It's never dudes in a room
Conspiracy as fantasy of competence
CIA Director: What do you think of her?
CIA underling: I think she’s smart.
CIA Director: —We’re all smart, Jeremy.
from Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
That “Never Forget” became the de facto national slogan of 9/11 now strikes me as insane. Anyone in this country who was old enough to watch television in 2001 is incapable of forgetting. If we’d forgotten 9/11, maybe we would’ve forgotten to invade Afghanistan.
Alas, hindsight is 2020.
(This week there was a pickup truck parked on 48th street with a commemorative 9/11 license-plate frame. The actual license plate read NVRFRGV. Never forgive! So much for the Judeo-Christian tradition!)
I first heard 9/11 jokes in college. Knock knock. Who’s there? 9/11. 9/11 who?
—You said you’d never forget!
The problem with telling that joke at parties is not the one you would expect. The problem is that, by approaching the topic sideways, the joke attracts people’s unorthodox beliefs about 9/11.
And christ jesus, do people harbor unorthodox beliefs about 9/11.
Perhaps you are one of those people!
Here’s the thing. Governments lie. Power corrupts. Gulf of Tonkin, yellowcake uranium, FIFA. Skepticism of received knowledge is indispensable. And! The lure of ostensible secrecy, the promise of hidden information, is irresistible. Seductive, even. Pointing out that a particular narrative is convenient for (invariably vaguely defined) Powerful People has the shape of persuasiveness—but sometimes lacks its content.
All conspiracy theories share the same insane premise: that groups of people achieve shared goals on purpose. Think about that for a second. Have you ever had a job? Conspiracy theories are implausible not only for their implication of supernatural discretion on the part of the conspirators—they’re implausible because they pretend people know what’s good for them. The greatest lie the CIA ever told was not one of their (many) bullshit denials of (many, many) evil deeds: it was the idea that they’re good at their jobs.
The truly convenient narrative is not a story of magic secret supervillains. It’s the hope that someone, somewhere, knows what they’re doing.
I suspect 9/11 has attracted so many conspiracy theories because the plain truth is hard to swallow: we got our asses handed to us. The claim that our own government orchestrated 9/11 is untrue in its popular form—that George Bush, or whoever, knocked down the Towers. For some reason. Ennui, perhaps.
Definitely Bush, and not the guys who had been loudly wanting to Do Terrorism at us for decades, and who by 2001 had long since graduated to actually Doing Terrorism at us, including attacking the literal Twin Towers in 1993.
Meanwhile, the claim that our own government orchestrated 9/11 rather by accident and negligence is close to indisputable. Whose idea was it to give Islamic militias as much destructive power as possible? Ours, in the 1980s, in order that the USSR might lose its war in Afghanistan. Remarkably, it worked. Until it didn’t. (That part is 9/11, btw.)
Despite general institutional sclerosis at the end of the 90s, some people in the CIA and FBI knew that al Qaeda was planning a large-scale attack. But having a good idea and getting your boss to listen to you are two different things; getting your boss to act on it is yet another; and your boss getting their boss to stick out their neck is yet another. This is also effectively the plot of Zero Dark Thirty, transposed to the post-attack search for bin Laden.
Don’t get me wrong—powerful people do fucked-up shit every day. But no one is immune to office politics. Least of all actual politicians.
Let me stress. None of this is new. The claim that Jesus had no dad feels dubious, but it’s historically clear that there really was a dude named Jesus—which to me is never clearer than in accounts of infighting among his apostles.
Bonus literary example: though the Iliad is about the Trojan War, the Trojan Horse does not appear in the poem. The Iliad is—and this is true—largely about Achilles refusing to do his job because he feels disrespected by his manager.
The stated intention of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber—nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM—was to remove U.S. military bases from Saudi Arabia and stop U.S. support for Israel. In this, and in attempting to destroy the Towers, he failed.
Why did bin Laden and KSM do what they did? Their stated intention… was to remove U.S. military bases from Saudi Arabia… and stop U.S. support for Israel. The Towers fell. And they still failed.
Achieving shared goals on purpose is extremely difficult in practice—even for two of the most bizarrely successful conspirators in the history of the world.
No matter who you think your enemies are, I promise: they aren’t as powerful as they appear.
“Hope you had a great 9/11 this year” is definitely the wrong way to end this post, right?
Is “It’s 9/11 somewhere” better?
Excellent.