The Lessons of 9/11

By Kirkpatrick Sale

What is most striking about the various conspiracy theories that have emerged to explain 9/11 is that so many of them seem plausible. It is hard not to feel that the Bush government could well have been not merely incompetent but actually to some extent complicit—actively or passively—in the hijackings and crashes. There are a great many holes in the official version of things, as is well documented elsewhere in this issue.

Then there are the errors of omission. The failure of the various intelligence agencies to coordinate information on al Qaeda and know its agents were living in this country.

The failure of the government to take steps to avert planes being hijacked to attack buildings in the U.S. despite being clearly warned by at least four foreign governments that picked up intelligence on this in the summer of 2001. (As is made clear by the memo agent Catherine Rowley sent to the FBI about Moussoui that summer.) The failure of the FBI to pay any attention to the field reports from at least two offices that some Arabs in their areas were taking flight lessons, though the idea that Al Qaeda planned to use airplanes as weapons was known back in the Clinton era. The failure of NORAD to scramble any jets in time to intercept the hijacked planes, though the first indication of a hijack in action came at 8:25 that morning and the last two planes were in the air until 9:45 and 10:10. (NORAD claimed that it couldn't locate the planes because the hijackers had removed the identifying transponders—for which there's no proof—but the fact is, as they admitted, they didn't have any jets scrambled up until around 10.)

All of that argues that the Bush administration at a minimum was certainly inept in not stopping the hijackings, evidence that the government is both too big and too complex to be able to function capably. It's not just the intelligence agencies that are too bureaucratically overgrown—though that's where the attention has been focused—but at all levels of a bloated government we find incompetence and incoherence. And it is typical that the solutions advanced—the Department of Homeland Security and the new intelligence czar—only add levels of bureaucracy and complexity to the central government. (I have a New York Times chart of the chain of command of Homeland Security, so crisscrossed with lines of responsibility that it looks like the drawing of the wiring of a superjet.)

But the failures of the government were so egregious, and in such a vitally important area, that it opens up the possibility that there was something beyond ineptitude at work. That, in fact, it knew of the threat and didn't try to stop it. This idea—the Pearl Harbor line—seems perfectly plausible to many people (49.3 per cent of New Yorkers in a 2004 Zogby poll) for two obvious reasons.

First, we know the Bush Neocons wanted to have a war to gain public support for an extension of the American Empire in Central Asia and the Middle East, both to protect and secure oil fields and existing (and future) pipelines and to protect and secure Israel. And a war on terror is the most advantageous of all, since it is global and neverending, allowing the government to put all its resources behind it and for a good time into the future.

Second, we know the Bush Neocons manufactured reasons for the Iraq invasion, and if they fabricated that they certainly could have fabricated 9/11—or, more charitably, allowed 9/11 to happen and fabricated the reasons it happened and wasn't stopped. That does suggest a true corruption at the heart of the Bush administration, but the fact is that this does not seem farfetched since it was the same kind of corruption that allowed them to decide shortly after taking office that they were going to war with Iraq, and lets them take upwards of 100,000 Iraqi and American lives for their project.
So what does all this mean for the rest of us—for Vermonters in particular.

Well, as I have suggested, it proves that we have a central government either too inefficient or too corrupt, and possibly both. One of the central virtues of the idea of secession is that it inevitably means a smaller government, one more in the control of the citizens, and thus not as bungling and easily corruptible. The small size of a nation does not guarantee that it is efficient and virtuous, but all history has shown that it is small states with some measure of democracy that are most successful in the long run.

I remember Leopold Kohr once telling me of his visit to the principality of Liechtenstein. He said he went to the prince's castle and knocked on the door. It was opened by a man in a suit and Leopold asked to see the prince. “I am the prince,” the man replied. “Please come in.” They went into an office where they talked for a while and then the phone rang. The prince picked it up and said, “Government.”

Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration, since Liechtenstein has a separate head of government and the prince is nominally head of state, and there are eleven communes where most of the day-to-day governing takes place. But it was true that any ordinary citizen could ring the prince (or knock on his door) and immediately make known a grievance or advance a request, and the person who heard it was in a position to do something about it. That's the virtue of a state with only 33,000 people in it.

Another virtue of secession is that it ends the entanglement of law-abiding populations with imperial law-benders and adventurers, whether they are corrupt or not. There is no reason in the world why certain good citizens of Vermont, who happen to be in the Army Reserves as a patriotic duty, should be sent half a world away to kill and torture people in a senseless, ugly, and insane war whose outcome will have no practical effect on Vermont other than raising its taxes and dishonoring it in the eyes of the world as part of a rogue nation.

But that war is only an egregious example of policies that are taken by a government far away over whose actions the people of Vermont have no control. The votes and influence of a couple of Senators and a Representative, even if those politicians knew what their constituents wanted, are insignificant in the political process of this nation. But even if they were powerful, they would have to work through a Congressional system that is far too complex and far too undemocratic to have any influence and that operates in ways that are basically corrupt and beholden to corporate interests, as the passing of any law or budget makes glaringly clear.

Besides, the influence of Congress, even if it were really “the people's voice,” is almost negligible on the actual administration in power, at least when it doesn't mesh with the administration's plans and programs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their cohorts don't do what they do because they are following some Congressional mandate but because they are carrying out a Neocon vision of their own making. What's worse, a great deal of that is done in secret, with off-the-books “black budgets,” and no one on the outside has a chance to have an influence on it, not even favored Congressional committee heads who may sometimes be told what is already going on.

The Bush administration and its series of misguided and dangerous actions is a clear and powerful argument for secession. But the virtues would be true under any government that tries to tend to 280 million people. The only way to have true democracy, real efficiency, and just governance is on a small scale—a population, say, of a little over 600,000.