Whodunnit?

In the wake of 9/11, there was a plethora of hypotheses, guesses, and speculations as to how such a thing could have happened. I expect that's a natural response, a human one, a way of trying to make sense of actions and outcomes that on the surface appear senseless.

We want things to make sense. When misfortune strikes, we're often tempted to say "why me?" Even when we know intellectually it was a freak accident, we still want a reason, a cause. The more shocking the incident, the greater the drive to believe that it couldn't be what it appears, there has got to be more to it. Think, for example, of the first Kennedy assassination: Lee Harvey Oswald just couldn't have acted alone, could he? He just couldn't have!

And likewise, the bigger the event, the bigger the conspiracy has to be. Since 9/11 was as shocking an event as we've experienced for some time, it's not surprising that there was a cottage industry of conspiracy theories "explaining" it as the result of calm, rational decisions - rational in the sense of being aware of their actions and intentions - by powerful forces behind the scenes. It couldn't just be that a bunch of murderous fanatics snookered our security systems. It just couldn't be!

Over at Cosmic Iguana, the various conspiracy possibilities for 9/11 are, it seems, still on the menu. On the anniversary, Cosmici offered four possibilities for "what really happened" on 9/11:

1. No One Could Have Predicted It. The Condoleeza Rice version.

2. The White House was too "blinded" by Iraq (Richard Clarke version) or by loyalty to the Saudis (Michael Moore version) to see what was coming.

3. Bush allowed 9-11 to happen for political gain.

4. The government was actively complicit in 9-11.

Cosmici says his position has been #3 but

[a]ll in all, although I am reluctant to abandon position 3, I am certainly more and more open to position 4.

All in all, I think this is nonsense. Now, far be it from me to defend the WHS^*, as I'm sure any even casual reader of this blog would be well aware. But I really think the conspiracy claims just don't hold up.

In fact, one commenter on Cosmici's post, in trying to uphold the conspiracy angle, actually did more to undermine it.

FIVE DAYS after Bush entered office Richard Clarke told Rice he needed to brief the "principals" on Al Qaeda - she said no! And her only defense to resisting his warnings over the next months was, apparently, his warnings did not include a plan!

Also, does anyone remember that Dick Cheney was the chair of the counterterrorism task force in spring and summer 2001?

Which is exactly the point. To the extent Clarke's account of his dealings with the Bush team is accurate, to that same extent it doesn't reveal a conspiracy of silence or a background of hidden complicity, but a pattern of ignorant indifference. They simply didn't take the issue seriously; it never rose past the level of "oh yeah, that too." For them it was all about missile defense, it was all about Iraq, it was all about the old ideas of power blocs and power balances. They were - they are - Cold War people with a Cold War mindset that simply doesn't allow for independent actors who are not under the sponsorship of some nation-state or another.

With that worldview where everything revolves around governments, any time the subject of Osama bin Laden did manage to come up, what would have been the response? Particularly in light of Bush's long and close relationship with the Saudis, how likely is it that such a potentially embarrassing topic would receive aggressive scrutiny? I expect very little; I expect the urge would have been both to downplay it and to want to handle such a "delicate" matter "carefully."

I suppose in Cosmici's list that puts me in a modified version of position 2, where the Bushists' incompetent, ideologically-hidebound failure to take the possibility of terrorist attack seriously melded with a desire to avoid offending the Saudis and produced a pattern of failing to look at the information that was all but literally being thrown in their faces - because it was telling them what they really didn't want to know in a way they could not understand.

So when 9/11 did happen, what did they do? Did they consider how you deal with a vaguely-defined group with a vaguely-defined hierarchy and an even more vaguely-defined ideology which nonetheless manages to have active operations all across central and southern Asia and the Middle East plus cells in both Europe and North America? Did they say "this is a different kind of enemy?" Did they say "we have to rethink our approach to the world?"

Of course not. It was Afghanistan's fault. After all, they were "harboring" al-Qaeda, weren't they? So take care of Afghanistan, take care of the problem!

In fact, just about everything the Bush crowd done since 9/11 reflects an attempt to continue with that Cold War worldview as intact as possible. During the Cold War, every opposition movement, no matter how indigenous, was seen as a proxy for the Soviets, the "evil empire" who were the source of all strife. Now, unhappily forced by reality to adopt references to "non-state actors" as if that was a major revelation, they made al-Qaeda into the spider in the web, the master controlling hand behind every instance of "terrorism." No longer able to look to governments as the focus, they settled on an image of an organization, one which could be "defeated" in the same way a nation-state could and against which we made "progress" by capturing members of its "hierarchy" - and they continue thinking that way well after intelligence sources have come to regard al-Qaeda more as a "brand," a way of thinking, a way of acting, rather than a top-down organization.

(This, I hasten to note, does note mean there isn't an actual al-Qaeda, any more than the nonsensical claims that "the Soviet hand is visible" in the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s meant there wasn't an actual Soviet Union. It does mean that neither policy overlap nor even declarations of ideological compatibility equal organizational connection or coordinated planning.)

Consider this a political version of Occam's Razor. William of Ockham, a 14th century English monk, did not originate the principle, but has come to be associated with it. His version of it was "plurality should not be posited without necessity." That's often expressed incorrectly as "the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct" but would be better said to be "the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct."

The fact is, based on what we know of the administration's behavior from Clarke, the 9/11 Commission (whose account pretty much confirmed Clarke's), and other sources, in order to say that the Shrubberies deliberately let 9/11 happen we have to conclude that they entered office knowing an attack was coming. That's the only way their consistent seeming indifference could possibly make sense. But that requires them to have had more knowledge of events than either the departing Clinton administration or the intelligence services, in addition to functioning as a perfectly leakless cabal - and remember, such leaks could come not only from them but from anyone they dealt with in obtaining the information with which they entered office. Having them be actively involved in promoting the plot requires even more layers of assumptions about contacts, information, and the utter absence of leaks despite the widening field of possibilities for them the more deeply involved the Shrub team was.

On the other hand, suggesting some form of "blindness" as the cause requires only that these people be who they are: old-line Cold Warriors incapable of recognizing a changed world until it hit them in the head with a brick (and not fully even then) working with a pampered frat brat who wouldn't want to trouble his buddies.

No, I don't believe they let it happen, even less do I believe they had any hand in promoting it. I do believe they are a bunch of short-sighted, narrow-minded, stiff-necked, unimaginative, arrogant, conceited twits who for that reason were too incompetent to see what they were being shown or hear what they were being told.

And who, if there is such a thing as ultimate justice - which I doubt - will someday pay a price for it.

^*WHS = White House Sociopaths