Читаем Gideon's Spies полностью

The Bush administration has given groups like the Scholars For Truth credibility by doing so much of its work in secret and by giving the public so many fake stories. A good example is that President Bush finally admitted in September, nine months after he had solemnly denied it, terrorist suspects were being secretly held in interrogation centers outside the jurisdiction of the United States. The result is the paranoia of groups like the Scholars For Truth are fed by the arrogance of those around President Bush.

The best argument against a conspiracy within the Bush administration is the profound incompetence of what followed. The same people who are now making a mess of Iraq and Afghanistan simply do not possess the skills, and deviousness, to stage a complex assault on two narrow towers of steel and glass standing alongside the Hudson River. The truth is that the attacks were the work of desperate men ready to die and with a goal that was clear. It was Osama bin Laden, an engineer of standing, and his brightest pupil, Mohamed Atta, who understood the best way to collapse the World Trade Center was not by targeting the base, but by undermining the upper levels of each structure. But this has all been discounted in the search for something more sinister at the very heart of American democracy. The very real danger is that the conspiracies will encourage the world to take its eye off the reality that the further we are away from the last catastrophic terrorist attack, the closer we are to the next.