9-11 and Conspiracy Theories

I had an hour to kill at the bookstore yesterday and ended up reading a chapter in the new book Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy:: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice. The book consists of several conversations between Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar. The section I read dealt with "Terrorism and Conspiracy Theories".

Chomsky is fairly critical of conspiracy theories in general and presents an argument on why 9-11 is unlikely to have been engineered by the current administration. His rationale being as follows (summarized from book)

1. If the question is who benefits from 9-11, then the answer in not just the US administration. Chomsky says that all "Power Systems" in the world have benefited from the event. For example, China, India, Israel, Russia etc. have all used the 9-11 pretext to increase local repression by an order of magnitude. So it cannot be said that 9-11 benefited the US exclusively in terms of the policies it is now able to implement which it could not have done before 9-11
2. You cannot become a civil engineer by just reading stuff on the internet. Everyone seems to claim to be an expert on how the towers collapsed.
3. The administration could not have possibly risked planning an event of such magnitude especially when the results of such a plan are for all practical purposes completely unpredictable (for example, one of the planes could've crashed into the White House for all you know). Planning such a complicated operation would have to involve hundreds of people and any leaks would have resulted in the end of the Republican party forever.
4. To prove anything, scientists always perform controlled experiments. Because, if they don't, then there are always too many coincidences, unexplained results that interfere with the experiment. In other words, you can prove anything if the experiment is not controlled. Chomsky goes on to make his point namely that with all the theories floating around, it is possible to prove that the White House was destroyed yesterday.
5. The administrators are not capable of planning anything. A look at declassified documents reveals the intense stupidity of planners. Therefore, the planners could not have planned an event such as 9-11 especially when the results of such a plan are completely unpredictable anyway.
6. 9-11 conspiracy theories survive because the administration actually wants you to believe them. It is considered by them as a welcome distraction. Not many officials are seriously critical of 9-11 conspiracy theories because they want the theories to flourish and occupy peoples minds. On the other hand, if people start talking about real issues such as the US invading the Middle East for oil etc., then they are immediately vilified.

Chomsky also talks about how there is a whole industry centered around trying to find out who assassinated JFK (Chomsky is equally dismissive of claims of a conspiracy theory in JFKs assassination saying its a complete waste of time). He then makes a reference to a document from the Department of Defense which talks about the administration releasing certain pieces of information merely as distraction ...to satisfy the public's "appetite". The document can be found here.

Some the interesting excerpts from this document are:

--"The use of the Internet could reduce the unrestrained public appetite for "secrets" by providing good faith distraction material"
--"Diversion: List of interesting declassified material - i.e. Kennedy assassination data."

Gilbert Achcar then challenges Chomsky saying that even if the US administration didn't engineer 9-11, they did indeed sit back and let it happen and that sitting back and doing nothing didn't really need any planning. But Chomsky sticks to his guns with a simple argument i.e. the results of sitting back and doing nothing by the administration are so unpredictable, that waiting for a 9-11 to happen that somehow by luck benefits them could not have been the administrations main intention. He also goes on to say that fighting terrorism is just a matter of priorities for the US government but it is not very high on that priority list, otherwise they would not be creating conditions and enforcing policies throughout the globe that make such an event more likely.

I find Chomsky's argument to be fairly cogent and I'm inclined to disregard 9-11 conspiracy theories. I also read this article by Diana Johnstone a month ago which has a roughly similar argument as Chomsky although Johnstone does mention that the JFK assassination conspiracy theory does seem more plausible than 9-11. Johnstone also talks about Achcar's argument i.e. the Administration let 9-11 happen by doing nothing, and suggests that angle is worth investigating

If you're still a conspiracy junkie regarding 9-11 and have loads of extra time, then I believe the book to read is Crossing The Rubicon (I haven't read the book, so I won't comment on it). If you do read it, then try to critique it from the perspective presented by Chomsky and Johnstone.