Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  Since the rise of the automobile, and the Teapot Dome Scandal of the early 1920s—an instance in which petro-conspirators truly did seek to secretly commandeer America’s ship of state—oil gradually has replaced gold as the mythical object of the conspirators’ obsessions; just as, more recently, “neocons” have replaced Jews, “bankers,” and “gamblers” as a description for the conspirators themselves. In the case of the 9/11 Truth movement, certainly, it is hard to find any conspiracy theorist who does not put oil smack at the center of his mythology.

  “Although the apparent crisis is about terrorism, the real one is about energy scarcity,” career conspiracist Michael Ruppert wrote in Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire At The End of the Age of Oil. “In order to prevent the extinction of the human race [due to a lack of oil], the world’s population must be reduced by as many as four billion people. [This] constitute[s] the ultimate motives for the attacks of 9/11.”

  Interestingly, the market crash of 2008, and the attendant rise of the price of precious metals, has led to a modest comeback for gold-based conspiracy theories. One widely circulated conspiracist email that began landing in my inbox in 2009 informed me that: “The biggest gold crime story of the century might be soon coming to full light. Evidence is accumulating that the Clinton administration . . . replaced perhaps the entire contents of the Fort Knox gold with tungsten bars plated by gold.” On conspiracist websites, such stories often appear side by side with advertisements from gold-coin wholesalers who, along with peddlers of wind-up radios and other survivalist gear, have carved out a profitable niche as conspiracism’s piggyback profiteers.

  Moreover, gold does figure prominently in one significant “retro” strand of the Truth movement: In the original version of the influential Truther film Loose Change (described in Chapter 7), director Dylan Avery spends several minutes making the case that the destruction of WTC 2 may have been part of an elaborate plot to steal no less than $167 billion in gold using a “10-wheel truck.” The claim was removed from subsequent versions—after it was pointed out that $167 billion in gold, valued in Sept. 2001, would weigh more than 19,000 tons, thus requiring a fleet of about 485 semitrailer trucks.

  Cui Bono?

  As noted already, early conspiracy theories about the French Revolution focused in large part on the Illuminati, Freemasons, and anti-Catholics. It wasn’t till several years later that Jews were added to Abbé Augustin Barruel’s list of suspects, almost as an afterthought. What convinced many Frenchmen of Jewish involvement? The French National Assembly abolished special restrictions on Jews in 1791, and Napoleon Bonaparte convened a high-profile meeting of Jewish notables in Paris sixteen years later. Then, as now, conspiracy theorists acted on the logic of cui bono—“who benefits?”

  The authors of the Protocols recited the logic of cui bono on every page, intertwining it with the related theme of insatiable Jewish greed: The Jews, it was imagined, would happily engineer any form of human tragedy to make a buck. Nazi propagandists applied this theme relentlessly in their propaganda. The 1943 Polish edition of the Protocols, for instance, depicted a fat Jew grasping two large bags of money as he sits atop a big pile of skulls.

  In our own era, the logic of cui bono has been trotted out by conspiracists when Halliburton, Blackwater, or some other American conglomerate is awarded a contract in Iraq or Afghanistan. Assassination-related conspiracy theories, in particular, tend to emphasize the logic of cui bono—since the death of any public figure (JFK is a good example) always produces hundreds of indirect beneficiaries. Career conspiracy theorist and leading Truther Webster Tarpley, for instance, argues that the likely suspect behind the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan was none other than “Freemason George Bush,” for whom “the vice presidency was not an end in itself, but merely another stage in the ascent towards the pinnacle of the federal bureaucracy, the White House.

  “The Roman common sense of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (who had seen so many of Nero’s intrigues, and who would eventually fall victim to one of them) would have dictated that the person who would have profited most from Reagan’s death be scrutinized as the prime suspect,” Tarpley has explained. “That was obviously Bush, since Bush would have assumed the presidency if Reagan had succumbed to his wounds.”

  Under the logic of cui bono, Truthers see today’s neocons—like the Jews of the Protocols—as both architects and profiteers of perpetual war. To quote John McMurtry, an influential Truther who teaches at the University of Guelph in Ontario:

  One would be naive to think the Bush Jr. faction and its oil, military-industrial and Wall Street backers who had stolen an election with its man rated in office by the majority of Americans as poor on the economy . . . and more deplored by the rest of the world as a deep danger to the global environment and the international rule of law, do not benefit astronomically from this mass-kill explosion. If there was a wish-list, it is all granted by this numbing turn of events. Americans are diverted from a free-falling economy to attack another foreign Satan, while the Bush regime’s popularity climbs. The military, the CIA and every satellite armed security apparatus have more money and power than ever, and become as dominant as they can over civilians in ‘the whole new era’ already being declared by the White House. The anti-missile plan to rule the skies is now exonerated (if irrelevantly so), and Israel’s apartheid civil war is vindicated at the same time. Even the surgingly popular “anti world-trade” movement is now associated with foreign terrorists blowing up the World Trade Center . . . The more you review the connections and the sweeping lapse of security across so many co-ordinates, the more the lines point backwards.

  Hypercompetence

  In September 2001, the World Trade Centre was attacked allegedly by terrorists. I am not sure now that Muslim terrorists carried out these attacks. There is strong evidence that the attacks were staged. If they can make Avatar, they can make anything.

  —Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, January 2010

  Of all the 9/11 conspiracy theories I’ve encountered, perhaps the most elaborate is that of Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, a retired Canadian mathematician who believes there were no Arab hijackers on September 11, 2001: The passengers of the four planes were killed using sarin gas, and the planes were flown into their targets by government-programmed computers.

  Among the many inconvenient facts casting doubt on Dewdney’s thesis are the various telephone calls from passengers on the hijacked 9/11 aircraft to their loved ones. And so, Dewdney has made it his life’s work to prove that the people who originated these phone calls actually were actors and actresses pretending to be hijack victims. Dewdney has even gone up in rented aircraft with a bag full of cell phones so that he can prove to the world that the alleged phone calls never took place.

  In his forty-page essay on the subject, “Ghost Riders In The Sky,” Dewdney describes how he thinks U.S. government agents stage-managed the desperate phone calls, in real time, on 9/11:

  Imagine then an operations room (of which every intelligence agency has several) with a screen on which the events appear as text, keeping all operatives on the same page, so to speak. An operations director would have much the same role as a symphony conductor, cueing various operators as the script unfolds. An audio engineer would have several tapes already made in a sound studio. The tapes, which portray mumbled conferences among passengers or muffled struggles, replete with shouts and curses, can be played over any of the phone lines, as determined by the script, or simply fed as ambient sound into the control room. Trained operators with headsets make the actual calls. Each operator has studied tapes for several of the individuals, as recorded on prior occasions of Flight 93, as well as profiles of the individuals, including a great deal of personal information, some of it obtained ‘on the ground,’ as they say. As soon as the passenger lists become available, each operator scans his or her own copy, searching for the names that he or she will specialize in, discarding the rest. The introductory se
ntence, somewhat fuzzily transmitted, would carry the hook: ‘Honey, we’ve been hijacked!’ Thereafter, with the belief framework installed, a similar live voice could react to questions, literally playing the situation by ear, but being sure to include pertinent details such as ‘Arab-looking guys,’ ‘boxcutters,’ and all the rest. If the contact has been made successfully in the operator’s opinion, with the essential information conveyed, it is always possible to terminate the call more or less gracefully, depending on what portion of the script is under execution. ‘Okay. We’re going to do something. I’ll call you back.’ Click. Each operator has a voice that is somewhat similar to that of the person he or she is pretending to be. It is not particularly difficult to do this. For example, it is far easier to find someone with a voice that can be mistaken for mine (especially over a telephone line) than it is to find someone who looks like me (even in a blurred photograph). Moreover, most people can learn to mimic voices, an art well-illustrated by comedians who mimic well-known personalities. Operators would have received general instructions about what do to in the course of a call. Although each has been supplied with at least some ‘intimate’ details of the target’s life, there would be techniques in place for temporizing or for avoiding long conversations where basic lack of knowledge might threaten to become suddenly obvious, and so on. Three such techniques are praying (from text, if necessary), crying, or discussing the other attacks.

  This fantasy encapsulates what Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs calls “the myth of hypercompetence.” Even as the conspiracy theorist imagines a world-controlling cabal that is subhuman in its lack of pity, morality, honesty, and empathy, he is simultaneously awestruck by their superhuman intelligence, ambition, guile, discipline, and singularity of purpose.

  Given the evildoer’s massive intellect, it is imagined that he has access to—or seeks to perfect—doomsday machines and other science-fiction technologies worthy of Dr. No. Truther David Ray Griffin, for instance, warns readers in his many books that 9/11 is in fact a “Space Pearl Harbor” that somehow will lead to the weaponization of the cosmos. Prominent British Truther David Icke (a man widely quoted within the movement, notwithstanding his odd claims that the world is controlled by intergalactic lizards) believes the CIA has developed microchips so small that they can be injected into humans through hypodermic vaccine needles. Michael Ruppert writes at great length about an all-knowing, all-powerful U.S. government computer program called PROMIS: “Having inspired four new computer languages, [the software] had made possible the positioning of satellites so far out in space that they were untouchable. At the same time the progeny had improved video quality to the point where the same satellite could focus on a single human hair. The ultimate big picture. PROMIS progeny had also evolved to the point where neural pads could be attached to plugs in the back of the human head and thought could be translated into electrical impulses that would be equally capable of flying a plane or wire-transferring money . . . Data, such as satellite reconnaissance, could also now be downloaded from a satellite directly into a human brain. The evolution of the artificial intelligence had progressed to a point where animal behavior and thought were being decoded. Mechanical humans were being tested. Animals were being controlled by computer.”

  During my years interviewing conspiracy theorists, I often felt like I was entering a science-fiction convention—a world of wide-eyed boy-men talking excitedly about remote-controlled jet airliners, paint-on explosives, undetectable electronic communications, and doomsday pathogens concocted in government weapons labs. Millions of conspiracy theorists—including Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez—even believe that the United States possesses “tectonic weapons” that can cause massive earthquakes, such as the one that struck Haiti in January 2010. Another popular theory is that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) ionospheric research facility in Gakona, Alaska, is a superweapon that can rain instant death (or, in the alternate view, control people’s minds) anywhere on earth. One correspondent even informed me that the 9/11 attacks were the work of time travelers: “A key whistleblower, Andrew D. Basiago, has emerged with evidence that secret U.S. time travel technologies were used as early as 1971 to acquire first-hand documentary knowledge about September 11, 2001—fully three decades before the horrific events of that fateful day. Mr. Basiago, a child participant in DARPA’s time travel program, Project Pegasus, has publicly stated how in 1971 he viewed moving images of the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 that had been obtained from the future and brought back to the early 1970’s.”

  This is one of the reasons why conspiracist movements tend to be so overwhelmingly male in their core membership. (Another is that the male mind tends to become more easily obsessed with abstract logic puzzles and eccentric ideological systems that are disconnected from the reality of day-to-day human existence—a subject to which I shall return in Chapter 5.) For all their pretensions to sophisticated truth-seeking, conspiracists often seem stuck in the suburban-basement universe of secret decoder rings and Star Wars action figures. As Meigs put it, many conspiracists have seen “too many movies”—particularly in the action genre. Like James Bond, freshly equipped at the beginning of each film with the latest gadgets from MI6’s weapons lab, the government agents of conspiracists’ imaginations have access to every sort of weapon ever invented—as well as many that are still imaginary. They possess Bond’s skill and savvy, as well. How else could they constantly avoid detection and capture?

  The Protocols—which cast the Jews as full-fledged evil geniuses, far superior in intellect to their gentile victims—once more provides the perfect case study. But the evil superman is a staple of all forms of conspiracism. In the anti-Soviet mythology of Cold War America, he was imagined to be a sort of emotionally neutered robot—as I.F. Stone put it, “some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic master minds in the distant Kremlin, engaged in a satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave mankind.” When the Cold War ended, the evil superman moved to Turtle Bay, and took up residence in the executive suites of the United Nations, where he developed the power to control fleets of undetectable black helicopters. “When the troops come in, they’ll come in such force it will be incredible,” Militia of Montana leader David Trochmann told journalist Michael Kelly back in 1995, near the height of the so-called patriot paramilitary militia movement. “In 48 hours, they can have one hundred million troops here. They’ll come out of the ground! They’ll come from submarines! They’ll come from air drops! They’ll come from everywhere.”

  Covering Their Tracks

  In the introduction to this book, I explained that my initial interest in the 9/11 Truth movement had an inward-looking aspect: Many of the conspiracy theorists I communicated with reminded me, in some way, of my own obsessional self. But there was another factor, too: Just about every conspiracy theorist I spoke with believed that my own industry—the corporate media—is deeply complicit with the government agents who destroy buildings and spread disease; that we know (or at least suspect) the awful truth, but refuse to report on it. Like all journalists, I regard myself as one of the good guys, as a force acting against unchecked government power. So why does my profession arouse such intense suspicion and hostility—not only among hard-core paranoiacs, but also among legitimate political activists spanning the political spectrum from left-wing student groups to right-wing Tea Partiers?

  The fact is that there is a grain of truth to the claim that the media creates its own “invented reality” (to cite the words of influential Canadian Truther Barrie Zwicker)—just not in the way that conspiracy theorists believe. No, we aren’t privy to shocking, other-worldly state secrets: If we were, there would be a mad rush among my colleagues to publish them, become sainted stars on par with Bernstein and Woodward, and then sign seven-figure book deals. Rather, the reality we journalists “invent” is very much based on the mundane happenings in the world around us, but it is selected, packaged, and sold according to our o
wn editorial and ideological biases, as well as our commercial understanding of what interests our readers, listeners, and viewers. As a result, the news that appears in the media often is dumbed down, sensationalized, slanted left or right in a way that can make people think we are making it all up out of whole cloth.

  In the three-channel universe of the postwar years, the variance between corporate media sources was so small that most people could imagine that the reported world and the world they knew were one and the same. Now that media choice has expanded by several orders of magnitude; people can switch realities merely by changing the channel—including an option now known as “reality television.” In describing the day’s news, for instance, FOX and NPR provide such different points of view that they might as well be broadcasting from different planets. In the current political environment, the usual practice among ordinary media consumers is that they “trust” one side and accuse the other of dishonesty. On this score, conspiracy theorists distinguish themselves only by their even-handedness: They accuse all sides of lying.

  Gregg Roberts describes himself as a freelance writer, business analyst, and lifelong peace activist. From the moment the Twin Towers collapsed, Roberts tells his readers, he was “surprised” by “the apparent completeness of the collapses, and the huge amount of dust that was produced.” In time, he came to conclude that the tragedy actually was the result of controlled demolition. “I spent the next couple of weeks appropriately depressed,” he reports. “I had known even before I knew all the facts that if the facts showed US officials were behind the attack, my life would never be the same. I would not be able to live my life in the same leisurely, typical American way. I would be compelled by my sense of integrity to try to do something about this attack, to try to bring the perpetrators to justice.”