I Want To Know Who Did It, I Know Bush Can Show Me: The 9/11 Conspiracy

James Skiest

AP United States History

Mr. Richied
June 2, 2016

Amidst the occasional shrieks and the crackling boom of jet fuel, aluminum, and steel
beams, a single man resigned himself to a mixture of the sweet embrace of death and concrete.
His identity is forever concealed in a cool haze of blood, rubble, and mystery. He represents
more than just a casualty, not because a face is put on the man, but because there is no face to put
on him. He represents, in a photo, the cold apathy of death and the unidentifiable reason for the
attack. At 9:41:15, the time of the mans descent into the wreckage, New York City had already
descended into extreme madness. The September 11th attacks are still treated with that same
feeling of malaise within current discourse because it is still, as any major attack is, filled with
conspiracy. The truth will never be found, but certainly both sides contain parts. The
conspiracies hold some merit, even if only to question the validity of the official reports, but
ultimately collapse under the weight of fallacy and serve as a distraction to all actual abuses of
the United States government.
To understand why there is conspiracy at all is simply because of censorship. Part of the
censorship problem is the propaganda machine that makes it unpatriotic to be opposed to war,
but the silences left in the wake of September 11th are numerous and complex, and the
censorship is both external and internal1. These scenarioswar, terror, disastercreate a
scenario for untellable narratives, and these narratives are often barred from the full truth by selfcensorship and nuanced by word of mouth to the point where they become common conspiracy.
One striking detail is that, a remarkable percentagearound 60%of the narratives collected
in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom just subsequent to the events focused on

Diane E. Goldstein The Sounds of Silence: Foreknowledge, Miracles, Suppressed Narratives,

and TerrorismWhat Not Telling Might Tell Us. (Western Folklore, 2009), 235-55.

the theme of foreknowledge. 2 While Bush capitalized on the aftermath, a Middle-Eastern sect
of the CIA had foreknowledge of the attack, and withheld it from other bureaucratic agencies.
In the summer of 2001, and the CIA expected an imminent attackthe purpose of withholding
the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward3. A disoriented and disconnected
executive branch of government had allowed the attacks to go through. The theme of
foreknowledge is once again broached because of unusual WTC market trading before the
attacks. There is evidence of unusual option market activity in the days leading up to September
11 that is consistent with investors trading on advance knowledge of the attacks,4 so it can be
assumed that there were somemost likely the terrorists families and friends, but also
intelligence operatives and those warned by the operativeswho did have this foreknowledge.
From this, there can be reasonable assumption that the attacks could have been prevented.
On the other hand, there cannot be reasonable assumption that the attacks never
happened. Much of the evidence presented by the World Trade Center hoax theoriststhose
who believe that the event never occurred and was perpetrated by the governmentis
demonstrably false, fallacious or irrelevant. An oft-quoted phrase, jet fuel cannot melt steel
beams is one of the leading arguments of theorists. This is true, but it is meaninglesswithout
calculating the stresses in columns. For low stress, high temperature is necessary to cause

Goldstein, The Sounds of Silence, 236

Peter Dale Scott. Launching the U.S. Terror War: The CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central

Asia. (Asia-Pacific Journal, 2012)

4

Allen M. Poteshman. Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September

11, 2001*. (The Journal of Business, 2006), 1726.

collapse, but for high enough stress, even a modestly elevated temperature will cause it.5 What
is observed in this paper is the energetic theory of progressive collapse, wherein the towers
collapsed because of the stress created by the planes and the laws of physics allow this.
Conspiracy arose because of the oddity of the situation: a small planerelative to the tower
should not be able to bring down the entire building. But, according to eyewitnesses and the
proven science of physics, the towers did in fact fall in a fashion where the tower, columns in
the critical floor that is heated most suffer buckling, the weight of the upper part of the structure
above this floor can no longer be supported, and so the upper part starts falling down onto the
lower part below the critical floor, gathering speed until it impacts the lower part.6 A distinction
must be made between those who are demonstrably wrong and those who question the
prevention of the situation itself and the suspicious moves of the United States Federal
Government after the attacks.
The more compelling sides to conspiracy are not the grand ideas themselves, but rather
holes in the logic or information on the official 9/11 report. What is even more compelling is the
Bush administrations relationship with conspiracy. There is a, form of state-level engagement
with conspiracy has been evident within the contemporary post-9/11 context, where the
boundaries of the American nation have been materially and ideologically produced by the Bush
administration through the conspiracy rhetoric of Islamic terrorists intent on infiltrating the US

Zdenk P Baant and Yong Zhou. Why Did The World Trade Center Collapse? Simple

Analysis. (Journal of Engineering Mechanics, 2002), 603-15.

6

Ibid.

homeland7 In addition to the question of the holes in official reports and attacks on the validity
of the attack, prophetic internet users attacked the Bush administration for the willingness to
comply to the conspiracy. Those prophetic users removed their fedoras for this topic and
discovered a conspiracy that can be discussed intelligently.
As linguist and author Noam Chomsky explains, One of the major consequences of the
9/11 movement has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism
directed to real and ongoing crimes of state, and their institutional background, crimes that are
far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be8. Some of these crimes include
waterboarding, the creation and upkeep of the Guantanamo Bay Prison Complex, the invasion of
Iraq, and the US PATRIOT Act. All of these are crimes against humanity created by the
government without most citizens so much as blinking an eye, and were all justified by the 9/11
attacks and sense of patriotism crafted by Bush and Cheney. This national-scale narrative of
patriotism was drawn on within the Bush administration's own conspiratorial discourse of
terrorist enemies threatening the borders of the US nation, with the amorphous threat of terror
discursively made into an identifiable 'them' and mobilized to solidify a porous nation through
the perceived necessity of securing the national 'homeland9. The Bush Administration creates
more conspiracy through this by dividing the groups into a binary of good and evil, and used a
hegemonic political culture of patriotic sentiment, where voices of dissent were demarcated as
7

Laura Jones. How Do the American People Know...?: Embodying Post-9/11 Conspiracy

Discourse. (GeoJournal, 2010), 359-71.

8

Andre Vltchek and Noam Chomsky. On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone
Warfare. (Pluto Press, 2013)

Jones. How Do the American People Know...?. 366.

anti-American during a time of 'war'10. Any other conspiracy against the administration was
tailored to the advantage of the president, and that is why it is allowed to exist. Because of this
binary, the executive branch noted to the public that the appropriate and patriotic response to
this threat was therefore to 'temporarily' give up some civil liberties in accepting the necessity for
increased domestic security legislation11. What was said to be a narrative of patriotism versus
dissent of the United States was and is rather a much more grey area. Those in full support
Bushs patriotsare actually just extreme nationalists. That temporary sacrifice of civil
liberties turned into an abuse of the citizen through the US PATRIOT Act. The United States
seemed to benefit from the 9/11 attacks, which is strange, because every single outcome and the
attacks themselves seem to be in direct violation of citizen rights. It is also strange that a land of
the free and of the citizen benefits from this, but, as a federal republicno, that is not correct.
As a neoconservative plutocracy, the United States of America did benefit from the 9/11 attacks.
The USA not only now violates the rights of its own citizens, but the rights of the citizens in
other countries, by tapping the wires of its allies, and, as an added bonus, by bombing countries
without weapons of mass destruction by simply claiming that those countries do, in fact, have
weapons of mass destruction.
Although the actual fate of the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, as it standsor rather,
fallsin science is that the event did occur, the conspiracy of foreknowledge and effect still has
a marked truth to it. Just as the identity of the falling man will never be found, the identity of the
actual 9/11 attack will never be truly reached, but there are several suggestions left by both the

10

Jones. How Do the American People Know...?. 366.

11

Ibid.

truth movement and the Bush Administration that would lead one to believe that there is a
veracity to the conspiracy.

Bibliography

Baant, Zdenk P., and Yong Zhou. Why Did The World Trade Center Collapse? Simple
Analysis. Journal of Engineering Mechanics 01, no. 04 (January 2002): 603-15.

Goldstein, Diane E. The Sounds of Silence: Foreknowledge, Miracles, Suppressed Narratives,

and TerrorismWhat Not Telling Might Tell Us. Western Folklore 68, no. 2/3 (2009):
235-55.

Jones, Laura. "How Do the American People Know: Embodying Post-9/11 Conspiracy
Discourse. GeoJournal 75, no. 4 (2010): 359-71.

Poteshman, Allen M. Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,
2001*. The Journal of Business J BUS 79, no. 4 (2006): 1703-726.

Scott, Peter Dale. Launching the U.S. Terror War: The CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.
Asia-Pacific Journal, 3rd ser., 10, no. 12 (March 12, 2012)

Vltchek, Andre, and Noam Chomsky. On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone
Warfare. Pluto Press, 2013.