How could the 9/11 conspiracy be concealed for so long?

9-11 Research provides multiple lines of analysis that thoroughly undermine the official conspiracy theory that the attack was the work of cells of Islamic extremists. We show that only insiders in the U.S. government possessed the means and opportunity to execute the attack. The following questions are frequently asked by people considering the idea that the attack was the work of insiders, including high-level officials in the US government and military. Other questions are addressed in other FAQs.

• Wouldn’t the orchestration of the attack by insiders have necessitated the involvement of large numbers of people?
• How could even a small number of people be persuaded to participate in such a horrific plan?
• How is it that none of the conspirators have changed their minds and come forward?
• How is it that no one who was NOT involved — but who happened to be close enough to see evidence and draw the right conclusions — has come forward either?
• How could the conspirators have been confident enough to plan such a complex attack given the risk of exposure by witnesses who saw too much?
• In spite of the consolidation of ownership of the media, wouldn’t there at least be some reporters and editors willing to expose the scam to make names for themselves?
• How could such a conspiracy have been successfully carried out by the notoriously incompetent officials of the Bush administration?
• Wouldn’t the orchestration of the attack by insiders have necessitated the involvement of large numbers of people? 

• Not in the execution of the attack. A conspiracy can involve different levels of complicity, with knowledge of the complete plan limited to a few individuals. There are plausible scenarios of the attack as an inside job in which the number of such individuals is smaller than the number of individuals accused by the official conspiracy theory of “sleeper cells” directed by Osama bin Laden. 

  High-ranking officials in the government have at their disposal several tools that Osama bin Laden would have lacked, such as detailed knowledge and control of the military’s disposition and response to the attack, and access to the military’s and intelligence agencies’ hierarchical and compartmentalized command structure designed to execute complex operations with individuals working on a need-to-know basis.Compartmentalization is an organizational tool long employed by intelligence agencies. ¹  

  The speculative scenario outlined in Attack Scenario 404 explains how the attack might have been carried out by as few as twelve individuals. 

• How could even a small number of people be persuaded to participate in such a horrific plan to kill “their own people”? 

  There are many examples of mass homicide, economic gain often being a central motivating factor, and many of those involve conspiracies including high officials. There are several generally acknowledged examples of false-flag attacks being staged as pretexts for launching wars. According to the cold-blooded calculus of a false-flag attack one’s own countrymen are sacrificed to rally the people against an external enemy blamed for the attack. 

  The economic interests riding on the success of the 9/11 attack (measurable in hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars), would have availed huge sums to the buying of people’s cooperation, and the procurement of state-of-the art covert operations capabilities. 

  The small number of people with operational knowledge and control of the plan were likely willing participants whose stake in the plan’s success was sufficiently persuasive. The much larger number of people whose actions were necessary to execute the plan were likely, for the most part, entirely unwitting participants in the murderous plan. 

• How is it that none of the conspirators have changed their minds and come forward? 

  Operatives would be carefully screened to assure their loyalty to the attack’s planners and to each other. Given the magnitude of the crime, admission of involvement would expose a conspirator to swift silencing by co-conspirators, vigilante justice by an outraged public, or harsh judgment by a court of law. It is also possible that many of the operatives could have been killed before or during the attack. 

• How is it that no one who was NOT involved — but who happened to be close enough to see evidence and draw the right conclusions — has come forward either? 

  Appearances that there are no such witnesses are misleading. For example, firefighters reported explosions in the towers, but official transcripts of their statements were purged of all such references. The objections of many people to the destruction of Ground Zero evidence was not widely reported. Many of the questions requested by the 9/11 Family Steering Committee were never asked of public officials, and media coverage of lawsuits by victims’ families has been sparse. 

  At least two scientists, Kevin Ryan and Steven E. Jones, were forced out of long-term career positions after publicly challenging the WTC collapse theory. Government insiders who have questioned the official story, such as former German Minister of Technology Andreas von Bulow have been quietly ignored. 

• How could the conspirators have been confident enough to plan such a complex attack given the risk of exposure by witnesses who saw too much? 

  The key to success was to make the attack so bold and shocking that even people who were subsequently involved in covering it up (like leaders in the media, FEMA, FBI, etc.) would succumb to the psychological operation. The FBI agents running around seizing video around the Pentagon may have thought they were covering up a war-game-gone-bad. Architects of the massive evidence destruction operation at Ground Zero may have thought they were shielding the building’s designers from charges of faulty engineering. Layers of cover stories allow people abetting the scam to think they are covering up less serious crimes. 

• In spite of the consolidation of ownership of the media, wouldn’t there at least be some reporters and editors willing to expose the scam to make names for themselves? 

  To seriously investigate the 9/11/01 attack, reporters and editors have to question the basic tenets of the official story. Such questioning, while widespread on the web, continues to be heresy in newsrooms. For reporters to acknowledge the larger implications of the attack being an inside job, they would have to question much of what they have been taught since childhood about the beneficence of our leaders and the nobility of our government and economic system. Such a “Matrix”-like awakening can involve a great deal of painful disillusionment. The small group of wealthy people who own and control the media are not inclined to question the OBL myth since that myth shifts responsibility away from the real perpetrators, whom they associate with. 

  Following the spectacular attack of September 11, the anthrax attacks were directed at reporters and Democrats, probably in an effort to intimidate them into silence. 

• How could such a conspiracy have been successfully carried out by the notoriously incompetent officials of the Bush administration? 

  Cultivating chaos is a time-honored method of advancing anti-democratic agendas, as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. ²  The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been extremely lucrative for Bush administration cabinet officials, many of whom have strong ties to the oil and weapons industries. ³  Average profits for the Big Five oil companies doubled from 2000 to 2007, and awards to the top ten Pentagon contractors increased 75% between 2001 and 2003. ^4 5  In carrying out its Constitutional responsibilities to the people, the Bush administration was indeed utterly incompetent. In enriching its insiders and their cronies and evading criminal accountability for its acts it couldn’t have been more competent.

Many of the questions in this FAQ are answered in much greater depth in Where Are the 9/11 Whistleblowers?, an essay by Gregg Roberts.