Andrew Sullivan seems confused by Michael Moore's appearance on Crossfire last week. In it, Moore asked a rhetorical question about whether it's believable that a terrorist could go to a rinky-dink flight school and learn to steer a jumbo-jet traveling at 500 miles per hour into a target that is only five stories tall. Sullivan seems to think that Moore is positing some crackpot "conspiracy theory" in which the 9/11 attacks were a (presumably US) military attack. But Sullivan's got it all wrong.

Here's the quote from Sullivan's website (quoting the CNN transcript) [link to Sullivan's blog]:

[Sullivan's commentary] MOORE WATCH: He seems to be leaning toward the notion that 9/11 was a government conspiracy:

[Quote from Moore] MOORE: I'd like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack. But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I'd like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation. I'm sorry, but my common sense has never allowed me to believe since that day that you can learn how to fly a plane at 500 miles per hour. And you know, when you go up 500 miles an hour, if you're off by this much, you're in the Potomac. You don't hit a five-store building like that.

[Sullivan's commentary] What on earth is he getting at?

I actually have the answer to that, since I took the time to read Moore's new book, "Dude, Where's My Country?". Here's Moore's point:

"George, apparently you were a pilot once -- how hard is it to hit a five-story building at more than 500 miles an hour? The Pentagon is only five stories high. At 500 miles an hour, had the pilots been off by just a hair, they'd have been in the river. You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone's air force.

The Saudi Air Force?

What if these weren't wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? The house of Saud, according to Robert Baer's book, is full of them, and the royal family -- and the country -- is in terrible turmoil. There is much dissension over how things are being run, and with the king incapacitated by a stroke he suffered in 1995, his brothers and numerous sons have been in a serious power struggle. Some favor cutting off all ties to the West. Some want the country to go the more fundamentalist route. After all, this was Osama's originally stated goal. His first beef wasn't with America, it was with the way Saudi Arabia was being run -- by Muslims who weren't true Muslims.

. . .

So did certain factions with the Saudi royal family execute the attack on September 11? Were these pilots trained by the Saudis? One thing we do know: Nearly all the hijackers were Saudis...

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So there you have it. Moore is posing a theory, namely that someone with connections to the Saudi military and an axe to grind against the Saudi government may have planned 9/11 to drive a wedge into the Saudi relationship with the US.

Is it a conspiracy theory? Maybe, but it's one that has some serious geopolitical thinking behind it. Before you dismiss it, consider that the Bush family has historically had a close relationship with the governing members of the Saudi royal family and, more importantly, that the health of the Saudi government is strategically important to the US, both because of Saudi oil and Saudi investment in the US.

Given this, it's not inconceivable that a dissident faction of the Saudi royal family might think that the attacks would destablize the Saudi government either because the US would blame Saudi Arabia or (more likely) because the attacks would force the US to withdraw support from the governing faction because of public outcry.

Is it farfetched to think that dissident Saudis were behind the attacks? It's not such a stretch. Consider, for example, that two previous terrorist attacks connected to Al Qaeda (the bombings of the Khobar Towers, an American and ex-pat compound in Saudia Arabia, and the U.S.S. Cole, at port in Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula) took place in and around Saudi Arabia and were both aimed at forcing the US to leave the Arabian peninsula.

In the circumstances, it's at least plausible that dissidents (perhaps even in collusion with Osama bin Laden) provided the manpower for 9/11. And it's also plausible that the Bush administration knows this, but for national security reasons can't finger Saudi Arabian royal family members as the principal perpetrators. Certainly, that would explain why the Bush administration censured 28 pages of the Congressional report on 9/11.

And it would partially explain one other curious fact -- that the Bush administration allowed members of the bin Laden family in the US to fly to a common gathering point and leave the country right after 9/11, when the rest of the country was prohibited from flying. The stated reason for this is that the US feared that they could be subjected to American reprisals.

The bin Laden family is a huge, and hugely influential, family in Saudi Arabia, having built most of the roads and large construction projects there. If there were concerns that a dissident faction was acting in the US to destabilize the American relationship with Saudi Arabia, and that that dissident faction was acting in apparent collusion with Osama bin Laden, the Saudi government might fear for what other members of the bin Laden family might be plotting, and want to have them under the government's watchful eye.

Can I prove any of this? No. It's just some food for thought...