The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [41]
AT THE CORE of conspiracy theory is the idea that we were all hoodwinked, that what we thought we saw on 9/11 was not the full picture. The Twin Towers may have been struck by airliners filled with passengers—though some doubt even that—but it was not the planes that brought them crashing down. Explosives, planted explosives, had been used to achieve that. The same went for the total collapse later in the day, the skeptics claim, of World Trade Center Building 7. As for the Pentagon, there were claims by some that it had been struck not by a plane but by a missile.
Why perpetrate such gross trickery? The overarching suspicion—for some the conviction—is that people at the heart of the United States government were behind the attacks. The doubters belong, essentially, to one of two schools of thought, broadly defined by the acronyms MIHOP—Made It Happen On Purpose—and, the alternative, LIHOP—Let It Happen On Purpose.
LIHOP proposes that elements in the Bush administration, aware that a terrorist onslaught was likely, and motivated by the opportunities for foreign intervention it might provide, turned a blind eye to warning signs and let the attacks happen. MIHOP adherents suspect—argue strongly—that elements in the U.S. government and military actually engineered the attacks.
Those, then, are the central planks of conspiracy theory. As late as January 2011, National Geographic Channel was rebroadcasting programming that covered the theories plugged by the people some call 9/11 “truthers.”
CONSPIRACY THEORIES are nothing new, in America and much of the rest of the world. The growth and durability of 9/11 skepticism, though, was inseparably intertwined with the rise and rise of the Internet. For better or worse and for the first time in history, the Internet permits citizens to propagate ideas faster than traditional media and beyond the control of government.
The electronic murmur that was to reach millions seems to have begun not six hours after the first strike on the Trade Center. Boston-based David Rostcheck, a software consultant with a physics degree, had spent the morning watching the drama on television. “Eventually,” he recalled, “I went to see what people were saying online. I belonged to the set of people who had been on the Internet for most of my adult life, before there was a Web and before the Internet became a household presence.… No one seemed to be commenting on the unusual aspects of the building collapses, so I wrote up an analysis and posted it.”
“Is it just me,” Rostcheck asked on the Net that afternoon,
or did anyone else recognize that it wasn’t the airplane impacts that blew up the World Trade Center? To me, this is the most frightening part of this morning … look at the footage—those buildings were demolished. To demolish a building, you don’t need all that much explosive but it needs to be placed in the correct places.… Someone had to have had a lot of access to all of both towers and a lot of time to do this.… If, in a few days, not one official has mentioned anything about the demolition part, I think we have a REALLY serious problem.
There it was, almost instantaneously, the very first hint at the theory that for many has long since become an item of faith—that the fall of the Twin Towers was in reality caused by explosives planted within the buildings. Rapidly, the Internet became the forum for a great flood of skepticism.
“What happened after September 11,” Rostcheck told the authors,
is that American society bifurcated into two groups—call them America 1 and America 2. America 1 makes up much of America. It is depicted by and shaped by broadcast media. It thinks it occupies what it would consider to be “conventional reality,