ISSN No.

1754-2839
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Politics

Centre for International Politics Working Paper Series
No. 34, August 2007




Conspiracy Theories about 9/11
Peter Knight

English & American Studies
University of Manchester
(peter.knight@manchester.ac.uk)











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Ralph Young, CIP Working Paper Series Coordinator



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Opinion polls conducted in 2004 found that half of New York City residents believe that U.S.
leaders knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and
that they consciously failed to act, and a Scripps-Howard poll in 2006 revealed that more
than a third of Americans believe that it is likely or very likely that the U.S. government
either actively assisted in the September 11
th
attacks, or deliberately allowed them to happen
because it wanted to go to war in the Middle East.
1
What are we are to make of these
increasingly popular conspiratorial beliefs? What is the relationship between these alternative
conspiracy-minded versions of events and the official discursive construction of 9/11? Are
9/11 conspiracy theories merely a continuation of existing patterns of conspiracy theories, or
do they represent a new development? This article will argue that, for all their claims to
creating a major challenge to the official version, 9/11 conspiracy theories have much more
in common with the orthodox account than their proponents would like to believe; or, to put
the argument the other way round, the official discursive construction of 9/11 and the war on
terror is much closer than one might think to the outrageous conspiracy theories (as
President Bush called them).
2
In particular both the official and the unofficial constructions of
9/11 share a similar demonological structure of explanation that usually apportions all
responsibility to an evil enemy (Bush in one case, bin Laden in the other), a view that is

1
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; 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 an actual hard-core belief. In the case of the Scripps-
Howard poll, figure that more accurately represents the full-blown scale of 9/11 conspiracy
belief is the 16% who suspected that it was very likely or somewhat likely that the Twin
Towers were brought down by controlled explosives.
2
President Bush speaking before the UN General Assembly (October 11, 2001), transcript
available online at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html.
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underpinned in both cases by an ideology of American exceptionalism. Before considering
the significance of the imagination of conspiracy in both the official and unofficial accounts,
I will briefly sketch out the emergence of 9/11 conspiracy theories and describe their main
features.

From Urban Legends to the Truth Movement
Compared to other much discussed recent events such as the death of Princess Diana,
conspiracy theories about 9/11 emerged quite slowly. Indeed, most professional conspiracy
theorists in the USnormally so ready to interpret events through the lens of conspiracy
seemed to be as shocked as the rest of the public, with one website for example proclaiming
that:

It is a sad day today. Twenty thousand people died in a terrorist attack. The world
trade center is reduced to rubble. I wish we could formulate in our minds a conspiracy
to mask the horror of what weve seen, but Im afraid that there arent any scheming
government goons, there arent any plots, and no double crossing. Only the cold
hearted killing of innocent people. I ask you all to give a moment of silence to those
who died. It is the least amount of respect we can give them.
3



3
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 website before September 11, 2001) is keen to remind his audience that he predicted
something like 9/11 in advance; 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 US; 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 buzz words. On the (slow) development of such
theories about 9/11 see Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy (Los Angeles: University

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However, a few early conspiracy-oriented theories did emerge in late 2001 and early 2002.
Most of the early challenges to the mainstream version focused primarily on anomalies in the
official account and publicly available evidence (such as the supposedly gravity-defying
speed of the towers collapse, or the lack of the hijackers names on the passenger manifests),
with researchers only later tending to develop more full-blown theories about the ultimate
source of an alleged plot.
4
Amidst all the other passionate debate about the meaning of the
terrorist attacks in the months following September 11, 2001 these conspiracy-minded
speculations did not attract much support at first, a situation that can be explained in part by
the overwhelming rallying around the flag (within the US) and the strong expressions of
solidarity (from elsewhere) in the initial aftermath, but also because some with a penchant for
conspiracy theory were keeping their powder dry until the publication of the findings of an
official enquiry into 9/11.
One conspiracy allegation that did achieve early prominence was the rumor widely
circulated by email and on the Web that not a single Jew had been killed in the WTC attack,
and therefore that the attacks must have been the work not of Islamic terrorists but Mossad.
This conspiracy-minded urban myth with its antisemitic overtones rapidly spread through
cyberspace, and although the rumor was soon rejected in the United States and Europe (in

of California Press, 2003); and Martin Durham, The American Right and the Framing of
9/11, Political Quarterly 75.1 (2004): 17-25.
4
Probably the first researchers to push the idea that 9/11 was an inside job were Jared
Israel and Illarion Bykov on The Emperors New Clothes website (aimed mainly at
challenging mainstream media reports on Yugoslavia), www.tenc.net. Michel Chossudovsky
(a Canadian who runs the Center for Research on Globalization) likewise published
influential early articles putting forward the allegation that the U.S. intelligence agencies had
far more forewarning than they claimed. See http://www.globalresearch.ca; some of his work
has also been published in book form as Americas War on Terrorism: In the Wake of
9/11, 2
nd
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 early researchers are being plagiarized by later popularizers; see for example
members.iinet.net.au/%7Eholmgren/history.html.
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part because it was shown to have originated from an anti-Zionist website in the Lebanon), it
soon became widely accept as fact in the Arab world.
5
In addition to the rumor about 4000
Jews being forewarned of the WTC attack, the first wave of fully fledged book-length
conspiracy speculations emerged in France and Germany. These included the blog of German
journalist Mathias Brckers; the Hunt the Boeing website and subsequent book by French
author Thierry Meyssan, director of a left-leaning think tank; a book by Andreas von Blow,
former German state minister of the late 1970s; and a television documentary and subsequent
book by Gerhard Wisnewski.
6
Although immensely popular in Europe (and soon translated
into Arabic), these early conspiracy accounts were treated by the U.S. media with either
bafflement or amusement, and dismissed by the U.S. government as the product of anti-
Americanism.
7
For example, in response to Meyssans book the FBI issued a statement in
April 2002 declaring that, To even suggest that AA77 did not crash into the Pentagon on

5
The 4000 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 allegedly 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 their follow-up report, 9/11 Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories Still Abound,
www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/9_11_conspiracy_theories.htm. Most scholarly
research on the rhetoric of conspiracy has tended to concentrate on Europe, the United States
and the ancient Greek and Roman world. Exceptions include Daniel Pipes, The Hidden
Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martins Press, 1996), 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).
6
Andreas von Blow, Die CIA und der 11. September: Internationaler Terror und die Rolle
der Geheimdienste (Mnchen: Piper 2003). Gerhard Wisnewski, Operation 9/11: Angriff auf
den Globus (Mnchen: Knaur 2003), and Mythos 9/11 (Mnchen: Knaur 2004). Thierry
Meyssan, The Big Lie: The Pentagon Plane Crash That Never Happened (London: Carnot
2002). Mathias Brckers, Verschwrungen, Verschwrungstheorien und die Geheimnisse des
11.9. (Berlin: Zweitausendeins, 2002), published in English as Conspiracies, Conspiracy
Theories, the Secrets of 9/11 (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 2006).
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September 11 is the ultimate insult; and in July 2005, the U.S. State Department published a
document refuting Meyssans work, identifying it as a form of anti-American misinformation
akin to Soviet disinformation campaigns. Although many of the European tracts did share a
skepticism about the official construction of 9/11 and the war on terror, the questions they
posed cannot merely be dismissed as knee-jerk anti-Americanismnot least because the very
same questions are now being asked by American 9/11 skeptics. The irony is that often
Europeans have viewed Americans as exceptionally prone to conspiracy belief, and the
central premise of Brckerss work, for example, is that the official version of 9/11 is itself a
conspiracy theory, very much in the American tradition of scapegoating, in which all blame is
cast onto a demonized enemy.
8

By 2004 conspiracy theories had begun to gain ground within the United States as
existing research became much more widely publicized, with the mainstream media finally
taking note of the increasing popularity of the theories in a number of articles published
around the fifth anniversary of the attacks.
9
The ideas are no longer confined to a specific

7
See for example Ian Johnson, Conspiracy Theories about Sept. 11 Get Hearing in
Germany, Wall Street Journal (September 29, 2003), online edition,
online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106479068042179400,00.html.
8
Since Richard Hofstadters and Bernard Bailyns pioneering work on the paranoid style in
American politics in the 1960s much of the discussion has had an implicit exceptionalist
underpinning, shaped by the conviction that the United States has either a peculiar propensity
for conspiracy, or that, unlike other nations (such as Germany and Russia) the paranoid style
in the United States in the twentieth century has largely been confined to the cultural realm.
For a round-up of these positions see Peter Knight, A Nation of Conspiracy Theorists, in
Knight, ed., Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (New York:
New York University Press, 2002); and for strong arguments for an underlying connection
between American ideology and conspiracy theory see for example Timothy Melley, Empire
of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1999), and Jeffrey Pasley, Conspiracy Theory and American Exceptionalism from the
Revolution to Roswell,
conspiracy.pasleybrothers.com/CT_and_American_Exceptionalism_web_version.htm.
9
See for example Lev Grossman, Why the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Wont Go Away,
Time (September 3, 2006), www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1531304,00.html;
Will Sullivan, Viewing 9/11 from a Grassy Knoll, U.S. News and World Report,

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location or ideological position of anti-Americanism but have now become thoroughly
international, and are now as popular inside the United States as elsewhere. The speculation
that 9/11 was an inside job has been promoted via books, magazine articles, blogs,
websites, mainstream films such as Michael Moores Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), andprobably
the most influential in terms of reachsophisticated home made videos that can usually be
downloaded for free. The latter include Painful Questions, In Plane Sight, Press for Truth,
and, above all, Loose Change, a video made on a laptop by two young men from a small
town in upstate New York. At one point in 2006 Loose Change was the most popular item on
Google Video, and has been downloaded more than ten million times to date, bringing 9/11
conspiracy theories to the MTV generation.
10
With the loss of support for the Bush
administration as the Iraq war began to falter, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists began to organize
themselves into a loose coalition of pressure groups under the umbrella term the 9/11 Truth
Movement. Various activist groups have staged demonstrations at Ground Zero in New
York, and in both the United States and Europe they have organized public meetings,
lectures, lobbying campaigns, and media appearances from the major spokespeople of the
movement, such as Alex Jones, Michael Ruppert and Jim Marrs (all long-time prominent
conspiracy theorists), and academics such as David Ray Griffin, Steven Jones and James
Fetzer, the latter two professors leading the Scholars for 9/11 Truth group.
The conspiracy theories have begun to sediment into two broad categories, namely
Letting it Happen on Purpose (LIHOP, in the acronym used by the Truth Movement), the
view that the Bush administration let it happen despite receiving warnings; and Making it

www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060903/11conspiracy.htm; and Nicholas Lemann,
Paranoid Style: How Conspiracy Theories Become News, New Yorker (October 16, 2006),
96-106.
10
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.
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Happen on Purpose (MIHOP), the stronger claim that elements of the U.S. government and
its intelligence agencies actively conspired to make the events happen.
11
The basic underlying
assumption of both LIHOP and MIHOP theories is usually that the Bush administration
and/or oil corporations had much to gain from the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, and were looking forperhaps even willing to engineera modern-day Pearl Harbor in
order to gain support for their pre-existing war plans.
Some theories, for example, concentrate on the evidence that there might well have
been far more forewarnings than the Bush administration initially admitted, and that the plans
for an Afghanistan invasion were laid in advance. Other theories have focused on the
physical evidence of the crashes and suggested that the official accounts leave many
troubling questions. Often the theorists point to small but troubling inconsistencies, such as
the lampposts that appear to be intact in photos of the Pentagon crash site (despite the plane
supposedly flying just above the ground); or the fact that cell phones seemed to have worked
on board some of the planes at an altitude that official reports deem impossible; or the fact
that jet fuel burns at a temperature lower than the melting point of steel leaving many puzzled
as to the cause of the Twin Towers collapse. Meyssan even questioned whether the crash hole
in the Pentagon was big enough to have been caused by a Boeing 757, leaving him to
speculate that it was a missile rather than a plane that hit the building (and consequently that
the actual plane and its passengers must have been secreted away somewhere else). Re-
examining television footage and eyewitness statements, some of the most prominent theories
focus on the possibility that the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 were
brought down not by the planes crashing into them but by controlled demolition. Another set
of theories deals with the failure of the military to shoot down the planes once it was known

11
For an outline of the two positions, see Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed:
The Unanswered Questions (London: Constable and Robinson, 2005).
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that they had been hijacked, while other theories concentrate on puzzling aspects about the
nineteen hijackers, such as their poor flying skills, their connections with the Pakistani
intelligence services, or the possibility that some of those accused by the FBI still appeared to
be alive.

The Unofficial Version
It might seem at first sight that the 9/11 Truth Movement poses a radical political challenge to
the official version of events with its charge that the conspiracy reaches to the highest levels
of government and business whose corruption knows no moral bounds. However, many 9/11
conspiracy theories stem from a deeply conventional view of American history that has much
in common with the official version of events they reject. The underlying ideological
assumption of much 9/11 conspiracy theory is that things would be fine if only a cabal of
ruthless plotters deep within the government, the intelligence agencies, the military and the
oil corporations had not engineered events for their own gain. For all they express an
embittered skepticism about the cynical corruptness of American leaders, 9/11 conspiracy
theories (more so the American ones than their European counterparts) nevertheless often
maintain an abiding faith in American innocence and the fundamental soundness of the
system of government. Given the Bush administrations eagerness to present 9/11 conspiracy
theorists as un-American, the Truth Movement has been keen to portray themselves as the
only real patriots remaining, calling up ideas of dissent as a properly American tradition. On
an online discussion board following the publication of the Scripps-Howard poll, for
example, one poster summed up the view that the American institutions were still
fundamentally sound, despite the existence of a mammoth conspiracy: America is and can
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be again a great nation, it just needs a little house cleaning.
12
If members of the Truth
Movement tend to be critical of the war on terrorism in general and the Iraq war in
particular it is not because they regard the whole adventure of neo-liberal imperialism as
immoral but because the provocation for the war is in their view shrouded in skullduggery. It
is therefore fitting that the Truthers are keen to draw attention to the attacks of September 11,
2001 as a false-flag conspiracy that parallels Pearl Harbor, because it leads implicitly to the
same conclusion that even if the initial provocation for the war was unjust (in the conspiracy
version of Pearl Harbor), then the overall thrust of the war on terrorism is still justified. The
Bush administration has likewise been only too keen to compare 9/11 with Pearl Harbor
(albeit with a very different reading of that event) in an attempt to evoke comparisons with a
war still widely perceived as just.
13

Although there are signs that some of the newer representational strategies of 9/11
conspiracy theories are straining to the limits the conventional logic of conspiracy thinking,
for the main part the 9/11 conspiracy theories also rely on a traditional model of highly
efficient individual intentional action, in addition to their abiding faith in American
exceptionalism. When the Truth Movement develops a full-blown MIHOP theory of who or
what is behind the eventsand it does not always do soit tends to rely on a portrait of a
tight-knit cabal within the highest reaches of government, involving the CIA, perhaps even

12
In a similar vein a relatively new website called Patriots Question 9/11
(www.patriotsquestion911.com) is seeking to publicize a roll-call of respectable military and
political leaders who have made comments that (in the eyes of the website) voice doubts
about aspects of the official version. In my experience of attending a 9/11 Truth Movement
public meeting in the UK 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 anti-globalization protesters (many citing the Peak Oil argument), anti-war
activists, and the merely curious.
13
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).
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the president and his neo-con cronies themselves, motivated either by the lust for oil, money
or imperialist power. The picture of conspiracy that emerges involves the plotters displaying
an awesome degree of ruthlessness and preparation, anticipating and acting upon every last
detail. Some of the theories about controlled demolitions, for example, lead to the conclusion
that the plotters managed to bypass security and the tens of thousands who worked in the
towers to plant explosives, while at the same time ensuring that the air-traffic control
procedures were stood down, and that the planes crashed at precisely the right time and
location (which often then leads to the speculation that they must have been remote-
controlled). The plan was nearly perfect, the argument goes, except for small tell-tale details
that the conspirators and the 9/11 Commission overlooked but which the eagle-eyed amateur
conspiracy researchers have managed to spot, such as the puffs of smoke visible on the
television footage in slow motion that are supposedly evidence of explosives detonating in
sequence visible in slow motion.

The Official Version
If conspiracy theories of 9/11 have set themselves up in opposition to the official version, so
too has the rhetorical construction of 9/11 and the war on terror by the government, the
media and in popular culture explicitly distanced itself from the conspiracy theories which
are deemed to be beyond the pale of reason. In a speech to the UN General Assembly just one
month after the September 11
th
attacksand well before conspiracy theories had become a
significant oppositional voicePresident Bush tried to put clear water between conspiracy
theories and the official version by making a pre-emptive attack: We must speak the truth
about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of
September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists
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themselves, away from the guilty.
14
For all Bushs insistence on the fundamental difference
between the official interpretation of events and conspiracy rumors, there are nevertheless
strong rhetorical and structural parallels between the two versionseven in Bushs very
rejection of conspiracy theories as outrageous. By insisting that any view that does not take
a black-and-white view of blame is beyond discussion, the Bush administration from the
outset forcefully rejected any suggestion of the culpabilityeven through negligenceof his
own or even Clintons administration, whether for failing to act on the warning signs or for
preventing the attacks once under way.
15
In this kind of comment the world is rhetorically
divided up into the totally innocent and the irremediably guilty with no shades of gray in
between, a view of all-or-nothing agency shared by many conspiracy theories. In each case,

14
Nor was Bushs an isolated comment. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, speaking on ABC
News on December 9, 2001 about the then recently released Osama bin Laden confession
video, took the opportunity to hammer home the message that blaming anyone other than bin
Laden as the personification of pure evil was an affront to moral sensibility: Its 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. Theres nothing new or surprising in
there. Its 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 (cited in Meyssan, The Big Lie, 104). Although it is possible that Bush was talking
about the 4000 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 the failure to heed the warning signs. In effect he
is dismissing any critical view as a conspiracy theory, a rhetorical maneuver that ends
discussion. (In contrast Brckersfinding a hidden, conspiratorial reason behind Bushs
vehemencesuggests it was an anxious, guilty reaction to a report in the Times of India that
Mohammed Atta received $100,000 shortly before the attacks from Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed
of the ISI, the Pakistani secret services [Brckers, Conspiracies, 115].)
15
The Bush administrations 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 (in order to create a commitment to national unity) was vital
from the very beginning to the construction of a consensus on the war on terror see Stuart
Croft, Culture, Crisis and Americas War on Terror (Cambridge; Cambridge University
Press, 2006), chap. 2.
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America is seen as a fundamentally innocent victim of a catastrophic event that came out of
the blue and that can only be explained by the existence of an all-powerful conspiracy
motivated by pure evil or lust for power, whether orchestrated by bin Laden or Bush.
16
Just as
with the Kennedy assassination the only choices are a lone gunman theory or a conspiracy
theory both of which rely on a similar fantasy of highly efficient agency, so with 9/11 it can
seem at times that you are forced to believe either that a highly organized and centrally
controlled conspiracy of terrorists carried it out or that a highly organized and centrally
controlled cabal of government and intelligence agents did it.
17
This stark choice creates a
false dilemma that makes a truly alternative view to the consensus view of the war on terror
even harder to assert.
18

It is even arguable that the official rhetorical construction of al Qaeda as a vast, highly
organized conspiracy, as opposed to a loose decentred network, is not merely the result of a
vague ideological disposition towards understanding causality and responsibility in terms of
pure intentional agency but a concerted effort to construct an image of the enemy as a
centralized conspiracy that would more easily dovetail with political and military strategy.
First, in order to prosecute the leaders of al Qaeda in absentia in the trial held in the United

16
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 recently emerged that
the 9/11 Commissioners were angry that they were lied to by the Pentagon, and were even
considerating 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), A3, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html.
17
On the false dilemma in the Kennedy case see Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, chap. 4.
18
Several commentators on the progressive left in the United States have bemoaned the fact
that although some of the accusations about official complicity are important, some of the
energy of the anti-war movement has been sucked into the 9/11 Truth Movement. See for
example Christopher Hayes, 9/11: The Roots of Paranoia, The Nation (December 25,
2006), www.thenation.com/doc/20061225/hayes.
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States after the East African embassy bombings of 1998, the U.S. government need to portray
al Qaeda as a corporate, coordinated organization with Osama bin Laden as the
masterminda conspiracy in the legal definitionunder the terms of the RICO (Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act that had been passed in 1970 to enable the
prosecution of Mafia bosses for crimes committed by lower-level members.
19
As President
Bush tellingly noted in his major speech of September 20, 2001, Al Qaeda is to terror what
the Mafia is to crime.
20
Second, the image of a vast, tightly knit, hierarchical and centrally
controlled terrorist conspiracy that linked a huge number of different groups and cells in
various countries was not a new idea, but a reworking of a theory developed during President
Reagans administration about the role of the Soviets as puppet masters behind seemingly
unrelated and local terrorism. However, it turned out that this idea of a vast, conspiratorial
terror network was the product of a CIA disinformation campaign, that then was taken for
reality by a journalist and then Reagan.
21



19
Unlike the traditional statutes of criminal conspiracy that require evidence that the accused
had actively conspired with the perpetrator of an illegal act, the RICO law 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 also been
used in civil suits against anti-abortion terrorist groups and even the Los Angeles Police
Department (see the entry on RICO in Knight, ed., Conspiracy Theories in American History:
An Encyclopedia [Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003]).
20
President Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress (September 20, 2006), transcript
available online at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.
21
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). The argument about it being a fabrication is put forward
forcibly in Adam Curtiss documentary The Power of Nightmares (BBC television, 2004).
There is of course by now 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. Books such as Lawrence Wright, The
Looming Tower (London: Penguin, 2006) offer intriguing detailed evidence of the groups
structure, describing for example how al Qaedas had developed a management philosophy
that it called centralization of decision and decentralization of execution (318).
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15
As several scholars have ably documented, the interpretation of the September 11
attacks by political and media elites as well as in popular culture as the work of an enemy that
is the personification of evil is not common sense but is a construction that arises out of and
gels with a particular ideological outlook that was already well established. In effect the Bush
administration quickly capitalized on the events of 9/11 to promote the idea of a decisive
intervention as the appropriate response to the attacks.
22
The mainstream discourse used to
explain 9/11 and justify the need for a war on terror is marked out by a tendency towards
apocalypticism and a heated exaggeration; a sense of urgent crisis and imminent threat to a
specifically American way of life from an all-pervasive hidden enemy; the portrayal of
America as an exceptional victim; the reassertion of traditional American values and a call to
national unity in response; a Manichean insistence on dividing the world into Them and Us;
the demand that America leads an epic to-the-death fight against the plotters; the casting of
all blame onto the enemy; and the portrayal of the enemy as completely alien, inhuman, all-
powerful and, above all, evil.

22
The best of these works are Jackson, Writing the War; Croft, Culture, Crisis; and Curtis,
Power of Nightmares. There is of course a fine but important distinction between capitalizing
on the attacks after they happened in order to pursue political objectives that had already been
articulated, and deliberately allowing them to take place in order to promote a pre-existing
hidden agenda. Both Jackson and Croft are careful to distinguish their views from a more
conspiratorial interpretation, with the latter for example arguing 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 misleadingthat 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 (26-7). Curtis has likewise made 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

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If the argument that the official discourse of 9/11 has much in common at a rhetorical
and structural level with the unofficial conspiratorial version it derides is correct it should
come as little surprise that the above list coincides almost point for point with Richard
Hofstadters classic description of the rhetorical features of the paranoid style in American
politics.
23
Although Hofstadters article is helpful in identifying some of the significant
stylistic and ideological features that the official and unofficial versions of 9/11 share, his
explanation for the emergence of conspiracy thinking and demonology is less helpful.
Hofstadter argued that American politics has been beset by waves of paranoid fears but these
delusions were usually confined to those far from the center of power who were merely
creating a symbolic expression of their powerlessness. This is obviously not the case with
9/11 and the war on terror, because it has been political and media lites (echoed by
influential voices in the world of film and television and other pop cultural forms) who have
led the way in constructing a mainstream version of 9/11 that partakes of the paranoid
style. As critics of Hofstadter have pointed out, the discourse of countersubversive
demonology is instead often promoted to serve the all too real vested interests of those in
positions of power, rather than merely being a psychological expression of their innate
fears.
24
According to this counter argument, popular fears about terrorism have their origin
not in the delusional and idiosyncratic paranoid psychology of the masses as Hofstadter
argues, but in the deliberate rhetorical constructions promoted by the lite that serve their

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/1/hi/programmes/4202741.stm).
23
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London:
Cape, 1966).
24
What might be termed the litist 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), and Corey
Robin, Fear: The History of Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For

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existing vested political and economic interests. Although it is all too easy to focus on 9/11
conspiracy theories as symptoms of mass paranoid delusions (as many of the media articles
on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 did), it is far more important to recognize that the official
version equally draws on the rhetoric of paranoia, and that its version of events and the policy
choices entailed are neither natural nor inevitable.
But what should we make of popular suspicions not of terrorism but of government
involvement in 9/11? Although the litist theory of moral panics can provide a powerful
account of how popular fears are manipulated through mainstream discourse, we also need to
consider the political and social functions that the alternative discourse of 9/11 conspiracy
serves, as well as the satisfactions it affords its believers. To begin with it is important to
recognize that 9/11 conspiracy theories only really began to gain a significant measure of
popular support in the United States from 2004, whereas the conspiratorial challenge to the
official American version had already gained currency in Europe well before then. It is
therefore arguable that the real engine driving the 9/11 Truth Movement to popularity in the
United States has not been the been the discovery of new or more compelling evidence or
even its more user-friendly presentation in videos such as Loose Change, but rather it has
been the re-election of Bush in 2004 and the slowly disintegrating American mission in Iraq
that has prompted many Americans to rethink the official version of the road from 9/11 to
war in the Gulf. In short, as with the belated flowering of Kennedy assassination conspiracy
theories in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is the troubling reality of contemporary events
that provokes the need to retrospectively posit a primal scene of conspiracy as a symbolically
necessary origin to present woes.
Although the anti-war and anti-Bush sentiment has contributed to the rapid growth of

discussions of the problems with Hofstadters still influential thesis see Knight, Conspiracy
Culture, Introduction, and Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, chap. 1.
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the 9/11 Truth Movement, we also need to recognize 9/11 conspiracy theories as an almost
inevitable counter-reactionhowever misguidednot only against the distorted official
version that sought to find a direct connection between al Qaeda and the Axis of Evil, but
also against the lack of transparency and honesty many detect in the official 9/11
Commission investigation. Subsequent revelations of spin doctoring and outright lying by
federal officials have only served to fuel the conspiracy theories. The obvious examples
include the claim about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the too easy
acceptance of apparently forged documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein had
attempted to purchase yellow cake uranium ore from Niger; the belated release in 2004
(under pressure from the 9/11 Commission) of the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6,
2001 that included the section Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.; and recent
reports that NORAD lied to the 9/11 Commission.
25
Whatever else we might think about 9/11
conspiracy theories, it is worth remembering that they played an instrumental role in
convincing various 9/11 victims families pressure groups that there were many unanswered
questions, that in turn led to the pressure on the White House to rethink its initial opposition
to a full investigation and its initial appointment of Henry Kissinger as chairperson.
26


Conclusion
As Richard Jackson and Stuart Croft have persuasively argued, the mainstream interpretation
of 9/11 and the subsequent call for a war on terror are neither natural nor inevitable but part

25
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), and
Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the War in Iraq
(New York: Crown, 2006).
26
The story of the influence of Paul Thompsons timeline 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).
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of a deliberately constructed discourse, and therefore amenable to revision. Does this mean
that the Truth Movements conspiracy theory is a valuable form of counter-knowledge, a
popular and subversive critique of the establishment and official mendacity (as some scholars
have argued for other forms of conspiracy culture)?
27
I am not convinced that conspiratorial
versions of 9/11 are necessarily the alternative that is required, not least because they often
get hooked up on trivial details, and they share many of the same ideological underpinnings
about causality, blame and American exceptionalism that prop up the orthodox account.
Likewise, for all that they manifest a profound scepticism towards official accounts and the
mainstream media, they also selectively rely on details culled from these sources in
constructing their alternative accounts. Indeed, it is arguable that the mainstream political and
popular culture found it so easy to dismiss the anti-war protests that were mobilized around
the No War for Oil stance precisely because they contained the whiff of a conspiracy
theory about them, just as early 9/11 conspiracy theories from Europe had been so quickly
rejected as mere anti-Americanism.
28
It was no accident that President Bush pre-emptively
dismissed any alternative interpretation on 9/11 as a conspiracy theory, a familiar rhetorical
move that makes any dissenting view seem wildly irrational, not even worth considering.

27
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.
28
In Culture, Crisis and Americas War on Terror, Croft concludes that the mainstream
construction of the war on terror has to date held remarkably firm, despite challenges to it
from anti-war and other protesters. In particular Croft points out that many of the key points
of the discourse were shared by both Republicans and Democrats, with the argument
revolving around tactics not fundamental policy differences.