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The Case for the Worst Case Scenario

Be honest now: When you first heard the news on September 11, how many of you had the thought, however briefly, that it might have been some sort of inside job? Well of course you folks are very sick puppies. It's a monstrous thought, though, in your defense, not historically unprecedented. And unless one subscribes to the can't-happen-here school of thought (a school whose dropout rate had to increase after 9/11), there are some fishy smells bearing further investigation.

Over the past 25 years I've heard every conspiracy theory in the book, and quite a few that didn't make it into the book. I tend to be an agnostic on most of them, unless they're backed up with solid evidence. But theories are useful exercises for open minds, and a number of them can be constructed to consider the events which brought on the War on Some Terrorism.

Every conspiracy theory has to have an Official Story in counterpoint. In this case, that story is that the terrorists attacked us because of their envy for our freedom and democracy. The evidence for that, one presumes, is those videotapes where Osama ignores our support for various nasty regimes in his home region and goes on about his longing to visit Disney World. Plus how jealous he is that they can't have an Electoral College and butterfly ballots in Yemen.

Okay, that's an interesting theory, too, but if you're not entirely satisfied, you might want to try on a few others for size. I'll propose four based on historical analogies: the Great Crash theory, the battleship Maine theory, the Pearl Harbor theory and the Reichstag Fire theory.

The Crash theory is the most benign, based on another event that changed America: the stock market meltdown of '29. Because of ideological rigidity, President Hoover was singularly ill-equipped to respond to the Great Depression that followed; he actually thought it would help to cut government spending. But it's also true that Hoover and his party helped to bring on the problem in the first place, with a decade of policies that redistributed wealth towards the very rich, thereby depressing consumer demand from the non-rich.

Like Hoover, the administration of the Usurper from Texas has some ideological blinders on. Witness the epic struggle to keep airport security in the hands of underpaid rent-a-cops. More seriously, consider how useful universal health care could be in combating the scourge of bioterrorism, especially if we escalate to contagious plagues like smallpox. But never mind that one: ain't gonna happen. Instead, you might want to consider whether our government's time-honored strategy of throwing guns and money at brutal megalomaniacs - like Karimov of Uzbekistan - wouldn't help to create the next generation of terrorists.

And that's where the Hoover analogy really kicks in, because this administration is full of the people who helped to create this mess in the first place. These are the people who thought it would be a great idea to shovel billions of dollars in high-tech weaponry to fanatics like Osama in the first place. These are the people who built up Saddam and illegally funneled chemical weapons to him, then winked when he massed forces on the Kuwaiti border. And of course, these are the same people who, twenty years ago, killed off any efforts to establish a rational energy policy, without which it became a matter of vital national security which particular group of thugs happened to run Kuwait.

And these are the folks who some eighty percent of the public trusts to solve all these problems they helped create. I would counsel against breath-holding.

But consider the battleship Maine. Back in 1898, President McKinley was itching for a war against the Spanish Empire. The Maine was sailed provocatively into Havana harbor with the hope that some sort of incident might occur. And when the ship blew up, the war began, under the slogan "Remember the Maine!" But it wasn't the Spanish who blew up the Maine, nor was it an inside job. Those who remembered the Maine investigated the wreck fifty years later and found that a boiler explosion had sunk the warship. But that was good enough for McKinley, and by the time the Spanish-American war was over, the Spanish Empire had collapsed, and the American Empire had begun, with Washington taking over the colonial possessions of Guam, Cuba and the Philippines.

Likewise, the US government has been eyeing the oil-rich Caspian Sea region north of Afghanistan ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. The War on Some Terrorists has allowed us to establish military bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and it looks like we could be there for a very long time. After all, the vice president says this war might take fifty years. In the meantime, we'll have troops there to intervene if some future terrorists don't like any particular group of thugs we back to make sure the oil keeps flowing.

So sure, we were attacked by evildoers, but then if the Maine hadn't sailed into Cuba, it wouldn't have mattered when the boiler room blew up. What makes this analogy interesting is that numerous reports in the foreign press indicate that the US was planning a war on Afghanistan before September 11, 2001. For instance, the BBC reported on 9/18/01 that Pakistani diplomats had been informed in July that the war would begin in October, which it did. The London paper The Independent reported on 10/30/01 that secret talks with the Taliban had broken down just prior to 9/11. These accounts have been corroborated elsewhere.

There are other reasons to believe that the Usurper and his handlers were itching for war in Central Asia, which we'll go into below. But to summarize the Maine theory: looking for a pretext to intervene in the Caspian oilfields, the US made demands on the Taliban, hoping they would give us a reason. Except that nobody thought it would be that big a reason. Remember what the US ambassador to Iraq said when asked why she hadn't objected to belligerent moves against Kuwait: "We didn't think he'd take the whole thing."

The problem with this theory is that there are too many indications that a huge terror attack on America was indeed anticipated. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was warned not to fly that day; author Salman Rushdie received similar warnings. Both Israeli and Russian intelligence had warned Washington about impending attacks. Reports indicated that an Iranian held in German custody had made specific warnings. So too had a British national in a Florida jail.

In fact, back in 1995, the FBI was warned about terror plots to hijack planes and fly them into skyscrapers, as CNN reported on 9/28/01. That information came from computers used by the group that tried to bring down the twin towers in 1993. Which makes it extremely curious that the military response to the 9/11 attacks was practically nonexistent until well after it was too late. Even though it was clear from early on that four planes had been hijacked simultaneously, the commander-in-chief continued to read stories about goats to schoolchildren. No fighter jets were scrambled to intercept, though there was more than enough time to do so.

To explain this, you might consider the Pearl Harbor theory. Back in 1941, the intelligentsia knew, even if the general public didn't, that FDR wanted to get us involved in the war in Europe. And it was clear that the US had been making impossible demands on Japan for many years. Since Japan was Germany's ally, war with one meant war with both. But it was not until many years later that it became clear how much the president had to have known about what was going to happen - and how he let it happen. FDR's foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor was once a conspiracy theory, but is today largely proven - though still rarely brought up.

This is of course not quite so benign. But it helps to explain the insider trading on various WTC-connected stocks prior to 9/11, coming from banks with extensive CIA connections. It helps to explain how we could have had the 20th hijacker in custody, identified by French intelligence as an al-Qaida member, and yet no warrant could be obtained to search his computer. It helps to explain why frantic warnings from flight school instructors were ignored. There may be more benign explanations for each item, but cumulatively they seem to call out for a theory involving some sort of conspiracy.

And as long as we're thinking like that, let's recall the Reichstag Fire. When somebody torched the parliament buildings in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party blamed the Communists, and tightened up homeland security in a way that helped them to consolidate their hold on power. Except that most historians believe it was the Nazis that torched the Reichstag. To this day, it can't be definitively proven, but it makes sense based on who benefited the most.

Well, some of you are saying, they may have stolen the election, but this is a bit much. After all, Osama as much as admitted he was behind the whole thing. But that's where it gets interesting, since the CIA helped Osama get his start in the terror biz in the first place. And while he supposedly turned against us during the Gulf War, it's also true that al-Qaida forces intervened in both Bosnia and Kosovo on the same side as the US - that is, against the Serbs.

Where it gets even more interesting is the Carlyle Group, a shadowy conglomerate which specializes in buying up defense firms and other strategic holdings worldwide (including, just coincidentally, the company that manufactures anthrax vaccine). Among the investors and consultants in Carlyle is the Usurper's daddy, former president George Herbert Walker Bush. And among his business partners (until a few weeks ago) were the Bin Laden Group, who cashed in after 9/11 so as not to embarrass anyone. Because yes, they are related to that bin Laden. The Official Story has it that Osama's family has cut him off, but in the real world, it's not entirely clear that that is true. His sister-in-law told ABC news of continuing contacts. Others in Saudi Arabia have reported support for al-Qaida among members of the Saudi royal family, who are also tight with the president's daddy.

For the past few months, the rest of the world has been abuzz about a book published in France called Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth. It details how shortly after coming to power, the Usurper's administration entered into secret negotiations with the Taliban to cut a deal on an oil pipeline from the Caspian through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. The Taliban offered to give up Osama, but ultimately the negotiations collapsed, resulting in the war plans reported by the BBC.

The authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, also report that the administration interfered with investigations into al-Qaida terrorist activities in the US. Extensive financial ties between the Saudi royals - who backed both Osama and the Taliban - and the president's supporters in the energy industries, led to political pressure against the FBI and other agencies. One FBI agent, John O'Neill, in charge of investigating bin Laden, resigned in protest shortly after making these charges to the book's authors.

Unfortunately, O'Neill himself died in the 9/11 attacks, but the charges are not unique. Judicial Watch is representing another disgruntled agent, and both the BBC and the UK paper The Guardian (11/7/01) have reported on political pressure to quash al-Qaida investigations. Cumulatively, these reports can provide support for either the Pearl Harbor or the Reichstag theories. Personally, I'm still an agnostic; I'd have to see a lot more evidence, and that could take fifty years.

One thing I do know: the Usurper and his minions benefitted from the attacks far more than Osama did. Osama's on the run, his bank accounts frozen, his protectors isolated. The Usurper was in a world of trouble on September 10th, in for big political heat on campaign finance, energy policy, missile defense, globalization and a dozen other issues. On September 12, he could get his way on just about anything short of changing the name of the country to Bushistan.

But even with the most generous interpretation, one would have to warm up to the Crash theory at the very least. That is, that we've been cursed with having the worst possible group of people in the White House to respond to this crisis - people whose myopia and arrogance and financial dealings helped to create the situation and who are likely to make things even worse before they're through.

But let's get back to the horrifying thought that you put out of your head almost as soon as you thought of it: the inside job. The Reichstag fire. Maybe the Nazis would be capable of such a thing, but it couldn't happen here. Well, maybe not. But before you discard your agnosticism on that point, consider one last piece of history, reported in the Baltimore Sun on 4/24/01. Back in 1962, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff considered faking a series of terrorist attacks on American soil, which would then be blamed on the Cubans in order to create a pretext for invading the island. Still think it can't happen here? Let's talk it over again, in 2051.

From the January 17, 2002 issue of the Santa Cruz Comic News