2004--- The Year I Became a Conspiracy Theorist

Yes indeed. Before 2004, I had some doubts about 9/11, but they were mainly of the variety of LIHOP (i.e. Bush "Let It Happen On Purpose").

However, as I detailed in an earlier post:

on 9/11 itself, I thought something strange happened, that I couldn't believe how badly my country's defenses had been subverted. Nonetheless on that day and for the next few weeks I didn't really question the official story too much. Sure, I thought, how fortunate they found the cars the hijackers had used parked at the airport, and how convenient the hijackers had left behing incriminating evidence. But it was only after hearing strange report after strange report dribble out for months after the attacks that I began to question how much the government really knew before the attacks.

Sure, several FBI agents had been suspcious of Arab men taking flight lessons, and when they tried to bring this up with their superiors, they were told to ignore it, but this was just bad luck. The intelligence people just couldn't connect the dots, and they weren't communicating properly with each other (there was this "wall"), and there were restrictions on what they could probe into. But really-- it was just an innocent mistake.

I guess what really set my alarm bells off was the story where two of the 9/11 hijackers had been living in an apartment in San Diego with a muslim FBI informant, who says he didn't know anything about the plot. Two hijackers were LIVING with a frigging FBI informant but no one knew what they were up to? Yeah, right. He didn't know. What a shame.

Then there was the story how before 9/11 one of the hijackers was interviewed by a CIA agent at an airport in Yemen, and then released. He was just asked a few questions, and they decided he was no threat. Okaaay.

Then there was the widely circulated story how the National Security Agency decrypted messgaes from Al Qaeda talking of the date of the 9/11 attack, but unfortunately, the NSA just translated it on September 12th. What a damn shame. But the date of the 12th always made me wonder-- isn't that just a little bit hard to believe? They were JUST a day late?

Then of course there were the warnings that Bush had saying Al Qaeda was trying to hijack airplanes. And the suspicious lack of response from the Bush administration to these warnings.

And I was ALWAYS highly suspicious of the anthrax attacks. The targets were exactly who the Bush administration would like to intimidate: journalists and key Democratic senators. And then the anthrax appeared to be a domestic source, and the anthrax mailer interestingly pretended to be a muslim fanatic. WHY muslim fanatics would target journalists and key Democratic senators was never really explained-- I guess no one could explain it, which is why the media have tended to ignore the story.

But oddly, what made me really put on my "tinfoil hat" was the murder of Nicholas Berg in Iraq. He was beheaded on video by an odd looking group of apparent Islamic terrorists. The reason I wondered about the murder was the timing--- exactly when the Abu Ghraib abuses were coming to light and provoking a huge outrage. The decapitation of Berg was an amazing distraction from Abu Ghraib, and the Abu Ghraib story lost most of its steam after the Nick Berg killing. Then I started reading about the life of Nick Berg, and he sounded a bit like he was a some kind of intelligence operative. Then, wonder of wonders, Nick Berg was linked to 9/11 via the "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui. Apparently, Nick berg shared his e-mail account with Moussaoui and another of the 9/11 hijackers. What an amazing coincidence! This jaw-dropping link was explained as merely because Nick Berg was VERY outgoing and he liked middle easterners. Okaaay.

The Nick Berg story sent me around the internet quite a bit, and I stumbled upon a fellow named Michael Wright who postulated that the 9/11 attacks were some kind of sting operation gone awry. This scenario seemed to explain a lot, and I bought it for a while, but more reading led me to believe an even darker version of what happened on 9/11. In any case, Mike Wright lives in Oklahoma, and is very familiar with Oklahoma University. His theory is that the president of OU, David Boren, collaborated with George Tenet, the CIA director, in this 9/11 sting operation gone bad. The reason Mike Wright got onto this theory is that one of the tickets used by the 9/11 hijackers was bought at a computer terminal in the OU unversity library. Here's the kicker: the person who bought the ticket was not an Arab or middle-easterner, but a caucasian American. The FBI won't tell who this was, but Wright speculated it was Nick Berg.

Well, if you have a caucasian American collaborating with the 9/11 hijackers, and you put together all the other facts I have said above, plus many many many other stories that I don't have time to go into (e.g. what Sibel Edmonds has said, the fact that several Al Qaeda members are/were apparently CIA assets, the fact that many governments have planned and used terror as a propaganda tool), it leads to one troubling and earth-shaking conclusion: a number of people in the US government knew about the 9/11 plot and actively facilitated it. It simply is just too hard to explain all these things as coincidences and harmless facts that merely look bad.

Finally, there is the fact that Geroge W. Bush's father, George H. W. Bush was CIA director and has been involved in quite a bit of known skull-duggery, and the fact that 9/11 served as a perfect excuse to launch a whole series of wars into the middle east, wars which suited the agenda of many people who are in the Bush administration.

So.... if anyone out there has read this far, tell me-- what part of this is hard to believe?

So, I will post my last post of the year of 2004 on that note.

Happy New Year to everybody out there, and let's hope 2005 is better than the last four years!