There are really two parts to September 11 conspiracy theories. The most common line is that the conspiracies were designed to “frame” Saddam, Osama — whoever you want — just fill in the blanks. But the less common approach is that the conspiracies were meant to deflect. Doors to certain areas were opened so that other doors would remain closed. Doors leading to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Islam, certain officials, Food for Oil, etc. Again, you can fill in the blanks. There was a report from a Japanese news agency right after the attacks that GWB had considered and rejected an unspecified “nuclear option”.
On general principles, this is what I think. Nobody “knew” anything for a fact on September 12, 2001, but a lot of people knew enough to realize they might be potentially implicated, intentionally or unintentionally, whether or not they were part of the chain of causality. Someone had to be responsible for the attack. The hammer had to come down on somebody. The only question in the days afterward was who.
In a sense the exact provenance of the actual attack was less important than the strategic and bureaucratic opportunities it provided. ‘Whoever did it, this is what we should do’. If you knew the AQ had an anthrax program, you wouldn’t wait to prove it in court, like some liberals wanted. Here was a chance to get an execute order signed. Served the b******s right anyway, or so you could argue.
I despair, really, of ever knowing what happened in the week after September 11. The lengths to which people would go to alter or expunge the record were illustrated by Sandy Berger stuffing his underwear with documents. And I’m fairly sure Sandy Berger was not alone. Who else jammed documents into his shorts? Fill in the blanks here too. Whatever historians find will be what has been left to be found. About the only thing we can really hang on to in the end was whether the subsequent response made strategic sense.
Personally the really lasting things that came out September 11 whose apparent truth endures and even grows with the passage of time was that a) a Jihad was brewing against the West; b) making deals with dictators didn’t work any more. If there was an unambiguous conspiracy, it was the concealment of those two facts that lie at its core. Who mailed the anthrax letters? Is Osama bin Laden still alive? They are important questions, but secondary questions.
