Have You Heard About Osama’s Cheez-It Stash?

It’s an article of faith among some Muslims that Israel and/or the international Jewish/Zionist cabal were behind the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Tales of “4,000 Jewish workers” who stayed home Sept. 11, and of Israeli spies videotaping the twin towers collapsing, were quickly debunked. Still, the stories persist. Most of us chalk them up to anti-Semitism, denial or ignorance, and go on our way.

But what about our Sept. 11 fantasies? 9/11--our shorthand for the attacks, the war, the anthrax scare, rolling terror alerts, the whole scary mess--has spawned a plethora of tall tales, and some of these are as kooky as the suddenly ill 4,000 Jewish workers.

The stories started soon after the attacks. By now, you probably know that the photo of the man on the World Trade Center observation deck with a jet pointed at his back is a fake. But did you hear that Osama bin Laden penned a memo to his cave mates, warning them to lay off his “Cheez-It” stash? Or that a New Yorker found bodies, still strapped in their airplane seats, inside her lower Manhattan apartment?

If these stories sound like urban legends, they are. But other storylines contain just enough truth to keep them in rotation. A year ago, who would have believed that terrorist “sleeper cells” would turn commercial jetliners into bombs, obliterating national landmarks and 3,000 lives in a single coordinated assault? Faced with the inexplicable, we seem to take comfort in irrational pseudo-explanations.

Take one of the latest stories making the rounds. This account has it that U.S. knowledge of terrorist mastermind Bin Laden’s murderous intentions goes all the way back to Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and the 1987 Iran-Contra congressional hearings. North is said to have told a U.S. Senate committee that Bin Laden threatened to kill him and his family, prompting him to spend $60,000 on a home-security system. Then-Sen. Al Gore is supposed to have grilled North on his story during the Senate hearings on the scandal.

Except it was actually terrorist Abu Nidal that North was worried about, according to the Urban Legends Web site (www.snopes2.com). The security system cost $16,000, not $60,000. And Gore was not one of North’s interrogators. So much for details.

One clue to the shakiness of the story might have been that North was convicted of obstruction of Congress, destruction of evidence and of accepting an illegal gratuity in Iran-Contra, although the judgments were later overturned. And consider the motive. The political right has every reason to blame Democrats, and excuse Republicans, for failing to abort an act of terrorism that, after all, occurred on the GOP’s watch.

But the right is not alone in pushing 9/11 lore that suits its political agenda. A story that has entranced some on the left revolves around the sudden departure of Bin Laden’s U.S.-based relatives after 9/11. Reputedly, President Bush bundled the relatives onto planes two days after the attacks, when the rest of the country was still barred from the skies and before they could be interrogated by the FBI, in exchange for some favor from the Saudis.

Two Saudi flights did leave the U.S., but Bush had nothing to do with the departures, according to the Urban Legends Web site. The flights, one chartered by the Bin Laden family and the other by the Saudi government, occurred one week after the attacks, when the no-flight rule had been lifted. The Saudis say Bin Laden’s relatives were questioned before they left, according to the site.

Another peculiarly American rumor with obvious antecedents is that Bin Laden is alive and well and living in the U.S. Like Elvis, Osama keeps popping up all over, although he seems to especially like Utah, where he is typically seen tucking into a Big Mac and fries at McDonald’s, or window-shopping at the local mall, according to the Urban Legends site.

A big hit on the e-mail circuit is the “Saucy Jack” letter. Jack is a U.S. Marine Corps special operations intelligence officer who writes his friend, “Bizarre,” a profane account of his Afghan tour. The letter includes this account of the Afghan people: “These guys, all of ‘em, are Huns. Actual, living Huns....They have no respect for anything, not for their families or for each other or for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their 5-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts ....”

The letter’s battlefield details, celebration of U.S. prowess and demonization of the enemy play well in these days of severe Pentagon reporting restrictions, when we’re starved for a soldier’s-eye view of the front. But there’s a problem with the letter: In it, Jack discloses his precise location and mission. Military censors? The letter’s author is unknown, but it certainly looks like a hoax. Its aim seems to be to discourage scrutiny of military operations, particularly from CNN and “that awful, sneering, pompous [CNN anchor] Aaron Brown.”

In the misty climes where the far left meets the far right, conspiracy theories have begun to dominate the 9/11 rumor mill. The basic premise is that President Bush/ the CIA/ Big Oil either planned the attacks or let them happen to secure a U.S. oil pipeline/ take over the Middle East/ launch a one-world government.

Some of the conspiracists, such as former LAPD narcotics investigator Michael C. Ruppert (www.copvcia.com), offer a timeline of suspicious-sounding, if unsubstantiated, 9/11 factoids and “let” the reader decide. Claiming that the CIA met with Bin Laden in July 2001 and allowed him to walk away, Ruppert asks, “If the CIA and the government weren’t involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, what were they doing?”

Other theorists, including private investigator Joe Vialls, lob more specific, but equally unsubstantiated, allegations. Vialls, on his Web site (https://geocities.com/mknemesis/homerun.html) claims that the jetliners used in the Sept. 11 attacks were “hijacked electronically” from the ground. Vialls doesn’t identify the culprits, but apparently the plot involves a secret U.S. military software program developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and “the multinationals.” The media can be considered unindicted co-conspirators.

“Many readers might by now be indignant; convinced this is incorrect or misleading information because of ‘those telephone calls from the hijacked aircraft,’” Vialls’ Web site says. “Which telephone calls exactly? There are no records of any such calls, and the emotional claptrap the media fed you in the aftermath of the attack was in all cases third-person.”

Shadowy government agencies with Maxwell Smartish-sounding acronyms are big with these conspiracy theorists. So are credentials that appear to mean something but don’t. Vialls, for example, is described on his Web site as a “former member of the Society of Licensed Aeronautical Engineers & Technologists, London.”

What Vialls and his ilk really represent is the conspiracy lobby, a tiny but persistent subgroup spawned by the John F. Kennedy assassination and nurtured through the CIA/ assassination-plot scandals of the following decades. They see conspiracies everywhere. A link on Vialls’ site refers to convicted Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski, one of the most thoroughly investigated crime figures on record, as a “patsy.”

Yet, their 9/11 scenarios have won them new followers. Ruppert has appeared on a Canadian cable television show, and a West Coast lecture series is underway. David Corn, The Nation magazine’s Washington editor, received so many e-mails from readers alerting him to dastardly U.S./ CIA 9/11 plots that he decided to debunk them in print. Now, he’s sorry he did.

“I was besieged by people accusing me of being a CIA disinformation agent,” says Corn, referring to the responses to his story. “In hindsight, it’s just not worth it; people who believe in conspiracies of this nature often can’t be argued against. Because they assume if you argue against them, you’re part of the conspiracy.”

Sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is just fiction. Getting at the truth is tough, accepting it can be harder still. Paranoia is a lot easier. Sept. 11 may have robbed us of our sense of normalcy, but we can’t let it unseat our reason.