“A stillness fell over the recovery workers as a child’s pajamas were pulled from the debris,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel William Lee, a chaplain. A Barbie doll was pulled out next, followed by the foot of a child—probably part of the torn remains of eight-year-old Zoe Falkenberg, who had been traveling on the plane with her parents and little sister, Dana. Dana, aged three, was one of the five victims for whom remains were not identified.
In light of such realities, Griffin’s musings—along with those of others, such as Professor Dewdney and a woman named Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who runs an Internet site called “The Cassiopaean Experiment”—might be thought to sink to the level of obscenity. The professor expressed doubt that “the bodies of the crew and passengers were really found in the Pentagon wreckage. “For all we know,” he opined, “human remains from two different sites could have been combined by FBI and military personnel.”
So it goes, in the face of all the evidence. Griffin, Dewdney, and Knight-Jadczyk have insisted for years that phone calls reportedly made from the hijacked planes—including Flight 77—are fabrications. His research, Dewdney wrote, showed that technologically, “cell phone calls alleged to have been made by passengers were essentially impossible” in 2001.
The suggestion is that the two conversations said to have been conducted from Flight 77—by flight attendant Renee May to her mother and by Barbara Olson to her husband, Theodore, the solicitor general—are official concoctions.
The issue of whether it was possible to make cell phone calls from airliners at the time turns out to be irrelevant. Detailed AT&T records now available make it clear that Mrs. Olson and May used seatback phones, not cell phones.
In a fatuous, callous account, Knight-Jadczyk suggests that Barbara Olson did not die on Flight 77, but may “have had a little plastic surgery and is waiting for Ted on that nice Caribbean island they have always wanted to retire to.”
Theologian Griffin, who likes to write and talk about “voice transformers” and “voice morphing,” techniques of flawlessly imitating voices that he thinks may have been used by the authorities on 9/11, does not emerge as having any consideration for the bereaved. Theodore Olson’s account of having received calls from his wife on the morning of 9/11, he alleged, was only a claim.
“Either Ted Olson lied or else he, like many other people that day, was fooled by fake calls.” The notion that the solicitor general told the truth, he said, “is based on the assumption that his wife Barbara Olson really died, and that he truly loved her.”
The remains of Olson’s wife, Barbara, were found in the ruins of the Pentagon, scattered in three separate locations. “It took a long time to provide an identification,” her husband has said. “But finally they did release the remains of Barbara. And she’s buried up in Door County, Wisconsin … because she loved that place so much. And she’s there now.”
Absent evidence for his claim about the Olson calls, Griffin resorted to innuendo. One “cannot ignore the fact,” he wrote, “that the information about Barbara came from Ted Olson, that he was working for the Bush-Cheney administration.” It is the notion on which Griffin and the rest harp over and over—in his words that there is “overwhelming” supporting evidence that 9/11 was “an inside job.” There was “a prima facie case for assuming that the Bush administration was involved.”
THE SKEPTICS MAKE much of a document issued exactly a year before the attacks by the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing group that included men soon to hold senior posts in the Bush administration—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and George Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor of Florida.
The paper, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” envisaged the removal of “regional aggressors” in the Middle East, and a continuing U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf—“unquestioned military pre-eminence.” Achieving such ambitions would be a lengthy process, the document noted, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
The luminaries of the New American Century group, all now appointed to positions in the new administration, got their catalyzing event within eight months. In a diary entry on the night of the attacks, President Bush reportedly called 9/11 “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century.” Later, he would draw the parallel to 1941 in public. The catastrophe of September 11 did predispose the American public for great military initiatives abroad, wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq—to topple regional aggressor Saddam Hussein.
The skeptics do not believe the September 11 attacks occurred by happenstance. They infer, rather, that those around Bush who yearned for “unquestioned military pre-eminence” must have been involved in 9/11. “Who benefits?” asked Griffin. “Who had the motive? Who had the means? Who had the opportunity? Certainly the U.S. government benefited immensely from 9/11 and cannot therefore be dropped from any rational list of suspect organizations.”
MIHOP—Made It Happen On Purpose—adherents suggest that 9/11 was a false flag operation, a fabrication to justify foreign wars, and rattle off a string of supposed precedents. They cite U.S. provocation as having triggered the Mexican-American War of 1846, resulting in the acquisition of vast new territories from Texas to California. They point to the mysterious sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898. Though perhaps just a tragic accident, the sinking was used to justify the ensuing war with Spain—leading to U.S. dominance over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.
MIHOP disciples also recall the argument that the orthodox history of Pearl Harbor itself is incorrect, that—though President Franklin Roosevelt had prior intelligence of a coming attack—he took no preemptive action. Roosevelt’s motive? According to revisionist theory, he needed the day of Japanese “infamy” to ensure support for taking America into the war.
MIHOP people cite, too, the Gulf of Tonkin incident during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Exposés have shown that the administration greatly exaggerated the facts about skirmishes in the gulf between North Vietnamese and U.S. ships in 1964. The inflated story was used, all the same, as pivotal justification for committing the United States to war in Vietnam.
Those who think the false flag ploy may apply to 9/11 also pounced, within days of the attacks, on an authentic recent revelation. Documents made public just months earlier showed that, back in 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had worked up plans to stage phony acts of terrorism—including the staged downing of a U.S. airliner—that could be blamed on Fidel Castro.
The object, then, had been to provoke an American invasion of Cuba and—though the project never got beyond the planning stage—news of its existence led to fevered speculation among 9/11 skeptics. “We must wonder,” one Web theorist wrote, “if the inexplicable intelligence and defense failures [surrounding 9/11] claimed by U.S. government agencies are simply part of some elaborate cover story.”
Wonder one may, but the authors have seen not a jot of evidence that anything like a false flag scenario was used on 9/11. Nor, after more than four years’ research, have we encountered a shred of real information indicating that the Bush administration was complicit in 9/11. Subjected to any serious probing, the suspicions raised by Professor Griffin and his fellow “truthers” simply vanish on the wind.
The investigative writer David Corn, a longtime Washington editor of The Nation, was on many matters a harsh critic of the President and those around him. As a serious investigative writer who specialized in intelligence coverage, though, he had no time for the skeptics’ fancies. “I won’t argue,” he wrote six months after 9/11,
that the U.S. government does not engage in brutal, murderous skulduggery from time to time. But the notion that the U.S. government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or worse, conspired to kill thousands of Americans … is absurd.
Would George W. Bush take the chance of being branded the most evil president of all time by countenancing such wrongdoing? Aren’t these conspiracy theories too silly to address? … Would U.S.
officials be capable of such a foul deed? Capable, as in able to pull it off and willing to do so. Simply put, the spies and the special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough.… That conclusion is based partly on, dare I say it, common sense, but also on years spent covering national security matters.…
Such a plot … would require dozens (or scores or hundreds) of individuals to attempt such a scheme. They would have to work together, and trust one another not to blow their part or reveal the conspiracy.…
This is as foul as it gets—to kill thousands of Americans, including Pentagon employees.… (The sacrificial lambs could have included White House staff or members of Congress, had the fourth plane not crashed in Pennsylvania.) This is a Hollywood-level of dastardliness, James Bond (or Dr. Evil) material.… There is plenty to get outraged about without becoming obsessed with X Files–like nonsense.
Corn’s piece attracted a howl of rage on the Internet from the busy scribblers he had characterized as “silly.” Eight years of scribbling and talk show jawing later, though, their theories still look silly.
THERE IS NO REASON to doubt that a team of terrorists targeted four airliners on September 11. No reason to doubt that the doomed planes stood at their assigned gates, that passengers boarded, that the aircraft took off, for some time flew their allotted flight paths, were hijacked, and then—except for one that crashed following a brave attempt at resistance by its passengers—crashed into targeted buildings in New York and Washington. There is no good reason to suspect that the collapse of the Twin Towers and nearby buildings, and the resulting deaths, were caused by anything other than the inferno started by the planes’ impact. There is no reason, either, to suspect that the damage and death at the Pentagon was caused by anything other than the plane striking the building.
The facts are fulsomely documented in the material available to the public—not just the 9/11 Commission Report but the reams of supporting documentation and the reports supplied by other agencies. The thousands of pages include: interviews of airline ground staff on duty that day, interviews with crews’ families, flight path studies prepared by the National Transportation Safety Board, Air Traffic Control recordings—transcripts of verbatim exchanges between controllers and pilots—accompanying reports prepared by NTSB specialists, radar data studies, the transcript of the one Cockpit Voice Recorder recovered in usable condition, the two Flight Data Recorders recovered, and interviews and transcripts of staff of the FAA Air Traffic Control Centers involved on the day.
All that material is now available, part of the approximately 300,000 pages released by the National Archives—with national security and privacy-related redactions—since 2009. The authors have read as much of it as was feasible, and it provides no support for the naysayers.
The legacy of the spurious doubts, though, has been that far too little attention has been given to the very real omissions and distortions in the official reporting. The conspiracy theorizing in which the skeptics indulged, David Corn has rightly said, “distracts people from the actual malfeasance, mistakes and misdeeds of the U.S. government and the intelligence community.”
There were certainly mistakes, and there may have been wrongdoing.
TWELVE
ALMOST THREE YEARS AFTER THE ATTACKS, IN 2004, THE EXECUTIVE director of the 9/11 Commission—then in the final weeks of its work—dictated a memo. It was addressed to the inquiry’s chairman and vice chairman, and it posed a very sensitive question. “How,” Philip Zelikow wanted to know, “should the Commission handle evidence of possible false statements by U.S. officials?”
“Team 8,” he reported, “has found evidence suggesting that one or more USAF officers—and possibly FAA officials—must have known their version was false, before and after it was briefed to and relied upon by the White House, presented to the nation, and presented to us.… The argument is not over details; it is about the fundamental way the story was presented. It is the most serious issue of truth/falsity in accounts to us that we have encountered so far.”
The “story” that so provoked the Commission was the military and FAA version of their response to the 9/11 attacks, a response that failed utterly to thwart the terrorists’ operation. The Commission’s belief that it had been deceived would be lost in the diplomatic language of its final Report. Zelikow’s memo on the subject would be withheld until 2009. The Commission’s chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, and the vice chairman, former congressman Lee Hamilton, however, gave a sense of their frustration in their later joint memoir. The military’s statements, they declared, were “not forthright or accurate.” To another commissioner, former congressman Tim Roemer, they were, quite simply, “false.”
Former New Jersey attorney general John Farmer, who went on to become a senior counsel on the Commission, led Team 8’s probe of the military’s performance. He was shocked by the “deception,” and explained why in a complex, mesmerizing account of his findings.
Farmer questioned not only how the military and the FAA had functioned on 9/11, but also the actions of the President and the Vice President. In his view, “The perpetuation of the untrue official version remains a betrayal of every citizen who demanded a truthful answer to the simple question: What happened?”
TO ESTABLISH WHAT did happen, investigators found themselves plunging into a labyrinth of facts and factoids. Early official statements, made within days of the attacks, were clearly inconsistent.
Two days after the attacks, Air Force general Richard Myers testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Though the hearing had been scheduled before 9/11, questioning turned naturally to the crisis of the moment. For an officer of distinction, about to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Myers seemed confused as to when fighters had gone up to attempt to intercept the hijacked planes. Memory, he said vaguely, told him that fighters had been launched to intercept Flight 93, the plane that crashed before reaching a target. “I mean,” he said, “we had gotten somebody close to it, as I recall. I’ll have to check it out.”
Twenty-four hours later, on the Friday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz seemed to confirm it. “We responded awfully quickly, I might say, on Tuesday,” he said in a nationally broadcast interview, “and in fact we were already tracking in on that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I think it was the heroism of the passengers on board that brought it down, but the Air Force was in a position to do so if we had had to … it’s the President’s decision on whether to take an action as fateful as that.”
The same day, though, another senior officer flatly contradicted Wolfowitz. Major General Paul Weaver, commander of the Air National Guard, gave reporters a detailed timeline of the military’s reaction. According to him, no airplanes had been scrambled to chase Flight 93. “There was no notification for us to launch airplanes … We weren’t even close.”
What, moreover, asked Weaver, could a fighter pilot have done had he intercepted one of the hijacked airliners? “You’re not going to get an American pilot shooting down an American airliner. We don’t have permission to do that.” The only person who could grant such permission was the President, the general pointed out, leaving the impression that Bush had not done so.
By week’s end, however, that notion was turned on its head. Vice President Cheney, speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, said that George W. Bush had indeed made the “toughest decision”—to shoot down a civilian airliner if necessary. Fighter pilots, he asserted, had been authorized to “take out” any plane that failed to obey instructions to move away from Washington.
In spite of denials by General Myers and others, there were people who thought United 93 might in fact have been shot down. Bush himself had asked Cheney, “Did we shoot it down, or did it crash?” “It’s my understanding,” Cheney had told Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, that “they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.” Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who was with the Vice President at the White House, recalled thinking, “Oh, my God, did
we shoot it down?”
At one base, a crewman saw a fighter returning without missiles, surmised that it had shot down Flight 93—then learned that the plane had never been loaded with missiles in the first place. One F-16 pilot who flew that day heard that the aircraft had been downed—only to be told that the report was incorrect. Rumors would still be circulating years later.
In the absence of good evidence to the contrary, though, few now credit the notion that any pilot shot down an airliner filled with helpless civilians on September 11. No pilot would have fired without authorization, could not have done so without fellow officers, radio operators, and others being aware of it. There was no way such an action could have been kept secret.
Shoot-down aside, the statements by the military and political leadership raised a host of questions. Had fighters really gone up in time to intercept any of the hijacked planes? If they did get up in time, what had they been expected to do? Could they—would they—have shot a plane down? If pilots were cleared to shoot, was the order given in the way the Vice President described? If so, when did he issue the order and when did it reach military commanders?
Getting clear answers to these questions at first seemed a manageable task. Why would it not be, given that the military, the FAA, and the White House all kept logs and records and taped hours of phone and radio exchanges? The law establishing the Commission “required” those involved to produce all records on request. In the event, though, investigators were thwarted by delayed responses, irritating conditions, and actual obstruction.
The FAA said it had produced all relevant material, only for Commission staff to discover that was not true. It had failed to provide a large number of tapes and transcripts. What the Department of Defense and NORAD—North American Aerospace Defense Command—provided was, in the words of one Commission staff member, “incomplete, late, and inadequate to our purposes.”
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 13