Let us conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire.
Would not we shatter it to bits - and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire. 1
An excellent essay by John Prados that sums up perfectly why the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are doing more harm than good. They are sidetracking the real issues.
There is no doubt that the events of 9/11 flowed from an immense chain of actions in many places by a host of actors. Orchestrating all this activity implies a level of skill that just does not track with the Bush administration’s demonstrated incompetence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israeli-Palestinian matters, or on selling democracy in the Middle East, detention and torture, domestic wiretapping, actually finding Osama bin Laden and on so much else. What the Bushies were good at was at capitalizing on the 9/11 tragedy to push their domestic and foreign policy agendas.
At the same time, it is not necessary for there to have been a Bush 9/11 plot to explain the extreme deceitfulness of the administration afterwards. Obviously there was a ton of blame to avoid and a political vulnerability that President Bush wants to evade at all costs. And there is plentiful evidence of missed signals, security officers not “connecting the dots,” parts of the government not talking to each other and more, all of which adds to the impression of incompetence rather than of ability to carry out a conspiracy this immense. Moreover, the Bush administration itself further muddied the waters in its prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, going back and forth repeatedly in claims that this terrorist was or was not part of the 9/11 plot.
The other problem is political. There’s a job to be done in getting the Bush administration to behave in a legal, responsible fashion. All this effort devoted to finding the truth of 9/11 might contribute to that, except that the questions are too minute. Arguing the kinetic energy of a Boeing 767 hitting the Trade Center with a given fuel load, the structural integrity of the building itself, or the actual time of impact on Pennsylvania soil of United Airlines Flight 93 does not trace complicity into the Oval Office. Even finding that the Pentagon really was hit by a missile and not an airplane, or that Flight 93 was actually shot down, would not necessarily implicate the White House or prove the grand conspiracy theory. Many of the questions can only lead to more questions. A whole new level of evidence would be necessary to establish whether complicity exists.
Absent that, pursuing the questions may finally add up to footnotes as this president, as Richard Nixon used to say, keeps his “big enchilada.” The exercise ends up looking at the past, not the present or future. Like Clint Eastwood, Americans will have heard all the theories and be left sitting at the bar. And believe it or not, at the end of the day the events of 9/11 may be just a paragraph in the story of a presidency that crippled this great nation.
