When Tucker Carlson interviewed Alex Jones last December, he played a supercut of predictions by Jones that Carlson called “so precise and so prescient, that it makes the hair on my arms stand up.”
“We know the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to blow up airliners, [according to the] Baltimore Sun, where if you let some terrorist group do it, like the World Trade Center, we know who to blame,” Jones said in an clip from July 25, 2001.
In Carlson’s edit, there’s a plane crashing into the second World Trade tower on Sept. 11, 2001 as Jones continues speaking.
“And if there was an outside threat, like a bin Laden, who was a known CIA asset in the 80s—he’s the boogeyman they need.”
The clip is a staple of various internet videos purporting to show that Alex Jones predicted the 9/11 attacks ahead of time, and it’s been uploaded over and over again across the internet to make that case.
In the full broadcast from that day, Jones discussed how governments use and react to terrorist attacks for their own ends, blaming the U.S. government for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the original World Trade Center bombing two years earlir.
“Tyranny is enveloping the globe,” Jones said in the broadcast of Infowars on a local station, well before the channel blew up in popularity. “And the United States is a shining jewel the globalists want to bring down, and they will use terrorism as the pretext to get it done.”
At the time, Jones broadcast on local public access television in Texas. He was a rising star of the conspiracy movement who, while clearly on the conservative right, had cross-partisan appeal to skeptics across the country. That January, he appeared as a cartoon character at Sundance in Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life, and his popularity would explode during the post-9/11 conspiracy boom.
In the full broadcast, Jones discusses James Bamford’s 2001 book Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency.
The Baltimore Sun reviewed the book on April 24 of the same year, which Jones refers to in the clip.
Bamford used public records requests and archival research to unearth formerly classified documents from the NSA and the Department of Defense detailing some of the more clandestine, and unsavory, sides of the agencies’ histories.
The moment in the clip where Jones mentions the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanting to blow up airliners is a reference to one of the operations Bamford documented in his book, not the 9/11 attacks.
Codenamed Operation Northwoods and never officially put into action, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 drafted a proposal for a false flag terrorist campaign in Miami which would have been blamed on Cuban Communist forces. The attack would intend to undermine the popularity of the Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro, and the document notes that “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation.”
President John F. Kennedy rejected the plan, though later approved a CIA plan codenamed Operation Mongoose, which included terrorist attacks in Cuba itself.
Jones’ mention of the World Trade Center in the video isn’t a prediction, but a reference to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which injured at least a thousand people. Bin Laden was never implicated in that attack, but was the frequent subject of U.S. media reports for his role in terrorist attacks outside of the United States throughout the 1990s. In 1998, he called for attacks by Muslims against the United States and later that year, two U.S. embassy bombings in Africa killed 220.
Jones’ reference to bin Laden’s CIA links picked up on allegations that have been the subject of speculation for years. In the 1980s, he was part of a group that became al-Qaeda, which fought against Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. According to the BBC, bin Laden’s forces received American and Saudi funds, and bin Laden may have received CIA training at the time too.
But while Jones was clearly following international news carefully, from listening to the whole broadcast it’s clear that he wasn’t predicting that bin Laden was going to slam airplanes into the World Trade Center, as Carlson’s edit frames the clips.
Instead, Jones predicted a massive bioweapon attack.
“There was a story that came out Monday … from the Associated Press,” Jones explained. “They are saying that between 1 million and 4 million Americans are going to die, that it’s not a question of if but when, that it is unavoidable, inevitable, we will be hit by terrorism, martial law will be declared, people will be rounded up forcibly.”
Jones wasn’t exactly wrong about a bioattack. Days after 9/11, letters containing anthrax spores were sent to former senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The death toll was far from the scale Jones warned about. Five people died and 17 were injured. Nobody was ever convicted for the attacks and the National Academy of Sciences released a report in 2011 casting doubt on the guilt of the FBI’s main suspect, who committed suicide in 2008.
Some conspiracy theorists also claim that Jones cribbed his 9/11 prediction from William Cooper, a prolific broadcaster whose conspiracy book Behold, A Pale Horse sold over 300,000 copies—one of the most successful underground books ever.
Jones took inspiration from Cooper, whose show ran on his native Texas airwaves.
About a month before Jones’ 9/11 “prediction,” Cooper discussed the possibility of a terrorist attack that was going to be blamed on bin Laden on his own show. In that broadcast, on June 28, Cooper talked about a CNN interview with bin Laden which he found suspicious. Cooper said it strained credulity that a reporter could get to bin Laden when intelligence agencies were supposed to be hunting for him and couldn’t find him.
Cooper said that the reason behind the interview was to prime American news watchers to blame bin Laden when a terrorist attack did happen.
“I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack,” Cooper predicted, claiming that a large American city would be hit. The target would be a large American city. “Something terrible is going to happen in this country. And whatever is going to happen they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden. Don’t you even believe it.”
So did Alex Jones predict 9/11? The answer to that is no. But like a lot of people who follow the news obsessively, including conspiracy theorists like Cooper, he did pick up on a growing conviction in intelligence circles that an attack was coming sooner rather than later.
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