"The Empire Never Ended"
Philip Dick was a master of capturing the paranoid sense of reality that pervaded American society during the Cold War. In Dick's universe, for any mystery that may be explained by multiple scenarios, it is always the most extreme, the most paranoiac possibility that's the actual one. This is part of what drives his creativity and makes his novels interesting.
There are many reasons why this site is named after Dick, and one is that the peculiarly American, paranoid sensibility Dick captured in his novels has not left us. The Cold War has been replaced with the War on Terror, and in a perpetual war in which our very existence is supposedly at stake and in which those in power may be said to have questionable motives, one gets the sense that all (and I mean all) possibilities are on the table.
Take, for example, conspiracy theories regarding 9/11. There are those who suspect that, at the very least, some in the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the attacks and did nothing to stop them. They saw them as instrumentally valuable for justifying a necessary military build-up in the Middle East -- the requisite "new Pearl Harbor" that the Project for a New American Century's report on "Rebuiliding America's Defenses" (pdf) conceived as necessary for initiating a swift transformation of the military in all its aspects (not only increased spending and improved technology, but also "forward basing" and "presence" beyond US borders; see p. 50-1 in the report).
Now I am not prone to conspiracy theories. I don't wear a tinfoil hat. I'm a philosopher -- a skeptic by training. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet, as a philosopher, I'm also trained to consider all possibilities, and to be conscious of what can and cannot be, strictly speaking, ruled out.
And it seems to me that we cannot rule out 9/11 conspiracy theories on the grounds that they are unthinkable -- i.e. that those in power would never do such a thing.
For there is already a solid precendent for the planning of terrorist operations against innocent Americans to win public support for war. It was called Operation Northwoods. From ABC News:
In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders [i.e. the Joint Chiefs of Staff] reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.
The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.
America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," and, "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
[snip]
Even after [the Head of the Joint Chiefs] Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext" operations at least through 1963.
One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base -- an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.
Like Dick's stories, this article shows that anything is possible.
1:22:45 AM 
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