The Bush administration is getting concerned. Virtually nothing they said about Iraq is turning out to be true, and nothing they predicted, from the flowering of democracy in the Middle East to cheap oil in the barrel, is coming to pass – and people are starting to see it.

    So what do they do? They contrive the most bizarre, paranoid counter-narrative they can imagine about the seminal political event of our time. They spread the word that 9-11 was an inside job, and begin looking for suckers who will believe it.

    Bush did it. The neo-cons did it. Big Oil did it. They expect the resulting controversy will prove an endlessly fascinating diversion and will give opposition groups something to argue about for the next 50 years, or at least until the next election, and it will make the military hard-liners, the anti-tax lobby and their religious-nut allies look relatively sane by comparison.

    That’s an interesting theory, but it’s dismissible for the same reason most conspiracy theories are. It’s too complicated. More than that, it’s unnecessary. The left produces its own wacko conspiracy theories, among them the current one, that 9-11 was an inside job pulled off by the right.

    For conspiracy buffs who long for something to sink their teeth into, here’s one to consider, and it might even be true. At least it’s doable, without leaving much in the way of tracks or smoking guns – a real plus for any conspiracy. As election season approaches, we keep hearing about terrorist plots in the United States being busted up “at an early stage.” Why?

    Consider first that thanks in large part to the war in Iraq, our Commander-in-Chief’s infuriating swagger and a foreign policy that more or less reflects it, there are many – probably millions – of young Muslims world-wide who harbor fantasies about doing harm to the United States. Add to that our own inexhaustible supply of home-grown peripheral figures, blowhards, psychopaths, and an unknown number of genuinely committed Islamic jihadists.

    Out of this pool there are surely at any given time hundreds of groups talking trash and terrorism. It’s equally certain that U.S. agencies have open files and gigabytes of information about many of them.

    All that remains is to find the best campaign consultants money can buy and have them figure out the optimum rate for news about thwarted attacks to be delivered. Then meter it out like a nurse pushing an IV. Time it so as the election draws near the average voter is just beginning to get the message: The Republicans – yes, the very ones that admittedly made some “serious mistakes” – are actually making some headway and getting this thing under control!
   
    As for the 9-11 inside-job theory, is it refutable?

    It’s hard to know where to begin. Complexity of the plot? Number of people who would need to be in on it and then keep a secret for life? The maze of tracks it would have left? The number of ways it could go wrong technically? And above all, even if you accept the premise they would do it if they could get away with it, the horrible PR consequences if the plot should be discovered. It would make Tonkin Gulf look like a fart.

    I’m inclined to begin with the towers. Having worked with steel for a dozen years or so, including some months welding on the beams and trusses that went into the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, I’ve probably spent a few thousand hours heating and cooling steel and watching it behave. An official theory of why the towers fell – upper structural members and connectors, some already damaged by impact, reached critical heat and lost strength; upper floors began to collapse, and a “pancake effect” then collapsed the entire structure – sounds right to me and is almost certainly on the right track. Even a house fire these days, fueled by carpets, appliances, computers, exotic construction laminates – all loaded and primed with BTUs – quickly reaches temperatures well above what’s required to make steel let go. Yes, it takes time for heat to transfer, but the jet fuel must have been quite an accelerant. 

    The alternative inside-job theory is that someone from the Mossad, the oil cartel, or Karl Rove’s basement carefully placed charges at exactly the right points on not one but two towers, and timed both arrays to discharge and implode the buildings an hour or two after they were hit with, quote, “hijacked” aircraft.

    If the 9-11 conspiracy theory can be said to have a core document, it’s an article called “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” by Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics and astronomy at Brigham Young University. Dr. Jones says that jet fuel and the subsequent fire could not have brought the buildings down, and he suggests it’s more likely they were brought down by “pre-positioned cutter-charges.”Among his other articles is one titled “Behold My Hands: Evidence for Christ's Visit in Ancient America.” In it he notes that dark marks on the hands of ancient Mayan artifacts and hieroglyphs resemble stigmata, and he posits this as evidence that the Book of Mormon was correct when it said that Jesus visited the New World shortly after his resurrection. To further make the case, he refers to an article by archeological scholar Robert Eliot Smith, who in describing a rendering of the Mayan god Itzamma, notes its “markedly Hebraic nose.”

    Getting a fix on the inside-job theory is really an epistemology problem. Epistemology is that obscure but fascinating branch of philosophy that asks, “How do we know what we know?” The epistemological structure of the conundrum posed by the 9-11 conspiracy theory could be rendered as follows:

    A fuel-laden aircraft weighing roughly 300,000 pounds  flies into a tall building at several hundred miles per hour. The building then burns and collapses – in some ways an unprecedented event, physically as well as politically. Your assumptions and computations lead you to conclude that a series of carefully timed pre-positioned charges, and not the collision and subsequent fire, caused the collapse. You must then decide whether (a) your conclusion is correct, or (b) your assumptions and/or computations are faulty.

    This question is really not in the realm of physics. It lies somewhere on the continuum between politics and personality test. It’s a separate question from whether any official account of the event is complete, or without guess work or mistakes, or whether cold war ideologues of both major parties – a generation of politicians and academic hacks who believed we were at “the end of history” once Communism had been defeated – should have seen it coming and didn’t. Or, above all, whether the Bush administration did or did not shamelessly exploit it once it happened.

    For someone who thinks the prevailing logic of war and predatory free-market economics is ripe for challenge, that universal single-payer health care is an issue the electorate is ready for, and that an American Fascism is taking shape right under our nose (Hebraic or otherwise), it’s disturbing to see the inroads this 9-11 ghost dance has made on the left. Here in Minnesota, home of the late Senator Paul Wellstone and the only state to vote Democratic in every presidential election since 1976, it’s become acceptable, especially among the younger progressive crowd. The current Green Party U.S. senate candidate is apparently among the believers.  You have to wonder how that will play out politically, but it could be good news for the nervous Democrats. The flakier the party to their left appears, the more room they have to back into the arms of their corporate friends, who are only too glad to have them.

David Rubenstein’s features and commentaries have appeared in The Nation, Law & Politics Minnesota, the New York Times, Pulse of the Twin Cities, Chicago Reader and many other periodicals. His article about modern firefighting won a first prize from the International Association of Firefighters in 2005.