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Derangement - part 3A

The Plagiarist

The Plagiarist

copypasty
After my incident in the diner with Nico Haupt and the other Truthers, I was, for quite some time, obsessed with the movement. I couldn't get it out of my head. I would stay up late at night surfing Truther sites and trying to wrap my head around some of the theories.
 
I found myself trying to put myself in the shoes of someone like University of Minnesota professor emeritus Jim Fetzer, a onetime leader of the movement (and head of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth) who among other things was the guy who came up with the theory about conspirators dropping 757 parts onto the Pentagon lawn from a circling C-130. I wondered where exactly a philosophy professor from Duluth imagined people like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush would go to find soldiers willing to lean out of a massive cargo plane midflight and drop huge chunks of metal onto a crowed crime scene. Clearly he thought this was not much of a problem, logistically speaking.
 
Another writer, a noted JFK conspiracist named Jim Marrs, speculated that former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean was an obvious choice to head the massive coverup exercise known as the 9/11 Commission because he sat on the Council of Foreign Relations, a "secret society," as Marrs called it. He wrote this matter-of-factly, as if it could be taken for granted that groups like these were little more than tightly knit bureaucratic communities of like-minded assassins I then saw this assertion repeated religiously all over the web -Kean naturally led the coverup, he was in the CFR, after all.
 
Gradually it began to dawn on me that very large numbers of people, perhaps millions, had no problem accepting the idea that a milquetoast career pol like Tom Kean would just casually salute and say "Jawohl!" when asked to cover up the biggest mass murder in American history -just because he sits on the Council of Foreign Relations! This sort of thing was everywhere on the internet: 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick was a board member of the oil drilling firm Schlumberger -so, naturally, she's in on it! Fellow commission member John Lehman had been Reagan's secretary of the navy, so naturally he was on call, willing to play his part in the plot. Even James Meigs, the magazine writer who wrote a lengthy article debunking the movement's science claims, was subsequently labeled part of the conspiracy because, among other things, he worked for "Hearst-owned" Popular Mechanics. If you had a connection with an oil company, a Wall Street bank, a security agency, a Republican presidential administration, a commercial media outlet, or a conservative think-tank, you were in on the plot.
 
This enthusiastic belief in the pure, almost mathematical precision of the conspiracy, with its unshakable faith in the unthinking, automatic participation of these long lists of faceless members of the cultural establishment, all coldly eager to get in on the killing of thousands of innocent Americans -it freaked me out. Among other things it seemed like almost perfect mirror image of the Christian extremists on the other side of the political spectrum, who similarly believed in the same childlike, unquestioning sort of way in the satanic inhumanity of liberals and nonbelievers. Jim Fetzer believing the army to be full of soldiers willing to rain fuselage parts down on Washington was no different from Matt Hagee believing the world scientific community to be teeming with men and women anxious to impose government-mandated abortions on the planet as a means of controlling the population. It was hard to imagine how either of these people managed to keep calm as they walked the streets, knowing they might at any time be sharing the sidewalk with some veins-in-his-teeth member of the Godless Man-Eating Conspiracy.
 
Or was it me? Was I losing my mind? To make absolutely sure, I spent much of November 2006 calling structural engineers and architects and pestering them with questions about 9/11. Most of the ones I spoke to seemed ready to reach through the phone and snap my neck in half for even bothering them with the dreaded "controlled demolition" theory. "Let me ask you a question," hissed Mir Ali, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Architecture. "If you get sick and you need an operation, where do you go? Do you go to a restaurant? A bicycle store?"

"Um...," I said.
 
"It's the same with this," he snapped. "How many of these people are structural engineers? How many? You people, always you are calling me!"

"But I'm not one of--"

From there he veered off into a long tangent about the fireproofing in buildings, and from there into a rant about fire in a building consuming oxygen and creating a vacuum. "The air outside the building wants to rush in, do you understand?"

"No," I said. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Well, then, how can you say you know what caused the building to collapse?"

"I didn't," I said. "I'm calling about someone else's theory about--"

But he was off on another tangent by then, ranting angrily into the phone.
 
I got similar responses from more than a dozen other engineers and architects, all of whom said that no one in the field took the controlled demolition theory seriously. "Oh, man, not this again," said Matthys Levy, a Vermont-based engineer and author of Why Buildings Fall Down. "I'm not going to end up on the Internet again, am I?" An architect friend of mine helped out by asking me to look at my own problem logically. "The key thing you have to ask yourself is who the people in the movement are going to believe," he said. "If you tell them you talked to ten of the country's leading guys in the field, and they all told you the planes caused the collapses, will they believe you? If the answer is no, what are you going to do -talk to ten more?"

"That's a good point," I said.

"Just give it up, man," he said. "This is an American controversy. No one ever gives up or admits they're wrong. It keeps going until it's time for the next argument."
 
Sadly, he was right, because I couldn't give it up either. Instead of just ignoring the hate mail I was continuing to get, I started answering some, leading to several uncomfortably long exchanges with total strangers who seemed to have limitless amounts of time on their hands. I began to mark the passage of time by the tenor of the letters that came to my in-box every day. The Democrats' midterm electoral victory, for instance, had its own species of letter. "Hey 'dickwad,'" read one. "You still feeel [sic] that Loose Change has helped the republicans win votes? get a clue, fucking traitor-asshole." I remember NFL week 5 of the 2006 season very well (an uninspiring Patriots-Dolphins game) because I spent half the day fending off a particularly infuriating letter-writer named Tim Woodill. The Woodill exchange drove me up a wall; the discussion kept going in circle after circle. The exchange is worth recalling because it shows how ridiculously far off into metaphorical hell these discussions can get. At one point, for instance, I kept asking him just to tell me what he thought happened on 9/11, but he refused.
 
"As for demanding that 9/11 Truthers advocates furnish an affirmative theory of the crime," he said, "that is a little like the police refusing to investigate the burglary of your house until you tell them who did it, how they got in, and where they stashed the loot."

Huh? No it isn't, I said. It's like asking the police to say, "We think the burglar entered through the front window, raided the bedroom first, took a glass of milk from the kitchen, left through the garage, and fled on a bicycle." In such a case, I said, "the evidence speaks -the front window ajar, the footprints leading up the stairs, the spilled milk on the floor, the milk droplets in the garage, the bicycle tracks in the woods."

He wasn't convinced. "Except in this case," he shot back, "the police have cleaned up all the evidence, wont [sic] show you any of the crime scene photos and used their presence in your house to rifle through your personal possessions so that you have no idea what the burglar took and what the police may have confiscated themselves. Finally it turns out that the burglary suspect was an ex-cop who used to work for the guys investigating your case."
 
I spent about twenty minutes staring at that passage, trying to make sense of it. Was Osama bin Laden the ex-cop? Which possessions was he talking about? I was beginning to feel like the metaphorical house we were talking about was actually this correspondence -was it the cops or the burglar who took out the trusses that held this metaphor together? I was still working on it when I saw the conclusion of his letter. "I guess I can understand why you don't want to debate me on this," he wrote. "We both know that in a straight debate I'd kick your ass.

"Regards, TJ Woodill."

So ended about six thousand words of angry correspondence. I sat there with that curt farewell staring me in the face, eyes blank, not knowing what to do. Now I was losing my shit. I tried to avoid the computer for a few days, but soon enough I was back at it, debating with none other that Jason Bermas, co-producer of the seminal Internet documentary, Loose Change. This correspondence lasted even longer and drove me even crazier. Loose Change, made by a couple of twentysomething kids from Jersey and featuring a catchy electronic soundtrack to go with an admittedly first-rate use of conspiracy-theory rhetorical innuendo, is a slick piece of shoestring-budget filmmaking, the kind of thing that should win a prize, if there were a prize for best use of two thousand dollars to scramble the brains of mental fourteen-year-olds. But the movie is also classic example of post-9/11 Internet journalism where the fact-checking process is limited to finding a link, any link, however old, to support your story. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed like these guys had made one of the decade's most influential films without making a single phone call to check a fact.
 
Before long I was calling people all over the world trying to see if any of the stuff in the film was true. For instance, Loose Change makes a point of "reporting" that many of the hijackers were reportedly seen alive after the attacks. If you looked closely, however, the sources they cited --in one case the Los Angeles Times, in another the BBC-- they were all very old stories, dating to less than a week after the attacks. As I subsequently learned, all of these supposed sightings were simple misunderstandings, based upon similarities with Arab names and cases of mistaken identity, in which the authorities, for instance, mistook one Waleed al-Shehri for another. The same sources that Loose Change quoted had all long since corrected the misunderstandings. The Saudi embassy, which had been the source for the LA Times story cited in Loose Change, laughed about the whole thing. "For God's sake, they're all dead. We settled this question ages ago. We even have DNA tests to confirm it," said Nail as-Jubeier of the embassy in Washington. The guys at Arab News were flabbergasted by the call. "They're just as dead as they were four years ago," one of the editors said. There was simply no way any of this stuff had made it into the movie unless they hadn't checked their facts.

So I asked Bermas if he'd made even one phone call on that score. His response:

"Yes phone calls were made to organizations such as CNN, the BBC, and other media outlets," he wrote. "However many of us do not have the privilege of being employed by The Rolling Stone [sic], so when asked about the legitimacy of an article or the possibility of licensing footage we would either be completely ignored or someone would 'get back to us.'"

These guys thought the "9/11 Commission Report" was shoddy, yet the sum total of their journalistic research was "No one returned our calls"!
 
We went back and forth for a while; meanwhile, I was still being deluged with angry mail and I was beginning to develop a strange sort of permanent migraine headache from staring at sites like PrisonPlanet.com and 9/11Truth.org. I started talking at great length about 9/11 to friends and relatives who clearly weren't in the least bit interested in the topic, and the slightest provocation would get me dialing anyone and everyone in search of immediate answers to my 9/11 questions. Bermas, for instance, at one point sent me a letter berating me about the notorious (notorious in Truther circles, that is) "missing twenty-eight pages" that had been redacted from the original congressional report about 9/11, pages that Truthers believe contain "missing evidence" of the involvement of a foreign power in funding the terrorists. The Truthers, you see, believed that the "foreign power" was probably Pakistan, and that was significant because Mahmoud Ahmand, the chief of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, was actually in Washington, meeting with Senator Bob Graham and onetime CIA director Porter Goss, on the morning of 9/11.
 
The whole thing struck me as absurd; if there was something suspicious about Bob Graham meeting with Mahmoud Ahmand, then what smoking-gun evidence could anyone possibly hope to glean from a redacted congressional report that had been written by...Bob Graham! In a frenzy by this point, I called the now-retired Graham (whom I'd last run into in a highly uncomfortable meeting while working for the Bush campaign undercover in Florida) and asked if I could ask him a few 9/11 questions. He was very polite and seemed to think this was a normal press inquiry, but his tone quickly became nervous when I started rambling about the Truth Movement and Loose Change and Jim Fetzer and a bunch of other names he'd never heard of. "What's, uh, the 9/11 Truth Movement?" he asked. "And who did you say you worked for?"

"It's, uh...Well, listen, what foreign country were you talking about in that report, anyway?" I asked, ignoring his second question.

Graham said he was talking about Saudi Arabia, that the commission had found evidence that Saudi Arabia had supported at least two of the hijackers financially. I asked him: Did he think that this hinted at U.S./Bush administration complicity in the planning of the attacks?

"No," he said. "That's absurd."

Then what did he mean?

"I think the Bush administration was anxious to protect its relationship with Saudi Arabia. I think they were covering up Saudi Arabian involvement," he said. "Dating back many years the U.S. had an agreement to provide security to Saudi Arabia in exchange fro a free flow of petroleum. They just weren't ready to jeopardize that relationship. That's what that was about."

"Right," I said. "Well...thanks."
 
"No problem," he said. "Who did you say you worked for again?"

"Um, well, usually I work for Rolling Stone, but not in this case," I said. "I was just sort of curious."

"I see," he said nervously.

"You know, Senator, we met once," I said. "In Orlando. I carried your luggage."

"I see," he said again.

"But the thing was, we never got to finish talking, because I was undercover and I had to revert back to my, uh, secret identity," I said.

"Mm-hmm. ri-i-i-ght," said the retired senator.

Graham couldn't get off the phone fast enough after that. When he finally hung up, I sat in my room -I was in Texas by then, ensconced in my new life as an [undercover] member of the Cornerstone Church- and suddenly it occurred to me that I had adopted all the characteristics of a 9/11 Truther. I was living almost full-time on the Internet, my personality had twisted in an extremely unpleasant missionary direction, and I was now more intimately familiar with names like Mahmoud Ahmad and Hani Hanjour than I was with the affairs of my own family. I used to think a lot about things like football in my spare time -now I was running over the historical details of 9/11 even as I went to sleep.
 
I started going to 9/11 Truther meetings under a pseudonym. My real self was under there somewhere, but it was becoming alarmingly easy for me to deal in these environments. Technically I was still what they would call a debunker or a "left gatekeeper," a defender of the "official story," but in a weird way I found myself in some of these gatherings setting legitimately impatient with the slow tactics of the movement. After all, I thought, if you really think that the government murdered three thousand Americans, shouldn't you be doing more that holding sit-ins and organizing discussion groups? And so, at some of these meetings, I started to hear "Lee Smith" -my alter ego- calling for immediate action.
 
"We've got to call Henry Waxman!" I shouted at a meeting of the Austin Citizens for 911 Truth. "Now that the Democrats have Congress, he's in charge of the Government Reform Committee. He's got subpoena power. He can get the documents we need, the information they've been hiding from us!"

What the fuck was I talking about, I wondered. It also suddenly occurred to me that my "disguise" was incredibly stupid. I had shaved my head bald and put on a pair of thin pane glasses. I looked like Emma Thompson in Wit, only with stubble.

"Anyway," I said, eyes darting left and right, "I just think now is the time to act. We've go to get people together and hit Congress, let 'em know we're here."

The moderator, a soft, curly-headed teacherish type named Geoff -the kind of guy who would have been a perfect physical fit as an activities counselor at a substance abuse retreat, passing out volleyballs to upper-class drunks- stood at the lectern and scanned the crowd. "Okay, well, that's certainly a good idea," he said, mock-clapping. "We do have to organize. Anyone else have a comment or a question? Yes? You in the back?"
 
There were about twenty-five people in the small church where we were meeting, mostly middle- to upper- class whites but of varying ages. Most of the people had come alone, although there were a few pairs. Attire was solidly post-hippie/film school, lots of ruffled hair, black T-shirts, olive tones, goatees --a crowd you'd expect to see at a Werner Herzog film festival.

A microphone was passed to the man in the back. He looked older, I guessed mid-forties, largeish, dressed in work clothes. He grabbed the mic and stood up.

"Thanks," he said. "Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think it's important for everybody to remember that what's going on right now is that they're provoking a war between the monotheists. They're setting the Christians against the Moslems, so that they'll wipe each other out. Then the Luciferians'll move in."

"Exactly," shouted a woman on my side of the church. "It's the Antichrist. It's all in the Bible."

"Hmm," said Geoff. "I don't know. That's an interesting comment, though. I appreciate that. Anyone else?"
 
A redheaded man in his early forties in the back stood up. "I have one thing to add," he said. "Listen, they've got the courts. They've got the media. We still have the Internet, but they're looking for ways to take that away, eventually. What I'm saying is that we have to find a way to communicate after they take that away. We've got to be prepared!"

Light murmurs, applause.

"Okay, thanks," said Geoff. "Preparation is good, I agree. Thank you."

It went on like this for a while, then the Q&A broke up so that the group could watch a Truther film called Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime. The film was a hodgepodge of boilerplate 9/11 Truth assertions, i.e., that the 9/11 hijackers had ties to the FBI and the Republican Party, that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolitions and not by crashing airplanes, etc. It also had some new stuff in there, including a deft little tie-in to Jack Abramaoff -according to the film hijacker Mohamed Atta was seen on Abramoff's floating casino in south Florida prior to the 9/11 attacks. There were also long clips culled from various dystopian films that were often shown as "background material" at Truther gatherings, the Truthers generally believing themselves to be living in a modern version of an Orwellian/Huxley/Zamyatin totalitarian paradigm. Brazil, Dr. Strangelove, Starship Troopers, and especially The Matrix (Truthers often talk about the moment of conversion, when you see the truth about the towers, as "taking the red pill") are often unironically recommended as "research material" in Truther gatherings.
 
The weird moment of Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime came when a lengthy segment of the movie Network came on the screen. This was the scene in which the secular ex-anchorman prophet Howard Beale, by now given his own show by the evil networks, implores his audience to abandon TV and get back to reality. "We deal in illusions, man, none of it's true!" he shouts. "But...you're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here!"

In the scene, Beale is shouting against a background of phony stained glass in the fake studio "temple" that the networks had designed as a set for his Mad Prophet of the Airwaves show.

The stained glass in the movie was kind of a visual joke -a symptom of the TV falseness that had already crept into Beale's act, a symbol of how TV conquers the genuine dissident by assimilating him. Even as Howard Beale denounced television, he was, simply by virtue of being a staged act on television, part of the problem. "Turn off your television sets...!" Beale shouts. "Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking right now! Turn them off!" Then Beale collapses, apparently dead, and the studio audience cheers as the show's directors urge them on.

No one, of course, has turned his TV set off. This was supposed to be a very darkly ironic moment in the movie, but here it was, twenty years later, repackaged in a homemade Truther movie and shown in an actual church in southern Texas -the cinema stained glass appearing right in front of an actual dais- as unvarnished, earnest reality.
 
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