Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (38 page)

The Power of Conspiracy

The Internet has created shadow armies whose size and power are unknowable. Cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally self-invented individuals have grown up, some of them permitting contact between people who in previous times might have thought each other’s interests impossibly exotic or even mad. At the same time, the democratic quality of the Net has permitted the release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd. But increasingly, material originating on the Net has turned up in popular culture—a millennial version of the word-of-mouth route to popularity. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has, at the time of writing, become a first resource for many students, despite the amusing randomness of its reliability.

Around the time of the Friends House meeting, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of English-language websites were springing up specifically devoted to proselytizing for the 9/11 Truth movement. In addition, many “independent” or “alternative” media sites routinely replicated 9/11 conspiracy material uncritically, and many of these sites linked to or cited each other. And then there were the thousands of bloggers who had 9/11 conspiracy constructions as part of their individual cyber-
Weltanschauungen
. How many individuals were represented by these sites, contributed to them, or, indeed, read them was conjectural in the absence of any substantial study. What was obvious, however, was that sites endorsing 9/11 conspiracy theories, and those subscribing to them in passing, far outnumbered sites devoted to debunking or refuting such theories.

The Internet has also allowed the construction and circulation of audio and visual material devoted to 9/11 revisionism. Cheap movies, often made using material not cleared for copyright, made and narrated by nonprofessional filmmakers, have been posted on Google video, YouTube, and other sites specializing in moving pictures. Invariably, such items make the same claims to accuracy and balance as do mainstream TV programs, but have been concocted with the smallest fraction of research and resource, though no little ingenuity.

The collision of new media with the 9/11 movement created new, young celebrities. In 2005, a video coproduced by three friends in upstate New York became one of the most popular items on the Web. Dylan Avery had begun “researching” 9/11 at the age of eighteen. “I found an article [on the Internet] on the World Trade Center,” he told
Vanity Fair
magazine. “Someone had posted a picture of a controlled demolition and then a picture of the World Trade Center collapsing. And I was like, wow, OK. And then you find one article and that article links to ten others, and before you know it you’re up until six in the morning. It’s crazy, the information takes over.”
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Avery’s Net-inspired film ran eighty minutes, was made in contemporary pop-video style with quick edits and short interviews, and was boosted by a lively soundtrack contributed by his friends.
Loose Change
claimed to be an examination of the WTC and Pentagon attacks in the light of the official investigation by the 9/11 Commission, and over the course of a year competed with some of the Web’s most celebrated videos—the comedian who was rude to the president, the chubby teenager singing along to a Romanian pop tune. By May of 2006,
Loose Change
had, in part or in its entirety, been viewed some ten million times. “We beat the woman getting punched in the face,” Avery told
Vanity Fair
. “We beat the guy who beats his computer with his keyboard,” added his coproducer. “The viral videos,” said his researcher, “we dominate them.”
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Radio coverage of their film soon meant Avery and team being invited to address college meetings all over America. Their objective in spreading the 9/11 word, they claimed, was just to get the truth out there, and certainly they seemed to have no discernible political ideology aside from a pleasure in making waves. Avery gleefully predicted a second American Revolution when people fully understood it was the U.S. government itself that had brought down the Twin Towers. “The shit is gonna hit the fan. People are going to be upset. You can’t stop it. People say, Aw, we need a peaceful revolution. We need to peacefully change things. Trust me, that’s a great idea—I’m all for it. But Americans are violent, especially when they’ve been lied to, especially over something like this . . . So many people have just got—fucked. It’s the only way to put it.”
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And a lot of people were indeed getting upset, or at least preparing to be upset. In 2003, a third of young Germans, for instance, were of the view that the attack was an inside job. In August 2004, a poll conducted by the Zogby opinion research company found nearly two-thirds of New Yorkers under thirty agreeing with the proposition that the administration “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.” Two years later, another Zogby poll found 42 percent of all Americans believing that there had been some kind of cover-up and that the authorities, both the government and the 9/11 Commission, had “concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks.” A Scripps Howard poll of July 2006 (which measured belief in a Kennedy conspiracy at 40 percent) had 36 percent of respondents suspecting government participation of some kind in the attacks, with just over one in six believing that explosives had been used to bring down the Twin Towers. These beliefs were particularly prevalent among younger respondents, Democrat voters, the less educated, and racial and ethnic minorities.
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Little by little, the idea of a 9/11 conspiracy leached into the mainstream. In March 2006, Charlie Sheen became the first Hollywood star to declare himself a supporter of the Truth movement. His doubts, he told a radio host, had begun on the day of the attacks, watching coverage of the planes flying into the World Trade Center. “It just didn’t look like any commercial jetliner I’ve flown on any time in my life and then when the buildings came down later on that day I said to my brother, ‘Call me insane, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?’ ”
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In September 2006, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the cult film director David Lynch, when asked about
Loose Change
in an interview on Dutch television, said that it wasn’t necessary to believe everything in Avery’s documentary to still have significant doubts about the generally accepted (or official) version of events. “You look back,” said Lynch, “and you remember what you saw, and what you were told, and now, you have questions.”
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That same week, James Brolin, the actor husband of Hollywood and music legend Barbra Streisand, interviewed on the ABC show
The View
, had urged the program’s audience to look at a 9/11 Truth website.

“Mobile Phones Don’t Work from Altitude, Simple as That”

It was early 2006, and I was writing a piece in Florida, and I found myself, along with others, having a salad lunch with Bob, a very young-looking sixty-year-old who had made his money in property and retired early. When the subject of 9/11 came up, Bob was all over it like a lurching puppy. He was certain that 9/11 was a conspiracy by the government, and what made him certain, the magic bullet, were the mobile phone calls from the flights. It was scientifically impossible, said Bob, for a mobile phone call to be made from an airplane once it was in the sky. There had been studies; there was a report by a leading professor; there had been attempts to replicate the circumstances of mobile calls; and all had concluded that it couldn’t be done.

The 9/11 Commission report (the official “official” version) contained details of a number of calls made between passengers and crew on the hijacked planes and people on the ground. The accounts given in these calls were critical in determining the means by which the hijackers had taken over the planes and in suggesting what weapons they had used or had access to. They included a call made by Peter Burton Hanson to his father, Lee, in Connecticut from United Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles at 8:52 a.m. Hanson told his father that hijackers might have taken over the cockpit, adding, “An attendant has been stabbed, and someone else up front may have been killed.” Seven minutes later, on the same flight, a male attendant spoke to the United Airlines office in San Francisco and said that the plane had been hijacked, another attendant had been stabbed and both pilots killed, and that he thought the hijackers were flying the plane. At 8:59 a.m., Brian Sweeney called his mother, Louise Sweeney, and said that the passengers were thinking of storming the cockpit. A minute later, Lee Hanson got another call from his son: “It’s getting bad, Dad. A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace. They said they have a bomb. The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down. Don’t worry, Dad, if it happens, it’ll be very fast. My God, my God.” At 9:03 a.m., the Commission reported, both Lee Hanson and Louise Sweeney saw on their TVs an aircraft slam into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. It was carrying their children.

Or so the world believed—as it believed that Betty Ong, flight attendant on AA11, the plane that hit the North Tower, called American Airlines and was speaking to a supervisor in Reservations, Lydia Gonzalez, as the aircraft headed across the water toward lower Manhattan. On the same flight was attendant Madeline Sweeney, whose last words to colleagues on the ground were: “I see the water. I see the building. I see buildings . . . Oh my God!” Most famous were the calls made by the dozen passengers and crew from Flight 93, who spoke to relatives, colleagues, and emergency services. From these conversations, it was concluded that they had rushed the cockpit.

Naturally, when Bob told us around that Miami table that all these calls were impossible, we were in no position to contradict him. I had certainly never tried to make a call on my mobile from altitude, nor had the other three at lunch that day. It’s probable that Bob’s information originated in a “study” carried out by Professor A. K. Dewdney of the University of Western Ontario in Canada, a longtime contributor to
Scientific American
magazine. This exercise consisted of him boarding planes and making a large number of calls at various altitudes, from which he concluded that mobile phones were altogether useless at altitudes above eight thousand feet and pretty much useless below that level.

If this were true, then how might one account for the parents who say they spoke to their children, the ground staff who were audio witnesses to their colleagues’ last moments, or the widely available recording of Betty Ong’s dialogue with Lydia Gonzalez? They would have to have been manufactured, as charged by Dylan Avery in
Loose Change
. “For starters,” he argued, “the calls themselves are extremely peculiar. Most of them are only a couple of sentences long, before the callers end the conversation, only to call back later.” Betty Ong did not sound to him like a woman on a hijacked plane who had just witnessed several murders should sound. “Why is nobody in the background screaming?” he demanded. As to Madeline Sweeney’s call, Avery was contemptuous. “ ‘I see buildings. Water. Oh my God!’ Madeline was a flight attendant out of Boston for twelve years. I think she would have recognized Manhattan. The cell phone calls were fake. No question about it.”
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One fairly obvious problem with judging the provenance of the calls is that many of them seem to have been made through the Airfone service but were reported, usually in the early days after 9/11, as having been cell phone calls. Reporters may not have been aware of the difference, and those receiving the calls were hardly likely to have made the distinction. Even so, mobile use at altitude is, in fact, possible. According to Marco Thompson, president of the San Diego Telecom Council, if a plane is slow and flying over a city, mobiles in it will work to an altitude of around ten thousand feet. Even at thirty thousand feet, a cell phone “may work momentarily while near a cell site, but it’s chancy and the connection won’t last.”
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Other mobile service providers concur with Thompson.

Anecdotally, there are plenty of examples of people who have successfully used their mobiles on planes, or who have witnessed other people doing so. But at least as relevant is a piece of research carried out in 2004, into the possible dangers of the use of mobiles and other emitting electronic devices on aircraft. On the incidence of use, the authors revealed, “Our research shows clearly that, in violation of FCC and FAA rules, calls are regularly made from commercial aircraft. Results from our analysis imply that calls from on board scheduled commercial aircraft in the eastern United States occur at a rate of one to four per flight.” The research, using specialized equipment, was carried out by Bill Strauss, an expert in aircraft electromagnetic compatibility; M. Granger Morgan, head of Carnegie Mellon’s department of engineering and public policy and a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering; Jay Apt, professor in the department of engineering and public policy; and Daniel D. Stancil, professor in Carnegie Mellon’s department of electrical and computer engineering.
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Bob’s likely source, Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, is, by contrast, not an engineer or an expert in electronics; he describes himself as “a mathematician, environmental scientist, and author of books on diverse subjects,” though he was the coordinator of a group calling itself the Scientific Panel Investigating Nine-Eleven.