Alexander Cockburn and the Politics of 9/11

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Alexander Cockburn and the Politics of 9/11

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December 12, 2006 -- Now that we’ve reached the
point where even the New York Times has stopped blaming the war in Iraq
on al-Qaeda, it’s probably safe to say that as long as the information
about 9/11 remains on the internet, there are going to be fewer and
fewer people believing in the “official story.” There are
some reactionary types who have taken it upon themselves to champion
the government’s cause, but in general I think it would be extremely
difficult for people from both sides of the political fence to watch
a movie like 9/11 Press for Truth and not come away feeling that there
is something seriously amiss about the way 9/11 has been represented
to the American public. Which means the problem now is no longer convincing
people that there are anomalies in the official story, but of trying
to keep everyone who feels that there’s been something incredibly
weird and insane about the structure of reality in America over the
last six years on the same page.

Because right now, very few of us are on the same page. Instead where
we are is on a kind of continuum. It begins with people like the editors
of the New York Times who while they might not question the official
story of 9/11 no longer believe that the government’s propaganda
is an accurate reflection of reality and who now realize that if you’re
really intent on solving the cultural division between east and west,
talking about the “ideological struggle of centuries” is
probably not the best way of going about it.

Next on the continuum we get into the region of 9/11 questioning proper,
but of a quiet sort that tends to get drowned out by the more rambunctious
parts of the continuum. This is the region of 9/11 Press for Truth,
the Jersey widows, Paul Thompson, FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, people
who because of their special insight realize that there’s something
wrong with the official story and that the 9/11 Commission was a joke,
but who are hesitant to leap to any conclusions.

Smack dab in the middle of the continuum is the region of Loose Change,
of Alex Jones, of government complicity and controlled demolitions and
explosions in the towers, of the 9/11 Scholars and the work of BYU physicist
Steven Jones, all of whom are pretty much responsible for that fact
that any of us found out about this issue in the first place.

And a little farther out on the continuum, probably because it isn’t
addressed by Jones in his paper, is the claim that a missile, not a
Boeing 757, hit the Pentagon. And it’s around this point too that
you begin to realize there is dissension among the ranks of the scholars
themselves, and that there’s this big debate going on between
the controlled demolition folks and a smaller contingent of scholars
who assert that actually, there were no planes, and the towers were
brought down by a sort of death ray beam that shot out of WTC7.

And from here we can use the no planes/death ray beam theory as a kind
of wormhole into the icy, nebular reaches of the continuum’s far
end, where we encounter people like David Icke, who argues that actually
everybody’s got it wrong and the real conspiracy behind 9/11 is
a race of supremely powerful reptilian humanoids that includes Queen
Elizabeth II, George W. Bush, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.

At the heart of all of this speculating lies a political lesson that
certain people on the left need badly to get through their heads, which
is that the kind of organized lying practiced by the Bush administration
over the last six years does not belong to the normal order of politics
and that the whole “for or against us” attitude is a moral
aberration that only enters the historical scene during periods of corruption
and political bankruptcy. Lying of this nature isn’t some temporary
expedient, like military deception. It’s an absolutely integral
part of the exaggerated, conspiratorial world the Bush administration
has managed to impose on the rest of us, and without it, the whole thing
would come crashing down like a house of cards. Which is why, contrary
to Nancy Pelosi’s expectations, Bush is not going to suddenly
start “acting rationally” or “behaving normally”
now that the Democrats have taken Congress. Not because he’s a
bad person – what we’re dealing with here totally transcends
issues of individual character: I still think, despite everything that
has happened over the last six years, that Bush would probably be an
okay guy to have a beer with – but because he’s harnessed
himself to a lying organizational structure without which he would be
a man just like any other man, and not the extraordinary figure all
of his lying has convinced him (falsely) that he is.

It’s the structure that needs to be gotten rid of, because its
existence poses a very real and very dangerous threat to a free society.
Its authority stems from one thing and one thing only: secrecy, which
is why something like the following ought to be nailed to the wall of
every newsroom in the country:

The only reason all these conspiracy theories are happening in the
first place is because the Bush administration has been the most secretive
administration in U.S. history, and so it seems like the right and honorable
thing for congressmen and journalists alike to do is not to blame the
people who are doing the theorizing, who after all, are just ordinary
people relishing the joy of having their eyes and ears returned to them
after six long years of government propaganda, but instead to demand
that steps be taken to force the Bush administration to stop being the
most secretive administration in U.S. history, a good example of which
would be getting the government to declassify important materials that
would help the public understand what happened on 9/11, which, it just
so happens, is also the date when the Bush administration began being
the most secretive administration in U.S. history.

Because so far, there have been a lot of journalists taking potshots
at the wrong people. Like Alexander Cockburn for instance, who just
last week published yet another one of his extremely counterproductive
articles denouncing the 9/11 conspiracy theorists as a bunch of loons.
Counterproductive not only because these articles of his smack of an
ugly kind of intellectual elitism, the whole “I’m so smart
because I can quote Adorno to disprove the theories of a bunch of people
who believe the World Trade Center was brought down by death beams from
space” attitude, and not only because the huge amount of time
he’s spent picking apart the arguments of the Loose Change crowd
could have been spent picking on people his own size, like members of
the federal government, but because every time he comes out with one
of these articles, in which he tries to crush the middle to far end
of the continuum, he ends up steam rolling over and inadvertently discrediting
the closer, quieter side of the continuum, which is composed mainly
of people who have a problem with the way the government is handling
terrorism.

It angers them, and it angers me too (for the simple reason that I
don’t want any of my family or friends dying in another horrible,
catastrophic event like 9/11), that not only have the Democrats failed
to enact the very few recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that did
make sense, but that according to Jersey widow Lorie van Auken (who,
if you’ll remember, was one of the people responsible for bringing
us the 9/11 Commission in the first place) the 9/11 Commission itself
was a total whitewash that failed to answer 70% of the families’
questions.

Now, if Congress only knows 30% of what happened on 9/11, we are in
sorry, sorry shape to prevent another attack. So it seems reasonable
to demand another investigation, so that we can know 100% of what happened
on 9/11, and get the government to do whatever it needs to do to ensure
that an attack like 9/11 never happens again. And I’m sure that
if Alexander Cockburn would pause and look at it from this perspective
for a few moments, he would agree.

Because otherwise the debate seems to be less between conspiracy theorists
and official story advocates than between people who care about protecting
the country from terrorism and people who don’t, a point that
becomes all the more significant when you recall that the perpetrators
of 9/11 are still at large. A convenient thing for the U.S. government
has always been that according to the official story nineteen of the
twenty criminals got gobbled up in the crime, which meant that what
remained to be dealt with was a single quantifiable individual –
bin Laden – and a diffuse unquantifiable mass – al-Qaeda
– the second of which could then be extended by a sort of imaginary
osmosis to people who had nothing to do with the attacks at all. Like
the people of Iraq, for instance, 650,000 of whom we’ve murdered
by now.

Ignored was what Bush always ignores: what the experts had to say.
According to the biographical description on the back of his book Osama
bin Laden: the Man Who Declared War on America, Yossef Bodansky is an
internationally renowned military and threat analyst, who serves as
the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare. A former senior consultant to the U.S. Departments of Defense
and State, he is the author of eight books on international terrorism
and global crises and has been studying Osama bin Laden since 1981.
Here are his words, published two years before the 9/11 attacks:

Ultimately the quintessence of bin Laden’s threat is his being
a cog, albeit an important one in a large system that will outlast his
demise – state-sponsored international terrorism…Islamist
international terrorism, perpetrated by deniable all-Islamic fronts
such as bin Laden’s and made up of individuals genuinely convinced
of the righteousness of their cause and methods, enables the sponsoring
states to escalate their struggle against the West at a relatively low
level of risk…Both regional and international terrorism can be
used by a relentless and unscrupulous government to further strategic
objectives, as Pakistan has proven with its war by proxy against India
waged in Kashmir, and Iran has proven with its campaign of pressure
and coercion against the Persian Gulf States. [Emphasis mine]

Now, when it comes to knowing what went down on 9/11, I think it’s
wiser to trust a guy like Yossef Bodansky than the guys over at the
ScrewLooseChange blog, not only because Yossef Bodansky has, in his
own words, “been studying terrorism and subversion, particularly
around the hub of Islam, for more than a quarter of a century now,”
but because what he has to say accords with what we already know about
9/11. We know, for instance, that several U.S. intelligence officers
told Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine just after 9/11 that Osama
bin Laden couldn’t have pulled off the attacks on his own:

In interviews over the past two weeks, a number of intelligence officials
have raised questions about Osama bin Laden's capabilities. "This
guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?"
one C.I.A. official asked. "It's so huge. He couldn't have done
it alone." A senior military officer told me that because of the
visas and other documentation needed to infiltrate team members into
the United States a major foreign intelligence service might also have
been involved. "To get somebody to fly an airplane—to kill
himself," the official added, further suggests that "somebody
paid his family a hell of a lot of money."

We know that Senator Bob Graham (FL) has stated publicly that there
is “very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists
were assisted not just in financing – although that was part of
it – by a sovereign government…it will become public when
it’s turned over to the archives, but that’s twenty to thirty
years from now.” We know from the work of the intrepid Paul Thompson
that there are suspicious ties between 9/11 and certain elements within
the governments of Pakistan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, each of which
has suspicious ties to certain elements within our own government, and
that all of these elements together would have shared a common interest
in seeing certain elements within the Iraqi government removed from
power. And most importantly, we know that there are a limited number
of actual physical bodies walking around out there who are responsible
for the attacks, and that so far absolutely nothing has been done to
either 1) identify who these bodies are, and 2) put them in jail.

We know all these things, and yet Alexander Cockburn won’t stop
writing his stupid articles saying there’s nothing to know. It
wouldn’t be so infuriating if it didn’t involve the welfare
of you and me and pretty much everyone else in the country. Because
it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that as long as those actual
physical bodies responsible for the attacks continue to walk around
out there, this country isn’t going to be safe. Which is why,
when seen from this angle, the Jersey girls, who are calling for a second
investigation, seem like good, civic-minded citizens, while Alexander
Cockburn, who’s desire to shut down the debate is now bordering
on the pathological, seems like the purveyor of a sort of divisive petty
attack politics that at the end of the day is not that much different
from the sort of divisive petty attack politics Anne Coulter engages
in. Because it serves nothing except to make some people feel good about
themselves and to piss some other people off.

In the end, what it comes down to is this: the perpetrators of 9/11
are still at large, and as long as they remain at large, they can do
it again. This fact has to take its place alongside all the other issues
that have been laid at the feet of the Bush administration: manipulated
intelligence, the Iraq war, torture, profiteering, wiretapping, corruption,
the response to hurricane Katrina. It shouldn’t be isolated as
a “movement,” or treated like some kooky topic that can’t
be talked about in the mainstream media. Because it involves a very
important question that America is going to have to come face to face
with eventually: are we serious about figuring out who attacked our
country? Or put another way: are we serious about fighting terrorism?
Because we can’t fight terrorism until we know who the terrorists
are, and we won’t know who the terrorists are until we stop thinking
in terms of fuzzy generalizations – like al Qaeda – and
start thinking in terms of individuals. In other words, we need to begin
investigating this thing like the crime that it actually was. And that’s
not going to happen until everyone – Congress and Alexander Cockburn
included – is on the same page.