An Inclusive Litany

10/16/01

George Monbiot in the Guardian, October 16, 2001:
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. The magical appearance of the terrorists' luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too good to be true. The dossier of "evidence" purporting to establish Bin Laden's guilt consists largely of supposition and conjecture. The ration packs being dropped on Afghanistan have no conceivable purpose other than to create the false impression that starving people are being fed. Even the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labelled "a gift from Iraq." This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion.

[Ed.: A similar conspiracy theory, widely circulating throughout the Muslim world, asserts that Israel was behind the attack and that all Jews working in the World Trade Center were tipped off minutes in advance by telephone and thus given a chance to escape death, presumably not warning their thousands of non-Jewish colleagues. In a variation of the rumor, Jews simply didn't show up for work that day.]