After thinking about it for a long time, I’ve decided to make two confessions. The people who don’t laugh at me for one will almost certainly laugh at me for the other. The first is that for a while I honestly wondered if 9-11 was an inside job. The second is that I now believe that this hypothesis is extremely unlikely.

To be fair, 9-11 does seem pretty odd, at least at first glance.

For instance, in 2000, a think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) produced a report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The authors argue that America should pursue a much more aggressive foreign policy to preserve an unquestioned and unchallengeable global hegemony. The Bush administration seems to be following the report’s recommendations, which isn’t surprising, as PNAC’s members include Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Strangely enough, the report said that the recommended changes could only be implemented slowly, unless America suffered “a new Pearl Harbor,” a statement that seems suspiciously prescient in the post-9-11 world.

Suspicious yes, but . . .

The events of September 11, 2001 also seem rather suspicious. Why didn’t jets from Andrews Air Force Base intercept the planes? Why did Building Seven collapse even though the planes didn’t hit it? And afterwards, why did the administration stonewall the 9-11 Commission? The list of questions goes on and on.

Those questions have spawned the “9-11 truth movement,” which challenges the official narrative about 9-11, and suggests that it was a massive false flag operation—that is, an American covert operation publicly blamed on foreign terrorists.

The movement’s supporters ask us to think about what it would mean if their claims of a conspiracy were true. This is fair enough, but they rarely ask what it would mean if their claims are wrong. They probably don’t like to think about what the answer would be. If their claims are unfounded, this would mean that a large segment of the Bush administration’s critics, most of them on the left, have wasted a lot of time and energy chasing their own tails instead of really challenging the regime. It would mean that they had severely compromised their own credibility, and, in the eyes of the public, the credibility of the entire anti-war movement for decades to come. It would mean that the 9-11 truth movement has been the anti-war movement’s Trojan Horse.

When we’re walking on fragile ice, we need to tread carefully. Unfortunately, the 9-11 truth movement is stomping with reckless abandon, often making unsubstantiated claims and disregarding evidence that doesn’t fit with its agenda.

Let’s take some of the examples I raised above. The movement often claims that the planes could have been easily intercepted by the combat-ready aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base. This would be true if and only if Andrews was ready to scramble its jets. In a debate with David Ray Griffin on the May 26, 2004 edition of Democracy Now, Chip Berlet argued that a military unit is “combat ready” if it’s prepared to enter combat with 24 to 72 hours notice, rather than at the drop of a hat, and “there is no evidence that there were jet aircraft fueled up, warmed up, ready to go at Andrews with fighter pilots sitting in a ready room ready to take off.”

Building 7 explained

The movement also claims that blasts caused by controlled demolitions are the only way to explain Building 7’s collapse. The leftist news magazine Counterpunch had Manuel Garcia, a physicist and engineer, look into this matter. He concludes that “The blast of hot debris from WTC 1 kindled fires in WTC 7 and caused an emergency power system to feed the burning to the point of building collapse. One of the building’s major bridging supports was heated to the point of exhaustion by the burning of an abundant store of hydrocarbon fuel.” Garcia compared the overall effect to that of an oil well fire beneath a burning bridge.

I could go on, but I think you get my point. These are supposedly two of the most damning pieces of evidence the movement can muster, and they blow apart like dandelion fluff in a strong breeze. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, but so far I haven’t found any argument put forward by the movement that stands up to sustained scrutiny.

The simplist explanation

There’s another reason to be wary of the movement, however. Its positions often violate a principle of critical thinking known as Ockham’s Razor. This principle states that the explanation for any given phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, “shaving off” those assumptions that don’t make any observable difference in the predictions of the hypothesis or theory used to explain the phenomena. In other words, the simplest explanations are usually the best ones, provided they’re comprehensive enough to account for the things they’re trying to explain.

George Monbiot uses Ockham’s Razor to dissect the movement in an article for the February 20, 2007 edition of The Guardian. He argues that to believe the movement’s claims, we’d have to assume that the Bush administration can perform miracles: “It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had plowed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, forever.” Monbiot writes that the movement asks us to “believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible.”

I can easily believe that the gang of war profiteers, ideologues, and criminals in the Bush administration used 9-11 as an excuse to erect a police state and embark on wars of imperial aggression. I have no doubt that if they could significantly advance their goals by staging a false flag operation that would kill 3,000 people on American soil and create massive property damage, they wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Having said this, I don’t believe they can do the impossible. As despicable as they are, they’re neither gods nor demons. They don’t have the superhuman powers necessary to pull this off. If they had these powers, they wouldn’t have failed so often at so many other things. Their repeated blunders show that they’re as fallible as we are.

Sometimes, you can step through a looking glass into an inverted world. Other times, you just get a bloody nose and a broken mirror. Perhaps the conspiratorial world the 9-11 truth movement is gazing upon is only the shattered reflection of its own lacerated face.