Читать книгу The Management of Savagery - Max Blumenthal - Страница 10

Two hours’ drive from Kandahar, in the southern Afghan desert city where the Taliban were born and where bin Laden maintained his operational base, a February 2001 wedding ceremony became the stage for bin Laden’s first public appearance in several years. Seated in the shade of palm trees was the Al Qaeda leader’s seventeen-year-old son, Mohammed, his father’s personal protector and likely successor. To his left was Mohammed Atef, an Egyptian comrade of Zawahiri who acted as the chief military strategist of Al Qaeda—the brains behind its operations. To Mohammed’s right sat his father, who smiled proudly as his son prepared to marry Atef’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

Ahmad Zaidan, a correspondent for the Qatari outlet Al Jazeera, was ferried to the wedding with a camera crew in an effort to provide bin Laden with the publicity he had been denied by the Taliban. Zaidan witnessed bin Laden rise before the guests to deliver verses of jihadist poetry: “She sails into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and false power. To her doom she moves slowly,” the wealthy sheikh exclaimed. “Your brothers in the East readied themselves. And the war camels prepared to move.”

In his verse, bin Laden appeared to be alluding to the October 2000 attack by two Al Qaeda assets on the USS Cole, a naval destroyer stationed in Yemen’s Aden harbor—another daring strike at the strategic point of access for the US military to its bases across the Gulf states. The bombs, detonated from a fiberglass boat piloted by two suicide attackers, had torn a forty-foot hole in the hull of the Cole and caused it to nearly capsize. Seventeen sailors were killed and thirty-eight more wounded, most of them blown apart while taking lunch. “The destroyer represented the West,” bin Laden said. “The small boat represented Muhammad.”

Later, Atef took Zaidan aside to detail Al Qaeda’s plan to drag the West into an endless war. “He was explaining to me what will happen in the coming five years,” Zaidan recalled, “and he said, ‘Look, there are two or three places in the world which are the most suitable places to fight America: Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. We are expecting the United States to invade Afghanistan and we are preparing for that. We want the United States to invade Afghanistan.”

The strategy to trigger a series of American interventions and bleed an overstretched empire represented an especially ironic adaptation of Brzezinski’s “Afghan trap.” Bin Laden and his lieutenants reasoned that it would only require a single violent cataclysm to draw the Americans in. His goal was to enact the very thing that the neocon authors of the PNAC’s first letter envisioned: “some catastrophic and catalyzing event.”

Early in 2000, an operation was set into motion to fulfill the American trap. An Al Qaeda operative named Khalid al-Mihdhar was deployed into the faceless suburbs of Southern California alongside his friend, Nawaf al-Hazmi. Both men were sons of Saudi Arabia, products of its Wahhabi-influenced school system, and had followed the jihadi trail through Bosnia and Chechnya during the 1990s. Mihdhar later trained in Afghanistan, likely under the watch of Ali Mohamed. The two landed at Los Angeles International Airport on January 15, 2000, on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Together, they represented part of the team that would execute what Al Qaeda informally referred to as “the planes operation.”

While the two were in Malaysia, CIA operatives broke into Mihdhar’s hotel room there and photographed his passport. Mihdhar was known to Saudi intelligence as a jihadist and was photographed by Malaysian secret police at a planning meeting for the “planes operation.” Also in attendance at the meeting was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, widely considered the “mastermind” behind the plot. The photos were immediately shared with the CIA. Two months later, the agency learned that Mihdhar, now a known Al Qaeda member, had traveled to Los Angeles on a multiple-entry visa, and that he was seated next to Hazmi on the flight. Curiously, the CIA refused to supply the information to the FBI.

Why did the agency sit on its hands? Lawrence Wright, one of the leading chroniclers of Al Qaeda’s rise, speculated that, “Mihdhar and Hazmi could have seemed like attractive recruitment possibilities—the CIA was desperate for a source inside Al Qaeda, having failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place someone in the training camps, even though they were largely open to anyone who showed up.”

Neither Mihdhar nor Hazmi spoke English or were familiar with American culture. When they arrived in Los Angeles, they were met at the airport by Omar Bayoumi, a Saudi civil aviation authority official who did no known work for the bureau—he was a ghost employee. Bayoumi had held a mysterious closed-door meeting at the Saudi consulate just moments before meeting the two men. Though he had never met Mihdhar or Hazmi before, he was clearly acting as their advance man. Upon arrival, the two worshipped at the King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles, a Saudi-funded institution. There, they met Fahad Al-Thumairy, an accredited Saudi consular official who served as the mosque’s imam. According to an FBI investigation carried out years later, they were “immediately assigned an individual to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.” That individual was almost certainly Bayoumi.

In February, Bayoumi took Mihdhar and Hazmi to San Diego, where they co-signed an apartment lease under his name. Neither man had any credit. Bayoumi was able to muster up large amounts of cash to cover his guests’ expenses, far more than any ordinary government worker should have had access to. As soon as he took Mihdhar and Hazmi in his charge, his salary shot up from $500 a month to $3,500. “One of the FBI’s best sources in San Diego informed the bureau that he thought that al-Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power,’’ a heavily redacted congressional investigative committee report later concluded. Bayoumi and Thumairy’s phones registered twenty-one calls between them spanning from Mihdhar and Hazmi’s arrival to May 2000. Bayoumi logged nearly 100 calls to Saudi officials in that period and traveled frequently to Saudi consular offices in Los Angeles and Washington during that time.

At a welcoming party Bayoumi organized for Mihdhar and Hazmi, he introduced them to Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the more notable Muslim religious figures in San Diego. On the day that Bayoumi helped Mihdhar and Hazmi find a local apartment, he logged four calls to al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki was a charismatic imam from Yemen whose flawless English and engaging style made him a star among many younger Muslims raised in the West. The cleric betrayed little sign of extremism, though he would later turn up in Yemen as top propagandist of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the time, Mihdhar and Hazmi each considered him a kind of spiritual advisor, worshipping at his Al-Ribat Al-Islami mosque in La Mesa and meeting in private with him.

It may never be known if al-Awlaki was aware that the two represented the advance team for a handful of operatives preparing a deadly operation. But neighbors of Mihdhar and Hazmi suspected some sort of criminal plot was underway: “There was always a series of cars driving up to the house late at night,” said one neighbor. “Sometimes they were nice cars. Sometimes they had darkened windows. They’d stay about 10 minutes.”

On March 5, 2000, a cable arrived to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, alerting the agency to Hazmi’s presence in the United States. It read, “Action Required: None.”

The FBI had eyes and ears on Mihdhar and Hazmi almost as soon as they arrived in California. Indeed, a bureau informant had extensive contacts with the two men, reporting back to his handler about them, but the bureau did nothing. The FBI’s inaction might have been understandable considering the CIA had inexplicably withheld evidence of Mihdhar and Hazmi’s presence at what the agency knew to be a gathering of top Al Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur. It was not until August 2001 that Mihdhar was placed on a terror watch list. By then, the “day of the planes” plot was in its final stages.

The Summer of the Shark

George W. Bush entered the White House after months of friendly coverage from the Washington press corps. With only a few exceptions, the pundits portrayed Bush as the consummate centrist, a uniter who could calm a badly divided nation. ABC’s Dean Reynolds called him a “different kind of Republican [who could] show middle of the road voters—both white and black—that he is more moderate than they would have suspected.” The New York Times’ Jim Yardley praised Bush’s “bipartisan, above-the-fray image,” while CNN trumpeted Bush’s supposed steps toward “healing a divided nation.”

On Bush’s selection as vice president, Representative Bill Paxon assured a CNN audience that “Dick Cheney is the ultimate man of moderation.” As for Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, CNN’s Tony Clark insisted she “doesn’t not believe the US military should be what is described as a 911 global police force.”

The neoconservatives that honeycombed the Bush administration had flown almost entirely under the media’s radar. A close look at the civilian wing of the Pentagon or the State Department’s Middle East handlers revealed a virtual government jobs program for the signers of PNAC. They included Elliott Abrams, the State Department’s undersecretary of Middle East affairs; Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas Feith, a “Clean Break” author hired as undersecretary of defense for policy; his mentor, Richard Perle, now chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board; and David Wurmser, an advisor to Cheney on Middle East policy. Having burrowed deep within the administration’s bureaucracy without any real scrutiny, these figures maintained their laser-like focus on Iraq, bringing in Laurie Mylroie, the crank conspiracist who blamed Saddam for the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing, as a terror consultant in the Pentagon.

On June 6, 2001, Wolfowitz appeared before an auditorium full of cadets to deliver the commencement address at the West Point Academy in New York state. His remarks centered on the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor and its relevance at the time. Years later, his words are chilling. “Interestingly,” Wolfowitz said, “that surprise attack was preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals … Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re surprised by it. Very few of these surprises are the product of simple blindness or simple stupidity. Almost always, there have been warnings and signals that have been missed, sometimes because there were just too many warnings to pick the right one out.”

The following month, a senior executive intelligence brief was delivered to the White House entitled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.” Wolfowitz dismissed the report out of hand, insisting to the deputy national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, that bin Laden was simply trying to study Washington’s reactions by leveling empty threats.

The US media spent the summer of 2001 swarming around the office of Representative Gary Condit, a previously unknown Democratic backbencher who was wrongly suspected of murdering Chandra Levy, his former intern and mistress who had disappeared while jogging in Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Park. In between fever-pitched dispatches about Condit’s whereabouts, the networks declared the weeks after July 4, 2001, “the summer of the shark,” blitzing viewers with reports of an unprecedented wave of Jaws-level carnage.

The number of shark attacks was actually down from the year before, but without any other source of sensational storylines, American media ginned up a Sharknado epidemic that was leaving half-chewed appendages bobbing in bloody seas. George Burgess, director of shark research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said he fielded thirty to fifty calls from reporters every day that summer. At the time, according to CIA director George Tenet, “the system was blinking red” with warnings about an imminent, massive terror attack on American soil.

Bush spent the summer of 2001 on the longest recorded vacation in presidential history. Tenet and National Security Council chief Condoleezza Rice were not present at his luxury ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he reviewed presidential daily briefings (PDBs) on August 6. That afternoon, Bush was handed one PDB with a headline that should have sent him rushing back to Washington. It read, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US.” The document was a page and a half—an exceptional length that highlighted its importance. Its source was described as an “Egyptian Islamic Jihad [EIJ] operative … a senior EIJ member [who] lived in California in the mid-1990s.” According to the brief, he warned that “a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim American youth for attacks.”

There was no doubt that that source was Ali Mohamed, who had by then been disappeared into federal custody. The “bin Laden cell” was a clear reference to the remnants of the Al-Kifah Center, which had served as one of the CIA’s major pipelines for sending jihadist fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, and then Bosnia and Chechnya throughout the ’90s. Deep within the federal prison system, where Mohamed had been registered as “John Doe,” the former triple spy appeared to be dishing everything he knew about Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and agenda.

While Bush reviewed the briefing document, several Al Qaeda operatives who had recently entered the country for the “Day of the Planes” plot maintained mailboxes at the Jersey City–based Sphinx Trading Company. This was the same mailbox center where Mohamed’s trainees and the Blind Sheikh exchanged dead drop messages. The owner of Sphinx, Waleed al-Noor, was well known to the FBI; he had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Blind Sheikh in 1995. But the bureau’s New York office was not paying attention to Sphinx or to al-Noor’s longtime business partner, Mohamed el-Atriss, who was selling fake IDs to several of the plotters, including Mihdhar. (During el-Atriss’s 2003 trial, where he was sentenced to six months’ probation, Passaic County detectives accused then-US Attorney Chris Christie, later the Republican governor of New Jersey and failed Republican presidential candidate, of bullying them into ending an investigation into el-Atriss’s links to the 9/11 hijackers.)

Bush did not appear to take the PDB seriously. He exuded an “expansive mood,” according to two Washington Post reporters, as he took a round of golf the day after reviewing the document. One week later, at the Pentagon’s annual convention on counterterrorism, CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black concluded his briefing by exclaiming, “we are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the US.”

Despite the doomsday predictions, Bush did not meet with his cabinet heads to discuss terrorism until September 4, his first meeting after returning from vacation. The “Day of Planes” plot would be executed a week later.

Pam Anderson’s Jet

The catastrophic and catalyzing events of September 11, 2001, unfolded live on one of New York City’s top morning talk shows. At 9:01, Howard Stern delivered a brief update about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, gashing open the face of the tower and sending plumes of smoke into the sky. “I don’t even know how you begin to fight that fire,” he commented. Then, without missing a beat, the legendary shock jock returned to an inane yarn about his date with former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson at a seedy Midtown bar called Scores.

“I felt her butt,” Stern bragged to his randy co-hosts. A highly involved discussion ensued about his failure to “bang Pam Anderson.” “I wasn’t gonna sit there and work it all night,” Stern explained moments before the second plane hit. Then, as soon as Tower 2 caught fire, he quipped, “I’m telling you, it was Pam Anderson’s jet.”

Minutes later, Stern’s producers began piping in audio from the local CBS affiliate, setting a traumatizing aural atmosphere that recalled Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.” Stern apparently realized the flames were the product of a terror attack, probably by Muslim extremists. Confronted with a national calamity, he and his shrieking sidekick Robin Quivers immediately shifted gears.

“We’ve gotta go bomb everything over there,” Quivers insisted.

“We’ve gotta bomb the hell out of them!” Stern added. “You know who it is. I can’t say but I know who it is. This is more upsetting than me not getting Pam Anderson!”

As the smoke engulfed lower Manhattan, Stern descended into a series of genocidal tirades. “We’ve gotta drop an atomic bomb,” he proclaimed.

“There has got to be a war,” Quivers demanded.

“But a devastating war, where people die. Burn their eyes out!”

Thirty minutes later, as the news of mass civilian casualties poured in, Stern had transformed into a cartoon villain: “Now is the time to not even ask questions. To drop a few atomic bombs. Do a few chemical warfare hits! Let their people suffer until they understand!”

“Because we haven’t been bothering anybody,” Quivers interjected. “They started screaming about colonialism. We stopped”

Moments later, Stern repeated his call for nuclear annihilation. “Blow them all to sky high!” he said. “Atom bombs! Just do it so they’re flattened out and turned into a paved road and we’ll take the oil for ourselves.”

This was not right-wing radio, but one of the consistently most highly rated morning shows in the country. Stern’s exterminationist diatribes demonstrated how deeply the neoconservative mind-set had been inculcated into mainstream American culture, how it had been simmering just below the surface of the bawdy blather that normally dominated the drive-time airwaves and was waiting to explode upon what PNAC described as “some catastrophic and catalyzing event.” The sleaze-laden shock jock who compared himself to Dan Rather as the attacks unfolded had given voice to large sectors of a shell-shocked public, earning him praise for channeling the outrage that average New Yorkers felt on that clear blue day.

Exactly a week later, before an audience of millions on the Late Show with David Letterman, the real Dan Rather appeared in the guest chair to render Stern’s tirades into smooth, vaguely Texas-accented sound-bites. “This will be long, the casualties will be greater,” Rather informed Letterman. “We’ve suffered casualties but there will be more. When we send our sons and daughters into this kind of war, into this twilight zone that they’re going, there will be great casualties.”

Visibly exhausted after nights of long, emotionally taxing broadcasts, Rather broke down several times. Following one teary display, he gathered his composure just enough to issue a vow of loyalty to the nation’s leader. “George Bush is the president,” said Rather. “He makes the decisions. As just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.”

When Letterman attempted a mild intervention—“What are the events that pissed [bin Laden] off?”—Rather insisted on the most comforting explanation possible, one that formed the basis of Bush’s talking points: “They hate America. They hate us. This is one of those things that makes this war different. They don’t want territory. They don’t want what we’ve got. They want to kill us and destroy us … Some evil, it can’t be explained.”

Letterman explored another line of critical questioning, this one slightly more daring than the last, but softened it with a humorous tinge: “I think about the CIA, they can’t even find the drinking fountain. Have we made some mistake, or done something we shouldn’t have?”

Rather quickly pivoted away from the uncomfortable question to one of the Bush administration’s pet obsessions. “Saddam Hussein—if he isn’t connected to this,” Rather stated, “he’s connected to many other things. He’s part of this ‘hate America’ thing … His hate is deep for us … It’s a new place and we’re headed for a new place.”

And where was that new place? According to Rather, delivering an eerily faithful recitation of neoconservative plans for the Middle East, “the focus is on, and we should understand, not just Afghanistan—Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya.”

Like Stern, Rather could hardly be associated with the exclusive, almost incestuous family of the neoconservatives. But the outlook they had insinuated into the country’s political culture and impressed upon the Bush administration had clearly shaped his understanding of the Middle East, terrorism and warfare. Through familiar, trustworthy faces like Rather, the American public was seeded with the mentality of interventionism and military unilateralism.

Down at the Pentagon, whose western wing had been smoldering only days before, Wesley Clark, the former head of the military’s European Command, strode into the office of a member of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We’re going to attack Iraq,” the general grumbled to him, a look of anguish on his face. “The decision has basically been made.”

Clark returned to the same general six weeks later to revisit the issue of invading Iraq, a source of rising exasperation among the Pentagon brass. “Oh, it’s worse than that,” the general told Clark. He waved around a classified memo he had just received. “Here’s the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.”

He then rattled off the Bush administration’s targets for regime change: first Iraq, then Syria and finally Iran, with Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan somewhere in between. The memo was a virtual mimeograph of the neoconservative “A Clean Break” produced in 1996 for Netanyahu. The momentum toward an invasion of Iraq was almost unstoppable.

Truthers and Experts

On September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush appeared at the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, a mosque dedicated in 1957 by then-president Eisenhower. Before a crowd of dignitaries and diplomats, Bush delivered an impassioned address stressing the “invaluable contribution” Muslims had made to American life. “In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect,” he continued. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.”

With his nobly worded address, Bush sought to calm the wave of anti-Muslim attacks that had erupted since 9/11. In the suburban Chicago town of Bridgeview, where thirty percent of residents were Arab, a “pro-American” vigil days after the attacks transformed into a racist mob as 300 marched toward a local mosque, chanting “USA! USA! USA!” and bellowing “Kill the Arabs!” They were halted only by a last-minute mobilization of police. Elsewhere, across the country, Sikhs were targeted with verbal abuse and physically attacked by patriots who mistook them for followers of bin Laden, now the omnipresent, bearded face of evil.

While Bush’s rhetoric may have helped reduce the anti-Muslim tide spreading across the country, he nonetheless signed off on the Patriot Act, granting the executive branch unprecedented wartime powers to investigate and prosecute Americans. The bill comprised a scattershot of sweeping surveillance proposals that represented a wish list of the FBI, giving the bureau unprecedented latitude to spy on, among others, Muslim American communities. Christopher Smith, the Republican congressman from New Jersey, credited a 1994 documentary, Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America, with playing a “real role” in the bill’s passage. In the days after 9/11, with an eye on passing a bill like the Patriot Act, the documentary was distributed to every member of the House of Representatives.

The film was produced by Steven Emerson, a self-styled terror expert who had wrongly blamed Arabs for bombing the Oklahoma City Federal Building and held expansive civil liberties protections responsible for transforming the United States into “occupied fundamentalist territory.” Funded by right-wing billionaires including Richard Mellon Scaife and criticized by investigative journalist Robert Friedman for “creating mass hysteria against American Arabs,” Emerson’s “Jihad in America” consisted of grainy footage of the extremists that inhabited the Al-Kifah center in Brooklyn during the time they were serving American foreign policy goals in Afghanistan. Having been assets in the CIA’s program during the Cold War, evildoers like Rahman and Azzam were exploited all over again, this time as props in America’s new “war on terror.”

Passed by a vote of ninety-nine to one in the Senate, the Patriot Act undoubtedly benefited from the folk myth of terrorist sleeper cells and Arab Americans celebrating Al Qaeda’s terror. Dan Rather had popularized the rumor during his post-9/11 Letterman show appearance when he cited “a report” that “there was one of these cells across the Hudson river … they got on the roof of the building, they knew it was going to happen, they were waiting for it to happen, and when it happened, they celebrated.” Howard Stern also spread the canard on the country’s most popular radio show in the days after 9/11.

In fact, the FBI had registered only one incident of people appearing to celebrate the attacks. The bizarre event consisted of three men suspiciously filming the flaming World Trade Center from atop a white van. “They were, like, happy, you know,” a witness observed. According to investigations by ABC News and Jewish Daily Forward, those men were not part of any Islamist terror cell. They were, in fact, Israeli intelligence agents. “We are Israeli. We are not your problem,” one of them told the FBI agents who rushed to the scene. “Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”

The events of 9/11 real were all too real, so much so that most Americans could only experience the horror as what philosopher Jean Baudrillard described as a televised simulacrum. For too many, the images of planes suddenly slamming into Manhattan’s iconic downtown skyline and sending workers tumbling from the burning towers to their agonizing death—the sheer magnitude of the terror and the tragedy—defied the bounds of comprehension. And the stories that emerged when the clouds of ash cleared raised more questions than they answered.

It was only natural that in the days after a traumatizing event like 9/11, millions of Americans gravitated toward conspiratorial thinking to make sense of the cataclysm. In July, just two months before the attacks, a radio personality in Austin, Texas, had prophesied what many came to believe was the hidden truth: “Please! Call Congress. Tell ’em we know the government is planning terrorism,” the gravelly voiced host intoned, warning that the target would be the World Trade Center. Next, he identified the name of the government’s patsy: “bin Laden is the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian, phony system.”

At the time, Alex Jones was on the cutting edge of alternative talk radio. Branded by Talkers magazine as “an early trailblazer” of the “digital, independent model of the 21st century,” he was broadcast on 100 stations across the country. Jones had made a memorable cameo in his friend Richard Linklater’s 2001 animated docufiction film, Waking Life, barreling down the barren streets of downtown Austin in an old car and barking through a public address system, “The twenty-first century is gonna be a new century, not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues with no significance, and classism and statism and all the rest of the modes of human control,” Jones ranted, unwittingly echoing rhetorical PNAC themes. “It’s gonna be the age of humankind standing up for something pure and something right!”

Following the shock of 9/11, Jones stood almost alone among his peers. On that morning, when he sat behind the microphone, he pointed his finger directly at the government, accusing it of orchestrating “controlled demolitions” inside both towers of the World Trade Center. It was an inside job, he insisted, the handiwork of a nefarious network of sociopathic globalists. Within days, Jones was unceremoniously dropped by radio affiliates until he virtually disappeared from the commercial airwaves. But he spoke to the masses of confused and suddenly inquisitive Americans who sensed that they were being lied to; who sensed that their media was manipulating them into war and that their simpleton president was little more than a front man for a sinister elite willing to sacrifice countless lives to deepen its control over the masses.

As the Bush administration spun out a case for invading Iraq almost immediately after 9/11, the mainstream media fell in line with the march to war. Pundits on both sides of the partisan divide acted out the sentiments that Dan Rather expressed days after the attacks: “wherever [Bush] wants me to line up, just tell me where.” Antiwar outliers like MSNBC’s Phil Donahue were summarily driven from their jobs while neoconservative conspiracy theorists like Laurie Mylroie found a mostly uncritical national media platform to make the dubious link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The case for invading Iraq on the basis of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction only compounded popular skepticism of the official narrative. By the summer of 2002, public trust in the federal government had plummeted twenty-four points from October 2001, when trust levels were at their highest point in forty years.

Amid the deluge of disinformation, Alex Jones emerged as a cult hero. With each rant about the government plot to engineer the most devastating terror attack on American soil in history, the barrel-chested, ruddy-faced agitator attracted thousands of new listeners, many of them deeply disillusioned young men with negligible economic prospects. His Infowars network ballooned into a multimillion-dollar empire with more online listeners than America’s top conservative radio jock, Rush Limbaugh, enabling Jones to roll out a highly profitable, nutritionally questionable line of dietary supplements, from Caveman True Paleo Formula to Silver Bullet colloidal silver, all marketed as antidotes to the government’s “chemical war.” (Ironically, the Center for Environmental Health found that Jones’ True Paleo Formula and another of his supplements contained toxic levels of lead, enough to increase risk of heart attacks and sperm damage. In a custody battle with his ex-wife, Jones’ own attorney described him as “a performance artist,” not an ideologically committed journalist.)

But even if he was just playing an online carnival barker, Jones put his money where his mouth was. Among the shock jock’s myriad pet projects was the 2005 Loose Change 9/11 documentary series, produced by Dylan Avery, a twentysome-thing waiter at Red Lobster at the time he edited it. The film is an eighty-minute scattershot of compelling theories and probing questions about the 9/11 attacks, clinically scripted and set with an impressively high production value. Avery’s narrative seemed to expose serious flaws in the government’s case, demonstrating that it at least had foreknowledge of the attacks and did nothing to stop them.

The insinuation that runs through the documentary is that, even more than an official cover-up, there was ample evidence of active government involvement in planning and implementing the attacks by planting bombs inside the World Trade Center. Inspired by the 9/11 Truth movement, Jones quickly recognized the film’s potency and invested heavily in its distribution, making himself its executive producer. Over the course of several editions, Loose Change garnered more than 10 million views, becoming the central recruiting vehicle of the Truth movement. Avery became a celebrity in his own right, finding interest from filmmaking legend David Lynch, actor Charlie Sheen and the oligarch Mark Cuban. Loose Change drove public opinion in an undeniable direction: by the time the film had reached several million views, in 2006, 42 percent of Americans told pollsters from Zogby—in a poll sponsored by the Truther organization 911Truth.org—that they believed the 9/11 Commission had either ignored or “concealed” evidence that contradicted the “official explanation.”

There was no doubt the 9/11 Commission had endeavored to cover up inconvenient truths surrounding the attacks. Twenty-eight pages of the commission’s final report had been redacted. These sections dealt with the Saudi connection to 9/11, delving into the relationship between Saudi officials like Fahad al-Thumairy and Omar Bayoumi, and the hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. The pages also included information showing contacts between one of the hijackers and a corporation managing the Aspen, Colorado, home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was then the Saudi ambassador to Washington. The Saudi government had forked over millions to powerhouse DC firms like Qorvis to lobby against the public release of those twenty-eight pages. And despite sustained pressure campaigns from the families of 9/11 victims, both the Bush and Obama administrations stood staunchly against any action that would embarrass a top ally like Saudi Arabia.

Then there was the issue of Operation Cyclone. Al Qaeda had been a natural outgrowth of the covert war the CIA oversaw during the 1980s in Afghanistan, where the agency armed and trained Islamist mujahedin like the warlord Hekmatyar. The 9/11 Commission Report glossed over this crucial piece of context in a short page and a half, referring to the mujahedin as “an Afghan national resistance movement” and noting only in passing that the United States covertly backed some of its most extreme elements. On this central point, the report was a historical whitewash.

If the government had advance warning of the 9/11 attacks; if it turned a blind eye to the devious schemes of the hijackers; and if it callously sacrificed the security of its own citizens, the reason was imperial ambition. Indeed, the American national security state had been so hell-bent on defeating the Soviet Union that the long-term consequences of weaponizing Islamist proxies were irrelevant—“compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant,” as Brzezinski had reflected in 2006. It was also undeniable that America’s special relationship with Saudi Arabia had necessitated a passive attitude toward the country’s funding and propagation of extremism across the Middle East, and may have caused the intelligence services to look the other way even when Saudi activities on American soil in the months leading up to 9/11 had their own systems “blinking red.” For many of the disillusioned youth that gravitated into 9/11 Truth circles, however, these critical pieces of historical and political context seemed overly complex and utterly unsatisfying.

Loose Change avoided any exploration of the blowback from American empire. By homing in instead on the granular details of the explosions that brought down the Twin Towers (and getting many of them wrong in the process), and by omitting any historical discussion of the American government’s relationship with the forces directly implicated in the attacks, turning to crude insinuations about an inside job, the Truthers inadvertently ran interference for the imperialist power elite they claimed to disdain.

There was probably one direction a national movement bound together by conspiratorial thinking could go, and that was hard right. The hyper-ambitious Jones proved eager to channel antiestablishment energy into right-wing mobilization. Having put 9/11 Truth on the national radar, Jones opened up a new front against undocumented immigrants, joining forces with the white nationalist border vigilantes known as the Minutemen to paint illegal immigration as a globalist plan to destroy American culture. He focused intensely on the threat of “chemtrails,” alleging that government jets were engaged in a secret plot to spray chemicals that promoted mind control and “could possibly cause flooding akin to Noah’s ark.” And he continued to push the claim—not far afield from self-styled terror expert Steven Emerson’s baseless speculation—that the Clinton administration had engineered the 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing to advance gun control and other liberal policies.