Frightening Frauds

"Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Administration Plot", reads the headline in today's Washington Post. Staff writer Juliet Eilperin details that Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) "is calling for an investigation into whether President Bush and other government officials had advance notice of terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 but did nothing to prevent them." The representative's comments came during a recent interview with a Berkeley radio station.

Such a notion links McKinney to other notorious speculators on the subject, ranging from the John Birch Society to the San Francisco Indymedia to the most visible 9/11 conspiracist of the moment, Frenchman Thierry Meyssan, whose bestselling book The Frightening Fraud alleges that the American Airlines plane that crashed into the Pentagon never existed.

But McKinney's comments also tie her to conspiracy theories about past sneak attacks on America, most notably the question of whether Franklin D. Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. While there are those who have no doubt about FDR's fiendish culpability, most remain far from convinced. (In a recent assessment of Winston Churchill in the April issue of The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens throws into play the intriguing notion that "FDR probably did not know…but Churchill quite possibly did." Thus another conspiracy cottage industry is born.)

McKinney's understanding of President Bush's purported motive for allowing the attacks calls to mind other forms of World War II-era conspiracy thinking. In implicating Bush, McKinney suggested the oldest and most base motive: "Persons close to this administration are poised to make huge profits off America's new war." War-profiteering is as serious a charge as it durable, and formed the basis of a number of lawsuits after 1945; it also gave Arthur Miller's popular 1947 play All My Sons whatever dramatic oomph it possesses. "What is undeniable," said McKinney, "is that corporations close to the administration have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11th." That charge may well be undeniable. Certainly there's no question that defense spending is booming and that anyone even peripherally attached to supporting industries will likely see more money coming for the forseeable future. Such a realization, of course, is a far cry from the sort of plot that is typically referred to "a conspiracy so vast…."

So what is one to make of Rep. McKinney's amazing charge, as outrageous as the unsupported claims that Bill Clinton was a serial killer? Conspiracy thinking -- that is, belief in plots unsupported by generally accepted facts -- can reflect any number of things. One might say that at its best, it is the warped mirror image of Enlightenment rationality and science, an attempt to ferret out and thus control the myriad variables that come into play in even the most mundane human interactions, let alone the most horrific. Conspiracy theories, however terrifying a world they may conjure, give people a version of events that they can live with.

There's a sense of this in the author's note to the first edition of Don DeLillo's JFK assassination novel, Libra, which spins out its own version of Lee Harvey Oswald's life. "Readers may find refuge here," writes DeLillo, "a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilites, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years." (Curiously -- some would say suspiciously -- later editions of Libra excised those lines from the author's note.) Thus, conspiracy thinking can work as what some Freudian analysts call "narrative smoothing" -- a good-enough version of events that allow people to make sense of their lives and to get on with love and work. More commonly, perhaps, by spinning out a grand theory in which the theorist alone is privy to secret knowledge, conspiracy thinking helps people create identities, however tortured and self-defeating, by which they derive a sense of self and meaning in a hostile world.

However, the McKinney case -- and, one suspects, most of the conspiracy theorizing about 9/11 -- suggest less interesting and even sympathetic motivations. In winning the 2000 presidential election, the Georgia Democrat averred in her radio chat, George W. Bush "stole from America our most precious right of all, the right to free and fair elections." The result, according to McKinney? "An administration of questionable legitimacy has been given unprecedented power." In such comments, one is reminded of another well-worn use of conspiracy theory: political advantage in the here and now.