9/11 Was Not An Inside Job

Seriously.

Recently I had the displeasure of conversing with a 9/11 “truther”—a person who believes that the September 11^th attacks were an inside job perpetrated by the Bush administration to use as a pretext for the so-called war on terror. His syllogism went something like this:

Bush wanted to invade Iraq (and presumably Afghanistan).

Bush could not invade without a good reason.

Therefore, 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush to provide the reason.

Now, I think George W. Bush is one of the worst presidents ever, and his invasion of Iraq was a textbook war crime. But if the Bush administration was going to go through the trouble of somehow getting planes (or missiles as some truthers claim) to fly into the World Trade Center, planting explosives in the buildings beforehand so they could be detonated after impact, fabricating the identities of the hijackers, covering up all government involvement after the fact, then I have just one question: Why wouldn’t the Bush administration just forge some Iraqi passports for the phony hijackers in order to make an airtight case for war against Iraq? I mean, if 9/11 was one big ingenious theatrical production by the government, why would Bush and company make the hijackers out to be from Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally? Instead, none of the nineteen hijackers were Iraqi, while fifteen of them were Saudi.

This question has never been coherently answered by any truther. When I posited this to a conspiracy nut once, he replied, “Because that would’ve been too obvious.”

Ha. So what he was saying was that the Bushies, instead of cooking up some fake Iraqi identities to create a slam-dunk justification for invading Iraq, decided to choose the path of most resistance by implicating a bunch of Saudis in the attacks so they’d have to jump through all kinds of hoops to explain to the American public that it wasn’t Saudi Arabia that needed to be invaded, but Afghanistan where the “terrorists” had trained, and then Iraq, which they had nothing to do with.

This does not make sense on any level. The fact that most of the hijackers were Saudi was extremely inconvenient for the Bush administration, and this needed to be overcome for propaganda purposes.

Another problem with the truther hypothesis is that if the government was able to orchestrate 9/11 and cover it up, fooling most Americans, why couldn’t it fabricate some evidence linking Iraq and 9/11? Or, why couldn’t it fabricate evidence proving beyond all doubt that Saddam was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction? Indeed, if the Bush administration had the will and the ability to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks, why didn’t it have the will and the ability to plant some WMDs in Iraq after the invasion so they could “find” them and tell the American people, “Aha! See, we were right!”? But this didn’t happen. Not even a single drum of nerve gas. And when no WMDs were found, Bush looked like a total asshole. So again, this makes no sense.

Also, what about the fact that in a conspiracy of this magnitude, hundreds, probably thousands of people would have to be involved in the attacks and the subsequent cover up? If 9/11 were an inside job, you’d think somebody would’ve leaked something. How can a secret like that be kept when hundreds of people know it? It’s impossible, especially with over eight years having passed.

But if you’re a truther, why bother trying to explain any of this? It’s much easier to take a condescending tone with people and tell them, as truthers love to do, “Wake up, people!” In using this kind of rhetoric, truthers are telling us that they are part of an “enlightened” minority, a small group of critical thinkers who are “in-the-know” about 9/11. They assume the guise of teachers who want others to see the light, but in reality they want stay small in number so they can continue to feel smarter than everyone else. The only problem is, their theory of what happened is totally fucking stupid.

- Max