Many conspiracy theories surround the events of September 11, 2001. Some are more plausible than others, but most seem far too fantastical and outlandish for belief by any educated and reasonable person. Most would logistically and logically require too much to be believable and smack of borderline psychotic paranoia.
For instance, the cultish Alex Jones Infowars/PrisonPlanet/911 Truther folks 
I think the most unfortunate thing is that they reference many of the same items I’ve included in this blog in so many of their articles and on so many of their websites. Please don’t presume guilt by association and dismiss the claims that I present for your consideration here out of hand because a few crazies happen to share an awareness of some of these indisputable facts. Subsequently, anyone wishing to verify the information I’ve contained here will stumble across lots of suspect paranoid conspiracy theory sites that might lead them to dismiss these claims out of hand as rubbish. It is for this reason that I have painstakingly sourced each and every claim to you to credible sources in the mainstream news media and provide links to more credible sources. Please ignore the crazies out there and understand there is much that smells rank.
As an historian, by nature, I am a skeptic. But unlike some historians, I am willing to at least consider allegations of
So, I'm far from an uncritical, unthinking consumer of conspiracy theories, or one who presumes the truth of a conspiracy theory first and considers a lack of evidence against it evidence for its veracity (this is argument from ignorance). Nor am I a conspiracy theorist who perverts and distorts any bit of information to fit my delusions as most of these paranoid conspiracy nut jobs are. I'm skeptical by nature and begin with the premise that these theories presume far too much, selectively consider information, and the like. While I’m open to the possibility, my default position is one of skepticism.
When it comes to the question of 9/11, I've been highly skeptical of conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, I don't think any 
After much reading, I've arrived at the conclusion that this administration deliberately ignored intelligence that would have and could have prevented 9/11. In this blog, I explain why. The rationale I posit here and the sources I provide are far from radical fringe publications.
“Documentaries” like Loose Change and Zeitgeist, agitprop films furthering the conspiracy theory view of 9/11, rely heavily on suspect media accounts in the fringe press. Loose Change, for instance, heavily quotes from AmericanFreePress.net, a site with connections to the Christian Identity Movement (far right anti-Semitic racist extremists). Frankly, I’m still dumbfounded that otherwise reasonable people still share these highly suspect agitprop films (that can hardly be legitimately labeled documentaries) with each other.
Unlike them, I use mainstream, major media sources to make my case. I still believe that many of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 are incredible and outlandish concoctions of those who are psychotically paranoid. But on the question of intelligence that should have prevented 9/11, I don't think any reasonable person can seriously avoid the fact that this administration is either grossly and criminally negligent (even worse than incompetent) or perhaps was culpable to the extent that it deliberately ignored intelligence that would have prevented the terrorist attacks. And between either of those alternatives, I think that the more plausible explanation is that they deliberately ignored such intelligence. I explain why in this blog.
But at the present moment, I wanted to address the Zacarius Moussaoui case.
Given this background, I thought I'd note recent testimony in the sentencing of Zacarius Moussaoui. Essentially, the prosecutor argued that Moussaoui should have confessed (though the defense argues that Moussaoui, although a non-citizen [and not protected under case law deriving from challenges to the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and Foreign Intelligence Security Act, or FISA], is protected by the Fifth Amendment [which protects us against self-incrimination]), and that if he had confessed, the plot could have been unraveled and 9/11 would not have occurred. Therefore, the prosecution argues, because Moussaoui did not confess (insinuating that if he had, 9/11 would have been prevented; after all, we discovered the identity of eleven of the hijackers through wire transfers involving Moussaoui after the terrorist attacks), he deserves to be executed.
Interestingly, during this phase of sentencing in haranguing over the question of the death penalty, prosecutors were stunned when the FBI arresting field agent they thought of as their star witness most likely to ensure Moussaoui got the death penalty instead took the stand against his FBI superiors for ignoring his urgent repeated requests to search his laptop and investigate him (see CBSnews.com: Agent: FBI Ignored Moussaoui Warnings: Testifies That Bureau Missed 'Serious Opportunity' To Stop 9/11 Attacks and LATimes.com: 9/11 Trial Reveals Troubles Then, and Ahead). The defense questioned why the FBI didn't launch a full criminal investigation of Moussaoui in August 2001 based on more than 70 appeals to Washington by arresting agent Harry Samit who warned that Moussaoui was a terrorist training to hijack an airliner. "The FBI has to have a confession ... before anybody listens?" MacMahon asked. Indeed. Stop and think about that.
More than 70 appeals from this arresting agent repeatedly warning that Moussaoui was a terrorist training to hijack an airliner were ignored by FBI headquarters. Is this truly euphemistically an intelligence failure? The very people tasked with investigating just such complaints ignored his repeated urgent requests seventy times because they had another seventy other investigations running so they couldn’t take it seriously from a green junior agent? Just stop right there and ponder this fact for a few minutes. Is it just that superiors at FBI headquarters didn't take the threat or the 70 appeals from the arresting agent seriously? I find that truly hard to believe. I mean, sure, one or two requests, but if Samit has documented more than 70 requests, including a 25-page memo, well, I just find that hard to believe. The FBI unit fielding those requests from Samit was the FBI unit specifically charged with investigating Islamist terrorism and domestic Al Qaeda operations. As an educator, if I spend my time showing non-curricular movies, I lose my job and am more than a tad incompetent. I hope you find this pill a little hard to swallow. If you don't yet, then I hope you'll let me try to convince you.
She is a whistleblower. She was involved with this investigation. She sacrificed her career and perhaps even her life in terms of future work so that the truth could be known by you. So I'd hope youd take the time to read her memo to FBI headquarters if you haven't already. It's well worth the read, and it sure makes one think about the events of September 11, 2001 and the events that have happened since. Plus, I think that her memo details a lot of the problems with the FBI's official excuses and provides ample reason to question the official accounts (including the 911 Commission's report), so its definitely worth the read in its entirety.
After 9/11, we also discovered that had the FBI searched Moussaoui's laptop, the entire plot could have been unraveled and 9/11 prevented. The official explanation from the FBI for why Moussaoui's laptop was not searched is that there was not enough evidence to search under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. The evidence against Moussaoui was circumstantial, so they claimed there was not sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant to search his laptop.
But my problem from the beginning with this reasoning is that there was a vast body of case law that upheld the idea that foreign nationals are not subject to the protections of the Bill of Rights, especially when dealing with matters of national security. Any layperson could easily discover the case law that was produced in the late 90s from legal challenges to detainments of Islamic foreign nationals under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act that upheld foreign nationals being denied due process, being held indefinitely based upon secret evidence, being denied access to attorneys, and the like. In 1999, Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole and Center for Democracy and Technology’s James Dempsey published the first edition of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security. It decried those “secret evidence” detainments of mostly Islamist foreign nationals under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act which was passed after the Oklahoma City Bombing and first Al Qaeda attempt on the World Trade Center as an erosion of the due process protections of the Bill of Rights. Fortunately, I’d read this book, cover to cover, by 9/11/2001, so the official explanation smelled rank to me from the get-go.
Let's make this clear here. Moussaoui was not an American citizen. He was a French Moroccan foreign national not under the legal protection of the Bill of Rights legally-speaking, or at least the FBI had every reason to believe the courts would uphold any warrant-less search given the case law I referred to previously. Hearsay and circumstantial evidence is enough to obtain a search warrant for a foreign national because the courts have agreed that they may be denied due process because they are not citizens protected by the Bill of Rights, so the official FBI line on why the laptop was not searched was specious in the beginning anyway.
Similarly, related to the Bush wire-tapping scandal (of American nationals living abroad without warrants), we know that under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, retroactive warrants can be obtained (this is the problem with Bush's wiretapping; as such, they were illegal) so that if the matter is a pressing one involving our nation's security, they can act first and ask questions later and warrants can be obtained retroactively after the search is performed. The Bush administration defended that national security trumps civil liberties and that, sometimes, they have to act first and ask questions later. But that’s the problem. They had the authority to do just that; this was entirely different. Here, they were monitoring the phone calls of every American citizen who had made an international phone call, and that was expressly prohibited by federal law. It was what the courts have defined a fishing expedition. Bush Administration officials expressly authorized our intelligence agencies to violate federal law and criminally monitor these calls.
And I think with more than 70 requests from the arresting agent to FBI headquarters that it was clear this was a case that at the time was known to be one that involved a clear and present danger to national security. So why not perform a search of the laptop without a warrant and seek a retroactive warrant after the fact with the authority granted under FISA, right? I believe more than 70 appeals from the arresting FBI officer exhibited unmistakable reason to believe that Moussaoui presented a clear and present national security danger and an imminent threat to our national security. Wouldn't you? Seriously, can anyone construct a reasonable case for why 70 appeals from an arresting FBI agent could or should be ignored categorically?
Oh yes, I forgot. That was yet another intelligence 'failure.' Nobody is to blame. It was sheer bureaucratic ineptitude or incompetence. Oh yes, it was a 'failure of imagination.' Nobody in their wildest imaginations could have actually thought that Moussaoui could have posed the slightest threat, right, most especially those whose specific job was to assess and investigate such threats or spectors of, right? Oh, forget that pesky Samit guy. He was just a green FBI agent who was told he was getting all spun up about this guy. That he wanted to learn how to take off, but didn't need to learn how to land, that he wanted to learn about flight paths around D.C. and NYC, that he paid cash, and that he was a foreign national, and that an FBI agent making more than 70 appeals to you couldn't have possibly warranted a search of the laptop, right? Inconceivable!
Next, officials claim that neither our intelligence community nor the French intelligence community had any evidence linking Moussaoui to Al Qaeda. That is unequivocally not true. The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen parroted the 
I have a problem with the Post's characterizations because, first, with existing case law concerning similar issues, the same wasn't even necessary in the first place legally (American law and case law was already sufficiently relaxed so that a deportation was totally unnecessary). Second, it would seem to me that this is a very deliberate official red herring introduced to the media to distract the public from the fact that the same wasn't necessary in the first place (this official line about needing to deport Moussaoui to France). Third, we know that the French possessed evidence linking Moussaoui to Al Qaeda, and that the FBI acquired this evidence from the French Intelligence Service prior to September 11, 2001 so that there was no need to deport to France so that the laptop could have been searched in the first place.
- the French Intelligence Service was contacted by the FBI prior to September 11, 2001, seeking sufficient evidence to obtain a search warrant to search the laptop under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act
- they had ample evidence connecting Moussaoui to Al Qaeda (the evidence the FBI was seeking in contacting French intelligence so that they could search the laptop under FISA)
- that while French law prohibits him from sharing what information/intelligence is shared between intelligence agency, it was France’s policy without exception to share everything and withhold nothing (“We gave them everything we had.”
So, according to the French Intelligence Service (Bruguiere), and in reading between the lines and making the inference Bruguiere intends for us to make from his 60 Minutes interview, we know that the French gave FBI headquarters the evidence they needed to search the laptop under FISA (the lack of which was the official rationale purported for why it wasn't searched before September 11, 2001).
So the question then becomes, if the FBI had sufficient evidence to search under FISA after approaching French intelligence and it was ostensibly given as Bruguiere suggests, which makes the official explanations about not having sufficient evidence to obtain a search warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop (or legal authority, which I’ve already demonstrated was a canard), then why on earth didn't the FBI search the laptop? Indeed. And speculative answers here inherently possess terrifying implications.
Is it truly accurate to speak of these matters as intelligence failures? To do so is not only to euphemize, but to revise. It is to rewrite history and replace truth with fiction.
Likewise, she was barred from testifying (gagged) in the class action suit Burnett v. Al Baraka Investment & Dev. Corp., in which she was to testify as to her allegation that the FBI had foreknowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. How do we know if her allegation is fallacious or valid if she has been barred (gagged) from testifying (from even telling the public in the first place why she believes this) and if any evidence she could provide of the same has been classified as TOP SECRET? The answer? We can’t. But I think it telling that Ashcroft's Department of Justice's motions invoked the State Secrets Privilege in the first place; is that not potentially an implicit admission that Edmond's testimony is valid?
Think this is a liberal conspiracy theory? Well, don't take it from liberals... Take it from Republican ex-governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean.
Even Kean in his role as chair of the 9/11 Comission publicly suggested that the White House had ample specific, actionable intelligence to have prevented 9/11 and failed to act (that 9/11 could have and should have been prevented although the final official 9/11 Commission Report stopped shy of making that statement). It appears the basis for his early conclusion is the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” that outlined seventy current F.B.I. investigations on U.S. soil into Al Qaeda operations here and suggested Al Qaeda was preparing for an attack involving the hijacking of planes or blowing buildings up using explosives (see below or SourceWatch.org’s entry). It is also based upon the July 10, 2001 F.B.I. “Phoenix Memo” in which FBI agent Kenneth Williams warned FBI headquarters about bin Laden disciples training at U.S. aviation facilities for future activities against civil aviation targets and he also speculated that Al Qaeda might be training to hi-jack planes to use them as missiles to fly into buildings. Condoleezza Rice and FBI Director Robert Mueller had both testified before Congress and the 9/11 Commission that there had been no specific, actionable intelligence that could have prevented the attacks.
The 9/11 Commission Report can be read or downloaded online in its entirety in PDF format.
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Even better, consider ex-FBI director Louis Freeh's opinion in The Wall Street Journal. Louis Freeh, ex-FBI director, hints that the 9-11 Commission is part of a massive cover-
The implication is that the 9/11 investigation was a whitewash and was never intended to be anything but a whitewash. And this is the ex-FBI director making this allegation. Stop and consider that. Not exactly your Alex Jones or run-of-the-mill 9/11 Truther, is he?
Counter-terrorism public servant Richard Clarke who served under Republicans and Democrats, a self-identified Republican who served in the State Department under President Reagan and served as counter-terrorism czar under both President Clinton and President Bush, alleged in his memoir Against All Enemies and testified before the 9/11 Commission on May 24, 2004 that the Bush Administration was pre-occupied with Iraq and changing its regime in 
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Conservative legal watchdog and public interest law firm Judicial Watch, who investigates and prosecutes corruption and abuse by public officials and spearheaded 
This leaves us with the question of motive. If, as it appears clear, this administration deliberately thwarted investigations and deliberately ignored specific, actionable intelligence that should have prevented September 11, 2001, we must understand its motives.
But I'll briefly recount the rationale as I see it.
Number 1.
Iraq. I told everyone I knew prior to the 2000 election that if Bush was elected, we'd probably invade Iraq within one year. It’s because I had friends in foreign policy and international studies and we had been discussing how best to help the Iraqi people (sanctions, etc.). My timing was a bit off, and I had not a clue how a preemptive illegal act of aggression could be pulled off, but 9/11/01 presented "the Pearl-harbor like event" explicitly desired by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC is a hawkish neoconservative think tank made up of Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, amongst others, that sought in the mid-90s the specific policy objective of regime change in Iraq by force for our nation’s energy security and stated in policy documents submitted to President Clinton in 1998 that public sentiment for regime change in Iraq was unlikely to foment absent a "Pearl-habor like event.”
I think there can be no doubt today that this administration deliberately distorted intelligence and lied to the American people and Congress in order to achieve an illegal preemptive act of aggression. Every allegation of this administration that suggested a legitimate clear and present danger to our national security in the form of weapons of mass destruction (and an imminent nuclear threat) was based upon intelligence that had been thoroughly discredited prior to the invasion but that the administration repeatedly argued (an argument by assertion and by repetition; argumentum ad nauseum/infinitum) as their rationale for invading: the aluminum tubes, the mobile weapons labs, the yellow cake, and the alleged connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
The idea that a lie oft repeated enough becomes truth originates in Adolph Hitler’s thoughts on propaganda and the art of lying in Mein Kampf:
"...all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands...But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
In formal studies of rhetoric, this fallacy is known as argument by assertion or argument by repetition. That, as of last December, according to a Harris poll for the Wall Street Journal, roughly a quarter of Americans continue to believe that Iraq had WMDs when the U.S. invaded and that some of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, and that 22 percent of U.S. adults still think that Saddam Hussein "helped plan 9/11," evidences the effectiveness of this administration's repetition of these lies.
In order to understand how and why this administration might have deliberately distorted intelligence and lied to the 
Likewise, read about the litany of Downing Street memos that prove that this sitting President lied to the American people and was “fixing intelligence” (in response to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s objections about the shaky nature of the so-called evidence in regard to Iraq’s alleged and much-touted weapons of mass destruction) to meet the foregone foreign policy objective of the neoconservatives, and I don't think any reasonable person can suggest that this administration's case for war was valid any longer. Another of the top secret documents headings has Bush saying, “First Iraq, then Saudi,” bolstering Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski’s testimony about neoconservative plans to use Iraq as a staging point for further operations in the Middle East over control over Middle Eastern oil as we reach global peak oil.
Is it so hard to believe that an administration made up of people so devoted to a cause, so driven by ideology and means justified by ends, that they will deliberately fabricate a case for war and sell that lie to Congress, the public, and the world? It it so hard to believe that such neoconservative ideologues driven by their vision for America’s energy security would sacrifice the lives of innocent American civilians (in deliberately ignoring intelligence that could have prevented September 11, 2001) as means justified by an end? Privatization of Iraq's nationalized oil reserves was a goal that they would willingly sacrifice the blood and lives of thousands of our soldiers over and plunge our nation into hundreds of billions of dollars in debt over. In their minds, the end justified the means. Strategically, to them, these “costs” were justified by a cost-benefit analysis. The opportunity costs are justified to them. To the families of our injured and fallen soldiers and to Iraqis, I'm sure some would beg to differ with them. But to them, what they have done is utterly justified. They are ideologues driven by a cause; no different than the Islamist extremist terrorists who kill innocents.
Furthermore, National Security Agency historian Robert J. Hanyock concluded in October 2005 that the NSA had deliberately distorted intelligence reports about the August 4, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident to cover up honest intelligence errors (see NYTimes.com: Vietnam War Intelligence 'Deliberately Skewed,' Secret Study Says). In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson privately commented, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.” On July 7, 1994 Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s (FAIR) Media Beat’s “30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War.”
It is true that just because we have valid historical examples of government officials deceiving the public for political ends and to justify some foreign policy objective does not mean that the Bush Administration deliberately ignored sufficient specific, actionable intelligence that ought to have prevented September 11, 2001, in order to provide a pretext for invading Iraq in order to ensure American energy security and economic hegemony into the 21st Century. But it does provide precedent for those skeptical of such Machievellian motives that those we elect and trust to protect and safeguard our interests are willing to lie and even sacrifice American lives for certain ends.
I think once someone has a solid handle on the fact of the matter that the Bush Administration absolutely, unequivocally fabricated the case for war, one can begin to see that the case that I lay out here is not entirely unthinkable.
A great place to start to understand that this is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact is the Robert Greenwald’s documentary Truth Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War.
After watching this video, I highly recommend checking out the Media Education Foundation’s Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire (right-click and choose “Play”; NOTE: You must have RealPlayer installed on your computer for the plugin to recognize this embedded vido). I think it does an excellent job of contextualizing exactly how the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were exploited by this administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.
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Finally, I’d recommend that you take a moment to watch Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight to further contextualize the hawkish neoconservatives and their connections to the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned Americans about. Is it any surprise these hawks drove us to war?
Incidentals (further motivations):
The National Opinion Research Center's analysis of over-votes (votes with two recorded votes for President) and under-votes (votes without a recorded vote for President) in Florida from the 2000 election debacle was supposed to be released on September 11, 2001. We know this because one of the New York Time's editors told us as much in an editorial on September 12, 2001, and the report's release was delayed due to 9/11. After 9/11, the spin and headlines read that, in most scenarios, Bush still won, but anyone who took enough time to read these articles knows that Gore won the state of Florida by more than sixty thousand votes statewide when over-votes where voter intent is clearly discernable (as required by Florida state law, these votes should have been counted, and were not) were counted, and therefore, the Presidency. The report would leave the public with no other conclusion than that George W. Bush became the forty-third President of our country not by being elected by a majority of Florida's electors and voters, but through voter fraud, voting rights abuses, and partisan judicial fiat. In short, this was not a legitimate presidency. And this is precisely why newspaper editors pulled the story just as it was about to go to press on September 12, 2001.
Nobody wants to believe a sitting President could abuse the intelligence apparatus at his/her disposal for their partisan political purposes (cough, cough Watergate), but it is it implausible that this administration was fully aware of how the NORC analysis would prove this administration illegitimate and the Supreme Court decision as the most partisan decision in the court's history (especially given the engineered shutdown of recounts by the GOP and the felon purge, and their implicit knowledge that they had stolen the election already)? Terrorist attacks would incidentally provide a convenient and welcome red herring to distract Americans from the issues that cut to the core of our democracy involved in the 2000 Presidential election and might have torn our democracy asunder. And after September 11, 2001, the media's treatment of the NORC analysis was one of deference to an administration during wartime, and the spin was that Bush won the presidency legitimately. Not quite. September 11, 2001 revised history.
Next, over the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan, the Natural Resources Defense Council had sued the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior as well as the White House under the Freedom of Information Act for records pertaining to the meetings that critics thought exhibited a gross conflict of interest in that the White House only cursorily met with environmental groups while permitting unobstructed access to big oil in producing an energy plan that cut the renewable energy research budget by 1/3 while calling for increased production of coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy (the Bush Administration paid for the printing of its energy plan on funds from the renewable energy research budget and announced its plans in front of redwood forests if that doesn’t make it Orwellian enough). ASIDE: Documents that escaped Enron shredders reflect that the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan, with little variance, was a facsimile of Enron's demands for our national energy policy. The General Accounting Office was looking at actions against the administration at the time 9/11/01 occurred, and the Senate (then controlled by Democrats after Jefford's defection) was looking at bringing both Bush and Cheney up on charges of Contempt of Congress. That would have literally been unprecedented in U.S. History. Yet one more reason that 9/11 was awfully convenient to the administration. This would have been unprecedented in all of American history.
So, yes, I believe that primarily due to the neoconservative agenda in the Middle East (and their hell bent endgame vision of energy security in the face of exponentially exploding population and global peak oil), but also due to these ancillary concerns (the NORC analysis that proved this administration a farce in the first place, and the fact that it was about to be brought up on charges of contempt of Congress which was unprecedented in American history) that this administration deliberately ignored intelligence that would have prevented 9/11 because they needed the Pearl Harbor-like event as a catalyst to bring about their foregone strategic objectives in the Middle East
This will sound like a bunch of hogwash unless you take the time to read all of the resources and articles I've linked here for you. I hope you'll take the time to do it. And once you do, I beg you to implore your friends to read this blog and the resources I've linked in it...
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