The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [42]
America 2, by comparison, is what I’ll roughly classify as the Internet domain. I don’t mean that America 1 doesn’t use the Internet—it does.… But America 2’s concepts originate on the Internet, which is a different domain.… The two Americas live together, work together, interact together, but they are not quite the same and they are not necessarily going in the same direction anymore. What happened after September 11 is that a whole group of Americans found themselves abruptly dumped into America 2 … the population of America 2 became huge—likely tens of millions.
America 1 is only dimly aware of America 2, and reflexively consigns any elements of thinking from America 2 that it becomes aware of into one bin marked “crazy,” then dismisses it.… By the standards of America 2, people from America 1 are profoundly and tragically uneducated—and reactionary.
Whatever one thinks of this concept of two Americas, the seeds of suspicion about 9/11 have flourished on the Internet ever since. Four years ago, it was said that almost a million Web pages were devoted to “9/11 conspiracy.” As of early 2011, entering the phrase “9/11 conspiracy” into the Google search engine returned almost seven million hits.
“I don’t believe the official story,” wrote Jared Israel, a veteran anti–Vietnam War activist who had earlier started Emperor’s Clothes—a website fired up by perceived American betrayal of the Serbs in Yugoslavia—within four days of the attacks. What he saw in “the semi-official New York Times,” he told his readers, raised grave questions. Why had President Bush gone on listening to a children’s story about goats when a third hijacked plane was aimed at Washington, D.C.? Wasn’t there something odd about the military response to the hijackings, or the lack of it? Israel said he smelled—and this may have been the first mention of the word in the context of 9/11—“conspiracy.”
Even to peer into the world we now enter requires suspending disbelief, giving houseroom to a mind-boggling range of views. It includes the “no-planers,” people who question whether commercial passenger jets crashed into the Trade Center and the Pentagon at all. Talk of that began just two days after 9/11 on a website run by a man named Peter Meyer and intended—he told readers—“for thinking people.” Meyer and others would eventually be expressing doubt as to whether some or all of the planes involved on 9/11 really existed as genuine passenger flights.
By early October, one Carol Valentine was declaring that “there were no suicide pilots on those September 11 jets. The jets were controlled by advanced robotics.” Her account, which ran to twelve pages, suggested that air traffic controllers’ records had vanished, that the alleged Arab hijackers’ names were missing from airline passenger lists, and that an alleged hijacker’s passport—reportedly found in the street near the Trade Center—had been planted. She believed, moreover, that Flight 93 was “without a doubt” shot down, to prevent its “electronic controls” being examined and to ensure the silence of its crew and passengers.
A character named Joe Vialls, meanwhile, cast doubt on the belief that there had been air-to-ground phone calls from the “electronically hijacked” planes. How was it, a certain Gary North asked, that no names of Arab hijackers appeared on early published passenger lists? The omission was “very strange … peculiar.”
Over the years, the plot thickened. An academic named Alex Dewdney suggested in 2003 that the four aircraft were not really hijacked but “ordered to land at a designated airport with a military presence.” Two “previously-prepared planes,” painted to look like an American Airlines jet and a United Airlines jet, were “flown by remote control” along the designated flight paths of Flights 11 and 175 and on into the Twin Towers.
In Dewdney’s version, it was a “fighter jet (under remote control), or a cruise missile” that crashed into the Pentagon. The passengers from the three genuine Boeings