Vivek’s 9/11 Meanderings

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

 

Life is short, so I confess that I haven’t paid much mind to the kerfuffle over Vivek Ramaswamy’s sticking his toe into the roiling puddle of 9/11 trutherism — or, for that matter, to Vivek’s Trump 2.0 campaign, as to which I won’t belabor what’s already been well said by Charlie, Jim, Jeff, and Noah.

 

But having now looked into it, here’s what I think happened. Ramaswamy was running with the Tucker Carlson demagogy that the Capitol riot was an “inside job.” As is his wont, Vivek sought to next-level it in an interview by The Atlantic (see also here) by comparing allegations that FBI undercover agents were on-site at the Capitol* with the imaginary presence of police on the hijacked planes the jihadists crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11. Ramaswamy’s point, assuming he had one, was that the public deserves an accounting of law-enforcement’s role, if any, in stoking the January 6 riot, just as we would expect that, in the 9/11 Commission investigation, the question whether police or federal agents were on the hijacked planes would be explored. It was an imbecilic analogy — we know who hijacked the planes and that there was no reason to believe law-enforcement participated in the suicide-attacks.

 

That’s why Vivek, who is very far from an imbecile, hastened to add that he personally had no reason to believe there was any law-enforcement participation in the 9/11 attacks. Realizing he dug himself a hole, the candidate has forged two disingenuous escape routes. First, he now says The Atlantic misquoted him. That seems highly unlikely — the quote is lengthy, the context is clear, and the interview was recorded. The Atlantic says it stands by its report, but it has not released the recording; Ramaswamy says he’d like the recording released, so let’s hope it is.

 

Second, Ramaswamy claims that what he told The Atlantic is that the government misled the public about 9/11 because it concealed the breadth of Saudi Arabia’s involvement. It is true that the government withheld the Saudi evidence for nearly 20 years and has still not come completely clean about it. Nevertheless, I am skeptical, to put it mildly, that Ramaswamy was addressing that well-known controversy. I think he was doing exactly what it appears he was doing: In elbowing his way to the front of the populist parade, as he has sought to do for months, he said something outrageous to draw attention to himself and to appeal to Trump supporters who’ve convinced themselves that January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI.

 

It was an unseemly thing to do. Alas, it also probably served its purpose.

 

For what it’s worth, in two of my books — Willful Blindness (2008) and The Grand Jihad (2010) — I wrote about evidence that the Saudi regime’s complicity in 9/11 was much more extensive than our government had let on. (The probability of an Iran–Hezbollah connection was also raised by the 9/11 Commission but never followed up on, at least publicly.) I synthesized this information, in addition to some new details that had emerged in the interim, in this 2016 NR column.

 

In 2021, amid pressure from the 9/11 families that he should not attend the 20th annual observance of the atrocities unless he released the suppressed intelligence, President Biden ordered the FBI to declassify and publish a 16-page document. Though heavily redacted (i.e., we still haven’t gotten the whole story) the document provided details about logistical support given to the suicide-hijackers by Saudis connected to the regime at the time. It neither implicated senior-level Saudi leaders nor discounted the possibility that they collaborated.

 

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* In House Judiciary Committee testimony several weeks back, FBI director Chris Wray indicated that there were no FBI undercover agents on the scene but would not address the possible presence of FBI informants — the latter are not law-enforcement agents but rather “confidential human sources” who provide information to the bureau. One would expect to find FBI informants at any large gathering in Washington that was attended by militia groups and about which there was pre-event intelligence indicating that violence could break out.)