The Hole That Was Too Small
“[Thierry] Meyssan’s arguments,” wrote Griffin in that first 2004 work, “combined with those of other critics, do provide many reasons for concluding that it was not Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon.”16 There were, Griffin argued, “insuperable difficulties” for the contention that the plane had crashed into the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense because “whatever did hit the Pentagon simply did not cause nearly enough destruction for the official story to be true.”17 This was evident largely because “the orifice created by the impact . . . was at most 18 feet in diameter. Is it not absurd to suggest that a Boeing 757 created and then disappeared into such a small hole? . . . Can anyone seriously believe that a 125-foot-wide airplane created and then went inside a hole less than 20 feet wide? . . . It was actually technically difficult to do as little damage to the Pentagon as was done.” Whatever else the evidence suggested, it “proves that it was not a Boeing 757 that went inside the Pentagon’s west wing.”18
There were not many precedents in 2004 for a large commercial airliner being flown deliberately and at speed into the side of a substantial building. So, throughout Griffin’s discussion of the crash of Flight 77, there was a notion, only partly expressed, of what he thought ought to have happened when plane and structure came together so cataclysmically. This idea seems to have been informed to an extent by Tom and Jerry cartoons in which the cat, Tom, when propelled through a wall, leaves his entire profile, whiskers and all, outlined in the brick. So, argued Griffin, if you had a plane, consisting of fuselage and wings, you broadly ought to see a hole equal to or larger than the shape of a fuselage with wings. Since that wasn’t what you saw, it couldn’t have been a plane, no matter what other evidence there was for it being just that.
In fact, Griffin’s measurements were wrong. The 2003 report into the Pentagon crash compiled by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Structural Engineering Institute gave a width of ninety feet to the hole but explained that the wings had been destroyed by the reinforced columns of the Pentagon as the plane entered the building and disintegrated. Mete Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, designed several simulations of the disaster, and their results were all consistent with Flight 77 striking the Pentagon.
Professor Sozen would have had difficulty otherwise, because the physical evidence for the official version, far from being absent was overwhelming. Fully 184 of the 189 people known to have been aboard Flight 77 or killed in the Pentagon, were identified (mostly through DNA testing) from remains found at the site. Wreckage from a large plane was also found, as one might expect, though few of the pieces were very big. There are photographs of parts of the plane on the lawn in front of the building, and pictures of engine and other parts inside. Aviation engineers from the website Aerospaceweb.org examined photographs of two pieces of wreckage from the Pentagon “and found them to be entirely consistent with the Rolls-Royce RB211-535 turbofan engine found on a Boeing 757 operated by American Airlines. The circular engine disk debris is just the right size and shape to match the compressor stages of the RB211, and it also shows evidence of being attached to a triple-shaft turbofan like the RB211.”19
But there is always the possibility, however extraordinarily remote, that DNA might have been planted to the exact specifications of the missing passengers, crew, and employees, that wreckage might somehow have been placed at the scene within minutes of the crash, and that the real occupants of the missing Flight 77 might have been spirited away to some unknown place, there to be butchered or to live in the world’s weirdest witness protection program. Those possibilities must be facts if, as David Griffin also averred, the attack on the Pentagon was “so difficult and so perfectly executed . . . no pilot with the minimal training the hijackers evidently had could have executed this maneuver.”20
Aerospaceweb takes issue with this idea. “It is unclear what has prompted this belief,” it comments, detailing the evidence from those eyewitnesses to the crash who had remarked on the way in which Flight 77 was flown. Sitting in traffic near the Pentagon, Afework Hagos noticed the plane “seesawing back and forth” as the pilot struggled for control. The aircraft was “tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance.” Penny Elgas observed the same thing, as did Ann Owens, James Ryan, Albert Hemp-hill, and David Marra. The site also reported the comments of a pilot, who remarked that “crashing a plane into a building as massive as the Pentagon is remarkably easy and takes no skill at all. Landing one on a runway safely even under the best conditions? Now that’s the hard part!”21
The number of people who claimed to have seen not just an aircraft, but one with an American Airlines logo on it, might be regarded as an insuperable problem for Griffin’s critique of the official version. James Ryan said that he had identified the AA on the tail: “The plane was low enough that I could see the windows of the plane. I could see every detail of the plane. In my head I have ingrained forever this image of every detail of that plane. It was a silver plane, American Airlines plane.” “I was close enough (about a hundred feet or so) that I could see the American Airlines logo on the tail as it headed toward the building . . . I clearly saw the AA logo with the eagle in the middle,” recalled Steve Riskus. A pilot, Donald “Tim” Timmerman, who lived in an apartment on the sixteenth floor of a building overlooking the Pentagon, had “quite a panorama . . . It was a Boeing 757, American Airlines, no question.”22
None of this counted for Griffin, since, in a conflict between physical evidence (the size of the hole) and eyewitness recollection, a court of law would favor the former “because the human testimony might be wrong for all sorts of reasons, such as misperception, faulty memory, or outright lying (perhaps because of bribery or intimidation).” Nor was he prepared to credit the claim made by the solicitor general of the United States, Ted Olson, that his wife, Barbara, a passenger on Flight 77, had made a phone call from the plane. There were “at least four reasons to doubt Ted Olson’s testimony,” the first that he was “very close to the Bush administration” and the fourth that “Ted Olson is the only person who reported receiving a call from Flight 77.”23 In fact, another passenger, Renee May, had called her mother, Nancy, at 9:12 a.m. to tell her that the aircraft had been hijacked. Nancy May was not, as far as anyone has established, an intimate of anyone in government.
Even so, despite the debris, the DNA, the eyewitnesses, the fact that Flight 77 indubitably went missing and none of its passengers has ever turned up alive, Griffin persisted in claiming throughout his books that it was far more probable that something else had happened to the Pentagon than that Flight 77, piloted by a hijacker, had flown into it. Against all the freely available evidence, Griffin, a Christian theologian, portrayed a bereaved man as a conspiring monster, implicated hundreds in the worst act of treachery in recent history, and was punished by having his books sell in their thousands and retired professionals from one coast to the other applaud his accusations.
Murderous Holograms and Other Fancies
A summary of what a made-it-happen-on-purpose 9/11 Truth activist—taking his or her cue from David Ray Griffin—was likely to believe as of January 2007 goes something like this. Certain forces in the Bush administration wanted a pretext to use overwhelming military force in the Caspian area and the Middle East, either to procure oil supplies, or to weaken opposition to Israel, or both. Accordingly, they or their agents organized a false-flag operation, which would accomplish what Pearl Harbor was supposed to have accomplished for the Rooseveltian war party in 1941, causing a large number of Americans to die on the territory of the United States itself, with the blame wrongly being put on Islamist extremists. The plot they devised involved three airliners being flown into the World Trade Center main towers and, possibly, a Washington target. There were either no hijackers or the ones on board were patsies, and two of the planes were guided remotely into the World Trade Center. What brought the towers down, however, was
a “controlled demolition” using explosives planted there at some earlier time. The same devices also toppled the structure now known as World Trade Center 7, though no plane flew into that building. The Pentagon was not hit by an airliner but by a guided missile. The fourth airliner, United 93, possibly heading for the capital, was either shot down because the passengers threatened to land it successfully, thus exposing the plot, or else it was never found. Various ruses, including faked mobile phone calls and fraudulent claims of such calls (for example, by Ted Olson), were used to disguise the true nature of the crime.
That was the basic theory, although different people in the Truth movement might agree or disagree with various parts of it. To accept it, you have to believe that elements of the American government engaged in a conspiracy of exceptional complexity and enormous risk of failure. This group of conspirators would have had to suborn, dupe, or train nineteen hijackers, create elaborate background stories for them, send them to flying schools to be seen around Florida and other parts of the United States, before disposing of them either in the crashes or, in the case of Flight 77, in a manner unknown.
The conspirators would have had to have sent experts in to rig the two main towers and WTC 7 with sufficient explosives to be sure of bringing the first two buildings down sometime after the planes had hit them, and WTC 7 whenever it was felt expedient to do so. But the explosives had to be sufficiently inert not to be triggered either by the impacts of the planes or by the thousands of gallons of burning aviation fuel, an especially tricky proposition since no precedent existed for the crashing of a large civil airliner into a thousand-foot skyscraper. The planes also had to be guided into the exact locations of the explosives. The towers had to come down because the destruction by terrorists of planes full of passengers and the unknowable number of casualties in the areas of the towers hit by the aircraft might not, in themselves, have been sufficiently provoking to cause the reaction needed by the plotters. On the other hand, it was apparently thought excessive to rig the towers in such a way as to have them topple over and possibly destroy half of lower Manhattan. A balance had to be struck.
For reasons unknown (a liking for variety, perhaps) the plotters decided not to repeat the trick in Washington. Believing that an attack that could kill up to 30,000 people in New York might not provide an adequate casus belli, the plotters trained a missile or an explosives-laden small military plane on the Pentagon, trusting that onlookers would accept that it must have been an airliner, either for the positive reason that Washingtonians are more suggestible than New Yorkers or the negative one that it was too tall an order to get a big plane to strike the Pentagon in the right way. There was, however, quite possibly a plane targeted on another Washington building (perhaps you don’t want too much variety), Flight 93. This was the one that supposedly crashed into a Pennsylvania field. Not so. It had to be shot down by the government when the passengers unfortunately got wind of what was planned and stormed the cockpit—to find the autopilot, or the patsies, or whatever they found. Although another theory, favored by the makers of Loose Change, is that Flight 93 didn’t crash and wasn’t shot down, but, like Flight 77, was made to disappear.
Of course, it was essential that no air defenses were deployed properly against the two or three planes containing “hijackers,” because the premature destruction of these aircraft would have meant the towers would have to be blown with no obvious culprit. So it was necessary to effectively stand down those defenses, by scrambling fighters deliberately late and issuing them with intentionally vague orders.
Then there was postproduction. One aspect of this was simple: the faking of videos of Osama bin Laden and others claiming responsibility for the attacks. Another was more complex: the passengers of Flight 77 and possibly Flight 93 were either murdered in a secret location and their bodies disposed of beyond any chance of discovery, or else they were relocated, lost forever to their families and friends, somewhere they could never be found. This would have been slightly easier if, as the millionaire 9/11 Truth activist Jimmy Walters has claimed, they were “all working for the government.” Finally, investigators belonging to the disaster agency FEMA, to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to the fire, police, and other emergency services, were paid off or intimidated to produce reports favorable to the official version.
Although the ingenious A. K. Dewdney has calculated that this whole plot would only require forty-four agents, it seems obvious that the intimidation alone would need as many if not more operatives than that. Hundreds, if not thousands, would have to have been directly involved in different aspects of the conspiracy. And all of them would have to have been either fanatically committed to the project or else almost unimaginably immoral. Think for a moment about the men who rigged the Twin Towers with explosives.
As if this plot weren’t sufficiently challenging, there were Truth activists who became persuaded of even more technologically complex possibilities. On the fifth anniversary of the attacks, the New Statesman carried an interview with David Shayler and his partner Annie Machon, also a former employee of MI5.o The interviewer describes Machon as looking uncomfortable when Shayler decides to reveal his true opinion.
“Oh, fuck it, I’m just going to say this,” [Shayler] tells her. “Yes, I believe no planes were involved in 9/11.” But we all saw with our own eyes the two planes crash into the WTC. “The only explanation is that they were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes,” he says. “Watch the footage frame by frame and you will see a cigar-shaped missile hitting the World Trade Center.” He must notice that my jaw has dropped. “I know it sounds weird, but this is what I believe.”24
It seems likely that Shayler hadn’t seen the pictures of wreckage from Flight 175 on top of WTC 5. Even so, this “intelligence expert” believed that a cabal that couldn’t plant weapons of mass destruction in the vastnesses of the Iraqi desert could fly hologram-shrouded missiles in plain daylight into one of the most public places in the world. But Shayler’s selective credulity was only very slightly different in scale to that of David Ray Griffin and, presuming that they had thought through the implications of the conspiracy charge, those of Griffin’s applauding audiences. It is surely remarkable that anyone should believe a story like the one effectively invented by the 9/11 Truth movement, let alone senior academics in American universities charged with instructing the young.
The Structural Engineers with a Special Place in Hell
Yet believe it they did. Griffin’s success in drawing into the 9/11 Truth movement a number of people who defied the stereotypical image of the deluded paranoid was both striking and unexpected. But Griffin was just one man. It took other adherents to his formula to disseminate the word on an almost institutional level. In December 2005, Professor James Fetzer, a philosopher from the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and Steven Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University, Utah, formed Scholars for 9/11 Truth (or, as they liked to call it, S9/11T). Fetzer at least was a veteran conspiracist, having previously argued, among other things, that President Kennedy’s brain had been swapped with someone else’s for the benefit of the autopsy X-rays, and that the Zapruder film had somehow been faked.
Unsurprisingly, from the start, S9/11T seemed to be making two contradictory pitches. According to its founding statement, the organization was both “devoted to applying the principles of scientific reasoning to the available evidence, ‘letting the chips fall where they may,’ ” but also to contending that it was already established that “the World Trade Center was almost certainly brought down by controlled demolitions and that the available relevant evidence casts grave doubt on the government’s official story about the attack on the Pentagon.” Far, therefore, from being allowed to fall unhindered, the chips had been nudged firmly, if not remotely controlled, into their final position. Indeed, leading members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, despite their commitment to an open-eyed search for veracity, turned out to have a rough way of dea
ling with rebuttals from other, invariably more qualified scholars who disagreed with the “science” underlying most 9/11 conspiracy theories. To Professor Fetzer, this opposition came down to moral deficiency. “These people lack integrity, or they are corrupt,” he told a radio audience in the summer of 2006. “I am disgusted, disgusted with the structural engineers who know the truth and have kept their mouths shut. There’s a special place in hell reserved for them.”25
Despite this ambivalence, the website for the Scholars gave evidence of something approaching hyperactivity, as its leading members addressed meetings, wrote articles, did interviews, attended symposia, and organized conferences. But who, exactly, were they? What were they scholars of? A researcher following up on the names discovered that, as of late 2006, out of seventy-six named Scholars for Truth there were no Middle Eastern experts and only two engineers, one of whom thought the United States was plotting to bomb the planet Jupiter with antimatter weapons while the other devoted himself to studying the mechanics of dentistry. Nine (the largest number) were philosophers, five were English experts, five were psychologists, five were physicists, and four were theologians. One, Webster G. Tarpley, was the president of the “Washington Grove Institute,” an institution traceable only via a PO Box on Tarpley’s website.
A Long, Digressive Note on Webster G. Tarpley
The story of 9/11 conspiracy theory is, as much as anything else, a story of the way in which the Internet has brought unlikely people together across geographic and political distances. Who, for example, is Webster G. Tarpley? It was a question I asked myself when I attended the 9/11 Truth meeting at Friends House in 2005. I didn’t know the name. Nor, I suspected, did the majority of the audience, and yet they were lapping up what he was telling them. Almost as though I were uncovering a conspiracy myself, I began to research the backgrounds of the key members of the 9/11 Truth movement. Who were they all, and what did they, in sociological or historical terms, represent?
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Page 29