"Every authoritarian system in the world gained from September 11 and it was immediately predictable. I remember my first interviews with journalists a couple of hours afterwards. First question I was asked about this I said: ‘Look, every power system in the world is cheering, the Russians love it. It’s giving them an excuse to increase their atrocities in Chechnya under the pretext that they’re defending themselves from terror. The Chinese love it. They’re going to step up their atrocities in western China against the Uyghurs claiming it’s defense against terror. Indonesia loves it. They’re going to go on a rampage in Aceh and massacre everyone because they’ve got to defend themselves against terror. Ariel Sharon will go wild and occupy territories because we have to protect ourselves from terror.’ And so it continues, in fact, just about every country… I mean the more violent ones just extended their own violence, but the less violent ones, say like England, United States or France, immediately imposed what they called ‘the protection against terrorism’-act. Which had almost nothing to do with terror, but a lot to do with disciplining their own populations. So, if you take a look around the world at what are called the more democratic nations, they instituted mechanisms of control of their population under the pretext of defending themselves against terror. And this, I mean, was completely predictable. Even after an earthquake, things like this happen. Power systems will exploit it to expand their own power over their primary enemies, which are their domestic enemies, their own population. And if they happen to be carrying out violent repression they’ll extend it.
So, if the Bush administration gained from it? Well, that’s true, but it doesn’t seem to tell you anything. It just says they’re one of the power systems in the world, so they gained from it. Did they plan it in any way or know anything about it? This seems to be extremely unlikely. For one thing, they would have had to be insane to try anything like that. First, if they had it’s almost certain it would have leaked. It’s a very poor system, secrets are very hard to keep. So something will have leaked out, very likely. And if they had, they would all be put in front of firing squads and that would be the end of the Republican party forever. To take a chance on that, even if you could control what would happen …, further it would be completely unpredictable what was going to happen. You couldn’t predict that the plane would actually hit the World Trade Center. I mean, it happened, it did, but it could easily have missed. So, you could hardly control it, but what you can almost be certain of is that any hint of a plan would have leaked and would have just destroyed them and to take a chance on something like that would be meaningless.
Now there’s a big industry in the United States, on the Left as well, I mean, you should see the e-mail that I get. This huge internet industry from the Left trying to demonstrate, and there’s books coming out, best-sellers in France and so on, that this was all faked and was planned by the Bush administration and so on. If you look at the evidence, anybody who knows anything about the sciences would instantly discount that evidence. I mean, there’s plenty of coincidences and unexplained phenomena, “why did this happen and why did that happen” and so on, but if you look at a controlled scientific experiment the same thing is true. When somebody carries out a controlled scientific experiment at the best laboratories at the end there are lots of things that are unexplained and there are funny coincidences and this and that. If you want to get a sense of it, take a look at the letters columns in the technical scientific journals, like ‘Nature’ or ‘Science’ or something, the letters are commonly about unexplained properties of reports of technical experiments carried out under controlled conditions which are just going to leave a lot of things unexplained. That’s just the way the world is. Now when you take a natural event, not something that was controlled, most of it will be unexplained. There will be all sorts of things that happened. Afterwards you can put them into some kind of pattern but beforehand you can’t and the pattern may be completely meaningless, because you can put them in some other pattern too if you want. That’s just the way complicated events are. So, the evidence that’s been produced in my eyes is essentially worthless. And the belief that it could have been done has such low credibility.
I should say I’m pretty isolated on this in the West. A large part on the Left completely disagrees on this and has all kinds of elaborate conspiracy theories about how it happened and why it happened and so on. First of all, I think it’s completely wrong, but also I think it’s diverting people away from serious issues. And even if it were true, which is extremely unlikely, who cares? It doesn’t have any significance. It’s a little bit like the huge energy that’s put out on trying to figure out who killed John Kennedy. Who knows? Who cares? Plenty of people get killed all the time, why does it matter that one of them happened to be John F. Kennedy? If there were some reason to believe that there was some high level conspiracy it might be interesting, but the evidence against that is just overwhelming. And after that, it’s just a matter of whether it happened to be a jealous husband, or the mafia, or someone else. What difference does it make? It’s just taking energy away from serious issues after the ones that don’t matter. And I just think the same is true here, it’s not my personal opinion.”
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