Bush himself, though, said it proved difficult—time and again—to get through to Cheney. He recalled pounding his desk on the plane, shouting, “This is inexcusable! Get me the Vice President!” He “could not remain in contact with people,” he was to say, “because the phones on Air Force One were cutting in and out.” In Washington, senior aide Karen Hughes experienced the same difficulty getting through to the presidential plane. “The military operator came back to me and in—in a voice that sounded very shaken—said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. We can’t reach Air Force One.’ ”
Given such contradictions, there is no way of knowing how Bush and Cheney or Bush and anyone else actually interacted that day. That issue, as will be seen, is central to the crucial matter of how the military responded to the hijackings.
Reporters traveling with the President watched the collapse of the towers on flickering television screens. At about 10:30, after the second tower fell, word came from the White House of a “credible,” anonymous phone threat to “Angel,” the insiders’ word for Air Force One. Tension rose accordingly. Armed guards were posted at the cockpit door, and agents checked the identification of almost everyone on board. Reporters were told not to use their cell phones. F-16 fighters were soon to begin escorting Air Force One, and did so for the rest of the day. One escort plane flew so close, the President’s press office would state, that Bush saluted through the window—and the F-16 pilot dipped a wing in reply. The warning of a threat to “Angel” had been just a baseless scare, but made a good story.
The President worried aloud about having literally vanished into the blue. “The American people,” he reportedly said, “want to know where their dang President is.” It was decided that he would land at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to make a television appearance. “Freedom itself,” Bush said in a two-minute taped address at 1:20 P.M., “was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.” This was less than the reassurance he had wished to communicate, not least because the tape first hit the airwaves running backward.
Then the President was off again, this time heading for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Once aboard, in a conversation he did succeed in having with Cheney, Bush said: “We’re at war, Dick. We’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.” And: “We’re not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.”
A rear admiral at Offutt, the underground headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command, would say he thought the President “very much in control … concerned about what was happening … calm … articulate … presidential.” In mid-afternoon, Bush took part in a videoconference with National Security Council members in Washington—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, CIA director Tenet, and FBI director Robert Mueller.
The President, however, was by now preoccupied with the thought that his continued absence from the capital made him look bad. The Secret Service was still advising him to stay away from Washington. His staff wanted him to address the nation again from Offutt. Bush, however, would apparently have none of it.
“I’m not going to do it from an Air Force base,” he reportedly said. “Not while folks are under the rubble.” And, in another account, “I don’t want a tin-horn terrorist to keep me out of Washington.” Press secretary Fleischer agreed that the President’s whereabouts was becoming “an increasingly difficult issue to deal with.”
Air Force One at last made the return trip to the capital. From the helicopter carrying him to the White House, Bush got his first glimpse of the reality of 9/11. There in the evening light was the Pentagon, partly veiled in black smoke, a deep gouge in its west side. “The mightiest building in the world is on fire,” Bush muttered, according to Fleischer. “That’s the twenty-first century war you’ve just witnessed.” Then he was down, landing on the South Lawn and walking back into the White House almost ten hours after the attacks had begun.
Political Washington had begun to show a brave face to the world. More than a hundred members of Congress had gathered on the steps of the Capitol in a display of unity. “We will stand together,” declared Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert—now back on the Hill—and he and colleagues broke into a chorus of “God Bless America.” An hour and a half later, once he was anchored back in the Oval Office, Bush delivered a four-minute address to the nation. It is said that he had an audience of eighty million people.
“Evil, despicable acts of terror,” the President said, “have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.” Though he could not have known it, he ended by citing the same passage from the Twenty-third Psalm to which United 93 passenger Todd Beamer had turned in a moment of terror: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil …”
The address also included something Bush had added himself just before going on air. “We will make no distinction,” he said, after assuring Americans that those behind the attacks would be brought to justice, “between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
Afterward, in the underground bunker where Cheney and others had spent the day, Bush met with key officials—the group he was to call his “war council.” The words “al Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” had been on everyone’s lips for hours, and CIA director Tenet said al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were essentially one and the same.
There was talk of reprisals and then, according to counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld came out with a remarkable comment. “You know,” he said, “we’ve got to do Iraq.”
PRESIDENT BUSH almost always went to bed early, and September 11 was no exception. He balked when the Secret Service asked him and the first lady to spend the night on a bed in the underground bunker, an old pullout couch. “The bed looked unappetizing,” he recalled, “so I said no.” The couple retired to their usual bedroom in the residence, only to be woken around 11:30 P.M. by a new security alert. “Incoming plane!” an agent told them. “We could be under attack. Come on. Right now!”
The President of the United States, he in T-shirt and running shorts and Mrs. Bush in her robe—with their dogs Barney and Spot—were rushed down to the basement to be confronted again by the unappetizing couch. The “incoming” plane, however, turned out to be merely a chartered airliner bringing FBI reinforcements from the West Coast. Back went the Bushes to their private quarters.
Two hundred and twenty-five miles away in New York City, in the glare of halogen lights, men worked on through the night in the tangle of steel and rubble that had once symbolized American prosperity. They were still looking hopefully for the living, and the hand of one more survivor—the last, as it turned out—would eventually appear through a hole to grasp that of a rescuer. It belonged to a young female clerk who had worked at the Trade Center and, though seriously injured, she was to recover.
That consolation aside, there would henceforth be only the dead, or fragments of the dead.
The pile at the scene of the attacks “heaved and groaned and constantly changed, was capable at any moment of killing again.” The air smelled of noxious chemicals, and strange flames shot out of the ground, purple, green, and yellow. Fires were to burn on, underground, for three months to come.
An American apocalypse, a catastrophe with consequences—in blood spilled and global political upheaval—that continue to this day.
TEN
ONE CONSEQUENCE, A NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON, is that countless citizens do not believe the story of September 11 as we have just told it.
We have striven in these chapters to recount what is firmly known. We have teased out detail, sorted the reliable from the dross, often gone back to original sources. Yet many would say our account is skewed, too close to the “official version,” or just plain wrong.
9/11 is mired in “conspiracy theory” like no previous event in American history—more so even than President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Doubt and disbelief as to what really happened on 9/11, a Ti
me magazine writer noted in 2006, is “not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.” By the end of George Bush’s first term as President, a more iconoclastic writer—Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone—concluded that Americans had “no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea.… Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him. What story is he going to tell?”
Americans, University of California history professor Kathryn Olmsted has said, “tend to be particularly receptive to anti-government conspiracy theories.” Her study of conspiracy theory notes not only the evidence of the polls—that in 2006 a third of the U.S. population believed the Bush administration was involved in 9/11—but that a majority of that third were aged eighteen to twenty-nine.
Significant, too, given the continuing global upheaval, is the degree of 9/11 conspiracy belief among Arab Americans (of whom there are more than three million), American Muslims, and Arabs worldwide. Taibbi, doing interviews in Dearborn, Michigan, was shocked to hear “well-educated, pious Lebanese Americans regurgitating 9/11 conspiracy theories like they were hard news.” One woman he interviewed “could not be budged from her conviction that Bush had bombed the Twin Towers.” In much of the Arab world, the author and longtime Middle East resident Jean Sasson has written, “conspiracy theories dominate public opinion.”
As recently as 2009, persistent belief in such theories so concerned the U.S. government that it issued a fact sheet for global consumption, seeking to rebut “unfounded … popular myths” about 9/11. It was an acknowledgment that the authors of conspiracy theory, the “skeptics” as they like to be characterized, were a force hard to ignore. What are their principal theories and speculations, and is there substance to them?
AT THE CORE of conspiracy theory is the idea that we were all hoodwinked, that what we thought we saw on 9/11 was not the full picture. The Twin Towers may have been struck by airliners filled with passengers—though some doubt even that—but it was not the planes that brought them crashing down. Explosives, planted explosives, had been used to achieve that. The same went for the total collapse later in the day, the skeptics claim, of World Trade Center Building 7. As for the Pentagon, there were claims by some that it had been struck not by a plane but by a missile.
Why perpetrate such gross trickery? The overarching suspicion—for some the conviction—is that people at the heart of the United States government were behind the attacks. The doubters belong, essentially, to one of two schools of thought, broadly defined by the acronyms MIHOP—Made It Happen On Purpose—and, the alternative, LIHOP—Let It Happen On Purpose.
LIHOP proposes that elements in the Bush administration, aware that a terrorist onslaught was likely, and motivated by the opportunities for foreign intervention it might provide, turned a blind eye to warning signs and let the attacks happen. MIHOP adherents suspect—argue strongly—that elements in the U.S. government and military actually engineered the attacks.
Those, then, are the central planks of conspiracy theory. As late as January 2011, National Geographic Channel was rebroadcasting programming that covered the theories plugged by the people some call 9/11 “truthers.”
CONSPIRACY THEORIES are nothing new, in America and much of the rest of the world. The growth and durability of 9/11 skepticism, though, was inseparably intertwined with the rise and rise of the Internet. For better or worse and for the first time in history, the Internet permits citizens to propagate ideas faster than traditional media and beyond the control of government.
The electronic murmur that was to reach millions seems to have begun not six hours after the first strike on the Trade Center. Boston-based David Rostcheck, a software consultant with a physics degree, had spent the morning watching the drama on television. “Eventually,” he recalled, “I went to see what people were saying online. I belonged to the set of people who had been on the Internet for most of my adult life, before there was a Web and before the Internet became a household presence.… No one seemed to be commenting on the unusual aspects of the building collapses, so I wrote up an analysis and posted it.”
“Is it just me,” Rostcheck asked on the Net that afternoon,
or did anyone else recognize that it wasn’t the airplane impacts that blew up the World Trade Center? To me, this is the most frightening part of this morning … look at the footage—those buildings were demolished. To demolish a building, you don’t need all that much explosive but it needs to be placed in the correct places.… Someone had to have had a lot of access to all of both towers and a lot of time to do this.… If, in a few days, not one official has mentioned anything about the demolition part, I think we have a REALLY serious problem.
There it was, almost instantaneously, the very first hint at the theory that for many has long since become an item of faith—that the fall of the Twin Towers was in reality caused by explosives planted within the buildings. Rapidly, the Internet became the forum for a great flood of skepticism.
“What happened after September 11,” Rostcheck told the authors,
is that American society bifurcated into two groups—call them America 1 and America 2. America 1 makes up much of America. It is depicted by and shaped by broadcast media. It thinks it occupies what it would consider to be “conventional reality,” which is to say it thinks it “is” America. It is barely aware of America 2, if at all.
America 2, by comparison, is what I’ll roughly classify as the Internet domain. I don’t mean that America 1 doesn’t use the Internet—it does.… But America 2’s concepts originate on the Internet, which is a different domain.… The two Americas live together, work together, interact together, but they are not quite the same and they are not necessarily going in the same direction anymore. What happened after September 11 is that a whole group of Americans found themselves abruptly dumped into America 2 … the population of America 2 became huge—likely tens of millions.
America 1 is only dimly aware of America 2, and reflexively consigns any elements of thinking from America 2 that it becomes aware of into one bin marked “crazy,” then dismisses it.… By the standards of America 2, people from America 1 are profoundly and tragically uneducated—and reactionary.
Whatever one thinks of this concept of two Americas, the seeds of suspicion about 9/11 have flourished on the Internet ever since. Four years ago, it was said that almost a million Web pages were devoted to “9/11 conspiracy.” As of early 2011, entering the phrase “9/11 conspiracy” into the Google search engine returned almost seven million hits.
“I don’t believe the official story,” wrote Jared Israel, a veteran anti–Vietnam War activist who had earlier started Emperor’s Clothes—a website fired up by perceived American betrayal of the Serbs in Yugoslavia—within four days of the attacks. What he saw in “the semi-official New York Times,” he told his readers, raised grave questions. Why had President Bush gone on listening to a children’s story about goats when a third hijacked plane was aimed at Washington, D.C.? Wasn’t there something odd about the military response to the hijackings, or the lack of it? Israel said he smelled—and this may have been the first mention of the word in the context of 9/11—“conspiracy.”
Even to peer into the world we now enter requires suspending disbelief, giving houseroom to a mind-boggling range of views. It includes the “no-planers,” people who question whether commercial passenger jets crashed into the Trade Center and the Pentagon at all. Talk of that began just two days after 9/11 on a website run by a man named Peter Meyer and intended—he told readers—“for thinking people.” Meyer and others would eventually be expressing doubt as to whether some or all of the planes involved on 9/11 really existed as genuine passenger flights.
By early October, one Carol Valentine was declaring that “there were no suicide pilots on those September 11 jets. The jets were controlled by advanced robotics.” Her account, which ran to twelve pages, suggested that air traffic controllers’ records
had vanished, that the alleged Arab hijackers’ names were missing from airline passenger lists, and that an alleged hijacker’s passport—reportedly found in the street near the Trade Center—had been planted. She believed, moreover, that Flight 93 was “without a doubt” shot down, to prevent its “electronic controls” being examined and to ensure the silence of its crew and passengers.
A character named Joe Vialls, meanwhile, cast doubt on the belief that there had been air-to-ground phone calls from the “electronically hijacked” planes. How was it, a certain Gary North asked, that no names of Arab hijackers appeared on early published passenger lists? The omission was “very strange … peculiar.”
Over the years, the plot thickened. An academic named Alex Dewdney suggested in 2003 that the four aircraft were not really hijacked but “ordered to land at a designated airport with a military presence.” Two “previously-prepared planes,” painted to look like an American Airlines jet and a United Airlines jet, were “flown by remote control” along the designated flight paths of Flights 11 and 175 and on into the Twin Towers.
In Dewdney’s version, it was a “fighter jet (under remote control), or a cruise missile” that crashed into the Pentagon. The passengers from the three genuine Boeings were transferred to Flight 93, which “flies towards Washington and is shot down by a U.S. Air Force jet over Pennsylvania.” The three original Boeings were flown “by remote control out over the Atlantic,” and then scuttled.
That is but a taste of the sort of theory many could read and some apparently believed—though there are more, yet more bizarre. Who are the theories’ proponents? Dewdney is professor emeritus of computer science and adjunct professor of biology at Canada’s University of Western Ontario. North holds a Ph.D. in history. Vialls, now deceased, said he was a “British aeronautical engineer.” Valentine has described herself as a writer, researcher, and human rights activist. Meyer apparently holds a double honors degree in philosophy and mathematics from a leading Australian university.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 10