Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies Ten Years After 9/11: An Anarchist Evaluation 2011.1 The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism in American Popular Culture Michael Truscello* Abstract Thisarticleexaminestheresponseto9/11skepticismbyscholarsinthe ﬁeldofculturalstudies. Asurveyofrecentbookson9/11inAmerican popular culture shows little consideration of 9/11 conspiracy theories in popular culture, and no consideration of legitimate forms of skepti- cism. In addition, cultural studies critics such as Claire Birchall, Jack Bratich, Mark Fenster, and Jodi Dean have theorized the discourse of 9/11 conspiracytheorieswithanemphasisonhow theconspiracies are articulated but not whether there are legitimate forms of skepti- cism. Toaddressthisabsenceinthescholarship,thisarticleconsiders some of the omissions and distortions of the 9/11 Commission Report. Itconcludesbycitingrecentarticlesinmainstreamacademicjournals that strongly indict the oﬃcial narrative of 9/11, and suggests the potential value of 9/11 skepticism to an anarchist cultural studies. *MichaelTruscelloisanassistantprofessorinEnglishandGeneralEducationatMount RoyalUniversityinCalgary,Alberta. Hispublicationshaveappearedinjournalssuch asPostmodernCulture,CulturalCritique,Aﬃnities,TechnicalCommunicationQuarterly and TEXT Technology. He discusses the nexus of technology and post-anarchism in Post-Anarchism: A Reader (2011) from Pluto Press, YouTube and the anarchist tradition in Transgression 2.0 (forthcoming) from Continuum Press, and humor and 9/11 skepticism in A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 Politics (2011) from University Press of Mississippi.

28 Michael Truscello The American public’s reaction to the 9/11 Commission Report, published in July 2004, showed varying degrees of skepticism over theveracityofthereportandthetestimonyofgovernmentandmili- tary oﬃcials.1 While many leading ﬁgures in mainstream American liberal and progressive media criticized the 9/11 Commission Report when it was published — Harper’s magazine ran a cover story in October 2004 describing the report as a “whitewash,” a “cheat and a fraud” (DeMott, 2004); Village Voice correspondent James Ridgeway suggested a proper interrogation of the White House “might have brought down a government” (Ridgeway, 2005, p. 168) — two years laterprogressivemediaauthoredvitriolicretortstodenominations oftheself-styled “9/11TruthMovement,” membersof whichwant a newinvestigationintotheeventsof September11, 2001. Though ostensibly, at one time, both radical critics and the 9/11 Truth Move- ment wanted a new investigation of 9/11 — in addition, two-thirds of New York City residents asked for a new investigation in a 2004 poll (Zogby, 2004) — most leftists have since distanced themselves from any interrogation of 9/11. The anarchist response to 9/11 skep- ticismresemblestheliberal/progressiveresponse,andisexempliﬁed by the reaction of Noam Chomsky. In a lecture delivered at MIT on October 18, 2001, Chomsky spoke of the September 11 attacks: “It is astonishing to me how weak the evidence was [against the alleged perpetrators],” he said. “And it ended up about where it started,withaprimafaciecase.”Hecontinued: “Solet’sassumethat it’s true. So let’s assume that, it looked obvious the ﬁrst day, still does,thattheactualperpetratorscomefromtheradicalIslamic,here called fundamentalist networks, of which the bin Laden network is undoubtedly a signiﬁcant part. . . Whether [Islamic terrorists] were involved or not, nobody knows. It doesn’t really matter much” (quoted in Zwicker, 2006, p. 202). Later, in his book 9–11, which as an international best-seller sold over 300,000 copies, Chomsky 1A Zogby poll in May 2006 showed 42% of Americans believe “that the US govern- ment and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their oﬃcial explanation of the September 11th attacks.” A Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll in August 2006 showed 36% of Americans believe their government was in some manner complicit with the 9/11 attacks. A New York Times/CBS News pollfrom October2006showedonly16% of Americansbelievemem- bersoftheBushAdministrationaretellingthetruthaboutpre-9/11intelligence,while 81%believethegovernmentiseither“hidingsomething”or“mostlylying.”ASeptem- ber 2007 Zogby poll found 51% of Americans want Congress to probe the actions of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regarding their “actions before, during and after the 9/11 attacks.”

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 29 again expressed indiﬀerence atthe paucity of evidenceagainstthe alleged conspirators of 9/11: “Nevertheless, despite what must be themostintensiveinternationalintelligenceinvestigationinhistory, evidence about the perpetrators of 9–11 has been hard to ﬁnd. . . Nevertheless, despite the thin evidence, the initial conclusion about 9–11 is presumably correct” (Chomsky, 2002, pp. 120–121). Because of his celebrated status, Chomsky was strenuously pursued by 9/11 skeptics to endorse their cause. “Even if it [the idea of US govern- mentcomplicitywiththe9/11attacks]weretrue,whichisextremely unlikely,” Chomsky asserted at a public appearance, “who cares? I mean, it doesn’t have any signiﬁcance. . . It’s just taking energy away fromserious issues for ones that don’t matter” (quoted in Pe- tersen, 2007). After the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011, Chomskymadestatementsthatsuggestedasofteningofhisposition on 9/11 skepticism. He declared an absence of “serious” evidence against Osama bin Laden for the crime of 9/11, and he described bin Laden’s “confession” to the crime of 9/11 “rather like my confession thatIwontheBostonMarathon. Heboastedofwhatheregardedas a great achievement” (Chomsky, 2011). Theunansweredquestionssurrounding9/11emergedinAmerican popular culture as both conspiracy theories and legitimate skepti- cism. Conspiracy theories with no basis in fact include: the notion that 4,000 Jews did not report to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11; the belief that no airplane hit the Pentagon; the “pod” the- ories; the theory that directed energy weapons from space toppled the World Trade Center towers; and all manner of theories incor- porating holograms or special eﬀects in the television coverage of the attacks. The evidence easily dismisses these theories, and yet they are commonly enumerated by mainstream media reports that do not wish to discuss legitimate forms of skepticism. Of the sev- eral academic books that have been published on the subject of 9/11 in American popular culture, none has addressed 9/11 skepticism in ﬁlm and television, and only a few have noted in passing the conspiracy theories. For example, in Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era, Douglas Kellner notes how 9/11 Commission chair Thomas Kean’s “involvement with [The Path to 9/11]seriouslydiscreditedtheformergovernor,andperhapsthe9/11 Commission he chaired, which was long under attack for not more vigorously investigating the 9/11 attacks” (2010, p. 110). Kellner does not explore the criticism of the 9/11 Commission. Instead, in a footnote on the ﬁlm United 93, he writes,

30 Michael Truscello Neither the ﬁlm nor [director Paul] Greengrass on the DVD commentaryaddressestheconspiracytheoriesthatsuggestthe governmentdidnotacttoprevent9/11becauseitwasplanning to exploit the tragedy to push through its rightwing extrem- ist agenda. The Wikipedia “9/11 Conspiracies” site lists salient points and sources of various conspiracy analyses and argu- ments against them. . . (pp. 127–128n7) Similarly, Stephen Prince, in his book Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism, acknowledges the compromises of the 9/11 Commission — referring to the Bush administration’s actions as “startling” (2009, p. 143), and noting how once “an investigation was under way, the Bush administration continued to behave as if it had things to hide” (p. 144). Indeed, the 9/11 Commission chair and vice chair, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, said the White House was the “chief obstacle” to their investigation (2006, p. 17). Prince even acknowledgestheconfessionsofKhalidSheikhMohamed(KSM),the alleged mastermind of 9/11, sometimes “were wildly improbable” (Prince, 2009, p. 240). Prince, unlike Kellner, proﬁles some of the conspiracy ﬁlms, but does not take seriously any of their claims. Jeﬀrey Melnick (2009), in 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction, alsodiscussestheconspiracyﬁlmsbutdeclares“theoriginsandevo- lutionofthesechallengestothe‘oﬃcialstory’of9/11areoutsidemy scope” (p. 40), and celebrates the “pioneering work” of Snopes.com (p.26). Ultimately,Melnickdismissesall9/11skepticismas“rumors” most likely “to ‘capture’ young people” (p. 41). “Many of these ru- mors,” claims Melnick, “are rooted in the simple doubt (or profound disbelief)that this couldhavehappened here”(p.26;italicsinorig- inal). That these “rumors” have transformed into “a major social force [the 9/11 Truth Movement]” Melnick attributes to the way the rumors “take the chaos of that day and map an intelligent de- sign onto it” (p. 41). This “grassroots rebellion” is not to be taken seriously on its own terms, but rather as a “revolt not only against governmental control over 9/11 inquiry but also as a critique of the centralizedcontrolofAmericanmediaheldbycorporateactorssuch asClear Channel”(p. 43). AndrewSchoppandMatthewB. Hill,in theirintroductiontoTheWaronTerrorandAmericanPopularCulture: September 11 and Beyond, note how “many elements of American popularculturehavebeenimplicitlyandexplicitlyinterrogatingthe attacksandtheiraftermathsincealmostthemomenttheyhappened” (Schopp & Hill 2009, p. 13). Schopp later admits he read an arti-

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 31 cle on 9/11 conspiracy theories in New York Magazine and can no longer “dismiss the possibilities as easily as [he] once might have” (Schopp2009,p.263). Despitethisstatement,Schoppelsewherein the same article grimaces over the “subway graﬃti and the stickers plastered throughout the stations asking that we reopen September 11” (p. 262). Finally, Gordon B. Arnold, in Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics, spends little time on 9/11 conspiracies and suggests their “most obvious point of comparison is with the ﬁlm Capricorn One, which had depicted how a NASA mission to Mars, complete with three astronauts, could be convincingly faked” (2008, p. 168), a compression of 9/11 skepticism that admits only the most ludicrous and discredited theories (in this case, the allusion is to theories suggesting the planes on 9/11 were holograms cloaking missiles, or to no-plane-at-the-Pentagon theories). Therefore, the combined reaction to 9/11 skepticism by academics in book-length treatiseson9/11in Americanpopular culture treats theomissions and distortions of the 9/11 Commission Report as nothing more than passingcuriositiesforwhichthereadershouldconsultWikipediaor Snopes.com. Such a response is not a condemnation of the scholars above, who are more than capable, but rather the social climate in which they are publishing, which is extremely hostile to treatments of9/11thatdonotreﬂecttheManicheanrhetoricoftheBushAdmin- istration and the ideologically vapid propaganda of the US national security state. It is the contention of this article that an anarchist approach to cultural studies must confront the glaring omissions and distortions of the 9/11 Commission Report, for several reasons: ﬁrst, a proper historical accounting of 9/11 requires a more comprehensive and independentinquiryinto9/11thanthe9/11Commissionprovided (which will be demonstrated below); second, a comprehensive ex- ploration of 9/11 reveals some of the covert machinations of the national security state (both US and foreign), and would contribute to an anarchist analysis ofthe function ofthe State in capitalist so- cieties; third, the logic of progressive avoidance, both in popular media and academia, assumes the omissions and distortions of the Report are inconsequential, and this logic is irrational because we do not know how consequential the omissions of the Report are; fourth, the possibility existsof treasonous activity within the Bush White House or some faction of the national security state, which hidfromseriousinterrogationwithclassiﬁcatoryprocessesandlegal maneuveringﬁttingofthe“imperialpresidency”(Savage,2008);ﬁfth,

32 Michael Truscello 9/11 has been used as justiﬁcation for widespread torture, imperial warsofaggression,andthesuspensionoftheUS constitution,andas such it should be subject to more, not less, academic scrutiny; and ﬁnally, the avoidance of 9/11 skepticism in mainstream academic research betrays the fundamental responsibilities of higher educa- tion “not only to search for the truth regardless of where it may lead but also toeducatestudents tomakeauthority politically and morallyaccountable;[highereducation]isobligedtoexpandboth academic freedom and the possibility and promise of the university asabastionofdemocraticinquiry,values,andpolitics,evenasthese are necessarily refashioned at the beginning of the new millennium” (Giroux, 2010, p. 95). Cultural Studies, Conspiracy Theory, and 9/11 Almostimmediatelyfollowing9/11,criticismsoftheoﬃcialnarra- tiveweretreatedasconspiracytheories. Atendencytoconﬂatecon- spiracytheories—thoseridiculousandsometimeshatefultheories thatareincongruentwiththeevidence—withlegitimateskepticism prevented an honest and comprehensive assessment of the event from taking place in the oﬃcial corridors of government and acade- mia. A throng of recent work in academic (largely Marxist) cultural studies has examined the psychological, political, and social charac- teristics of conspiracy theory, some of which discuss 9/11 theories. Fourofthelatestbooksthatrepresenttheculturalstudies“approach” toconspiracytheoryareJackZ.Bratich’sConspiracyPanics: Political RationalityandPopularCulture,ClareBirchall’sKnowledgeGoesPop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip, Jodi Dean’s Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, and Mark Fenster’s second edition of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Though cultural studies attempts to take conspiracytheorizingmoreseriouslythanotherapproacheshave,“it alsocomesperilouslyclosetoignoringthemicropoliticalfunctionof thecategory[conspiracytheory/ist]”(HustingandOrr,2007,p.138). Cultural studies of conspiracy theory tend to avoid whether the spe- ciﬁctheoryinquestionisatallcredibleforthemorepalliativedebate of howthe theoryfunctionsdiscursively. Hustingand Orr capture the basic problem with the cultural studies approach: “Instead of questioningthecoherenceof‘conspiracytheorizing’asacategory,or pointing to the reframing power of the phrase, these analyses come

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 33 dangerously close to reifying it. Lumping together alien abductees, the X-Files, and concerns about corporate or political corruption erasesdistinctionsbetweenvaryingconcernsofconspiracy,treating them all as part of the ‘freak show’ of American culture in the post- modern moment” (p. 143). Pelkmans and Machold rightly focus on “the convergence of truth and use value” in the deployment of the label “conspiracy theory/ist,” which recognizes that the label can be aneﬀectivemeansof“discreditingopponentsorrallyingsupporters” (2011,p.68). Instead,PelkmansandMacholdwishtoforeground“the precise manner in which such theories are embedded in socio-politi- cal ﬁelds” (p. 68). They use the 9/11 Truth Movement as an example of how “theories of conspiracy produced by those who are not in power tend to remain ‘conspiracy theories,’ no matter their location along the truth-axis” (p. 75). Even though authors in the 9/11 Truth Movement have produced “numerous volumes on the faults in the oﬃcial account,” these “theories continue to be easily dismissed as conspiracytheories”(p.75). Iwouldcharacterizetheculturalstudies practitioners below as a variant of this dynamic that classiﬁes 9/11 skepticism in one of two ways: by assuming the label “conspiracy theory” applies to all 9/11 skepticism, they condemn even demon- strable falsehoods to what Orr and Husting call the “freak show” of postmodern American culture; and by focusing on how the theories are able to circulate, rather than whether the theories possess any epistemological legitimacy, they avoid questions regarding the very deﬁnition of conspiracy theory. Claire Birchall’s study of popular knowledge, for example, uses a deconstructionist methodology: I wanted to write a book that could open up a diﬀerent way of responding to popular knowledge: one that moves beyond the truth or falsity of statements produced by a particular knowl- edge and the question of why people might choose to invest in them. Working against the grain of much academic work on fan communities and the idea of empowered consumers (in myﬁeldofculturalstudiesespecially),Iwantedtofocusonthe knowledge believed in, rather than those who believe. (2006, p. xii) Popular invocations of conspiracy theory often focus on “those who believe,” dismissing their beliefs on a priori psychological grounds rather than exploring the evidence for those beliefs. Steve

34 Michael Truscello Clarkeidentiﬁesthis“dispositional”error,sometimescalledthe“fun- damental attribution error” or the “correspondence bias,” as that which obscures “situational” evidence in conspiracy theories; that is, conspiracy theorists tend to support what Imre Lakatos calls “de- generatingresearchprogrammes,”orresearchprojectsthatcontinue despitecontradictoryevidence,becausetheybelievesostronglythat the people involved are malevolent and omnipotent (Clarke, 2002, p. 145). The problem with academic work predicated on the psychol- ogyoftheconspiracists(datingbacktoRichardHofstadter’sfamous “paranoid style”) is that too often it constructs a priori arguments abouttheconspiracyinquestion. Inthecaseof9/11,therearecount- less examples of a priori suppositions used to counter the evidence presented by skeptics: somebody in the conspiracy would have talked, the conspiracy would involve too many people, the US government is not competent enough, and so on. Such claims are intellectually lazy and they avoid an assessment of the known evidence. Birchall’s focus on “the knowledge believed in” and not the psy- chology of the believer is an improvement over the typically dis- missive academic appraisal of conspiracy theory and other popu- lar knowledges. Birchall’s approach is more problematic, however, when it seeks to move “beyond the truth or falsity of statements” produced by so-called conspiracy theory and gossip. While there is no single deﬁnition of “popular knowledges,” Birchall argues “they all oﬀer understandings of the world not bounded by. . . ‘oﬃcial’, legitimated knowledge” (p. 21). Birchall then frames popular knowl- edge such as conspiracy theory in terms of its ability to perform deconstructive self-reﬂexivity. Conspiracy theory, she writes, “can suggestthatallknowledgeisonlyever‘theory’;thattherelationship between a sign and its referent is necessarily inﬂected by imaginary processes; and that any transcendental truth claims rely on contin- gent strategies of legitimation” (p. 73). Birchall sees her framing of conspiracytheoryasaddressinga“blindspot”intheculturalstudies debate, because in her epistemology conspiracy theory performs “a self-reﬂexivity about the very possibility of interpretation, of being able to say anything about one’s positionality, agenda, prejudices” (p. 84). Birchall’s treatment of 9/11 skepticismis deﬁcient in its declared intentiontogo“beyondthetruthorfalsityofstatements.”Insteadof discussing the compromised 9/11 Commission and the aporias of its report,Birchallsurveysacollectionofobvioushoaxesandsomewhat interesting anomalies, positing an explanatory framework for 9/11

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 35 conspiracieswithanaprioriassumption: “peopleﬁndfamiliarways of knowing to understand and discuss [9/11] perhaps because not in spite of its potentially disruptive nature,” an explanation that echoes Melnick above. Thus, Theenergyforsuchtheoriescanbefoundintheabsence,more than the presence, of evidence or answers: the lack of a pub- lished photograph of Flight 77 after having crashed into the Pentagon arouses suspicion; the late mobilization of scrambler planes raises eyebrows; the President’s lack of reaction to the news that America was under attack during a low-key visit to a school suggests to some that this news was ‘no news’ to him. (p. 56) Thereactiontothisjumbleofodditiesfrom9/11,Birchallsuggests, resembles what Timothy Melley calls “agency panic”: “Conspiracy theories ﬂood in to ﬁll the void of a nebulous, dispersed terror or fear” (Birchall, 2006, p. 62). It is true that the absence of evidence, such as deﬁnitive video footage of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon, has inspired some half-baked conspiracy theories. Instead of mea- suring the apparent substance of these theories, Birchall ascribes their existenceto the desireof conspiracists to counteract the Bush regime’s program of fear-mongering. This is often the case, but should cultural theorists lump together all forms of 9/11 skepticism under this amorphous attempt to ﬁght the future? By falling back onthe“potentiallydisruptivenature”of9/11astheprimemoverfor conspiracytheories,Birchallisawfullyclosetoinvokingpsychology, not evidence, as the determining factor. Jack Bratich’s focus is on “how the risky thought encapsulated in the conspiracy theory problem is generated discursively, under what conditions, and to what ends” (2008, p. 9). His text comes the closest of those examined in this article to an “anarchist” form of cultural studies. Conspiracy theory, he contends, “functions as an intolerable line and an antagonism,” and the “panic here is over a particular form of thought (and its potential links to action)” (p. 11). AnimportantcontributiontoFoucaultiangovernmentalityliterature, Bratich’s textexamineshowconspiracy panics “‘problematize’con- spiracy theories as a relation between power and thought” (p. 13). Instead of asking whether a theory deserves to be identiﬁed as a conspiracy theory, Bratich asks, “What commitment to rationality exists when a narrative is identiﬁed as a conspiracy theory? Whose

36 Michael Truscello authority is aﬃrmed?” (p. 16). Bratich argues that “a will-to-modera- tion permeatesour politicalrationality, and that conspiracy panics have been a signiﬁcant symptom of this will in action,” an incisive and important observation to be sure, and it is accompanied, thank- fully, by recognition of the “impossibility of a totalizing notion of conspiracy panics” (pp. 16–17, 23). When he turns to 9/11 conspiracy theories, Bratich prefaces his analysis with a comment that seems unaware of the various pub- lic opinion polls taken since 9/11 showing degrees of skepticism overtheoﬃcialnarrative(seeendnote2inthisarticle): “Despitethe seemingnationalconsensusovertheevents,”hewrites,“theskeptical narratives persisted” (p. 131). While his discussion of the 9/11 Truth Movement is more comprehensive than any other academic’s, it re- mains informed by his Foucaultian method and therefore ultimately not concerned with whether the 9/11 conspiracy theories deserve theepithetbutratherhowtheywere“generateddiscursively”: “what is at stake [in the 9/11 Truth Movement] is not which narrative is true but which body is authorized to make statements within the regime of truth” (p. 135). Retaining this epistemological posture, Bratich nonetheless identiﬁes one salient reason for intellectuals on the Leftto engageconspiracytheory/ist accusations: “The 9/11 Truth Movement was precisely discomforting to the Left because of its indiscernible political possibilities” (p. 142). Whether the Left believes pursuing questions about 9/11 is a politically futile activity, or whether the Left was simply bullied into being silent by a jingo- istic mainstream press in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bratich expresses succinctly the basic question that drives the analysis in thelatterhalfofthispaperandthatshouldbeaddressedtothoseon the Left who berate amateur attempts, however often misguided, to pursue the unanswered questions about 9/11: We can, however, question this limited range of investigation. For instance, much leftist ink has been spilled (actual and vir- tual) on the lies, cover-ups, and misinformation that led up to and continued after the Iraq invasion. Why has there been so much attention to those deeds and so little to 9/11? (p. 153) Why, indeed? Political scientistJodiDean invokesLacanianpsychoanalysis to understand the 9/11 Truth Movement. “The conﬂict over 9/11 truth,” sheargues,“isabattleoverfacts,knowledge,whoknew,whoknows,

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 37 andwhohastherighttoknow”(2009,p.146). Sheframesherdiscus- sion with the following question, “So does the push to uncover the truth of September 11 continue the democratic project of undermin- ing the sovereign privilege of secrecy by making hidden knowledge public?”(p.146). Dean’sanswerworkswithinthemilieuofwhatshe calls “communicative capitalism,” an environment of media ubiquity in which “subjects feel themselves to be active [blogging, posting videos on YouTube, etc.] even as their very activity reinforces the status quo. Revelation can be celebrated because it is ineﬀectual. Its results are medialogical, just another contribution to the circulation of content with little impact on power or policy” (p. 148). Dean is less interested in whether the 9/11 Truth Movement has something to say, and more interested in how it speaks: “The movement associ- ated with 9/11 truth manifests a shift in conspiracy thinking, a shift from questioning to certainty and from a logic of desire to a logic of drive” (p. 148). This new form of articulation is “a new form of psy- chotic discourse” (p. 148). Instead of “hysterical” discourse, which features perennial questioning, the Truth Movement’s “psychotic” discourse, Dean says, is notable for its certainty about the truth, whichsimply requires theability to see it. Like Birchall andBratich, Dean has little to say about the evidence and much to say about the social milieu in which the current speculation exists. As prob- lematic, her entire discussion frames all manner of 9/11 skepticism as “conspiracy theory,” instead of diﬀerentiating legitimate forms of skepticism. Dean’s analysis is valuable, and it is not my intention to denigrate poststructuralist epistemology — in fact, I very much identify with it — but in the case of 9/11 skepticism, as stigmatized as it is, avoiding the crucial question of whether you believe it is legitimatetoquestiontheveracityofthe9/11CommissionReportfor the more palliative question of how wild-eyed conspiracy theories are articulated invites the charge of “dodging the issue.” MarkFenster,inthesecondeditionofhisseminalbookConspiracy Theories: SecrecyandPowerinAmericanCulture,“describestheemer- genceof9/11asanobjectofconspiratorialintrigueandimagination, and thus oﬀers a snapshot of parts of an emerging set of conspir- acy theories and conspiracy community as they begin to reach full bloom” (2008, p. 236). Like Melnick, Fenster declares that a lack of space conﬁnes him to “a thumbnail description of a sample of the most prominent theories and theorists” (pp. 237–238). Like Melnick and Kellner, Fenster “does not set out to debunk the 9/11 conspiracy theories” (p. 238), but instead directs the reader to an endnote that

38 Michael Truscello recommends the book Debunking 9/11 Myths from Popular Mechan- ics,aswellaswebsitessuchasdebunking911.comand911myths.com (p. 341n15). In other words, the actual reasons Fenster believes all forms of 9/11 skepticism should be considered conspiracy theories are relegated to an endnote that presumes certain sources are al- waysreliableonquestionssurrounding9/11.2 Hispositionon9/11 skepticism is this: I remain skeptical of all of the conspiracy theories described in this chapter and dismissive of the most speculative. I concede, however, that the 9/11 Commission’s oﬃcial account fails to hold culpable individuals and institutions suﬃciently respon- sible for their negligence on and before September 11, and its narrative and explanations (like those of any eﬀort to explain such a complexevent)must relyupon enough anomalous, am- biguous occurrences to make me understand and sympathize with those who are skeptical of the oﬃcial account, even if, based on what I have read, I am not persuaded by the truth community’s conclusions. (p. 238) The endnote to this paragraph provides a lengthy discourse on Fenster’s actual beliefs (p. 342n17). Among them, he sees James Ridgeway’sbook(2005)asthe“bestcritique”ofthe9/11Commission Report. He compliments Bratich’s book, but acknowledges that it “eschews evaluation of the [9/11 Truth] movement’s claims, as well as those of the 9/11 Commission and other state and mainstream private actors that oﬀer the dominant explanation of the attacks” (p. 342). Fenster describes Bratich’s position as an “unqualiﬁed ag- nosticism,” and describes himself as “not as sanguine” as Bratich “that the movement’s single-minded absorption with ﬁnding an elu- sive truth about 9/11 lends itself to political linkages with the left beyond a shared, generalized hatred of the Bush administration and a deep skepticism about the exercise of state power” (p. 342).3 In 2The Popular Mechanics book, for example, received a book-length response from Pro- fessorDavidRayGriﬃn(Debunking9/11Debunking: AnAnswertoPopularMechanics and Other Defenders of the Oﬃcial Conspiracy Theory). While not all of Griﬃn’s criti- cismsofthePopularMechanicsbookaresound,inmyopinion,someofhiscriticisms are legitimate. In other words, it is insuﬃcient to direct the reader to a problematic textforanswers. ThePopularMechanicsbookisdeeplyﬂawedandoftenrhetorically disingenuous. 3 It is worth noting that Bratich and Fenster engaged in an illuminating discussion

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 39 total, Fenster’s position speaks to a common discomfort with the va- rietyofpoliticalaﬃliationsrepresentedinthe9/11TruthMovement. Most of this new chapter in the second edition of Conspiracy Theo- ries, however, is devoted to a close reading of Kean and Hamilton’s Without Precedent, which articulates the rhetorical ways in which theytried to frame theReport ascomprehensiveandaccurateand not another Warren Commission. Fenster also spends considerable time critiquing the popular ﬁlm Loose Change. Ultimately, Fenster’s conclusion about the 9/11 Commission is deeply problematic and makes me wonder if the publication of Philip Shenon’s The Commis- sion, whichappeared inthesame yearasConspiracy Theories, would changehisopinion?4 Fensterwrites: “The9/11Commission’sReport and its eﬀorts to engage and address the public, imperfect though theymayhavebeen, representavastimprovementovertheWarren Commission’s eﬀorts, and may have been as good and eﬀective as any independent commission can be” (p. 268). This statement can too easily be read as a fatalistic apology for State malfeasance and negligence. A more diplomatic reading, however, might interpret Fenster’scommentasaformofpolitical“realism,”and,indeed,many observershavedeclaredthe9/11TruthMovementinvalidbecauseit doesnotaccountforthecomplexitiesandinevitableincompetence of large bureaucracies. I disagree with this assessment, and what follows is a survey of what I consider to be compelling evidence for a legitimate 9/11 skepticism. The 9/11 Commission and Its Report Clearly, acommonopinionamongcultural studiespractitioners was that the 9/11 Commission Report was not problematic enough to demand another investigation, or at least that the omissions and distortions could not possibly contain information that would dra- maticallytransformtheoverarchingnarrativesetdownbytheBush Administration. Or perhaps most academics are simply unaware of each other’s work in the International Journal of Communication (Vol. 3, 2009) and Journal of Communication Inquiry (Vol. 33 No. 3, July 2009). I recommend these dialogues to interested readers. 4Professor Fenster was given the opportunity to respond to this article publicly, but he declined.

40 Michael Truscello of the continuing developments in 9/11 research. Just how compro- misedwasthe9/11CommissionReport? Itisaquestionthatcannotbe answeredadequatelyinthislimitedspace;however,someomissions and anomalies can be established. At least two problematic features oftheoﬃcial9/11narrativebecomevisibleafteracursoryreadingof theevidence: ﬁrst, theBushAdministrationexplicitlyattemptedto deny the victims’ families and the American public an independent investigation of 9/11; and second, the commission that was even- tually established was in no wayindependent ofthe White House, andits“inquiry”wasnottheformofcriminalinvestigationanevent such as 9/11 requires; consider, for example, that most witnesses before theCommissionwerenottestifyingunderoath. Infact, the composition and execution ofthe 9/11 Commission ran counterto itsstatedmission,whichwas“toprovidethefullestpossibleaccount of the events surrounding 9/11” (9/11 CR, 2004, p. xvi). Its stated missionwasparadoxical,becauseitalsoincludedthedeclarationnot “to assign individual blame” (p. xvi); the latter declaration makes it inherently impossible to “provide the fullest possible account.” Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised the administration would release a white paper outlining the evidence of Osama bin Laden’s complicity in the attacks. “His guilt is going to be very obvious to the world,” Powell said (quoted in “Evidence,” 2001). The white paper never arrived. Five years later theFBI announcedithad“nohardevidence”toconnectbinLadento the 9/11 attacks, and no indictment for the crimes of 9/11 had been issued against him (Muckraker Report, 2006). The “trail” in the hunt for bin Laden had “run cold,” according to American and Pakistani oﬃcials (MSNBC, 2007), and the CIA oﬃcially closed the unit devoted to searching for bin Laden (Mazzetti, 2006). According to Richard Clarke in Against All Enemies, Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network were the primary suspects in the 9/11 attacks by 10 a.m. themorningofSeptember11,beforeFlight93hadcrashed,basedon names from the ﬂight manifests (Clarke, 2004, p. 13); before Flight 77hitthePentagon,televisionnewswasalreadydeliveringaproﬁle of bin Laden and why he may have orchestrated the attacks. Bin Laden’spublicreactiontotheattackswasstrange,givenhis repeated public vows to attack America for grievances related to its support for Israel and the presence of American troops on Muslim holy land in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden denied any role in the 9/11 attacks on three occasions, stating, “I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 41 planned by people for personal reasons” (quoted in CNN, 2001). In the Pakistani paper Ummat he stated, “The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system, but are dissenting against it.” He speciﬁcally identiﬁed as possible suspects “intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year.” On December 14, 2001, the American government released video tapes it allegedly found in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which purport to show bin Laden confessing to the crimes of 9/11. A week later, Dr. AbdelElM.HusseinitoldGermantelevision,“Ihavecarefullyexam- inedthePentagon’stranslation. Thistranslationisveryproblematic. Atthemostimportantplaceswhereitisheldtoprovetheguiltofbin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic” (quoted in DC Indymedia, 2001). Dr. Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg, added: “The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear butthatcannotbeheardonthetapenomatterhowmanytimesyou listen to it.” Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University’s Religious Studies program and editor of Messagesto the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, called the tapes “bogus” (quoted in Barrett, 2007). Veteran journalist Eric Margolis (2010), who met bin Laden in Afghanistan before 9/11, called the tapes “clumsy fakes” and “told CNN viewers [bin Laden] was not the man in the tapes.” Of course the tapes may be authentic, but questions remain: Why would a world-famous terrorist with a declared vendetta against the United States publicly declare his innocence in the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil, if he alone actually orchestrated this terrorist masterstroke? Can the US government provide proof of the provenance and chain of custody of the confession video? So far it has not. According to the Washington Post, in 2010 a former CIA oﬃcial revealedthattheagency’sIraq Operation’sGrouphadactuallycre- ated “a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campﬁre swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys,” part of an eﬀort to portray bin Laden as a pedophile. “The actors were drawn from ‘some of us darker- skinned employees,’” a CIA employee said (quoted in Stein, 2010). ThisrevelationofafakebinLadentape,inadditiontoalonghistory of US intelligence complex duplicity, reinforces the plausibility of

42 Michael Truscello suspicion that the bin Laden video in which he discusses 9/11 could be a fake. FormanyAmericanstheconfessiontapewasalltheevidencethey would need to connect bin Laden to 9/11, but the victims’ families foughtforoverayeartohaveanindependentinvestigation. Perhaps one of the most incredible facts about the post-9/11 era is that the sitting president during the worst terror attacks in the country’s history actually fought the families of the victims not to investigate the attacks with an independent commission. On January 24, 2002, Congressional and White House sources told CNN that “President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. . . to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11”(Bash,Karl,andKing,2002). OnMay23,2002,thePresidentpub- licly announced his opposition to the formation of an independent commission (CBS News, 2002). The White House then stalled the cre- ation of an independent commission, only relenting 441 days after 9/11. Senator Daschle had heard from Senator Trent Lott that the eﬀortstoblockthe9/11Commissionlegislationwereorchestrated by top Bush aide Karl Rove (Shenon, 2008, p. 29); in conﬂict with his commitment to the 9/11 Commission, executive director Philip ZelikowmaintainedcontactwithRovewhilethecommissionwasin progress (p. 173). Commissioner John Lehman said Rove was “very much involved” with the commission, and was “the quarterback for dealing with the commission” (pp. 175–176). On November 27, 2002, President Bush signed the 9/11 Com- mission Bill into law, and nominated Henry Kissinger as the com- mission’s chairman. Considered by some to be a war criminal, Kissinger’s nomination was an exceedingly cynical gesture from the White House. Kissinger was a frequent adviser to Bush and Ch- eney, an insider with an extensive history of secrecy and cover-ups. Hesoonresigned,alongwithvicechairmanGeorgeMitchell,dueto “conﬂicts of interest.” Their replacements also had conﬂicts of inter- est, but noneresignedfromthecommissionbecause ofthem. Some commissioners worked for law ﬁrms that represented the airlines impacted on 9/11, several commissioners had strong ties to defense contractors and ﬁnancial consulting ﬁrms, and others had legally represented the upper echelons ofthe Democraticand Republican parties (Arnold, 2003). Chair Thomas Kean had a signiﬁcant connection to a Saudi oil company, and vice chair Lee Hamilton “failed to show the virtues of independence and thoroughness both as chair of the Select Com-

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 43 mittee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran in 1987, and again in 1992 as chair of the congressional task force charged with investigationofthe ‘October Surprise’ allegationsagainstthe Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980” (Sacks, 2006, p. 233). Hamilton’s record in such investigations shows a willingness to deﬂect poten- tially damaging examinations of the Bush family. Hamilton, though a Democratic Party member, had lengthy friendships with top neo- conservatives in the Bush Administration, including Dick Cheney and DonRumsfeld, who “let others in theWhiteHouseknow that Hamilton could be trusted” (Shenon, 2008, p. 177). Cheney and Hamilton formed a close bond when Hamilton led the House investigation of Iran-Contra after the arms-for- hostages aﬀair was exposed. Cheney was the ranking Repub- lican. Hamilton had known Rumsfeld even longer. Rumsfeld served in the House from neighboring Illinois from 1962 to 1969. . . They were still close friends when Cheney and Rums- feld returned to power in Washington in 2001. . . Hamilton also had a good relationship with Cheney’s powerful White House counsel, David Addington, who had worked for Cheney in Congress. (p. 33) Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director, also “had goodfriendsonRumsfeld’sstaﬀ,mostimportantlyStevenCambone, theundersecretaryofdefenseforintelligence,[who]wasRumsfeld’s most trusted aide” (p. 205). Even Henry Kissinger, the deposed chair of the 9/11 Commission, had representation on the commission in theformofJohnLehman,whoservedunderKissingerattheNational Security Council, and who was a member of the neoconservative think tank,theProjectfortheNew AmericanCentury, alongwith Cheney, Rumsfeld, Cambone, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and several others in the Bush Administration. Thus, the upper echelon of neoconservative advisers in the Bush administration was deeply entwined with members of the 9/11 Commission. TheconnectionbetweentheCommissionandtheneoconsappears to be more than superﬁcial, when one considers the ﬁnal text. For example, Paul Wolfowitz recalled in an April 2004 speech at the Aspen Institute how he and Donald Rumsfeld instructed the 9/11 Commission to frame its report in the neoconservative rhetoric of the “existential threat”:

44 Michael Truscello WhenDonRumsfeldandIhadlunchwithmembersofthe9/11 commission recently, one member asked what could they do to ensure that their report would make a real diﬀerence, that it would be read ﬁve or ten years from now, instead of just ﬁled away on a dusty shelf. . . What I told them, basically, was to write something similarto George Kennan’s long telegram or PaulNitze’sNSC-68. . . [NSC-68]isamodeloflong-termstrategic planning. NSC-68 addressed not only importance of a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, but also the importance of the ideological orientation of the Soviet Union. Paul recognized the Soviet ideology as an inherent evil. And when combined with a for- midable military capability, that ideology became an existential threat. (Wolfowitz, 2004; italics mine) TheCommissionpresentsal-Qaedainpreciselytheseexaggerated andManicheanterms,whilerepeatedlyandmisleadinglydescribing al-Qaeda as a “worldwide organization” (911CR, 2004, p. 55), “a hier- archical top-down group with deﬁned positions, tasks, and salaries” (p. 67).5 President Bush and Vice President Cheney, when pressed to talk to the 9/11 Commission, would eventually do so, but not under oath, only if they could be interviewed together, only with speciﬁc members of the commission, and under the condition that no notes would be taken during the session. When Senator Max Cleland left the commission to take a job in the private sector, he called the commission “a national scandal” (quoted in Boehlert, 2003). The scandal did not end with the belated start, the selection of commissioners, or the limited allotment of funds (initially $3 mil- 5Several (unlikely) sources reject this depiction of al-Qaeda. For example, former CIA executive director “Buzzy” Krongard rejects the notion of a “top-down” organiza- tion: “Al-Qaida, in my opinion, is an amalgamation, a loose amalgamation of people who share an antipathy to the United States and all Western values. Some of them hate each other, some of them get along, some of them are very, very small splinter groups, but it’s not like IBM, with an organizational chart with black lines and chains of command and things like that” (quoted in Koppelman, 2007). According to Pro- fessor Andrew Silke, Director of Terrorism Studies at the University of East London, al-Qaeda“doesnothaveaclearhierarchy,militarymindsetandcentralizedcommand. At best, al-Qaeda is a network of aﬃliated groups sharing religious and ideological backgrounds, but which often interact sparingly” (Silke, 2003). And the RAND corpo- ration,thepsychoticmindoftheUS military-industrialcomplex,referstoal-Qaeda as a “contested concept” (Rabasa et. al., 2006, p. 26). The deﬁnition of al-Qaeda is also complicated by its history of support from Western intelligence agencies (Curtis, 2010; Dreyfus, 2005; Labévière, 2000).

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 45 lion, andreluctantlyincreased to$12milliontwomonthslater; by comparison, over$60 millionwasspenttryingto impeachPresident Clinton). By the admission of Kean and Hamilton, the 9/11 Commis- sion was “set up to fail” (Kean and Hamilton, 2006, p. 14). Of course, they believe the Commission was eventually a success, despite con- siderable obfuscation from the White House and the Republican House of Representatives in an election year. The appointment of executive director Philip Zelikow was an insurmountable conﬂict of interest. The “importance” of the executive director position, say Kean and Hamilton, “cannot be overstated” (Kean and Hamilton, 2006, p. 22). Zelikow selected staﬀ, and had considerable control over the ﬁnal edit of the report. According to Paul Sperry, “Though hehasnovote,(Zelikow)arguablyhasmoreswaythananymember, including the chairman. Zelikow picks the areas of investigation, thebrieﬁngmaterials,thetopicsforhearings,thewitnesses,andthe lines of questioning for witnesses. . . In eﬀect, he sets the agenda andrunstheinvestigation”(quotedinSacks,2005). KeanandHamil- ton state they “seriously only considered one candidate,” who was recommended by the White House. In fact, “Zelikow was selected with little consultation with the rest of the committee, but several commissioners had concerns about the kind of inquiry he would lead” (Kean and Hamilton, 2006, p. 35). Zelikow’sproﬁlealarmedtheFamilySteeringCommitteesomuch thattheyrequestedheresign. Inadditiontobeingaprofessorofhis- toryatHarvardandtheUniversityofVirginia,Zelikowco-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice, and was later appointed as a senior policy advisor to Rice at the US Department of State; he served in theUS DepartmentofStateunderthesecondReaganadministration, and joined the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush; heco-authored the2002National Security Strategyfor President George W. Bush, for whom he was also a member of the transitionteamfollowingthe2000election; hewasamemberofthe ForeignIntelligenceAdvisoryBoardfrom2001to2003;andZelikow was a member of the Carter-Ford Commission on Federal Electoral Reform,membersofwhichdescribedhimas“arrogantandsecretive” (Shenon, 2008, p. 59). Even Henry Kissinger knew Zelikow from his work at the University of Virginia and Harvard (p. 61). Bryan Sacks also notes an often-obscured item on Zelikow’s resume: his directorship of the Aspen Strategy Group (ASG) in the 1990s. Emer- itusmembersofthe ASG includeRice, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, and former New York Times re-

46 Michael Truscello porter Judith Miller (Sacks, 2005). Zelikow neglected to mention several compromising experiences on the resume he gave Kean and Hamilton: his role on the Bush 2000 transition team; his part in the review and eventual demotion of counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke; and his authorship of the Bush pre-emptive war doctrine in 2002 (Shenon, 2008, p.170). With Zelikow as the executivedirector of the 9/11 Commission, the White House and the national security complex were investigating themselves. As Richard Clarke said on the appointment of Zelikow, “The ﬁx is in” (quoted in Shenon, 2008, p.63). Most of the commission staﬀ, recruited by Zelikow, were chosen becausetheyhadhigh-levelsecurityclearances,whichwouldenable accesstoessentialdocumentsandtherebyquickentheinvestigation. According to Ernest May — a professor of American History at Har- vard, occasional consultant to the Oﬃce of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, and other agencies, and a senior ad- visor to the 9/11 Commission — once a premium was placed on security clearance, there was a preference for “people who could be detailedfromnationalsecurityagenciesorwhohadbeenonthestaﬀ ofoneofthecongressionalintelligenceoversightcommittees. Ofthe ﬁfty-odd men and women who counted as professional rather than administrativestaﬀ,atleasthalfhadsuchbackgrounds”(May,2005). All of the commission employees had to be cleared by the FBI and CIA to handle secret information (Kean and Hamilton, 2006, p. 34). Thispreferenceforstaﬀfromintelligenceagencies, framedby Kean and Hamilton as a vital component of an expedient investigation, ensured nothing incriminating of these agencies would appear in the report. The “bipartisan” composition of the Commission — with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans — ensured nothing terribly damaging to members of either party would be included in thereport. Informationthatrequiredthehighestsecurityclearances was meted out by the White House only to select members of the commission. KeanandHamiltonexplain: “TheWhiteHousewanted strict limitations on both of these fronts — limiting staﬀ with access to White House documents to just two or three people, limiting the commissioners with access to certain materials to just the chair and vice-chair, and restricting the amount of notes the staﬀ could bring back to the 9/11 Commission’s oﬃce” (p. 72). Forexample,afterabattleoveraccesstoseveralyearsofPresiden- tial Daily Brieﬁngs (PDB), the White House agreed to release only those PDBs pertaining to select topics, and that larger pool of PDBs

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 47 would be seen only by commissioner Jamie Gorelick and Zelikow, and they would decide which PDBs to show other commissioners (p.98). Ultimately,alloftheinformationcontainedinthereporthad to be cleared by the White House (p. 134). And should something contentious escape the initial ﬁlters of agency and party aﬃliation, and White House regulations, Zelikow was the ﬁnal arbiter of what was included in the report. As May wrote, “no language appeared anywhere in the ﬁnal text unless Zelikow or I or both of us — and allthecommissioners—hadacceptedit”(May,2005). Withsomany layersofimplicit censorshipofinformation regarding intelligence agencies, political parties, corporate interests, and the White House itself, there was no need for an explicit cover-up. The commission was structurally incapable of being seriously critical of the govern- ment or the national security complex. As 9/11 widow Lori van Auken remarked during the commission hearings, “We [the Family SteeringCommittee]feelthattheCommissionalreadyhasitsreport written. It’s our sense today that they decided early on what they wanted the public to know, and then geared the hearings to ﬁt this pre-conceived script” (quoted in Lance, 2004, p. 3). In May’s account of the Commission’s work, he oﬀers some eu- phemistic criticism of how the composition of the Commission in- ﬂected the ﬁnal report: “Most troubling to me,” he writes, “the re- port is probably too balanced. Its harshest criticism is directed at institutions and procedures, particularly the CIA, the FBI, and com- municationslinkswithinthecounterterroristcommunity. Butmany of the staﬀ had worked in these or other national security agencies. Theyfeltloyaltothemandsomeofthemexpectedtoreturntowork there. Collective drafting led to the introduction of passages that oﬀset criticism of an agency with words of praise. Not all these words were deserved” (May, 2005). May’s criticism of the report’s treatmentoftheintelligenceagenciesisunquestionablyunderstated because, even after what was allegedly the worst intelligence fail- ure in American history, no one within the intelligence community was ﬁred or demoted as a result of demonstrable failures pertaining to 9/11; in fact, principal players were actually rewarded. George Tenet,the Director of CentralIntelligence forthe CIA on9/11, was awardedtheMedalofFreedombyPresidentBushin2004. InAugust 2011, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke accused Tenet, Cofer Black, and Richard Blee of the CIA of “knowingly withhold- ing intelligence from the Bush and Clinton White House, the FBI, Immigrationand theStateand Defense Departmentsabouttwoof

48 Michael Truscello the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the United States more than a year before the attacks” (Leopold, 2011). Porter Goss — a former clandestine CIA operativeandchair oftheHouse IntelligenceCom- mittee who co-sponsored the USA PATRIOT Act and co-chaired the Joint 9/11 Intelligence Inquiry — had breakfast on 9/11 with Senator Bob Graham and Pakistani ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed. At this meeting, the three were allegedly discussing terrorism from Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden in particular (Risen, 2002). Gen. Ahmed was identiﬁed by an October 2001 Times of India report as the individual who authorized British-born terrorist Ahmad Saeed Omar Sheikh to wire transfer $100,000 to hijacker Mohammed Atta. The FBI would only conﬁrm that it “traced the origin of the funding for 9/11 back to ﬁnancial accounts in Pakistan” (Joshi, 2003). Gen. Ahmed resignedshortly after the Timesof India story appeared. The 9/11CommissionReportdescribedtheoriginsoftheﬁnancingforthe 9/11 attacks as “of little practical signiﬁcance” (911CR, 2004, p. 172). Porter Goss was named Director of the CIA in 2004.6 6The reported machinations of intelligence agencies before, during, and after 9/11 pro- videcompellingbutincompleteglimpsesofpossibleforeknowledgeoforparticipation intheattacksbythusfarunindictednationsorfactions. Accordingtothe9/11Commis- sion Report (2004), President Bush received more than 40 “intelligence articles in the PDBs[PresidentialDailyBrieﬁngs]fromJanuary20toSeptember10,2001,thatrelated toBinLadin”(p.254),includingtheinfamousAugust6,2001PDB titled“BinLadinDe- termined to Strike in US” (p. 261). Several countries oﬀered warnings of forthcoming attacks against the United States, prior to 9/11 (see the following summary: http: //www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essaytheytriedtowarnus). As noted at the aforementioned website, “So many countries warned the US: Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, and Russia. Yet the two countries in the best position to know about the 9/11 plot — Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — apparently didn’t give any warning at all.” The intelligence agents of at least three of America’s allies — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel — demonstrated suspicious behaviour before and on 9/11. For example, 28 pages from a congressional intelligence report on 9/11 were redacted because they allegedly detailed connections between the Saudi government and the hijackers (Johnston, 2003). 15 of the 19 hijackers, and of course Osama bin Laden, possessed Saudipassports. ThetransferoffundsbetweentheSaudiAmbassadortotheUS,Prince Bandar bin Sultan (known as “Bandar Bush,” because of his close ties to the Bush family),andhiswifeandatleasttwoofthehijackersoveraperiodofseveralmonths was the subject of much interest during the 9/11 investigation. Prince Bandar would later claim that Saudi intelligence was “actively following” the future hijackers (CNN, “Ex-Saudiambassador,”2007). PerhapshewasreferringtoSaudispyOmaral-Bayoumi, who befriended two of the West Coast hijackers he accidentally met at a restaurant (911CR, 2004, p. 217)? Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, was also implicated. Given that Omar Saeed Sheikh was reportedly a “protected asset” of the ISI, argues author Mark Curtis,“itisbarely credible thatthe ISI didnot have foreknowledgeof 9/11”(Curtis,

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 49 FBI agents who obstructed the investigation of alleged al-Qaeda activities were also promoted in the wake of 9/11. Marion Bow- man, the FBI’s National Security Law Unit deputy general counsel, 2010, p. 252). In addition to the story of Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed and Omar Saeed Sheikh mentioned above, the former security chief for Pakistan Prime Minister Be- nazir Bhutto acted as Osama bin Laden’s “handling oﬃcer” for the ISI (Raman, 2007). The ISI has a lengthy association with the CIA, and was part of a collaboration of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan sending jihadists to ﬁght the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s (Dreyfuss, 2005, p. 273). During the same period that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan collaborated to ﬁght the Soviets, Israel sold arms to Iran (the “Iran-Contra” aﬀair). Israel was also, like the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, involved in supporting fundamentalist Islam; for example, “beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader oftheBrotherhood,increatingHamas, betting thatits Islamiccharacter would weaken the PLO” (Dreyfuss, 2005, p. 191). Agents of Israel were also reported committing suspicious activities on 9/11. The suspicion surrounding these activities is confusing, since in the weeks prior to 9/11 Israel reportedly issued two warnings to the US government about impending attacks. Nonetheless, Israeli agents were reported conducting bizarre behaviour on 9/11. For example, about two hours before the attack, two employees of Odigo, Inc., an Israeli company with its headquarters two blocks from the World Trade Center, received warning of the impending attacks (“Instant messages,” 2001). The FBI reportedly investigated the matter, but no results oftheinvestigationhavebeendisclosed. AftertheﬁrstplanestruckWTC1,awoman in New Jersey witnessed several men on top of a warehouse celebrating and taking picturesofthemselvesinfrontoftheburningtower. Themen,ﬁveintotal,werelater arrested and their photos conﬁscated. Their photos included a picture of one of the men holding a lighter aloft in front of the burning tower. At least two of the men were later identiﬁed as Israeli spies. After being deported,they appeared on Israeli televisionandproclaimed,“Ourpurposewastodocumenttheevent”(Ketcham,2007). Afewdaysafter9/11theownerofthecompanywheretheIsraelispiesworked,Urban Moving Systems, ﬂed the country. The spies were deﬁnitely part of an intelligence gathering operation; however, no evidence of their involvement in the 9/11 plot has been discovered. Skeptics often note the fact that many members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) think tank, a group committed to a vision of a new Pax Americana in the 21st century, had deep ties to right-wing politics in Israel. All of this evidence sounds compelling, but none of it establishes deﬁnitive proof of Israeli involvement with 9/11. At best, skeptics can say there is contentious evidence suggesting potentialforeknowledge of orinvolvementin the 9/11 plot by members of Pakistani, Saudi, and Israeli intelligence. However, it must be stressed that no proof of direct involvement exists. In addition, to single out one of these countriesasalikelyculpritisfoolishsincesuspiciousevidenceseeminglyimplicating all of them in 9/11 exists. Suspicion of Israel has garnered the most attention from critics of 9/11 conspiracy theories, often leading to accusations of anti-Semitism; the Anti-Defamation League issued two rebuttals to the incriminations of Israel (ADL 2003, 2006). The fundamental problem for researchers, however, is the opacity of intelligence agencies in every country. We may never know the whole story of 9/11 simply because of the role secrecy plays in the operation of the State.

50 Michael Truscello had refused a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant for the Zacharias Moussaoui investigation. The 9/11 Congressional InquiryaccusedBowman’sunitofgivingMinneapolisFBI agents“in- excusably confused and inaccurate information” that was “patently false” (Grow, 2002). In January 2003, Bowman was awarded a pres- idential citation and a raise. Dave Frasca, head of the FBI’s Radical FundamentalistUnit, wasalsoaccusedofobstructinginvestigations that might have uncovered the 9/11 plot. Frasca suppressed the infamous “Phoenix memo,” a letter from Phoenix oﬃce FBI agent Kenneth Williams on July 10, 2001 that warned of supporters of bin Laden attending American ﬂight schools. Frasca was promoted not long after 9/11. A total of 13 veteran national security experts turnedwhistleblowersinthewakeof9/11,includingSibelEdmonds,7 RobertWright, andColeenRowley(oneofTIME magazine’sPersons of the Year for 2002), after their testimony was ignored by the 9/11 Commission. Perhaps May would also describe the Commission’s treatment of theFAAandNORADas“toobalanced”? KeanandHamiltonrevealthat the commissionconsideredlegalaction againstthe FAA and NORAD, when it was apparent senior oﬃcials “made statements about the timelineof9/11 thatwerelaterproventobeinaccurate”(Keanand Hamilton, 2006, p. 127). Currently, at least three contradictory time- lines for FAA and NORAD responses on 9/11 exist. “Fog of war could explain why some people were confused on the day of 9/11,” argue Kean and Hamilton (2006), “but it could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations, and public testimony by FAA and NORAD oﬃcials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue” (p. 261). Essential information contained in the 9/11 Commission Report, informationthatestablishesaconnectionbetweenOsamabinLaden and9/11,isderivedfromreportsofallegedinterrogationsofal-Qaeda detainees by US intelligence. The commissioners never met the de- tainees, werenot allowed tosubmit questions to the interrogators, andcouldnotcorroboratesomeoftheevidenceattributedtodetainee confessions (9/11 CR, 2004, p. 146). Kean and Hamilton admit where 7Edmonds is now the most gagged person in American history. She has stated con- cerning the evidence she is forbidden to discuss, “But I can tell that once, and if, and when this issue gets to be, under real terms, investigated, you will be seeing certain people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally.”AbloggernamedLukeRylandhasprovidedthebestcoverageofEdmonds’ case: http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com.

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 51 they could not corroborate information, “it was left to the reader to consider the credibility of the source — we had no opportunity to do so” (Kean and Hamilton, 2006, p. 124). May says the Commission “neverhadfull conﬁdenceinthe interrogationreports ashistorical sources” (May, 2005). According to a document discovered by the ACLU in 2010, Cheney’s counsel David Addington, Attorney General JohnAshcroft,DefenseSecretaryDonaldRumsfeld,andCIA Director George Tenet had warned the Commission in January 2004 that its request to question al-Qaeda detainees was a “line” it “should not cross” (quoted in Kapur, 2010). In 2008 the CIA revealed that it had tortured three al-Qaeda de- taineesincludingalleged9/11mastermindKhalidSheikhMohammed (KSM),whichfurtherobscurestheveracityofcommentsattributed tothesesuspects(BBC News,2008). KSM wasallegedlywaterboarded 183timesinonemonth(Shane,2009),andtheCIA threatenedtorape hismotherandkillhischildren(Landers,2009). TranscriptsofKSM’s interrogations released in June 2009 noted KSM admitting he“[made] up stories” when tortured by his captors (Barrett, 2009). The CIA admitted it destroyed at least two videotapes of al-Qaeda detainee interrogations, a clear case of obstruction of the 9/11 Commission (Mazzetti,2007). MSNBC conductedaninvestigationandfoundthat more than 25% of the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission Report were sourced to tortured testimony (Windrem and Limjoco, 2008); sig- niﬁcantly, most of these footnotes refer to chapters 5 and 7, which containtheallegationsagainstbinLadenanddetailsoftheal-Qaeda plot. When KSM allegedly confessed to orchestrating 9/11 and 30 other terrorplotsbeforeamilitarytribunalinMarch2007,noreportersor lawyerswereallowedatthehearing. PresidentBushsignedintolaw the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the President to suspend habeas corpus in the detention of an “enemy combatant,” and it allows for tortured testimony and hearsay to be admitted as evidence in a tribunal. The unconstitutional nature of the Act has already cast doubt on KSM’s tribunal, among others. For example, former CIA oﬃcer Robert Baer wrote in TIME magazine, On the face of it, KSM, as he is known inside the government, comes across as boasting, at times mentally unstable. It’s also clearheismakingthingsup.I’mtoldbypeopleinvolvedinthe investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl’s execution but was in fact not the

52 Michael Truscello person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM’s role. And if KSM did indeed exaggeratehisroleinthePearlmurder,itraisesthequestionof just what else hehas exaggerated, or outrightfabricated. Just as importantly, there is an absence of collateral evidence that would support KSM’s story. (Baer, 2007) Even murdered journalist Daniel Pearl’s family does not believe KSM’s confession (Ross, 2007). The skepticism was widespread, and sometimes questioned the style as well as the content of the con- fessions: for example, while the redacted confessions are rambling and incoherent, a mess of broken English, a 2003 article from The Guardian says KSM “spoke very good English” (Gunaratna, 2003). What if KSM turns out to have the same credibility as a source as once highly-regarded detainee Abu Zubaydah? Zubaydah was touted by the Bush Administration as a “high-value” detainee, a “number2 or3” person in al-Qaeda, a conﬁdant of OsamabinLaden, andevenasonewhoplanned9/11. In2010,theUSJusticeDepartment backedawayfromalloftheseclaims(Leopold,2010). Zubaydah,like KSM,wastorturedrepeatedly. Thevideosofhistorturesessionswere among those destroyed by the CIA. What the 9/11 Commission used as primary sources for the most important chapters of its report were, inotherwords, allegationsfromdeepwithin thesecretiveand unethicalvoidofthenationalsecuritystatebasedonstatementsthat may have been made by a man who was tortured 183 times in one month,andanothermanwhowasinitiallytoutedasamemberofthe al-Qaedamanagementteambutlaterdiscardedasanobodywithno connectiontotheplanningof9/11. InApril2011theObamaAdmin- istration announced a military tribunal, instead of a civilian court, would try KSM. The credibility of the primary source in the 9/11 case will likely remain in dispute and beyond transparent investigation. 9/11 Skepticism and American Popular Culture There are several examples of 9/11 skepticism in American pop- ular culture of the past ten years. For example,in the 2006 version of Casino Royale, James Bond encounters terrorists who use the ﬁ- nancial markets to proﬁt from their terrorism. A banker named Le Chiﬀre short-sells companies against whom he later orchestrates terrorist attacks, a plot element that clearly echoes the suspicious

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 53 put-options trading on the airlines aﬀected by the 9/11 attacks. Al- legations of “insider trading” on the 9/11 attacks were dismissed as conspiracy theories, and the 9/11 Commission would eventually declare, after an SEC investigation, “that the apparently suspicious [trades prior to 9/11] consistently proved innocuous” (9/11CR, 2004, p. 499n130). However, market insiders just after 9/11, and multiple academics who studied the data years later, determined the suspi- cious trading had to be the result of insider foreknowledge of the attacks. While the Commission attributed most of the trading to “a singleU.S.-basedinstitutionalinvestorwithnoconceivabletiestoal Qaeda,” it did not name this investor, nor did it explain why some- one with foreknowledge of the attacks had to be tied to al-Qaeda. Forewarnings of the attacks were so common in the months leading up to September 2001 — for example, the Report says “there were more than 40 intelligence articles in the PDBs [Presidential Daily Brieﬁngs]fromJanuary20toSeptember10,2001,thatrelatedtoBin Ladin” (9/11 CR, 2004, p. 254) — that chapter 8 of the Report is titled with George Tenet’s famous remark that“the system was blinking red.” Several foreign intelligence agencies had sent warnings to US intelligence prior to 9/11. Other forms of potential foreknowledge havebeendebatedbyskeptics,buthereIwillfocusonthepossibility that “insider trading” capitalized on foreknowledge of the attacks. Thepurposeofthisbriefdetouristodemonstratethattherearecases of skepticism pertaining to 9/11, such as the suspicion of pre-9/11 insider trading, that are supported by substantial and credible evi- dence, and clearly do not deserve to be classiﬁed as fringe-dwelling conspiracy theories. Several countries, including Belgium, Britain, Canada, Cyprus, France, Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Monte Carlo, launched investigations into suspicious stock market trading immediately prior to 9/11. Extremely unusual volumes of put options were pur- chased, betting on the decline of the stocks associated with the two airlines aﬀected on 9/11, United Airlines and American Airlines; for example, CBS News reported “a jump in UAL put options 90 times abovenormalbetweenSeptember6andSeptember10,and285times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack. . . [as well as] a jump in American Airlines put options 60 times above normal on the day before the attacks” (quoted in Zarembka, 2008, p. 65). In addition, high volumes of trading on ﬁrms located in the World Trade Center towers were observed. In Germany, central bank pres- ident Ernst Welteke reported that a study conducted by his bank

54 Michael Truscello showed that “there are ever clearer signs that there were activities on international ﬁnancial markets that must have been carried out with the necessary expert knowledge.” The study cites “almost ir- refutable proof of insider trading” (Brinkley-Rogers, Chardy, and Olkon, 2001). “I saw put-call numbers higher than I’ve ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets,” JohnKinnucan,aprincipalofBroadbandResearch,toldtheSanFran- ciscoChronicle(Berthelsen,2001). Evenmoreexpertsintheﬁnancial markets expressed the opinion that millions, perhaps billions, had been stolen based on foreknowledge of the attacks: AccordingtoPhilErlanger, aformerSeniorTechnical Analyst with Fidelity, and founder of a Florida ﬁrm that tracks short selling and options trading, insiders made oﬀ with billions (not mere millions) in proﬁts by betting on the fall of stocks they knew would tumble in the aftermath of the WTC and Pentagon attacks. Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German Parliament, once responsible forthe oversight ofthe German secret services, estimated that proﬁts by insider traders were $15 billion. . . Jonathan Winer, an ABC News Consultant, said ‘it’s absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading coveringtheentireworldfromJapantotheUStoNorthAmerica to Europe.’ (quoted in Zarembka, 2008, p. 64) In addition to the many international bankers who believed the put options trading prior to 9/11 was obviously a case of insider trading, professorof ﬁnance Allen Poteshman studied the evidence and reached a similar conclusion in the peer-reviewed Journal of Business: “the paper concludes that there is evidence of unusual option market activityin the days leading up to September11that is consistent with investors trading on advance knowledge of the attacks”(Poteshman,2006,p.1725). Otheracademicstudiesfollowed. An April 2010 study published by academics from the University of Wisconsin, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the National Univer- sityofSingaporeconcludedthat“abnormaltrading”priortothe9/11 attacks was“consistent with insidersanticipating the 9–11 attacks” (Wong,Thompson,andTeh,2010). AnotherstudypublishedinApril 2010 by academics from the University of Zurich conﬁrmed the re- sults of Poteshman’s study (Chesney et al., 2010, p. 18). In addition to these studies of pre-9/11 trading, members of the German data recovery company, CONVAR, hired to recover hard drive data from

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 55 computers destroyed in the World Trade Center towers speculated to Reuters that illegal market trades were made prior to and during the attacks: Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert at the company, said illegal transfers of more than $100 million might have been made immediately before and during the disaster. “Thereisasuspicionthatsomepeoplehadadvanceknowledgeof theapproximatetimeoftheplanecrashesinordertomoveout amounts exceeding $100 million,” Wagner said. “They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed.” (quoted in Fury, 2008) CONVARreportedlycooperatedwithanFBIinvestigationintothere- coveredharddrives;however,since2001therehasbeennoreporting on the progress of this investigation. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would eventually conclude all of the evidence of insider trading had an “innocuous explanation” (9/11 CR, 2004, p. 499n130). According to the Report, “much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American [Airlines] on September 10 was traced to a speciﬁc U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades” (p. 499n130). Economics professor Paul Zarembka (2008) refutes the “newsletter” explanation for the anom- alies observed: “consideringthevastnumbersofnewslettersbeing put out, it is hardly a surprise to ﬁnd one which made such a rec- ommendation. The issue is whether this recommendation was un- usual, whether opposite recommendationswereor werenot being made, and whether these subscribers were in fact heavily involved inAMR optiontradingon9–10–01”(p.67;emphasisinoriginal). The newsletterreferencedbytheSEC wasissued by Glenn Engelof Gold- man Sachs. In April 2010, the SEC ﬁnally issued its entire report on the matter of insider trading prior to 9/11.8 Unsurprisingly, “inter- views with the ﬁnancial advisers and traders who initiated those [suspicious] transactions found they based their decisions on sev- eral bearish factors already aﬀecting the airline industry, including widely distributed recommendations for short selling from a Cali- fornia newsletter called Options Hotline” (Schuman, 2010). In other 8 http://nsarchive.ﬁles.wordpress.com/2010/04/9-11-sec-report.pdf

56 Michael Truscello words, the traders interviewed by the SEC said they did not act on insider knowledge. Unfortunately, as discovered by a 2009 FOIA re- questsubmittedbyDavidCallahanofSmartCEO,SEC recordsrelated to potential insider trading have since “been destroyed.”9 Other examples of 9/11 skepticism in American popular culture include: the ﬁlm V for Vendetta (2006), about a government that sets a plague on its own people in order to consolidate its power, possessed so many analogies with the narratives of the 9/11 Truth MovementthataYouTubeusernamed“Drural”editedacompilation of scenes from the ﬁlm demonstrating its allusions to 9/11 skepti- cism;10 the TV show Jericho (2006–2008), about Americans dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear attack apparently sponsored by a faction within the US government, portrayed a ﬁctionalized account of“continuityofgovernment”contingenciesthatweredeclaredon 9/11 and never rescinded;11 the ﬁrst season of the TV show Heroes (2006–2010) featured a collection of superheroes trying to prevent a massiveexplosionfromgoingoﬀinNewYorkCity,anevent,weare toldby apowerful businessmanplayedbyMalcolmMcDowell, that willbeusedtorallysupportforaspeciﬁcpoliticalcandidate;season 5 of the TV show 24 (2001–2010) featured a president who plots a terrorist attack on his own country; and Rescue Me (2004–2011), a show about NYC ﬁreﬁghters living in the aftermath of 9/11, features actor and9/11 activist Daniel Sanjata, whoplaysa ﬁreﬁghter who is skeptical of the oﬃcial 9/11 narrative. These examples of pop- ular culture engaging the possibility of a government committing terrorism against its own people, in the aftermath of 9/11 and with the speciﬁc allusions they present, suggest the discussion of 9/11 skepticism,thoughapparentlytoocontroversialforacademicstoad- dress, found a willing audience among producers and consumers of popular ﬁlm and television. No doubt, many viewers were aware of the allusions based on the circulation online of 9/11 skepticism, and 9 http://maxkeiser.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/FOIAresponseGIF1.gif 10http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lkKyaj1GF4 11President Bush declared a “state of emergency” on 9/11 that invoked “continuity of government” policies developed by neoconservatives such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld at least since the Reagan Administration. The “state of emergency,” which essentially suspends the US constitution and activates hundreds of previously dormantlaws,hasbeenrenewedeveryyearsince2001,includingbyPresidentObama in 2010. Professor Peter Dale Scott discusses “continuity of government” measures and 9/11 in his 2007 book The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, pp. 180–245.

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 57 probablymanyviewerssawtheseplotsasechoesof“9/11conspiracy theories.” The diﬀerence between these examples of popular culture appropriation and the academic treatises on 9/11 in American cul- tureisthattheseﬁlmsandTV showsatleastcontainedconsideration of the ideas in circulation online, whereas mainstream academics seemed to believe 9/11 skepticism was either marginal enough to ignore or unconvincing in the forms it has appeared (for example, Griﬃn 2007, 2008, 2010). While I do not agree with most publica- tionsofthe9/11TruthMovementintheirentirety,Ibelieveacademia should be the place where individual claims are taken up, discussed, researched, and evaluated. Popular culture also reﬂected the trauma, paranoia, and fear gen- erated by events related to 9/11, events in its immediate aftermath. In particular, several television shows and ﬁlms in the post-9/11 era used bioterrorism as a key plot point in the wake of the anthrax attacks that came to be known as Amerithrax. Television shows such as 24, Watch Over Me, and ReGenesis, and ﬁlms such as 28 Days Later (2002), Resident Evil (2002), V for Vendetta (2006), and Pan- demic (2007), featured bioterrorismas central narrative devices. The Amerithrax attacks began on September 18, 2001, and continued for several weeks. Targets of anthrax-laced letters included NBC, the New York Post, and Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, early opponents of the proposed USA PATRIOT Act. Initial news reports connected the attacks to al-Qaeda and Iraq. According to a Daily Newsreport,“Intheimmediateaftermathofthe2001anthraxattacks, WhiteHouseoﬃcialsrepeatedlypressedFBI DirectorRobertMueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda” (Meek, 2008). Even though these foreign connections were discounted, as late as February 5, 2003 Secretary of State Colin Powell stated before the United Nations: Less than a teaspoon-full of dry anthrax in an envelope shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001. This forced several hundred people to undergo emergency medical treat- ment and killed two postal workers just from an amount just about this quantity that was inside of an envelope. Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters. If concentrated into this dry form, this amount would be enough to ﬁll tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons.

58 Michael Truscello Sixweekslater,theinvasionofIraqbegan. Thatis,theAmerithrax attacks were used to connect 9/11 with the initiative to invade Iraq. Forensic evidence led FBI investigators to suspects at the biodefense labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland. After wrongfully targeting a virol- ogist named Steven Hatﬁll, the FBI identiﬁed Dr. Bruce Ivins, a re- searcheratFortDetrick,asitsprimarysuspect. Afterbeingharassed by the FBI, Ivins allegedly committed suicide in 2008. The FBI de- claredthecaseclosed. However,thecaseagainstIvinswassospotty that establishment media such as The Wall Street Journal declared “Bruce Ivins Wasn’t the Anthrax Culprit” (Spertzel, 2008) and “The Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved” (Epstein, 2010). Senator Leahy expressed “extreme doubts” about the case (Kane, 2011). A scientiﬁc review ofthe evidence bythe National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded,“[i]Itisnotpossibletoreachadeﬁnitiveconclusionabout the origins of the B. anthracis in the mailings based on the available scientiﬁcevidencealone”(quotedinSheridan,2011). Anthraxfound in a ﬂask in Ivins’ lab “shared genetic similarities with spores in the mailed letters,” but the NAS study concludes this ﬂask “was not the immediate source of spores used in the letters” (Sheridan, 2011). Dr. Henry S. Heine, a scientist at Fort Detrick, said it would have been “impossible” for Ivins to grow the necessary 10 trillion spores with- outanyonenoticing,ataskthatwouldhaverequired8,000labhours morethanIvinsactuallylogged inthemonthsprecedingtheattacks (Matsumoto, 2010). McClatchy journalist Greg Gordon (2011) and Wired magazine writer Noah Shachtman (2011a, 2011b) have also recently explored the holes in the case against Ivins. Academic 9/11 Skepticism The common refrain among progressives and radicals was that the 9/11 Commission Report contained serious omissions and distor- tions, but none serious enough to warrant further investigation or to consider the remote possibility that a faction of the US federal government or military, or of a foreign government, enabled or or- chestrated the attacks. This position is paradoxical: How can one know the omissions are unimportant? And if this event is the pivot on which pre-emptive wars, widespread torture, transgression of the US constitution, and the perpetuation of generational conﬂict turn, then how can the deﬁciencies of the report not be considered

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 59 consequential enough for further review? The Commission’s entire mandate,infact,wasparadoxical: atonce“toprovidethefullestpos- sible account of the events surrounding 9/11,” and yet not “to assign individual blame.” Ultimately, the report blamed “deep institutional failings” (911CR, 2004, 265) and the fact that “no one was ﬁrmly in charge”(p.400). CommissionerBobKerreywouldlateradmit,“There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternativeto what we outlined in our version [of the history of 9/11]” (quoted in Manjoo, 2006). Cofer Black, Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, felt “there were things the commissions [investigating 9/11] wantedtoknowaboutandthingstheydidn’twanttoknowabout” (quoted in Froomkin, 2006). 70 per cent of the questions submitted to thecommissionbytheFamily SteeringCommitteewerenot an- swered, and by 2006 the Jersey Girls questioned “the veracity of the entire Commission’s report” (Brynaert, 2006). The failure of the 9/11Commissiontofulﬁllitsmandateissupportedbythetestimony of victims’ families, the evidence of the report, the statements of the principal investigators, and public opinion. Media pundits and academics who ignore such evidence and instead deride outrageous conspiracytheorieshavesofarchosentoignorethelegitimateforms of skepticism. Recently, however, some academics have managed to voice stri- dentcriticism ofthe oﬃcial 9/11narrativein mainstreamacademic venues. In his 2007 book from the University of California Press, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, Profes- sor Peter Dale Scott declares: “9/11 was the largest homicide by far in American history, yet it has never been adequately investigated” (p.194). Scottcallsthe9/11CommissionReporta“concertedcover-up, partly by omissions and just as important by its cherry-picking of evidence and contrived misrepresentations. More important, there is a consistent pattern in all this: to minimize [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s responsibility for what happened that day and conceal unexplained and disturbing actions by him” (pp. 194–195). Scott devotes two chapters of his book to this “pattern.” Scott’s approach to the omissions and misrepresentations of the Report is measured andresponsible,andhereiterateshisbeliefthat“thepublicstilldoes notknowwhathappenedonSeptember11,2001”(p.231). Hewrites that when asked to summarize his opinion of what happened on 9/11, he answers that he is “sure of one thing only: that there has beenasigniﬁcantcover-upofvitalissues”(p.234). Thisisaperfectly reasonable conclusion, one often derided by mainstream media and

60 Michael Truscello academics because it does not provide an elaborate alternative ex- planation. In 2010 in the American BehavioralScientist, a leading journal in the social sciences for over 50 years, Laurie A. Manwell discussed 9/11 in terms of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD), a concept taken up by Lance deHaven-Smith (2006). In a ranging survey of social psychologicaltheories that explain how and why people have diﬃculty accepting the fact that sometimes representatives of the State commit horrendous crimes against their own citizens, Man- well argues that “social truth and justice movements and reform initiatives need to include strategies for resolving the cognitive dis- sonance and worldview defense reactions that their claims and pro- posals regarding SCADsinevitably provoke”(Manwell, 2010, p. 858). Manwell explores a range of theories that explain why people con- tinuetoclingtoapoliticalsystemthatbetraysthem: “Naïverealism, cognitivedissonance,TMT[TerrorManagementTheory],andSJT[Sys- tem Justiﬁcation Theory] all indicate that what generally supports the persistence of preexisting worldviews — particularly in the face of evidence to the contrary — is uncertainty reduction and threat management”(p.863). Manwellcitesanumberofscholarswhohave demonstrated the inadequacies ofthegovernmentinvestigationand account of 9/11, scholars with book-length analyses of the evidence that are ignored by mainstream cultural studies, before arriving at this provocative conclusion: Topreservewhatis left of North Americandemocracy — and our responsibility for tolerance and restraint toward citizens of nondemocratic states — the culture of fear and political intoler- ance and a governing dissociative mindset of “democracy for thefew”mustbesubjectedtoimmediateseriouspublicscrutiny and debate. This must begin with the thorough and scientiﬁc vetting of evidence that contradicts the U.S. government’s oﬃ- cialaccountof9/11,onwhichtwowarsofaggressionhavebeen predicated, with the possibility of a third looming in the near future; for it was this event, more than any other in modern history, that has precipitated an epochal change in the social psychology of “We, the People.” (p. 870) Not long after Manwell’s article appeared, sociologist David Mac- Gregor and economist Paul Zarembka, who had previously edited a collection of essays examining the evidence for 9/11 (Zarembka,

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 61 2006), published an article in Socialism and Democracy that con- demned “hostility on the left to research ﬁndings regarding 9–11” (2010,p.141)andarticulatedaMarxisttheoryofconspiracyinwhich “the fundamental Marxist notion that the capitalist state is a masked form of bourgeois rule. . . is itself an accusation of conspiracy on the grandest of historical scales” (p. 143). Positing the events sur- rounding the ascent of Louis Bonaparte as potentially historically analogous to 9/11, MacGregor and Zarembka suggest a “deep-po- litical” Marxist analysis for 9/11 (p. 150). They reach a conclusion similar to Manwell’s: LiketheEighteenthBrumaireofLouisBonaparte,September11 unfurledableakeraofcapitalistreaction. And,likeBonaparte’s coup d’etat in France, the ﬁery events in New York and Wash- ington initiated a harsh suppression of thought and opinion in the United States that quelled liberal and left opposition. Most especially, the oﬃcial story of 9–11 became the holy-of-holies, unassailable truth, a new form of Biblical belief. Indeed, the oﬃcial dog and pony show featuring the 19 alleged hijackers is still the lynch-pin for President Barack Obama’s pursuit of the conﬂictin AfghanistanandexpansionofthewarintoPak- istan. Thus, from our perspective, the global anti-war move- ment needs seriously to question 9–11 if it wishes to be truly eﬀective. Though it seems improbable now, there are reasons to believe that 9–11 may eventually force a new Marxist under- standingofthecapitaliststate,moreinlinewithMarx’sviewof the fragility of bourgeois democracy, the dangers of bourgeois terrorism, and capital’s readiness to resort to states of siege. (p. 161) Anthony Hall, a professor of globalization studies, published his critique of the oﬃcial 9/11 narrative in Earth Into Property: Coloniza- tion, Decolonization, and Capitalism, a 2010 book from a respected university press that was also hailed as one of the best books of 2010 by The Independent (Howe, 2010). Hall’s case is exemplary of the diﬃculties faced by academics who wish to critique part of the 9/11evidencewithoutappearingtoendorsecomprehensivetheories abouttheattacks. Hallwrites,“Byfarthelargestweightofevidence pointsawayfromtheoﬃcialstorytowardscontrolleddemolitions [of the WTC towers] and a missile strike [at the Pentagon]” (Hall, 2010, p. 640). In order to explain my own speciﬁc thoughts about

62 Michael Truscello the evidence, I would have to explain in great detail why I do not believethe “no plane at the Pentagon” theory has any credibility,12 but I do think the theory of controlled demolition possesses some merits and deserves additional scrutiny. Rather than explain the faultswiththemissiletheory,Iwillexplainsomeofthemeritsofthe controlled demolition theory. Consider the evidence that suggests the WTC towers were demolished. According to engineering analyses of the WTC towers prior to 9/11thetowerswere“sixteentimesstiﬀerthanaconventionalstruc- ture” (Glanz and Lipton, 2003, pp. 134–136), and damage far worse than that experienced on 9/11 could be tolerated and “the building wouldstillbestrongenoughtowithstanda100-mile-per-hourwind” (p. 133). Les Robertson, one of the original structural engineers, as- sured experts there is “little likelihood of a collapse no matter how the building [is] attacked” (p. 227). After the 1993 bombing, John Skilling,thetowers’ChiefEngineer,saidthetowerscouldwithstand an airplane impact “without collapsing” (pp. 131–132). Prior to 9/11, Skilling testiﬁed that the towers would withstand jet fuel ﬁres in the event of a crash and “the building structure would still be there” (Quoted in Nalder, 1993). Frank A. Demartini, the on-site construc- tion manager for the World Trade Center, claimed just months prior to9/11thatthetowerscouldwithstand“multipleimpactsofjetliners” (Quoted in Dwyer and Flynn, p. 149). As reported by The New York Times, “experts said no. . .modern, steel-reinforced high-rise had ever collapsed because of an uncon- trolled ﬁre” (Glanz, 2001). The lack of a precedent for collapses that happened three times on 9/11 thus presented skeptics with a compelling anomaly. In addition, demolition experts attested to the demolition-like appearance of the collapses, which were rapid, sym- metrical, and total, and included high velocity horizontal bursts of debriswellbelowthecollapsewave. “ThecollapseoftheWTC towers lookedlikeaclassiccontrolleddemolition,”accordingtoMikeTaylor of the National Association of Demolition Contractors (Samuel and Carrington, 2001). Structural engineer Ronald Hamburger told The Wall Street Journal, “It appeared to me that charges had been placed inthebuilding.”InthesamearticleCharlesH.Thornton,chairmanof 12For example, skeptics of the impact at the Pentagon have never been able to explain away the photographic evidence of debris from an American Airlines jet on the Pentagon front lawn, the downed light posts in the path of the jet, and the dozens of eyewitnesses who saw a passenger jet hit the Pentagon.

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 63 the structural engineering ﬁrm Thornton-Tomasetti Group, said, “I was absolutely ﬂabbergasted when [the collapses] happened — that it happened at all, and that it happened in less than three or four hours” (Hallinan, Burton and Eig, 2001). Van Romero, explosives expert and Vice Presidentfor Research at NewMexico Institute of Mining and Technology, told the Albuquerque Journal on 9/11, “My opinion is, basedon the videotapes,that aftertheairplaneshitthe World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildingsthatcausedthetowerstocollapse”(QuotedinUyttebrouck, 2001). Romero later retracted his statement asserting the presence of explosive devices inside the towers, and is placed here alongside other experts who say they do not believe there were explosives in the towers (despite appearances to the contrary). The apparent paradox of expert testimony that says, yes, the col- lapseslookedexactlylikecontrolleddemolitions,but,no,therewere no explosives in the towers, creates a space of ambiguity for non- experts. The government investigations into the collapses did little toresolvethis. TwoinvestigativereportsfortheWTC collapseswere eventually published, one by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 2002, and the other by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2005. From the beginning, these investigations were plagued with compromises similar to the 9/11 Commission. A January 2002 editorial by Bill Manning in the re- spectedjournalFireEngineeringcalledtheFEMA investigation“ahalf- baked farce” (Manning, 2002). The FEMA report concludes, “With the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to thecollapseof each tower couldnot bedeﬁnitively determined” (FEMA, 2002: “Executive Summary,” p. 2). Regarding Tower Seven, FEMA states,“ThespeciﬁcsoftheﬁresinWTC 7andhowtheycaused the buildingto collapseremainunknown atthistime”(FEMA,2002: “Section8,”p.7). Dr. S.ShyamSunder,theheadoftheNIST investiga- tionintoWTC7,admittedinNewYorkMagazine,“We’vehadtrouble getting a handle on building number seven” (Quoted in Jacobson, 2006). In August 2008 NIST released its Tower Seven investigation, in which it attributed the collapse to a “new phenomenon” called “thermal expansion.” NIST declared WTC7 “the ﬁrst known instance ofﬁrecausingthetotalcollapseofatallbuilding.”NIST alsoadmitted that several ﬂoors of WTC7 fell at freefall speed for 2.25 seconds, a physical impossibility without the aid of incendiary devices. NIST did not use any steel from WTC7 in its investigation, but instead relied on elaborate computer models.

64 Michael Truscello TheNIST studyspentmuchmoretimeandmoneythanFEMA onits investigationoftheTwinTowers,andpublishedaremarkable10,000 pages in the ﬁnal report; however, skeptics saw problems with the parameters of the investigation and the conclusions reached. For example, NIST doesnot attempttoexplainphenomena aftercollapse initiationisachieved; itsinvestigation“doesnotactuallyincludethe structuralbehaviorofthetoweraftertheconditionsforcollapseiniti- ationwerereachedandcollapsebecameinevitable”(NIST,2005,p.82). NIST conﬁrmed its inabilitytoexplainwhythe towersexperienced total collapses in a letter it wrote September 27, 2007, in response to a Request for Correction written by a group of researchers and 9/11familymembers: “InthecaseoftheWTC towers,NIST hasestab- lished that the failures initiated in the ﬂoors aﬀected by the aircraft impact damage and the ensuing ﬁres resulted in the collapses of the towers. . . We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.”13 WhileNIST maintainsit“foundnocorroboratingevidence to suggest that explosives were used to bring down the buildings,” it alsoadmits it“didnot conducttests for explosive residueandas notedabove, suchtestswouldnotnecessarilyhavebeenconclusive.” Therefore, the parameters of NIST’s study did not include the actual collapses, NIST did not test for explosive residue, and NIST cannot explainthetotalcollapses; however, NIST assertsitiscertainthereis no evidence of the use of explosives in the WTC towers. Supporters of the oﬃcial narrative often cite the plane crashes as the obvious causes of the collapses; however, this is not the oﬃcial theory. NIST states: “The towers likely would not have collapsed under the combinedeﬀectsof aircraft impact damageand the exten- sive, multi-ﬂoor ﬁres if the thermal insulation had not been widely dislodged or had been only minimally dislodged by aircraft impact” (2005, p. xxxviii). Thus the oﬃcial theory supposes ﬁre-induced col- lapses of two steel-reinforced skyscrapers, of which there are no precedents, happening in 56 and 102 minutes after impact. The NIST theory also argues the ﬁres were not very hot, never rising“above 600 degrees C for as long as 15 minutes” (p. 180). In addition, when NIST tested their own physical models of the ﬁres, they could not make themodelscollapse, even though NIST applied ﬁreshotter and longer lasting than the ﬁres of 9/11 (p. 143). Given the failure of the physical models, NIST resorted to a computer model of the WTC towers. Forthecomputermodels, NIST employedthemost“severe” 13 http://www.911proof.com/NIST.pdf

The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism 65 data for “each of the most inﬂuential variables,” because with the moderateformsofdata“itbecameclearthatthetowerswouldlikely remainstanding”(pp.143–144). TheNIST investigationwascriticized by Dr. James Quintiere, former Chief of the Fire Science Division of NIST, who called NIST’s conclusion “questionable” and called for an independent review of NIST’s work. Quintiere is not alone in his criticism of the NIST investigation: over 1,500 architects and engi- neersbelongtotheArchitectsandEngineersfor9/11Truth,agroup “dedicated to exposing the falsehoods and to revealing truths about the ‘collapses’ of the WTC high-rises on 9/11/01” (ae911truth.org). Skeptics also ﬁnd the oral histories of the ﬁrst responders com- pelling. Many skeptics believe these eyewitness accounts support thecontrolleddemolitiontheory. ProfessorGraemeMacQueeniden- tiﬁed 118 witnesses to explosions, of the 503 witnesses in the oral histories (MacQueen, 2006; all quotationsare fromMacQueen, un- less otherwise noted). For example, Richard Banaciski witnessed an “explosion” in the South Tower: “It seemed like on television they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.” Gregg Brady heard “three loud explosions” under the North Tower, and Edward Cachia said that the South Tower “gave at a lower ﬂoor, not the ﬂoor where the plane hit, because we originally had thought there was like an internal detonation explosives because it went in succession, boom, boom,boom,boom,andthe