Conspiracy
Was '9/11' a Conspiracy?
People who question the official version of the 9/11/01 attack are reflexively branded by the "opinion leaders" in the media as conspiracy theorists whose ideas are not worthy of discussion. However, the official story is itself a conspiracy theory involving bands of hijackers led by the elusive cave-dwelling Osama bin Laden.
Why do people embrace the official conspiracy theory, despite its many absurdities, while rejecting theories that implicate people who actually possessed the means and motives to commit the crime? Two of the important reasons people are reluctant to consider that the attack was an inside job are:
- People naturally have a strong desire to believe that the people in positions of power over them are benign and protective of their best interests.
- The engineering of the attack by insiders would seem to require a large number of co-conspirators, making their success in avoiding detection unlikely.
The People Problem
At first glance, any alternative suggested by skeptical analysis of the official story would seem to involve an unwieldy wide-ranging conspiracy that would be almost impossible to keep secret. Demolishing buildings in mid-air and much more thoroughly than conventional demolitions, preventing any military interceptions for well over an hour as the crisis unfolded, pulling off an amazing illusion at the Pentagon -- all would seem to require people numbering in the hundreds if not thousands. However, it is possible to imagine ways it could have been accomplished using only a handful of people, perhaps less than thirty. Attack Scenario 404 is a hypothetical scenario than explains the events of 9/11/01 without requiring a large number of insiders.
What do all of the elements of Attack Scenario 404 have in common? They can all be performed using existing electronic infrastructure, such as remote control and computers, or orders passed down through the hierarchical military command structure. In both cases they require that only a very few people be insiders. The insiders use careful planning and exploit existing military infrastructure to carry out the attack, and procedural changes to funnel all interception requests to Donald Rumsfeld, so he can bottle up any response on September 11th.
Countless individuals have worked in the cover-up, but in few cases are they consciously aware of it. Some may have thought they were covering up lesser crimes. For example, those responsible for the destruction of evidence at Ground Zero may have believed they were protecting architects and engineers who designed faulty buildings.
Thus, the exeuction of 9/11 by insiders did not need to involve a great number of people, and certainly not many with broad opeational knowledge. That realization alone deflates one of the most prominent objections to all theories of insider involvement: that whistleblowers would come forward.