http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003250424_911conspire09.html
Close-up The 9/11 conspiracy plots thicken
By Michael Powell
The Washington Post
HEESOON YIM / AP
A helicopter flies over the smoldering Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on
Sept. 11, 2001. According to a recent poll, 12 percent of Americans
believe a cruise missile, not a hijacked airliner, struck the building.
David Ray Griffin sees "massive complicity."
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-Qaida 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
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," Griffin said. "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 extent of
belief that the Bush administration had a hand in the attacks of Sept. 11
to spark an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
36 percent suspicious
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.
advertising 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."
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.
Motley crew
The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped
looking for truth from the government. A cacophonous and free-range a
bunch of conspiracists, they produce hip-hop inflected documentaries and
scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode. Every citizen is a
researcher.
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 ...
Peter Knight, senior lecturer in American studies at the University of
Manchester and editor of the 2002 book "Conspiracy Nation: The Politics
of Paranoia in Postwar America," called the movement "a strange beast, an
amalgam of elements. You've got the anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war crowd - you
know, if they lied about the war, maybe they lied about 9/11. Another
part is people merely interested in the anomalies, with no preconceived
political agenda.
"Then you have the more traditional right-wing conspiracy part of the
continuum that believes a vast cabal has taken over the United States,
the mega-conspiracy of the right's new world order. To them, all of these
things are connected. Each group inserts 9/11 into its pre-existing
conspiracy model."
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; and Daniel Orr, retired
chairman of the economics department at the University of Illinois.
Professor suspended
The movement's de facto minister of engineering is Steven Jones, a
tenured physics professor at Brigham Young University who has 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.
Jones has been placed on paid leave while the Mormon-church-owned school
investigates his claims, it was announced Friday.
The physicist published his views two weeks ago in the book "9/11 and
American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out."
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.
Then there's Morgan O. Reynolds, appointed by George W. Bush as chief
economist at the Labor Department. He left in 2002 and doesn't think much
of his former boss.
"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 Bush and Cheney could have
invaded Iraq without the help of 9/11," Reynolds asserts.
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
Bush Administration and 9/11," sold more than 100,000 copies and became a
movement founding stone. Last year he traveled through New England,
giving speeches. One evening in West Hartford, Conn., 400 mostly
middle-aged and upper-middle-class doctors and lawyers, teachers and
social workers sat waiting.
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. 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.
No patience
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," says Berlet.
"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.
"I love 'The X-Files' but I don't base my research on it. My vision of
hell is having to review these [conspiracy] books over and over again."
In the days after Sept. 11, experts claimed temperatures reached 2,000
degrees on the upper floors. Others claimed steel melted. Nope. What
happened, says Eager, the MIT materials-science professor, 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 ... "
Professsor Jones' suspension was reported Friday by The Associated Press.
Peter Knight was quoted by McClatchy Newspapers.
Copyright ) 2006 The Seattle Times Company