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NEW YORK - He felt no shiver of doubt in those first terrible hours.
He watched the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and assumed al-Qaeda
had wreaked terrible vengeance. He listened to anchors and military experts and assumed the facts of
Sept. 11, 2001, were as stated on the screen.
It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher, began his
stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why President Bush listened to a child's story while the nation
was attacked and how Osama bin Laden, America's Public Enemy No. 1, escaped in the mountains of Tora
Bora.
He wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. He
read the 9/11 Commission report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or
civilian official was reprimanded, much less cashiered.
"To me, the report read as a cartoon." White-haired and courtly, Griffin sits on a couch in a hotel
lobby in Manhattan, unspooling words in that reasonable Presbyterian minister's voice. "It's a much
greater stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the alternatives."
Such as?
"There was massive complicity in this attack by U.S. government operatives."
If that feels like a skip off the cliff of established reality, more Americans are in free fall than
you might guess. There are few more startling measures of American distrust of leaders than the
widespread belief that the President Bush administration had a hand in the attacks of Sept. 11 in order to
spark an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found that 36 percent suspect the
U.S. government promoted the attacks or intentionally sat on its hands. Sixteen percent believe
explosives brought down the towers. Twelve percent believe a cruise missile hit the Pentagon.
Distrust near Ground Zero
Distrust percolates more strongly near Ground Zero. A Zogby International poll of New York City
residents two years ago found 49.3 percent believed the government "consciously failed to act."
You could dismiss this as a louder than usual howl from the
CIA-controls-my-thoughts-through-the-filling-in-my-molar crowd. Establishment assessments of the
believers tend toward the psychotherapeutic. Many academics, politicians and thinkers left, right and
center say the conspiracy theories are a case of one plus one equals five. It's a piling up of
improbabilities.
Thomas Eager, a professor of materials science at MIT, has studied the collapse of the twin towers.
"At first, I thought it was amazing that the buildings would come down in their own footprints,"
Eager says. "Then I realized that it wasn't that amazing -- it's the only way a building that weighs
a million tons and is 95 percent air can come down."
But the chatter out there is loud enough for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to
post a Web "fact sheet" poking holes in the conspiracy theories and defending its report on the
towers.
Yeah, as if . . .
The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped looking for truth from the
government. As cacophonous and free-range a bunch of conspiracists anywhere this side of Guy Fawkes,
they produce hip-hop inflected documentaries and scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode.
Every citizen is a researcher. There's nothing like a triple, Google-fed epiphany lighting up the
laptop at 2:44 a.m.
Did you see that the CIA met with bin Laden in a hospital room in Dubai? Check out this Pakistani
site, there are really weird doings in Baluchistan . . .
The academic wing is led by Griffin, who founded the Center for a Postmodern World at Claremont
University; James Fetzer, a tenured philosopher at the University of Minnesota (Fetzer's an old hand
in JFK assassination research); and Daniel Orr, the retired chairman of the economics department at
the University of Illinois. The movement's de facto minister of engineering is Steven Jones, a
tenured physics professor at Brigham Young University, who's studied vectors and velocities and
tested explosives and concluded that the collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled
demolition, sped by a thousand pounds of high-grade thermite.
‘Possible war criminal’
Former Reagan aide Barbara Honegger is a senior military affairs journalist at the Naval Postgraduate
School in California. She's convinced, based on her freelance research, that a bomb went off about
six minutes before an airplane hit the Pentagon -- or didn't hit it, as some believe the case may be.
Catherine Austin Fitts served as assistant secretary of housing in the first President President Bush's
administration and gained a fine reputation as a fraud buster; David Bowman was chief of advanced
space programs under presidents Ford and Carter. Fitts and Bowman agree that the "most unbelievable
conspiracy" theory is the one retailed by the government.
Then there's Morgan O. Reynolds, appointed by George W. President Bush as chief economist at the Labor
Department. He left in 2002 and doesn't think much of his former boss; he describes President President Bush as
a "dysfunctional creep," not to mention a "possible war criminal."
You reach Reynolds at his country home in the hills of Arkansas. His favored rhetorical style is long
paragraphs without obvious punctuation: "Who did it? Elements of our government and M-16 and the
Mossad. The government's case is a laugh-out-loud proposition. They used patsies and lies and
subterfuge and there's no way that President Bush and Cheney could have invaded Iraq without the help of 9/11."
They are cantankerous and sometimes distrust each other -- who knows where the double agents lurk?
But unreasonable questions resonate with the reasonable. Colleen Kelly's brother, a salesman, had
breakfast at the Windows on the World restaurant on Sept. 11. After he died she founded September
Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows to oppose the Iraq war. She lives in the Bronx and gives a
gingerly embrace to the conspiracy crowd.
"Sometimes I listen to them and I think that's sooooo outlandish and bizarre," she says. "But that
day had such disastrous geopolitical consequences. If David Ray Griffin asks uncomfortable questions
and points out painful discrepancies? Good for him."
Griffin's book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the President Bush Administration and 9/11,"
never reviewed in a major U.S. newspaper, sold more than 100,000 copies and became a movement
founding stone. Last year he traveled through New England, giving speeches in whitewashed churches
and gymnasiums. He came to West Hartford, Conn., on a rainy autumn evening. Four hundred mostly
middle-aged and upper-middle-class doctors and lawyers, teachers and social workers sat waiting.
‘Domestic terrorists’
Griffin took the podium and laid down his ideas with calm and cool. He concluded:
"It is already possible to know beyond a reasonable doubt one very important thing: The destruction
of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists," he says. "The
welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth
about 9/11 exposed."
The audience rose and applauded for more than a minute.
"Reality is a thin line between denial and paranoia."
-- Author unknown, but often quoted by the 9/11 truth movement
"Me?" You've asked the Rev. Frank Morales, the bohemian Episcopalian minister with the hipster
goatee, where he stands on the nature of the conspiracy. We're standing in the ancient graveyard of
St. Mark's Church in the Bowery on Second Avenue. "I lean to LIHOP."
The 9/11 truthers share a lieutenant colonel's love of acronyms. They divide themselves into LIHOPS
and MIHOPS and differences are not trifling. LIHOP stands for "Let It Happen On Purpose," which means
someone inside the U.S. government intentionally let the terror conspiracy go. MIHOP means "Made It
Happen On Purpose," and its gradations center on whether President Bush was in or out of the loop (a surprising
number believe he was clueless) and whether the Mossad or British intelligence was dealt into the
deal.
Morales, 57, who came out of the Lower East Side housing projects, spent days at Ground Zero
performing last rites for the dead, many little more than a collection of body parts.
"I didn't presume to know who did it," he says. "There was a lot of shucking and jiving. I wonder at
what point massive incompetence crosses over into negligent homicide."
To make sense of the truth movement's anger, you need to hit the rewind button to early 2001, with
the hindsight of today. There was, as the 9/11 Commission hearings made clear, a bad moon rising.
Warnings kept coming of a "high probability" of a "spectacular" terrorist attack. A national security
adviser warned Condoleezza Rice there were terrorist cells, probably al-Qaeda guys, in the country.
CIA chief George Tenet said the "system was blinking red."
A presidential bulletin on Aug. 6 had a catchy title: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." President Bush
did not discuss it again with Tenet before Sept. 11.
So give the truth movement, many of whom are based in New York City, their props. They may be
paranoid, but something nasty came our way. They pore over the paper trail with a Sherlock Holmesian
intensity, alert to intriguing discrepancy.
Such as:
Former transporation secretary Norman Mineta told the commission he arrived in the presidential
operations center -- under the White House -- at 9:20 a.m. on Sept. 11 and found Vice President
Cheney. When an aide asked Cheney about the hijacked plane fast approaching the Pentagon, Mineta says
the vice president snapped that the "orders still stand." Mineta assumed the orders were to shoot the
plane down. Conspiracy theorists interpret this to mean: Don't shoot it down.
Cheney later said he was not in the operations center until after the plane hit. The commission never
mentioned Mineta's contradictory version.
In September 2001, NORAD generals said they learned of the hijackings in time to scramble fighter
jets. But the government recently released tapes claiming to show the FAA did not tell the military
about the hijackings until three of the four planes had crashed.
That would mean the FAA repeatedly lied. It would also mean, as Griffin points out, that the entire
military chain of command stayed quiet about huge inaccuracies for four years "even though . . . the
true story would put the military in a better light."
More mysteries pile up. The 9/11 Commission says Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37. But Honegger
says clocks stopped at the Pentagon at 9:32. Then there's the collapse of the twin towers, which
Jones, the physics professor, timed at just short of free fall. Griffin cites firefighters, including
a captain, who said in hearings and on tapes from that day that they saw flashes and heard the sound
of explosions before the collapse.
"It's like the Nazi-facilitated Reichstag fire," Honegger says from her home in California. "They
guided and secretly protected it to justify their global agenda."
Let's put aside the could-anyone-do-something-that-spectacularly-twisted? question and touch on
practicalities. Isn't the problem with big ugly conspiracies -- from the Gulf of Tonkin to My Lai to
the 1961 Pentagon plan to provoke a war by attacking Americans and blaming it on Castro -- that they
are too big and ugly to keep secret?
Griffin shrugs. History is littered with government black-bag jobs. "How do you know they can't keep
big secrets? Can you be sure you know what you don't know?"
There is a "morning after" quality to the conspiratorial romance. One moment you groove on the
epiphanies and the next moment you're lost in a dull haze of "this cannot be a coincidence," "perhaps
significantly" and "if so . . ."
What of incompetence? Or the raw absurdity of life? The truth movement makes much of a 2001 BBC
report that a half-dozen of the hijackers were still alive. They mention Waleed al Shehri, a pilot
who still flies commercial runs in Morocco. But the BBC retracted that.
It turns out the live guy and the dead hijacker spelled their names differently.
Then there's the theory that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon and United 93 did not crash in
Shanksville, Pa. But, like, what happened to the passengers? (Among the passengers on Flight 77 was
Barbara Olson, wife of former U.S. solicitor general Ted Olson).
‘They don’t do their homework’
"Why should any of us know where it went?" Griffin says. "It could have been it crashed in Kentucky.
We don't need a theory where it went."
Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a Boston-based left-leaning think tank,
is no fan of the 9/11 Commission. He believes a serious investigation should have led to indictments
and the firing of incompetent generals and civilian officials.
But he has no patience with the conspiracy theorists.
"They don't do their homework; it's a kind of charlatanism," Berlet says over the phone. "They say
there's no debris on the lawn in front of the Pentagon, but they base their analysis on a photo on
the Internet . That's like analyzing an impressionist painting by looking at a postcard."
Now comes a loud sigh.
"I love 'The X-Files' but I don't base my research on it," he says. "My vision of hell is having to
review these [conspiracy] books over and over again."
Let's move on to Eager of MIT. "Demolition experts say, 'Ohhh, it's all science and timing.' Bull!"
Eager says. "What's the technique? If 200,000 tons gives way, where do you think it's going? Straight
down."
In the days after Sept. 11, experts claimed temperatures reached 2,000 degrees on the upper floors.
Others claimed steel melted. Nope. What happened, Eager says, is that jet fuel sloshed around and
beams got rubbery.
"It's not too much to think that you could have some regions at 900 degrees and others at 1,200
degrees, and that will distort the beams."
The truth movement doesn't really care for Eager. A Web site casts a fisheye of suspicion at the
professor and his colleagues. "Did the MIT have prior knowledge?" notes one chat room. "This is for
sure another speculative topic . . . "
"It is no measure of health to be sane in an insane society."
-- Krishnamurti
Nico Haupt, a gaunt fellow in black sneakers, black socks, black jeans and black T-shirt, stands up
in St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. He holds aloft two blue Oreos boxes taped to resemble the twin
towers. A pen juts out, kind of like a Boeing airplane.
For an hour he's shown videos of planes hitting the towers. If you note the glinting sunlight and
angle of wings and you're honest about vectors and maybe the hashish is kicking in, you'll realize
there were no planes .
Truth movement veterans distance themselves from Haupt, who has a bit of a temper. But Reynolds, the
former Labor Department economist, also is a "no-planer."
"There were no planes, there were no hijackers," Reynolds insists. "I know, I know, I'm out of the
mainstream, but that's the way it is."
But what about all those New Yorkers who saw airplanes hitting the twin towers? A chuckle rumbles
down the phone line. "I don't believe anyone in Lower Manhattan," he says. "You hire three dozen
Actors' Equity dudes and they'll say anything."
Some days the 9/11 truth movement resembles an Italian coalition government -- dissolution is a
certainty. Honegger and Griffin believe bombs brought down the twin towers but have little truck with
make-believe planes. There's a faction that says the Mossad did it and another that says that's
insane, and maybe anti-Semitic.
Where are we going here? There's a Journal of 9/11 Studies, documentaries, CDs and DVDs. Is
conspiracy thought getting codified?
"That's our worry, of course," Griffin says. "I want my life back. But how can I ignore that we have
become entranced by demonic power, so focused on lust for wealth and control that almost anything
becomes possible?"
You reach Honegger a few nights later. She'd like to give it up, too. "I am sitting here in my little
office trying to figure out what happened to my country on this day. I wouldn't be a patriot if I
didn't try to prove the government's story is preposterous."
By Michael Powell
The Washington Post
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14723997/
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Proof that Jets and Jet Fuel were
not the cause of the WTC collapse.
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The frames from the pentagon video
should look more like this:
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Project MASCAL participant pilots
flight77. Massive Irony gone unreported.
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Some very Interesting parties have
been caught examining 911Lies.org.
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The man in the video is not Bin
Laden, not even close.
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911 truth activist, On
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Lou Dobbs Wakes Up to 911
Lies!
Recent airing, Lou details the true deception surrounding 911!
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Pentagon Scene Analyzed.
Obvious Proof; NO AIRLINER!
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