14/09/2026
9/11, actually
by Martin McKenzie-Murray
Even 25 years after the terrorist attacks, all of those stories – conspiratorial, cuckoo and quotidian – linger on
The conspiracy theories bloomed quick. I heard plenty on campus, on the other side of the world, each slightly different in form but each one ardently (and self-admiringly) pointing to the same “truth”: 9/11 was an inside job.
If the truth of that day was that it was the United States’ worst intelligence failure in its history – proof not of an omniscient Deep State, but a sclerotic and catastrophically rivalrous mess of intelligence agencies – the “9/11 truth movement” was committed to believing the opposite: that the American Deep State was a leviathan of supreme malevolence with near-magical powers.
I’m not sure when, precisely, I first began to see the stickers and graffiti declaring that “Bush did 9/11”. Certainly they increased upon the release, in 2005, of Loose Change, a “documentary” made for a few grand on a young stoner’s laptop, which would quickly become a global phenomenon and a Rosetta Stone for paranoid creeps.
Initially exclusive to the internet, and made free to all, Loose Change soon found its release on DVD and its earnest passage through smoke-funked dorm rooms. A copy or three were pressed into my hands. At the time, I worked behind the desk of a backpackers’ hostel, a classic locus for unrooted souls, in a moment when Loose Change had acquired a secret, talismanic power not dissimilar to the first Velvet Underground album.
The first time it was passed to me, I was deeply sceptical. Upon watching it, I found my scepticism was not merely upheld but that the film also sparked a profound anger. It was vulgar in its stupidity and reflected poorly on those who encouraged my watching it. I’m angry again thinking about it.
There were several versions of Loose Change, the earliest – with several million views, and hundreds of thousands in DVD sales – made the following, now infamous claims: the collapse of the two towers of the World Trade Center was in fact the result of controlled explosions (because jet fuel can’t melt steel beams) and that the planes were empty and controlled remotely. That the Pentagon was never struck by a plane at all, but rather a cruise missile. And, regarding United Airlines Flight 93 –the plane likely headed towards the Capitol but thwarted by bravely rebellious passengers, and which crashed into a lonely field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania – well, that never happened at all.
To what end had the US government acted so diabolically (and with such sublime sophistication)? It’s oddly vague in its answer, beyond saying that it provided the means for justification. But for what? Well, probably corporate profit-making from subsequent war.
The documentary found resonance – nay, a sneaky hat-tip to the coming “inside job” – in this 2000 quote from US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld writing about preserving “American military pre-eminence in the coming decades”: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Loose Change was a gross fantasia made by a stoner boy from the twigs of vibes, coincidence, cherrypicked quotes and perfectly nutty interpretations of technical matters he knew nothing about.
In 2007, Alex Jones joined as executive producer on Loose Change: Final Cut. Yes, that Alex Jones, the garrulous freak of InfoWars recently bankrupted by his grotesque claims, made for years, that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting (26 murdered; 20 of them children aged six or seven) never happened – that it was, in fact, a false-flag operation conducted by the government and in which the “alleged” victims’ families were merely actors. Those grieving families were stalked for years by Jones’s followers.
So why did so many treat Loose Change so seriously? Why did so many allegedly smart people believe that our stoner boy had opened a door to the darkest, most sanctified chambers of the superpower’s deepest state?
I can’t possibly audit them all, but in my experience of hearing this horsesh*t for some years, I found recurring elements. One was that 9/11 truthers had too easily accepted the myth of America’s spooky omniscience – a fearsome myth sold by its most famous agency to American presidents since its inception.
Second, and relatedly, the 9/11 truthers – or truther-curious – were avowedly contemptuous of the United States and naturally sought justification for their hatred and schadenfreude.
Third, I wondered if the extraordinary images – many of which we watched live, and were typically, almost compulsively, described at the time as being like a Hollywood disaster film (something many assumed they were actually watching when they first turned on the news) – had hastened their incredulity. That is, if it looks like a high-production movie, well, then, maybe that’s because it’s all diabolically staged by the biggest film financier in the world: the US government.
Fourth, there was the self-pleasure that often attends the beliefs of arrogant mid-wits – an unctuous pride in their possession of grand secrets. I return here to an old essay I find reason to reread every couple of years. It’s critic James Wood writing about Don DeLillo – that overrated novelist of deep American dream-states and political paranoia. What Wood writes about DeLillo’s language and his characters applies neatly to the 9/11 truthers:
When DeLillo writes about secrets, about hidden plots and political viruses, his language becomes a thick scrabble. It sickens into vagueness. The culture of secrets encourages a pomposity in DeLillo and his characters. In White Noise, he smartly burlesques a portentousness he now seems to respect. The difficulty is that the paranoid character is necessarily pompous; he is always at the centre of all his plots; he worships himself really, is the brass god of his own mysticism.
Here, Wood is talking about characters, but it applies off the page too. What was that murderous conspiracist Dezi Freeman if not a brass god of his own mysticism? If not a supercilious and unpleasant man whose sense of secrets and superiority transformed into a murderous licence?
Finally, though, was reality. Those weapons of mass destruction? Didn’t exist. Never mind. Australia joined two of the longest wars in recent history, which achieved nothing but more death and radicalisation.
In the hours and days and weeks – then in the months and many years after the people had jumped from the towers and then the towers fell – the intelligence apparatus, which had so acutely failed, was newly emboldened by its own humiliation and its executive decree. It was also emboldened by the willingness of the people to take their consolation in the form of righteous vengeance, which curdled into torture and endless war.
Ziad Jarrah might’ve been the loosest thread of the 19 hijackers that day. In retrospect at least. The one whose murderous zealotry might’ve been closest to coming undone. A few things distinguished him from the others – but one thing particularly concerned the plot’s practical leader, Mohamad Atta. It might be described simply as love – as earthly attachments. I’ll come to that.
Born in Lebanon in 1975 to a moderate family, Jarrah attended a Christian school and liked to party. In the 1990s, he moved to Germany to study and, like The Beatles, found deliverance in Hamburg. Unlike the band, he found there a defining commitment to a death cult.
He also found love. Aysel Sengün was her name, a Turkish woman studying medicine. They met in 1996 and their relationship, tumultuous as it was, withstood his secrecy, creeping radicalisation, and severe complaints about her dress and behaviour. And all here, in this most self-consciously liberal German city.
Jarrah was one of the four pilots; he was also the only one of the 19 not to sever all ties at some point with lovers and family. The US government’s 9/11 Commission Report tells us that Jarrah arrived in America with his other “Hamburg pilots”, in the summer of 2000 – then merely armed with murderous intent, student visas and their enrolment in separate flight schools.
In the year between his arrival in Florida for flight instruction and September 11, 2001, hundreds of phone calls were made to or received from his lover back in Germany. That is, they spoke almost every day. The jihadist was in love with Osama bin Laden and the golden paradise reserved for his martyrs. He was also just in love.
This displeased Atta. Unsettled him. One’s commitment should be purely to bin Laden, as the chief functionary of Allah’s work of Holy War, and romantic fripperies were potentially ruinous.
Adding to the other conspirators’ doubts were Jarrah’s frequent flights home to Lebanon, and the trip his girlfriend made to Florida over the Christmas period of 2000. The others had broken contact with their friends and family. They understood this as necessary to the holy mission – that is, the righteous work of emotional compartmentalisation required of a suicidal mass killer.
But the 9/11 Commission Report describes – fitfully, incompletely – tension between Jarrah and Atta. His peers didn’t like Jarrah’s visits home to Lebanon or to Germany to see Sengün, or the holiday visit. They thought he was at risk of abandoning the mission.
When Aysel Sengün bought Jarrah a one-way flight from Miami to Düsseldorf, Atta took notice and drove Jarrah to the airport himself. A one-way ticket? We don’t know, and will never know, what was said on that drive to the airport.
But we know that Jarrah returned. And that he was one of the four pilots. And that he drove from Florida to New Jersey on September 8, and that a little after midnight he was pulled over by cops in Maryland and given a speeding fine.
We know that Jarrah wrote a letter to his girlfriend, posted a few days before 9/11. It was addressed incorrectly, and thus its first readers were investigators in the weeks after the attacks. In part, it read:
I did not escape from you, but I did what I was supposed to. You should be very proud of me. It’s an honor, and you will see the results, and everybody will be happy. I want you to remain very strong as I knew you, but whatever you do, head high, with a goal, never be without goal, always have a goal in front of you and always think, “what for.”
Remember always who you are and what you are. Keep your head high. The victors never have their heads down!
We know that Jarrah made a call to Sengün not long before he boarded Flight 93 and that he said he loved her and said goodbye.
Jarrah was the pilot on the flight meant for Washington, DC. The Capitol was probably the target, but we don’t know – bin Laden had always insisted upon the White House, a target his American operatives told him was too small, too difficult. As it was, the death jackals were overwhelmed by rebellious passengers and the flight found its gruesome end in a lonely field in Pennsylvania.
Even after the fact, when the dead conspirers were known, there were large gaps between the evidence. It was made that way.
Telephonic communication was used slightly, in favour of developments communicated in person between trusted figures and bin Laden. There were codes, obviously, and the shutting out of friends and family.
Cut-outs and go-betweens were used, phones only sparingly, and behaviours were altered according to need. Look at the passport photos of the 19 hijackers: none have beards. Aysel Sengün told investigators that in the last year he seemed more like himself.
The spy-craft of this murderous plot left gaps.
In the hours and days after the attacks, spooks and lovers alike sought to find meaning in grey spaces. Both had missed this. As American agents studied crash sites, Aysel Sengün was refusing to accept that her partner was one of the pilots.
Intelligence agencies had to clarify the blurriness of Jarrah’s biography. Sengün had to reconcile something much more intimate. Both were working backwards now, sifting through the greyness.
For a time, the absence of confirmation allowed Sengün to believe that her lover wasn’t involved. And for a time, millions could believe – and perhaps still believe – that 9/11 was an inside job.
Nothing is known of Aysel Sengün now. She cooperated with investigators and was immediately entered into a witness protection program. Presumably she lives with a new name in a new place.
She’d been humbled, outraged, endangered. So too the spooks now interviewing her – the ones assumed to have been omniscient, but would now ask for, and be given, new powers to try to become so.
