It’s widely known that there are many conspiracy theories around September 11. There are extreme theories found on Arab fundamentalist and neo-Nazi sites that claim the conspiracy was organized by the Jews, and that all Jews working in the Twin Towers had been warned the previous day not to turn up for work, despite the fact that around four hundred Israeli or Jewish American citizens were among the victims; there are the anti-Bush theories claiming the attack had been organized so that Afghanistan and Iraq could be invaded; there are those who point the finger at more or less deviant American secret services; there’s the theory that it was an Arab fundamentalist plot and the American government knew the details in advance, but they let things go their own way, to provide a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, rather like the suggestion that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked but did nothing to save the fleet because he needed a pretext for declaring war on Japan; and lastly, there’s the theory that the attack was orchestrated by bin Laden’s fundamentalists, but the authorities responsible for the defense of America reacted wrongly and late, demonstrating their incompetence. The supporters of one or another of these conspiracies claim the official reconstruction of events is false, fraudulent, and puerile.
Anyone wanting to find out about the conspiracy theories can read Zero: Perché la versione ufficiale sull’11/9 è un falso (Zero: Why the Official Version of 9/11 Is False), edited by Giulietto Chiesa and Roberto Vignoli, which includes interviews with such eminent figures as Franco Cardini, Gianni Vattimo, Gore Vidal, Lidia Ravera, and many foreign contributors.
But anyone wanting to consider a different view can thank the same publisher, who, with admirable fairness, and proving its ability to capture two opposing sectors of the market, published in the same year a book against conspiracy theories, 11/9: La cospirazione impossibile (9/11: The Impossible Conspiracy), edited by Massimo Polidoro, with equally eminent contributors including Piergiorgio Odifreddi and James Randi. The fact that I am also in the book should be neither to my credit nor to my detriment, since the editor simply asked to republish a previously printed article that wasn’t so much about September 11 as about the eternal conspiracy syndrome. Nevertheless, since I believe that our world was created by chance, I have no difficulty believing that most of the events that have racked it over the course of thousands of years, from the Trojan War to the present day, have happened by chance or through the concurrence of a series of human follies, and I am by nature, out of skepticism, out of caution, always inclined to doubt any conspiracy, since I believe my fellow human beings are incapable of dreaming up a perfect one. All this despite the fact that—for reasons certainly of temperament, but also of irrepressible impulse—I’m inclined to regard Bush and his administration as capable of anything.
For reasons of space, I won’t go through the details of the arguments used by the supporters of both positions, which may all seem persuasive, but I appeal only to what I would describe as the “test of silence.” One example of the test of silence can be used against those who allege that the American landing on the Moon was a television sham. If the American spaceship hadn’t arrived on the Moon, then there must have been someone in a position to check this out, and who had an interest in revealing it, and this was the Soviets. And if the Soviets have kept silent, this is proof that the Americans actually got to the Moon. And that’s the end of it.
As regards conspiracies and secrets: experience, as well as history, tells us, first, that if there’s a secret, even if only one person knows about it, this person, perhaps in bed with his lover, will reveal it sooner or later. Only naïve Freemasons and followers of bogus Templar rituals believe in a secret that remains unbroken. Second, if there’s a secret, there’s always a price at which someone will be prepared to reveal it. A few hundred thousand dollars in publishing rights was enough to persuade a British army officer to recount all he’d done in bed with Princess Diana, and if he’d done it with the princess’s mother-in-law, it would have been worth double the sum. Now, to organize a false attack on the Twin Towers, to mine them, to warn the air force not to intervene, to hide embarrassing evidence, and so forth, would have involved the collaboration of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Generally speaking, the people used for such undertakings are never gentlemen, and it’s inconceivable that at least one of them, for a sufficient sum, wouldn’t have spoken. In short, what’s lacking in this story is the “deep throat.”
2007