On February 7, 2005, I became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/ Illuminati conspiracy for global domination. It was on that day the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, with its cover story debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, hit newsstands. Within hours, the online community of 9/11 conspiracy buffs--which calls itself the "9/11 Truth Movement"--was aflame with wild fantasies about me and my staff, the magazine I edit, and the article we had published.
The Web site
www.911research.wtc7.net, an organization that claims that questioning the "official" story of 9/11 is "an act of responsible citizenship," fired one of the first salvos: "Popular Mechanics Attacks Its 9/11 LIES Straw Man," read the headline of a piece by a leading conspiracy theorist named Jim Hoffman.
We had begun our plunge down the rabbit hole. Within hours, a post on
www.portland.indymedia.org, which claims to be dedicated to "radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth," called me "James Meigs the Coward and Traitor." Not long afterward, another prominent conspiracy theorist produced an analysis that concluded that Popular Mechanics is a CIA front organization. Invective and threats soon clogged the comments section of our Web site and poured in by e-mail:
I was amused at your attempts to prove the conspirator theorists wrong by your interviewing people who work for the government. Face it: The U.S. government planned this attack to further its own agenda in the Middle East.
Rest assured, puppet boys . . . when the hammer comes down about the biggest crime ever perpetrated in the history of man--AND IT WILL--it will be VERY easy to identify the co-conspirators by their flimsy, awkwardly ignorant of reality magazine articles. Keep that in mind the next time you align yourself with evil scum.
YOU HAVE DECLARD YOURSELF ENEMY OF AMERICANS AND FRIEND OF THE MOSSAD!
I shouldn't have been surprised. In researching the article we'd spent enough time studying the conspiracy movement to get a feel for its style: the tone of outraged patriotism, the apocalyptic rhetoric, the casual use of invective. A common refrain in conspiracy circles is the claim that "We're just asking questions." One would think that at least some quarters of the conspiracy movement might welcome a mainstream publication's serious, nonideological attempt to answer those questions. One would be wrong.
It was only a matter of time before the Nazis got dragged in. Christopher Bollyn, a prominent conspiracy theorist affiliated with the far-right American Free Press, weighed in a few weeks later with a piece titled "The Hidden Hand of the CIA, 911 And Popular Mechanics." The article begins with a brief history of Hitler's consolidation of power following the Reichstag fire in 1933. "Like Nazi Germany of 1933," Bollyn wrote, "American newsstands today carry a mainstream magazine dedicated to pushing the government's truth of 9/11 while viciously smearing independent researchers as extremists who peddle fantasies and make poisonous claims."
In a few short weeks, Popular Mechanics had gone from being a 100-year-old journal about science, engineering, car maintenance, and home improvement to being a pivotal player in a global conspiracy on a par with Nazi Germany.
Not all the responses were negative, of course. One visitor to our Web site, after plowing through dozens of angry comments, left a supportive post that included this astute observation:
Some people are open to any possibility, and honestly examine all evidence in a rational manner to come to a conclusion, followed by a moral evaluation. Others start with a desire for a specific moral evaluation, and then work backwards assembling any fact that supports them, and dismissing any fact that does not.
Author Chip Berlet, who is an analyst for the liberal think tank Political Research Associates, employs the awkward but useful term "conspiracism" to describe this mindset. "Populist conspiracism sees secret plots by tiny cabals of evildoers as the major motor powering important historical events," he writes on the think tank's Web site. Berlet has spent more than two decades studying far-right and authoritarian movements in the United States. "Every major traumatic event in U.S. history generates a new round of speculation about conspiracies," he writes. "The attacks on 9/11/01 are no exception."
As the hate mail poured in and articles claiming to have debunked the magazine's analysis proliferated online, we soon learned to identify the key techniques that give conspiracy theorists their illusion of coherence.
Marginalization of Opposing Views
The 9/11 Truth Movement invariably describes the mainstream account of 9/11 as the "government version" or "the official version." In fact, the generally accepted account of 9/11 is made up of a multitude of sources: thousands of newspaper, TV, and radio reports produced by journalists from all over the world; investigations conducted by independent organizations and institutions, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, Purdue University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the National Fire Protection Association, and Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.; eyewitness testimony from literally thousands of people; recordings and transcripts of phone calls, air traffic control transmissions, and other communications; thousands of photographs; thousands of feet of video footage; and, let's not forget the words of Osama bin Laden, who discussed the operation in detail on more than one occasion, including in an audio recording released in May 2006 that said: "I am responsible for assigning the roles of the 19 brothers to conduct these conquests . . ."
The mainstream view of 9/11 is, in other words, a vast consensus. By presenting it instead as the product of a small coterie of insiders, conspiracists are able to ignore facts they find inconvenient and demonize people with whom they disagree.
Argument by Anomaly
In an article about the Popular Mechanics 9/11 report, Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer makes an important observation about the conspiracist method: "The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics). All the `evidence' for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy."
A successful scientific theory organizes masses of information into a coherent, well-tested narrative. When a theory has managed to explain the real world accurately enough for long enough, it becomes accepted as fact. Conspiracy theorists, Shermer points out, generally ignore the mass of evidence that supports the mainstream view and focus strictly on tiny anomalies. But, in a complex and messy world, the fact that there might be a few details we don't yet understand should not be surprising.
A good example is the conspiracist fascination with the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. Since the 47-story tower was not hit by an airplane, only by the debris of the North Tower, investigators weren't sure at first just how or why it collapsed hours after the attacks. A scientist (or for that matter, a journalist or historian) might see that gap in our knowledge as an opportunity for further research (see "WTC 7: Fire and Debris Damage," page 53). In the conspiracy world, however, even a hint of uncertainty is a chance to set a trap. If researchers can't "prove" exactly how the building fell, they say, then there is only one other possible conclusion: Someone blew it up.
Slipshod Handling of Facts
There are hundreds of books--and hundreds of thousands of Web pages--devoted to 9/11 conspiracy theories, many bristling with footnotes, citations, and technical jargon. But despite the appearance of scholarly rigor, few of these documents handle factual material with enough care to pass muster at a high-school newspaper, much less at a scholarly journal. Some mistakes are mere sloppiness; others show deliberate disregard for the truth.