Last year, actor Charlie Sheen starred in Martin Guigui's film 9/11, a small-scale drama based on Patrick Carson's a stage play Elevator, which details the experiences of five disparate and desperate people trapped in a World Trade Centre lift during the World Trade Center attacks of September 2001. The film received some of the most savage reviews ever garnered by a Hollywood production and the movie was widely deemed 'offensive' and 'exploitative' by professional critics and online pundits alike. However, I wonder how fair or even intelligible these judgements really are. Is any film about 9/11 necessarily going to be exploitative, as some commentators seemed to imply; and who is to say what is or isn't 'offensive'?
Perhaps the film, by depicting the vulnerability and suffering of citizens during the attacks, offends against the dominant media framing of the event. For most of us, our mental picture of 9/11 is the one that was reproduced across almost all of the newspapers following the event: the unforgettable, archetypal image of the towers engulfed in flames. The widespread reproduction of this image - which recalls nothing so much as a scene from a blockbuster action film - sent the message that the West was at war with the forces of darkness and that bloody vengeance must ensue. But it didn't have to be that way. Other, less martial and more human-scaled images of the attacks could have prevailed. As Brad Evans wonders in the preface to his book Liberal Terror, 'how [...] would the world look today if the images of the falling victims had become the defining emblem of the 9/11 attacks?'
While the public reaction to Guigui's film is undoubtedly tied up with these difficult questions over how 9/11 should be represented, the blanket obloquy directed against the movie surely also has a lot to do with Charlie Sheen's earlier, apparently unforgivable involvement in the 9/11 truth movement. Indeed, while we still don't know very much about how the event of 9/11 really happened, to express doubts about the official 9/11 story, even today, is to court lasting derision. The jokes about 9/11 'truthers' never stop - and any challenge to the received narrative of 9/11 tends to be regarded as an idiocy enabled by the information free-for-all of the Internet. As Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) puts it in his ironic diatribe in the recent Trainspotting sequel, "Choose rape jokes, slut-shaming, revenge porn and an endless tide of depressing misogyny. Choose 9/11 never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews".
Perhaps the film, by depicting the vulnerability and suffering of citizens during the attacks, offends against the dominant media framing of the event. For most of us, our mental picture of 9/11 is the one that was reproduced across almost all of the newspapers following the event: the unforgettable, archetypal image of the towers engulfed in flames. The widespread reproduction of this image - which recalls nothing so much as a scene from a blockbuster action film - sent the message that the West was at war with the forces of darkness and that bloody vengeance must ensue. But it didn't have to be that way. Other, less martial and more human-scaled images of the attacks could have prevailed. As Brad Evans wonders in the preface to his book Liberal Terror, 'how [...] would the world look today if the images of the falling victims had become the defining emblem of the 9/11 attacks?'
While the public reaction to Guigui's film is undoubtedly tied up with these difficult questions over how 9/11 should be represented, the blanket obloquy directed against the movie surely also has a lot to do with Charlie Sheen's earlier, apparently unforgivable involvement in the 9/11 truth movement. Indeed, while we still don't know very much about how the event of 9/11 really happened, to express doubts about the official 9/11 story, even today, is to court lasting derision. The jokes about 9/11 'truthers' never stop - and any challenge to the received narrative of 9/11 tends to be regarded as an idiocy enabled by the information free-for-all of the Internet. As Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) puts it in his ironic diatribe in the recent Trainspotting sequel, "Choose rape jokes, slut-shaming, revenge porn and an endless tide of depressing misogyny. Choose 9/11 never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews".
Of course, 9/11 did happen - and I am pretty darned certain that it wasn't the fault of the Jews. But the prevalence of outlandish conspiracy theories like these on the Internet makes it difficult to raise genuine questions about the official narrative about the attacks. The public was told many lies about the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed 'weapons of mass destruction' is the most egregious and now widely acknowledged one. Nevertheless, many people struggle to accept anything but the mainstream political-media account of the atrocity that was used to justify those invasions. Anybody challenging that account is usually consigned to what Daniel C. Hallin called the 'sphere of deviance' - a domain outside the 'sphere of legitimate controversy' which contains ideas and opinions that must not be publicly aired. The price of dissent can be high. Over the seventeen years since the attacks, journalists, politicians, military figures and academics who have questioned the endless inconsistencies and absurdities in the official story of 9/11 have faced ridicule or lost their jobs.
Liberals and leftists have tended to be even more disparaging of the 9/11 truth/justice movement than conservatives. Noam Chomsky's response to a question about the authorship of 9/11 was, infamously, "who cares"? I'm hardly the first to point out that this was a strange thing for the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy to say about the biggest terrorist attack on American soil or that that the families and friends of those who were murdered on 9/11 might just have a passing interest in whether their loved ones were killed by Muslim terrorists or by 'their own' government. And does Chomsky really believe that nobody in the US will 'care' if 9/11 were revealed to be, say, an 'inside job'? After all, he himself points out that such a revelation would destroy the Republican party forever and would result in "firing squads".
I must admit that for many years after 9/11, I myself tended to dismiss with a smirk anybody who questioned the official narrative about the attacks as a 'conspiracy theorist'. In doing so I was merely following the crowd. It's taken me many years to realise that conspiracies do sometimes occur and to start questioning received wisdom on certain subjects. In this I've been helped by reading the most intelligent 'alternative' journalists and investigators, such as Tom Secker, whose work more or less convinced me that, for example, Edward Snowden was probably not a 'whistleblower', but a CIA agent from start to finish and that the official narrative of the 7/7 bombings in London was almost certainly incorrect.
But my reluctance to ask questions about the official account of 9/11 was not just a personal failing. There was little appetite for critical questioning in the wake of the atrocities; after all, it's hard for those exposed to seismic acts of terror to retain their critical faculties. On the contrary, traumatized people often take refuge in group think and myth-mongering or indulge in fantasies of violent retribution. That's why it was so easy for politicians and journalists in 2001 to spin the attacks as an assault on the US and its values by an evil, non-Christian Other. In line with the propaganda dynamics outlined in Naomi Klein's 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, the view prevailed that 9/11 was an attack on 'our way of life' that demanded not critical analysis, but immediate, bloody revenge against the supposed perpetrators.
Over the last few years I have, rather belatedly, read many books about 9/11 and listened to a lot of the professional critics of the official account. And like many others (a 2016 study suggested that more than half of Americans believe that their government is concealing information about the attacks), I've concluded that the official version of events makes no sense at all. It is undermined by, inter alia, the failure of all air defences (for which multiple, mutually contradictory explanations have been supplied by officials); the lack of any photographic evidence that the alleged attackers even boarded the planes; the mismatch between the alleged hijackers' extraordinary aerial manoeuvres and their almost total lack of pilot training; the refusal of official investigators to consider first-hand accounts of multiple explosions before the planes hit; the near-miraculous discovery of an incriminating passport amid the ashes of the Twin Towers (shades of the London 7/7 attacks there); and so on. It still blow my mind that on 1 June 2001 the procedure for shooting down planes was changed to require prior approval from National Command Authority, allowing Dick Cheney to effectively stand down interceptor aircraft by removing himself from the picture (this rule was removed in December 2001).
The full catalogue of circumstantial absurdities and improbabilities surrounding 9/11 was usefully summarized back in the noughties in the books of David Ray Griffin, and they have never been refuted, in my view at least, by defenders of the official story. Of great significance, too, are the so-called 'intelligence failures' at Alec Station, whereby the CIA did not pass its information about Khalid al-Mihdhar and Salem al-Hazmi to the FBI, and the recently recrudescent question of Saudi complicity in the organization of the attacks. To discuss these questions is not to fall prey to 'conspiracy theory', but to acknowledge that we still lack a coherent account of what happened on 9/11. There are still more questions than answers.
Liberals and leftists have tended to be even more disparaging of the 9/11 truth/justice movement than conservatives. Noam Chomsky's response to a question about the authorship of 9/11 was, infamously, "who cares"? I'm hardly the first to point out that this was a strange thing for the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy to say about the biggest terrorist attack on American soil or that that the families and friends of those who were murdered on 9/11 might just have a passing interest in whether their loved ones were killed by Muslim terrorists or by 'their own' government. And does Chomsky really believe that nobody in the US will 'care' if 9/11 were revealed to be, say, an 'inside job'? After all, he himself points out that such a revelation would destroy the Republican party forever and would result in "firing squads".
I must admit that for many years after 9/11, I myself tended to dismiss with a smirk anybody who questioned the official narrative about the attacks as a 'conspiracy theorist'. In doing so I was merely following the crowd. It's taken me many years to realise that conspiracies do sometimes occur and to start questioning received wisdom on certain subjects. In this I've been helped by reading the most intelligent 'alternative' journalists and investigators, such as Tom Secker, whose work more or less convinced me that, for example, Edward Snowden was probably not a 'whistleblower', but a CIA agent from start to finish and that the official narrative of the 7/7 bombings in London was almost certainly incorrect.
But my reluctance to ask questions about the official account of 9/11 was not just a personal failing. There was little appetite for critical questioning in the wake of the atrocities; after all, it's hard for those exposed to seismic acts of terror to retain their critical faculties. On the contrary, traumatized people often take refuge in group think and myth-mongering or indulge in fantasies of violent retribution. That's why it was so easy for politicians and journalists in 2001 to spin the attacks as an assault on the US and its values by an evil, non-Christian Other. In line with the propaganda dynamics outlined in Naomi Klein's 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, the view prevailed that 9/11 was an attack on 'our way of life' that demanded not critical analysis, but immediate, bloody revenge against the supposed perpetrators.
Over the last few years I have, rather belatedly, read many books about 9/11 and listened to a lot of the professional critics of the official account. And like many others (a 2016 study suggested that more than half of Americans believe that their government is concealing information about the attacks), I've concluded that the official version of events makes no sense at all. It is undermined by, inter alia, the failure of all air defences (for which multiple, mutually contradictory explanations have been supplied by officials); the lack of any photographic evidence that the alleged attackers even boarded the planes; the mismatch between the alleged hijackers' extraordinary aerial manoeuvres and their almost total lack of pilot training; the refusal of official investigators to consider first-hand accounts of multiple explosions before the planes hit; the near-miraculous discovery of an incriminating passport amid the ashes of the Twin Towers (shades of the London 7/7 attacks there); and so on. It still blow my mind that on 1 June 2001 the procedure for shooting down planes was changed to require prior approval from National Command Authority, allowing Dick Cheney to effectively stand down interceptor aircraft by removing himself from the picture (this rule was removed in December 2001).
The full catalogue of circumstantial absurdities and improbabilities surrounding 9/11 was usefully summarized back in the noughties in the books of David Ray Griffin, and they have never been refuted, in my view at least, by defenders of the official story. Of great significance, too, are the so-called 'intelligence failures' at Alec Station, whereby the CIA did not pass its information about Khalid al-Mihdhar and Salem al-Hazmi to the FBI, and the recently recrudescent question of Saudi complicity in the organization of the attacks. To discuss these questions is not to fall prey to 'conspiracy theory', but to acknowledge that we still lack a coherent account of what happened on 9/11. There are still more questions than answers.
Then, of course, there are the technical debates, such as the dispute over the National Institute of Standards in Technology report's claim that the collapse of WTC 7 (2.25 seconds of which was in free-fall) was caused by office fires. NIST's findings now look to be undermined by preliminary reports from Dr J. Leroy Hulsey's ongoing University of Alaska study. Niels Harrit, Richard Gage and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth group have of course long argued that Building 7 collapsed as a result of so-called 'controlled demolition' and in an MSNBC interview on the day itself, FDNY Lieutenant David Restuccio stated that he had "heard reports" that the building was unstable and "would need to come down on its own or it would be taken down". An Emergency Medical Technician, JP Morgan-Chase worker Indira Singh, claimed in a 2005 radio interview that she was told something very similar on the day ("Building 7 was going to come down or being brought down"). Whether or not the Alaska study will support the controlled demolition view is as yet unclear. It is possible, in fact, that we will never know for sure how WTC 7, or indeed any of the New York buildings, came down, since all of the material evidence from the scene of the crime was immediately removed and sent overseas for recycling. Of course, this hurry to get things 'back to normal' after the New York attacks itself involved a cynical deception: despite repeated assurances from the Environmental Protection Agency and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani that Ground Zero was safe to return to, the area was in fact strewn with toxic debris (sulfur dioxide and asbestos) that has caused respiratory illnesses and cancers in hundreds of cases. It took the courageous action of EPA whistleblower Dr. Cate Jenkins to expose the official lies.
We should, I think, be highly critical of those who use the term 'conspiracy theory' in order to dismiss dissenting opinions about 9/11. After all, conspiracy theories, even though they are not identified as such, are integral to the maintenance of the status quo and mainstream media promote them regularly. Just consider the various evidence-light anti-Russian confections in the British and US media recently, most notably that of the alleged hacking of the 2016 US election (indeed, it is becoming more and more obvious that 'Russiagate' has been coordinated by Western intelligence services). Indeed, it is hardly outlandish to regard the 9/11 Commission's story that the attacks were carried out by 19 Muslim hijackers directed by a very unwell man in Afghanistan as a mainstream conspiracy theory. Even Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, state in their 2006 book Without Precedent that their investigation was underfunded and 'set up to fail' and that they were lied to by officials.
Precisely which organizations and individuals were behind, or had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks is still unclear. Plenty of ludicrous theories about the attacks have been put forward by assorted lunatics and even intelligence agents. Remember David Shayler, the MI5 officer who, during the high-tide of the 9/11 truth movement, argued that the planes that struck the Twin Towers were in fact missiles camouflaged by holograms? Perhaps in order to ensure that nobody could take his theory about 9/11 seriously, Shayler also claimed to be the Messiah (move over, David Icke) and to be able to control the footballing fortunes of Middlesbrough F.C. The preposterous assertions of Shayler, like those of the absurd Alex Jones, have served over time as a useful distraction, discrediting anybody who dares to ask probing questions about the attacks. But the doubts and questions of independent investigators and victims' family members are not so easily laughed off. To this day, many people are aware that, in the title of Jon Gold's useful recent collection of interviews, We Were Lied to About 9/11 and they are looking for an honest and coherent account of what actually happened.
So what about the 'inside job' theory? I think that it is possible that elements the US state either played a part in orchestrating 9/11 or allowed the attacks to happen, something the US has certainly done before as a pretext for war (Griffin, perhaps the most coherent and persistent of all the inside job advocates, famously termed 9/11 'the new Pearl Harbour', borrowing the Project for a New American Century's phrase from 1997). Contra Chomsky, it would be worth knowing if this was indeed the case. For one thing, it would provide the families of the victims with closure. It might also help to convince those who need convincing that the bourgeoisie is thoroughly Machiavellian. Indeed, fear of being labelled a conspiracy theorist (a fear that is widespread among Marxists and anarchists, it seems to me) should not prevent us from recognizing that ruling classes the world over shroud their activities in secrecy and disinformation. Power prefers darkness.
As Richard Jackson pointed out in his 2005 book Writing the War on Terrorism, the use of the term 'ground zero' to describe the scene of the 9/11 crime recalled the phrase 'year zero' and thus signalled that the attacks had inaugurated a new era requiring different techniques of securitization and counter-terrorism. To paraphrase the U.S. political machinator Rahm Emanuel, the capitalist class never let a serious crisis go to waste. Whoever was responsible for them - and here Chomsky does have a point - the 9/11 attacks were used as a pretext for subsequent resource-grabbing invasions of several Middle Eastern and North African countries that have cost trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
They were also a pretext for a refreshed assault on civil liberties and human rights across the world. For the US and many other national governments around the world, 9/11 has provided a golden opportunity to ramp up the repression and surveillance of Muslims and other 'suspect communities'. Judicial and spatial 'states of exception' have multiplied, from the Patriot Act and Guantánamo Bay in the early days of Bush's War on Terror to the Uyghur internment camps of China's Xinjiang province and the oppression of Muslims by the Indian state today. On a more banal level, the rhetoric of the War on Terror has normalized anti-Muslim prejudice, so that Boris Johnson's recent quip about burka- or niqab-wearing Muslim women looking like 'bank robbers' seems almost unremarkable (it certainly didn't seem to do Johnson's career any harm). Social attitudes and priorities have also shifted in the direction of xenophobia and paranoia. A World Values Survey in 2015, for example, found that in the decade following 9/11, U.S. citizens more and more prioritize 'survival' above 'self-expression'.
Perhaps these points should not be pushed too far. In their 2012 book Icons of War and Terror, John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood cautioned that the proposition '9/11 changed everything' - widespread among opportunistic politicians and CEOs following the attacks - was always problematic and ideological, eliding among other things the longer history of terrorism. Tulloch and Blood also point to the arguments of Slavoj Žižek, who has suggested that 9/11 represented not a break with the past, but on the contrary a kind of resetting of the U.S.'s basic ideological co-ordinates. Yet be that as it may, from the vantage point of 2018, the post-9/11 world looks and feels more dangerous. Shortly after the attacks, U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld declared that 9/11 presented 'the kind of opportunities that World War II offered' to 'refashion the world'. In numerous big and small ways, 9/11 has helped the world's rulers in their attempts to do that - although the U.S. bid to become the sole global hegemon has arguably failed.
The events surrounding 9/11 itself remain, to a great extent, cloaked in mystery. I have no idea whether we might one day have a clearer understanding of what happened on that day, or whether a new official investigation would be useful or even possible; at this point, the 9/11 truth movement has been largely dormant for a decade. But the families and friends of those who died, and of those tortured and killed across the globe in the name of the war on terror, certainly deserve answers.
We should, I think, be highly critical of those who use the term 'conspiracy theory' in order to dismiss dissenting opinions about 9/11. After all, conspiracy theories, even though they are not identified as such, are integral to the maintenance of the status quo and mainstream media promote them regularly. Just consider the various evidence-light anti-Russian confections in the British and US media recently, most notably that of the alleged hacking of the 2016 US election (indeed, it is becoming more and more obvious that 'Russiagate' has been coordinated by Western intelligence services). Indeed, it is hardly outlandish to regard the 9/11 Commission's story that the attacks were carried out by 19 Muslim hijackers directed by a very unwell man in Afghanistan as a mainstream conspiracy theory. Even Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, state in their 2006 book Without Precedent that their investigation was underfunded and 'set up to fail' and that they were lied to by officials.
Precisely which organizations and individuals were behind, or had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks is still unclear. Plenty of ludicrous theories about the attacks have been put forward by assorted lunatics and even intelligence agents. Remember David Shayler, the MI5 officer who, during the high-tide of the 9/11 truth movement, argued that the planes that struck the Twin Towers were in fact missiles camouflaged by holograms? Perhaps in order to ensure that nobody could take his theory about 9/11 seriously, Shayler also claimed to be the Messiah (move over, David Icke) and to be able to control the footballing fortunes of Middlesbrough F.C. The preposterous assertions of Shayler, like those of the absurd Alex Jones, have served over time as a useful distraction, discrediting anybody who dares to ask probing questions about the attacks. But the doubts and questions of independent investigators and victims' family members are not so easily laughed off. To this day, many people are aware that, in the title of Jon Gold's useful recent collection of interviews, We Were Lied to About 9/11 and they are looking for an honest and coherent account of what actually happened.
So what about the 'inside job' theory? I think that it is possible that elements the US state either played a part in orchestrating 9/11 or allowed the attacks to happen, something the US has certainly done before as a pretext for war (Griffin, perhaps the most coherent and persistent of all the inside job advocates, famously termed 9/11 'the new Pearl Harbour', borrowing the Project for a New American Century's phrase from 1997). Contra Chomsky, it would be worth knowing if this was indeed the case. For one thing, it would provide the families of the victims with closure. It might also help to convince those who need convincing that the bourgeoisie is thoroughly Machiavellian. Indeed, fear of being labelled a conspiracy theorist (a fear that is widespread among Marxists and anarchists, it seems to me) should not prevent us from recognizing that ruling classes the world over shroud their activities in secrecy and disinformation. Power prefers darkness.
As Richard Jackson pointed out in his 2005 book Writing the War on Terrorism, the use of the term 'ground zero' to describe the scene of the 9/11 crime recalled the phrase 'year zero' and thus signalled that the attacks had inaugurated a new era requiring different techniques of securitization and counter-terrorism. To paraphrase the U.S. political machinator Rahm Emanuel, the capitalist class never let a serious crisis go to waste. Whoever was responsible for them - and here Chomsky does have a point - the 9/11 attacks were used as a pretext for subsequent resource-grabbing invasions of several Middle Eastern and North African countries that have cost trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
They were also a pretext for a refreshed assault on civil liberties and human rights across the world. For the US and many other national governments around the world, 9/11 has provided a golden opportunity to ramp up the repression and surveillance of Muslims and other 'suspect communities'. Judicial and spatial 'states of exception' have multiplied, from the Patriot Act and Guantánamo Bay in the early days of Bush's War on Terror to the Uyghur internment camps of China's Xinjiang province and the oppression of Muslims by the Indian state today. On a more banal level, the rhetoric of the War on Terror has normalized anti-Muslim prejudice, so that Boris Johnson's recent quip about burka- or niqab-wearing Muslim women looking like 'bank robbers' seems almost unremarkable (it certainly didn't seem to do Johnson's career any harm). Social attitudes and priorities have also shifted in the direction of xenophobia and paranoia. A World Values Survey in 2015, for example, found that in the decade following 9/11, U.S. citizens more and more prioritize 'survival' above 'self-expression'.
Perhaps these points should not be pushed too far. In their 2012 book Icons of War and Terror, John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood cautioned that the proposition '9/11 changed everything' - widespread among opportunistic politicians and CEOs following the attacks - was always problematic and ideological, eliding among other things the longer history of terrorism. Tulloch and Blood also point to the arguments of Slavoj Žižek, who has suggested that 9/11 represented not a break with the past, but on the contrary a kind of resetting of the U.S.'s basic ideological co-ordinates. Yet be that as it may, from the vantage point of 2018, the post-9/11 world looks and feels more dangerous. Shortly after the attacks, U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld declared that 9/11 presented 'the kind of opportunities that World War II offered' to 'refashion the world'. In numerous big and small ways, 9/11 has helped the world's rulers in their attempts to do that - although the U.S. bid to become the sole global hegemon has arguably failed.
The events surrounding 9/11 itself remain, to a great extent, cloaked in mystery. I have no idea whether we might one day have a clearer understanding of what happened on that day, or whether a new official investigation would be useful or even possible; at this point, the 9/11 truth movement has been largely dormant for a decade. But the families and friends of those who died, and of those tortured and killed across the globe in the name of the war on terror, certainly deserve answers.
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