9/11: A mass murder mystery.

• Author: Caffentzis, George
• Position: War and War Hysteria

The destruction of the World Trade Center towers is a mass murder mystery, for the basic murder detective's questions--How? Who? and Why?--are still unanswered. Or, I should say, unanswered in the minds of those people like myself who have not accepted either the Bush Administration's or the conspiracy theorists' narrative. I don't know how many people like me there are, but I'm beginning to think that there are relatively few. If the Gallup polls are correct, most people in the US accept the Bush Administration's story, while my guess is that most well-informed people in Europe and the Islamic world think that some combination of the CIA and the Mossad (the Israeli counterpart to the CIA) were involved in stage managing the attacks. I reject both approaches.

It is relatively easy to reject the Bush Administration's tale simply because it is based on a discredited criminology. Bush tells us that the crime was planned and committed by cowardly "evil doers" like Osama bin Laden, who are driven by hatred and envy to attack and destroy the US by terrorist means and that the only way to stop them is by executing them. This is the well-known retributive narrative that has justified the death penalty for regular murders in the last few decades, applied to a mass murder. It is no surprise that George W. Bush, the most executionist politician in recent US history, has voiced this version of events.

But what is bad criminology for individual murders is even worse when applied to mass murder. No one is essentially a criminal, much less an "evil doer." Consequently, one can hardly explain why a crime is committed by simply pointing to the criminal essence of the perpetrator. Moreover, the gesture of simply pointing to emotions like hatred and envy defers explanation because it does not explain why someone hates and envies.

Moreover, if we take the standard definition of terrorism as given (i.e., the use of violence or the threat of violence to influence the political decisions of civilians), then terrorism is not an ideology like fascisrn. The "ism" after the noun is misleading, since terrorism is a political tactic (like electoral campaigning) that can be employed by adherents of almost any political ideology and can be abandoned as well. For example, many Zionists before 1949 were terrorists. They blew up hotels and boats and slaughtered Palestinian women and children at Deir Yassin to terrorize other Palestinians enough to make them leave their homes. After 1948 many of these same terrorists like Menachem Begin became "regular" politicians and, if they practiced terrorism at all, it was of the state variety.

The Bush Administration was given the opportunity to deploy its vacuous criminology simply because no organization has taken responsibility for the September 11 crimes, nor have the hijackers (as far as we know) left a written statement voicing their demands and objectives. If they had, then we could have examined the organization's or hijackers' political program and determined their motivations, affiliations and justifications. In this void, the Bush Administration launched an open-ended "war against terrorism" which is not directed against any particular ideology, but against a tactic almost any ideology can employ. In effect, Bush declared war on the world, since there is no state (including the US) nor state-power-seeking organization that has not at one time or another employed terrorist tactics. (Indeed, for Thomas Hobbes the phrase "terrorist state" is tautological, since every state rules on the basis of its monopoly of violence and terror!)

It is no surprise that in response to the Bush Administration's tawdry tale, many have tried to "dig deeper," only to find that the "sheriff did it!" After all, the first question any detective asks of a murder is: "Who gained from the death?" In this case, it would appear to be up until now the Bush and Sharon Administrations. Add to this the many suspicious details--ranging from the long association Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and many other Islamic fundamentalist organizations (like Hamas) have had with either the CIA and/or Mossad to the Bush Administration's swift transport of bin Laden family members living in the US to Saudi Arabia (without interrogation) immediately after September 11--and one breathes an atmosphere of conspiracy. Certainly many in the antiglobalization movement, who have spent the last few years demonstrating outside of buildings where the "rulers of the universe" get together and plot the course of the world's politics and economics, have a sense of the enormous amount of conspiring that goes on in organizing a "free market globalization!" So the ground has been fertile for the seeds of conspiracy theory in the 9/11 case.

This is not the time or place to examine all the different varieties of such theories. My response is to simply point out there are two assumptions that many, if not most, 9/11 conspiracy theories share that are questionable:

* Arabs are too underdeveloped to have brought off such a crime which required skill, discipline and resolve-at best, the hijackers were dupes of the CIA and/or Mossad;

* the US government is so powerful and omniscient that no serious attack can take place against it that is not permitted or planned by its own officials.

As for the first assumption, it should be obvious now after seeing the events of the Second Intifada that the Arab world is filled with skillful, disciplined and resolute fighters (both men and women). The defeat of Arab armies during the colonial period and the catastrophic wars against Israel seem to have perpetuated a myth about the war-making capabilities of this once feared people. In fact, one of the main objectives for the creation of the Arab Afghanis in the 1980s was to show that Arabs, if given the proper technological backing, can defeat a modem army (the Soviet Union's).

The second assumption leads one to conclude that it is completely futile to resist the plans of those who control the US government on any level. If recessions, military defeats, diplomatic snafus or other apparently problematic events occur, then they must have been planned by the super-Machiavellians of the CIA, NSA and other agencies with more obscure acronyms.

Not all conspiracy theories suffer from such tunnel vision, of course, but even those that do not still have not provided us with the famous smoking gun. As a result, the case is still open and the leads are getting cold.

I propose that we detectives of 9/11 take another more radical approach. Let us assume that the hijackers and the organization(s) that supported them did have some autonomy and were not the complete puppets of the Mossad and the CIA. What kind of motivation might have led them to perpetrate such a crime?

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