The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

“Imaginative” or anything of that sort. I have set down nothing that is not strictly reasonable and practicable. It is the soberest of books and the least original of books. I think I have written enough to show that it is impossible for world affairs to remain at their present level. Either mankind collapses or our species struggles up by the hard yet fairly obvious routes I have collated in this book, to reach a new level of social organisation. There can be little question of the abundance, excitement and vigour of living that awaits our children upon that upland. If it is attained. There is no doubting their degradation and misery if it is not.

There is nothing really novel about this book. But there has been a certain temerity in bringing together facts that many people have avoided bringing together for fear they might form an explosive mixture. Maybe they will. They may blast through some obstinate mental barriers. In spite of that explosive possibility, that explosive necessity, it may be, this remains essentially an assemblage, digest and encouragement of now prevalent but still hesitating ideas. It is a plain statement of the revolution to which reason points an increasing number of minds, but which they still lack resolution to undertake. In The Fate of Homo sapiens I have stressed the urgency of the case. Here I have assembled the things they can and need to do. They had better summon up their resolution.

9/11

Tuesday 11 September 2001. A day of infamy. At 8.35 a.m., a hijacked passenger plane crashed into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center. Thirty minutes later, a second plane hit the south tower. Over in Washington DC, a third airliner crashed into the Pentagon.

Nearly 3,000 people died as a result of these attacks. The US had just suffered its worst terrorist incident in history. Kjalid Sheikh Mohammed, the head of the military committee of Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda, accepted responsibility: “Yes, we did it,” he told al-Jazeera TV. According to intelligence received, the White House of George W. Bush agreed that al-Qaeda had committed the attack.

Case closed? Not quite.

9/11 was a tragedy for all except paranoid conspiracy theorists, to whom every cloud of explosive smoke has a silver lining. Within weeks of 9/11, the internet was humming with alternative versions of whodunnit and why. By mid-2007 the 9/11 internet conspiracy documentary Loose Change had been downloaded over four million times.

For all the multiplicity of post-9/11 conspiracy theories, they boil down to two main hypotheses: that George W. Bush either staged the 9/11 attacks or purposely allowed them to occur because the attacks would generate public support for an invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and other fuel-rich countries. With American oil running out, such invasions were a strategic necessity.

Proponents of the theories—who include Hollywood luminaries Charlie Sheen and David Lynch—point accusingly at the Project for the New American Century, the right-wing think tank that campaigns for increased American global leadership. Former PNAC members include 9/11-era Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney. An internal PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, allegedly claims that “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” would be needed to move public opinion in their favour. Proponents of this theory also note the Bush–bin Laden Connection, the long ties between the two families, together with the administration’s initial opposition to an investigation into the attacks. Could the US Government willingly allow an attack on its own people?

Proponents answer “Pearl Harbor”. Even commit a false-flag attack on its own people? Answer: Operation Northwoods. This latter plan, proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, proposed a stage-managed “terrorist” attack on US soil; Castro would get the blame, thus providing the justification for an invasion of Cuba.

So far as the false-flag case goes, theorists find quite a lot of evidence that the Government put its rampant political desires into practice.

First there’s the sheer amount of incriminating evidence the plotters left around. Oddly, amidst 1.6 million tons of debris, investigators found the intact passport of Mohammed Atta, the man alleged to be the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks. So fortuitous was this find, conspiracy researchers suggest, that it must have been a plant. In fact, a number of other laminated passports were found in the debris. Atta also left flight-simulation manuals behind in a car, and apparently a will. However, he cannot have minded their discovery since he was intent on suicide. In fact, he may have wished them to be discovered to let the world know his martyrdom.

Second, what befell the towers of the World Trade Center bears examination. To most observers what happened to the WTC towers on 9/11 is straightforward: two planes hit the towers, then the towers fell down. This “reality” was soon challenged by conspiracy theorists, together with a covey of scientific experts.

Before 9/11 no steel-framed skyscraper had collapsed because of fire, yet WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 collapsed like pancakes. Particularly unusual was the death of WTC 7, which was not hit by an aircraft. Additionally, according to at least one demolition expert, the billows of dust coming out of the towers were more indicative of explosion than fire. Steel wreckage recovered from the site shows that it became molten; fire is not usually able to effect this change in steel. But a bomb is.

The “controlled demolition hypothesis” is a central plank of 9/11 conspiracy theory, featuring heavily in David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor (2005), and most cogently argued by Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University. Jones asserts that without demolition charges a “gravity-driven collapse” of the sort that happened to the WTC buildings would defy the laws of physics.

By the laws of the “controlled demolition hypothesis” the WTC was rigged with explosive devices, probably containing thermite. The strange comment by Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC 7, on a PBS documentary that he told the fire department to “pull it” makes sense in this scenario: “pull it” is demolition industry slang for setting off demolition charges. (Silverstein’s spokesman said later that Silverstein meant “pull it” as in “pull outta there”.) The bottom-to-top style collapse of WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 is said to be typical of controlled demolitions. Fuelling conspiracy theory is the fact that building 7 housed offices of the CIA and the FBI, plus New York City’s emergency command bunker.

In counterpoint to the controlled demolition hypothesis is the finding of the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report into 9/11. According to this report the fireproofing on the Twin Towers’ steel infrastructures was blown off by the impact of the planes, thus opening them to fire damage. Fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, which made the floors sag. Sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns, making them bow inwards. Buckled columns could not support the building. Thus the buildings collapsed. NIST’s findings are supported by a whole range of independent researchers.

What the controlled-demolition hypothesis fails to take into account is the aviation fuel carried by the planes. Skyscrapers were never made to withstand the effects of having thousands of gallons of ignited aviation fuel swilling around inside them.

Demolition experts have also weighed in on NIST’s side. To place enough lethal charges around three skyscrapers would require weeks of work and tons of explosive. Security at the WTC was among the tightest in the US, following a terrorist attack there in 1993. Wouldn’t somebody have noticed men carrying in bags of explosives for days on end or heard the drilling work needed to secure the devices to the steel frames?

Over to Washington DC. Like the WTC, the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked plane… well, no, the 9/11 “Truthers” say. Whereas in NY the dramatic extent of the damage done by the hijacked planes arouses suspicion, in Washington it is the limited extent of the damage done that incurs disbelief. In 2002, French writer Thierry Meyssan published 9/11: The Big Lie, which noted that the hole in the outer wall of the west wing was too small to have been caused by an incoming Boeing 747 and that the interior of the Pentagon was suspiciously undamaged.

Specifically, the holes punched in the interior walls of the Pentagon were 16 feet in diameter, too small to be made by a 757. According to Meyssan, the hole was caused by a cruise missile. (A more realistic weapon, some commentators feel, than the HAARP-like energy beam nominated by Assistant Professor Judy Woods as the doomslayer-of-the-day on 9/11.) Why did the Pentagon fire a missile at itself? Conspiracist Jesse Ventura, sometime wrestler and Minnesota governor, posited on his TV show that the Pentagon was trying to bury