9/11 conspiracy theories

5 Comments

I'm amazed that I haven't come across this before. I found it tonight entirely by accident, while looking for lyrics to a song:

Ghost Riders in the Sky: An Alternative 9-11 Scenario is by A. K. Dewdney, "a well known Canadian scientist, who used to write [the] Mathematical Recreations [column] for Scientific American magazine." It's a conspiracy theory that says it would be consistent with all the (then-)known facts if the 9/11 attacks had actually been faked, possibly in the form of "a combined clandestine operation between Mossad and some US agencies such as the CIA and NSA." In this scenario, there were no Muslim terrorist hijackers; the planes were under remote control, and everyone aboard each plane was killed with nerve gas released remotely before the planes crashed. In this scenario, the cell phone calls allegedly made from flight 93 were actually made from the ground by operatives.

Now, I find this scenario silly and implausible when applied to 9/11 (especially when it comes to the faked cell-phone calls); Dewdney explains at length that spy agencies are quite willing to engage in extremely elaborate and complex reality-faking operations when it suits their purposes, but I've watched governments in action, and I have a hard time believing that they're capable of successfully carrying out this level of conspiracy. I'm also mighty dubious about the notion that Mossad and the CIA were the groups who had the most to gain from 9/11.

However, the proposed method of hijacking planes remotely doesn't sound at all silly or implausible to me, as a method that could be used in the future by an interested enough group. It would require a lot more high tech than having a group of dedicated people hijack planes with box cutters; but I don't think there's anything science-fictional about the tech. I could be wrong—Dewdney doesn't go into a lot of detail—but it sounds plausible to me.

(I'm kind of amused: a lot of the things Dewdney suggests sound like they come straight out of episodes of Alias, which Kam and I have continued to watch and enjoy.)

At any rate, Dewdney no longer supports the specific premise of the "Ghost Riders" scenario; that scenario has been supplanted by his new scenario, "Operation Pearl," in which the planes that were flown into the WTC and the Pentagon were not in fact the hijacked planes at all, but substitutes made en route.

Again, I don't buy it as a factual description of what happened on September 11, 2001. But I think it's an interesting scenario for fiction.

And I sometimes wonder whether the number of inconsistencies and unlikelihoods in available data about just about everything (not just 9/11) suggests that in fact reality is just plain inconsistent and unlikely.

5 Responses to “9/11 conspiracy theories”

  1. Catherine O

    ok, I too am all about the general inability of governments to pull this shit off, and I don’t believe this scenario either.

    that said!

    The American and British governments — that is, two governments having to *coordinate*, even — managed to completely pull the wool over Germany’s eyes regarding the location of the D-Day landing. It was an incredibly elaborate scheme, involving not only fake intelligence fed via double agents, but rubber blowup “tanks” and other equipment located in the wrong part of the coast which would be seen by German spy planes and subs; a fake army with a real group of officers who did nothing but sit miles apart and send each other radio messages that the Germans would hear; and so on. The unbelievable thing is that it actually worked. Here’s some stuff from “A World at Arms” by Bob Weinberg. The idea is that the Allies have to convince the Nazis that the real landing is only a diversion for the *real* real landing to come at Pas de Calais, and that therefore the German army should divide its defenses.

    “What the Allies therefore had to do and did was create over time a whole series of notional divisions, corps, armies, and one Army Group; with one army, the British 4th, being ostensibly slated to invade Norway, while the fake 1st United States Army Group (FUSAG) would invade France near Calais. The decption operation (“Bodyguard”) was conducted on a very large scale with the direct operational parts under the code names “Fortitude North” (Norway) and “South” (Calais)….In brief outline, it involved the slow buildup of a complex of imaginary headquarters with both radio traffic for the Germans to locate and attempt to analyze and commanders who really existed. Of the latter, Lt. General Patton of FUSAG was by far the best known; and when he was sent to Normandy to command the 3rd Army, he was replaced at FUSAG by the commanding general of the Army Ground Forces, Lt. General Leslie McNair. When McNair was killed by an Allied bomb dropped short on July 25, he was in turn replaced by Lt. General John DeWitt, until then head of the Western Defense Command.

    “The effectiveness of the deception was reinforced by the fact that every German spy in the U.K. had been captured by the British and, if not executed, had been turned around so that a stream of erroneous information was fed to the Germans both before and after the day of the invasion, with special emphasis on the concept that the Normandy landing was a diversion before the main invasion yet to come in the Calais area, thereby keeping units of the German 15th Army there from being sent to reinforce the 7th Army fighting for its life in Normandy.”

    Catherine again — and partly this all worked because the Allies were reading the German Enigma code, and the Germans didn’t know it, and weren’t able to break the highest level Allied codes themselves. So the Allies could keep an eye on all the German radio communication, which let them know that the deception was working (though theoretically I guess that too could have been a blind.)

    Anyway. Sometimes truth is almost as strange as fiction.

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  2. Nick Mamatas

    My question is this:

    Assuming the CIA and Mossad were behind 9/11, why bother with the nerve gas and remote control and faked phone calls when the easiest thing to do would have been to find an al-Qaeda cell, fund and instruct it, and feed it false orders from the top (the cell structure is an example of “leaderless resistance” making it difficult to double-check the veracity of orders)?

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  3. David Moles

    Or just use the Orbital Mind Control Lasers on a couple of dozen Arab bodybuilders and flying students.

    By the way, does anyone know what’s supposed to be “Manchurian” about the Manchurian Candidate remake?

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  4. Jed

    Last question first ’cause it’s easiest to answer: my guess (based on a line in the preview) is that there’s a nefarious company in the movie called Manchurian. Goofy.

    Nick: I think the Dewdney article does suggest, somewhere in the middle part that I skimmed over, that Al Qaeda is being run by the feds, and the rank-and-file only think they’re a terrorist organization.

    Catherine O: Yeah, it’s certainly true that there have been some amazing intelligence and counterintelligence operations. And control over communications is control over reality. But my gut feeling is that successful large-scale conspiracies are pretty rare (though of course we wouldn’t know if they weren’t), and the current leadership and intelligence community have been demonstrating their fallibility a lot lately. (Though of course that could all be a front to make us think they’re buffoons….)

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  5. Dan P

    About your last point, Jed, it’s worth noting that conspiring towards some kind of active project is much, much easier than preventing an entire class of conspiracies from carrying out their own actions.

    In saying this, I feel like I’m committing myself to a position I don’t hold. Oh, well.

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