Tin foil hats and tin-plated lies. Part one.

I have my own 9/11 conspiracy theory.

Actually, it's a post-9/11 conspiracy theory.

Goes like this:

George W. Bush was never a truly popular President.  As much as the National Press Corps and the Punditocracy tried to sell him to us as the regular guy we liked and wanted to have a beer with, more than fifty per cent of the voters voted against him and his support was soft among those who voted for him.  This is not an unusual condition for Presidents coming into office; even Reagan wasn't all that popular in his first year in office and had to get shot to see his poll numbers start climbing.  Bush struggled from Inauguration Day and was having a very bad year as of September 10, 2001.  His administration had straight away shown itself up to be on its way to becoming what it has since proven to be---corrupt, inept, hyper-partisan, and totally a Dick Cheney-run operation.

Bush was on working hard at making himself a one-termer and a premature lame duck.

Then the planes hit the Towers and the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania.

And Bush ran and hid.

But what was he hiding from?

I know there are plenty of people who think that he was just scared out of his wits.

I know there are people, particularly on the Right, who believe that he had to go to ground under the cornfields of Nebraska because bin-Laden was out to kill him.

Among the many lies the Bush Administration has told over the years, one from that day was that the Secret Service had word that Air Force One was a target and it was the Secret Service who ordered the President's plane re-routed away from Washington, where the President wanted to go, and forced him to hide in the bunker until very late that afternoon.

As if Presidents of the United States can't tell Secret Service agents to stuff it.

By 11 AM Eastern time on September 11, 2001, it was all over.  I don't think anybody knows how many, if any, more planes bin-Laden intended to have hijacked, but there were none in the air left to hijack.  There was reason to fear that he might have planned to follow up with attacks on the ground but if he did they weren't happening at the moment.

Things were quiet enough that Bush could have come back to Washington...or at least to somewhere secure close by, like CIA headquarters, some place from where he could make his presence felt to the nation, from where he could do what Rudy Giuliani ended up doing in his stead, assure us that someone was in charge and things were being done.

But both Bush and Cheney had to hide.

From what?

I don't believe they were scared.  I don't believe they believed they were targets at all.

This is where my "conspiracy theory" begins.

I haven't read anything proving this, so it's just my theory:  Osama bin-Laden got very lucky that day.

I don't believe he had any plan or any hope of bringing down even one of the towers of the World Trade Center, let alone destroying the place.  I don't believe he planned to destroy the WTC and the Pentagon and whatever was United Flight 93's target, probably the White House, but who knows?  I believe that all he really planned to do was kill as many people as he could in the noisiest and scariest way he could manage.

I believe he planned the hijacking of four planes...or five..or six...in the hope that one would get through.

Considering all that could have gone wrong, all that should have gone wrong, and all that did---the lead group of terrorists was late for their check-in---it's a Devil's Own miracle that four of the planes were taken over and three of them struck their targets at all.

Bin-Laden shot his wad.  He was done for the day, and probably, considering how many of his own agents he'd had to sacrifice, for a long time to come.

The reason there were no follow-up attacks is that he had no one left here to carry them out.

So Bush, and the rest of us, were safe, at least for the time being.

And the Bush Administration knew it.

They knew it because they knew exactly what had happened.

As soon as they got word that the first plane had been hijacked they knew.

A hundred people in the Administration slapped their foreheads and said, "Oh shit!  That memo!"

That's what Bush was hiding from.

Headlines like this:

As soon as the attacks began, the Bush Administration went into panic mode.  They were terrified, not by the attacks, but of someone asking them how the attacks had been pulled off.  How come we didn't have any warning?  How come we weren't prepared?  Where was the CIA?  Where was the FBI?

The Bush Leaguers were scared to death that someone would turn up "that memo."

And if American journalists and the United States Congress had done their jobs, those questions would have been asked, and that memo would have turned up within a couple of weeks, if not a few days.

Bush and Cheney hid while Cheney and Rove and Condoleeza Rice and a few others (Donald Rumsfeld was busy that morning helping pull people out of the burning rubble at the Pentagon, but he was probably consulted later in the day) scrambled to find a way to hide that memo or explain it away.

They desperately did not want to have to answer the question:

If you knew al-Qaeda was planning to hijack airplanes why didn't you take any measures to prevent him?

The answer isn't that they wanted the attacks to happen.

The answer is the same as the answer to any question about the Bush Leaguer's apparent carelessness and ineptitude, from 9/11 to Iraq to Katrina.

Because they are careless and inept.

End of Part One.

Hat tip Carolyn Kay by way of Think Progress by way of Atrios.

Comments

[robertognome]

The ONE conspiracy theory I'm CERTAIN isn't true is the official story. Alex Jones comes in second. Most of the rest seem plausible if not outright likely.

[Rana]

Hmmm. Seems worth thinking about, at any rate.

[Linkmeister]

Hanlon's Razor was in full-blown mode that day within the US government, that's for sure.

That's the "Never attribute to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity" law I first heard back in 1981 from a managing partner at a CPA firm my company used.

[Ken Houghton]

Actually, the Secret Service, in a time of emergency, can very well order re-routing and is empowered to take extraordinary measures to protect the President.

Which is the one place your CT goes awry: given that the attack happened with W on the ground, there is no reasonable grounds under which that plane Takes Off. Especially no as airplanes were being used as attack weapons.

Otherwise, we await part 2.

[anita]

interesting. and i agree with rana that it's worth thinking about.

although, i continue to maintain a tentative hold onto the controlled demolition theory on the wtc collapse(s). i know i'm very much in the minority on that since a lot of the theories "seem" to have been debunked.

but but so be it.

i'm an outlier.

[Bill Altreuter]

The problem I have with this hypothesis is that it seems inconsistent with Bush's desire to go to war with Iraq. If it was a set-up, they should have been able to set it up to be a reason to go after the country we all knew he was going to attack from the get-go. The information we have is that they tried to, but couldn't sell it, but if they knew it was coming, practiced liars like this should have had a plausible narrative in place.

[Lance]

Bill,

I'm getting to that. That's what my part two's all about.

[AnotherDemocraticVeteran]

This is speculation on my part ...

One thing about the 9/11/2001 attacks that always intrigued me is that the attacks happened about 9 months after Bush took office. As if the attacks were conceived because Bush was elected, and executed (a.k.a. born) 9 months afterwards.

Osama was into symbolism ... WTC was a huge symbol of America, and he used airplanes from United and American airlines to symbolize the United States of America ... so my birth symbolism may not be insane as it first sounds.

We know that, because of Bush Senior's first Gulf War, the U.S. military was stationed in Saudi Arabia during and after the war (until shortly before the current Iraq war). We know Osama thought this U.S military presence was blasphemy. I wonder what Osama thought when Bush Jr., the son of the man who caused this blasphemy, was elected president.

According to Wikipedia, human pregnancy takes about 38 weeks. The time difference between when George took office (jan 20) and 9/11 is 39 weeks.