I worry that I'm turning into a conspiracy theorist

AL Kennedy
Wednesday May 11, 2005
The Guardian

OK, I'm paranoid and depressed. My new government of troglodytes, murderers and spivs barely elongates the customary scream I give upon waking. What troubles me more is our rulers' inevitable recommencement of the war on terror bollocks.

To begin at what we're told is the beginning, we have 9/11 - the one in the US, not the earlier one in Chile when covert US government intervention killed thousands of innocents and handed the country to a commerce-friendly, torture-loving, far-right junta. Now if 9/11/2001 is so important, why is it so hard to find out what happened?

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The FBI, as we know, blocked all manner of investigations into the plot in the run up to its execution, whether these involved highly specific warnings from its own agents or from government sources in Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, the Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco and Russia.

Meanwhile, I worry why the nearest military aircraft weren't scrambled to intercept any of the hijacked flights when this is standard procedure and why, when more distant jets were finally aloft, they flew at less than half speed, thus failing to prevent the impacts at the twin towers and then, it would seem, managing to shoot down Flight 93 when its passengers may already have overcome its hijackers.

It would, of course, be easier to know what happened to Flight 93 if there weren't - according to educated estimates - three minutes of the cockpit recording missing. It would, equally, be handy to have access to the black boxes from the other crashes. Firefighters at Ground Zero have repeatedly stated that three of the four possible black boxes there were found and taken away by government agents.

And these worries are maybe less important than the ones about clear links between the Pakistani ISI, the CIA and the men named as the 9/11 hijackers. Or the mysterious inability of anyone to capture Osama bin Laden, who fled from Tora Bora, possibly being evacuated by helicopter, and then escaped to Pakistan unhindered.

So while Chinese paperclips are now made out of vital 9/11 evidence and almost every implicated party goes free, we and our controlling US interests continue fearlessly to terrorise countries unconnected with the attacks, to place permanent military bases near oil reserves and pipeline routes, to harass and murder Muslims anywhere we can, and to foment terrorist resistance at every opportunity. The UK unmasks non-existent ricin plots and threatens us with ID cards, but we can't supply our troops in Iraq with working radios or a legal causus belli.

But you'd never want to think that on 9/11/2001 covert US government intervention killed thousands of innocents and handed the country, if not the world, to a commerce-friendly, torture-loving, far-right junta. That would make you a paranoid, depressed conspiracy theorist. And, take it from me, that just wouldn't be comfortable.