Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

Even to peer into the world we now enter requires suspending disbelief, giving houseroom to a mind-boggling range of views. It includes the “no-planers,” people who question whether commercial passenger jets crashed into the Trade Center and the Pentagon at all. Talk of that began just two days after 9/11 on a website run by a man named Peter Meyer and intended—he told readers—“for thinking people.” Meyer and others would eventually be expressing doubt as to whether some or all of the planes involved on 9/11 really existed as genuine passenger flights.

By early October, one Carol Valentine was declaring that “there were no suicide pilots on those September 11 jets. The jets were controlled by advanced robotics.” Her account, which ran to twelve pages, suggested that air traffic controllers’ records had vanished, that the alleged Arab hijackers’ names were missing from airline passenger lists, and that an alleged hijacker’s passport—reportedly found in the street near the Trade Center—had been planted. She believed, moreover, that Flight 93 was “without a doubt” shot down, to prevent its “electronic controls” being examined and to ensure the silence of its crew and passengers.

A character named Joe Vialls, meanwhile, cast doubt on the belief that there had been air-to-ground phone calls from the “electronically hijacked” planes. How was it, a certain Gary North asked, that no names of Arab hijackers appeared on early published passenger lists? The omission was “very strange … peculiar.”

Over the years, the plot thickened. An academic named Alex Dewdney suggested in 2003 that the four aircraft were not really hijacked but “ordered to land at a designated airport with a military presence.” Two “previously-prepared planes,” painted to look like an American Airlines jet and a United Airlines jet, were “flown by remote control” along the designated flight paths of Flights 11 and 175 and on into the Twin Towers.

In Dewdney’s version, it was a “fighter jet (under remote control), or a cruise missile” that crashed into the Pentagon. The passengers from the three genuine Boeings were transferred to Flight 93, which “flies towards Washington and is shot down by a U.S. Air Force jet over Pennsylvania.” The three original Boeings were flown “by remote control out over the Atlantic,” and then scuttled.

That is but a taste of the sort of theory many could read and some apparently believed—though there are more, yet more bizarre. Who are the theories’ proponents? Dewdney is professor emeritus of computer science and adjunct professor of biology at Canada’s University of Western Ontario. North holds a Ph.D. in history. Vialls, now deceased, said he was a “British aeronautical engineer.” Valentine has described herself as a writer, researcher, and human rights activist. Meyer apparently holds a double honors degree in philosophy and mathematics from a leading Australian university.

There is more one should know about some of them. North describes himself as a Christian Reconstructionist and the magazine he edits as “an attempt to apply biblical principles to economic analysis.” Cuba, Vialls declared as late as 2004, would “soon be used as ‘point man’ in a grand plan to deny American warships and other vessels safe transit through the Gulf of Mexico.… America will collapse in six months.” The Southeast Asia tsunami that same year, he theorized, was a “nuclear war crime.”

Carol Valentine, who ran a “Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum,” claimed that Branch Davidian followers did not perish by fire in Texas in 1993. They had, rather, been secretly shot earlier, or shot while trying to escape, by the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command.

Peter Meyer, for his part, cheerfully acknowledges having indulged over a long period in the use of psychedelic drugs—including LSD. He developed computer software for “Timewave Zero,” a program illustrating a “theory of time, history and the end of history” as revealed “by an alien intelligence.” He reportedly “hopes to be present at the end of history in 2012.”

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AND THEN THERE ARE the books. As early as spring 2002 came one with a title that said it all— 9/11: The Big Lie . This was the work of Thierry Meyssan, a Frenchman whose biographical note describes him as president of the Voltaire Network for freedom of speech and secretary of the Radical Left Party. According to the book’s cover, The Big Lie was “based exclusively on documents published by the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as statements by American civilian and military leaders.”

Meyssan’s book was a best-seller, reportedly selling more than 200,000 copies in France and half a million internationally, and eighteen editions in other foreign languages. It was largely lambasted by the media in the West—ignored at first in France—and praised elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In the United Arab Emirates, where Meyssan was invited to speak, he was introduced as a man “with the spirit of an investigative journalist, of a thinker.” Al Watan , a prominent newspaper in Saudi Arabia, trumpeted the book on its front page.

The idea that the Pentagon had been struck by a Boeing airliner on 9/11, Meyssan claimed, was “nonsense,” a “loony tale.” “Only a missile of the United States armed forces transmitting a friendly code,” he wrote, “could enter the Pentagon’s airspace without provoking a counter-missile barrage.”

The attacks on the World Trade Center had occurred “under the eye of the intelligence services, who observed but did not intervene.” And: “We are asked to believe that these hijackers were Arab-Islamic militants.… The first question that should be asked is ‘Who profits?’ ” Meyssan asked whether the ensuing FBI investigation was “meant to hide from view domestic American culpability and justify the military operations to follow.” The 9/11 attacks, he concluded, were “masterminded from inside the American state apparatus.”

That, the “truth” camp’s dominant message, has been gotten over—couched in beguilingly moderate tones—by a theologian. David Ray Griffin, professor of religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology in California for more than three decades, has churned out no fewer than nine books on 9/11. He has become known as the “dean” of opposition to 9/11 orthodoxy.

Griffin makes stunning leaps, slipped in amidst phrases like “the evidence suggests” and “the many reasons to” in his books. The evidence on the destruction of the World Trade Center and other factors, he has said, “show that the attacks must have been planned by our own political and military leaders.” He is evidently a full-fledged MIHOP man.

If the engine of the movement has been the Internet, it is the Web documentary film Loose Change —through its several incarnations since 2005—that has carried the message to a vast audience. The film is a fricassee of factoids, its ingredients largely clips from broadcast footage, laced with the voices of skeptics and served up over about two hours. While the film does not hand down a verdict in as many words, it makes no secret of its producers’ belief in MIHOP. It is Ministry of Propaganda stuff delivered, ironically, via the Internet, the ultimate medium of free speech.

By mid-2010, the producers say, 125 million people had viewed Loose Change on Google alone. In the words of producer Korey Rowe, who served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, “This is our generation’s Kennedy assassination.” Originally made for some $2,000 and available free on the Internet, the film has since gone into edition after edition. The latest update cost $1 million, and writer-director Dylan Avery moved to Los Angeles to write a feature film script.