Reasonable people don't frequent the websites that go into the anomalies of 9/11, although such anomalies no doubt exist—the puffs of dust that emanated from the collapsing towers, the too-small hole at the Pentagon crash site, the "ghost plane" that was seen by witnesses in Pennsylvania—all of these things seem suspicious at first but one suspects they can be explained without much difficulty—the wave of downward pressure in the structure of the towers caused the dust puffs, the wings sheared off the plane that hit the Pentagon, etc. In the end, one is left with competing narratives and no authoritative method to distill truth from conjecture, so one simply moves on since the cat needs to be fed anyway and it's laundry day and, etc.
I don't know if the Bush administration was just asleep at the switch on 9/11 or whether they knew something was about to happen and declined to prevent it for political reasons. I strongly suspect the latter, but since I am a reasonable person and lack conclusive evidence, I keep silent.
But then, what about the possibility that the reasonable disinclination to get lost in the conspiracy labyrinth is an obstacle that prevents reasonable people from perceiving the truth? There is always the danger of throwing out the good apples with the rotten ones. After admitting this possibility, the next step along the trail of madness is to understand that the reasonable disinclination to go in for half-baked theories might itself be the cloak that shields the perpetrators from discovery. Maybe they even planned on it from the start. It's simple psychology—do something so outrageous that nobody would ever believe it, then blame a more likely suspect. (This is, in fact, the sort of pernicious policy I tend to associate with the Likud.) The Bush crew is the most mendacious and cynically manipulative administration in US history and it would be naive to put such outrageous chicanery beyond them.
Reasonable people understand that we don't yet know the whole truth about the events of 9/11, but because other major mysteries that engendered conspiracy theories have never been resolved (the Kennedy assassination being the supreme example), there is a tendency to accept the lack of resolution as inevitable, thereby adding another layer to the impermeable cloak of mystery.
Having laid out my credentials as a reasonable person who doesn't go in for wild theories but who remains uncomfortable about official narratives, let me tell you about my own conspiracy theory. I'm not interested in questionable points of evidence. Rather, I look at the major events that have taken place since 9/11 and I notice the overall and continuous de-emphasis of Bin Laden as the evil perpetrator and enemy mastermind, culminating in the following headline in today's New York Times (online version):
U.S. Strategy Shifts Focus From Al Qaeda
On the one hand, for the US to shift focus at this point seems not unreasonable, since many copycat terror organizations have sprung up to follow in Bin Laden's footsteps. Such small and loosely connected organizations represent a new force in the world, one that is irresistibly attractive to dis-empowered people who join them in order to reinvigorate their own dormant sense of imminence and hit back against the dominant forces that have long been oppressing them, especially the US. But these groups have multiplied so enormously primarily as a consequence of the US war in Iraq. If that war had not occurred and the focus had remained on Bin Laden and if Bin Laden had been brought to justice, then these small terror groups would not now have such drawing power on the "Arab street" and all over the Islamic world.
At some point, the following questions need to be asked:
- Why did the focus shift so early from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein?
- Was Bin Laden allowed to escape Tora Bora? (See here, here, and here.)
- Was it necessary to identify a different enemy (Iraq) so that Bin Laden and all his associations could escape public scrutiny?
UPDATE (6/2/2016): It's a few months shy of ten years since I wrote the above post, and I'm blogging again. Over the intervening years I've changed my tune on this question of conspiracy because the physical, photographic, anecdotal and recorded bureaucratic evidence in support of conspiracy is now overwhelming and impossible to refute. I believe, along with many thousands (if not millions) of other sane and rational (reasonable) people that it's imperative to reopen the case and to follow all available leads with journalistic thoroughness in full public view, just as it is more vital than ever for the Kennedy assassination to be similarly exposed, but this thankless (not to say hopeless) and arduous work is not going to be done by me. I, the Luminous Pachyderm, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bury my head in the sand.
Accordingly, I am considering changing the name of this blog to "Fluorescent Ostrich."
