Why the 911 dispute?

[Steve Martinot]

Why the 911 Dispute?
Steve Martinot

There are two 911 factions, neither of which accept the
government's account of what happened. One side takes a look at
the physical wreckage, and other evidence, and concludes that the
planes that hit the twin towers did not bring those towers down.
The other faction attacks them for saying so, calling them
conspiracy theoriest, morons, and worse. They say that the planes
brought the towers down, and that though the government had
forewarning of the attack, let it happen. (The idea that the
government is too incoompetant to have done this itself is a red
herring; those in the administration who wished to bring off any
such event have enough money to hire the best professional
planners, designers and engineers in the world.)

Both sides agree on the role 911 has played: the
event has been used for the purposes of constituting a police
state in the US, starting unprovoked wars with other nations, and
dragooning other nations into supporting it in those wars. Most
agree that control of the oil in the nations invaded by the US is
the US goal. This is key, and should not be forgotten. Control of
the oil does not mean having it to use. It is a colonialist
paradigm: he who controls the oil controls all industrialized
countries.

Six years into the occupation of Afghanistan, and four years
into the occupation of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of people
killed by these invasions, why should the question of whether
airplanes or controlled demolition brought the buildings down be
such a touchy subject (and it is its touchiness that is critical
here) that it cannot be discussed rationally, or the evidence
considered objectively, in a forensic manner. But those who look
at the wreckage forensically, who we could call the
"questioners," receive only derogation ("conpiracy theory," as a
phrase, has been turned into a derogatory term; it no longer
signifies anything discursively with respect to 911) when they
try to speak about what the wreckage says to them through their
forensics. There is a strange rabidity with which the expression
"conpiracy theory" emerges, almost as a kneejerk response. And I
not just speaking of mailing list fulminators, but also such
thinkers as Cockburn and Monbiot; the latter may be more
practiced in political writing, and better able to temper its
animus, but their discourse remains derogatory in its non-
factuality and rhetoric. It is necessarily non-factual since they
accept the basic premises of the government's account, but need
to stay outside the domain of governmental support.

Because, in their derogation of the "questioners," this
faction has to make due with an empty rhetorical position,
characterized mostly by shouting "conspiracy theory," the term
"anti-questioners" seems appropriate.

What is the real issue between these two 911 factions,
between the questioners and the anti-questioners. Why is the
dispute between them so vituperative, and so often vicious. What
is driving someone like Monbiot to claim that arguing for
"controlled demolition" will destroy years of his political work?

Let us follow the logic of each position backward. The anti-
questioners claim that the government let 911 happen, despite the
fact that they had forewarnings. That means that planes were
hijacked, and flown into the buildings. If planes were hijacked,
and those who did the hijackings were foreigners, then the
event constituted an attack by those foreigners on the US.

The questioners look at the way the towers came down
(imploding, straight down into their footprint, at almost the
velocity of free fall, throwing heavy steel debris hundreds of
feet to the side, with the massive central columns all cut off
horizontally at ground level, leaving tons of molden steel
burning in the basement for weeks afterward), and deduce that
only controlled demolition, and not gravity working on the upper
floors, could have done this. In that case, the buildings were
brought down not by airplanes but by whoever directed the placing
of explosive charges in the buildings. That means that the planes
that hit the towers were not hijacked. Those who directed the
demolition would need to be certain that planes would actually
hit the towers on the proper morning in order to make it look
like the planes brought the buildings down, and thus could not
afford to rely on hijackers. They would have had to find other
ways to fly planes into those buildings. (Thanks to Hufschmid for
that argument.) But if no hijackings occurred, which is the logic
of the controlled demolition argument, then the planes that hit
the towers did not represent an attack on the US.

Now, there we have the real conflictual issue between
these two factions, the questioners and the anti-questioners.
Both agree that the government lied. One reasons from the
evidence that there was no attack on the US. The other reasons
through a modified version of the government's account that 911
was an actual attack on the US.

Now, in the presence of an evidentiary argument that there
was no attack on the US on 911, why would the anti-questioners
press so hard for the idea, hidden in their derogation of the
questioners, that 911 was indeed an attack on the US. What is
their interest in 911 being an attack on the US, that they would
have to denigrate anyone who would call that idea in question?

We could say that, in being as vociferous as they have been,
using endless rhetorical derogation, that they want 911 to have
been, and to continue to be, seen as an attack on the US. That is,
they have an identity involvement in 911 being an attack on the
US.

When people want to be attacked, it can only mean that they
have a strong desire to be able to respond to that attack, to
defend themselves, to partake in the glory of a noble struggle
for self-defense. You can't defend yourself if you have not been
attacked. In order to join the noble cause of self-defense, and
the solidarity that this requires, an attack is absolutely
essential. Perhaps it is that feeling of solidarity that the
anti-questioners desire, though it would be a corrupt solidarity.
It might even be what leads Monbiot to say the questioners are
disrupting all his political work, which is presumably based on
some kind of solidarity.

We have a name for all this when it concerns a nation, and
the possibility that a nation may have to defend itself against a
foreign attack. It is called "nationalism."

The anti-questioners are revealing a very profound intense
nationalism in their attacks on the questioners, a nationalism
that the questioners themselves do not feel. Does that mean that
the questioners do not care? Not at all. They care very much
about bringing to justice those who carried out this criminal
act called "911." And they wish to investigate the government, to
find those guilty of this deed. Unfortunately, the anti-
questioners can redirect their feelings toward no such idea of
justice, since the people who they think conceived and carried
out this attack all died in the crashes. Against whom can they
express their nationalism, and against whom can they experience
the glory of solidarity against an aggressor? Hence, there is a
frustration among the anti-questioners that they do not
acknowledge; their adopted position elides their ability to seek
justice. Perhaps that is what they are taking out on the
questioners. Perhaps that is why they react to the questioners as
if they were aggressors.

I shudder to think that perhaps it is even worse than a
frustrated nationalism; there is the possibility that the anti-
questioners' animus is a contemporary form of yellow-perilism, a
need to hate a perceived Asian evil (Islamic fundamentalism, in
this case, which is what the government targets). Is that what
sustains these people's identity as "good Americans," especially
in their opposition to the government? There ability to defend
the US against an Asian peril?

Well, US nationalism is not an enviable position or ideology
to hold. It means support or complicity in the carpet bombing of
Vietnam and Afghanistan; overthrowing democratically elected
governments in Chile, Indonesia, Iran, and more; dropping the
atomic bomb on two cities in Japan for no reason except to test
them; organizing death squads throughout Latin America; using
biological weapons against Cuba a number of times; embargoing
nations until they cried uncle; and all the time, speaking
hypocritically about equality and democracy. A nationalism that
supports all this is hard-pressed to see itself as virtuous.

It behooves those who are either open nationalists, or
unconscious nationalists, to sit down and seriously reconsider
the ideology that they have chosen for themselves.


PS: Among those who think the government just let it happen,
there are many who add that what happened on 911 is not the real
issue, and that it is silly to spend time on it. When I suggest
that it is central to all foreign and domestic policy since it
happened, as motive, icon, and rationale for what the government
is doing. The response is that this is true, but it is not the
real issue. But the government's use of 911 makes it the
essential fulcrum between those who support the government's wars,
and those who wish to win people away from the government's wars.
How, then, could it not be a central issue?

I ran into such a person, someone I knew, on the last anti-
war march. We walked along, talking about the march, and
exchanging some political ideas. I asked him about his own
refusal to discuss what had happened on 911, which I knew about
from other encounters. We agreed that nothing has occurred since
that moment that has not been grounded on that event. But when I
mentioned that understanding 911 was therefore crucial to all
political opposition to the government, he simply threw at me
that people would refuse to take up the discussion because they
had better things to do. Oddly, he didn't walk along with me and
explain what those better things might be, neither for him nor
for others nor for myself. Instead, he simply fled from me. We
had nothing better to do than walk along with the march, and talk
politics. But he found a "better thing" to do, which was to flee
from me.

It was an ironic example of an identity involvement in
something, in not confronting an issue of nationalism, right
there in the midst of an Iraq anti-war demonstration.