FAKE NEWS & CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Of jet fuel and steal beams 9/11 conspiracy theories. Yes – those again. I could expend a considerable amount of ink on why they are utterly false. I could detail the reams of research by journalists and congressional staffers of all political stripes into how the attacks of 9/11 were planned and unfolded, or the refutation by civil and aerospace engineers of the arguments put forward about ‘irregularities’ in the manner of the buildings’ collapse. I could point to the comprehensive lack of planning for the post-war settlement in Iraq, or what Bush’s Administration would do if Iraq had no WMDs. Or the fact that the first war the United States undertook after 9/11 was in Afghanistan - a country that had been never been of prior interest to any Bush administration members. Yet the theories still persist. Given the weight of evidence against them, this would be surprising, if we were not dealing with political history. History, and political history in particular, is the stories we tell about the past in order to make sense of how we got here, and by extension who 14
we are now. These are often based on who we want to be, on a yearning for a favourable identity. The story that the 'Truthers' want to tell is that a US president orchestrated attacks that killed thousands of American civilians, a narrative that denies the possibility that a non-state group in Afghanistan launched devastatingly successful attacks on the World Trade Center, UA Flight 93 and the Pentagon. Indeed, this story seems to depend on the assumption that it would be better for the
United States government to be competently evil, rather than its best intentions having failed. This attitude is built on two things: American exceptionalism and racism. FAKE NEWS
