them told the FBI agents who rushed to the scene. “Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
The events of 9/11 real were all too real, so much so that most Americans could only experience the horror as what philosopher Jean Baudrillard described as a televised simulacrum. For too many, the images of planes suddenly slamming into Manhattan’s iconic downtown skyline and sending workers tumbling from the burning towers to their agonizing death—the sheer magnitude of the terror and the tragedy—defied the bounds of comprehension. And the stories that emerged when the clouds of ash cleared raised more questions than they answered.
It was only natural that in the days after a traumatizing event like 9/11, millions of Americans gravitated toward conspiratorial thinking to make sense of the cataclysm. In July, just two months before the attacks, a radio personality in Austin, Texas, had prophesied what many came to believe was the hidden truth: “Please! Call Congress. Tell ’em we know the government is planning terrorism,” the gravelly voiced host intoned, warning that the target would be the World Trade Center. Next, he identified the name of the government’s patsy: “bin Laden is the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian, phony system.”
At the time, Alex Jones was on the cutting edge of alternative talk radio. Branded by Talkers magazine as “an early trailblazer” of the “digital, independent model of the 21st century,” he was broadcast on 100 stations across the country. Jones had made a memorable cameo in his friend Richard Linklater’s 2001 animated docufiction film, Waking Life, barreling down the barren streets of downtown Austin in an old car and barking through a public address system, “The twenty-first century is gonna be a new century, not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues with no significance, and classism and statism and all the rest of the modes of human control,” Jones ranted, unwittingly echoing rhetorical PNAC themes. “It’s gonna be the age of humankind standing up for something pure and something right!”
Following the shock of 9/11, Jones stood almost alone among his peers. On that morning, when he sat behind the microphone, he pointed his finger directly at the government, accusing it of orchestrating “controlled demolitions” inside both towers of the World Trade Center. It was an inside job, he insisted, the handiwork of a nefarious network of sociopathic globalists. Within days, Jones was unceremoniously dropped by radio affiliates until he virtually disappeared from the commercial airwaves. But he spoke to the masses of confused and suddenly inquisitive Americans who sensed that they were being lied to; who sensed that their media was manipulating them into war and that their simpleton president was little more than a front man for a sinister elite willing to sacrifice countless lives to deepen its control over the masses.
As the Bush administration spun out a case for invading Iraq almost immediately after 9/11, the mainstream media fell in line with the march to war. Pundits on both sides of the partisan divide acted out the sentiments that Dan Rather expressed days after the attacks: “wherever [Bush] wants me to line up, just tell me where.” Antiwar outliers like MSNBC’s Phil Donahue were summarily driven from their jobs while neoconservative conspiracy theorists like Laurie Mylroie found a mostly uncritical national media platform to make the dubious link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The case for invading Iraq on the basis of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction only compounded popular skepticism of the official narrative. By the summer of 2002, public trust in the federal government had plummeted twenty-four points from October 2001, when trust levels were at their highest point in forty years.
Amid the deluge of disinformation, Alex Jones emerged as a cult hero. With each rant about the government plot to engineer the most devastating terror attack on American soil in history, the barrel-chested, ruddy-faced agitator attracted thousands of new listeners, many of them deeply disillusioned young men with negligible economic prospects. His Infowars network ballooned into a multimillion-dollar empire with more online listeners than America’s top conservative radio jock, Rush Limbaugh, enabling Jones to roll out a highly profitable, nutritionally questionable line of dietary supplements, from Caveman True Paleo Formula to Silver Bullet colloidal silver, all marketed as antidotes to the government’s “chemical war.” (Ironically, the Center for Environmental Health found that Jones’ True Paleo Formula and another of his supplements contained toxic levels of lead, enough to increase risk of heart attacks and sperm damage. In a custody battle with his ex-wife, Jones’ own attorney described him as “a performance artist,” not an ideologically committed journalist.)
But even if he was just playing an online carnival barker, Jones put his money where his mouth was. Among the shock jock’s myriad pet projects was the 2005 Loose Change 9/11 documentary series, produced by Dylan Avery, a twentysome-thing waiter at Red Lobster at the time he edited it. The film is an eighty-minute scattershot of compelling theories and probing questions about the 9/11 attacks, clinically scripted and set with an impressively high production value. Avery’s narrative seemed to expose serious flaws in the government’s case, demonstrating that it at least had foreknowledge of the attacks and did nothing to stop them.
The insinuation that runs through the documentary is that, even more than an official cover-up, there was ample evidence of active government involvement in planning and implementing the attacks by planting bombs inside the World Trade Center. Inspired by the 9/11 Truth movement, Jones quickly recognized the film’s potency and invested heavily in its distribution, making himself its executive producer. Over the course of several editions, Loose Change garnered more than 10 million views, becoming the central recruiting vehicle of the Truth movement. Avery became a celebrity in his own right, finding interest from filmmaking legend David Lynch, actor Charlie Sheen and the oligarch Mark Cuban. Loose Change drove public opinion in an undeniable direction: by the time the film had reached several million views, in 2006, 42 percent of Americans told pollsters from Zogby—in a poll sponsored by the Truther organization 911Truth.org—that they believed the 9/11 Commission had either ignored or “concealed” evidence that contradicted the “official explanation.”
There was no doubt the 9/11 Commission had endeavored to cover up inconvenient truths surrounding the attacks. Twenty-eight pages of the commission’s final report had been redacted. These sections dealt with the Saudi connection to 9/11, delving into the relationship between Saudi officials like Fahad al-Thumairy and Omar Bayoumi, and the hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. The pages also included information showing contacts between one of the hijackers and a corporation managing the Aspen, Colorado, home of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was then the Saudi ambassador to Washington. The Saudi government had forked over millions to powerhouse DC firms like Qorvis to lobby against the public release of those twenty-eight pages. And despite sustained pressure campaigns from the families of 9/11 victims, both the Bush and Obama administrations stood staunchly against any action that would embarrass a top ally like Saudi Arabia.
Then there was the issue of Operation Cyclone. Al Qaeda had been a natural outgrowth of the covert war the CIA oversaw during the 1980s in Afghanistan, where the agency armed and trained Islamist mujahedin like the warlord Hekmatyar. The 9/11 Commission Report glossed over this crucial piece of context in a short page and a half, referring to the mujahedin as “an Afghan national resistance movement” and noting only in passing that the United States covertly backed some of its most extreme elements. On this central point, the report was a historical whitewash.
If the government had advance warning of the 9/11 attacks; if it turned a blind eye to the devious schemes of the hijackers; and if it callously sacrificed the security of its own citizens, the reason was imperial ambition. Indeed, the American national security state had been so hell-bent on defeating the Soviet Union that the long-term consequences of weaponizing Islamist proxies were irrelevant—“compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant,” as Brzezinski had reflected in 2006. It was also undeniable that America’s special relationship with Saudi Arabia had necessitated a passive attitude toward the country’s funding and propagation of extremism across the Middle East, and may have caused the intelligence services to look the other way even when Saudi activities on American soil in the months leading up to 9/11 had their own systems “blinking red.” For many of the disillusioned youth that gravitated into 9/11 Truth circles, however, these critical pieces of historical