Big lies and brave liars

Last weekend marked the third anniversary of that shocking day of death and destruction, September 11, 2001. It was predictable that a whole industry of conspiracy theories would bubble up in the wake of an event of that magnitude. It was also predictable that facts slowly emerging from studious research and the legitimate historical and scholarly speculation they give rise to would be grouped together with the unfounded theories and dismissed along with them. That is unfortunate because there is plenty in the tale of September 11 to interest serious students of current history.

Curiously, just three years after what is undoubtedly the single most shocking event in American history, there was barely a nod of acknowledgement throughout a normally feverishly patriotic media. The mood of the people has decidedly turned off. If that's how fast America has traversed the decades it usually takes to get over these kinds of events, perhaps we aren't so far from the day truth emerges about what actually happened that day, and who actually did the deed.

Though the Bush White House has drawn false connections between September 11 and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction loudly and frequently, no one seems to have noticed the odd parallels that do exist between the two stories.

White House principles demonstrated impressively steely nerves in telling huge lies to fool Congress and American citizens into supporting a potentially disastrous war on Iraq that they knew could risk the whole empire. Recall Donald Rumsfeld chuckling in his falsely exuberant confidence about knowing exactly where each of the non-existent weapons were buried. Recall Colin Powell's straight-faced presentation to the United Nations on the eve of war, detailing photographs of nuclear weapons development sites.

Boy oh boy, can these men tell lies well. Bearing in mind what we know now about the magnitude and implications of the lies they were telling, it's worth reflecting back on their conduct to marvel at just how icy cold they really were.

Yet, while we know now how good they are at telling lies, and while we know now how big these people are capable of thinking when it comes to concocting lies, no one seems willing to go back before Iraq to the event that they themselves keep pointing to as the precursor: September 11. Since there is no longer any argument about whether they are capable of creating and telling very big, significant, and risky lies, it may be fruitful to re-examine what these same people had to say about the September 11 event.

If one is the kind of person capable of both concocting and repeatedly telling lies of the magnitude and significance of those that were told about Iraq, one is certainly capable of concocting and telling lies about something like the attacks of September 11, if one should have any reason to do so.

Compared to the persuasive lies made up about Iraq, the stories these same men have told about September 11 are pathetically lacking in substance and coherence. There may be a few lies to uncover in what they have said about that event.

We have learned from the Congressional inquiry into September 11, for example, that American intelligence agencies were woefully misinformed about the identities and intentions of various active international terrorists. Yet, it took only 24 hours for those same agencies to release to the media names and photographs of all 19 of the hijackers involved in the attack. This very quickly assembled list of names is supposedly so accurate, not one addition, subtraction, or alteration has been necessary after years of ensuing investigations.

Witnesses who met the alleged hijackers, like their flight school instructors, have gone on record insisting they could not fly Cessnas, and could certainly not manage fully fueled passenger jets. Many pilots who have flown those jets for years insist the maneuvers performed during the attacks indicate unknown levels of skill even among veteran fliers of military craft.

Furthermore, it is impossible to imagine one hijacked Cessna could fly straight for twenty minutes over the desert without being intercepted by a military F-16 jet. How likely is it that four hijacked and completely turned around passenger jets could fly for a total of an hour and half over the most populated urban areas on the continent and not draw a single interceptor?

The people who asked us then to believe that this is exactly what was done by exactly those Arab men have since told bigger and more tricky lies. No honest person can therefore any longer maintain confidence that the alleged perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, and the alleged events of that day, are anywhere near the truth.

These suspicions represent only a small fraction of the many blatantly obvious lies and cogency problems within the official version of events surrounding September 11. But there is no point in searching further for reasons why the official story about September 11 ought to be doubted. To participate in debates about whether Bush and company tell the truth about that day is to show far more respect than is deserved for such poor liars telling such simplistically concocted fibs.

What we do know so far

What we do know allows us to at least begin piecing together fragments of the real history. The grounding of all intercepting F-16s that day make it clear there was some degree of American military complicity in the attacks. The record of honour in the American military makes it likely it was not officially endorsed complicity, suggesting that a rogue element within the military played the crucial role. That rogue element, however, is highly placed—no mid-level general could shut down the defence of the whole eastern seaboard.

The creation of a list of names and faces of perpetrators by the FBI within 24 hours of the attacks suggests that the rogue element has high level comrades in that agency as well.

The rapid presentation of extremely complex legislation contained in the USA Patriot Act within mere weeks of the attacks makes clear this legislation was already prepared, and was only waiting for September 11 to happen. This suggests that members of the rogue team played their role from their positions on the political side in Congress and the Senate.

A picture is emerging from these speculations, and it's not an altogether unfamiliar one. What we have witnessed, it seems, is a standard coup d'etat. The plan was put into action on November 7, 2000. On that day, many voters in the closely contested swing state of Florida were illegally or improperly de-listed from voter rolls, polling stations in predominantly Democratic districts were opened late and closed early, ballot reading machines in those districts were sabotaged and failed, and car trunk loads of ballots were destroyed before being counted.

Still, the ballots that were counted, despite all the machinations of the coup plotters, produced an inconclusive result. At the same time, conclusive results everywhere else in the country left the outcome in Florida, with its 25 electoral college votes, the key to the overall outcome for the presidential elections.

Early results of recounts clearly showed Gore would be awarded Florida, and hence the White House. Coup associates on the US Supreme Court illegally intervened in a Florida Supreme Court decision, and called a halt to recounts, essentially awarding Bush the election.

It took only nine months for the coup plotters to move from their illegal seizure of the White House, and more significantly, their seizure of the office of the Commander in Chief of the world's most powerful and far reaching military, to their seizure of the American popular will and imagination with their staging of the spectacular events of September 11.

Is it really so hard to believe?

Anticipating the stunned reaction of the American people and legislators alike, the coup plotters quickly announced foreign wars, pushed through legislation installing police state suppression of dissent, and moved rapidly to the next steps in the coup script. They ensured the USA Patriot Act would pass without debate and without even having been read by any legislators by clearing out the Congressional building with anthrax attacks launched from military bases in the US through the mail system to the offices of the political opposition.

Bush's presidency began with steep declines in the polls and the coup plotters had to have known there would arise a constitutional crisis when the theft of the office of the president was fully realized. A full recount of all ballots conducted by the New York Times and Miami Herald was scheduled for publication on September 12, 2001. That item and related articles—set to dominate the front pages of newspapers across the country—was of course spiked by the dramatic events the day before.

It does sound too incredible to believe when it's put like that: the US government, victim of a violent coup d'etat. But surely Chileans were at first incredulous when they learned that General Pinochet was in fact installed as president by way of a covert US-orchestrated coup in 1973, and surely Iranians were at first surprised to learn it was all a US manufactured plot to overthrow Mossadegh and replace him with The Shah in the coup that occurred there in 1956.

Other examples abound. With so much expertise in the fine art of coup d'etats and suspensions of democratic rule and suppressions of political dissent, it's not at all difficult to imagine some expert Americans could pull a very similar job on the home turf and get away with it. In all their other successful operations, it is the sheer size of the job and the incredulity of the public that they rely upon as their smokescreen.

The local public's incredulity plays the key role in all US-created coups wherever they have occurred. The more audacious and daring the covert plan, the more the public is unlikely to suspect anyone could be capable of it. A big plan leads to lots of crazed conspiracy theories. Widespread dismissal of all genuine historical research as only more conspiracy theories is integral to the cover hiding the plot.

They've done well and plotters of the American coup d'etat should be congratulated for that, for it was, and remains, an extremely audacious plan. It's about to get a whole lot more audacious as the suspension of November elections looms.

****