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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-
000021219mar24.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dsuncomment
URBAN LEGENDS
Have You Heard About Osama's Cheez-It Stash?
The conspiracy lobby is working to keep rumors alive.
By GALE HOLLAND
Gale Holland is a freelance writer.
March 24 2002
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 (http://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.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives. For information about reprinting this article,
go to www.lats.com/rights.
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