There is more one should know about some of them. North describes himself as a Christian Reconstructionist and the magazine he edits as “an attempt to apply biblical principles to economic analysis.” Cuba, Vialls declared as late as 2004, would “soon be used as ‘point man’ in a grand plan to deny American warships and other vessels safe transit through the Gulf of Mexico.… America will collapse in six months.” The Southeast Asia tsunami that same year, he theorized, was a “nuclear war crime.”
Carol Valentine, who ran a “Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum,” claimed that Branch Davidian followers did not perish by fire in Texas in 1993. They had, rather, been secretly shot earlier, or shot while trying to escape, by the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command.
Peter Meyer, for his part, cheerfully acknowledges having indulged over a long period in the use of psychedelic drugs—including LSD. He developed computer software for “Timewave Zero,” a program illustrating a “theory of time, history and the end of history” as revealed “by an alien intelligence.” He reportedly “hopes to be present at the end of history in 2012.”
• • •
AND THEN THERE ARE the books. As early as spring 2002 came one with a title that said it all—9/11: The Big Lie. This was the work of Thierry Meyssan, a Frenchman whose biographical note describes him as president of the Voltaire Network for freedom of speech and secretary of the Radical Left Party. According to the book’s cover, The Big Lie was “based exclusively on documents published by the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as statements by American civilian and military leaders.”
Meyssan’s book was a best-seller, reportedly selling more than 200,000 copies in France and half a million internationally, and eighteen editions in other foreign languages. It was largely lambasted by the media in the West—ignored at first in France—and praised elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In the United Arab Emirates, where Meyssan was invited to speak, he was introduced as a man “with the spirit of an investigative journalist, of a thinker.” Al Watan, a prominent newspaper in Saudi Arabia, trumpeted the book on its front page.
The idea that the Pentagon had been struck by a Boeing airliner on 9/11, Meyssan claimed, was “nonsense,” a “loony tale.” “Only a missile of the United States armed forces transmitting a friendly code,” he wrote, “could enter the Pentagon’s airspace without provoking a counter-missile barrage.”
The attacks on the World Trade Center had occurred “under the eye of the intelligence services, who observed but did not intervene.” And: “We are asked to believe that these hijackers were Arab-Islamic militants.… The first question that should be asked is ‘Who profits?’ ” Meyssan asked whether the ensuing FBI investigation was “meant to hide from view domestic American culpability and justify the military operations to follow.” The 9/11 attacks, he concluded, were “masterminded from inside the American state apparatus.”
That, the “truth” camp’s dominant message, has been gotten over—couched in beguilingly moderate tones—by a theologian. David Ray Griffin, professor of religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology in California for more than three decades, has churned out no fewer than nine books on 9/11. He has become known as the “dean” of opposition to 9/11 orthodoxy.
Griffin makes stunning leaps, slipped in amidst phrases like “the evidence suggests” and “the many reasons to” in his books. The evidence on the destruction of the World Trade Center and other factors, he has said, “show that the attacks must have been planned by our own political and military leaders.” He is evidently a full-fledged MIHOP man.
If the engine of the movement has been the Internet, it is the Web documentary film Loose Change—through its several incarnations since 2005—that has carried the message to a vast audience. The film is a fricassee of factoids, its ingredients largely clips from broadcast footage, laced with the voices of skeptics and served up over about two hours. While the film does not hand down a verdict in as many words, it makes no secret of its producers’ belief in MIHOP. It is Ministry of Propaganda stuff delivered, ironically, via the Internet, the ultimate medium of free speech.
By mid-2010, the producers say, 125 million people had viewed Loose Change on Google alone. In the words of producer Korey Rowe, who served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, “This is our generation’s Kennedy assassination.” Originally made for some $2,000 and available free on the Internet, the film has since gone into edition after edition. The latest update cost $1 million, and writer-director Dylan Avery moved to Los Angeles to write a feature film script.
In its most recent, 2009, edition, the makers of Loose Change no longer bothered to veil its message. They changed the title to Loose Change 9/11—An American Coup. “America was hijacked on September 11, 2001,” an earnest voice intones at the end, “by a group of tyrants ready and willing to do whatever is necessary to keep their stranglehold on the United States of America. A group beyond any one man [a picture of President Bush appears on the screen], or any one administration [a picture of President Obama appears]. Until there is a new investigation into the events, we will not go away. We will not be silent. Ask questions. Demand answers.”
David Griffin, usually careful to appear judicious, academically careful, at one stage acted as script consultant for Loose Change. He has, moreover, been quoted as saying he is doing what he can “to get the cabal who engineered 9/11 for imperialistic and plutocratic reasons stopped before they do still more damage to our country and our planet.” The “cabal” he had in mind, Griffin had long since made clear, was the Bush administration.
Many who have voiced support for the professor, to one degree or another, have been educated, professional people. Richard Falk, Princeton University’s Milbank professor emeritus of international law—and currently the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories of Palestine—lent credibility to Griffin’s first book with a glowing foreword. Falk has written, “It is not paranoid to assume that the established elites of the American governmental structure have something to hide, and much to explain.”
PROFESSIONALS WITH IDEAS like Griffin’s have associated themselves with Internet groups reflecting their expertise—Scholars for 9/11 Truth, the Scientific Panel Investigating 9/11, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Veterans for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth, and so on. Such skeptics include men and women from differing fields of expertise, some distinguished, some even prominent. Here is a sample.
Scholars for 9/11 Truth, originally headed jointly by James Fetzer, now professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota—a specialist on the philosophy of science—and Steven Jones, professor emeritus of physics at Brigham Young University, focused specifically on the collapses. Following a series of disagreements and a split into two separate groups—with perhaps a thousand members between them—Fetzer and Jones offer differing perspectives.
According to Fetzer, members of his group “believe that the government not only permitted 9/11 to occur but may even have orchestrated these events to facilitate its political agenda.” Fetzer claimed that his group has “established beyond reasonable doubt that the Twin Towers were destroyed by a novel form of controlled demolition from the top down … and that, whatever may have hit the Pentagon, multiple lines of argument support the conclusion that it was not a Boeing 757.” Perhaps, he theorized, “high-tech weapons of the directed energy kind” were used against the Trade Center.
Dr. Jones has called for “discretion and discipline” and strict adherence to “the Scientific Method.” He, too, however, espouses the hypothesis that the Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition. He, too, asserts that 9/11 was an “inside job,” that “the case for accusing ill-trained Muslims of causing all the destruction on 9/11 … just does not add up.”
The academic doubters found apparently reputable allies in other walks of life. Glenn MacDonald, a former Army Reserve major who runs a We
b journal called MilitaryCorruption.com, thought he could see something in the footage of the underside of Flight 175, as it tore toward the South Tower. “I have seen attachments that look like that—on military aircraft … It could have been even a missile.…”
Morgan Reynolds, who served as chief economist in the Department of Labor under President Bush, has described the official wisdom on the collapse of the Trade Center as “bogus,” explicable only as “professional demolition.” “We know,” said Paul Roberts, an assistant secretary of the treasury under President Reagan who himself has some engineering training, that “it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel-columned buildings, to ‘pancake’ at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false.”
Seven CIA veterans have found fault with the official account. William Christison, a former director of the Agency’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, has been vocal on the collapses. In a lengthy article, he declared himself impressed by the “carefully collected and analyzed evidence” suggesting that the two Trade Center Towers and Building 7 “were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before 9/11.” He had time, too, for the theory that the Pentagon was hit not by an airliner but perhaps by a “missile, a drone, or … a smaller manned aircraft.”
Military men and members of parliaments in several foreign nations have raised questions about the towers’ collapse. A bevy of show business figures and celebrities—including actors Charlie Sheen and Marion Cotillard, director David Lynch, comedian Rosie O’Donnell, and singer Willie Nelson—have drawn attention to the issue. So has former Minnesota governor turned television star Jesse Ventura, who showcased 9/11 on his television show Conspiracy Theory. Most significant, however, have seemed the views of professionals with seemingly relevant backgrounds.
Joel Hirschhorn, a former engineering professor who has often testified to congressional committees, believes that studies by scholars and professionals in relevant fields “reveal the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings was not caused by the two airplanes exploding into the Twin Towers.… Why have the government and official investigations not come to the same controlled demolition conclusion?”
Dwain Deets, former director for aeronautical projects at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, stated that “The many visual images (massive structural members being hurled horizontally, huge pyroclastic clouds etc.) leave no doubt in my mind explosives were involved.” Larry Erickson, a retired aerospace engineer and research scientist for NASA; David Griscom, a research physicist for the Naval Research Laboratory; and Robert Waser, a former research and development engineer with the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, all joined their names to a petition signed by a thousand architects and engineers requesting a new investigation.
Because the attacks began in New York, because they killed so many people, and because the Twin Towers were iconic, the strike on Washington, D.C., has tended to take second place in the public mind. The crash at the Pentagon has also preoccupied the skeptics, though, and appearances suggest they are in impressive company.
Colonel George Nelson, U.S. Air Force (retired), a former aircraft accident investigator, commercial pilot, and airframe mechanic, said that—on the evidence as he saw it in 2006—“any unbiased rational investigator” would conclude no Boeing 757 was involved in either the crash at the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Latas, aerospace engineer, airline captain, and former president of an Air Force accident board, found discrepancies between the Flight Data Recorder information on Flight 77 and the 9/11 Commission’s account.
Former Army Captain Daniel Davis, who served with Air Defense Command before becoming a senior manager at General Electric Turbine [jet] Engine Division, declared himself puzzled by the seeming lack of substantial airplane wreckage at the Pentagon. “Where,” he wanted to know, “are all of those engines?”
Former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was at the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11, later went public with a lengthy essay expressing her suspicions. “There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact,” she wrote. “There was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner.… It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon.”
From French author Thierry Meyssan to Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski, that is the notion that has proved durable among the doubters. The Pentagon was hit not by an airliner but by a missile.
The perceived Pentagon mysteries have given the skeptics free rein. A group calling itself Citizen Investigation Team claimed in 2010 to have “proof” that “the plane that was seen flying low over Arlington on 9/11/01 did not in fact hit the Pentagon.” Rather, it pulled up and flew over it at the last moment—all part, the authors would have us believe, of a “skilfully executed deception.”
Only a tiny community of believers, perhaps, credit such bizarre hypotheses So influential have the skeptics proven, however, above all but not only thanks to the Internet, that many people are at least somewhat hooked.
The authors’ contacts during the more than four years of work on this book—including both professional and social conversations with hundreds of people—seemed to confirm that many citizens, and not only young people, doubt that they have been given the full picture of what occurred on 9/11.
Such widespread doubt demands corroboration based on solid evidence—or rebuttal.
ELEVEN
THERE HAVE BEEN THREE MAIN OFFICIAL REPORTS ON THE NEW YORK collapses. First, the World Trade Center Building Performance Study, compiled in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and other bodies. Second, there was the far more thorough—248 pages coupled to forty-two companion reports—2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). There is also the institute’s eighty-eight-page report on the collapse of Trade Center Building 7, issued in 2008.
More than two hundred technical specialists, eighty-five from NIST and the others from the private sector and the academic world, worked on the institute’s report on the Trade Center. Its conclusion as to why the towers collapsed in essence differed from FEMA’s earlier finding only in the detail of its analysis.
The impact of the planes, NIST’s experts said, severed steel support columns and dislodged fireproofing—a vital factor—and started fires that reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius. The intense heat had the effect of weakening floors to the point where they sagged and pulled inward until outer columns—on the south face of the North Tower and the east face of the South Tower—in turn bowed inward.
That is the process, according to the NIST, that led the towers to collapse. The institute found “no corroborating evidence” for theories that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted in advance. It said that even the perception that the towers “pancaked,” as a cursory look at video footage might suggest—and as is associated with films of demolition using explosives—is inaccurate. NIST’s reading of the evidence, moreover, is that there was no failure of the floors—falling down one upon another one by one—but rather that the inward bowing, as described in the previous paragraph, initiated collapse.
What ammunition do the conspiracy theorists have to challenge the NIST account, and what is it worth? We came across a study of just that, dedicated solely to Professor Griffin’s criticism of the NIST reports on the Trade Center, and written by a NASA research scientist named Ryan Mackey—in language anyone can understand. In his analysis of Griffin’s work, Mackey applies what the astrophysicist Carl Sagan called a “baloney detection kit.”
Vital tools in the kit include independent confirmation of the facts, not confining oneself a
t the outset to a single hypothesis, and adherence to Occam’s Razor—the principle that precedence should be given to the simpler of competing theories.
The approach of Professor Griffin, the conspiracy author who presents himself as reasoned and judicious, in Mackey’s view “violates every single tenet” of the baloney detection kit. Mackey demonstrates as much, successfully in our view, over some three hundred pages. Errors made by Griffin regarding the NIST report, Mackey writes, “are so numerous and substantial as to discourage further analysis of his claims.” Here, large and small, are examples of Griffin’s claims, Mackey’s rebuttals, and on occasion points of our own.
Contrary to the NIST’s finding that fires so weakened the Twin Towers as to cause their collapse, Griffin has claimed that the fires were not especially hot, that there was no evidence that the heat was “breaking windows.” In fact, video and photographs show hundreds of windows broken, with either flame or smoke visible.
Griffin, who on the one hand argues that the fires in the Twin Towers were not hot enough to fatally weaken the steel columns, on the other hand asserts that molten steel was seen. For steel to have melted, he writes, “would be very strong evidence” that the columns were in fact “cut by explosives.”
There is in fact no good evidence—evidence, as distinct from verbal eyewitness recollections—that any steel, as distinct from other metals like aluminum, melted. According to Mackey, moreover, explosives, “particularly those used in real controlled demolitions, do not melt steel. They destroy steel through impulse.”
One possible scenario, Mackey writes, might support steel having melted at the very moment of collapse. That, he says, would fit not with the use of explosives but of “high-temperature incendiaries,” such as thermite—the presence of which has been postulated by skeptic Dr. Steven Jones.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 11