. For discussions of the problems with Hofstadter's still influential thesis see Knight, Conspiracy Culture, intro.;
74. and Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, chap. 1.
75. These and other stories are covered in more detail in Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (London: Penguin, 2006);
76. and Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the War in Iraq (New York: Crown, 2006).
77. The story of the influence of Paul Thompson's time line on one group of 9/11 widows (known as the "Jersey Girls") and their campaigning for a full inquiry is told in the documentary film 9/11: Press for Truth (dir. Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy; 2006).
78. Ultimately, Griffin concludes that 9/11 is better explained by a complicity theory than by either incompetence or coincidence.
79. Bröckers, Conspiracies, 183. Subsequent references are given in parentheses in the text.
80. On the idea of conspiracy theory as scapegoating see Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford, 2000).
81. However, it is ultimately unclear whether Bröckers is developing a theory of collusion in contrast to a theory of conspiracy, or expanding the analysis of conspiracy to the extent that he finds intentional plotting everywhere, even at the level of cells. The idea of a reinscription of a humanist understanding of agency and identity with the personifying of conspiracy at the cellular level (in the work of William S. Burroughs) is discussed in Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, chap. 3.
82. See Knight, Conspiracy Culture, chap. 6.
83. It comes as little surprise that, in addition to translating Wilson's Everything Is under Control, Bröckers had previously published a work arguing for the positive value of the cannabis plant and the legalization of hemp, whose prohibition has been a favored conspiracy theory of the counterculture. There is thus a schizophrenic quality to the anti-Americanism of Bröckers's generation, simultaneously drawn to the 1960s American counterculture as a model of freedom from tradition and convinced that the American government has been taken over by a vast conspiracy.
84. Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Penguin, 1988), 15.
85. Ibid., 440.
86. In effect, Bröckers unwittingly contributes to a debate about conspiracy theory as an attempt to map the totality of socioeconomic relations. Fredric Jameson dismisses conspiracy theories as "the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age," a "degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content" ("Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988], 356). In contrast, Jodi Dean argues that conspiracy theories now often express a sense of skepticism that there is a coherent big picture ("If Anything Is Possible," in Knight, Conspiracy Nation, 85-106).
87. There is also a book version: Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 (New York: ReganBooks, 2004).
88. www.cooperativeresearch.org/projectjsp?project=911_project.
89. Gerhard Seyfried, "The Secret Diagrams," www.seyfried-berlin.de/diagram-l.htm.
90. See also Bureau d'Etudes, "Cartographies," utangente.free.fr.
91. The case for the subversive potential of conspiracy theory is made, for example, in John Fiske, "Blackstream Knowledge: Genocide," in Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 191-216.
92. In Culture, Crisis, and America's War on Terror, Croft concludes that the mainstream construction of the war on terror has held remarkably firm, despite challenges to it from antiwar and other protesters. In particular, Croft points out that many key points of the discourse were shared by Republicans and Democrats, with the argument revolving around tactics, not fundamental policy differences.