Tucker Carlson And The Great 9/11 Fallacy

Tucker Carlson is one of those people you either love or hate. Liberals hate him, everyone else takes him for what he is.

Unsurprisingly, being both a genuine journalist and a conservative, he has often been accused of promoting conspiracy theories. His latest venture is The 9/11 Files, a TV miniseries which is said to cast doubt on the official narrative of the worst day in American history, the day the world changed, and a dozen other clichés.

As Tucker is 56, he is old enough to remember that terrible day. Most of the people who will watch this are not. It is difficult to believe it happened nearly a quarter of a century ago.

There are 5 episodes in this series, the third is called They Could Have Stopped It. But could they? This is one of the many spurious claims of the lunatic fringe and people, who like Carlson, should know better but don’t. Many go a lot further of course. There are those who claim Israel was behind it, and others who claim Uncle Sam was the culprit. The 9/11 attacks were indeed the result of a conspiracy; they were carried out by 19 Islamist fanatics armed with box cutters and financed by evil men beyond American shores.

There was actually a twentieth hijacker – five for each plane – but two of the prime suspects were denied entry to the country.

The idea that the authorities could have stopped the attacks, that they knew about them, or even that they allowed them to go ahead for their own nefarious reasons, is based on a fallacy pointed out by Professor Quigley in his classic Tragedy & Hope and known to most detectives even if they don’t always recognise it as such.

Knowing something is one thing, acting on it is another. To take just one example from the UK, the Metropolitan Police knew Colin Stagg was responsible for the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in July 1992. The lead detective on the case still knew this after Mr Justice Ognall shredded the case against Stagg before a jury could be sworn in. It was only a decade and more later that the real killer was identified thanks to advances in DNA profiling; this was the serial rapist Robert Napper who murdered a young mother and her daughter in November 1993.

There are countless examples of the wrong person being arrested for and even convicted of murder, including at times murders that never happened.

The 9/11 attacks were so audacious that no Hollywood studio would have produced a film on a similar theme. Did the NSA or other agencies, American or otherwise, pick up chatter about an attack on New York? Quite possibly, but what about one on The Pentagon? And if someone were to inform the authorities, who would have believed him?

Imagine a man walking into a police station on September 4, 2001 and telling a detective about the forthcoming attacks.

“Yes, Mr Muhammed, and where did you obtain this information?...You heard two men discussing it in the mosque last night? I see, well, thank you for being a public spirited citizen. We’ll look into it.”

What happens next? The man leave the police station, the detective shares a joke with his colleague, and they turn to serious matters. What do they do the following week? Obviously, they destroy any evidence relating to this conversation.

Is it possible that a broadly similar conversation took place somewhere in the United States or elsewhere about that time? Of course, and it is also possible that the terrorists sent out signals indicating an entirely different target, the Hoover Dam, for instance.

In episode 4, Tucker and his team appear to have fallen for the nonsense of Building 7, alluded to here as Tower 7. This is a canard that has long been promoted by Richard Gage, a crank with credentials. There was absolutely no mystery about the collapse of Building 7. The comedian Eddie Current made an excellent video that explained its collapse even though it was not hit by one of the planes. No one was killed when Building 7 collapsed because the professionals on the ground could tell in advance what would happen so had long evacuated it and the area.

Was there any sort of cover-up? Almost certainly. Most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals. As Saudi Arabia was and remains one of America’s closest allies, this was acutely embarrassing. Most of the attention focused on this terror cell concerned the leader, Mohamed Atta, who was an Egyptian. It is not impossible that one or two of the 15 Saudis knew someone who worked for the Saudi Government. At that time, the population of the country was less than 17 million including a large number of foreign nationals. They were all educated men and were heavily committed to the cause of radical Islam, so moved in the same kind of circles as many leading Saudis. How embarrassing would even an innocent connection with a Saudi Government official have been?

Episode 5 of the series sees Carlson on firmer ground. It is clear that the 9/11 attacks was a useful pretext for the neo-cons to further their interference in the Middle East, the best known instance of this being the ludicrous weapons of mass destruction hoax that was used as a pretext for invading Iraq, but it was the leading Democrat Rahm Emanuel who summed up this technique in a different context – never let a good crisis go to waste. Or a bad one, for that matter. This is what Tucker Carlson and his collaborators appear to have missed.