Michael Meacher, British Member of Parliament, and until recently environment minister in Tony Blair's government, added a lot of credibility to conspiracy theories about the 9/11-01 terrorist attacks on the USA, more than hinting that the Bush government and the neocons deliberately allowed these attacks to happen as an excuse for starting a global war on terror, in reality just a grab for oil.
Over a few days, I posted a number of detailed rebuttals and debunkings of Michael Meacher's absurd, monstrous and factually dishonest claims.
This is a collection of my blog postings on the subject, in chronological order from first to last.
Michael Meacher, who was environment minister in the UK until June this year, and is a member of the parliament for Labour, is arguing that the US government allowed al-Qaeda to murder 3000+ of its citizens to provide the evil neo-conservatives with the excuse to wage war for oil.
Meacher seems to be a frequent reader of conspiracy web pages, and he pushes a lot of the typical nonsense that have been pushed by conspiracy theorists for decades, and which has been debunked many times.
Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.
The claim that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbour in advance is a common theme of conspiracy theories, but is not supported by evidence and certainly not accepted by well-renowed historians. The same claim has been made about Churchill, and is debunked e.g. here.
Conspiracy theoriests, and that include Islamists as well as neo-nazis, often make the comparison between Pearl Harbour and 9/11 using very similar arguments.
Meacher draws a lot of anger already, but I expect a lot more will be hurled his way when the Americans wake up this morning. He uses a lot of quotations that only seemingly support his cause, and some appear to be taken out of context. I'll be back with more.
Update: a detailed debunking of the fighter plane claim here.
Update 2: more detailed debunking, showing Meacher's dishonesty and misquotations, as well as his weasel-worded backtracking, here.
Update 3: So where did Michael Meacher get his wacky conspiracy theories from? Look here.
A lot of conspiracy theorists have argued that no fighters were scrambled to intercept the hijacked airliners on 9/11-01. In fact, fighters were dispatched, but too late to reach any of the planes. Michael Meacher is at least reasonably well updated on these facts, so to build a case he begins with a very deceptive presentation of the facts.
All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.
Note how Meacher concentrates on a single airport, and only on the plane that hit Pentagon outside Washington DC. A casual reader will be given the impression that no fighters were scrambled anywhere, which is false. If you look at this timeline of the events on that fateful day, you can easily see how his above presentation is deceptive.
It is true that NORAD was warned about the hijacking of the flights that hit the World Trade Center, both taking off from Boston, long before dispatching aircraft near Washington DC. But that is beside the point, as at that time there was no known threat to the capital area, only to New York.
--8:38 a.m.: Boston air traffic center notifies NORAD that American Airlines flight 11 has been hijacked.
--8:43 a.m.: FAA notifies NORAD that United Airlines flight 175 has been hijacked.
--8:44 a.m.: Otis Air National Guard Base in Mass. orders to fighters scrambled.
--8:46 a.m.: American Airlines flight 11 strikes the World Trade Center's north tower.
At this time, flight 77 has just left Dulles in DC (8:22), and is probably not yet hijacked. So why should craft then have been dispatched around Washington DC? That happens some time later.
--9:25 a.m.: FAA notifies NORAD that United flight 77 may have been hijacked.
--9:27 a.m.: (approximate time) NORAD orders jets scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to head to intercept United Airlines flight 77.
--9:35 a.m.: Three F-16 Fighting Falcons take off from Langley AFB headed toward Washington area.
--9:37 a.m.: American Airlines flight 77 is lost from radar screens.
--9:38 a.m.: American Airlines flight 77 strikes the Pentagon.
As we can see, there was too short a warning to intercept the flight that hit the Pentagon. Ten minutes after the plane hit the building, F16s were in place over the capital. At this time, nobody knew how many hijacked planes were in the air.
Indeed, in his deceptive account Meacher trusts the reader to be unaware of the exact timeline, and he makes it sound like there was a several hour delay from a plane was hijacked until any fighters were even scrambled. Meacher is also inaccurate with his times.
Based on this deceptive presentation, he starts speculating:
Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority?
As we have seen, it was not a particularly long delay from NORAD was notified until fighters were in the air. As we all know, unfortunately there was little chance of intercepting the hijacked planes (and if fighters did intercept, the only option would have been to shoot the commercial airliners down, a very uncomfortable idea indeed, and no doubt one that conspiracy nuts would have a field day with).
Meacher jumps from his own distortions into atrocious speculations. Is he seriously arguing that people at air traffic centers, NORAD itself, members of the air force have been ordered by top members of the Bush adminstration to "step down" the defences? Is he further thinking that after 3000+ of their countrymen are brutally murdered, the hundreds of people, dedicated to their jobs and their country, would keep mum about the worst and most murderous conspiracy ever on American soil, and all for the sake of oil contracts and a pipeline?
There is a saying, two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Grand conspiracy theories all rely on potentially dangerous information being kept hidden by hundreds of people, few of whom would have any personal interest in keeping the facts hidden in the first place.
The Telegraph has an opinion piece poking some well-deserved fun at Michael Meacher's accusations that the US government let 9/11 happen to launch a phony war on terror:
The gist of Mr Meacher's conclusion is that the US government was prepared to see thousands of its citizens murdered to provide a convenient excuse for a series of conquering wars. This is a most novel theory. We look forward to more articles by him: "Aliens: why they choose to live among us" or "The cabal of jealous starlets who killed Marilyn Monroe" and "The coded Confederate message in the Gettysburg Address."
We are holding our breaths.
Btw, unfortunately the polician who now lends his credibility to these crazy conspiracy theories is a well-respected ex-minister with a long career in Labour.
The British MP Michael Meacher appears to be backing down a bit from his fantastic allegations. In this ITV interview with Andrew Harvey, he says he is just asking questions.
AH: You do quote that, you suggest that the American forces stood by while that attack took place.
MM: I did not say that, it is absolutely not my view.
AH: Well, as this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding or being ignorant of the evidence?
MM: I ask questions. I literally do not know the answers to all of these matters and my view is we need much further investigation, we need a new Congressional investigation that is much more thorough than the last one. There are legitimate issues that I don't purport to answer.
That is not a very accurate description of what he did in his letter. His questions are more of the type "have you stopped beating your wife," a fallacy known as complex question. In the original Guardian letter, he makes a number of claims that are not correct, and based on these claims he asks what he calls 'just questions.'
Here are a number of Meacher's unproven and false assertions:
The US had been planning an attack in Afghanistan at that time before 9/11, something which would only be possible if there was specific foreknowledge of the attacks.
I am sure there exists operational plans for an attack on virtually any place on the planet somewhere in the Pentagon. Geopolitical situations can change virtually overnight, so I expect no less. The US had already, under Clinton, launched missile strikes on Afghanistan, so obviously it was in its sights.
But what Meacher claims, is that specific plans and intentions for a September attack on Afghanistan existed before 9/11. He has, by his own admission, relied on various Internet pages to "research" the issue, and he repeats allegations which have been long debunked, that the US had given the Taliban an ultimatum to accept a pipeline through their country or else. The sources he relies on are, to put it mildly, not very credible.
That no fighter planes were scrambled on 9/11
I have debunked that assertion solidly here. While he is somewhat truthful with facts (if deceptive by omission) in his Guardian letter, in the ITV interview he is outright lying:
Why were no planes on the day itself put into the air for an hour and a half after the Pentagon knew that a hijack had taken place, when there is a routine intercept procedure which is always operated when an airliner goes off course? It had operated 67 times in the last year. On this particular day it did not operate. Why?
As we have seen, fighter planes were scrambled, immediately after NORAD was made aware of the hijackings, but it was too late to intercept the airliners. The Guardian letter shows that Meacher is somewhat aware of the actual facts, yet choose to use deceptive wording to mislead his audience (this is evident in other news sources' interpretation of his article, where they say no fighters whatsoever was scrambled before the Pentagon was hit, a direct lie).
If Meacher wants to implicate NORAD in the massive neocon conspiracy, he should perhaps be aware that the person in actual command of NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain HQ on 9/11-01 was Canadian Brig. Gen. Jim Hunter. But I am sure Meacher can implicate Canada in the big bad conspiracy, too.
That the US didn't want to kill Bin Laden
By very disingenious use of selective quotations, Meacher makes it look like the US did not want to capture Bin Laden. That is a rather absurd proposition. If you look beyond the short quotations he shares with his readers, you will see that rather than being an indication that the US did not want Bin Laden dead or alive, it shows the US commanders in the war on terror realised that they needed to do more than capture one man. Here is one example of Meacher's dishonesty:
The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002).
Hunt: The Big Question for General Myers: One embarrassment for the U.S. has been that, in almost seven months after 9/11, we still haven't captured Osama bin Laden. With the apprehension this week of one of his top lieutenants, have we gotten enough information to be any closer to maybe finally getting bin Laden?
Myers: Well, if you remember, if we go back to the beginning of this segment, the goal has never been to get bin Laden. Obviously, that's desirable.
Interesting, I just read a piece by some analysts that said you may not want to go after the top people in these organizations. You may have more effect by going after the middlemen, because they're harder to replace. I don't know if that's true, or not, and clearly we would like to eventually get bin Laden.
But I think the fact that we've been able to disrupt operations, get a lot of the people just under him and maybe just a little bit further down, has had some impact on their operations. We know have disrupted, you know, four, five, six, seven active operations that they had planned and probably more that we don't know about.
So we're going to keep the hunt on. Finding one person, as we've talked about before, is a very difficult prospect, but we will keep trying.
Obviously, Myers is not supporting Meacher's crazy conspiracy idea, he is simply pointing out that the war on terror has a much broader scope than catching one man. Note that Meacher conveniently left out Gen. Myers folliowing sentence.
I have good reasons to believe that this opinion piece in Toronto Star, by columnist Michele Landsberg, reveals who is the primary source of Michael Meacher's (picture) conspiracy theories as presented in the infamous letter in the Guardian. It is an interview and profile of environmentalist and veteran journalist Barrie Zwicker, who asks some of the same stupid loaded "questions" as Meacher.
For example, after seeing some propaganda video by the conspiracy theorist Zwicker, Landsberg asks this rhetorical question:
Why did the United States Air Force fail to scramble interceptor jets — in defiance of all long-standing rules and well-established practice — for almost two hours after it was known that an unprecedented four planes had been hijacked? [...]
Why did the two squadrons of fighter jets at Andrews Air Force base, 19 kilometres from Washington, not zoom into action to defend the White House, one of their primary tasks?
Do you recognize the argument? Meacher also had this obsession with Andrews Air Force base, and by asking rhetorical questions about this base only he made the impression no fighters were scrambled. Fellow blogger Flit debunked the Toronto Star article back in May.
As we have seen earlier, a fact easily available from a number of sources, fighters were scrambled, from Langley, not Andrews, immediately after flight 77 was reported hijacked, and those F-16s formed a combat air patrol (CAP) over the capital right after flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Also, contrary to these conspiracy theorists' assertions, earlier the same day, fighters had been scrambled in the NY area in response to the hijackings there.
Flit explains why it's nonsensical to focus on Andrews:
The units at Andrews are actually the F-16s of 113 Wing, D.C. Air National Guard, a formation of part-time pilots obviously not at a high level of operational readiness. The interceptor units protecting Washington are at Langley AFB, which as noted above, fully participated in the D.C. defense on Sept. 11.
The conspiracy nuts have failed to do the most basic fact checking before starting to ask their loaded "questions."
Michael Meacher was, as you may remember, environment minister in Britain until quite recently. He is known for his "skepticism" to GM, among other things. The conspiracy nut Zwicker is also an environmentalist, which may explain why the British MP knew about his ideas and believed in them.
PS: Some more background and reactions on Michael Meacher here.
You could no doubt build a case that US interests in the Gulf states, including Iraq, is closely related to its dependence on oil supplies. I doubt the west would care more about the Middle East than, say, Africa south of Sahara, if the region wasn't home to the largest oil reserves on Earth. That's economic reality for you.
Yet, radical leftists have a need to see oil everywhere. Even when the US, immediately after 9/11-01 launched a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, many leftists desperately tried to spin some oil connection into it. Problem is, there is no oil in Afghanistan. The country is sadly lacking in resources that would interest the rest of the world, perhaps excepting opium.
That did not stop the conspiracy theorists. The reason for the war, they argue, is that that US wanted a gas pipeline through Afghanistan. The Taliban supposedly refused, so the CIA or the Neocons or the Illuminati or all three staged the terror attacks on WTC and Pentagon, and started a massive military operation to make it possible for Unocal to build a $3bn gas pipeline (the truly ignorant say "oil pipeline") from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.
Does that sound stupid enough?
Luckily, if you again meet anyone ignorant and crazy enough to believe this, you can merely point them to Ken Silverstein's brilliant debunking of the whole concept.
Thanks to Dave for finding this article for me again.
I am pleasantly surprised to see that the Guardian, who printed MP Meacher's infamous conspiracy letter, has given David Aaronovitch the job to write a throrough trashing approproately titled Has Meacher completely lost the plot?
He goes over quite a bit of the ground already covered in this blog and elsewhere, and shows exactly where Meacher got his "facts" wrong. Absolutely brilliant. One could be tempted to believe Aaronovitch reads Secular Blasphemy (j/k).
I didn't find a link to this article on the front page, though. Perhaps later.
