CONSPIRASPHERE
Twenty years ago the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City announced the dawning of a strange new world. NOEL ROONEY revisits the Ground Zero of 21st century conspiracy theory.
TRAGEDY AND ILLUSION
“It feels like fifty years ago, and then it feels like yesterday” – FDNY Assistant Chief Salvatore Cassano
The events of 9/11, 20 years ago, are vividly fresh in my mind; for many people of my generation, this was our JFK moment, the event that separated before and after. I recall a whole raft of feelings, but three stand out now.
First, of course, was the visceral horror of it all; television and the Internet had brought all sorts of terrible events into our living rooms – the US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, the worst atrocities of the war in the former Yugoslavia, natural disasters – but this was different. This was New York. This was somehow in our own backyard, even if we lived in Europe. There was a real sense that people we knew, or people who knew people we knew, could be in those towers. This was in some sense us. And it was coming to us live on TV.
Second was the eerie sensation that I was witnessing a spectacle of terrible beauty. The symmetry and symbolism of it, the choreography of the event, had a cruel, but palpable, æsthetic. The two planes careened inexorably into the two towers; the towers collapsed in an apocalypse of dust and debris. Here were the ithyphallic icons of rampant capitalism crumbling before our eyes, brought to earth by commercial aircraft, another icon of modern technology and the illusion of limitless freedom. We were being given a stark warning in a script that, if only we could read it, would reveal the darkest secrets of our culture.
The third feeling was the most diffifificult to articulate at the time, but is perhaps the most important for what follows. The real tragedy, unravelling in real time on live
The scene was set for a battle of conflicting narratives
TV, carried an equally tangible sense of unreality, of fiction; this was horrible, but it was also Hollywood. The story of Flight 93, the only plane that failed to reach its target, only added to the action movie feel; heroic passengers foiling the terrorists at the expense of their own lives, striking a blow for freedom, for the little guy.
Within minutes of the first plane striking the WTC, all TV channels were monopolised by the unfolding events, and this was to spawn a raft of unintended consequences. In the confusion, all sorts of strange reports were clutched at by TV crews desperate to be the first to the big reveal. The US security apparatus sprang into action very quickly to try and control the narrative, but they were constantly contradicted and blindsided by news from reporters and witnesses on the ground.
There were explosions in the basements of the buildings, before the planes struck. More explosions preceded the collapse of the towers. Israeli art students were dancing in celebration as they watched the towers fall. A truck loaded with explosives had been apprehended near Brooklyn Bridge. There were more hijacked planes in the air. The litany of anomalous reports, many of them no doubt the panicked confabulations of people too scared to think straight, permeated the offifificial narrative from the very beginning.
Then, as the events unfolded through the day, a pivotal event – unnoticed or forgotten by many – occurred. A third skyscraper, WTC7, collapsed. It had not been struck by a plane, but it had suffered some damage from the collapse of the neighbouring towers. The CIA’s New York offififices, FEMA, the SEC, the New York mayor’s command post, were all housed in Building 7. Strangest of all, the BBC appeared to report the building’s collapse some 20-odd minutes before it actually happened (you can still find the footage online, of reporter Jane Standley announcing the news, Building 7 clearly visible, and clearly still standing, in the background).
The scene was set for a titanic battle of conflicting narratives. The battle is still being waged today, by one side at least. The avalanche of conspiracy theories about 9/11 began to circulate within hours of the first act of the tragedy unfolding. This was (hard to imagine now) before the days of social media, but the Internet was alive with questions, with rumours, with theories, right from the start. While the US, and much of the world, was still numb with shock, inquiring minds were sifting and filtering the torrent of strange stories and measuring them against the rapidly solidifying offifificial narrative, which by now had a
principal villain, and a cast of fanatical accomplices, already in place.
It is worth noting that both the offifificial narrative and the alternative account promoted by the Truthers are conspiracy theories. To date, the FBI, which has indicted Osama bin Laden on a number of counts, has never done so in relation to 9/11, and that is, by their own admission, because there is actually no evidence – forensic, documentary or witness testimony – against him. If anything, the Truthers have presented more concrete evidence (whether or not one agrees with it) than the US government and its many three-letter agencies.
It would take a book to enumerate the points of contention between the two camps, and there are hundreds out there (some of them really out there) for those who are interested. I want to focus on some broader themes here. What does 9/11 tell us about the nature of conspiracy theory, and of those who see it as a threat to democracy? Has conspiracy theory changed since that terrible event and, if so, was 9/11 responsible for those changes? And have the very real inconsistencies in the offifificial narrative caught the attention of commentators who are not conspiracy theorists?
There has been a lot of talk in academic circles about the ‘new’ conspiracy theory. The suggestion is that the Internet, social media, and perhaps the increasingly adversarial nature of politics in the US, has created the conditions for a new way of doing conspiracy theory; Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, authors of A Lot of People are Saying, have characterised this variant on the conspiracist standpoint as “conspiracy without the theory”.
If that is the salient feature, then clearly the 9/11 truth movement does not fit the bill. The amount of serious research, often carried out by experts in various fields – architects, engineers, physicists, pilots and aeronautics experts, economists and political analysts – is staggering. The sheer number of individuals who have chosen to stick their necks out and say that something is deeply wrong with the offifificial narrative, people with longstanding careers in professional occupations or the military, speaks to a collective doubt that is anything but frivolous. The volume of dissenting evidence amassed by these investigators of 9/11 probably outstrips the material gathered by investigators of the JFK assassination, and that is a truly impressive claim; it certainly far outweighs the – itself voluminous – material in support of the orthodox narrative. So perhaps we can say that the 9/11 truth movement is the last of the ‘old’ conspiracy theories; a concerted attempt by people with deadly serious concerns, and the research and analytical skills to pursue them, to get at a truth about 9/11 that they feel is missing and needs to be told.
Incidentally, there are many, this writer included, who do not think there is any ‘new’ form of conspiracy theory. Knee-jerk dissident responses (and, more prosaically, gossip) are as old as history, and to date none has been shown to have threatened or assaulted a political system. The phenomenon commentators such as Muirhead and Rosenblum examine says a great deal more about the insidious nature of social media than it does about the Conspirasphere.
My third question leads to some curious developments in the conflict of narratives. I have spent some time searching academic literature to see if there is evidence that the issues raised by Truthers are getting any kind of traction among those who might see themselves as arbiters of ‘serious’ debate. I found a few examples of papers and lectures tentatively suggesting that 9/11, and the questions that still surround it, are perhaps worthy of, or even in need of, academic examination (this assuming, as I suspect many in the Establishment do, that the work done by even the most qualified Truthers does not count); some cautious suggestions that the discipline of International Relations ought to be treating the controversy seriously, and at least one lecture where the speaker casts serious doubt on the coherence (and thus by implication the veracity) of offifificial explanations of the Building 7 collapse. This is by no means a big shift in academic perspective, but it is intriguing.
And from the outset, there have been political commentators who, while they may not agree with the evidence presented by the Truthers, have certainly been sceptical of the behaviour of the US administration before, during and after the events of 9/11. The ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (the latter now revealed as another Saigon moment for the US) have produced a slew of political conspiracy theories emanating from people who would not normally be labelled conspiracy theorists.
So there are in a sense two different frameworks for conspiracy theories about 9/11: one concerned with the nuts and bolts of the events, asking the age-old question – cui bono? – and coming up with the answer of an inside job; and one examining the (equally age-old) propensity of powerful people to treat a disaster as an opportunity to implement pre-existing plans. Both continue to engage millions of people, 20 years after the event; and neither can be said to have come to a definitive conclusion.
Personally, I think 9/11 has, more than anything, given further credence (if that were needed) to the idea first proposed by Daniel Boorstin in The Image, and since expanded on by writers such as Chris Hedges, Neal Gadler and John Ralston Saul, among others, that we live in an age of illusion. In this case, the illusion is, paradoxically, based largely on a tragic real-world event; but the legacy of 9/11 is one of smoke and mirrors, of rivals struggling for control of a narrative that will likely never be properly told, and which may be of such a high order of strangeness that, if it were, it would not be believed.
Spookiness aside, the legacy of 9/11 may contain another paradox; that the event has become a central motif in the grand narrative of conspiracy theory, at the same time as the guardians of the offifificial narrative, the several governments intimately connected to the tragedy, would very probably like to see it fade decorously into the background of history. In this respect at least, I think the conspiracists are on the winning side.
SOURCES
https://whatabouttheroads.co/ who-will-survive-the-dim-age/
www.wtc7.net/bbc.html
www.ae911truth.org/
www.academia.edu/29139050/ Evolution_of_the_9_11_ Controversy_From_Conspiracy_ Theories_to_Conspiracy_ Photographs_An_Ekphrastic_ Examination
https://scholarworks. iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/ handle/2022/21803/911%20 Truth%20Movement%20Diss. pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
A Lot of People are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, Princeton University Press, 2019.