The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [40]
The President of the United States, he in T-shirt and running shorts and Mrs. Bush in her robe—with their dogs Barney and Spot—were rushed down to the basement to be confronted again by the unappetizing couch. The “incoming” plane, however, turned out to be merely a chartered airliner bringing FBI reinforcements from the West Coast. Back went the Bushes to their private quarters.
Two hundred and twenty-five miles away in New York City, in the glare of halogen lights, men worked on through the night in the tangle of steel and rubble that had once symbolized American prosperity. They were still looking hopefully for the living, and the hand of one more survivor—the last, as it turned out—would eventually appear through a hole to grasp that of a rescuer. It belonged to a young female clerk who had worked at the Trade Center and, though seriously injured, she was to recover.
That consolation aside, there would henceforth be only the dead, or fragments of the dead.
The pile at the scene of the attacks “heaved and groaned and constantly changed, was capable at any moment of killing again.” The air smelled of noxious chemicals, and strange flames shot out of the ground, purple, green, and yellow. Fires were to burn on, underground, for three months to come.
An American apocalypse, a catastrophe with consequences—in blood spilled and global political upheaval—that continue to this day.
PART II
DISTRUST AND DECEIT
TEN
ONE CONSEQUENCE, A NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON, is that countless citizens do not believe the story of September 11 as we have just told it.
We have striven in these chapters to recount what is firmly known. We have teased out detail, sorted the reliable from the dross, often gone back to original sources. Yet many would say our account is skewed, too close to the “official version,” or just plain wrong.
9/11 is mired in “conspiracy theory” like no previous event in American history—more so even than President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Doubt and disbelief as to what really happened on 9/11, a Time magazine writer noted in 2006, is “not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.” By the end of George Bush’s first term as President, a more iconoclastic writer—Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone—concluded that Americans had “no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea.… Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him. What story is he going to tell?”
Americans, University of California history professor Kathryn Olmsted has said, “tend to be particularly receptive to anti-government conspiracy theories.” Her study of conspiracy theory notes not only the evidence of the polls—that in 2006 a third of the U.S. population believed the Bush administration was involved in 9/11—but that a majority of that third were aged eighteen to twenty-nine.
Significant, too, given the continuing global upheaval, is the degree of 9/11 conspiracy belief among Arab Americans (of whom there are more than three million), American Muslims, and Arabs worldwide. Taibbi, doing interviews in Dearborn, Michigan, was shocked to hear “well-educated, pious Lebanese Americans regurgitating 9/11 conspiracy theories like they were hard news.” One woman he interviewed “could not be budged from her conviction that Bush had bombed the Twin Towers.” In much of the Arab world, the author and longtime Middle East resident Jean Sasson has written, “conspiracy theories dominate public opinion.”
As recently as 2009, persistent belief in such theories so