Ten years after the September 11th attacks, conspiracy theorists on the right and left remain hard at work trying to dig out the real story of what happened that day. Points readers may be pleased or dismayed to know that as of yet, no one has tried to explain the attacks through the prism of alcohol or drugs. And on this day of total media saturation, your managing editors will avoid the temptation as well. For those readers who simply must have their 9/11 commemorations served up with a side of intoxicants, however, we recommend anecdotal reports of increased incidents of drug and alcohol abuse among first responders in the years immediately after the 9/11 attacks; a government white paper denying that drug trafficking has been an important source of revenue for Al Qaeda (p. 22); and a compelling narrative linking the decision to go to war in the wake of the attacks to Donald Rumsfeld’s son’s relapse into drug addiction. You may now return to surfing the web in search of more satisfying material on 9/11. As you do so, bear in mind the wise words of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, from his poem “The Digital Revolution”:
A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!
Frankin Roosevelt once commented, ” in politics nothing happens by coincidence.” Conspiracy theorists do refer to nexus between some banks,drug smuggling, the funding of Al-Qaeda along with the dubious complicity of the CIA. An investigation of the intertwined economic and poliical interets and conflicts through the ‘prism of drugs’ could reveal much more than meets the eye.
I’m not sure I find Roosevelt’s comment particularly persuasive; good cocktail party banter, but not exactly a driver for the most exacting scholarship. Economic and political interests– including interests in drug trafficking money– are certainly intertwined here, and the boom in Afghani heroin is due at least in part to the destabilization of the region following our going to war there in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But in terms of theories of causality for the attacks themselves, I like to “keep it simple,” as they 12-step world: think oil, not poppies. A full discussion of right- and left-wing conspiracy theories can be found in “A Failure of imagination: Competing Narrative of 9/11 Truth” in _Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture_, by Mark Fenster. (Full disclosure: he’s my husband.)