Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (43 page)

Inevitably, the London bombs that killed fifty-six people on July 7, 2005, gave rise to a whole raft of speculation about government involvement, and in 2006, two British versions of
Loose Change
appeared on the Net. One was called
Ludicrous Diversion,
and the other (after a public service announcement made at certain London Underground stations)
Mind the Gap.
David Shayler was the author of the second, arguing in it that the 7/7 bombings were probably a false-flag operation designed to instill a false fear of terrorism into the British people and permit the government to do whatever nefarious thing it had on its collective mind at the time.
Mind the Gap
came complete with supposed warnings to Israelis, disturbing questions about evidence and photographs, and CCTV shots allegedly so badly forged that they were evidence of elements in the new world order wanting to reveal themselves, saying, “Look, we’re sick of lying. We’ve had enough.”
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The aftermath of the bomb blasts didn’t look like the product of peroxide bombs to Shayler, who as a deskbound operative for MI5 would, one must imagine, have seen very few peroxide bombs exploding. What was more, the so-called bombers were nice boys who liked cricket, and the train timetables for the jihadists to arrive in London were all wrong.

One piece of evidence, a potential magic bullet, was accepted by all the 7/7 conspiracists, and this was the impossible locations of the blasts. The official version was that the lethal explosives had been carried in back-packs by the bombers, who set them off on three trains and a bus, killing themselves and the people around them. But if the bombs could be shown to have detonated somewhere else—underneath the trains, for example—then they couldn’t have been associated with the so-called terrorists. This, stated the theorists, was exactly what eyewitnesses had claimed to see happen when the bombs exploded. Ultimately, all such reports could be traced to one source—
Guardian
journalist Mark Honigsbaum. In June 2006, Honigsbaum gave an account of how the idea of the blast from below had come into existence. On July 7, he had been sent by his news desk to Edgware Road, the site of one of the explosions, where among scenes of complete confusion he had managed to grab quick interviews with some of the survivors as they left a makeshift triage center in a local store.

Two of them told Honigsbaum that when the bomb exploded, the covering on the floor of the carriage had “raised up.” With no time to check what the passengers had said, Honigsbaum phoned in an audio report to the
Guardian
, which was used on its website. It was Honigsbaum who added the elaboration that it “was believed” that the explosion had happened underneath the train, and “some passengers described how the tiles, the covers on the floors of the train, flew up, raised up.” After filing, Honigsbaum spoke at greater length to more survivors who had been much closer to the blast, and they told him that the explosion had happened inside the carriage. His earlier report, admitted Honigsbaum, had been “flawed,” but unfortunately “my comments, disseminated over the Internet where they could be replayed ad nauseam, were already taking on a life of their own.” Ruefully, the reporter concluded that in the old days of telephones and books it would have taken some time for Rumor to paint itself full of tongues, but today “such networks can be created instantaneously with a few clicks of a mouse.”
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In Defense of Extreme Improbability

It is a contention of this book that conspiracy theorists fail to apply the principle of Occam’s razor to their arguments. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the attempts by Dr. David Ray Griffin to justify the wild improbability of the alternatives to the generally accepted story of 9/11. He constructed three lines of defense. The first was that the conspiracy theories, no matter how far-fetched, might be found to be quite believable, if properly tested. “The questions they [conspiracy theorists] have raised about the official account,” he wrote, “are based on conflicts between this account and known facts, whereas the questions just now raised about complicity theory [the theory that the government was complicit] are rhetorical questions, implying that no answers could be given to any of them. But perhaps answers CAN be given at least to some of them.” For example, hazarded Griffin, on the problem of why none of the thousands of conspirators had spoken out, “the revisionists could reply, people raising this question have probably never experienced the kind of intimidation that can be brought to bear on individuals by threats of prosecution, or worse.”
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Here, of course, he was entering that inevitable circular plea of conspiracism, that the objections to the theory tended, if anything, to prove the theory right. The very fact that no one had talked could almost be seen as evidence of the sheer ruthlessness of the plotters.

Griffin’s second defense—linked to the first—was that the arguments of 9/11 Truth activists somehow belonged in a different ontological category from those of their critics. Challenged on radio by a left-wing American conspiracy skeptic, Griffin reasoned, “What I have presented is a cumulative argument which relies on a massive amount of evidence that I do take to be prima facie reliable . . . If you’re presenting a deductive argument, that’s when we say that no chain is stronger than its weakest link, then it is important to point out if there are a couple premises of the argument that are at fault, then the whole thing falls. But with the cumulative argument that isn’t the case.”
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As we’ve seen, Griffin’s evidence was far from reliable to say the least, but even so, for his argument to fail one would have to refute specifically almost every single element of it. This supposed separation between deductive and cumulative arguments is reminiscent of the
Holy Blood
authors’ scholarship of synthesis, which explicitly didn’t require the old, more academic way of looking at evidence but a new willingness to make impossible connections between disparate phenomena. Both have the same quality—the need for a leap of faith.

Griffin’s third defense was, in essence, if you think my theory is silly then take a look at your own. If there was a choice between the received conspiracy theory (Osama did it) or the revisionist conspiracy theory (Bush did it), was the latter really more unbelievable than the former? Was it not deeply unlikely that a man in a cave together with a few mad Arabs could pull off something so truly devastating? This unlikelihood, suggested Griffin, dwarfed all the other unlikelihoods.

It is certainly true that the 9/11 plotters, if we believe them to have been al-Qaeda members, carried out an audacious and imaginative plot, in the execution of which they enjoyed very little bad luck, and before which they went about their business relatively free of harassment by the authorities. It was, if you accept the evidence, something of a judo throw in which the opponent’s very weight was used against him.

There was, however, one other obvious factor that Griffin might have considered when seeking to compare unlikelihoods. Most people, even ones we think of as bad, do what they think and profess to be good, or else invent excuses as to why they can’t. Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri said several times that their organization was behind 9/11. Their particular ideology justified such attacks, and saw them as both laudable and central to Islamist strategy. What’s more, jihadis operating as part of bin Laden’s group had already exploded huge bombs at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, attacked a U.S. destroyer in Yemen and Israeli holidaymakers in Mombasa, and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner. In 1993, Islamists later associated with bin Laden had also exploded a huge bomb under the World Trade Center itself, with the objective of destroying the buildings. So bin Laden’s responsibility for 9/11, if proved, would make him exactly what he wanted to be, a hero of the Islamic resistance to American /Zionist/Crusader imperialism, and every jihadi would have understood that. By contrast, if it were to have been established that President Bush had been in some way involved, then he would become the greatest traitor and liar in American history, a kind of super Benedict Arnold. We may guess that every Bush-ite collaborator would have known this too.

Cui bono?

This kind of tangle occurs through the conspiracy theorist’s use of the
cui bono?
(who benefits?) question to establish motive. If you can make a case that X, in some way and at some time, derived some benefit out of an event, no matter how much X may have declared their opposition to it, then you are justified in asking whether X might not have been in some way involved. That’s the way the planets move, the way the world is. David Ray Griffin provides a classic example of
Cui bono?
when he quotes in his book someone named Patrick Martin. “The principal beneficiaries of the destruction of the World Trade Center,” Martin argues, “are in the United States: the Bush administration, the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the weapons industry, the oil industry. It is reasonable to ask whether those who have profited to such an extent from this tragedy contributed to bring it about.”
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Readers will note the yoking of a highly questionable assertion made as obvious fact to the professed mildness of the conclusion. It is not at all clear, for example, that the CIA and the FBI, charged above all with protecting the United States, would have expected to benefit from allowing the worst terrorist attack in world history to take place on U.S. soil. Describing them as among the “principal beneficiaries” of such an atrocity must therefore be regarded as eccentric, and to use the idea of benefit to ask the question whether they “contributed to bring it about” seems not to be the act of any reasonable seeker after truth, but rather of someone who has already decided where the truth lies.

An agreeably simple and often quoted
cui bono?
sentiment was formulated by the late George Seldes, an American muckraking journalist. “If you look for the social-economic motive,” Seldes wrote, “you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth.” The problem with this seductive proposition is that it is hopelessly reductionist, completely failing to appreciate that people act from many other motives. It rejects the accidental, the complex, the unforeseen or the ideological, substituting an unpredictable economic outcome as the test of a subjective intention.

So, who plotted the First World War? Not those people who danced in the streets in Vienna, London, Berlin, and Paris in August 1914; they couldn’t benefit because they weren’t rich and were too likely to suffer in one way or another. Not the German kaiser, the Russian tsar, or the Austro-Hungarian emperor, because they all lost their thrones in the end.

Not the American administration, because it obviously entered the war too late and too reluctantly to be considered a prime mover. But who emerged, secretly smiling, from the hecatomb? The armaments manufacturers, the war profiteers, and, behind them, the bankers. And, for those inclined to ask the extra question, what religion did many of the bankers profess?

That is where over-schematizing gets you. A further problem with the
cui bono?
line is that it assumes the supposed protagonist knows at the outset what is going to happen. In other words, it falls prey to the historian’s fallacy.

The Historian’s Fallacy

The term “historian’s fallacy” was coined in 1970 by the scholar David Hackett Fischer to describe the “ludicrous” but common error in the assumption “that a man who has a given historical experience knows it, when he has it, to be all that a historian would know it to be, with the advantage of historical perspective.” Fischer is not talking about what we call the benefit of hindsight, but about the tendency to forget that the actors in a historical drama simply did not know, at the time, what was coming next. Subsequent to an event, we may recall the clues and warnings that it was about to happen, but, warns Fischer, “our memory does not extend with equal clarity to many other signs and signals which pointed unequivocally in the other direction.”
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You can apply Fischer’s insight both to specific charges and to the bigger picture of the 9/11 attacks. In one very clear example, David Ray Griffin took the North American Aerospace Defense Command to task for its suspicious tardiness. He demanded to know “why, if NORAD had been told at 9:24 [a.m.] that Flight 77 appeared to be headed back toward Washington, the Pentagon was not evacuated. In 13 minutes, it seems, virtually everyone could have gotten out. The strike would not have caused the death of 125 people working in the Pentagon.”
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Griffin knew, as did we all, that Flight 77 was supposed to have struck the Pentagon. That’s because we saw the damage to the Pentagon and were told a plane had flown into it. But thirteen minutes earlier, the Pentagon was not the only target that Flight 77 could have been heading for. It could just as easily have been bound for the Capitol or the White House or the CIA headquarters at Langley, or have been a hijacking aimed at securing the release of prisoners. Griffin never suggests that all of these other places should also have been evacuated or other possibilities entertained, because he assumes a prior knowledge of the target.

On a more general level, the picture painted by the commission of inquiry into 9/11 was one of an Establishment taken utterly by surprise by the events of September 11—events that, from the time Flight 11 was seen to crash into the WTC to the confirmation by Pennsylvania police of the destruction of Flight 93, lasted only 123 minutes. In the form it took, the attack was neither expected nor predicted; once it was under way, it took some time to realize what was going on, and no one knew what might happen next. For example, at 1:44 p.m. on 9/11 the Pentagon announced that a task force of two aircraft carriers and five other warships would sail from the U.S. naval station in Norfolk, Virginia, both to protect the East Coast from further danger and to reduce the number of ships sitting in port and therefore vulnerable to attack. It was quite possible to imagine then that the WTC and Pentagon attacks might be supplemented by hijacked transatlantic flights only now arriving at the coast. In the skies over the eastern United States, with the planes’ transponders turned off by the hijackers, the signals from the individual hijacked flights had melted into the usual swarm of radar spots. We might also mention the understandable unwillingness of the authorities to send fighters into the sky with instructions to shoot down any passenger airliner that seemed to fit an offending profile.