Information Warfare:
Ideas as Weapons in the Era of Deception

At the core of the September 11, 2001 attack is a series of stupendous lies, including:

• That jet impacts and fires induced the mammoth steel-framed Twin Towers to explode into dust and shards of steel long after the impacts.
• That fires caused 47-story steel-framed Building 7 to implode with all the features of a standard controlled demolition.
• That Islamic terrorists hijacked four jetliners with knives and flew them all over the Northeast for nearly two hours without encountering any resistance from the trillion-dollar US Air Force.
• That top officials and Bush's Secret Service detail remained unaware that the country was under attack long after it began to be broadcast on TV worldwide.

Adding to the absurdity of the official story are facts such as:

• The responsible commanders were promoted after the attack.
• The evidence from collapses of the WTC skyscrapers -- the largest and most unanticipated structural failures in world history according to the official explanation -- was destroyed as rapidly as possible.
• Only $600,000 was allocated to study the collapses before the steel had been recycled, and the all-volunteer investigators were barred from the site.
• There has not been a single successful prosecution of any of the supposed perpetrators anywhere in the world for direct involvement in the attack.

How could such glaring red flags be ignored by the vast majority of Americans, and indeed most people throughout the world? To grasp how this is possible it is helpful to understand the history and sophistication of the "weapons of mass deception" that are used regularly to achieve the aims that the powerful could not attain through legitimate means.

There are many examples of intentional deceptions that, unlike the Big Lie of 9/11/01, are widely recognized, such as the specter of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction concocted by the administrations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair as a pretext to invade Iraq. Other less contemporary examples are described on this site under Historical Precedents for 9/11/01. With each operation, the perpetrators gain more experience about how the news media and the public will react -- experience useful in the planning of subsequent operations. For example, despite reports in local news outlets that responders to the Oklahoma City bombing discovered unexploded bombs inside the building, national media reports remained free of any mention of such contradictions to the official story. It is likely that the success of the cover-up of this operation emboldened the planners of the 9/11/01 attack.

The September 11, 2001 attack was not only bolder than previous attacks, it also likely involved the most careful planning of any psychological operation ever undertaken. We can see in its design and cover-up multiple layers of deception: should the outermost layer be exposed as fraudulent, the deeper layers will serve to continue to obscure the truth. Broadly speaking, there are three layers of cover-up:

• The mainstream official story: This is the story as told by the mainstream media since the day of the attack.
• The "limited hangouts": These are revelations that seem shocking to adherents to the official story, but fall far short of the whole truth. Examples are the many warnings of the attack that the administration should have acted on.
• The "poison pills": These are extreme ideas that have either no basis in evidence or only an illusory one and serve to discredit evidence-based research about the core facts of the attack through guilt-by-association. Examples are the no-planes and pod-planes ideas popularized by propaganda such as In Plane Site, and racist ideas like "the Jews did it."

Remarkably, it appears that the vast majority of propaganda supporting all three layers of deception was produced, not by attack insiders, but by people exploited by the perpetrators using psychological engineering. The perpetrators are apparently highly expert at designing memes that effectively recruit people to unwittingly support such diversions from the true nature of the attack.