Finished the book long ago, and even began writing an academic paper using some of its insights [got some nibbles on it from the journal it was submitted to, but haven't updated it yet and now it would need more work]. In lieu of chapter summaries, here's some of that paper from which the book's contents can be sussed out to some degree.
Figured it's worth posting since the next wave in an ocean of conspiracy denouncing is under way ahead of the 10th anniversary, and also to combat Clarke's allegation and [to a lesser degree, even though it is far more damning that what Clarke has said thus far] Kevin Fenton's allegations:
DRAFT
Conspiracy Panics and the Legitimation Crisis of the Modern Liberal State
Abstract: The reaction on the political left to hypotheses that include US officials in the circle of complicity for the 9/11 attacks amounts to a 'conspiracy panic', a term used by Jack Bratich in a recent book. The pre-emptive disqualification of these so-called conspiracy theories (a category which typically includes what I will sometimes call 'complicity theories' and 'counterknowledges') is most often not based on a consideration of their merits, but is instead an effort to 'manufacture consent' along the lines of the prevailing political rationality.
The process of disqualification enacts some of the same forms of deviance management and expulsion found in other kinds of moral panics. The dynamics of disqualification are complex and worthy of closer study. Elements of this dynamic are discussed and analyzed in this paper, but more study is needed.
It is argued that at least some of the energy deployed to disqualify complicity and conspiracy narratives arises from the desire to stave off an incipient 'legitimation crisis' facing the modern imperial/liberal state, of which the United States is the paradigmatic example.
In 1972, psychologist David Rosenhan published an article in the journal Science titled, "On Being Sane in Insane Places." Challenging both the legitimacy and value of psychiatric diagnoses, the paper was the fruit of a devilish experiment Rosenhan conducted. He and seven other confederates presented themselves for psychiatric evaluation at 12 psychiatric institutions. Each pseudopatient complained of hearing voices that said 'empty', 'hollow' or 'thud'. On the basis of these claims all were subsequently admitted to the hospitals, in all but one case with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
In reality, of course, none of the pseudopatients were mentally ill. None had any psychiatric history whatsoever, in fact. Once the pseudopatient gained entry to the hospitals, each told the staff that he or she felt better, and would like to be discharged.
Rosenhan's experiment sought to determine just how long it would take for the psychiatric experts in a hospital setting to figure out that the pseudopatients were not mentally ill. The results were alarming. The pseudopatients were not easily detected - in fact they were never detected to be 'pseudopatients'. Each was eventually discharged with a statement that their disorder was 'in remission'.
The study produced great controversy that lives to this day, with defenders of psychiatry pointing - and not without some merit - to methodological shortcomings in Rosenhan's study. But those critics have not defused the central question animating Rosenhan's study. He asked:
Do the salient characteristics that lead to diagnoses reside in the patients themselves or in the environments and contexts in which observers find them? (Rosenhan, 1973)
His study seemed to offer support for the latter claim, one that was being championed in the anti-psychiatry movement of the time.
Now, most everyone knows the term 'conspiracy theory'. Yet it's not always clear just what IS a conspiracy theory, and what is not. Is it the specific content of an argument that makes a conspiracy theory, or is it something else?
In a recent book, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture, Jack Bratich asks: "Is a conspiracy theory defined primarily by its internal narrative characteristics or by its external discursive position? In other words is it something inherent in the theory itself or is it more about the forums it appears in, its relation to other theories and the legitimation accorded it?" (Bratich, p. 2)
The answer matters a great deal, because the term 'conspiracy theory' is not just used to describe narratives of a particular type; it also is employed as a term of disqualification for narratives that may well, on their merits, deserve consideration.
'Conspiracy theory' exists as a discursive object, a designation formed by a number of overlapping discourses including history, sociology, political science and journalism. In recent times, notes Bratich, 'conspiracy theory' has been 'problematized' by these disciplines, casting 'conspiracy theory' as something - like madness - that both carries a stigma and poses a threat. Bratich says, "Rather than assuming we know what (a conspiracy theory) is, I am arguing for the need to examine the very conditions of recognition, the contexts that make this object visible and intelligible." (Bratich, p. 13) We see early on, then, that Bratich will not take the standard approach to conspiracy theory that pathologizes certain kinds of thought, either by generating a schema of political types (Lasswell, 1948) or, in what will become the more common approach, by identifying as paranoid certain modes of political expression (Hofstadter, 1967).
What marks Bratich's work as distinctive is the approach to conspiracy theory he takes:
Ultimately, conspiracy theory (CT) is a symptom, but in the reversed perspective I'm proposing, a symptom of the discourse that positions it. (Bratich, p.17)
Thus, rather than treating conspiracy theory as a sociological curiosity, or as an indication of a psychological trait or style of its adherents, Bratich attends to the cultural context responsible for positioning the discursive object 'conspiracy theory' as deviant, extreme and problematical.
I think Bratich is correct to question the deployment of the term conspiracy theory, though I would argue that 'conspiracy theory', as a discursive object, often has a substantive character. Far from denoting all possible conspiracies in the legal sense, the term 'conspiracy theory' typically, though not always, pertains to suggestions of purposeful wrongdoing on the part of authorities charged with preventing such wrongdoing, or more generally any misconduct by trusted persons that goes directly against either express or reasonable expectations of their behavior. Hypothesizing, for instance, that the police have a hand in the creation of crime is indulging in conspiracy theory, because the express purpose of police behavior is preventing and confronting crime, not cultivating it. With respect to the 9/11 attacks, a topic treated by Bratich, the hypothesis that US intelligence and/or military officials were complicit in the attacks either by willful negligence or covert action is a conspiracy theory, because the express purpose of military and intelligence operations is protection of the state, and to scheme to attack it would be the greatest perversion of this trust. It can also be a conspiracy theory to simply suggest that a government official would murder an associate.
We can see then that Bratich takes a parallax view of conspiracy theories: he does not see them as problematical on their own, but instead sees the reaction to them - both in the mainstream and on the left - as the bigger story. His key insight is in seeing that "conspiracy theories become objects when they become object of concern. . .'What is conspiracy theory?' is usually asked by those who wish to disqualify the claims." (Bratich, p.160).
'Conspiracy theories', as objects of concern, have engendered what Bratich calls conspiracy panics: the irrational concern that a particular style of narrative explanation will infiltrate the realm of political rationality and somehow subvert it. But what precisely is the supposed danger here? And how is the threatened alteration to political rationality different from the more standard alteration that occurs from ordinary public debate in a liberal society? Bratich's most important contribution may be showing that whatever danger conspiracy theories are thought to present to the body politic, the official response to conspiracy theories threatens to be far more dangerous to those who have been marked as conspiracy theorists.
PARTICIPATION IN A PANIC
Modern liberal states, argues Bratich, with their will-to-moderation, participate in conspiracy panics as a means of expanding their sphere of influence along the lines articulated by Michel Foucault in his work on the concept of power. This will-to-moderation contains an injunction to modulation of extreme forms of political thinking and action. Bratich follows Noam Chomsky and others in viewing this effort at modulation as part of the manufacture of consent in a democratic society first articulated by Walter Lippmann (1922), and later criticized by Chomsky and Herman in their work of the same name.
Once marked, "conspiracy theorists" can become targets of official reaction. Bratich argues that "the conceptualization of conspiracism as a threat can lead to explicit state intervention into dissent," (Bratich, p. 49), and thus conspiracy panics have a productive component. They help to construct "common sense" and concomitantly provide a basis for both the discursive dismissal of counterknowledges including complicity narratives, as well as providing a justification for state interventionism against those who propound them. This subject is worthy of a much longer treatment than I can give it here. Bratich does give it a fuller treatment, connecting conspiracy panics to a strategy of liberal governance which endeavors to bring citizens around to the 'reasonable' perspective occupied by the cultural experts who shape public opinion.
The institution of professional journalism participates in conspiracy panics for reasons traceable to its own internal dynamics and fluctuating social position. In short, Bratich sees the effort within professional journalism to problematize conspiracy theory stemming from an attempt at institutional resuscitation (Bratich, p. 76).
A relevant pre-9/11 example of this occurred in the mid-1990's, with the release of Oliver Stone's movie, JFK. At the time, writes Bratich, professional journalism was suffering from declining interest and diminishing audiences. Its attack on an epic-scale conspiracy text served to help redefine its relationship to the 'popular'. In challenging Stone's rendition of the assassination, the profession of journalism sought to re-claim the authority to determine what is and what is not an acceptable account of political history - and Stone's movie was not. Here journalism enacts the Lippmanian ideal of rule by the cultural expert, who separates the wheat from the chaff for the mass he both serves and educates. In fact, on this view the journalist helps to form a public out of an undifferentiated mass by virtue of the journalist's professional intervention.
The denunciation of conspiracy theory, and Stone's movie in particular, became an occasion for the profession's internal strengthening. In Bratich's words, "Popular culture conspiracy theories, much like early yellow journalism in their combination of sensationalism and investigation, became the irrational counterpoint to the rational public and its representative: professional journalism." (Bratich, p.76)
The second major episode of problematizing a conspiracy theory occurred after the San Jose Mercury News published a series of articles by journalist Gary Webb entitled Dark Alliance. Webb's investigation revealed strong evidence of CIA complicity in the US drug trade, associated with the CIA's sponsorship of the Nicaraguan Contras. As is well known and amply documented, Webb came under heavy fire from the establishment media for supposed errors in his research, but also for things he did not claim. The country's leading newspapers, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, happily reported the word of CIA officials as refutations, applying none of the same scrutiny to official claims as they did to Webb's.
The ferocity of the attack by the major newspapers was plainly disproportionate to the errors Webb made and was driven by the need to compensate for their failure to capture the story in the first place, according to Norman Solomon's excellent summary of the affair (Solomon, 1997). Years later after the completion of the CIA's own internal investigation, not only were many of Webb's conclusions verified but a great deal more that he had not uncovered was also brought to light: for instance, that the CIA had covered up Contra drug-trafficking for more than since the early 1980's. During the battle with the corporate press, Webb was eventually abandoned by his editors at the newspaper and found it very difficult to find work in the aftermath of the controversy. In December 2004, he committed suicide.
The panic over Webb's work was joined with anxiety over the mode of its dissemination, a relatively new means of dissemination called the 'internet'. At this cultural moment conspiracy panickers, argues Bratich, sought to link the supposed irresponsibility of conspiracy theories like Webb's to the medium that circulated them in an attempt to discredit both. And so in time, we had the term, "internet conspiracy theory" or simply "internet theory" as a term of disqualification, as if something substantive were actually denoted by them.
RESPONDING TO 9/11 SKEPTICISM
. . .if the [media] system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to. Because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively.
In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet. So therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct -- can't go beyond them. And a well-functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind. The media would then serve to say in effect: Thus far and no further.
--Interview with Noam Chomsky, from 'Manufacturing Consent'
Narratives doubting the official version of the 9/11 attacks began circulating shortly afterward, but they didn't garner a great deal of attention in the left media until their popularity grew to a level that made response to them irresistible. One of the earliest critical articles from an established left media outlet came from Stephen R. Shalom and Michael Albert of Z Communications, entitled Conspiracies or Institutions: 9/11 and Beyond. It was published in June of 2002, just a couple of weeks after a shorter piece by Albert entitled, What Did Bush Know, When? These came just a couple of months after David Corn of The Nation published The Loyal Opposition: The 9/11 X-Files. These authors would display certain tendencies toward the presentation of evidence later shown by other writers in the left media who participated in the 9/11 conspiracy panic. Among them are the defactualization of analysis, the focus/avoidance binary. Also noteworthy among certain of these writers was the seeming presence of dual consciousness.
1. The first and most important of the evidence-presentation tendencies concerns the substance of this body of criticism. Nafeez Ahmed, a prominent 9/11 skeptic who has written a number of books on the 9/11 and 7/7 London attacks, notices that Albert's piece is marked by a 'defactualization of analysis'. Here is one example he cites from Albert's article:
“Supposing we had the means to answer the question about Bush’s foreknowledge of 9/11, it would at most reveal that U.S. intelligence services lack competence.” (Albert)
When one asks, 'How does Albert know this?', the answer, as Ahmed shows, is that he doesn't. Albert merely offers a statement of belief, based on the application of a general principle to a specific case where it may have no meaningful application. What is needed, as Ahmed points out, is an analysis of the facts. But that is precisely what's missing in Albert's article, time and again. This defactualized style of analysis is inadequate to dismiss the claims Albert wishes to dismiss, and seems aimed at bounding skepticism at the point Albert has deemed appropriate.
A second example of the defactualization of analysis occurs in David Corn's article mentioned above:
I won't argue that the U.S. government does not engage in brutal, murderous skulduggery from time to time. But the notion that the U.S. government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or, worse, conspired to kill thousands of Americans to launch a war-for-oil in Afghanistan is absurd. (Corn)
How does Corn know this? He tells us:
Simply put, the spies and special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough to mount this operation. That conclusion is based partly on, dare I say it, common sense, but also on years spent covering national security matters. (For a book I wrote on the CIA, I interviewed over 100 CIA officials and employees.)
The problems with this response should be evident. Corn makes it seem that for conspiracy theorists to have a point, US intelligence must 'mount' the operation, instead of merely, say, shepherding an existing one. We are further asked to accept that the 100 CIA officials he interviewed are representative of the agents used in plots like these, and even more speciously, that the interviews Corn conducted were sufficient to conclude that any agents lacked the personality characteristics and ability to take part in such a plot.
Corn then goes on to say:
Anyone with the most basic understanding of how government functions realizes that the national security bureaucracies of Washington do not work well together. (Corn)
But as Ahmed points out, Corn's claims about national security compartmentalization are so vague as to be meaningless.
Corn fails entirely, however, to specify exactly in what respect(s) this is the case. Unlike Stratfor [a private intelligence firm that concluded that bureaucratic fragmentation has resulted in making it difficult for the CIA to generate "a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world" - ed.], he does not clarify the nature of particular structural discontinuities between different bureaucratic and intelligence agencies and in what way they have problems integrating. As a consequence, his blanket statement about the national security community “not working well together” fails to actually communicate anything significant at all. (Ahmed)
Corn's subsequent conclusions are similarly flawed, as they ultimately rely on his own sense of what is likely or not, rather than relevant facts. Yet it is not difficult to find others more closely connected to intelligence circles who have a different sense of what is possible. Ahmed summarizes a discussion he had with a former FBI special agent specializing in counterterrorism named Tyrone Powers on this subject, which is worth quoting at length:
[Powers] told me that in his view, based on the facts that have recently surfaced on the public record, there was “credible information from the FBI, CIA and foreign intelligence services that an attack was imminent”. The information indicated that an Al-Qaeda hijacking attempt was probable. . .Powers puts this in context with what he describes as the consequentialism” inherent to the decision making process of leaders, which he has witnessed firsthand in his intelligence and counter-intelligence background: “... on occasion, [damaging] acts are allowed if in the minds of the decision-makers, they will lead to ‘greater good’,” and as long as the damage is contained within certain limits. Powers further refers to a variety of combined institutional influences and issues: pressure on intelligence agencies to vastly reduce their powers; concern over the “blowback” from the controversies of the Presidential election; the desire on the part of elements of the intelligence community to “reconstitute the CIA” after its perceived “emasculation by the Clinton administration”; the belief among these elements that such a reconstitution required “a need, a demand and a free hand that would be given by a democratic Congress [only] if there was a National outcry”. He then told me that: “My experience tells me that these incidents would have reached the level at which the ‘consequentialism’ thought process would have been made a real option” - in other words, that elements of the intelligence community and the administration may have deliberately failed to act in the belief that the resultant damage would contribute to a “greater good”, providing a pretext for such policies as the reconstitution of the CIA.However, Powers emphasises that this policy would have been the result of a “miscalculation” - a failure to anticipate the extent of this damage: “But the amount of destruction wrought on a civilian population shocked even the advocates of this policy." (Ahmed, emphasis added)
Given Powers' claims, and without reason to think they are inaccurate, what reason could there possibly be to bound thought at the limits of David Corn's 'common sense'?
2. Writing in The Nation in 2006, one entrant in the conspiracy panic files, Christopher Hayes, makes the following interesting claim in discussing the 'paranoid style' in political explanation:
the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called the credulous style. In the credulous style all political actors are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe in it. (Hayes)
Here Hayes makes a promising observation, one he unfortunately does not develop sufficiently to make it truly probing (more on this below). He also falls prey to another panic tendency, what I call the focus/avoidance binary. These writers spend most of their time debunking the least supported claims made by 9/11 skeptics, while studiously avoiding the far better-supported contentions of actionable foreknowledge and potential complicity. Hayes, for instance, references the Popular Mechanics treatment of "some of the Truth Movement's most common claims". He cites one example in summary form, regarding the temperature at which steel melts. That's it.
Further, he accepts that the Popular Mechanics piece authoritatively debunks the claims in question, without making reference to the fact that the piece generated several detailed responses from those defending controlled demolition, and of course without evaluating those claims.
This approach allows Hayes to conclude that "the problem isn't with conspiracy theories as such; the problem is continuing to assert the existence of a conspiracy even after the evidence shows it to be virtually impossible." Hayes apparently feels justified in making this sweeping claim despite failing to review most of the key evidence that has resulted in a conclusion of controlled demolition.
Since I do not find the evidence for controlled demolition compelling, my main concern here is with faulty process: even if Hayes had reviewed the relevant evidence and then rejected controlled demolition on its merits, its dismissal would not nearly be sufficient to show a government conspiracy was 'virtually impossible'. It would merely rule out this one claim made by 9/11 skeptics. Thus by focusing on a speculative and spectacular claim and avoiding comment on the more sober and plausible evidence of foreknowledge and complicity, Hayes can conclude that "Conspiracy theories that claim to explain 9/11 are wrongheaded and a terrible waste of time," even though he believes that "the skeptical instinct is, on balance, salutary."
But it seems Hayes is battling himself to some degree here, expressing another of the traits common to conspiracy panickers. That is dual consciousness. He says:
"It is right to suspect that the operations of government, the power elite and the military-industrial complex are often not what they seem; and proper to raise questions when the answers provided have been unconvincing. Given the untruths to which American citizens have been subjected these past six years, is it any surprise that a majority of them think the government's lying about what happened before and on 9/11? (Hayes)
Ultimately, however, despite offering real criticism of his professional journalist brethren, Hayes closes ranks around prevailing professional assumptions in the fashion mentioned by Bratich and described above. Hayes' remedy for excessive credulity will come from inside the profession. In order to overcome it, he says:
the public must come to trust that the gatekeepers of public discourse share their skepticism about the agenda its government is pursuing. The antidote, ultimately, to the Truth Movement is a press that refuses to allow the government to continue to lie. (Hayes)
But why is an antidote to the 'Truth Movement' needed? One would think that, from Hayes' analysis, the world had much more to fear from a credulous press corps than a band of skeptical keystrokers on the internet! But about this Hayes says only that if journalism doesn't get it's house in order, there is a 'danger' more people with be attracted to the 'Truth Movement'. What precisely is dangerous about that, is left unsaid.
Hayes gets tripped up once he ventures too close to the heart of the matter. For one thing, he does not make a distinction between actual credulity and what we may call 'performative' credulity. The question is: are the credulous journalists really suffering from a lack of appropriate skepticism, or have they simply learned not to give it voice? Surely the latter is more likely the case, as Hayes' own words ('share their skepticism') seem to acknowledge. But then if journalists often don't believe the stories they're told by high-ranking officials, yet still report them as fact out of professional/careerist considerations, then that's not actual credulity, that's a simulacrum of credulity, and thus it's much more dangerous and much harder to overcome. To paraphrase the old saying: you can't wake up someone who pretends to be asleep.
3. Alexander Cockburn is perhaps the conspiracy panicker who has garnered the greatest attention from the 'Truth Movement' itself. Cockburn, with Jeffrey St. Clair, operates the online "political newsletter", Counterpunch. His late 2006 missive, The Age of Irrationality: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the Anmerican (sic) Left, describes 9/11 conspiracism as "nuttishness" and "kookery", among other pejoratives. Cockburn engages in the focus/avoidance binary as well, devoting a good deal of space to ridiculing those who forward the demolition thesis, but he also engages 'softer' claims of 9/11 skepticism. Cockburn is knowledgeable about covert affairs, and Counterpunch has published excellent work on the subject of CIA criminality, from writers including William Blum and Douglas Valentine. Yet in his desire to demolish 9/11 conspiracism, he seems not to understand how close his own views are to those he seeks to excoriate. For instance, he writes:
Of course there are conspiracies. I think there is strong evidence that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the north Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. It's quite possible Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to get the US into the war. (Cockburn)
This interesting admission may sound innocuous to Cockburn, but were a president to keep information from military commanders about an enemy attack, or conspire with them to keep silent about it and expose US soldiers to needless mortal danger, he would clearly be in violation of his sworn duties as commander-in-chief.
With the 9/11 attacks in mind, suppose we re-write Cockburn's paragraph with the following substitutions (in bold): "Of course there are conspiracies. I think there is strong evidence that military intelligence did have knowledge that Al Qaeda was going to launch an attack on US cities. It's quite possible Rumsfeld and Cheney thought it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to declare war on Afghanistan and attack Iraq ."
Isn't this precisely what 9/11 skeptics have been arguing is consistent with the evidence? Cockburn, of course, did not write the passage above, yet he seems to agree with the general sentiment expressed therein. Here's the next paragraph from his piece:
Indeed it's very probable that the FBI or US military intelligence, even the CIA, had penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 attacks; that intelligence reports--some are already known--piled up in various Washington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught and even the manner in which it might be carried out. (Cockburn, emphasis mine)
So what stopped the plot from being foiled in this case, according to Cockburn? He doesn't know, but reminds the reader of the profusion of examples in history of "successful intelligence collection" conjoined with "fatal slowness to act".
Here Cockburn's confidence in an 'incompetence' explanation has to be weighed against the enormity of the plot, and the multitude of warnings from foreign intelligence agencies in the weeks and months prior to the attacks. If we accept this view, an obvious question arises: if successful intelligence collection in this case could result in "fatal slowness to act", when would it not? When would the intelligence collected be sufficient to translate into immediate action? In the case of Pearl Harbor just cited, it wasn't 'fatal slowness' that Cockburn believes was responsible for the attack's success - it was calculation.
Cockburn offers an example from the Yom Kippur War of an instance in which actionable intelligence lay unused by the CIA due to bureaucratic inertia, but it's hardly clear it applies to present circumstances. In the case of 9/11, does Cockburn have evidence it was inertia, and not some other motivation, that resulted in the CIA's inaction? His only answer is: "I doubt it". Here he speaks with the disembodied voice of political respectability: "We don't impugn the motives of covert operatives without smoking gun evidence." He seeks, in other words, to set a limit for reasonable speculation - to bound debate. Yet nowhere does he explain why such deference is due to intelligence agencies who routinely flout the law, commit acts of extrajudicial killing, and who spare no expense to disguise their true motivations and cover their tracks. He specifically ignores evidence, for instance, that the CIA schemed to keep the FBI in the dark about the presence of the 9/11 suspects in the United States for many months before the attacks (1).
Cockburn makes another admission that is worthy of discussion here. Understanding that law enforcement routinely infiltrates cells plotting these sorts of attacks, he explains:
Sometime an undercover agent will actually propose an action, either to deflect efforts away from some graver threat, or to put the plotters in a position where they can be caught red-handed.
Whether it fits the legal definition or not, here Cockburn describes entrapment - a notorious and all-too-common law enforcement tactic. The recent conviction of the so-called 'Fort Dix Five', as well as the case of the 'Texas two', throw harsh light on some of the reasons why. In neither of these cases were the suspects caught 'red-handed'. The most dire actions it is claimed they were considering were suggested by the FBI's own paid informants, career criminals themselves whose role was to goad the defendants into furthering their plans. One of the 'Fort Dix Five', Serdar Tatar, had actually called the police to alert them to the behavior of one of the FBI's informants because he was concerned it was criminal.
So without the informants' suggestions and well-paid cultivation, what plots were there? If an informant 'proposes an action' where there was no illegal activity before, what public interest is being served?
Further, and more to the point of this paper, consider the potential outcomes from law enforcement engaging in this kind of pump-priming. It is not the case, of course, that actions are simply proposed by informants; often they develop into the planning stage, with materials and coordination supplied by the informants and their government handlers (2).
A little-discussed but highly troubling consequence of this is that law enforcement will almost always have cover should it decide to create a terror event. That cover is: 'we were only aiding a plot for the purpose of catching the real perpetrators "red-handed'' later on, but something went wrong'. Given that there are reasons why a government might not be sorry to see a terror event befall its country - consequentialist reasons like those articulated by Tyrone Powers above - how is this a tolerable state of affairs for the public?
One scenario which falls into this category would be the fabrication of a terror event for the purpose of making a pre-existing agenda easier to enact. Witness the decades-long, NATO-sponsored 'Operation Gladio' in Europe, for instance, that saw the state liaise with right-wing elements to conduct terror attacks against their own populations and blame the radical left. (3)
Did not former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski hint at the possibility that a similar 'strategy of tension' could be deployed against Americans in his speech to the Senate' Foreign Relations Committee in February of 2007? Concerned with the expansion of the Iraq conflict, which he described as a 'historic, strategic and moral calamity," Brzezinski described what he considered to be a "plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran". It might result from:
Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Brzezinski)
In Brzezinski's own text, the word 'defensive' was bracketed in quotation marks, signalling quite clearly that he was referring to the possibility that the United States would undertake a provocation to go to war with Iran. In the words of World Socialist Web Site reporter Barry Grey, who was present for the speech, "Although he did not explicitly say so, Brzezinski came close to suggesting that the White House was capable of manufacturing a provocation—including a possible terrorist attack within the US—to provide the casus belli for war." (Grey)
At the conclusion of his speech, Grey asked Brzezinski to clarify his statements. Here is the exchange Grey reported:
Grey: Dr. Brzezinski, who do you think would be carrying out this possible provocation?
Brzezinski: I have no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous.
Grey: Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?
Brzezinski: I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace. (Grey)
Here we have the former top national security advisor to a US president asked point-blank, and refusing to deny, that the US government could manufacture a terrorist attack in the US and blame it on an enemy as a pretext for war.
Brzezinski reminds us here that the routine operation of the national security state creates conditions under which it is impossible for outsiders to know with any degree of confidence who actually originated a hostile act. Awareness of this harrowing yet indisputable fact, I argue, accounts in part for the dual consciousness in commentators like Alexander Cockburn, and why we should reject both stealth and overt calls for bounding thought at the consideration of official complicity.
Further evidence of Cockburn's dual consciousness comes from the privileged position held at Counterpunch by Paul Craig Roberts, a conservative economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Roberts, a staunch opponent of the Bush administration, is also very outspoken about his 9/11 skepticism, and has written on Counterpunch of his belief that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11 and that the 9/11 Commission report is fraudulent (4).
Thus the sense one is left with after reading Cockburn's denunciations is: he is a kind of 9/11 skeptic himself, one who cannot bring himself to acknowledge it because he doesn't care to be lumped with the 'unwashed' who are associated with the voicing of these sorts of doubt. His own arguments point him out as one.
more if anyone is interested . . .
Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 3:01 pm