Chomsky on 9/11 Truth (2024)

1. Introduction

Noam Chomsky has been one of the leading dissident voices on the American left for decades. Accordingly, people invest a lot of credence in what he has to say on a plethora of topics. As with any celebrated intellectual, Chomsky’s following contains a cultic subset of devotees who take his word as gospel warranting no critical scrutiny. Disappointingly, he has demonstrated poor reasoning when interrogated about the peculiarities of 9/11 that appear to undermine the official story. The following exposition by Chomsky is in response to a query about the implications of physical anomalies associated with the World Trade Center (WTC) collapses that have been documented and studied by a community of scientists, engineers, and architects:

“What you are referring to is a statement by a thousand people, most of them basically unknown, who make certain claims about technical facts which I’m in no position to evaluate. The obvious thing for them to do is present their findings to the people who can make evaluations. . . . These people you are referring to, though they don’t seem to understand it, are in fact working very hard to absolve George Bush and implicate Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And the reason is extremely simple. I mean everyone agrees, this is uncontroversial, that the destruction of the world trade center was attributed to Saudis. OK, now suppose the Bush administration had done it. They would attribute it to Iraqis. I mean they’re trying very hard to find an excuse to invade Iraq. If they had attributed it to Iraqis, it would have been a walk away. They would immediately get total popular support. They’d get a UN resolution. NATO would pass a supportive resolution. When they attributed it to Saudis, first of all, they alienated their most powerful ally in the region—most important ally. And secondly, they forced themselves to jump through hoops to try to concoct some sort of pretext for invading Iraq (weapons of mass destruction, some sort of connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam) the whole business which of course collapsed, exposing them to ridicule. And they also diverted their efforts to a side show—invading Afghanistan for which there was very little purpose . . . and getting themselves caught up in that. And delaying the invasion of Iraq, which they wanted in the first place. So, they [Bush administration officials] couldn’t have done it, short of lunacy. But who does it point to? Who would have gained by attributing the destruction to Saudis? I can think of only two people: One is Saddam Hussein, who wanted to divert a U.S. attack on Iraq. And the other is Osama bin Laden. I mean the Saudis are his worst enemies. To try to get the U.S. to hate Saudis would be wonderful [for Osama bin Laden]. At least I can’t think of anyone else who would have benefited. So, it seems to me all these huge efforts are essentially directed to absolving the Bush administration and blaming Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And I just don’t see any point in taking off years of study to prove that” (1). – Noam Chomsky, 10/29/2009

We will proceed by parsing the various premises contained in Chomsky’s statement and then dissect related comments from other talks. This study will show how his deceptive framing and exclusion of evidence distort his conclusions about 9/11, especially in light of more recent revelations. Chomsky egregiously diminishes the significance of expert opinions concerning the building collapses and thereby fails to attend to their historiographical import (Chapters 2, 6, and Appendix A). Also, he flagrantly misconstrues the Afghanistan invasion (Chapter 3). Chomsky offers an erroneous counterfactual argument about the implications of Saudi involvement by conflating two diametrically opposed groups (Osama bin Laden’s syndicate of militant jihadists and the U.S.-friendly Saudi royals). He thereby misinterprets some of the strongest evidence for an inside job scenario (Chapters 4, 5, and Appendix C). Finally, Chomsky misuses principles of scientific reasoning in his dismissive treatment of both the 9/11 inside job position and the more general category of “conspiracy theories” (Chapter 7 and Appendix B). Upon close inspection, the substance of Chomsky’s contentions evaporates to reveal a misguided adherence to the official story. Sadly, he has shown no indication of updating, amending, or correcting his mistakes as he has repeated the identical arguments on numerous occasions over a period of several years.

This monograph is not an exhaustive examination of all the suspiscious “coincidences” related to the calamitous events of 9/11 (e.g., conveniently timed war games that aided the hijackings, Bush family connections to the security firm in charge of the WTC complex, etc.). Nor is it a final adjudication of truth regarding the building collapses. It has a more modest charge: The purpose is merely to show that the assumptions and framing used by Chomsky to bolster the establishment-sanctioned version of events are fallacious and misleading. In the process it will expose how the scientific debate about the building collapses has been shut down by the purveyors of the official story. While not disproving it, this avoidance of critical disputation and lack of transparency casts a shadow of doubt over the orthodox narrative of fire-based structural failure. Hence, absent a substantive rebuttal from government investigators, we will tentatively accept the controlled demolition hypothesis as having a greater likelihood of being correct than the mainstream version of events does. On the historical issues, we will take for granted many factual premises from reputable academic and journalistic sources. The reconfiguration of the 9/11 tragedy within an expanded array of considerations will reveal the probability of an insider conspiracy to be higher than the probability of the narrative to which Chomsky assents.

2. What People?

NC: “What you are referring to is a statement by a thousand people, most of them basically unknown, who make certain claims about technical facts which I’m in no position to evaluate. The obvious thing for them to do is present their findings to the people who can make evaluations” (Ibid.).

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911) is the group of “a thousand people” that Chomsky and his interlocutor were referring to:

“Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth) is a nonprofit organization of architects, engineers, and affiliates dedicated to establishing the truth about the events of September 11, 2001.
“We pursue our mission by conducting research and educating the public about the scientific evidence related to the destruction of thethree World Trade Center towers and by working with victims’ families and other activists to advocate for a new investigation.
“At the heart of our work is our deeply held conviction that establishing the truth is essential to achieving justice for the murder of nearly 3,000 people that day. Furthermore, we believe that an honest public accounting of 9/11 is theonly way to bring about genuine and lasting change to the system that enabled this atrocity to take place and to the sweeping policies enacted in its aftermath”
(2).

As of 2024, over 3,600 experts have signed their petition:

“To the Members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate of the United States of America,
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE THAT:
On Behalf of the People of the United States of America, the undersigned Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and affiliates hereby petition for, and demand, a truly independent investigation with subpoena power in order to uncover the full truth surrounding the events of 9/11/01—specifically the collapses of the World Trade Center Towers and Building 7. We believe there is sufficient doubt about the official story and therefore the 9/11 investigation must be re-opened and must include a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives that might have been the actual cause of the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and Building 7” (3).

Chomsky gives a subtle slight by remarking that they are “basically unknown”. This is a vacuous observation as it does not reflect the quality of their credentials or the relevance of their expertise. After all, how many architects or engineers are well-known? Not many. AE911 displays no signs of being a racket or grift. Even though mainstream media have pejoratively discounted them as a “conspiracy group” (4), they do not have a stated position on who was ultimately responsible for 9/11. Their focus has always been the physical evidence to which their expertise applies:

“The architects, engineers, and scientists who make up AE911Truth provide forensic evidence, video documentation, and eyewitness testimony that offer clues to the identity of the perpetrators. But it is the job of serious journalists, trained criminal investigators, and officials in the legislative and judicial branches of government to uncover the "who" and "why" of 9/11. In particular, attorneys and judges have both the subpoena power and the legal authority to offer immunity that will bring forth witnesses and suspects, leading to the conviction of those responsible for planning and carrying out the attacks of 9/11” (5).

Since the time of Chomsky’s dismissive comments, AE911 has attempted the peer-review outreach that he recommended—“The obvious thing for them to do is present their findings to the people who can make evaluations” (1):

“Project Due Diligence is a coordinated effort by a team of engineers around the world to engage the profession in performing its due diligence regarding the official reports on the three catastrophic building failures that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
“To facilitate this process of due diligence, we are giving our presentation to groups all over the world. At the conclusion of each presentation, we invite engineers to sign our petition and to join us in disseminating this information to the entire engineering profession” (6).

While having critiqued the U.S. government’s explanations for all of the World Trade Center (WTC) building collapses on September 11^th, AE911 went so far as to commission an independent academic study of the World Trade Center 7 failure—which found the officially sanctioned explanation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) untenable:

“On March 25, 2020, researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks issued the final report of a four-year computer modeling study on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.
“The 47-story WTC 7 was the third skyscraper to be completely destroyed on September 11, 2001, collapsing rapidly and symmetrically into its footprint at 5:20 PM. Seven years later, investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires.
“Contrary to the conclusions of NIST, the UAF research team found that the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was caused not by fires but by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building” (7).

There was a subsequent attempt to compel NIST to amend its conclusions, based partly on the findings of the UAF study:

“A group of eight family members who lost children, parents, siblings, and spouses on 9/11 filed alawsuit today against the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The lawsuit alleges that NIST violated federal law in its denial of arequest for correctioncalling on the agency to throw out the conclusions of its 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.
“The eight family members were joined by 10 structural engineers and architects and by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. All three groups of plaintiffs were signatories to the original request for correction, which identified eight ways that NIST’s fire-based scenario for the collapse of Building 7 was both physically impossible and inconsistent with the available evidence.
“The goal of the lawsuit is to obtain a court order that forces NIST to perform new analyses and to develop a new ‘probable collapse sequence’ that is physically possible and consistent with the available evidence. The plaintiffs argue that the only such scenario is a controlled demolition of the building.
“In August 2020, NIST issued itsinitial decisiondenying the request for correction. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth decried the decision as a ‘blatant avoidance of the arguments and facts contained in the request.’ Following the group’s subsequentappealin September 2020, NIST took until June 2021 to issue afinal decision—seven months longer than the agency usually takes to respond to such appeals.
“The lawsuit alleges that NIST’s denial of the request for correction is arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law because the agency’s responses to the arguments in the request are irrational, evasive, and unsubstantive” (8).

Chomsky’s assertion that he is “in no position to evaluate” the “claims about technical facts” made by AE911 cues his adherents to ignore the issue altogether. It is a peculiar statement since repeating expert opinions without possessing said expertise is ordinarily legitimate (e.g. Chomsky’s citation of climate studies without being a climate scientist himself). Clearly, advanced degrees in engineering are not required for us to recognize that the NIST investigators are abrogating their scientific responsibility by refusing to offer substantive rebuttals to AE911’s trenchant disputation of their conclusions. NIST appears to be avoiding their attempt at a constructive technical dialogue. A layperson can perceive that they are averting the dispute, presumably because they don’t have a counterargument of scientific merit. (Notice that NIST does not defer to arguments of popular skeptics or debunkers to bolster their positions. Likewise, we will ignore their attempted rebuttals, since they are not referenced by the qualified experts from which the government-approved narrative originates [i.e., the NIST investigators]. Accordingly, this essay’s treatment of the WTC failures is restricted to the arguments and analyses of AE911 and NIST.)

By skirting the issue of the aberrant WTC collapses, Chomsky avoids a potentially damning problem for the official narrative. Professionally orchestrated demolitions would have to be explained as either unconnected with the terrorist events or somehow compatible with the mainstream hypothesis that no American elites were involved. Both seem like challenging cases to make. Curiously, Chomsky presents the issue as if there is no reputational risk associated with challenging the mainstream narrative of 9/11. However, the implication that there was an inside job is strongly resisted by many people, especially those who cannot easily assimilate the reality of such malevolent treachery from their elected officials. The ubiquity of this cognitive dissonance across governmental and scientific institutions (e.g., the judicial system, NIST) may account for the apparent unwillingness within such organizations to give the alternative theory (orchestrated demolition) an impartial hearing. This is not, itself, evidence for the demolition theory of the WTC disintegrations. It is only a possible explanation of why NIST sabotaged the scientific process as made apparent by their refusal to engage with AE911’s formally submitted critiques. The obvious reason would be to forestall unacceptable conclusions that are suggestive of an inside job.

Chomsky’s own aversion to the stigma associated with alternative 9/11 theories may explain the motivated reasoning by which he eschews disquieting areas of research and is thereby steered towards the establishment narrative. Manifestations of his bias include intentional ignorance of pertinent facts and the misframing of historical context. These errors cumulatively serve to lead his acolytes to likewise adopt his ill-conceived position that 9/11 was solely an instantiation of blowback from foreign groups disaffected by U.S. policy. Chomsky’s off-hand mischaracterization of the Afghanistan incursion is a quintessential example of the inaccurate premising that sets the stage for his confused reconstruction of the historical backdrop to 9/11.

3. The Afghanistan “Sideshow”

NC: “And they also diverted their efforts to a sideshow—invading Afghanistan for which there was very little purpose—and getting themselves caught up in that. And delaying the invasion of Iraq, which they wanted in the first place. So, they [Bush administration officials] couldn’t have done it, short of lunacy” (1).

Afghanistan was not a sideshow. In fact, the record shows that prior to 9/11 the Bush administration had intentions of launching a massive campaign. Oddly, Chomsky reiterates the canard that the intervention in Afghanistan was only a post hoc response to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Had this been the case, would we expect planning for an invasion to have occurred before the attacks even transpired? It seems very doubtful to say the least.

Consider the following proof of a pre-9/11 plan to invade. This comes from the 2004 testimony of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

“The first draft of that new strategy, in the form of a Presidential directive, was circulated by the NSC staff on June 7, 2001 and I am told some five more meetings were held that summer at the Deputy Secretary level to address the policy questions involved, such as relating an aggressive strategy against the Taliban to U.S.-Pakistan relations. By the first week of September, this process had arrived at a strategy that was presented to Principals and later became National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)-9. The objectives of the new strategy were:
• To eliminate the al-Qaeda network;
• To use all elements of national power to do so—diplomatic, military, economic, intelligence, information and law enforcement;
• To eliminate sanctuaries for al-Qaeda and related terrorist networks—and if diplomatic efforts to do so failed, to consider additional measures.
“The essence of this strategy was contained in NSPD-9. It was the first major substantive national security decision directive issued by this administration. It was presented for decision by principals on September 4, 2001—7 days before September 11th. The directive was signed by the President, with minor changes, and a preamble to reflect the events of 9/11, on October 25, 2001” (9).

It is highly suspect that the core features of this operation (NSPD-9) were readied only a week before the perfect pretext for selling it to the public had shocked the nation into enthusiastically supporting it.

As Rumsfeld went on to explain, the rationale for this pre-9/11 plan was to combat terrorism:

“It had become increasingly clear that we could no longer afford to treat terrorism as a manageable evil—that we needed an approach that treated terrorism more like fascism—as an evil that needed to be not contained, but fought and eliminated” (Ibid.).

This statement suggests that the global war on terror was essentially conceived before the attacks of 9/11 occurred. So, even if Rumsfeld’s explanation is a complete account of why an ”aggressive strategy against the Taliban” (that included the use of military power) was drafted, we are still left with an affirmation that prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. had targeted Afghanistan for regime change. (It is worth emphasizing his admission that only “minor changes” were made to the policy after the events of 9/11.)

How seriously should Rumsfeld’s account of the reason for NSPD-9 be taken? Was it only out of anti-terrorist stratagems that such a plan arose? Afghanistan had long been viewed as geostrategically important due to its location relative to fossil fuel producing regions—hence the value of securing it for U.S. interests. In 1997, a few years before the Bush clique took office, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state made this assessment:

“Madeline Albright sat in a ‘full-dress CIA briefing’ on the Caspian region. CIA agents then accompanied ‘some well-trained petroleum engineers’ to the region. Albright concluded that shaping the region’s policies was ‘one of the most exciting things that we can do’” (10).

In the late 1990s, Western oil and gas interests were courting the Taliban to exploit the central Asian energy reserves through the construction of trans-Afghan pipelines: “The Taliban and Unocal were hoping to build a $4.5 billion pipeline network to transport Caspian Sea oil and gas across Afghanistan to the Indian subcontinent” (11). However, al-Qaeda threw a wrench in the works by bombing U.S. embassies, prompting the Clinton administration to launch airstrikes into Afghanistan:

“After U.S. missile strikes against Afghanistan, Unocal suspends pipeline project and asks American staff to leave . . . Citing low oil prices, concerns over Osama bin Laden, and pressure from women's groups, Unocal withdraws from Afghan pipeline consortium” (12).

Speaking at a Cato Institute conference in 1998, future Vice President Dick Cheney indicated why such a massive operation against the Taliban would become a priority by the turn of the millennium:

“I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight. The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States” (10).

This strategic importance extended to Afghanistan since “The only way to get that fuel [from central Asia] to bigger markets like India or the Gulf of Oman—from where it could be shipped to Western markets—was by building apipeline through Afghanistan” (13). The same year that Cheney was addressing the Cato Institute about the desirability of gaining access to Caspian Sea hydrocarbons, the inchoate motivation behind NSPD-9 came into view:

“About two months after the Houston parties, UNOCAL executive John Maresca addressed the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific and urged support for establishment of an investor-friendly climate in Afghanistan, ‘. . . we have made it clear that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our company.’ Meaning that UNOCAL’s ability to construct the Afghan pipeline was a cause worthy of U.S. taxpayer dollars” (10).

As it turns out, Rumsfeld was likely dissembling by only giving us part of the story. It is reasonable to surmise that the problem of terrorism warranted a major military campaign because it was stifling geostrategic objectives and corporate access to a crucial region of the world. By the year 2000, it had become an open secret that the guiding luminaries of the U.S. fossil fuel industry had their sights set on the Caspian Sea as one of the most resplendent prizes on the world stage:

“What do the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea and the Balkans have in common? U.S. domination in these areas serves the interests of corporate multimillionaires such as Dick Cheney.
“Cheney is CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen have zeroed in on the world's other major source of oil—the Caspian Sea. Its rich oil and gas resources are estimated at $4 trillion by U.S. News and World Report. The Washington-based American Petroleum Institute, voice of the major U.S. oil companies, called the Caspian region, ‘the area of greatest resource potential outside of the Middle East’” (14).

This interpretation of the incursion into Afghanistan following 9/11 is strengthened by the identity of the post-invasion leadership:

“Maresca’s prayers have been answered with the Taliban’s replacement . . . [T]he new Afghan government’s head, Hamid Karzai, formerly served as a UNOCAL consultant. Only nine days after Karzai’s ascension, President Bush nominated another UNOCAL consultant and former Taliban defender, Zalmay Khalilzad, as his special envoy to Afghanistan” (10).

Given all this, it is curious that Chomsky would characterize such a strategically significant region as a mere sideshow “for which there was very little purpose”. How could any honest assessor of the Bush administration’s personnel fail to register the importance of the Afghanistan invasion? Chomsky completely ignores this by mischaracterizing the intervention as an obligatory diversion from their primary goal (Iraq). To the contrary, it is obvious from NSPD-9 that Afghanistan was also a high priority from the outset of George W. Bush’s first term.

4. Abject Omissions and a Train Wreck of Counterfactuals

NC: “I mean everyone agrees, this is uncontroversial, that the destruction of the world trade center was attributed to Saudis. OK, now suppose the Bush administration had done it. They would attribute it to Iraqis. I mean they’re trying very hard to find an excuse to invade Iraq. If they had attributed it to Iraqis, it would have been a walk away. They would immediately get total popular support. They’d get a UN resolution. NATO would pass a supportive resolution. They forced themselves to jump through hoops to try to concoct some sort of pretext for invading Iraq (weapons of mass destruction, some sort of connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam—the whole business which of course collapsed, exposing them to ridicule. But who does it point to? Who would have gained by attributing the destruction to Saudis? I can think of only two people: One is Saddam Hussein, who wanted to divert a U.S. attack on Iraq. And the other is Osama bin Laden. I mean the Saudis are his worst enemies. To try to get the U.S. to hate Saudis would be wonderful [for Osama bin Laden]. At least I can’t think of anyone else who would have benefited. So, it seems to me all these huge efforts are essentially directed to absolving the Bush administration and blaming Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. And I just don’t see any point in taking off years of study to prove that” (1).

Chomsky’s hypothetico-deductive exercise is problematic at multiple points. It rests on dubious assumptions: First, it takes for granted that Bush administration officials (and stateside ancillary parties) would not have been bound by any limitations in concocting or facilitating the 9/11 attacks had they played a role in them. In other words, Chomsky supposes they would have had complete freedom to attribute the attacks to anyone they had wished (i.e., Iraqis). This reasoning rests on the faulty assumption that they would have had no desire to blame terrorists that could be connected to Afghanistan. The fact that they had pre-9/11 plans to intervene in Afghanistan (NSPD-9) already refutes this erroneous notion. But, setting that aside, it is unrealistic to believe that there were no constraints on who they could have held responsible. If the administration secretly wanted an actual attack on the United States, they would have probably aided real jihadists who shared a sincere conviction to carry out such a crime. This means there would have been a limited pool of terrorists that could have been indirectly supported to unknowingly fulfill the administration’s need for a terrorist event. To clear the way for the plan’s realization, the accomplices within the Bush White House could have deliberately ignored warnings of the impending crime and stifled the nation’s defenses. Appallingly, this hypothetical scenario appears to match reality. There was an intentional ignorance and obstruction of intelligence (that could have thwarted the plot) at the highest level of government. This purposeful negligence even reached the critical threshold for the tragic crescendo of September 11, 2001 to unfold:

“How the president’s national security advisor—and the president and vice president themselves—did not prioritize the urgency of new intelligence regarding a terrorist attack against the United States is still a matter of confusion and deep disappointment for [CIA Director] Tenet” (15).
“Tenet vividly recalls the White House meeting with Rice and her team. (George W. Bush was on a trip to Boston.) ‘Rich [Blee] started by saying, “There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda's intention is the destruction of the United States"’” (16).

The CIA’s head of counterterrorism was equally perplexed by the apathy of the White House:

“[S]tarting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.
“By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, ‘it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.’
“The drama of failed warnings began when Tenet and Black pitched a plan, in the spring of 2001, called ‘the Blue Sky paper’ to Bush’s new national security team. It called for a covert CIA and military campaign to end the Al Qaeda threat—'getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.’‘And the word back,’ says Tenet, ‘was “we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.”’ (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)
“That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof's fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed. Tenet picked up the white phone to Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you,’” Tenet remembers. “It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We're comin' right now. We have to get there.’”
“What happened?” I ask Cofer Black. “Yeah. Whatdidhappen?” he replies. “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of likeThe Twilight Zone.”
“And there was one more chilling warning to come. At the end of July, Tenet and his deputies gathered in the director’s conference room at CIA headquarters. ‘We were just thinking about all of this and trying to figure out how this attack might occur,’ he recalls. ‘And I'll never forget this until the day I die. Rich Blee looked at everybody and said, “They're coming here.” And the silence that followed was deafening.’
“Tenet, who is perhaps the agency’s most embattled director ever, can barely contain himself when talking about the unheeded warnings he says he gave the White House” (Ibid.).

Another manifestation of this deliberately increased vulnerability came from Bush’s head of the Department of Justice, John Ashcroft, who was chosen to be Attorney General by the incipient administration in December of the year 2000:

“The Bush Administration actually reversed the Clinton Administration's strong emphasis on counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Attorney General John Ashcroft not only moved aggressively to reduce DoJ's anti-terrorist budget but also shift DoJ's mission in spirit to emphasize its role as a domestic police force and anti-drug force. These changes in mission were just as critical as the budget changes, with Ashcroft, in effect, guiding the day-to-day decisions made by field officers and agents. And all of this while the Administration was receiving repeated warnings about potential terrorist attacks. . . . Ashcroft was trying to slash funding from counterterrorism and grants and other homeland defense programs before 9/11” (17).
“According to the sworn testimony of two FBI agents interviewed by the9/11 Commission, Ashcroft ignored warnings of an imminent al-Qaida attack” (18).

Consider the inconsistency of this apparent disinterest in the light of Rumsfeld’s previous statement about the administration’s pre-9/11 view that terrorism was an urgent foreign policy priority (9). Hence, it looks more like willful ignorance than fumbling neglect.

Chomsky seems to assume Bush’s clique of neoconservative associates would not have crafted or effectuated such a plan in concert with any foreign accomplices. Notice how he frames it in his comments: “. . . suppose the Bush administration had done it.” This simplistic formulation fails to convey a crucial nuance of this inside job theory: While it is near certain that the hijackers had no direct contact with the White House and no intent to work for the interests of the Bush administration, some members of the Saudi royal family likely did. Any U.S. governing authority would have been viewed as evil to a sincere jihadist. It is a self-evident truism that a suicidal terrorist would not waste his life on a plot that would knowingly benefit his adversary. But it is entirely possible that the hijackers were indirectly enabled by their enemy to facilitate an end consonant to both parties. Had this been the case, they would have been oblivious to the ultimate source and intention behind any assistance they were receiving from the Americans and their elite Saudi friends that made the crime possible. The identities of the intermediaries (primarily Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud) that connected the Bush White House to the hijackers give indications that this is probably what happened. There are reasonable grounds to suspect that the faction of ideologically-driven neoconservatives surrounding Bush, with significant connections to prominent Saudis, conspired to create opportunities (through backchannel support for terrorists and the disabling of preemptive defenses) for the hijacking plot to come to fruition. The network of individuals that has come to light is circ*mstantially suggestive that this hypothesis is likely correct, given the nature of the relationships and aims of the participants.

There was a preponderance of hawkish ideologues populating George W. Bush’s administration. Many of them were associated with a foreign policy think tank called The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was formed in 1997: “Of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in theadministration of U.S. President George W. Bush, includingDick Cheney [Vice President],Donald Rumsfeld [Secretary of Defense], andPaul Wolfowitz [Deputy Secretary of Defense]” (19). Other Bush administration officials had PNAC connections as well: John Bolton (Under Secretary of Arms Control and International Security Affairs, Ambassador to UN); Scooter Libby (Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, Chief of Staff to the Vice President); Peter Rodman (Asst. Defense Secretary for International Security Affairs); Henry Rowen (Defense Policy Board member); William Schneider, Jr. (Chairman of the Defense Science Board); Abram Shulsky (Director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans); Stephen Cambone (Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence); Devon Gaffney Cross (Defense Policy Board member); Paula Dobriansky (Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs); Jeane Kirkpatrick (Representative to UN) (20). The prevalence of this ideological bent within the administration cannot be denied.

PNAC was focused on the furtherance of America’s global interests through the enhanced projection of military power. In September of the year 2000 (about a year before the 9/11 attacks and a few months before the Bush administration took office), PNAC released a prescriptive report titled, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies Forces and Resources for a New Century. Participants in its production included “six of whom [that] subsequently assumed key defense and foreign policy positions in the Bush administration” (19). The document outlined the following concerns:

“If defense budgets remain at projected levels, America’s global military preeminence will be impossible to maintain, as will the world order that is secured by that preeminence. . . . Conventional forces that are insufficient to fight multiple theater wars simultaneously cannot protect American global interests and allies. . . . [A]ddressing the Army’s many challenges will require significantly increased funding. . . . The true cost of not meeting our defense requirements will be a lessened capacity for American global leadership and, ultimately, the loss of a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity” (21).

In the same report, PNAC admitted that such a desired transition would be accelerated by a cataclysmic assault on the United States: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” (Ibid.). This is exactly what the attacks of 9/11 turned out to be. Notice how similar this sentiment is to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s admission that such a traumatizing attack was needed to justify the coveted plan to invade Afghanistan:

“Imagine the outcry any U.S. President would have faced had he proposed what would have been labeled a pre-emptive war in Afghanistan before the experience of September 11^th. Unfortunately, history shows that it can take a tragedy like September 11^th to awaken the world to new threats—and the need for action . . .” (9).

Rumsfeld essentially explained that the 9/11 attacks were a necessary casus belli. He inadvertently revealed why an administration intent on such foreign policy actions would have had a motive for allowing (or enabling) provocative attacks on U.S. soil.

After 9/11, Rumsfeld even recommended the strategy of covertly impelling or precipitating acts of terrorism to expose adversarial groups and hold harboring nations accountable:

“Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its classified ‘outbrief—a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon agencies—that the global war on terrorism ‘requires new strategies, postures and organization.’
“The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.
“Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at ‘stimulating reactions’ among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to ‘quick-response’ attacks by U.S. forces” (22).

Although this organization (P2OG) was created post-9/11, it demonstrates the debased conscience of Donald Rumsfeld and, by extension, the administration he served. He was able to rationalize potentially lethal criminal actions presumably at the risk of innocent civilian lives. Rumsfeld was not averse to “prodding terrorist cells into action” so long as it served some perceived greater purpose. This makes his complicity in the facilitation of the 9/11 attacks quite plausible since they functioned as a necessary pretext for the realization of his foreign policy aspirations (i.e., the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq).

A person of interest not part of PNAC, but nevertheless intimately involved in crafting the 9/11 narrative, is Philip Zelikow. While not having agreed with every excess of the Bush administration’s policies, he was certainly connected to the clique from PNAC:

“In late 2000 and early 2001, Zelikow served onPresident Bush'stransition team. AfterGeorge W. Bushtook office, Zelikow was named to a position on thePresident's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board[PFIAB], and worked on other task forces and commissions as well.
“Zelikow was appointed executive director of the9/11 Commission(National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), whose work included examination of the conduct of presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and their administrations prior to and on September 11, 2001. Zelikow's prior involvement with the administration ofGeorge W. Bushled to opposition from the9/11 Family Steering Committee, citing the obvious conflict of interest of having previously worked on the Bush transition team” (23).

Zelikow’s conception of the threat of “catastrophic terrorism” was very compatible with their vision of belligerent U.S. hegemony and, therefore, useful to their agenda as his subsequent assignments evince. In 1998, around the time PNAC began promoting their radical philosophy of globe-spanning militarism (including the value of “a new Pearl Harbor”), Zelikow co-authored an eerily prescient warning of a massive terrorist event—the likes of which became a reality just three years later, on September 11, 2001. Given his eventual role in shielding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from a proper investigation, it is fascinating that his 1998 formulation of the nature and response to “catastrophic terrorism” appears to have been a de facto blueprint that prefigured subsequent events:

“Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently” (24).

Zelikow was suspiciously prophetic, given the added trauma of the WTC building collapses on 9/11. It is patently significant that he served on Bush’s transition team, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and was later in charge of shaping the official narrative of the 9/11 Commission Report (seemingly at the direction of the White House). These facts should raise suspicions as to his impartiality. As elucidated below, Zelikow used his power as executive director of the 9/11 Commission to protect the Saudis that were cozy with the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. Revealingly, the 9/11 Commission Report, over which Zelkow presided, failed to include the July meeting in which Tenet’s CIA was urgently trying to warn the White House of an impending attack: “Inexplicably, although Tenet brought up this meeting in his closed-door testimony before the 9/11 Commission, it was never mentioned in the committee’s final report” (16). This puts Zelikow plausibly within our posited cabal since he shaped the official narrative in a way that obfuscated the ambit of the conspiracy and effectively absolved the administration.

The above examples demonstrate that people in key positions of the Bush administration (and their neocon comrades) were conscious that a national tragedy like 9/11 would have advanced their goals. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone in the Bush administration with connections to PNAC would have been directly involved in the plot, nor that everyone involved was also a member of PNAC. But certainly, there was a shared philosophy within the institutional hierarchy of the executive branch that makes a plot to have enabled a successful attack contextually plausible. Obviously, there would have been varying degrees of participation within the American side of the conspiracy. The central players would have had key roles in planning and implementation. The more peripherally involved actors would have known to look the other way (allowing things to unfold in a desirable fashion) or helped to cover-up inconvenient evidence after the fact (e.g. Zelikow’s exculpatory omission of Saudi elite participation from the 9/11 Commission Report).

A complicit culture of intentional ineffectuality was ultimately behind the occlusive breakdown of intelligence-sharing that could have prevented the terrorist assault on September 11^th 2001. The flow of crucial information seems to have been thwarted from high levels of the Bush administration, as attested by the experience of then-acting counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke:

“In his memoir,Against All Enemies, Clarke wrote that Condoleezza Rice decided that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism should be downgraded. By demoting the office, he believed that the administration sent a signal to the national security bureaucracy that reduced the salience of terrorism. No longer would Clarke's memos go to the President; instead they had to pass through a chain of command of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and her deputyStephen Hadley, who bounced every one of them back” (25).

Such deliberate stifling of bureaucratic cooperation would also explain the puzzling failure of crucial information to have reached Clarke as well:

“Clarke, who led government-wide counterterrorism efforts from the White House during the Bush and Clinton administration, has said in the past that he was astonished to learn after 9/11 that the CIA had long known about the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar inside the United States.
“He said that if he had known anything about Hazmi and Mihdhar even days before 9/11, he would have ordered an immediate manhunt to find them—and that it would have succeeded, possibly disrupting the 9/11 plot” (26).

According to former senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) Thomas Drake, this exclusion of Clarke was a deliberate act of Vice President Dick Cheney. Drake was active in the NSA on September 11, 2001. In an interview with journalist Paul Jay, he gave the following explanation of how Cheney stifled the intelligence from the NSA and CIA concerning the oncoming assault:

“DRAKE: . . . Cheney had quickly created his own intelligence network from those he trusted. Clarke was not part of that network. Fact. So, he was cut out. JAY: So the back channel to Cheney is created pre-9/11, then. DRAKE: There is a back channel to Cheney. JAY: Pre-9/11. DRAKE: Pre-9/11 . . . JAY: Yeah, how do you not prioritize what you know about these guys, the Yemen connections, and there’s a presidential—a memo, briefing from the CIA, saying bin Laden plans to attack America? DRAKE: That’s correct. JAY: And you know two guys are in Seattle. DRAKE: Yup. They let it happen” (27).

Could this effort by Vice President Cheney (founding member of PNAC) be a completely unrelated coincidence? Or is it more likely a deliberate facilitation of the 9/11 tragedy?

Without knowing every detail, we can nevertheless discern that the impediment of normal inter-bureaucratic information relays was a calculated act on the part of the Bush administration. The fact that this increased vulnerability worked in perfect synergy with the Saudi elite’s support and aid of the hijackers makes it highly unlikely to have been a tragic coincidence, given that the two parties had a long and intimate history of cooperative affiliation.

This postulated conspiracy crossed national borders, contra Chomsky’s crude characterization of the inside job position as an exclusively Bush administration concoction. There were suspicious links between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the hijackers. For example, there is “evidence linking the Saudi royal family to Saudis in South Florida who reportedly had direct contact with the 9/11 hijackers before fleeing the United States just prior to the attacks” (28). The Ghazzawis were affluent Sarasota-based Saudis of high social rank.

“Phone records showed communication, dating back more than a year, that connected those in the house with the alleged plot leader, Mohammed Atta and his accomplices, including eleven of the other hijackers. Other records, kept by guards at the gated community, documented numerous visits to the house by a vehicle known to have been used by Atta, and indicated the physical presence in the car of Atta’s purported accomplice Ziad Jarrah. It appeared as if the Ghazzawi house was some kind of nerve center for the entire operation. . . . Of special interest is the Ghazzawis’ boss, the chairman of EIRAD Holding Co. Ltd.,Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud. He is a prominent and powerful member of the ruling Saudi royal family. . .” (Ibid.).

However, the more telling revelations concern the Saudi royals that were tied to the hijackers in California.

“Some leaked information from CIA and FBI documents allege that there is ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that Saudi government officials, including from the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles, gave the hijackers both financial and logistical aid. Among those named were then-Saudi AmbassadorPrince BandarandOsama Bassnan, a Saudi agent, as well as Americanal-QaedaclericAnwar al-Awlaki, 9/11 ringleaderMohamed Atta, andEsam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew ofKing Fahd” (29).

Consider Prince Bandar’s connections to both the hijackers and Bush administration neocons. Why would he have had any al-Qaeda connections? Does it seem likely that such a person would have been working against the wishes of the Americans with whom he had developed such intimate ties?

5. The Enemy of My Friends…

NC: “When they attributed it to Saudis, first of all, they alienated their most powerful ally in the region . . . most important ally. I mean, the Saudis are his [bin Laden’s] worst enemies. To try to get the U.S. to hate Saudis would be wonderful [for bin Laden]” (1).

To be fair, Chomsky echoes the conventional interpretation that Bush et al. did not want to offend the Saudis. This is a common observation in mainstream reportage:

“Immediately after the attacks, the Bush administration downplayed the Saudi connection and suppressed evidence that might link powerful Saudis to the funding of Islamic extremism and terrorism. The Bush White House didn’t want to upset its relationship with one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, which was also an American ally with enormous political influence in Washington . . .” (47).

At the turn of the millennium, the dynamic between the Saudis and U.S. was more complicated than these comments might lead one to believe. Chomsky’s remarks could give the false impression that the U.S. had no power in its relationship to the Kingdom. It is true that there were sometimes very public tensions between Crown Prince Abdullah and the Bush II administration regarding the American position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. (Yet, it is hard to know how much of that acrimony was exaggerated by Abdullah for the performative purpose of shoring up political legitimacy to a fervently anti-Israeli Arab population). Also, many eminent Saudis feared that, if captured, Osama bin Laden would reveal information about high-level Saudi support for previous terrorist operations (48). If apprehended and interrogated, he could have exposed criminal relationships of powerful Saudis royals. However, even granting such areas of tension, would the fear of alienating the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia be the driving factor in shielding them from perceived complicity in the 9/11 attacks, given that they were heavily dependent on the U.S. at an existential level?

“We have a lot of national interest in Saudi Arabia, as much as Saudi Arabia has an interest in our protection and in retaining the 60-year-old relationship” (49).
“After all, the House of Saud has long been virtually dependent on Washington’s protection for its very survival. Arms and security guarantees supplied by Washington represent a formidable obstacle to any Saudis seeking to take their country down a different path, and have played a significant, perhaps decisive, role in keeping the regime in power. Washington is the ultimate sponsor and guarantor of this repressive regional order, through massive arms deals, training for regime security forces, and the large-scalepresence of its own troopsand military apparatus” (50).

Thus, there was a fundamental reliance of the House of Saud on Washington. The two countries had grown into a symbiotic relationship. This is because:

“From its establishment in 1932 to the present day, Saudi Arabia has attached great importance to developing good relations with the U.S., which has been its most crucial security guarantor. Thanks to U.S. support, Saudi Arabia, for almost a century now, has been able to overcome the gravest regional threats confronting it. For the United States, the oversight of the enormous hydrocarbon resources of the Gulf region, especially those of the Saudis, is crucial to the U.S.'s own energy security and claim of global leadership. These mutual interests have been pivotal in keeping the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. very close since 1932. . . . No global power other than the U.S. has the motivation and capacity to ensure security in the Gulf; 2. Saudi-U.S. relations are based on interests, and not common values” (51).

Having been so-tethered, the House of Saud would have been equally as worried about alienating Washington as vice versa. Therefore, if the people in power in the United States had wanted “a new Pearl Harbor”, then support from a coterie of the Saudi ruling class to the attackers may not be difficult to fathom. They would have known they weren’t acting inappropriately with respect to their benefactors in Washington by supporting an operation that was ultimately desired. As demonstrated above, we know that the Bush neocons wanted to advance American global hegemony through an enhanced projection of military power. It was explicitly observed that they would need a traumatic event to rouse public support for such an agenda.

It is also worth remembering that there was much anti-government domestic sympathy for al-Qaeda within Saudi Arabia, which made dealing with them a delicate quandary for the ruling elites.

“There is a broad category of Saudis who agree with the extreme interpretations of religion and the call to jihad espoused by Osama bin Laden, and they're also in agreement with bin Laden's political perspective—accusing the Saudi royals of being puppets of the West, attacking the U.S. for support of Israel and its invasion of Iraq, opposing the U.S. troop presence in the region. There is a significant section of Saudi public opinion that is supportive of bin Laden, and it's within that sea that these al-Qaeda extremists swim. Setting out to crush al-Qaeda puts the government into conflict with this significant section of Saudi society, and that's a difficult problem” (52).

The relationship with the United States was even a touchy issue to the less extremist members of the Saudi public: “There is a demand in the Arab street for the United States to take a position that is perceived at least in the Arab world as even-handed” (49). Washington’s unabashed loyalty to Israel made an image of even-handedness difficult to convey. The Saudi regime was at the nexus of two opposing forces—American commercial and foreign policy priorities versus Arab public opinion. However, the Kingdom’s reliance on the United States was not something that could have easily been eclipsed, no matter how unpopular it made them (49-51). Case in point: Despite Crown Prince Abdullah’s antipathy to the prospect of a U.S. war against Iraq in early 2003, the Saudis did eventually aid and support the massive American military campaign (42, 53). This conflict of ostensibly incompatible interests (i.e., depending on the U.S. to remain in power while needing to placate a largely anti-U.S. population) was tangentially acknowledged in the PNAC report mentioned above:

“Although Saudi domestic sensibilities demand that the forces based in the Kingdom nominally remain rotational forces, it has become apparent that this is now a semi-permanent mission” (21).

However, an increased American military presence in the Gulf region (the likes of which would be justified by “a new Pearl Harbor”) may have been consonant to the desires of the more U.S.-friendly faction of the Saudi ruling class. It offered them the security of having a protective ally nearby. It could have been expected to bolster their hold on power while simultaneously lessening the need for a U.S. military footprint within Saudi borders, thus, diffusing domestic hostility to the Kingdom. As the House of Saud was not a monolith, it is conceivable that a 9/11 attack was perceived as agreeable to at least some in the Saudi regime: In contrast to Crown Prince Abdullah’s circ*mspection (53), Prince Bandar “encouraged military action against Iraq and supportedDick Cheney's agenda for ‘The New Middle East’, which called for pro-democracy programs in both Syria and Iran” (30).

So, while there was concern among the Saudi rulers about stirring the hornet’s nest of domestic tensions, it is far from clear that they would have been alienated by the United States blaming bin Laden’s organization for the crimes of 9/11, precisely because the “Saudis are his worst enemies.”

“Saudi-born Qaeda leaderOsama bin Ladenhas long called for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family to punish it for allowing U.S. military bases in the Kingdom. He broke with the monarchy in 1990 over the Gulf War, when the Kingdom invited U.S.-led coalition troops onto Saudi soil to defend its oil fields and to prepare to attack Iraq” (54).

Bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan since the mid-1990s, after being excommunicated from the house of Saud: “1994-- The Saudi government officially strips bin Laden of his citizenship, freezing all the remaining assets he has in the country. His family disowns him as well” (55). This suggests that bin Laden’s culpability in the 9/11 events would not necessarily reflect badly on a government that had previously rebuked him as a persona non grata. And the House of Saud would not have been antagonized by one of their principal enemies (bin Laden) catching the wrath of the American military behemoth, so long as he wasn’t put in a position to incriminate any of them (through the opportunity to stand trial and testify).

Chomsky’s elision of this pertinent information makes his reasoning uncogent. Back-channel support from Saudi elites for an attack attributable to bin Laden would have been a way to persecute a figurehead of anti-government sentiment while achieving aims of American friends that wanted a pretext for military interventions. So, blaming bin Laden (who the Saudi ruling elite viewed as an enemy, even stripping him of his citizenship) would likely have been within the Saudi regime’s self-interest, insofar as members of that regime would not have also appeared culpable for the 9/11 crime. It would have channeled perceived responsibility for the attacks away from the Saudis that we wouldn’t have wished to implicate, while bringing more American military force against one of the Kingdom’s most hated adversaries (who had been based in Afghanistan, not Saudi Arabia). In fact, the U.S. government and media were very quick to blame bin Laden without any substantive evidence linking him to the attacks; so, it didn’t seem to be against their perceived self-interest to do so:

“Through corporate media, the Bush administration told the American people that bin Laden was ‘Public Enemy Number One,’ responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. The federal government claims to have invaded Afghanistan to ‘root out’ bin Laden and the Taliban, yet nearly six years later, the FBI said that it had no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11” (56).

Interestingly, this is compatible with Osama bin Laden’s own attestation in his first interview after the attacks of 2001: "I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks” (57). In a statement issued within a week of the attacks, bin Laden said, "I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons” (58). This dovetails with the Pentagon’s dubious translation of bin Laden’s supposed confession in which certain words may have been added to make it sound more incriminating than it was in the original Arabic.

“Arabist Dr.Abdel El M. Husseini, one of the translators, states, ‘I have carefully examined the Pentagon’s translation. This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic . . .’ Prof. Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg sums it up: ‘The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribes them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it’” (59).

It is interesting that the two disaffirmations made by bin Laden are unequivocal and their authenticity remains undisputed, while the alleged confession is clouded in ambiguity and uncertainty. Of course, this does not decisively establish that bin Laden was honest in his denials. But it does suggest that it is a possibility worthy of serious consideration. Contrary to prior assumptions, the mere ideological affiliation of bin Laden with the hijackers doesn’t entail that he would have been involved in every terrorist mission in which they participated. Apparently, the FBI didn’t see a necessary connection. This is because, as more recent academic study has demonstrated, the organizational structure of al-Qaeda was a distributed network as opposed to a centralized network (60). Therefore, it is plausible that an operation could have been undertaken without bin Laden occupying a central role in its planning or execution.

“Although Osama bin Laden is commonly thought to be the leader of al-Qaeda, in reality there is no one in charge of this organization. He is attributed with providing the fundamental ideology, as well as the operating goals and objectives for this organization. However, it would not be possible to track an operational cell to him through an organizational structure” (Ibid.).

There were, however, later purported confessions by bin Laden (See Appendix C). In the years following 9/11, recordings in which he claimed responsibility for the attacks surfaced in the U.S. media. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether these statements were genuine and honest, genuine but mendacious, faked, mistranslated, or misconstrued. We must first wonder why bin Laden adamantly and unambiguously denied a role in the attacks immediately after they happened. Again, the authenticity of these early disavowals has not been disputed. However, the most explicit “confessions” were released much later and garner some suspicion since the U.S. government has had the technology to create fake recordings in service of their own psychological operations (PSYOPs) since the 1990s (61). The CIA even planned a propaganda video falsely portraying Saddam Hussein in a morally reprehensible light. In fact, they actually made a hoax propaganda video depicting bin Laden unfavorably (62). It was ultimately not released, but the fact that it was produced is enough to establish a precedent that casts doubt onto the later alleged confessions of bin Laden. Again, this does not prove that bin Laden’s admissions of responsibility were fabricated by the U.S. government. But it is certainly possible, given their contradiction by his early denials and the propensity of clandestine corners of the U.S. intelligence community to fake videos and run PSYOPs. The fact that Osama bin Laden was blamed for the crimes of 9/11 before any compelling evidence had been adduced shows that there was a desire (or a need) for him to be held responsible—which, in turn, demonstrates a potential motive to have manufactured evidence to support it. This would not have been out of character for an administration that so readily deceived and contrived false pretexts for their policy agenda (46).

Regardless of the status of bin Laden’s actual role in the attacks (or lack thereof), his estranged relatives were so frightened of guilt by association that they franticly fled the United States following 9/11 (presumably to escape any potential interrogation or persecution). This reflects an awareness of the establishment’s early commitment to the story that Osama was behind the attacks, despite a conspicuous dearth of incriminating evidence.

“Two dozen members of Osama bin Laden's family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, according to the Saudi ambassador to Washington” (63).
“Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the 52-year-old Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, had been in Washington orchestrating the exodus of about 140 Saudis scattered throughout the country who were members of, or close to, two enormous families. One was the House of Saud, the family that rules the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and that, owing to its vast oil reserves, is the richest family in the world. The other was the ruling family’s friends and allies the bin Ladens, who, in addition to owning a multi-billion-dollar construction conglomerate, had spawned the notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden” (44).

Consider how this reaction evinces an anticipated backlash towards these two groups of high-profile Saudis. As noted above, the Saudi Kingdom was eventually revealed to have had ties to the hijackers (28-39). Is this another insignificant coincidence? Perhaps there was concern that these connections would be uncovered, hence the fear of blowback. The bin Ladens that fled were relatives of the man that was blamed for the attacks. Their worry is understandable, despite the absence of substantial evidence linking Osama to the plot (64). Their flight from the country appears to have been a preemptive measure of self-protection. This move is another indication of the ubiquitous commitment to the incipient narrative that casted Osama as the main villain even before a strong case could have been levied against him. His role as mastermind was presented as a self-evident fact without a sufficient reason to believe so. It became the default story to which government and media fervently adhered from the very beginning of the post-9/11 era. (Interestingly, the Saudi ambassador to Washington that orchestrated this urgent evacuation was none other than Prince Bandar—who arguably had more incriminating links to the 9/11 hijackers than Osama bin Laden had.) There is enough credible information controverting the assumption that bin Laden was directly responsible for 9/11 to leave us uncertain. It is plausible that he was being honest in his disavowals of the accusation that he was behind it. Unfortunately, the inconsistent nature of Osama’s post-9/11 statements negates their evidentiary value in support of either the inside job thesis or the mainstream establishment’s account (See Appendix C). In our final analysis, the combined effect of his contradictory assertions is null. However, the answer to the question of bin Laden’s involvement, whatever it happens to be, does not invalidate the evidence for a social network that included both Saudi and American participants as co-conspirators.

As we saw, a crucial piece of background information neglected by Chomsky is the well-supported inference that the principal Saudi royal connected to the hijackers was Prince Bandar. He was also very close to the Bush administration and agreed with their agenda (30, 43, 44). Taken together, these facts are a sine qua non of this inside job theory. Their importance cannot be overemphasized: As mentioned before, it is difficult to believe that Prince Bandar (or the Saudi regime) would have purposely contributed to anything so disastrous to the United States, as 9/11 was, had it not been welcomed at a high level of the U.S. political establishment. The history of his loyalties and the Saudi government’s dependence on the U.S. at the beginning of the 21^st century make this obvious. Chomsky has it backwards: Far from alienating the Saudi ruling class, the attribution of the September 11^th attacks to bin Laden shifted the ire of the Americans onto a shared adversary of the Saudi regime. It clearly satisfied the desires of the U.S. neocons in power at the time, to which the House of Saud was largely beholden. After all, Bin Laden had been blamed for the terrorist attacks against U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, so he was already in the crosshairs. The difficulties that bin Laden created in Afghanistan (provoking airstrikes from Clinton and scaring away Unocal) turned him into more than just a terrorist. He became a problematic stumbling block to American corporate and strategic interests. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had already disowned him for working against the legitimacy of their rule. Aside from not wanting to cause tumult among the restive Arabs that felt some solidarity with al-Qaeda, the House of Saud would have been simpatico with the U.S. regarding bin Laden. Somehow, Chomsky misses the importance of this not-so-subtle distinction when he treats the Saudis as a monolith.

To the extent that the official narrative was believed, it is hard to imagine an American public so-indoctrinated would have demanded attacking Saudi Arabia—a government that was also at odds with Osama bin Laden. But despite this, many prominent Saudi’s were fearful of persecution as the hijackers’ nationalities were made public (63). An intense push ensued on multiple fronts to narrow the concern of popular consciousness onto the Afghanistan-based bin Laden and al-Qaeda. An active effort was made to shield the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from being implicated. Prince Bandar did his part to guide the narrative in the desired direction:

“With the help of P.R. giant Burson-Marsteller, Bandar launched an international media blitz. He placed ads in newspapers across the country condemning the attacks and disassociating Saudi Arabia from them. On TV, he hammered home the same points: Saudi Arabia would support America in its fight against terrorism. The hijackers could not even be considered real Saudis, he asserted, because ‘we in the Kingdom, the government and the people of Saudi Arabia, refuse to have any person affiliated with terrorism to be connected to our country.’ That included Osama bin Laden, Bandar said, since the government had taken away his passport in response to his terrorist activities” (44).

The meticulous guidance of Philip Zelikow (18, 19) ensured that any supportive connections to the hijackers (e.g. funding) were effectively downplayed or ignored in the official investigation of the 9/11 Commission:

“Staff Director of the 9/11 Commission, Phil Zelikow, actively worked against any thorough investigation into the KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] and its role in the 9/11 attacks. So, when two JICI staffers were brought over to the 9/11 Commission to continue their work on the links between the KSA and the 9/11 attacks, they were blocked by Zelikow. Zelikow fired one investigator when she tried to access the 28 pages [that implicate Prince Bandar] as part of her further investigation and work for the commission. And the second staffer (who was the person responsible for writing the 28 pages in the first place when he worked on the JICI) was actively thwarted from his investigation by Zelikow, as well. In fact, once the 9/11 Commission report was in its final draft form, Zelikow ‘re-wrote’ the entire section that dealt with the Saudis—leaving out vital, highly pertinent, and extremely damning information. Thus, when a person says the 9/11 Commission, ‘found no evidence linking the Saudis,’ be wary of the cute context of the words. The 9/11 Commission ‘found no evidence’ because they were either never allowed to look for any evidence or whatever evidence they did find was conveniently written out of the final report, compliments of Phil Zelikow. Why would Zelikow block his own investigation? No one knows for sure, but for starters, Zelikow was taking regular phone calls from White House political adviser Karl Rove whose job at the time was to ramp up the drumbeat for the war in Iraq—not a war with Saudi Arabia. In addition, Zelikow was part of George W. Bush’s transition team and good friends with Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. In fact, it was Zelikow’s job to brief the incoming Bush administration about national security issues” (48).

The CIA also contributed to shaping the establishment-sanctioned story:

“The public’s understanding of the 9/11 attacks is heavily informed by testimonies delivered by CIA torture victims under the most extreme duress imaginable. And Bikowsky, a veteran of the Alec Station that ran cover for at least two would-be 9/11 hijackers, had been in charge of interrogating the alleged perpetrators of the attacks” (64).

This manipulative curation of information and orchestrated misdirection prevented the public from seeing the incriminating links between powerful players in Washington, the House of Saud, and the terrorists. It seems less likely to have been about alienating the symbiotically dependent Saudi regime since they typically yielded to U.S. pressure anyway (42). All the effort and resources to wage a public relations campaign, employ inhumanely coercive forms of interrogation, and avoid a probing investigation would have been unnecessary had there not been something important to hide (44, 48, 64). The implication of the Saudi royals’ involvement (as part of the hijacker support network) was likely a primary reason for it.

It was relatively easy for Bush (et al.) to direct the American population’s thirst for revenge towards other countries in their subsuming mission against internationally based terrorists. The administration fixed the nation’s attention on Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq while deflecting attention away from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The propagandistic utility of a “war on terror” was its broad applicability (not narrowly identified with one specific country): “The naming of the campaign [the War on Terror] uses ametaphor of warto refer to a variety of actions that do not constitute a specific war as traditionally defined” (65). It was an umbrella policy that could encapsulate any operation in any country, so long as a rhetorical link with terrorism could be made to the targeted nation. With such flexibility to selectively frame interventionist justifications, the Bush administration exercised confident control over which countries to demonize. The neocons in Washington and their powerful Saudi comrades obviously assumed they could keep the Kingdom in the clear and evade any scrutiny or accountability. Yet, their aggressive management of the narrative from the immediate aftermath of 9/11 seems disproportionate had there been no high-level malfeasance to conceal (44, 48, 64).

Chomsky’s insistence that the involvement of Saudi-born hijackers precludes a Bush administration role in the attacks is misguided, to say the least. The truth of the matter is almost the direct opposite: The Saudis that were involved behind the scenes give us good reason to suspect Bush administration cooperation and complicity. It borders on the absurd to assume that prominent members of the House of Saud supported the 9/11 attack because they secretly hated the Americans. Conversely, they formed a tightly knit circle with an extensive history of mutual assistance and converging agendas (42-44, 49-51). Hence, any support given by the Saudi royals to the terrorists was likely at the behest (or in agreement with) their neocon confederates in the Bush administration. Chomsky’s refusal to factor in this obviously relevant distinction (the Saudi jihadis that were blamed as opposed to the Saudi intelligence operatives that enabled them behind the scenes) is an oddity that begs explanation. It contravenes the careful attention to details that characterizes his other analyses of historical and geopolitical affairs.

“The veteran FBI deep cover agent Aukai Collins concluded his memoir with a chilling reflection which was only reinforced by Don Canestraro’s bombshell declaration: ‘I was very mistrustful about the fact that bin Laden’s name was mentioned literally hours after the attack. . . . I became very skeptical about anything anybody said about what happened, or who did it. I thought back to when I was still working for them and we had the opportunity to enter Bin Laden’s camp. Something just hadn’t smelled right. . . . To this day I’m unsure who was behind September 11, nor can I even guess. . . . Someday the truth will reveal itself, and I have a feeling that people won’t like what they hear’” (40).

6. Another Blind Spot: Building 7 Revisited

Chomsky has done his listeners a disservice by offering transparently inadequate arguments against skeptics of the official 9/11 story. Aside from dismissing the dissenting experts (See Chapter 2 and Appendix A), one of Chomsky’s most egregious errors is his failure to reckon with the testimony of people that were in the immediate vicinity of the WTC buildings near the time of their collapses. It is interesting that this facet of 9/11 does not show up in his remarks, not even in refutation. Instead, Chomsky decided to bracket the entire issue of World Trade Center 7 and its inconvenient implications.

As previously noted, the professional organization focused on this facet of the tragedy (AE911) has pointed to suspicious anomalies of all three WTC building collapses. However, the fact that an independent study from a university engineering faculty has so thoroughly refuted NIST’s story of WTC 7’s collapse should give us pause:

“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building” (66).

The conclusion of insider involvement does not hinge on the anomalous destruction of WTC 7. However, the probability of that scenario being correct is raised when the peculiarity of the collapses is acknowledged. If pre-planned demolitions were involved, how does the official explanation (which Chomsky prefers) account for this? Could it have been completely disconnected from the terrorist operations on 9/11? A mentioned before, that seems highly unlikely. If it was a standard legally arranged demolition, how could it have been a surprise to people who were employed there? This is a counterfactual point that Chomsky completely misses: Barry Jennings, the Deputy Director of Emergency Services for the New York City Housing Authority, was called in to WTC 7 to assist the emergency response coordination on the morning of 9/11. After having been trapped in the building for an extended period, he finally managed to get out. While fleeing the area, he heard about the collapse: “That’s when I found out Building Seven came down; I was so surprised” (67). A normal aboveboard razing would have been known and expected by the people with occupational responsibilities in the building scheduled for destruction. Certainly, someone in Jennings’ position would have known about a legitimately sanctioned demolition before being called to work there. While in the building, Jennings witnessed a quickly abandoned workplace—not a scene you would anticipate had a planned demolition been scheduled for the near future:

“Upon arriving into the OEM EOC [Emergency Operations Center], we noticed that everybody was gone. I saw coffee that was on the desk. The smoke was still coming off the coffee. I saw half-eaten sandwiches” (Ibid.).

How likely would the people who so hastily vacated their workstations have even been there on a day when a demolition was planned? One could speculate that the building had been wired for destruction for some time in the coming days or weeks, and the events of 9/11 made them decide to do it ahead of schedule. (The evacuation of employees from WTC 7 following the first plane impact [at the North Tower] was immanently sensible. This is not surprising, given the unprecedented nature of the tragedy befalling downtown NYC.) However, it seems highly improbable that anyone would have even been allowed to report to work in a building that was in the process of being prepared for demolition, let alone one that had already been fully rigged for destruction (as it seems WTC 7 was). This is an important and revealing deduction often omitted in discussions of Jennings’ harrowing experience. No structure that had been wired for a controlled implosion would have been staffed by anyone other than people working towards (or aware of) its eventual destruction in some capacity. The available evidence points to a preplanned professional demolition of WTC 7 (as indicated by the UAF study, to which NIST has no rebuttal). Imagine a normal office building: Would employees be permitted to come to work in city hall if it had been rigged with explosive charges? Would factory workers be allowed to labor on an assembly line had their entire facility been prepped with explosive charges for the purpose of bringing it down? As counterintuitive as that would be, all indications are that WTC 7 had been functioning as a normal work setting for the offices within it up to the morning of the attacks. Ergo, this was not an aboveboard implosion prepared under the expected protocols. This is a problematic anomaly that Chomsky shows no awareness of or interest in. Yet, it is a clue that the official story is unsustainable.

It remains obscure as to exactly why WTC 7 was imploded since it is not attributable to an aircraft impact. Since the other two collapses (WTC 1 and 2) were accompanied by plane crashes, it is plausible that the same was intended for Building 7. It may have been the original target of flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania. Most of the evidence suggests that this hijacked plane was headed to targets in Washington D.C. (probably the White House or Capitol). However, the passengers wrested control from the terrorists and crashed before it could get close enough to be certain of its intended destination. It was on a southeast-bound trajectory prior to its erratic descent. It is conceivable that it would have turned slightly north and headed back towards New York to strike WTC 7. However, this is only conjecture. Unfortunately, we may never know for sure what the design for the hijacking of flight 93 was.

There is evidence that another hijacking (out of JFK International Airport) was planned for the morning of September 11, 2001. Fortunately, the flight was aborted before takeoff:

“The captain of a United Airlines flight scheduled to take off the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, is convinced his plane was intended to be part of the coordinatedterroristattack.
“The flight attendants and pilot aboard United Flight 23 believe they were indeed targeted. . . . United 23, a 767 aircraft, was scheduled to depart JFK at 9 AM, bound for L.A. Six passengers aroused the suspicion of flight attendants for various reasons.
“The plane was near the runway, ready to take off, when JFK was abruptly closed after the World Trade Center was hit. It taxied back to the gate and the plane was fully evacuated and locked” (68).

Perhaps this was part of the hijacking plan that involved the WTC complex. Had it been allowed to take off, it might have rerouted to impact Building 7 once the terrorists had commandeered the aircraft. It is certainly plausible since the adjacent collapses of Towers 1 and 2 were preceded by hijacked plane strikes.

An additional possibility is that Building 7’s demolition was intended to cover up some aspect of the coordination or implementation of the Twin Tower attacks. The conspirators might have assumed that the chaos of the day would obfuscate and distract from how genuinely aberrant the collapse was. The New York City Office of Emergency Management was headquartered there. Interestingly, this office was a central hub for coordinating drills and agency responses to emergency situations. (In an amazing stroke of luck, an alternate emergency command center was set up on Pier 92 just prior to 9/11 for FEMA drills scheduled for Sept. 12th, according to the testimony of NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani.) The C.I.A. also had an office in WTC 7. Maybe the building was brought down to impede investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as they were also a tenant (69). There are multiple possible reasons for bringing down WTC 7.

In the absence of any decisive evidence of a specific motive (or motives), we can at least say this: If there was an inside job involved, it is imaginable that the tentacles of the conspiracy extended to individuals that had an interest in Tower 7’s destruction. It is less explicable on the assumption that al-Qaeda was the only responsible party. Whatever the reason for imploding WTC 7, it seems near certain that it was the result of a professional demolishment. Honest historians of 9/11 do not have the luxury of ignoring the very persuasive case for controlled demolitions. As AE911 has shown, the other two WTC collapses also evince signs of having been assisted by explosive charges (70). Hence, the fall of Building 7 likely originated from the same criminal plot as the terrorist events that occurred in its immediate vicinity on the same day. However, the common cause (that connects the fall of the WTC 1, 2 and 7) cannot be that Building 7 collapsed due to damage from debris ejected by the violent disintegration of the Twin Towers. Many commentators assume this must be the case. Yet, not even NIST attempts this argument in its forensic engineering study, presumably because there is no evidence that such extreme structural damage to Building 7 had occurred prior to its implosion. Any expulsion of projectile debris from Towers 1 and 2 cannot ultimately account for the neatly symmetrical collapse that was observed. Again, we are left with the nagging question: What are the chances that two other anomalous collapses would have randomly occurred within the same complex only a few hours before? Surely the destruction of WTC 7 was a result of the same plan. Some may protest on the basis that the task of properly rigging demolitions required a high level of specialized logistical capability and time-consuming work. However, there are reports of unusual activities in the WTC buildings in the lead up to September 11^th that may be indicative of such preparation:

“It is possible, for example, that they related to efforts to secretly prepare the Twin Towers and WTC 7 to be brought down with explosives as part of the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps the heightened security at the World Trade Center and the supposed maintenance work on the elevators were intended to create cover stories for the men who were planting the explosives. If a person inquired about mysterious workers they had seen at the Trade Center, they could be falsely told these men were there to repair the elevators or help out in response to the heightened security. Or if someone asked about unusual work they had noticed being carried out in the buildings, they could be told this work related to repairs on the elevators, even though it in fact related to the preparations for demolishing the buildings.
“It is striking, in light of the fact that the World Trade Center was about to become the scene of a massive terrorist attack, that security at the Trade Center was suddenly increased around the end of August 2001.
“And Ben Fountain, who worked for a company on the 47th floor of the South Tower, recalled that in the ‘few weeks’ before September 11, he and his colleagues were evacuated from the building ‘a number of times.’ It is unclear whether this was because of the heightened security. All the same, the amount of evacuations was ‘unusual,’ Fountain commented. Brown similarly said the increased security measures were ‘unusual.’ ‘We had wondered if something was up,’ he remarked” (71).

Is this another random coincidence? Or is there a 9/11 connection? Given the problematic issue of access, it is indisputable that it would have been more feasible for a coalition of U.S. based power elites to have employed the necessary skill-intensive labor to covertly rig a building for demolition than for a loosely affiliated scattering of foreign terrorists to have done it. Such a colossal breach of security in a building that housed powerful federal agencies (CIA, SEC, IRS, DOD) would have required privileged and exclusive connections to high levels of the U.S. establishment (69).

In effect, the fall of the three WTC buildings was a reification of Philip Zelikow’s ominously predictive concept of “catastrophic terrorism” that “could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security” (24). The enhanced public trauma evoked by the dramatic collapses was probably the ultimate purpose of the apparent application of professional demolition techniques. The desired effect may have been just what Zelikow anticipated: “More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently” (Ibid.).

7. ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’ and the Misapplication of Scientific Reasoning

Chomsky has violated a maxim of rigorous historiography by eliding relevant background information. He also engages in fallacious argumentation when dealing with alternative accounts of 9/11. It is important to remember that the truth movement he opposes is not monolithic as it encompasses a multiplicity of hypotheses that challenge the official narrative, from the outright outlandish to the more conservative and reasonable. The minimal inside job theory that has been explored in this monograph has yet to be adequately addressed in Chomsky’s glib hand-waving of “conspiracy theories”.

8. Concluding Assessment

The inside job theory resolves the glaring discordance of the Bush administration’s early focus on eradicating terrorism with their contemporaneous obstinate inefficaciousness about addressing monitions of terrorist attacks (9, 15-18). The cumulative effect of the evidence, as sparse as it is, presses towards an uncomfortable conclusion: The bureaucratic disconnect within the U.S. national security establishment that opened the door for the 9/11 hijackings was most likely by design, which implies some degree of coordination between the PNAC neocons in the White House and the Saudi royals with their intelligence operatives who assisted the hijackers.

In summary, Chomsky makes the following errors when attempting to refute alternative 9/11 theories:

He makes distorted hypothetico-deductive assumptions by neglecting crucial background information and oversimplifying the relevant contexts.
He critiques an inference from a premise in isolation, thereby circumventing the force of consilience.
He dismissively categorizes inconvenient information (suggestive of an inside job) under the rubric of random coincidence without specifying which facts he has so-designated and why.
He clouds the field of argumentation with a misleading analogy to the unpredictable outcomes of scientific experimentation and glosses over countervailing data as the inevitable fog of unexplained features common to complex systems.
He claims that the organization of historical data into an alternative explanatory pattern (i.e., a causal theory with an inside job element) is underdetermined to the point of vacuity, without comparing its merits to those of the officially sanctioned explanatory pattern according to the criteria of IBE. This is an abuse of the concept of contrastive underdetermination since it lacks a coherent elucidation of its pertinence to the theories about September 11^th that are in contention.

As a result of his omissions and distortions, Chomsky’s probability assessments are skewed in favor of the official account. The narrow scope of considerations that form the basis of his inferences leads him astray into untenable historiographical territory. A more granular scrutiny of highly significant details regarding the web of nontrivial relationships and motivations paints quite a different picture than the one to which Chomsky adheres. His credibility (gained from a record of admirable stances against unethical government policies) gives his analysis of 9/11 a delusive aura of seriousness and cogency. Chomsky seems to have fallen prey to an irrational tendentiousness. How else could such an astute high-functioning analyst pass over a plausible evidence-based historical reconstruction (i.e., the Saudi royal-U.S. neocon conspiracy theory)? We are left to wonder if he is uncharacteristically ignorant and uninformed, or if he deliberately misleads his audience. Avoiding a cynical conjecture of malign motivations to deceive, we can grant the more charitable interpretation that he is simply a victim of his own prejudicial inclinations. For whatever reason, it is clear that Chomsky has been reduced to sophistry in his reinforcement of a hackneyed narrative.

Appendix A: Evidential Weight of Expert Opinion

NC: “You’re right that there’s a consensus among a miniscule number of architects and engineers. A tiny number. A couple of them are perfectly serious” (78).

In this statement, Chomsky slips into a common tactic of 9/11 truth debunkers when discussing the multitude of architects, engineers and other qualified professionals that have publicly doubted the NIST account of the WTC building collapses. He downplays the significance of the number of experts (over 3,600 as of 2024) that have voiced skepticism about the official account. The rhetorical power of his emphasis on the “tiny number” of architects and engineers that have publicly questioned the official story comes from the insinuation is that such skepticism is unwarranted since it is only expressed by a minority of the people that work in those areas. This line of reasoning implicitly relies on misleading conflations and the formal logical fallacy called affirming the consequent. Formally, it can be expressed as the following syllogism:

Premise 1.) If A, then BP1 A →B
Premise 2.) B P2 B
Conclusion: Therefore, A ؞ A

Or:

Premise 1.) [A] If a relevantly credentialed expert publicly criticizes the official 9/11 story, then [B] they doubt the official 9/11 story.
Premise 2.) [B] An expert doubts the official 9/11 story.
Conclusion: Therefore, [A] that expert will publicly criticize the official 9/11 story.

Obviously, the conclusion in the above argument form does not follow from the premises.

Hence: ¬ ((A→B) → (B→A))

This fallacy can be represented with a Venn diagram (see below). The fact that all members of A are members of B does not entail that all members of B belong to A. There may be many more experts that doubt the official story, but for one reason or another (careerism, fear of ridicule, peer pressure, etc.), refuse to voice their objections.

Another crucial point is that not all credentialed professionals of relevant fields have even delved into the issue. Chomsky understands that the germane opinions are from the experts who have evaluated the data: “I’m willing to let the professional societies determine it, if they get the information” (89). Yet, he seems to take for granted that the “professional societies” will embrace such a culturally contentious and stigmatized topic with the requisite rigor and detached objectivity. This assumption has been undermined by the steadfast exclusion of dissenting views from prominent guild publications that have addressed the WTC collapses (91). Only the applied expertise of those who probe the issue free of the muddle of unscientific biases is useable. If that group is our set C (see diagram), it may be that B would be a relatively large subset (if not coterminous with C). We can also represent the entirety of those with relevant expertise as the biggest set [D], becoming the outermost circle in the Venn diagram. By tacitly invoking this totality, Chomsky may be covertly treating set C as coterminous with set D, and contrasting that fallaciously conflated set with A. But, as he surely knows, the only ratio that matters is that of subset B (all the relevant experts that doubt the official story) and set C (the entire pool of relevant experts that have evaluated the data in a scientifically dispassionate way). Unfortunately, this ratio is not easily accessible as we lack data for these numbers. Yet, proper acknowledgment of these categorical distinctions is crucial for any honest appeal to expert testimony. Disappointingly, Chomsky’s polemic relies on a fallacy of category conflation:

“Conflationis the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, opinions, etc., into one, often in error.
“Inlogic, it is the practice of treating two distinctconceptsas if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts” (92).

While this conflation is not explicit in Chomsky’s remarks, it is strongly implied by the fact that he calls attention to the “miniscule number of architects and engineers” as if it has supportive relevance to his dismissal of their concerns.

According to Chomsky, the reason offered by truthers for the (relatively) small number of vocal advocates within the expert communities is fear of government reprisal: “[T]he scientists and engineers and professional societies and physicists are so intimidated by the government that they’re afraid; they don’t have the courage to take this position” (77). This may be a straw man, as it is hard to determine how common this excuse actually is within the 9/11 truth community. But this posited motivation, to the extent that it is operative, is superfluous and moot since it is entirely plausible that quotidian careerism (with its concomitant prioritization of reputation management) acts as a sufficient disincentive to engagement and dispassionate analysis by those with the technical qualifications to do so. The threat of being labeled a conspiracy theorist for merely considering an alternative position about the building collapses might be perceived as enough of a nuisance to many professional engineers and physicists to discourage them from looking into it objectively. Presumably, the architects and engineers who have publicly objected to NIST’s conclusions have done so out of a sense of professional integrity since the consequences of taking such a contentious position are mostly negative. Adopting a stigmatized cause typically does not advance one’s status within a guild. To the extent that such activism has any career effects at all, they are expected to be detrimental. This probably explains why many in set D are excluded from subset C. Given the parochial bias that plagues the official explanations advanced by NIST (and derivative parties), it would not be surprising if B encompasses a majority of the members of set C. It would certainly be a mistake to presume that A:D (an undoubtedly small ratio) accurately reflects B:C (which may be very large). Yet, this befuddling conflation is strongly implied by Chomsky’s emphasis of the small size of the subset expert community that has joined the 9/11 truth cause. However, once these categorical nuances are introduced, A:D becomes irrelevant to assessing the evidential weight of credentialed opinion on the issue of the WTC building collapses. The ratio of B:C is the only ratio that matters, regardless of how difficult it may be to ascertain.

Another slipshod rhetorical tactic employed by Chomsky is the insinuation that a prevalent research modality of 9/11 truth advocates is the faulty assumption that expertise (sufficient to adjudicate technical issues) is gained after devoting only minimal time and effort on investigation: “Now there happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the internet and think they know a lot of physics” (Ibid.). This may be a hasty generalization as we have no statistics on how pervasive this attitude has been within the 9/11 truth movement. More importantly, Chomsky should acknowledge the crucial distinction between the citation of expertise and the claim to possess said expertise. He often accuses 9/11 researchers of feigning mastery of engineering and physics after only an hour of superficial investigation. However, repeating the judgments of actual experts is not the same as pretending to be such an expert. Chomsky seems to ignore this differentiation so to strawman the truth movement. It is legitimate for amateur researchers, with no relevant qualifications, to note that the scientific objections of AE911 to the NIST report have not been answered. Instead, NIST has transparently deflected and avoided the informed criticisms of its work on the WTC collapses:

“If the investigators at NIST were truly confident of their findings and wanted the public to accept their report as scientifically sound, they should have opened the door wide to scrutiny and made it easy for other engineers to attempt to replicate their analysis. This is how the scientific process works. But NIST has done exactly the opposite of that since issuing its final report in November 2008” (93).

The hindrance of the normal corrective process of disputation even manifests in scientific studies upon which NIST relied for their questionable collapse theories (91). It is reasonable to conclude that NIST behaves in this evasive manner because its investigators have no rebuttals on scientific grounds. No other reason makes sense. Sadly, this is another area in which Chomsky refuses to heed the problematic issues of the officially sanctioned 9/11 story. Through fallacious reasoning, exclusion of relevant information, and mischaracterization, he has revealed himself to be an unreliable analyst of this important historical issue.

Appendix B: Chomsky vs. the Inside Job Position—Bayesian Consilience and Conditionality

A social network analysis of the relationships under consideration (included in our background knowledge [B]) makes the hypothesized emergent conspiracy to facilitate 9/11 circ*mstantially credible. However, the problematic task of educing a useful Bayesian prior probability for this type of elite conspiracy (due to the inaccessibility of the applicable leak rate) warrants an assignment of 50%—making it just as likely as not.

Thus: p(N|B) = p(N̅|B)

The priors can therefore be omitted from the calculation since they have no effect on the relative posterior probabilities. It then becomes a battle of evidential likelihoods:

“A Bayesian approach to the inference of some common cause would consider the variational group as evidence [the colligated explananda associated with 9/11: H, C, S, & D] and the description of some common cause [N] as a hypothesis that should increase the likelihood of the evidence more than the competing hypothesis that members of the variational group had separate causes” (90).

Clarification of Probabilistic Conditionality

It is crucial to clarify the probabilities of interest: We are not concerned with the probability of Bandar’s relationships on the premise of an inside job. It may be very low. But this ratio is immaterial since we already have an evidential basis establishing Bandar’s suspicious connections. We need to keep clear that these two probabilities are not the same:

p(C|N) ≠ p(N|C)

The probability of an inside job on the premise of Bandar’s connections is our focus. The conclusion inferred from our background knowledge (in conjunction with the confluent anomalies: stifled prevention and the “new Pearl Harbor” motive) is that, given Bandar’s relationships, the probability of an inside job is greater than the probability of the official story:

p(N|C) > p(A|C)

The conditionality is in the same direction regarding the likelihood of controlled demolitions at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001:

We are not interested in the probability of the pre-planned orchestrated destruction of the structures based on the assumption that there was an inside job:

p(D|N)

We are, instead, inferring the likelihood of an inside job based on the evidence for controlled demolition that we already have established (to a high probability) as a premise, accompanied by other evidence that is incongruous with the official narrative:

p(N|D) > p(A|D)

Appendix C: Chronological List of Statements Attributed to Osama bin Laden about 9/11

1.) This communiqué was issued by Osama bin Laden to Al Jazeera circa 10/16/2001:

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons. I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations” (58).

2.) This interview was conducted by the Pakistani newspaper Daily Ummat on 10/28/2001:

Daily UMMAT:“You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington. What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be?”

Osama bin Laden: “In the name of Allah (God), the most beneficent, the most merciful. Praise be toAllah, Who is the creator of the whole universe and Who made the Earth as an abode for peace, for the whole humankind. Allahis the Sustainer, who sent Prophet Muhammad (saw) for our guidance. I am thankful to TheUmmat Group of Publications, which gave me the opportunity to convey my viewpoint to the people, particularly the valiant andmomin(true Muslim) people of Pakistan who refused to believe the lies of thedemon(Pakistani military dictatorGeneral Pervez Musharraf).
“I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.

“It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath ofGodupon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those Muslim countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia?

“Only one conclusion could be derived from theindifference of the United States and the Westto these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Muslim countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Muslims.
“The U.S. has no friends, nor does it want to keep any because the prerequisite of friendship is to come to the level of the friend or consider him at par with you. America does not want to see anyone equal to it. It expects slavery from others. Therefore, other countries are either its slaves or subordinates.

“However, our case is different. We have pledged slavery toGodAlmighty alone and after this pledge there is no possibility to become the slave of someone else. If we do that it will be disregardful to both our Sustainer and his fellow beings. Most of the world nations upholding their freedom are the religious ones, which are the enemies of the United States, or the U.S. itself considers them as its enemies.
“The countries which do not agree to become the U.S. slaves are China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria [Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia] and Russia. Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.

“According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the U.S. Government has stated. But theBush Administrationdoes not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive.
“They can be anyone, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the U.S. itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with PresidentBushever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.
“Then there are intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy.

“So, they first started propaganda againstUsamaandTalebanand then this incident happened. You see, theBush Administrationapproved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example.
“Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the U.S. secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the U.S.Drug Enforcement Department(. . . Administration- DEA) are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget.
“General Noriegawas made a drug baron by theCIAand, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it isPresident Bushor any other U.S. President, they cannot bringIsraelto justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks” (57).

3.) This is from an interview of bin Laden by Al Jazeera also from late October, 2001:

Q: “Sheikh, the question that's on the mind of many people around the world: America claims that it has convincing evidence of your collusion in the events in New York and Washington. What's your answer?”
BIN LADEN: “America has made many accusations against us and many other Muslims around the world. Its charge that we are carrying out acts of terrorism is an unwarranted description.
“We never heard in our lives a court decision to convict someone based on a "secret" proof it has. The logical thing to do is to present a proof to a court of law. What many leaders have said so far is that America has an indication only, and not a tangible proof. They describe those brave guys who took the battle to the heart of America and destroyed its most famous economic and military landmarks.
“They did this, as we understand it, and this is something we have agitated for before, as a matter of self-defense, in defense of our brothers and sons in Palestine, and to liberate our sacred religious sites/things. If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists.”
Q: “Sheikh, those who follow your statements and speeches may link your threats to what happened in America. To quote one of your latest statements: ‘I swear that America won't enjoy security before we live it for real in Palestine.’ It is easy for anyone following developments to link the acts to your threats.”
BIN LADEN: “It is easy to link them. We have agitated for this for years and we have issued statements and fatwas to that effect. This appeared in the investigations into the four young men who destroyed the American center in Ulayya in Riyadh, as disclosed and published by the Saudi government. The [Saudis] reported that they were influenced by some of the fatwas and statements that we issued. Also, apart from that, incitement continues in many meetings and has been published in the media. If they mean, or if you mean, that there is a link as a result of our incitement, then it is true. We incite because incitement is our [unintelligible] today. God assigned incitement to the best of all mankind, Mohammed, who said, ‘Fight for the sake of God. Assign this to no one but yourself, and incite the faithful.’ This is a true response. We have incited battle against Americans and Jews. This is true” (94).

This statement is compatible with Osama bin Laden’s previous denials. Here he admitted guilt for incitement only. Bin Laden clearly meant that his anti-American message informed the ideology of some of the hijackers on 9/11. He also made a point of saying that no evidence had been adduced proving his direct involvement with the plot. Taken together, this suggests that he was, again, denying any role in planning the attacks of 9/11.

4.) This video recording of bin Laden speaking to his associates was released by the U.S. State Department on 12/13/2001. It seems to have been recorded in Afghanistan after 9/11 and before the U.S. invasion:

"[W]e calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. . . . We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day. We had finished our work that day and had the radio on. . . . Muhammad(Atta) from the Egyptian family (meaning the Al Qaida Egyptian group), was in charge of the group. . . . The brothers, who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America but they didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter. But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes" (95).

*The disparities between the audible Arabic and the English translation are indictive of propagandistic manipulation:

“On December 20, 2001, German TV channel ‘Das Erste’ broadcast an analysis of the White House's translation of the videotape. On the program "Monitor", two independent translators and an expert onoriental studiesfound the White House's translation to be both inaccurate and manipulative stating ‘At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic’ and that the words used that indicate foreknowledge cannot be heard at all in the original. Prof. Gernot Rotter, professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg said, ‘The American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote a lot of things in that they wanted to hear but that cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it.’
“In the recording,bin Laden describes attacks by the United States againstIslamicpeople. He describes his message as a review of events following 9/11, and in this statement, he neither admits nor denies responsibility for the attacks” (Ibid.).

5.) On 10/29/2004, this video of Osama bin Laden addressing the American people was released by Al Jazeera:

“I will explain to you the reasons behind these events, and I will tell you the truth about the moments when this decision was taken, so that you can reflect on it. God knows that the plan of striking the towers had not occurred to us, but the idea came to me when things went just too far with the American-Israeli alliance's oppression and atrocities against our people in Palestine and Lebanon” (Ibid.).

6.) This is from a video purportedly of Osama bin Laden released by Al Jazeera on 05/23/2006:

“[Zacarias Moussaoui] had no connection at all with September 11. I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission. I am certain of what I say because I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers . . . with the raid" (Ibid.).

These two statements (#5 and #6) blatantly contradict his early denials. It is not possible to reconcile them with his assertion that he was “not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States” or his claim that he “did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons” (57, 58). It is conceivable that he was lying in these late confessions so as to reinforce his status as an inspirational figurehead to the jihadist movement he helped generate. It seems just as plausible as the postulation that his early denials were prevarications.

7.) The following statement is from an audio recording allegedly from bin Laden released by an Islamicist internet site from 10/13/2009:

“At the beginning, I say that we have made it clear and stated so many times for over two decades that the cause of the quarrel with you is your support for your Israeli allies, who have occupied our land, Palestine. This position of yours, along with some other grievances, is what prompted us to carry out the 11 September events. Had you known the magnitude of our suffering as a result of the injustice of the Jews against us, with the support of your administrations for them, you would have known that both our nations are victims of the policies of the White House, which is in fact a hostage in the hands of pressure groups, especially major corporations and the Israeli lobby” (95).

This one is ambiguous. The “us” who bin Laden said was prompted to carry out the attacks could refer to the more nebulous ideological affiliation that he shares with the hijackers. It need not mean he was part of the group that planned this specific attack.

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