User:Cs32en/911/Articles/9-11 conspiracy theories

History

Since the September 11 attacks, a number of theories challenging the mainstream account of the attacks have been put forward in websites, books, and films. Many groups and individuals challenging the mainstream account identify as part of the 9/11 Truth Movement.

Conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks did not emerge immediately after the event, as most professional conspiracy theorists in the United States appeared to be as shocked as the rest of the population. The first theories that emerged focused primarily on anomalies in the official account and publicly available evidence, and propenents were only later tending to develop more full-blown theories about the ultimate source of an alleged plot.

The first elaborated theories, published in books, appeared in Europe. They include a blog published by Matthias Bröcker, an editor at the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung at the time, the book 9/11: The Big Lie by French journalist Thierry Meyssan, the book The CIA and September 11 by former German state minister Andreas von Bülow and the book Operation 9/11, written by the German journalist Gerhard Wisnewski.

While these theories were popular in Europe, U.S. media treated them with either bafflement or amusement. The U.S. government dismissed them as anti-Americanism. In an address to the United Nations on November 10, 2001, United States President George W. Bush denounced the emergence of "outrageous conspiracy theories&nbsp[...] that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty."

By 2004, conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks began to gain ground in the United States. This increase in popularity was arguably not due to the discovery of any new or more compelling evidence, or to an improvement of the technical quality of the presentation of the theories, but rather to the growing criticism of the Iraq War and the presidency of George W. Bush, who had been reelected in 2004. Revelations of spin doctoring and outright lying by federal officials, such as the claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the belated release of the President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001 and reports that NORAD had lied to the 9/11 Commission, have fueled the conspiracy theories.

Between 2004 and the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2006, mainstream coverage of the conspiracy theories increased. Reacting to the growing publicity, U.S. Government agencies and the Bush Administration issued responses to the theories, including a formal analysis by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) about the collapse of the World Trade Center, a revised 2006 State Department webpage to debunk the theories, and a strategy paper referred to by President Bush in an August 2006 speech, which declared that terrorism springs from "subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation," and that "terrorists recruit more effectively from populations whose information about the world is contaminated by falsehoods and corrupted by conspiracy theories. The distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts that would challenge popular prejudices and self-serving propaganda." al-Qaeda has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attacks, with chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri accusing Shia Iran and Hezbollah of intentionally starting rumors that Israel carried out the attacks to denigrate Sunni successes in hurting America.

Many of the conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks do not involve classical representational strategies that establish a clear dichotomy between good and evil, or guilty and innocent. Instead, they call up gradations of negligence and complicity. Matthias Bröckers, an early proponent of such theories, dismisses the official account of the September attacks as being itself a conspiracy theory that seeks "to reduce complexity, disentangle what is confusing," and "explain the inexplicable".

A number of 9/11 opinion polls have been conducted in an attempt to establish roughly how many people have doubts about the mainstream account, and how prevalent some of the theories are. Just prior to the fifth anniversary of the attacks, mainstream news outlets released a flurry of articles on the growth of 9/11 conspiracy theories, with Time Magazine stating, "This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality." In 2008 9/11 conspiracy theories topped a "greatest conspiracy theory” list compiled by The Daily Telegraph. The list was based on following and traction. An August 2007 Zogby poll found that, while 26.4% of Americans believe that "certain elements in the U.S. Government knew the attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military and economic reasons", another 4.8% of them believe that "certain U.S. Government elements actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks". Mainstream coverage generally presents these theories as a cultural phenomenon and is often critical of their content.