Bush learns America is under attack.

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In her testimony to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Mindy Kleinberg talks about the freak serendipity of September 11. After recounting that day's appalling events, Kleinberg spells out the elaborate path the 19 hijackers followed to the cockpits of four airliners, and from there, to the World Trade Center office where her husband worked. As a preface, Kleinberg throws out a sentence fragment, unconnected: "The theory of luck," she says.

In the months leading up to September 11, Kleinberg explains, the good fortune of the hijackers knew no bounds. They were the beneficiaries of small charms, such as receiving visas despite incomplete applications, and great, mystifying spells of fortuity, such as the one that held FAA entranced for 20 minutes after Flight 11 was known to have been hijacked. Even the mechanisms of financial windfall mystically arranged themselves to register the hijackers' luck. An investor or investors who were fortunate enough to place an unusual number of put options on American and United airlines "netted a profit of several million dollars after the September 11 attacks," Kleinberg explains.

Naturally, the owners of these put options never came forward to collect their dividends. But neither have these strange transactions been investigated, at least so far as anyone knows. That the options were purchased is strange enough. That the purchase is acknowledged in the mainstream press, but treated as though it were not a story but a mere fluke, is stranger still.

Regarding the hijackers' treatment at the hands of the INS, Mindy Kleinberg cites a handful of figures to underscore how astronomically unlikely the September 11 attacks were. "The terrorists got lucky 15 individual times," she says, "Because 15 of the 19 hijackers' visas should have been unquestionably denied." All of their forms were stunningly incorrect — with "hotel", "California", or "no" provided as destinations, for instance — but were approved nonetheless. With each additional issued visa the long odds got exponentially, incalculably longer, like a flipped coin that comes up heads not once or twice, but 15 times.

Conspiracy websites have been making these points for months. But Kleinberg, in citing them on the floor of Congress, studiously avoids the word "conspiracy". This is what creates the sense that the events she relates are astonishingly improbable. September 11 seems a proverbial tin full of gears and springs that, when dumped to the ground, fall into the configuration of a watch entirely by chance. All the stranger, then, that such a nearly supernatural, ordered convergence could lead to so much chaos, disorder, and death.

Mindy Kleinberg's tone enables her to sidestep the stigma that almost inevitably results when one talks about September 11 without following a broad set of generally agreed-upon rules. For the most part, these rules are put in place to enforce a dominant narrative about the attacks, a conventional wisdom orchestrated by the Bush administration and its compatriots among the right wing, and also supported by the mainstream of the Democratic party. The rules are so stridently imposed — violate them and Anne Coulter accuses you of treason, or Joe Lieberman calls you cowardly, "soft on terrorism" — because the narrative they protect is so contradictory and incomplete.

We are to believe, apparently, that Osama bin Laden attacked the United States essentially on his own, because he "hates our freedom". Yet we are also told that launching a massive invasion of Iraq, irrelevant both to bin Laden and to whatever forces designed and carried out September 11, is an appropriate response. So is the enemy a series of lone wolves, inscrutable freedom-haters and "rogue" actors, or a well-organized, Borg-like conspiracy defined mainly by a perceived race?

It depends on what's at issue. If you're wondering how a comparatively ill-funded terrorist organization, stationed in a poverty-stricken country and located in another hemisphere managed to trump the most powerful military and intelligence service the world has ever known, rest assured that the mystical zeal of bin Laden and his followers is, on its own, enough to weave such dark magic. If, on the other hand, you're not sure why the US responded to September 11 by attacking Iraq, the explanation appears to be that al Qaeda, far from acting alone, is a component in a vast cabal of Arab villains, part of an evil web connecting with Saddam Hussein and the Baath party, as well as, for example, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Iranians, and the Palestinians.

Often — as with the Iranians and the Iraqis, or Hussein and bin Laden — these groups have a record of mutual hostility, but no matter. To point out the clear pattern of US military expansion in the Middle East is to evoke from its defenders the narrative that these disparate groups are linked by race, and by an incomprehensible and unprovoked hatred of the United States.

Basing an evidently interminable military campaign on such offensive and asinine preconceptions invites a torrent of questions from the skeptical. Thus, words like "treason" are slung about to jealously defend the status quo: a set of policies so flagrantly irrational that they collapse almost instantly when inspected and for this reason, reasoned discussion about them must not be allowed to take place.

Curiously, such aversion to objectivity can also be found in discourses that interrogate the status quo. Take as an example "An Interesting Day", a parapolitical chronology of September 11 that breaks down the Bush administration's actions during the attacks to argue that the administration actively participated in September 11, in order to rescue the Bush presidency and pave the way for the endless war currently unfolding in the Middle East. This hypothesis accounts for many of the coincidences and oddities that plague the mainstream explanation for the attacks, but "An Interesting Day"'s authors, Allan Wood and Paul Thompson, are unable to present their argument without repeatedly resorting to ad hominem attacks on George W. Bush and his cabinet. Although I share many of their antipathies, objectivity requires that such feelings be set aside in the interest of making a more reasoned argument.

Such is the position of John Reese, a self-described conspiracy-theory skeptic who attempts to debunk "An Interesting Day" and in so doing reveals a converse bias, presuming the administration's inherent nobility and its simple, selfless desire to do only what is best for the American people.

The argument that Wood and Thompson present, and that Reese attempts to refute, is founded on tracking Bush's movements throughout September 11, from his security briefing at around 8 a.m. to his return to Washington D.C. and his address to the nation that evening. Over and over, Wood and Thompson maintain that Bush's response to the hijackings suggested not a commander in chief taken by surprise, but a conspirator: one anxious to appear engaged in protecting the nation's security, while in reality he and his cabinet deliberately maneuvered to avoid taking actions that would prevent the hijacked planes from reaching their targets.

This was done, Wood and Thompson contend, in a variety of ways. George Bush and his cabinet members, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and acting Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers being the most frequently mentioned, were held in situations, such as public photo opportunities and private meetings, where they would be less able or expected to make quick decisions. When fighters were launched, they did so from air force bases far from the off-course planes they were intended to intercept. And this lethargic response was accounted for later, when on September 16 Dick Cheney mischaracterized FAA procedures on "Meet the Press" by claiming that the Air Force needed George W. Bush's explicit order to send Air Force jets after the airliners that had gone off-course, when in fact such interceptions are routine and require no such orders.

Concerning Bush's 8a.m. security briefing on September 11, Wood and Thompson mention a similar briefing on August 6th entitled "Bin Laden to Strike in U.S.", which warned about the possibility of al Qaeda hijacking multiple planes. Wood and Thompson seize on this previous briefing as evidence that, were we to take the Bush administration at its word that it knew nothing about the attacks, it would surely have at least speculated on this possibility at some point not long after 8:45a.m.

John Reese tries to account for the administration's curious lack of response considering the August 6 briefing by asserting that "the President is a busy man. He is briefed on many, many things." (Source: SkepticReport.com) The thrust of this counterargument is that the first Trade Tower crash looked for a time as much like an accident as it did a terrorist attack. Therefore, there was no reason to assume that the administration would believe an attack was underway until 9:03a.m. — when the second crash established that the first was a deliberate act. Further, there was no reason to believe the attack was ongoing until about 9:40a.m., when Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

One potential problem with this argument: local authorities would presumably handle an accidental crash — and no executive act would immediately be needed — but any possibility that the crashes were terrorist attacks would call for immediate executive response. The absence of any such response means not only that the administration had not determined that the crashes were deliberate, but that the possibility had not even occurred to them until around 9:30a.m., when the Bush administration's first official 9/11-related act, Bush's brief television address from the Emma Booker school, took place.

There's every good reason to think that the administration would consider the mere possibility of terrorist attack well before 9:00a.m., and certainly by 9:03, when it became plainly obvious to the entire world. Here, Reese's argument is weakest; he would have us believe that Bush remained in the Booker school classroom because he did not want to scare the schoolchildren, or the nation's television viewers, by walking out to learn more about the situation. The language Reese uses to describe the general level of alarm after Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower on live television: it was "the first sign of a coordinated attack, requiring involvement of the President at the earliest convenience." (Source: SkepticReport.com) Those who recall this moment likely remember it being somewhat more urgent than that.

On both sides, these complicated arguments in their essence rely on what the reader thinks about the Bush administration and the office of the presidency. To Wood and Thompson, the administration's lack of response amounts to direct evidence of complicity, where for Reese, the response sets the standard for likely response time to an event that had never been witnessed before.

Time and again Reese correctly points out instances where Wood and Thompson resolve ambiguous evidence in ways that suppose the worst about the Bush administration. But then he himself goes on to praise the Bush administration in ways that presume the point he is trying to establish. For example, Wood and Thompson quote a local reporter, who characterizes Bush as "clueless" for staying at the Booker school for 25 minutes after White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed him that America was under attack.

Reese responds to this: "I am sure the local reporter to whom the authors are referring is a fine journalist, but this does not necessarily qualify him to question the judgment of the President of the United States." (Source: SkepticReport.com) When Reese continues by objecting that "the word 'clueless' imples incompetence when such a judgment is unwarranted," his friendly disposition toward George Bush leads him to make an unsubstantiated claim that nonetheless summarizes the problem pretty well.

After all, this is the issue: whether the government's response to September 11 was basically reasonable considering that day's unprecedented events, or whether they indicate incompetence, as the unnamed local journalist asserts, or even government complicity, as Wood and Thompson more seriously allege.

Wood, Thompson, and Reese's polemics are understandable enough, considering that the Bush administration is undoubtedly the most divisive and controversial since, well, since the administration that preceded it. Still, the fact that none of these authors can make his case without resorting to personal invective demonstrates how hard it is to be impartial when September 11 is at issue.

In the meantime, somewhere outside all of this acrimony those like Mindy Kleinberg, who are attempting in earnest to understand September 11, struggle with its array of strange coincidences. So too, in their odd way, do some in the Defense department. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seems aware of the problems Kleinberg hints at when it refers to the immense complexity involved in making effective predictions and testing speculative claims.

In a report describing its Terrorism Information Awareness program, DARPA cites an assortment of obstacles to effective information processing and prediction. Among them: "mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence; confusing unfamiliar with improbable; having too many unknown unknowns . . ." and "generating a single hypothesis versus competing hypotheses."

Thompson, Wood, and Reese would seem to have fallen victim to this last hypothesis. The other hypothesis, particularly "confusing unfamiliar with improbable", can be used to support either Reese or Thompson and Wood. They enable the argument that the Bush administration, in not responding quickly to September 11, assumed that they were witnessing something familiar, an accident. But in adopting a friendly posture toward counter-intuitive speculation — consider the hearty endorsement of conjecture and circumstantial argumentation implied in the "absence of evidence" line — the folks at DARPA, by their own thinking, would hardly dispose of Thompson and Wood's government-complicity hypothesis out of hand.

The point DARPA's report most often comes back to is that things have gotten awfully hard for people to understand — or, as DARPA puts it, "In today's world, the amount of information that needs to be considered far exceeds the capacity of the unaided humans in the system." The report suggests several technologies for aiding humans in considering information — the most recent and notorious being FutureMAP, a plan for creating a financial market in, among other things, the probability of upcoming terrorist attacks. If this report can be taken at face value (which is hardly safe to presume), then those in government have considered the problem and come to a conclusion much like Mindy Kleinberg's: the theory of luck.