The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

by Matt Taibbi

  FEITH: Fantastic. I love killing people in the finance industry. It’s too bad the people on the lower floors will get to escape.

  CHENEY: It is too bad—especially since we’re going to blow up the rest of the building complex anyway.

  FEITH: We are?

  CHENEY: Yes. You see, the way I see it, our best course of action is to first crash planes into each of the towers, trapping and killing those thousands on the upper floors of each building. After the impact, of course, the people on the lower floors will find their way out of the building and onto the street, where they will achieve relative safety—at which point we’ll finally detonate the massive network of explosive charges we’ve secretly hidden in the buildings in the weeks and months prior to the attacks.

  FEITH: Wait, why did we do that again?

  CHENEY: Because the buildings wouldn’t have fallen down unless we did.

  WOLFOWITZ: But why do we need the buildings to fall down?

  CHENEY: Because the events of the day will be insufficiently horrifying and impactful without the building collapses.

  FEITH: So why don’t we detonate the charges earlier, so that we can kill the people on the lower floors, too?

  CHENEY: That’s a good question. At some point we have to sacrifice effect for believability. You see, if the planes crash into the buildings and the buildings collapse immediately, everyone will be suspicious and they’ll be onto the presence of the explosives. So what we have to do is let the planes crash into the building, give the jet fuel time to start fires that will “soften” the building core, and then we detonate the charges. Afterward, we’ll be able to argue that the fires coupled with the impact actually caused the buildings to collapse.

  FEITH: Why will we be able to argue that? Didn’t our studies show that impact and fire alone wouldn’t have caused the buildings to collapse?

  CHENEY: Those were our secret, far-more-advanced studies, done with secret, far-more-advanced military technology. The vast majority of the world’s civilian structural engineers, however, can be counted on after the incident to conclude that the buildings collapsed due to a combination of fire, impact, and the knocking off of fireproofing from the building beams.

  FEITH: Why can they be counted on to conclude that?

  CHENEY: Because that’s what our secret research shows their not-secret research will show! Jesus Christ, work with me on this, will you?

  WOLFOWITZ: I think I get it. We crash the planes, kill everyone above the impact of the planes, let the people underneath the impact out to safety, then collapse the buildings about an hour or so later using the explosives that we pointlessly incurred months’ and weeks’ worth of career-and life-threatening risk to covertly plant in a building complex visited by hundreds of thousands of people every week.

  CHENEY: Exactly! The actual deaths will mostly be caused by the planes. But we’ll incur the massive additional risk simply to destroy the building for effect, because it will look cool and scary on television.

  FEITH: I’m still confused about the our-studies and their-studies thing.

  CHENEY (sighing): What’s the matter, Doug?

  FEITH: If we know the planes won’t collapse the buildings, isn’t it possible that other people after the accident will figure out that the planes didn’t collapse the buildings?

  CHENEY: Yes. But those other people will be a tiny minority of mostly nonscientists who’ll deduce the whole plan by researching the matter on the Internet. But we can count on their groundbreaking, visionary research being ignored by the mainstream scientific community, which will continue to insist the planes caused the collapses.

  FEITH: Why can we count on that?

  CHENEY: Because the mainstream science community, like the whole of the corporate media, the Congress, the Democratic Party, even the mainstream leftist political opposition, will naturally be in either conscious or unconscious assent with our plan. Most scientists, you know, depend in some form or another on government funding. So they’ll be highly motivated to sign off on our dastardly mass-murder plot, since they know their salaries—some of these people make almost a hundred thousand a year, you know—ultimately depend on our ability to secure fifty billion additional barrels of oil per day by 2010 by fooling the population into invading Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq by faking a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center at the hands of a bunch of Saudi religious radicals loyal to the Afghan-supported terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

  WOLFOWITZ: No, I get it, I really do. It all makes sense.

  CHENEY: Also, we have to knock down WTC 7, this very building, in order to get rid of the evidence. I think it goes without saying that we’ll need a command center for these operations, and I can’t think of a place that would be better or more appropriate than an office right next to the point of attack. From these very offices, gentlemen, we will coordinate the military war exercises that will be held in this region on that very morning, war exercises that will so thoroughly confuse our own military that they will be unable to identify and intercept the hijacked planes we will be sending at the towers like so many deadly guided missiles.

  KRISTOL: But, Dick—how can we be sure that the air force won’t find a way to intercept the planes anyway?

  WOLFOWITZ: I’ll answer that, Dick. Irv, the best way we can guarantee that will be to issue stand-down orders in addition to implementing the war games.

  KRISTOL: I see. We order the war games in order to stymie the air force intercepts we don’t control, but just in case those fail, we’ll control the air force intercepts.

  CHENEY: Now you’re catching on.

  KRISTOL: And the control center for those war games and for all our other plans, including the demolition, will be right here. These rooms are secret and utterly impenetrable to the general public at the moment, but after the attacks they will be vulnerable to forensic inspection by whichever city or federal agency goes through the wreckage of this doomed building.

  CHENEY: Exactly. That’s one of the reasons I thought we should choose this space. If we chose some other spot as a base of operations—a warehouse in Queens, say—we might be able to keep it secure forever. But if we set up here, we can be sure some snooping official will end up poking around in the ruins. And we want that, it adds intrigue to the whole deal. Because it goes without saying that we won’t be able to control all the cleanup agencies, except those that might be inclined to find our bomb fragments. Those we can count on one hundred percent.

  KRISTOL: Right, but still, we have to really be sure we destroy everything here. Especially all the papers and computer records of the conspiracy plans, which we will naturally leave behind, banking on the fact that they will be destroyed in the hellish conflagration.

  FEITH: Guys, I’m lost. You’re saying we have to detonate this entire building in order to cover up the evidence of the crime?

  ALL: Of course.

  FEITH: Why don’t we just not leave the evidence behind and not blow up the building? Why should there be any evidence to leave behind at all?

  CHENEY: Doug, you’re not being realistic. You always have to leave evidence of covert operations behind for the public to maybe find.

  WOLFOWITZ: Well, except that we never have before.

  CHENEY: Right, except for that. (A phone in the middle of the conference table rings. Kristol picks it up.)

  KRISTOL: Hello? Who’s this? Oh, hey, Larry. A gast in shtetl! I’ll put you on speaker! (cups phone, presses speaker button; addresses others) It’s Larry Silverstein, the WTC landlord.

  SILVERSTEIN: Hey guys! Vos makht ir?

  CHENEY: Not bad, Larry, how goes it?

  SILVERSTEIN: In dr’erd afn dek! Just awful! But we get by, you know.

  CHENEY: What can we do you for, Larry?

  SILVERSTEIN: Oh, hey, well, a little birdie told me that you guys were planning on blowing up my building complex and blaming it on Islamic terrorists!

  CHENEY: We all have our hobbies, Larry.

  SILVERSTEI
N: Well, naturally, you have my assent. Anything to grease the wheels of international capitalism. Also, as a landlord, I love seeing my tenants burned to death and jumping out of high windows on live television and that sort of thing. Plus, I’m a Jew, you know, I have horns. Paul, how’s your family?

  WOLFOWITZ: Oh, Larry, don’t ask. Clare just last week popped her bursa sac building a sukkah. But does anyone live a life without troubles these days?

  SILVERSTEIN: Things just keep getting worse and worse, you’re right there. Listen, fellas, about that building complex…

  CHENEY: Yes?

  SILVERSTEIN: Do you think you could make sure that the WTC 7 building goes down, too? See, the thing is, I just signed a new insurance deal with Industrial Risk Insurers; this could all work out very nicely for me.

  CHENEY: Larry, it’s such an amazing coincidence, we were just talking about that. As it happens, we need to destroy the building to get rid of the evidence anyway. So say no more about that, we’ll take care of it.

  WOLFOWITZ: Well, say no more until it happens. Then you might just want to casually mention near a PBS camera that you’re planning on “pulling” the building.

  SILVERSTEIN: What does “pulling” mean?

  CHENEY: Well, it’s not a demolition term, but some will say it is. We’re thinking you might just want to make a little admission in that direction.

  SILVERSTEIN: Before my insurance investigation is concluded? At exactly the time when such an admission would cost me my entire settlement? Consider it done!

  ALL: Thanks, Larry.

  SILVERSTEIN: You bet, fellas! See you on the links. Mazel tov! Oh, hey, Paul…

  WOLFOWITZ: Yes?

  SILVERSTEIN: Pull my finger, Paul! Pull it!

  WOLFOWITZ: You bet I’ll “pull it,” you mensch!

  SILVERSTEIN: Later! (Silverstein hangs up.)

  CHENEY: Well, that worked out well. I guess the only things left to really worry about are the other two planes. What do you guys think?

  KRISTOL: Well, one plane. I’m thinking with the Pentagon, we send a missile or a drone into the building, then just tell everyone it’s a plane. Just to fuck with people.

  FEITH: Is this going to be one of your basic take-the-real-plane-to-a-remote-military-base, kill-the-passengers, then-fake-their-cell-phone-distress-calls-using-advanced-voice-recog-technology deals?

  KRISTOL: That’s what I’m thinking. Keep it simple, in other words.

  WOLFOWITZ: Now I’m confused. We hire patsies to fly into the World Trade Center, but for the Pentagon, we don’t use patsies?

  CHENEY: No. We use patsies, but just not to fly the plane. See, the patsies we choose for the Pentagon job won’t actually have enough piloting skill to maneuver a plane into the Pentagon. So what we’ll do is take a real passenger flight, hijack it, and take it to a remote location—say, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio—and then kill all the passengers on board, including the patsies, with poison gas.*3 Then, instead of using that plane, we’ll either shoot a missile or use one of those Global Hawk drone planes to crash into the Pentagon. Then we tell everyone that it was actually the missing plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

  WOLFOWITZ: Why don’t we just get patsies who can fly a plane? Isn’t that what we’re doing in New York?

  CHENEY: It’s so hard to find skilled patsies these days.

  KRISTOL: Plus, Paul, it’ll be simple. All we have to do is go to the crash site afterward and deposit pieces of airplane wreckage, landing gear and so on, at the appropriate places.

  CHENEY: That’s perfect. I know exactly where we can get some airplane wreckage, too. There was an American Airlines jet that crashed in Colombia in 1995; we can take pieces of that plane and just sort of drop them on the lawn when no one is looking.†4 You know, just like in The Great Escape—drop them through a pantleg while whistling and looking off into the distance, and just sort of kick them around in the burning wreckage.

  KRISTOL: Or even better, we can drop them on the lawn from a circling C-130 after the crash.*5 Just have someone leaning out the cargo bay with big pieces of fuselage, dropping them strategically in between the rescue workers. We can do the same thing with the body parts; we’ll just take some of the bodies, barbecue them with jet fuel, and just sort of toss bits of them here and there around the site.

  CHENEY: That works for me. What I like about that is that it’s so simple.

  WOLFOWITZ: Okay, let me back up. Rather than just finding some patsies who can fly—which is exactly what we’ll be doing in New York—we instead seize an actual passenger flight and remove the passengers to a remote location and kill them, disposing of the plane later. Then we attack the Pentagon and kill one hundred or so of our own people with either a missile or a Global Hawk drone plane, banking on the probability that no one will see a plane shooting a missile in broad daylight in the nation’s capital. Then, after we execute this attack on the Pentagon, we go back to the site and cleverly rearrange the evidence to make it look like a plane crashed there, including planting the samples of DNA of all the people we killed in Ohio or whatever. I’m not saying it doesn’t sound like a good plan, but can I ask why we’re doing this? If we can’t find a patsy who can fly a plane, why not just not crash a plane into the Pentagon?

  CHENEY: What do you mean? But a plane crashes into the Pentagon. That’s part of the plan.

  WOLFOWITZ: Right, but since it’s our plan and we can change it, why don’t we just scuttle the entire Pentagon operation? We’ve already got the money shot with the towers—why do we need to go through all the trouble of finding hijackers who can’t fly, nurturing them in the womb of ineffective government surveillance, getting them on a plane full of passengers, and then faking the deaths of all these people, telling the world they died in a plane crash that was actually a sinister attack using our own technology? I mean, so many things can go wrong. You’ve got to get people to sign off on the DNA reports, you’ve got eyewitnesses with weird stories, you’ve got inconsistent radar data, you’ve got to put stuff there for the dogs to find…

  CHENEY: Don’t worry about the dogs. We’ve got the dogs covered.*6

  WOLFOWITZ: Oh, well, okay. But still—why not just skip the whole thing?

  CHENEY: Are you suggesting that instead of executing hundreds of sinister, secretive, murderous subplans that all must go off flawlessly together to create a single underpublicized deception, that instead of that we just blow it off and go with the much larger and more spectacular World Trade Center event?

  WOLFOWITZ: Right. Either that or find patsies who can fly.

  CHENEY: Hmm. Interesting. What do you guys think?

  FEITH: I don’t know, Dick. It seems much easier just to go with the whole fake-the-flight, kill-the-passengers, fake-the-cell-phone-calls, pass-off-the-missile-attack-as-a-plane-crash thing. I can’t think of any simpler way to do this plan than that.

  KRISTOL: Yeah, Dick, frankly, neither can I. I like your plan better. It’s so much more…cloak ’n’ daggerier!

  CHENEY: Well, it’s settled, then. Paul, you cool?

  WOLFOWITZ: Hey, I trust you guys, you know that.

  FEITH: Well, that worked out well. I mean, there are a few loose ends, but…

  CHENEY: Look, the point is, we do the towers and pin it on bin Laden. That leads us to invade Afghanistan. A year and a half later, we invade Iraq.

  FEITH: And we blame the whole WTC thing on Saddam.

  CHENEY: Right, and…wait, what? No! No, actually we never make that connection, because none exists. I figure we can just say he’s in violation of his UN restrictions, and that will be a good enough reason to invade. He is anyway, right? In violation, I mean?

  WOLFOWITZ: I think you’re right, he is!

  Of course one could go on and on in this direction. To read 9/11 Truther lore is to enter a world where criminals commit dastardly acts without motive, where even brilliant Machiavellian politicians like Dick Cheney repeatedly take the path of most perilous resistance to achieve their
nefarious ends, where simplicity of criminal plan is eschewed as a matter of principle, where everyone who is not actively involved with exposing the conspiracy can be considered a solid suspect for mass murder.

  ELEVEN

  PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

  IN EARLY MARCH I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea—literally woke up laughing. As it happened it was a Sunday, in the predawn hours. I looked down at my forearm, chuckled, then went back to bed.

  Within a few hours I was dressed up and back in church, sitting next to Laurie and Janine and a few other familiars, watching on the dual church JumboTrons as Pastor Hagee played a few homemade public service announcements. One of these was a spoof of Apple’s “Get a Mac” ad campaign—those irritating “offbeat” computer ads where effete hipster actor Justin Long (“Mac”) tries endlessly, against a seamless digital white-screen background, to console the hapless pudgy humorist John Hodgman (“PC”). In the “hilarious” church version, the two characters were “Man of God” and “Man of the World”—with the Man of God a cool, together cat and the Man of the World a helpless, flailing dickwad with a comb-over.

  “I live according to the holy values and principles set down in the Bible, the revealed word of God!” was the kickoff statement of the suave Man of God.

  “I get my values from pretty much anything and everything that I read and see, with no direction or guidance whatsoever!” moaned the goofball Man of the World.

  The audience roared with laughter. Someone behind me, I swear, slapped a knee. Laurie, sitting next to me, chortled out loud.

  “Oh, that is funn-ny!” she said.

  “Hilarious!” I agreed. “First-rate stuff.”

  She looked down at me.

  “Are you okay, honey? Something wrong with your arm?”

  I was scratching my left forearm furiously.

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine. Just a little itch.”

  She shrugged. “Okay, then,” she said. “I hope you’re okay.”

  I smiled. I felt firmly in my element by now. I had even been baptized in the church, an amusing if sensually unpleasant ceremony. Hagee farmed out the orientation process to a fifth-string pastor named Larry, an aging, bitter old curmudgeon whose mangled beet-red face was a mess of exploding capillaries. Larry’s crushed-cauliflower nose passed air to his lungs very spottily, and as a result the old meanie’s speech was almost completely incomprehensible, which made his narration about our impending spiritual journey into grace somewhat less enthralling than it might have been. In a cramped second-floor storage room, he kept telling stories about what a mean drunken prick he used to be before he found God, and how after he was saved he became just a flat-out frickin’ awesome individual. Everyone in the room looked bored. It didn’t help that he had a cold and kept sneezing and hacking in the windowless chamber, causing, I noticed with some amusement, some Mexican children in the front row to recoil continually from his speech.