One Utah

Here’s a reminder to tune in to The History Channel at 10 pm Monday night (in Utah) for their special, “9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction.”

There are four distinct 9/11 conspiracy theories to choose from. In the first two, the conspirators are members of a terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda. In the second two, the conspirators include members of the United States government. A lot of ink and pixels have been devoted to all four.

1. The Bush administration’s theory

President Bush and his advisors claimed there was no reasonable expectation that members of Al Qaeda would hijack commercial airliners and use them as weapons against key buildings in New York and Washington, DC. Then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on May 16th, 2002: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” According to this theory, the government suffered from a failure of imagination and was caught utterly unprepared.

2. The incompetence theory

The 9/11 Commission Report laid out a detailed time line showing that U.S. government incompetence played a decisive role in the success of an Al Qaeda attack using hijacked commercial airliners, which could easily have been anticipated and planned for. Serious plots to crash passenger planes into CIA headquarters and the Eiffel Tower had been uncovered years earlier– in the latter case, the plane was actually hijacked but the terrorists were thwarted. Major intelligence lapses (for example, botched investigations of Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight school in Arizona and two 9/11 hijackers who were known terrorists) caused the CIA and FBI to miss opportunities to uncover the 9/11 plot. On the day of the attacks, the FAA alerted NEADS, the Northeast Air Defense Sector, only nine minutes before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Fighters were scrambled at three East Coast airbases, but not in time to shoot down any hijacked planes.

3. The LIHOP theory

This is the contention that the U.S. government was partly or fully aware of the impending Al Qaeda attacks and decided to “let it happen on purpose.” The 9/11 commission established that President Bush received a presidential daily brief on August 6, 2001, with the following title: Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US (sic). According to this theory, the Bush administration wanted a new Pearl Harbor to justify a war on terrorism involving rollbacks of civil liberties and attacks on Iraq and other targets in the Middle East. The government deliberately ignored warnings or even actively weakened America’s defenses to ensure the hijacked flights were not intercepted.

4. The MIHOP or “false flag” theory

Some say that the U.S. government “made it happen on purpose.” This is the theory that that key individuals within the government actually planned the attacks as a false flag operation to be blamed on Al Qaeda. There are many ideas about how the operation may have been carried out, including the use of controlled demolitions, remote-control planes, cruise missiles and directed energy beam weapons. Most adherents of this theory deny that foreign terrorists in fact hijacked four planes on September 11, 2001.

Watch the History Channel documentary and then comment on what theory you support, or make your own.

EXTRA: I have identified the man in the video Cliff posted July 31 (who I called YouTube Guy because we had no information on who he is). He is Michael Ruppert, a professional conspiracy monger since at least 1998. Ruppert participated in the International Citizens Inquiry Into 9/11 (Toronto, May 2004).

UPDATE: If you didn’t watch the History Channel program last night, be sure and catch a re-run. Highly recommended. I think the single most important point was that 9/11 conspiracy theorists, like the JFK assassination theorists (some are the same people!), aren’t motivated by dishonesty. It’s a deep-seated feeling that great events must have great causes. Most just cannot accept that historical events can be set in motion by 19 guys we never heard of before. Their view of history doesn’t make any allowances for “nobodies” like Lee Harvey Oswald or the 9/11 hijackers.

UPDATE: Paul Joseph Watson accuses the History Channel of setting up “straw man” conspiracy theories in order to do a “hit piece.” Watson, however, undermines his own credibility by making several inaccurate claims about the contents of the History Channel special.

UPDATE: Former BYU prof Steven Jones only got a brief snippet of his interview included in the History Channel special. He notes that his “microspheres” theory was left out. Also that many of the scientists advocating 9/11 conspiracy theories were not interviewed.

This entry was posted Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under 9/11, George W. Bush, National Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.