No event in living memory has had as immediate an impact upon the American consciousness and imagination as the events of September 11, 2001. Terrorists used airliners in attacks upon the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and hijacked United Flight 93, which ultimately crashed in western Pennsylvania. These events have already become fertile breeding grounds of American legend and folklore, and they have likewise spawned myriad conspiracy theories. Indeed, the narratives developed around these events were so potent that they served as prime catalysts for inflaming public opinion and creating an atmosphere that helped to launch protracted wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
In this image, United Flight 175 approaches the South Tower of the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 spawned a vast literature of conspiracy-themed speculation, fueled in part by the ease of communication offered by the relatively new medium of the Internet. (AP Photo)
American Airlines Flight 11, with ninety-two people on board, departed Boston’s Logan International Airport for Los Angeles at 7:59 a.m. Fifteen minutes later United Airlines Flight 175 likewise departed Logan for Los Angeles with sixty-five people aboard. Also bound for Los Angeles was American Airlines Flight 77, which departed Washington Dulles International Airport six minutes later with sixty-four passengers. The last flight to be airborne, United Airlines Flight 93, was en route from Newark to San Francisco, carrying forty-four passengers.
At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 rammed into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, followed seventeen minutes later by Flight 175’s collision with the South Tower. Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. Just a minute beforehand, Vice President Dick Cheney had been hustled by Secret Service agents into a Cold War bunker under the White House, and by 9:45 a.m., both the Capitol and the White House had been evacuated. The fourth hijacked plane plummeted into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m., apparently due to the efforts of the passengers aboard, who had learned of the other hijackings via cell phone and rose up against the hijackers, resulting in the crash.
Flight 93 in particular has itself become embedded in American lore as a heroic last stand by Americans refusing to sit idly by in the face of terrorism. A number of cell phone calls serve to flesh out our knowledge of what happened on Flight 93. One of these calls evidently provided the information that the passengers had voted to storm the cockpit and to attempt to wrest control of the aircraft from the hijackers. The passengers rushed the terrorists at 9:57 a.m., resulting in a crash in a Pennsylvania meadow less than a half hour’s flying time from Washington, D.C.
By 9:31 a.m., President George W. Bush, speaking from Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, had already characterized the horrific events of that morning as “terrorist attacks,” launching a powerful new American narrative tradition. Later that afternoon, President Bush spoke to the nation from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana; in this speech, the president turned the focus of his remarks upon the perpetrators of what he had termed terrorist attacks earlier that day: He assured the American people that U.S. military forces were on high alert at home and abroad, and he promised retribution for, in his potent phrase, the “cowardly attacks” of 9/11. President Bush framed the still nascent official version of events in powerful rhetoric on this occasion; in addition to characterizing those responsible for the events as craven, he promised to “hunt down” and “punish” those involved. These words were to prove particularly powerful, and American history, as well as legend and folklore, were to be deeply and indelibly affected by this response.
In addition, gut-wrenching images of the attacks, and most especially those showing the collapsing of the twin skyscrapers in the heart of America’s premier financial district, were to be repeated in an almost endless media loop. Ultimately they became seared in the collective American consciousness. Mayor Rudy Giuliani had ordered all of New York City below Canal Street to be evacuated shortly after 11:00 a.m. By this point, due to safety hazards and security concerns, the island of Manhattan was virtually cut off, and a vast number of people were stranded. In addition, by the time the president spoke that afternoon, all American airspace had been cleared of aircraft, an unprecedented step that was to impose an eerie silence and stillness upon the skies above the United States for some days. In combination with the practical and logistical concerns of the myriad stranded passengers, this step was to leave a lasting impression upon the American imagination.
Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda
Few figures in recent memory have been demonized as quickly and thoroughly in the American imagination as Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) and Al Qaeda. Bin Laden was moved by the events of 9/11 from the fringes of American thought to a central and fully formed Satan-figure in American narratives, and rapidly came to be reviled in the popular American consciousness much as Hitler was before him. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, replaced the Soviet Union as the great enemy in the popular mind, and the terror evoked by their decentralized efforts and unorthodox modes of attack raised American hysteria to a fever pitch unmatched since the direst days on the edge of nuclear annihilation during the depths of the Cold War. Indeed, the American response to the threat associated with terrorists soon rose to heights arguably greater than McCarthyism at the height of the “Red Scare,” with civil liberties curtailed by the Patriot Act, the “extraordinary rendition” of detainees to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and the Bush administration’s support for “harsh interrogation” techniques.
C. Fee
In addition to the legendary status accorded to the official version of events, September 11 has proven fertile soil for conspiracy theories, which quickly developed into two main strands. In the first strand, militant voices in the Islamic world immediately cast doubt upon the involvement of Osama bin Laden in the planning and execution of the attacks, positing instead in the most extreme cases that the U.S. government was itself involved in or responsible for the attacks. This theory holds that the United States planned to use 9/11 as a pretext for aggression against the Muslim world. In the second strand, as the thinking goes, Al Qaeda terrorists perpetrated the attacks without U.S. direction, but U.S. officials knew of the plot in time to stop it. They failed to thwart the attacks to have the excuse to wage war against radical Islam, most notably against the Taliban in Afghanistan. According to this theory, the U.S. response was planned before September 11, and the Bush administration thus was poised to take full advantage of the American public’s emotional vulnerability and thirst for vengeance in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.
This narrative strain is varnished, as folk narratives such as conspiracy theories and urban legends generally are, with a modicum of intriguing facts: the Patriot Act was rolled out so quickly, for example, that a number of commentators have suggested that it must have been drafted ahead of time. Moreover, it is generally conceded that a number of allies abroad warned the United States of possible strikes, and that the American intelligence agencies should have been able to discern from their own sources what was about to happen. Finally, long and strong ties between the powerful American family of George W. Bush and the House of Saud, of which Osama bin Laden was a scion, have further confused the backdrop of the tragedy. In any case, the idea that the government knew about an impending sneak attack but did nothing to thwart it—ostensibly in a callous and calculating attempt to further foreign policy objectives, which might otherwise fail to rally popular support—seems to speak to some aspect of the national psyche, in that it is not at all new in American lore. In fact, this version of September 11 resonates closely with a deeply ingrained and highly cynical school of thought about Pearl Harbor, which author Mark E. Willey termed the “Mother of All Conspiracies” in a recent book of that title.
The official explanation of the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to uncover and to circumvent the terrorist plot behind the September 11 tragedies is, for all intents and purposes, in general a verdict of ineptitude on the part of the relevant agencies. A widespread belief in such governmental incompetence allowed the dominant narrative of events to become concerned with the rationalization of retaliation against the alleged perpetrators of the acts, as well as with the justification of greater security measures and the concomitant curtailment of civil liberties. Although a view of the government as bumbling and ineffectual certainly does represent a very old strain of American folk wisdom, it also flies in the face of another highly popular form of American storytelling, the government conspiracy theory. Many of the most elaborate examples of such theories presuppose that the government, or at least some ruling subset thereof, is highly organized and devastatingly efficient in its machinations and its orchestration of various intricate plots and cover-ups. Stories embraced by conspiracy theorists known as “truthers,” who posit that the government played an active role in the attacks—or at least chose to do nothing, although in possession of prior knowledge of the terrorist plot—participate in this strain of American folklore.
C. Fee
See also Area 51; Bilderbergers; Conspiracy Theories; Montauk Project; New World Order; X-Files
Further Reading
Aaronovitch, David. 2010. Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. New York: Riverhead Books.
Arnold, Gordon B. 2008. Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Bennett, Richard M. 2003. Conspiracy: Plots, Lies and Cover-Ups. London: Virgin.
DeHaven-Smith, Lance. 2013. Conspiracy Theory in America. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Fenster, Mark. 1999. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Goldberg, Robert Alan. 2001. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Olmsted, Kathryn S. 2009. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walker, Jesse. 2013. The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. New York: Harper.