American Gangster (24 page)

Pearl Harbor, or Reichstag Fire, take your pick. What mattered was that the deed was done; three thousand human beings were dead in the worst
single attack on American soil in history, freeing Manchurian Candidate Bush to decree his fraudulent War of Terror, a Social Darwinian/Hobbe-sian “with us or against us” struggle to corner the planet's dwindling bounty—a global conflict without end in which only the strong, the white, and the Republican would survive.

In an April 2004 paper titled “What Is Your Hop Level,” Nick Levis, who co-coordinates the NY911 truth meetings with the aforementioned Father Frank Morales and Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic analytical responses to the events of September 11 “short of those who believe in divine or extraterrestrial intervention.” Although offering a number of off-shoots, Levis's paper essentially boils down to four major choices.

A: The Official Story (called the Official Conspiracy Theory by 9/11 truth activists). The received Bushian fantasy: Al Qaeda/Osama, nineteen guys with boxcutters, flight 93 made to crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, by heroic (“Let's Roll”) passengers, etc., etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleisher said in his initial response, there was “no warning.”

B: The Incompetence Theory (a.k.a. the Stupidity, Arrogance, Dysfunctional, “Reno Wall” Theory): accepts the Official Story, yet allows for failure on the part of the White House/FBI/CIA/NSA to heed warnings of the plot brewing right under their taxpayer-funded noses. This line was partially advanced, with much butt-covering compensation, in the Kean 9/11 Commission Report.

C: LIHOP, or “Let It Happen on Purpose.” Many variations here, but primarily: elements of the U.S. government and/or well-placed factions of the private sector were aware of specific details of the hijackers' plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.

D: MIHOP, or “Made It Happen on Purpose,” that is, elements of the U.S. government and/or private forces actively planned and executed the attacks, including, quite possibly, using the airplane strikes as a cover to bring down the Trade Center buildings with secreted explosives.

“What are the alternatives to MIHOP?” asks Webster Tarpley, rhetorically, in the introduction of his book
Synthetic Terror
, dismissing the only other thinkable possibility, LIHOP, as being “increasingly at war with the masses of evidence.”

Tarpley's “rouge network/invisible government MIHOP” is only one of the many MIHOPs floating around 9/11truth circles. Most popular are various configs of Cheney/Bush MIHOP, asserting that the vice president, who appeared to be charge on 9/11 (in violation of the constitutionally decreed chain of command), was the main actor in the plot. Also ambient is Peak Oil MIHOP, an ecodoomsday scenario stemming from the notion that the “peaking” of planetary petroleum reserves prompted the false provocation for the “oil war” in the Middle East.

Further afield are numerous versions of NWO MIHOP, or New World Order MIHOP, which Nick Levis characterizes as the concerted effort of “a global ruling elite seeking greater control of the world Zeitgeist” as a means to fomenting “a transition to open corporate feudalism.” Many NWO MIHOPs take into account the long-standing influence of secret societies such as the Freemasons (if you don't believe it, just look at the pyramid-meeting-the-eye on the back every dollar in your pocket, fool!), the Illuminati, and their alleged modern-day standard-bearers like Yale's Skull and Bones Society (both Bushes bonesmen, John Kerry too), the Council on Foreign Relations, and blue-hat armies of the United Nations.

Less cited scenarios include a Sino MIHOP claiming the Chinese military was behind 9/11 as a first strike in the inevitable economic conflict between China and the West. And, in what cannot be considered a newsflash, Scientologists have suggested a Shrink MIHOP, claiming evil psychologists were a controlling force in the attack.

More controversial is Mossad MIHOP, the school of thought that Israeli intelligence played a crucial role in the disaster. This is based in part on the curious story of the “white van,” that is, on the morning of September 11 five men, apparently filming the attack from Liberty State Park, were observed exchanging high fives as the planes hit the buildings. Later that day their moving-company van was pulled over by police on Route 3 by Giants Stadium. One of the men was found to have $4,700 in his sock. Extra passports were also recovered. “We are Israeli,” the driver reputedly told cops. “We are not your problem. Your problems are your problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” The men were taken to the Federal Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, from where, sans further action, they were deported to Israel. Later an article in the Jewish
Forward
identified the company that owned the van, Urban Moving Systems, to be a Mossad front.

Much as been made of this and other such incidents among 9/11truth sources, but this is clearly tricky terrain. As witnessed by the very first of so-called 9/11 conspiracies, the disproved but often repeated story that four thoudand Jewish WTC workers were warned to stay home that day, any Mossad MIHOP can easily morph to Zionist MIHOP and/or Jew MIHOP. In an odd revisionism of Art Spiegelman's
Maus
, well-known 9/11truth researcher Eric Hufschmid (author of “Painful Questions”) writes, “I see the Zionists as being analogous to an organization of cats who work together to catch thousands of stupid, unorganized mice. Why should I feel sorry for the mice? Why should I hate the cats?”

Despite laborious efforts to distinguish the difference between “Zionism” and “Judaism,” this remains a difficult area for NY 9/11truth advocates, many of whom are Jews. The specter of being too easily tarred with the anti-Semite brush by the Abe Foxmans of the world is a real danger. “Do I believe Israel has undue influence over U.S. foreign policy?” asks one local activist. “Absolutely. But there are people in this movement who are fucking Nazis. I think you have to draw the line at Holocaust denial.”

But this aside, when it comes to 9/11, it is all MIHOP because as far as Truth activists are concerned, we are living in a MIHOP world.

“For me, MIHOP was inevitable, because in this, the more you know, the more you know,” says Les Jamieson, a tall, friendly, eminently reasonable seeming forty-five-year-old guy from Brooklyn who serves as Northeast Program Coordinator of the nationwide 9/11truth.org. Like most 9/11truth people, Les remembers the moment when the scales of the Official Story media fog fell from his eyes.

“On September 11 my first reaction was like everyone else: shock, horror, rage. But then I kept coming across these items. One of the first was a story in
Newsweek
, which said these generals were told earlier that week not to fly. They said there was no warning, but obviously someone knew. I saw videos about the way the buildings fell, how they seemed to implode. My reaction was: ‘holy shit.' That's what this process has been, one ‘holy shit' after another.”

Now, most Saturday afternoons, Les can often be found in front of the PATH station at Ground Zero holding up a banner proclaiming that 9/11
WAS AN INSIDE JOB
. Reaction to this demonstration has been “mixed,” Les reports. Last Memorial Day, when the Truth activists were “surrounded by these screaming sons of firemen,” it was particularly rough. “It was like we were committing some kind of blasphemy,” recalls Les, who vows to continue the vigils no matter what.

He says: “I truly believe that we, our 9/11truth movement, are sort of minutemen, trying to make the country aware of this terrible crime that has been committed. We're like prosecutors in the discovery phase, unearthing evidence for a trial that is sure to come.”

Father Frank Morales agrees that “this is about history.” Morales, who if not for his priest collar could easily be mistaken for an East Village hipster in his black stocking cap and quarter-inch beard vertically bifurcating his chin, is a longtime neighborhood hero. Raised in the Jacob Riis projects, ordained in 1976, Morales spent years as “a street priest walking in Jesus' path” in the then burning South Bronx before coming back to the Lower East Side to work with the squatter community. The day after 9/11 he got a call from the diocese asking him to go to Ground Zero to perform last rites for the victims.

“They said to be prepared because ‘we're not talking bodies here, Frank, we're talking body parts,'” Morales recalls.

“It was a real test of faith, being down there, because I could feel myself getting madder and madder, not the way a priest is supposed to feel,” says Father Frank, who recalls the ground being “rich and moist, enriched with the ground-up bodies of the dead.” Sitting with a fireman who'd been “on the pile like forty-eight hours straight,” Morales remembers cursing the hijackers, screaming that “I just wanna get those motherfuckers.”

It was at this point, Morales says, that the fireman “put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, ‘Hey, it's not about that…. You wanna know something? Bush and Bin Laden have the same banker.'”

It was everything that happened afterward, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, that turned him into a 9/11truth activist, Morales said. Now, he's MIHOP too.

Activists like Nick Levis, Les Jamieson, and Frank Morales know that the sort of 9/11truth they seek is unlikely to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. There are too many nuts around. After all, they've got people on their side like the “Web fairy” who runs a site supposedly proving the planes that hit the Trade Center were not planes at all but holograms, or “ghost planes.” What can you say about a truth movement's relationship to the nature of truth when many of the entries about its main concerns in the Wikipedia bear the caveat “disputed”?

Yet for all this the 911truth movement retains one irrefutably puissant weapon in its struggle with the Official Story. As Frank Morales asks, “Would you believe anything George W. Bush told you?”

Type “9/11 conspiracy” into the Google and the bytes bury you. The first truly great conspiracy theory of the Internet Age—imagine JFK assassinationology with the Web!—9/11truth is a fast traveling meme.

The thicket of “truth” sites seems endless. There is “911truth.org,” “911truth.com,” “911forthetruth.com,” “911truthla.org,” “nakedfor 911truth.com,” “911truthemergence.com,” “911citizenswatch.com,” “911inquiry
.org,” “911research.net,” “911–strike.com,” “total911.info.com,” “911blogger.com,” “911review.com,” “septembereleventh.com,” “physics911.com,” “psychics911.com,” and dozens more.

There are radco guys too, like Alex Jones, proprietor of prisonplanet.com and infowars.com, an inveterate loudmouth who charges ahead with his smorgasbord New World Order MIHOP and video camera into the beating heart of old boy networks, accosting small potatoes like David Gergen outside the Bohemian Grove, supposed site of Bilderbergian Satanic rituals.

Such antics notwithstanding, it can be argued that a whole new kind of politics is being waged in the 9/11truth assault, a kind of emerging panlibertarianism that trashes not only the slack boundaries of the mainstream but also the supposed “Far” Left and Right. Apocalyptically minded survivalists and extreme Bush-haters are equally attracted to the blanket
j'accuse
that the U.S. government has attacked its own people to prod them into a ceaseless, baseless terror crusade, a clash of civilizations to end all civilization. Be you a Starbucks window breaker or John Bircher, it ain't like you need a weatherman to tell you which way Thomas L. Friedman and his globalist windbaggery blows.

For a post-9/11 world, there is a post-9/11 flow of information. Without the web, 9/11truth does not exist. This is not a movement where people are taking their Nagra tape recorders to document the acoustics of Dealey Plaza, so as to better ascertain which bullet came from what angle. When 9/11truth “researchers” refer to “the physical evidence,” they often are referring to pictures posted on various blog sites. They are stay-at-home interpreters of graphics, analyzers of webcasts. Paul Thompson, whose copiously detailed 9/11 timeline has become the undisputed gold standard of all Truth research, does all his work on the Net. If it's not online, it is not in the timeline.

“I don't have to be in any particular place to do this,” says Thompson, who for a time moved to New Zealand so it would be easier for him to concentrate.

Yet it is difficult to deny the allure of this Web-based critique. The conspiracist has always relied on a degree of magical thinking. And, as Marshall McLuhan would doubtless assert if he wasn't dead, there has never
been a tool more paranoia-ready than the Internet. It is an exhilarating serendipity that every surfer has felt: the way one link seems to lead miraculously to the next, each connection synchronistically handshaking to the one beyond, the notion of not knowing how exactly you wound up where you are but being sure, absolutely sure, that you have arrived at precisely the right place. Conclusions made by the aegis of such miraculous method cannot simply be random. For the moment, and maybe longer, it feels like Truth.

Spooky coincidences and clairvoyances abound. How does one accomo-date the fact that in the months prior to September 11 parties unknown purchased the domain names “nycterrorstrike.com,” “horrorinnewyork.com,” “tradetowerstrike.com,” “tradecenterbombs.com,” and several others. Was this Mohammad Atta's idea of a cyber joke?

Consider Pammy Wynant, protagonist of the novel
Players
by Don DeLillo (big surprise, that). Published in 1977, the book describes how Pammy, working for a firm called Grief Management Council, which has its offices in the World Trade Center, at first felt the WTC was “an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?” A few lines later, DeLillo writes, “To Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.”