Various conspiracy theories attribute the preparation and execution of the September 11 attacks against the United States to parties other than, or in addition to, al-Qaeda. These include the theory that high-level government officials had advance knowledge of the attacks. Government investigations and independent reviews have rejected these theories. Proponents of these theories assert that there are inconsistencies in the commonly accepted version, or that there is evidence that was ignored, concealed, or overlooked. Most of these theories either lack evidence or have been debunked by experts.
The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Another prominent belief is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile launched by elements from inside the U.S. government, or that hijacked planes were remotely controlled, or that commercial airliners were allowed to hit the targets via an effective stand-down of the U.S. military. Motives conspiracy theorists ascribe to such actions include justifying the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (even though the U.S. government concluded Iraq was not involved in the attacks)U.S. Drops Last Link of Iraq to 9/11 New York Times May 2, 2002 to advance U.S. geostrategic interests, such as plans to construct a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan. Other conspiracy theories revolve around authorities having advance knowledge of the attacks and deliberately ignoring or assisting the attackers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the technology magazine Popular Mechanics investigated and rejected these theories. The 9/11 Commission and most of the civil engineering community accept that the impacts of jet aircraft at high speeds in combination with subsequent fires, not controlled demolition, led to the Twin Towers' collapse, but some conspiracy theory groups, including Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, reject the scientific and expert consensus.
Background 9/11 conspiracy theorists reject one or both of the following facts about the 9/11 attacks:
Al-Qaeda suicide operatives hijacked and crashed United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The impact and resulting fires caused the Twin Towers' collapse and the destruction and damage of other buildings in the World Trade Center complex. The Pentagon was severely damaged by the airliner and the resulting fire. Hijackers also crashed a fourth plane into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers and flight crew attempted to regain control of the aircraft. Pre-attack warnings of varying detail of al-Qaeda's planned attacks against the U.S. were ignored due to lack of communication between various law enforcement and intelligence personnel. For the lack of interagency communication, the 9/11 report cited bureaucratic inertia and laws passed in the 1970s to prevent abuses that caused scandals during that era, most notably the Watergate scandal. The report faulted both the Clinton and the Bush administrations for "failure of imagination".
This consensus view is backed by various sources, including: Reports from government investigations: the 9/11 Commission Report (which incorporated intelligence information from the earlier FBI investigation (PENTTBOM) and the Joint Inquiry of 2002) and studies into building performance by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Investigations by non-government organizations that support the accepted account, such as those by scientists at Purdue University. Articles supporting these facts and theories in magazines such as Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, and Time. Similar articles in news media worldwide, including The Times of India, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the BBC, Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and The Chosun Ilbo of South Korea.
History Since the attacks, various conspiracy theories have been advanced in websites, books and films. Many groups and individuals advocating 9/11 conspiracy theories identify as part of the 9/11 Truth movement.The following news media state that the movement is being known as or being called "9/11 truth(er) movement":
Within six hours of the attack, a suggestion appeared in an online chatroom suggesting that the towers' collapse looked like a controlled demolition. "If, in a few days, not one official has mentioned anything about the controlled demolition part," the author wrote, "I think we have a REALLY serious problem." The first theories focused primarily on various perceived anomalies in the publicly available evidence; proponents later developed more specific theories about an alleged plot. One false allegation that circulated widely online is that no Jews were killed in the attack and that therefore the attacks must have been the work of the Mossad, not Islamist terrorists.
The first elaborated theories appeared in Europe. One week after the attacks, the "inside job" theory was the subject of a thesis by a researcher from the French National Centre for Scientific Research published in the newspaper Le Monde. Other theories sprang from around the world within weeks. Six months after the attacks, Thierry Meyssan's piece on 9/11, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Terrible Deceit), topped the French bestseller list. Its publication in English (as 9/11: The Big Lie) received little attention, but it remains one of the principal sources for "trutherism". 2003 saw the publication of former German state minister Andreas von Bülow's The CIA and September 11 and German journalist Gerhard Wisnewski's Operation 9/11; both were published by Mathias Bröckers, at the time an editor at the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung.
While these theories were popular in Europe, the U.S. media treated them with either bafflement or amusement, and the U.S. government dismissed them as the product of anti-Americanism. In an address to the United Nations on November 10, 2001, President George W. Bush denounced the "outrageous conspiracy theories [...] that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty".
The 9/11 conspiracy theories started out mostly on the political left but broadened into what New York magazine described in 2011 as "terra incognita where left and right meet, fusing sixties countercultural distrust with the don't-tread-on-me variety".
By 2004, conspiracy theories about the attacks began to gain ground in the U.S. One explanation is that the rise in popularity stemmed more from growing criticism of the Iraq War and the newly reelected President Bush than from any discovery of new or more compelling evidence or improvement in the technical quality of the presentation of the theories. Knight Ridder news theorized that revelations that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq, the belated release of the President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001, and reports that NORAD had lied to the 9/11 Commission might have fueled the theories.
Between 2004 and the fifth anniversary of the attacks in 2006, mainstream coverage of the conspiracy theories increased. The U.S. government issued a formal analysis by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the collapse of the World Trade Center. To address the growing publicity of the theories, the State Department revised a webpage in 2006 to debunk them. A 2006 national security strategy paper said that terrorism springs from "subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation" and that "terrorists recruit more effectively from populations whose information about the world is contaminated by falsehoods and corrupted by conspiracy theories. The distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts that would challenge popular prejudices and self-serving propaganda." Al-Qaeda has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attacks, with chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri accusing Shia Iran and Hezbollah of denigrating Sunni successes in hurting the U.S. by intentionally starting rumors that Israel carried out the attacks.
Some of the conspiracy theories about the attacks do not involve representational strategies typical of many conspiracy theories that establish a clear dichotomy between good and evil, or guilty and innocent; instead, they call up gradations of negligence and complicity. Bröckers, an early proponent of such theories, dismisses the commonly accepted account of the attacks as itself a conspiracy theory that seeks "to reduce complexity, disentangle what is confusing" and "explain the inexplicable".
Just before the fifth anniversary of the attacks, mainstream news outlets released a flurry of articles on the growth of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Time wrote: "This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality." Several surveys have included questions about beliefs related to the attacks. In 2008, 9/11 conspiracy theories topped a "greatest conspiracy theory" list compiled by The Daily Telegraph. The list was ranked by following and traction.
In 2010, the "International Center for 9/11 Studies", a private organization said to be sympathetic to conspiracy theories, sued for the release of videos collected by NIST of the attacks and aftermath. According to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the videos that were published shortly before the ninth anniversary of the attacks provided "new food for conspiracy theorists". Many of the videos show images of 7 World Trade Center, a skyscraper in the vicinity of the Twin Towers that also collapsed on September 11, 2001.
9/11 truth figures Steven E. Jones and Mike Berger have said that the death of Osama bin Laden did not change their questions about the attacks or provide closure.
According to writer Jeremy Stahl, since Bush left office, the number of believers in 9/11 conspiracy theories has decreased, but the number of people who believe in the most "radical" theories has held fairly steady.Stahl, Jeremy. "Why Trutherism Lives On The 9/11 conspiracy movement has faded, but the conspiracy theory will never die". Slate. September 9, 2011
Types The most prominent conspiracy theories can be broadly divided into three main forms: LIHOP ("Let it happen on purpose") – suggests that key individuals within the government had at least some foreknowledge of the attacks and deliberately ignored it or actively weakened United States' defenses to ensure the hijacked flights were not intercepted. Similar allegations were made about Pearl Harbor and the October 7 attacks. MIHOP ("Make/Made it happen on purpose") – that key individuals within the government planned the attacks and collaborated with, or framed, al-Qaeda in carrying them out. There is a range of opinions about how this might have been achieved. Others – who reject the accepted account of the September 11 attacks but are not proposing specific theories, but try to demonstrate that the U.S. government's account of the events is wrong. This, according to them, would lead to a general call for a new official investigation into the events of September 11, 2001. According to Jonathan Kay, managing editor for comment at the Canadian newspaper National Post and author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, "They feel their job is to show everybody that the official theory of 9/11 is wrong. And then, when everybody is convinced, then the population will rise up and demand a new investigation with government resources, and that investigation will tell us what actually happened."
Theories Foreknowledge