27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Issue No.553
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001 Issue No.553 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Creative license
The attacks on the US have led to plenty of bizarre theories about "whodunnit". Omayma Abdel-Latif reports
"A US military intelligence source revealed details of an internal intelligence memo that points to the Israeli Mossad intelligence service having links to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks." So read an e-mail sourced from an unknown organisation called Intel-Stern, in Canada. This was but one of scores of e-mails that circulated on the Internet following the 11 September attacks on America.
As with many huge tragedies, conspiracy theories arrived almost as soon as the FBI, playing on people's fears, hopes and appetite for extravagant hidden horrors, invisible enemies and future threats. E-mail and the Internet have multiplied the speed and extent to which some of these theories spread, and the conspiracy theorists were given added impetus by the total anonymity of the attackers, whose identity, for a time, was anyone's guess.
To many Arabs, the culprit was obvious: the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service. "Who would be the beneficiary of this?" asked a columnist in Al-Arabi newspaper, mouthpiece of the Nasserist Party. "The Mossad, of course". This assumption should come as no surprise: after watching Israel's behaviour in the region for many decades, when things blow up, Arabs naturally assume Israeli involvement. The conspiracy theorists adduced plenty of other circumstantial evidence to support their claims. Sharon had a golden opportunity to tarnish the image of the Arabs and Muslims and cause a deep schism in Arab/American relations, they said. Advocates of this theory also pointed out that the Mossad has targeted American interests before, ever since the 1960s.
In the days following the attack, the theory took on new life when Israeli papers suggested that the Mossad has warned the American CIA of "a colossal act of terrorism on American territory." But CIA officials denied the reports as groundless. Then Israeli daily Haaretz reported that five Israelis who had worked for a moving company based in New Jersey were held in US prisons for what the FBI described as "puzzling behavior" following the terror attack on the World Trade Center (WTC).
An e-mail that widely circulated soon after the attacks also suggested that the day before the attack, the Mossad notified all Israelis working in the WTC not to come to work the following day and that four thousand Israelis conspicuously failed to show for work. But Israel, in response, confirmed that 140 Israelis died in the rubble of the WTC. Other grist to the theorists' mills was that the precision, expertise and coordination skills of the attacks bore the hallmarks of a savvy intelligence agency, not a rag-tag group of Islamists. Surprisingly, it was not Arabs alone who suspected a Mossad link. A US-based Web site, williamcopper.com, carried a front page statement saying, "So who benefits? Everyone in the oil business, especially the Bush family and their business partners. Everyone in the defence industrial complex. The state of Israel will benefit big time."
This was followed by a number of questions suggesting Muslims were not the perpetrators. "A devout Muslim would not take a copy of his holy book to a bar and leave it behind when he left after spending an evening drinking, participating in lap dances and bragging about pending bloodshed to take place the following day. Who is so stupid that they would believe this?" was one. "We are supposed to believe that by some incredible miracle they escaped the notice of every law enforcement and intelligence agency in the entire world," the author added.
Culprits other than the Mossad were also on the suspects' list in some Arab papers. The Serbs, the Japanese Red Army and the Adventists were all accused. The most surprising theory suggested that the attack was made to settle old accounts between the US and Russia. But original theories were not confined to the Arabic press. Some Western papers suggested other hidden motives. Robert Fisk, in the Independent, on 16 September, credibly argued that the bombings were part of Bin Laden's plot to destabilise the Arab regimes of the Middle East, who Bin Laden hates. Fisk argued that the deployment of US troops in the region would provide the spur for popular uprisings in the area, circuitously achieving Bin Laden's objectives.
But few theories had the insight of Fisk's. As the week after the attack wore on, the conspiracy theories proliferated and began to grow more and more outlandish. Fabricated quatrains attributed to Nostradamus were claimed to have foretold the destruction of the World Trade Center. "Amazing" coincidences about the date, the buildings, the planes or other circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks eagerly whizzed back and forth. One piece of near Cabalistic ingenuity by e-mail linked the attack to the number 11. The date of the attack was 9/11. Those digits (nine, one, one) add up to 11. The area codes to Iran and Iraq are 119, said the e-mail: that same potent combination. Actually the two countries' area codes are 98 and 964. The twin towers, standing side by side, the e-mail continued, resemble a number 11. And so on. Another e-mail claimed that Satan could be discerned in a photo of the smoking WTC. More risible yet, a further e-mail tried to strengthen the Mossad conspiracy by showing that the flight number of one of the aeroplanes that crashed into the WTC, (allegedly Q33NY), when converted to Windings font on a computer, revealed an aeroplane, a tower, two skull & crossbones and a Star of David. In fact, the flight numbers of the planes that crashed into the WTC were UA175 and AA11.
So fast have the lunatic theories spread, that Web sites have been set up specifically to debunk them. But the hoaxes and the bizarre speculations are likely to continue, as long as the US keeps under wraps the "conclusive" evidence it has, about who did the bombing, and why.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page