Why so many Americans still believe 9/11 was a conspiracy

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Guest Columnist

The two decades since the hijacked 747s rammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon hasn’t changed one thing. Millions of Americans still fervently believe that the 9/11 terror attacks were part of a well-conceived, well-planned, diabolical, staged act. Various polls since that hideous day, have consistently shown that anywhere from one-third to one-half of Americans think the attack was staged, that the government knew about it beforehand, or that it was part of a plot to impose martial law on the country. And those are just the more commonplace conspiracy theories. Some are far more bizarre.

The disbelief that 9/11 was the ghoulish handiwork of anti-American, hate-filled, foreign terrorists has been fed by a loud and pesky pack of professional conspiracy theorists who perennially see a sinister government hand behind any and every assassination, terror attack, and even a natural disaster. Filmmaker Spike Lee had the temerity to initially include some of the rants of conspiracy theorists in his HBO series on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. He had the good sense though to excise the conspiracy rants out.

The 9/11 attack is the jewel in the crown for the conspiracy nuts. They’ve managed to convince the credulous that the carnage was part of a Machiavellian plot by a parade of the usual suspects — George W. Bush, the GOP, the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Justice — to wipe out civil liberties, impose a national security state, create a pretext for the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorize the American people and strengthen the hand of the pro-Israel lobby in U.S. politics.

Some of the more whacked-out theorists with an anti-Semitic bent even claim that the terror attack was part of a decades-old web of intrigue woven by international Jewish groups to dominate global politics.

Conspiracy theorists allege that explosives were planted at the WTC; that Jewish and Israeli Tower workers and occupants were warned the day before, supposedly by the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) to stay away; that a missile slammed into the Pentagon; that the government hid the wreckage of the United Airlines plane that terrorists crashed in Pennsylvania. Every one of these theories has been debunked.

Yet as evidenced by the polls over the last two decades, millions of Americans aren’t convinced. That’s easy to understand. The American woods swarm with groups that fervently believe that government, corporate, or international Zionist groups busily hatch secret plots and concoct hidden plans to wreak havoc on their lives. The Manchurian Candidate idea, popularized in books and countless movies and TV shows, has firmly implanted the notion that shadowy government groups routinely topple foreign governments, assassinate government leaders, and brainwash operatives to do dirty deeds.

There are two other undeniable reasons that 9/11 conspiracy theories have so easily infected the popular imagination. Government agencies, such as the FBI, the CIA, and INSCOM (Army intelligence), with the connivance of presidents, have often played fast and loose with the law and the rules of democracy. They have spied on, harassed, and jailed thousands of Americans, from Communists to anti-war activists.

The biggest, juiciest, and most relentless target for government spymasters during the past decades has been African-American political groups, from the moderate NAACP to the radical Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam. In 2007, a fresh batch of publicly disclosed FBI documents showed that the agency waged a kinder, gentler, but no less illegal spy campaign against Coretta Scott King. The sordid and relentless campaign the FBI waged against her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is well documented.

The widespread disbelief that a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone in the murder of JFK has not dissipated one iota since that fateful day in Dallas in 1963. The literature disputing the lone nut finding on the assassination could fill up a small library. Conspiracy paranoia got another monster boost with Trump’s White House election in 2016 and subsequent defeat in 2020. He fanned the conspiracy flames on everything from Obama’s alleged foreign birth, to the Russians allegedly helping Hillary Clinton in 2016, to the notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by a vast conspiracy stage-managed by the Democrats and the media to oust him.

The mountainous iron-clad proof that there was no conspiracy to defeat Trump has not meant a thing to the millions who still say the election was riddled with fraud and Trump really won. Much of this conspiracy paranoia was on horrific display in the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Polls show that the majority of Republicans and many others buy the Trump conspiracy ballyhoo.

So, on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the conspiracy theorists still busily spin their well-worn 9/11 conspiracy myths. They continue to fall on fertile ground again because of government officials’ long and at times disgraceful penchant for covering up and flat-out lying to the public about their misdeeds, conduct, and spying. This is enough to ensure that 9/11 conspiracy fantasies still remain alive and well twenty years later.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Bring Back the Poll Tax!—The GOP War on Voting Rights (Middle Passage Press) . His weekly political commentaries can be found at thehutchinsonreport.net.

This article originally published in the September 13, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.