Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  As Hufschmid pressed his notion of crypto-Jewish conspiracies at work in the anti-conspiracy movement, the response from the Loose Change men became ever more agonized, like children whose favorite uncle has begun to behave strangely. They were, said Avery, “well aware of the Illuminati, we’re aware of the New World Order, and we’re well aware that there are people who want an all-Jewish state, but that’s not what we’re about . . . If you’re going to say crypto-Jew, you have to have something to back it up. Until you get a Kabbalah or a Torah or a yarmulkah, how can you say that?” Bermas conceded that maybe Mossad was behind the bringing down of the Twin Towers. “It’s not that [the theory is] not legitimate, I just haven’t seen enough information to say that this Zionist cabal that everybody’s talking about is responsible.”39

  Since September 12, 2001, there have been theories linking Israelis/ Jews/Zionists (the names always indicating the same people) to the worst terrorist incident in history. Christopher Bollyn, last seen in this chapter joining Thierry Meyssan at his anti-imperialist colloquium in Brussels, was one of the leading American protagonists of this strand, along with his American Free Press colleague Michael Collins-Piper. To Bollyn, there was “a preponderance of evidence pointing to Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, being involved in the terror attacks.”40 Some of this evidence was circumstantial but, to a certain cast of mind, suggestive, such as the case of the five young Israelis picked up by the FBI after they were seen watching the attack on the Twin Towers from the George Washington Bridge and supposedly “speaking in a foreign language and hugging each other.”

  But the story that provided the initial impetus for the claims of a Zionist plot was the urban myth, repeated by Bollyn, that four thousand Jews or Israelis (the description varies) mysteriously stayed at home on the day of the attacks, clearly forewarned about what was to happen. On September 15, the Syrian newspaper Al-Thawra stated that “four thousand Jews were absent from their work on the day of the explosions.” Al-Manar television in Lebanon, linked to the militant Hezbollah organization, also referred to Israelis who “remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place.” If these were the first instances of the charges, they certainly weren’t the last: in January 2007, an Internet search on Google turned up over 33,000 references to “4,000 Jews” and the WTC attacks.

  The origin of the figure is probably the September 12 Internet edition of the Jerusalem Post, which stated, “the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks.” This story, almost certainly based on panicky inquiries about relatives visiting or living in the Washington and New York areas, was given the utterly misleading headline “Hundreds of Israelis Missing in WTC Attack.” Later, when four thousand Israelis did not turn up dead in the WTC, this permitted those who wanted to, such as Bollyn, to note a nonexistent discrepancy.

  In fact, 2,071 workers in and visitors to the World Trade Center were killed on 9/11, and as far as can be ascertained, between 10 and 14 percent were Jewish, roughly correlating to the percentage of Jews in the population of the New York area. This should have surprised nobody except perhaps an anti-Semite or a Syrian newspaper. From Bollyn, who belongs to the section of the openly racist far right that also believes the Holocaust to be a hoax or an exaggeration, such an argument might be considered run-of-the-mill. Far more extraordinary was that he kept company with, among others, a German Social Democrat and a black American Marxist poet.

  Andreas von Bülow, the German former government minister who had also attended the Brussels conference, was asked about the Israeli connection by a journalist from Der Spiegel. There were, said von Bülow, “a number of indications . . . point[ing] to some connection between the Mossad and the act and perpetrators of 9/11,” including the fact that there was “only one Israeli victim on 9/11.” There then followed this slightly surreal exchange:

  VON BÜLOW: They [the Israelis] didn’t know about it, [but] they had an idea.

  Q: And why isn’t any of them talking today?

  VON BÜLOW: That has happened. They say a little Pakistani boy said, “The towers will no longer be standing tomorrow.”41

  At the time of 9/11, the official poet laureate of New Jersey was the sixty-six-year-old black left-wing writer Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones). In 2002 he published a poem titled “Somebody Blew Up America,” the essence of which was to contrast the demonization of militant Islam with the lack of attention paid to other, worse criminals, such as those who became rich from slavery. The technique Baraka used was to ask who was responsible for each of the other historical offenses against humanity. So the poem included, according to one supporter of Baraka’s, a “provocatively poetic inquiry about who knew beforehand” about the WTC attacks:

  Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed?

  Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

  To stay home that day?

  Why did Sharon stay away?

  It seemed 9/11 had drawn together a lifelong foe of racism and a foot soldier in the ranks of the modern neo-fascists. They could agree (or provocatively inquire, poetically) that the Jews were somehow to blame. Or if not the Jews, as such, the evil manipulators of the Jews, the Zionists, themselves an almost invincible form of super-Jew.

  Mind the Gap

  The growth in belief in conspiracies about 9/11 owed as much to what occurred after the attack as to what happened before it. In October 2001 coalition forces went into Afghanistan, removed the Islamist Taliban government, and chased Osama bin Laden out of his bases. Then in March 2003, American and British forces invaded Iraq in what was to prove the most controversial and divisive foreign-policy decision for both countries of the post-Cold War era. There were huge protests, followed by a widespread belief that somehow the American and British people had been lied to. Many books have covered and will cover that territory, but one consequence was a flood of conspiracy theories discussing almost every aspect of Western (here defined as American, British, Israeli, and, if you have less parochial tastes, Australian) foreign and counterterrorist policy.

  Within a day of the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, it was being suggested that the United States might have planted the devices to “consolidate broader social support for coming imperial wars, restrictions of civil liberties, and general social paranoia, phenomena from which Spain had been relatively exempt until today.”42 The following month, the capture and filmed beheading in Iraq of an American contractor, Nicholas Berg, led to widespread speculation that the event had been staged to make the Iraqi insurgency look bad. His captors didn’t wear their headgear the way real Arabs would; a doctor said there wasn’t enough blood, and so on. In the same week that Berg was kidnapped, the doyenne of the antiglobalization movement, Naomi Klein, wrote from Baghdad that the burgeoning civil war might be being deliberately fomented by the American administration, “creating the chaos it needs” to avoid having to hand over power to the Iraqis.43

  Inevitably, the London bombs that killed fifty-six people on July 7, 2005, gave rise to a whole raft of speculation about government involvement, and in 2006, two British versions of Loose Change appeared on the Net. One was called Ludicrous Diversion, and the other (after a public service announcement made at certain London Underground stations) Mind the Gap. David Shayler was the author of the second, arguing in it that the 7/7 bombings were probably a false-flag operation designed to instill a false fear of terrorism into the British people and permit the government to do whatever nefarious thing it had on its collective mind at the time. Mind the Gap came complete with supposed warnings to Israelis, disturbing questions about evidence and photographs, and CCTV shots allegedly so badly forged that they were evidence of elements in the new world order wanting to reveal themselves, saying, “Look, we’re sick of lying. We’ve had enough.”44 The aftermath of the bomb blasts didn’t look like the product of peroxi
de bombs to Shayler, who as a deskbound operative for MI5 would, one must imagine, have seen very few peroxide bombs exploding. What was more, the so-called bombers were nice boys who liked cricket, and the train timetables for the jihadists to arrive in London were all wrong.

  One piece of evidence, a potential magic bullet, was accepted by all the 7/7 conspiracists, and this was the impossible locations of the blasts. The official version was that the lethal explosives had been carried in back-packs by the bombers, who set them off on three trains and a bus, killing themselves and the people around them. But if the bombs could be shown to have detonated somewhere else—underneath the trains, for example—then they couldn’t have been associated with the so-called terrorists. This, stated the theorists, was exactly what eyewitnesses had claimed to see happen when the bombs exploded. Ultimately, all such reports could be traced to one source—Guardian journalist Mark Honigsbaum. In June 2006, Honigsbaum gave an account of how the idea of the blast from below had come into existence. On July 7, he had been sent by his news desk to Edgware Road, the site of one of the explosions, where among scenes of complete confusion he had managed to grab quick interviews with some of the survivors as they left a makeshift triage center in a local store.

  Two of them told Honigsbaum that when the bomb exploded, the covering on the floor of the carriage had “raised up.” With no time to check what the passengers had said, Honigsbaum phoned in an audio report to the Guardian, which was used on its website. It was Honigsbaum who added the elaboration that it “was believed” that the explosion had happened underneath the train, and “some passengers described how the tiles, the covers on the floors of the train, flew up, raised up.” After filing, Honigsbaum spoke at greater length to more survivors who had been much closer to the blast, and they told him that the explosion had happened inside the carriage. His earlier report, admitted Honigsbaum, had been “flawed,” but unfortunately “my comments, disseminated over the Internet where they could be replayed ad nauseam, were already taking on a life of their own.” Ruefully, the reporter concluded that in the old days of telephones and books it would have taken some time for Rumor to paint itself full of tongues, but today “such networks can be created instantaneously with a few clicks of a mouse.”45

  In Defense of Extreme Improbability

  It is a contention of this book that conspiracy theorists fail to apply the principle of Occam’s razor to their arguments. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the attempts by Dr. David Ray Griffin to justify the wild improbability of the alternatives to the generally accepted story of 9/11. He constructed three lines of defense. The first was that the conspiracy theories, no matter how far-fetched, might be found to be quite believable, if properly tested. “The questions they [conspiracy theorists] have raised about the official account,” he wrote, “are based on conflicts between this account and known facts, whereas the questions just now raised about complicity theory [the theory that the government was complicit] are rhetorical questions, implying that no answers could be given to any of them. But perhaps answers CAN be given at least to some of them.” For example, hazarded Griffin, on the problem of why none of the thousands of conspirators had spoken out, “the revisionists could reply, people raising this question have probably never experienced the kind of intimidation that can be brought to bear on individuals by threats of prosecution, or worse.”46 Here, of course, he was entering that inevitable circular plea of conspiracism, that the objections to the theory tended, if anything, to prove the theory right. The very fact that no one had talked could almost be seen as evidence of the sheer ruthlessness of the plotters.

  Griffin’s second defense—linked to the first—was that the arguments of 9/11 Truth activists somehow belonged in a different ontological category from those of their critics. Challenged on radio by a left-wing American conspiracy skeptic, Griffin reasoned, “What I have presented is a cumulative argument which relies on a massive amount of evidence that I do take to be prima facie reliable . . . If you’re presenting a deductive argument, that’s when we say that no chain is stronger than its weakest link, then it is important to point out if there are a couple premises of the argument that are at fault, then the whole thing falls. But with the cumulative argument that isn’t the case.”47 As we’ve seen, Griffin’s evidence was far from reliable to say the least, but even so, for his argument to fail one would have to refute specifically almost every single element of it. This supposed separation between deductive and cumulative arguments is reminiscent of the Holy Blood authors’ scholarship of synthesis, which explicitly didn’t require the old, more academic way of looking at evidence but a new willingness to make impossible connections between disparate phenomena. Both have the same quality—the need for a leap of faith.

  Griffin’s third defense was, in essence, if you think my theory is silly then take a look at your own. If there was a choice between the received conspiracy theory (Osama did it) or the revisionist conspiracy theory (Bush did it), was the latter really more unbelievable than the former? Was it not deeply unlikely that a man in a cave together with a few mad Arabs could pull off something so truly devastating? This unlikelihood, suggested Griffin, dwarfed all the other unlikelihoods.

  It is certainly true that the 9/11 plotters, if we believe them to have been al-Qaeda members, carried out an audacious and imaginative plot, in the execution of which they enjoyed very little bad luck, and before which they went about their business relatively free of harassment by the authorities. It was, if you accept the evidence, something of a judo throw in which the opponent’s very weight was used against him.

  There was, however, one other obvious factor that Griffin might have considered when seeking to compare unlikelihoods. Most people, even ones we think of as bad, do what they think and profess to be good, or else invent excuses as to why they can’t. Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri said several times that their organization was behind 9/11. Their particular ideology justified such attacks, and saw them as both laudable and central to Islamist strategy. What’s more, jihadis operating as part of bin Laden’s group had already exploded huge bombs at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, attacked a U.S. destroyer in Yemen and Israeli holidaymakers in Mombasa, and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner. In 1993, Islamists later associated with bin Laden had also exploded a huge bomb under the World Trade Center itself, with the objective of destroying the buildings. So bin Laden’s responsibility for 9/11, if proved, would make him exactly what he wanted to be, a hero of the Islamic resistance to American /Zionist/Crusader imperialism, and every jihadi would have understood that. By contrast, if it were to have been established that President Bush had been in some way involved, then he would become the greatest traitor and liar in American history, a kind of super Benedict Arnold. We may guess that every Bush-ite collaborator would have known this too.

  Cui bono?

  This kind of tangle occurs through the conspiracy theorist’s use of the cui bono? (who benefits?) question to establish motive. If you can make a case that X, in some way and at some time, derived some benefit out of an event, no matter how much X may have declared their opposition to it, then you are justified in asking whether X might not have been in some way involved. That’s the way the planets move, the way the world is. David Ray Griffin provides a classic example of Cui bono? when he quotes in his book someone named Patrick Martin. “The principal beneficiaries of the destruction of the World Trade Center,” Martin argues, “are in the United States: the Bush administration, the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the weapons industry, the oil industry. It is reasonable to ask whether those who have profited to such an extent from this tragedy contributed to bring it about.”48

  Readers will note the yoking of a highly questionable assertion made as obvious fact to the professed mildness of the conclusion. It is not at all clear, for example, that the CIA and the FBI, charged above all with protecting the United States, would have expected to benefit from allowing the worst te
rrorist attack in world history to take place on U.S. soil. Describing them as among the “principal beneficiaries” of such an atrocity must therefore be regarded as eccentric, and to use the idea of benefit to ask the question whether they “contributed to bring it about” seems not to be the act of any reasonable seeker after truth, but rather of someone who has already decided where the truth lies.

  An agreeably simple and often quoted cui bono? sentiment was formulated by the late George Seldes, an American muckraking journalist. “If you look for the social-economic motive,” Seldes wrote, “you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth.” The problem with this seductive proposition is that it is hopelessly reductionist, completely failing to appreciate that people act from many other motives. It rejects the accidental, the complex, the unforeseen or the ideological, substituting an unpredictable economic outcome as the test of a subjective intention.

  So, who plotted the First World War? Not those people who danced in the streets in Vienna, London, Berlin, and Paris in August 1914; they couldn’t benefit because they weren’t rich and were too likely to suffer in one way or another. Not the German kaiser, the Russian tsar, or the Austro-Hungarian emperor, because they all lost their thrones in the end.

  Not the American administration, because it obviously entered the war too late and too reluctantly to be considered a prime mover. But who emerged, secretly smiling, from the hecatomb? The armaments manufacturers, the war profiteers, and, behind them, the bankers. And, for those inclined to ask the extra question, what religion did many of the bankers profess?