9-18 Conspiracy Theories

This is getting creepy. I have always been scornful of 9-11 conspiracy theorists, and remain so today. But now Glenn Greenwald, who I have always respected, is beginning to sound almost like a 9-11 conspiracy theorist when talking about the anthrax attacks that followed. Are even respectable people sinking into paranoia, or is something genuinely sinister happening here?

To recap, a week after the 9-11 attacks (September 18), major newspapers and new networks received envelopes containing anthrax spores and threatening letters saying "9-11-01" and "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." In October, similar letters were sent to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle (the Majority Leader) and Patrick Leahy (Chairman of the Judiciary Committee). In the overheated atmosphere of the time, most people suspected Arab terrorists. When the second batch of letters appeared to contain weapons-grade anthrax, many people blamed Saddam Hussein. However, further FBI investigation determined that the anthrax was a US strain developed at the Army Medical Research Institute at Ft. Detrick, and the water used the process it came from the northeastern United States. The attack came from inside.

None of this so far is the stuff of paranoia. Recall the distinction between real conspiracies and imagined ones. Real conspiracies are characterized by (1) a limited number of participants, (2) limited duration and (3) limited objectives. They also create positive evidence of their existence. Sending out the anthrax appears to have been an inside job, but it required only a single participant (one participant doesn't even rate as a conspiracy). The time between the 9-11 attacks and the second anthrax mailing was about one month. The mailer's objective is unknown, but it appears to have been to intensify the fear of Arab terrorism. The sender may have seen himself as trying to awaken a still-complacent nation to its true danger. And whoever send out the anthrax did, indeed, create physical evidence that the spores were American in origin and probably came from Ft. Detrick. The FBI never managed to solve the mystery, but at least decisively debunked claims that the anthrax came from overseas.

In the aftermath of the anthrax mailings, the White House constantly urged the FBI to find a link to Al-Qaeda. Government officials and commentators in outlets such as the Guardian, the Wallstreet Journal and CNN speculated that Iraq might be behind the attacks. This appears to have been speculation rather than conspiracy. Many Bush Administration hawks and conservative commentators were determined to have a war with Iraq and eager to attribute just about anything to Saddam Hussein. And the speculation is not entirely unreasonable. If the anthrax was, after all, weapons grade, there are only a limited number of sources and Iraq had, after all, made biological weapons in the past.

Things start looking more sinister on October 26, 2001, when ABC News reported actual evidence implicating Iraq. According to ABC, lab reports showed the presence of bentonite in the anthrax, and only Iraq weaponized anthrax with bentonite. The report was false. There was not bentonite in the anthrax. And here is where it becomes disturbing. The source of the report was three or four independent sources in the investigation at Ft. Detrick. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the sources making these false reports came from the same place that the anthrax originated. Our conspiracy has now jumped from a single member to four, and the motive is now beginning to look like an attempt to encourage war with Iraq. Suddenly the targets take on added significance. The attack was aimed, not at random Americans, but at the elite, people who would have real influence on whether to invade Iraq. And the targets were two Democratic leaders and the purportedly liberal MSM, people who might otherwise have opposed the invasion, but were more likely to get on board if they felt personally targeted.

Or maybe something less sinister was happening. Maybe the four anonymous individuals at the lab were simply repeating false reports they received from the actual anthrax mailer. Maybe they were in shock and denial about being the source. Or maybe they were trying to protect a friend and colleague.

In any even, the White House quite truthfully denied reports of bentonite in the anthrax. Naturally the usual suspects proclaimed the ABC report as proof Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks and blasted the White House for failing to come out and say so. Nothing very conspiratorial about that. Certain neoconservative hawks were determined to have their war with Iraq no matter what and eagerly seized on anything to support them. White House motives are a bit more intriguing. Were they simply making an innocent denial of a false rumor? Or was it a clever calculation that an unofficial report, officially denied, would carry more weight than an official statement? Or simply fear of being caught lying?

But even assuming the worse so far, we have only a conspiracy of four members wanting war with Iraq and taking actions to reinforce hawks' pre-existing notions and undermine doves' potential resistence. The fact that warhawks did, indeed, allow their prejudices to be confirmed is no evidence of any conspiracy on their part.

But it really starts to get disturbing when Greenwald quotes columnist Richard Cohen as saying that an unnamed "high government official" warned him to take Cipro against anthrax shortly before the anthrax mailings. Now this is starting to look alarming. As blogger Atrios says:

Years later it apparently does not occur to American's Funniest Pundit to ask why a "high government official" was warning media figures to start popping Cipro in the aftermath of 9/11. I can see why, at the time, the obvious interpretation would be that there was intelligence about possible biological attacks. But now that we know that the US gov't believes that anthrax came from the inside, shouldn't Cohen be a wee bit curious about what this warning was based on?

This is so alarming it starts to look like tinfoil hat territory. So, trying to avoid sinking into utter paranoia, let us consider the possibilities:

1. It was purely a coincidence. The government was in a generally paranoid mood following 9-11 trying to imagine all possible terrorist attacks. Anthrax was one such possiblity.
2. Someone at Ft. Detrick heard the government was getting paranoid about anthrax and started getting ideas. (And, in fact, if the government was paranoid about anthrax, it would almost certainly have been putting Ft. Detrick, an Army medical research lab, on alert).
3. The anthrax plotter(s) were actively feeding the paranoia by spreading rumors before the attack. (And perhaps also sought to reduce casualties by encouraging people to take Cipro).
4. There was a wider conspiracy.

My own inclination is to be skeptical of (1) and (4) and to favor either (2) or (3). But whatever the case, Glenn Greenwald is right. Perhaps there was only one anthrax plotter, who misled his colleagues. Maybe there were several. Or maybe the tinfoil hat crowd are less crazy than we think. But we really need to be investigating not only the origins of the anthrax, but also the origins of the tips about anthrax in order to discover how many people were involved. Or even respectable people may start sinking into paranoia.

Bad Blogger Habit

It is a very bad blogging habit to forego original thought and make posts that are just links to someone else's posts. Nonetheless, I recently saw a couple of comments that are just too good to pass up. Orcinus recently had a link to an earlier post on how to tell real conspiracies from paranoid conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies are characterized by:

• Limited objectives (sometimes just a single, narrow purpose)
• Limited duration
• Limited participation.

As the boundaries of real conspiracies expand, the risk of failure or exposure increases exponentially. Paranoid conspiracy theories presuppose plots of virtually unlimited grandiosity, duration, and members. Real conspiracies break down long before they even approach such a scale.

Totally unrelated, but brilliant is the following epigram. "Conservatives love the (imaginary) America of the past, while liberals love the (imaginary) America of the future."

Government Conspiracies, Real and Imagined

None of my previous posts are intended to deny the existence of real conspiracies. But the difference between real and imaginary conspiracies is that real conspiracies cannot help but create evidence. September 11 conspiracy theorists set out to poke holes in the "official" version of events. But not only do their own scenarios leave holes large enough to fly a 767 through, conspiracy theorists offer no positive evidence in favor of their proposed versions of events.

Consider the government's conspiracy to establish "black sites" (secret prisons) and practice "extraordinary rendition." These actions created evidence that simply could not be made to go away. This evidence included accounts by surviving victims, witnesses mysterious plane flights among different suspicious sites, and witnesses who saw handcuffed and hooded prisoners taken onto the planes. Sharp investigative reporters with the Washington Post were able to trace one such plane through its numerous stops, and to determine that the corporation said to own the plane and all corporate directors where shams.

Compare this to "no-planes" conspiracy theorists. Unlike the planes used in extraordinary renditions, neither the diverted planes, the drone substitutes nor cruise missile has created any flight record or been observed taking off or landing at any airport or landing field. Extraordinary rendition flights, despite all attempts at secrecy, cannot be concealed. 9/11 decoy flights are apparently invisible ghosts.

Granted, some conspiracy theorists accept that the planes hit their targets. But what of the explosives used to bring down the towers? When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, government investigators were able to trace where he purchased and stored the fertilizer used to make the bomb. So where did the explosives used to bring down the WTC come from? What demolitions company had unaccounted explosives mysteriously disappear? Or had crews sent off on mysterious, unknown missions? Why did not one person notice strange maintenance work going on at three towers simultaneously? And just how many people were involved, for how long, transporting what quantity of explosive? Without arousing any sort of suspicion?

And there are countless other alleged events that should have left some sort of evidence. If the planes were flown by remote control, how was the remote control installed? Who operated it, and from where? If the telephone calls were faked, what evidence is there from flight records that someone was stalking crew members and regular passengers? And if there was a "war room" faking the calls, shouldn't that fact show up in telephone records? The more elaborate one's conspiracy theory, the more people involved and the more evidence it should have created. So why didn't it?

And finally, this link should be good for a laugh as it attempts identify all the conpsirators involved. The following are only a few of them:

• Everyone responsible for planting evidence in the hijackers cars, bags and so on
• Everyone responsible for planting evidence in the WTC wreckage (passports etc), or removing it (WTC black boxes)
• Air Traffic Control and flight schedulers at the takeoff airports (to cope with the double flights), and to make sure they didn't follow procedure in reporting the hijackings promptly
• Whoever prepared the "special" planes swapped for the real flights, complete with "missile pod" for firing into the towers just before impact, and the ATC and Norad staff who didn't mention the swap
• Norad and senior officers working at the day (so they could lie about the war games and their lack of response)
• Fighter pilots who deliberately flew too slowly so they wouldn't reach the aircraft in time
• Whoever shot down Flight 93, and the senior officers who helped cover it up
• Everyone who researched the passengers, then all the actors who used that research to make fake mobile calls to their relatives, and either the phone company or the FBI for covering up the phone records
• Everyone involved in killing hundreds of passengers, assuming they didn't die in the crashes and were killed later
• Everyone involved in transporting their bodies to the various scenes if they did, or faking the DNA evidence if they didn't
• The people who researched the WTC to find out the best place to place explosives
• The people who planted the explosives through the WTC towers and WTC7
• Whoever detonated the WTC explosives at various different times of the day

The author concludes by recommending:

If you discuss 9/11 conspiracies online anywhere, try keeping your own list,and add to it everyone someone implies that another person or group was “in on it”. Then produce the list after a month or two and see just how realistic it looks...

My recommendation: Read the entire link.

Occam's Razor and Controlled Demolitions

Although they disagree on what hit the buildings, conspiracy theorists generally agree that the Twin Towers (and Tower 7) were brought down by some type of controlled demolitions. Most people do not know enough about structural engineering to competently judge the subject. But we can still apply Occam's Razor.

For instance, if the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives, why bother with the planes at all? Surely bombs would have just as much dramatic effect. And some of the events offered as evidence of demolitions don't bear close examination. Many witnesses saw or heard explosions in places remote from the crash well before the towers collapsed. There is said to have been molten steel in the basement after the towers collapsed. Both of these are alleged to be inconsistent with damage caused by the planes. But are they consistent with controlled demolitions? When buildings are deliberately brought down, do random explosions normally go off in sites far from the actual demolition? Is there usually molten steel in the basement afterwards? Really?

What happens when a plane flies into a skyscraper? Well, in 1945 a B-25 bomber flew into the Empire State Building. The building did not fall because the plane was much smaller and flying slower, but the fuel tank exploded on impact. Although the bomber contained only 800 gallons compared to 10,000 gallons in the planes that hit the Twin Towers, it sent a fireball through hallways and stairwells, that caused damage several floors below impact, and one elevator fell to the bottom of the shaft. Multiply that by eight times the weight, over twice the speed and more than ten times the fuel load and it should hardly be surprising that the WTC suffered far-reaching damage. And anyone wanting to use any event at the WTC to prove disprove the "official account" should first answer this conspiracy debunker:

I'd like to propose a little thought experiment to the conspiracy believers. I've asked this before but no one has ever answered. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what you would EXPECT to hear and see after a fully-loaded airliner hit a skyscraper at top speed, causing enormous damage, and the building caught fire to the point of collapse? And when a billion-pound building does start to collapse, what would you EXPECT to see and hear at the lower levels? Because in order to be surprised by what did happen, you must have some expectation of what SHOULD have happened.

Touching very briefly on technical details of what caused the collapse, I will point out that just before the towers fell, people inside were desparate, reporting that the ceilings were bulging and the floors were sagging. This is consistent with the truss theory, that the fire caused the metal strips (trusses) supporting the floors to sag, which pulled the walls inward and caused them to buckle. Of course, the most obvious shortcoming with the demolitions theory is how were all those explosives planting without anyone noticing? All that demolitions work going on in three different towers, and not one person noticed anything out of the ordinary?

But perhaps the best evidence of just how implausible the controlled demolitions scenario is was unwittingly made by one of its own advocates:

In addition to having to determine the quantities and placement of explosives necessary to achieve the total destruction of the Towers, the planners had to plan the timing of their detonations with some precision. It is clear from photographs and videos of the Towers' destruction that the zones of destruction moved downward at about the same rates as the exploding rubble clouds descended, so that these zones remained concealed by the clouds. If these zones of destruction moved either too quickly or too slowly, they would would have become visible below or above the rubble clouds, blatantly contradicting the official account of gravity-driven collapses.

Translation: Videos appear to support the "official" view of progressive collapse from the site of impact. That proves how cleverly the evidence was faked. Occam, someone needs a shave.

Meanwhile, Other Conspiracy Theories

In the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting certain right-wing commentators had the knee-jerk reaction of suspecting that Islamic terrorists were behind it all. It is senseless to try to score cheap political points from the tragedy by accusing them of using the tragedy to score cheap political points. Their fears are sincere, if paranoid, and they assume that the rest of us are either woefully naive or reflexively polically correct to dismiss that possibility.

So, in the interest of fairness and rationality, why do we (or at least I) dismiss that possibility. Experience, for one. In that time that I have been able to follow the news, there have been many stories of mass shootings in the US, going back before anyone ever heard of Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda. The vast majority were the work of isolated, highly disturbed individuals, acting alone. A small number (the Columbine High School shootings and the Washington, DC snipers are the only ones I can think of) were the work of pair. Not one of these mass shootings involved a larger conspiracy of any kind. Granted, just because it hasn't happened in the past doesn't mean it can't happen in the future. But, as the saying goes, when you hear hoofbeats, don't assume a zebra. If no US mass shooting in the past has been part of a larger conspiracy, don't assume a larger conspiracy absent some sort of evidence.

Furthermore, most mass shooters attack in familiar locations. Postal workers hit the post offices that fired them. School shooters hit the school they attended. Again, exceptions are possible, but let's rule out a horse before we assume a zebra. From the start there was evidence that the shooter knew his way around campus. To the paranoid, that is evidence that the terrorists scoped it out well in advance. A much more obvious explanation would be that, like most school shooters, this one was a student there. And surely terrorists scoping out a campus would be more likely to attract attention and suspicion that a student who writes disturbing poems.

This leads to the question of the target. I speak as one who immediately recognized the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building as the work of anti-government Americans, not Mideastern terrorists. The Oklahoma City federal building just is not a "sexy" enough target to interest Mideastern terrorists. Despite frequent claims that the Heartland is more "American" that coastal cities, an attack on the heartland just isn't a symbolic attack on American in the same way as an attack on New York City. The same applies to Virginia Tech. It just isn't a dramatic enough target.

And finally, when Bin Laden pulled off the September 11 attacks, he set himself a presumably unanticipated problem. How do you top that? How do you do a more mundane act of terrorism without appearing to lose your touch? After destroying the Twin Towers and killing some 3,000 people, a campus shooting is certain to look amateurish by comparison.

Occam's Razor and the Remote Control, No Hijackers Theory

Not all 9-11 conspiracy theorists believe so far-fetched an account as the one in Loose Change. Many accept that the first three planes did, in fact, hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and that Flight 93 crashed. They also generally accept the phone calls from the planes as genuine. But, they say, the three planes were flown by remote control and not by hijackers, and Flight 93 was shot down.

This view is not as obvious a violation of Occam's Razor as the no planes theory, but it raises problems nonetheless. The main argument offered against a hijacking is the lack of resistence, or even distress calls, by the pilots. By looping and rolling the plane, it is argued, a pilot can thwart any hijacking. Of course, if one takes that argument to its logical conclusion, then no hijacking should ever take place. Since hijackings have, in fact, taken place, it seems reasonable to assume that pilots do not normally use this technique. Before 9/11, it was generally assumed that hijackers were not suicidal, but merely wanted to divert the plane and take hostages. Pilots were therefore not inclined to use drastic and possibly dangerous flying techniques to thwart them, and passengers usually submitted to what they assumed was survivable. Conspiracy theorists are expecting pre-9/11 pilots to think in post-9/11 terms. As for distress calls, if the pilots were taken by surprise and killed, they could hardly make them.

Besides, if the flights were being flown by remote, the lack of pilot resistence is even more problematic. Why didn't the pilots attempt to override the remote, or at least inform the ground that they had suddenly lost control of their own planes? A proposed answer is that the plane was depressurized or filled with "potent gas" to kill or incapacitate the people on board. But that leaves the problem of the phone calls, which subscribers to this theory generally accept as genuine. There were calls from all four planes, describing hijackings in all four cases. The passengers could hardly have made those calls if they had been killed or incapacitated. If the phone calls were genuine and true, they refute the remote control theory. If the phone calls were genuine, but coerced or reporting staged events, then there would have to be suicidal conspirators on board the planes to coerce the passengers or fake the hijackings. As for the possibility of the calls being faked, I have discussed that at length already. The site linked here makes no attempt to reconcile its remote control theory with the phone calls reporting a hijacking. And it is hard to imagine any explanation that Occam would accept.

Furthermore, the remote control scenario apparently accepts the overwhelming evidence that there were hijackers on Flight 93 and a geuine passenger revolt against the hijackers, but the flight was shot down as the revolt was on the verge of success. This raises all sorts of obvious questions. If the other three flights could be flown by remote, why not Flight 93? Why bother with hijackers if they were not necessary? Who were the hijackers, anyway? Were they part of the conspiracy? Or was there, by a remarkable coincidence, a real hijacking by real Arab terrorists immediately after three fake hijackings by fake Arab terrorists?* Conspiracy theorists do not even ask, let alone answer, these questions.

Conspiracy theorists further deny that the purported hijackers were on the planes at all and claim that some or many of them are still alive. In fact, this appears to be a case of different people with the same names the hijackers. (Given the notorious mixups that have occurred on everything from no-fly lists to "extraordinary renditions," is it any wonder that there has also been confusion over the identities of the hijackers?)

But if the identities of the hijackers were faked, and if they were never on the planes at all, that raises another obvious question. Surely if there is one thing all of us can agree on, it is that the Bush Administration was determined to start a war with Iraq. So when it staged this elaborate hoax, including the falsified hijackers, why did it falsify 15 Saudis and not one single Iraqi? Are we seriously to believe that an Administration capable of pulling off so complex a scheme as 9/11 couldn't fake Saddam Hussein's participation while it was at it? Keep in mind that the Administration, particularly Dick Cheney, has been trying to falsify Saddam's participation in the attacks for a long time. But the attempt to claim a meeting between hijacker Atta and Iraqi intelligence has been thoroughly discredited, and all attempts at proving a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda have been duds. Even George Bush has given up trying to prove that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and settles for hinting at it by continually mentioning Iraq, terrorism and "taking the fight to the enemy" in the same sentence. How can a conspiracy capable of staging such an elaborate and successful ruse be so utterly inept at tying in their primary target?

*The takeover of Flight 93 at 9:28 occurred about 3/4 an hour after the first flight hit the North Tower, 25 minutes after the second plane hit the South Tower and nine minutes before the third plane hit the Pentagon. The takeover also happened after there had been calls from all three other flights reporting hijackings by Arab terrorists.

Occam's Razor and No Phone Calls, Either

An obvious reason to question the scenario laid out in Loose Change is that it contradicts the accounts of people who made calls from the hijacked airplanes. But our clever fiction writer has an easy answer. It was impossible for cell phones in 2001 to contact the ground from an airplane. The calls were actually faked by voice duplication technology.

Not only is there considerable evidence that such cell phone calls were possible, many of the calls were made from Airfones (phone provided by the airline, attached to seats), not cell phones. If Airfones can't contact the ground from in flight, what is the point in having them? Then there is the question of whether voice duplication technolgy is capable of faking extended narratives or active conversations.

But even without getting into a technical discussion, Occam can see obvious flaws in the claim that the calls were faked. Where would the conspirators get recordings of the callers voices? How would they know the telephone numbers of their family members? How would they know the personal details some of the callers discussed? Avery does not even address any of these questions in Loose Change. A.K. Dewdney, the apparent inventor of the no-calls theory, does address the question - and makes himself look ridiculous with his answer:

The operatives first gathered personal data on regulars of the flight through a combination of data mining and human engineering. Then they leveraged that information by repeatedly taking the flight and engaging flight regulars in conversation to get personal details and record voice samples for study and practice. On the big day, the operatives worked in a single "war room" with a big screen to keep them on the same page.

Occam could go to town on this one! And even if the conspirators did somehow get voice recordings and personal information on flight "regulars" (presumably meaning flight attendants and passengers who routinely commuted on the same flight), what about passengers who were not "regulars"? I know of no evidence whether any of the passengers who made calls were regular commuters on any particular flight. And at least two not only were not regulars, but had made last-minute changes in plans. Barbara Olson had originally been booked on a flight the day before but delayed by one day so she would be with her husband on his birthday. Conspiracy theorists may distrust Barbara Olson, but surely they have no suspicion of Lauren Grandcolas. Grandcolas was originally scheduled to fly later the same day and moved her flight up at the last minute. (She was also not a regular commuter, but was going home from her grandmother's funeral). Some telephone calls also included personal details the conspirators were unlikely to uncover either by datamining or by casual conversation. Passenger Linda Gronlund gave the location of her will and the combination to the safe!

Avery latches onto a handful of mistakes and oddities to discredit the calls. But many people make mistakes or say strange things, particularly when under extreme stress. In fact, the timing and content of the calls matches very well with external evidence about the hijackings.

On American 11 (the first flight to hit the WTC), flight attendant Betty Ong called an American Airlines office in North Carolina five minutes after the flight stopped responding to air traffic commands. She reported stabbing and said that the attackers were in the cockpit and they could not contact the cockpit. She had not personally seen the attack and was unclear on some of the details, which is consistent with her working in the rear of the plane. She reported the plane was flying erratically about the time it made a sharp turn. She lost contact about two minutes before the first plane hit the North Tower. Flight attendant Amy Sweeney called American Airlines in Boston a few minutes later and gave seat numbers of the hijackers, which permitted the airline to identify them. She also reported that the passengers in coach did not realize the plane had been hijacked and thought there was a medical emergency in first class. This is consistent with accounts by the air traffic controller that the hijackers kept broadcast announcements intended for passengers over the air traffic control channel instead. In the last two minutes before impact, Sweeney reported they were in rapid descent, flying much too low, and she saw water and buildings. Then the call cut off.

On United 175 (the second plane to hit the WTC), flight attendant Robert Fangman called United Airlines in San Francisco and passenger Peter Hanson called his father in Connecticut, both five minutes after the plane first began acting strangely. Both gave essentially the same account that a flight attendant had been stabbed and the hijackers were flying the plane. Calls from both Hanson and passenger Brian Sweeney broke off just before the second plane struck the South tower. Indeed recipients of both calls turned on their television sets when the calls broke off and saw the plane hit the tower.

Communications with American 77 (the flight that hit the Pentagon) were sketchier. Flight attendant Renee May called her mother in Las Vegas at 9:12, about 18 minutes after the flight deviated from its course. Barbara Olson called her husband the Solicitor General somewhat later, although it is not clear when. No calls were in progress when the plane hit the Pentagon. Perhaps the much-heralded 330 degree turn the plane took before its final dive threw the passengers too much off-balance to make any last-minute calls.

As for United 93, the basic facts are too well-known to need repeating. Numerous called to unrelated people in different places reported that the passengers were planning to retake the plane. The two final calls from the flight both appear to have been placed at 9:58 and to have cut off when the plane crashed. Several calls had sound of men planning the counter-attack or reciting the 23rd Psalm in the background. There is some uncertainty when the first call after the hijacking was made. Air traffic controllers heard the takeover of the cockpit at 9:28 a.m. Passenger Tom Burnett's wife is adament that she received four calls from him, the first at 9:27. Accounts from the Zacarias Moussaoui trial lists only three calls, the first at 9:30. The Pittsburg Post-Gazett, almost certainly erroneously, gives the time as 9:20.

If any call from Tom Burnett reported a hijacking at 9:20, eight minutes before the takeover, that would be a serious anomaly. His wife's report that the call was at 9:27 could mean that Burnett, a first class passenger, saw the disturbance as the hijackers broke into the cockpit before the air traffic controllers overheard the takeover within the cockpit. And a first call at 9:30 presents no problems at all. No other timing anomalies are even suggested. On three of the four flights, calls began within a few minutes of the takeover and broke off just before impact. Calls from each plane report essentially the same events (although there were some differences in MO between the planes). Flight 11 accounts of what the plane was doing match what the radar indicated. Two calls from Flight 175 cut off so soon before impact that the recipients turned on their TV's and immediately was the South Tower being hit. Calls from Flight 93 not only agreed that the passengers were planning to resist, but reported the revolt beginning at about the same time. The final two call ended with the plane crashing. And all these calls were received in completely different places, by people who had never heard of each other.

Perhaps the conspirators not only had information on the people whose calls they were faking, but were also tracing the planes (excuse me, decoys) on radar to match their narrative to what the blip was doing. But it seems almost incomprehensible that they could coordinate so many calls without making a single mistake. A much simpler explanation is that the calls began with the hijacking and ended with the crash, matched each other and the radar blip and were perfectly coordinated because they were real calls, describing real events.

Occam's Razor and the No-Planes Theory

Of all "alternative" theories to September 11, the one presented in Loose Change is probably the best known and most complex. Producer Dylan Avery proposes that none of the four planes actually hit their targets. The Twin Towers were hit by substitute planes. The Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile. The passengers the four planes were actually transferred onto Flight 93, which did not crash, but landed in Cleveland. (The crater in Pennsylvania was dug to simulate a crash). The passengers were taken from the plane and have not been seen since. All four planes may still be in service.

Occam could wear out several razor blades shaving off the needless complications here. On September 11, 2001, four planes deviate from their courses and stop responding to radio. Two of the planes broadcast messages from apparent hijackers. People who have never met, in completely different locations, simultaneously begin receiving calls from family members on board reporting the planes have been hijacked. Two planes are filmed flying into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Numerous witnesses see another plane fly into the Pentagon. The fourth plane vanishes, leaving behind a crater and debris. None of the four planes or the people on board have been seen since. What is the simplest explanation? Why, that that three hijacked planes hit the targets and the fourth one crashed!

Consider the problems with Avery's scenario. When were the substitutions made? Presumably not before boarding. Preventing the passengers from boarding the planes would have attracted attention. Not between boarding and takeoff. Switching planes on the runway would also have attracted attention. So the substitution must have taken place in the air, where there would be no witnesses except the air traffic controllers. But problems appear here, too. Air traffic controller track planes in two ways, by tracking each plane's unique transponder signal, or by radar. The transponder is more accurate because radar does not indicate the plane's altitude or identity. Air traffic controllers tracking the four planes on September 11 noticed that they failed to respond to instructions and turned off their transponders or changed transponder codes and that the planes deviated from flight paths. On Flight 93 the air traffic controller even overheard the takeover. But they did not observe any decoy flights. Avery makes no attempt to explain how the air traffic controllers were failed to notice the substitution. Other conspiracy theorists have proposed that all four planes were warned of a terrorist attack and commanded to turn off their transponders, maintain radio silence, and land at a military base. Before each of the planes landed, a decoy was sent up to match its flight path, either above or below it, so as to fool air controllers into thinking that the decoy's radar blip was from the original flight.

Decoys would have been needed, not only to hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, but to allow Flight 93 to sneak off to a hidden rendezvous unnoticed. After hearing the takeover of Flight 93 at 9:28, air traffic controllers continued to follow its transponder signal until 9:41 and to follow the radar blip until around 9:53. Even after radar contact was lost, other aircraft saw Flight 93 in the vicinity of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. At 10:08, they saw black smoke rising. So, if Flight 93 was meeting the others in an unknown location and then heading to Cleveland, something else would have to take its place. And someone would have to set off a smoke bomb within minutes of its apparent crash. Not to mention the question of how the conspirators managed to dig the crater where Avery says the crash was faked without leaving any tracks of earth-moving equipment.

I will admit to not knowing enough about air traffic to say for certain that it would be impossible for controllers to miss hearing secret commands or seeing the decoys' radar blips converge with and then diverge from the four planes. Nor can I say with certainty that the pilots would have noticed the decoy planes paralleling them and reported this anomaly. But it seems far-fetched.
And even if the substitution could have taken place in the air unnoticed, the no-planes theory leaves other unanswered questions. Where did the decoy planes and cruise missile come from? Where did the four hijacked planes meet? (Not Cleveland; that is where Flight 93 went after the passengers were transferred). Why did no one notice the four planes meeting up where ever they went? And what became of the planes and passengers afterward?

Avery attempts to answer only this last question. He acknowledges not knowing what happened to the people on board the planes. As for the planes themselves, he suggests that they are still in use. His evidence for this is that two of their tail numbers are still valid and the tail number of Flight 93 was spotted in Chicago in 2003. That is, however, the only reported sighting of any of the four planes. Furthermore, Flight 93's tail number of N591UA was spotted on a plane whose official tail number is N594UA. Applying Occam's Razor, which is the more plausible explanation, that someone mistook one digit of a plane's tail number, or that the plane has been in use all these years and only one person has ever seen it?

Avery says he originally intended Loose Change as a work of fiction but ended up being convinced that it was true. And, indeed, Loose Change comes across more like a fiction writer trying to be clever than anything that would happen in the real world. A clever enough fiction writer might be able to make up explanations for all the holes in the story -- where the decoys and cruise missile came from, how the air traffic controllers failed to notice the substitution, where the planes met, how they avoided being detected, and why neither the planes nor the people on board were never seen again. But that still leaves one obvious question that Loose Change never even attempts to address. Why would the government conspirators attempt such an absurdly complex plot with so many potential places to fail when flying the planes into their targets would be so much easier?

911 Conspiracies, Meet Occam's Razor

I really shouldn't waste my time on such foolishness, but as one who has seen the 911 conspiracy movie Loose Change and who has known people who believe there may be something to it, I do believe it is worth while for anyone who comes into contact with September 11 conspiracy theorists to know what they believe and have some convincing refutation.

Different people believe such theories for different reasons. Some are chronic paranoids or such hard-core Bush haters that they will believe anything about him. People with such immutable preconceptions are impossible to argue with. But I believe that many people who are not hard-core can be convinced by 911 conspiracy theorists because they lack the technical knowledge to refute them. To be able to truly judge the validity of such theories calls for knowledge of NORAD defense procedures, aircraft design, metallurgy, structural engineering, demolitions, and communications technology far beyond the understanding of any ordinary layperson. Counter-experts and dueling opinions will only further confuse most people. Conspiracy theorists have the advantage over ordinary people even with non-technical evidence, like eyewitness testimony. How many people have times to read through the thousands of interviews to see when conspiracy theorists are cherry picking and citing out of context?

But if most people do not have the expertise to refute 911 conspiracy theories in detail, what we do have is common sense and the ability to apply Occam's Razor to see how plausible these theories are. I will, therefore, focus as much as possible on ways to apply common sense and Occam's Razor to conspiracy theories that do not call for any research at all. I will secondarily present research (properly linked) not calling for any specialized technical knowledge. I will avoid technical argument as much as possible (although it is not always possible). September 11 conspiracy theorists focus on poking holes in the "official" version of events. But anyone casting a critical eye on any conspiracy theory will find holes large enough to fly a Boeing 767 through.

Before discussing any technical scenario in detail, there is the allegation that people in power took actions that suggest advance knowledge. Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airlines several months before September 11. On September 10 a group of top Pentagon officials canceled flights for the next day and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown received a call warning him not to fly the next morning. But none of this makes any sense whatever as evidence that 9-11 was an inside job. If Ashcroft and the Pentagon officials were conspirators, they would have known which planes would be targeted and would have not reason to avoid any other planes. Willie Brown, on the west coast, was well outside of the danger zone. And why would the conspirators care about the fate of the liberal Democratic Mayor of San Francisco? If the point is that the political elite protects its own regardless of party, the conspirators would have had to have kept track of the travel plans of an immense number of people to know that so obscure a figure as Brown, so far from the attacks, was flying that morning.

And if the political elite protects its own, why did the conspirators fail to warn Barbara Olson, conservative commentator on CNN and wife of Ted Olson, Solicitor General of the Bush Administration? Barbara Olson was on the plane that hit the Pentagon. Why would the conpsirators warn the Mayor of San Francisco, flying on the west coast, but not the wife of the number three official in the Justice Department, who was much closer to the danger zone? Were the Olsons left out of the loop? Was Barbara Olson really part of the conspiracy? Is she alive and well and recently arrested along the non-existent Polish-Austrian border? Is any insanity too far-fetched for a conspiracy theorist?

September 11 conspiracy theorists are divided into many quarrelling factions, each presenting scenarios of what happened and regularly accusing each other of peddling deliberate government disinformation. The next few posts will take Occam's Razor to some of the leading rival theories.