[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
Corrupt Government Title: 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Are Building Their Case Against the Government From Ground Zero The Disbelievers 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Are Building Their Case Against the Government From Ground Zero By Michael Powell Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 8, 2006; Page C01 NEW YORK He felt no shiver of doubt in those first terrible hours. David Ray Griffin, whose book "The New Pearl Harbor" is a foundation of the "9/11 Truth Movement." (Helayne Seidman - For The Washington Post) The Disbelievers In Politics, Folks, It's Never Pretty Two Bodies, One Mind Superman, Without The X-Ray Vision 'Survivor' Host's Geoethnic Studies, From Soup to Mutts Style Section Who's Blogging? Read what bloggers are saying about this article. Kinshasa On The Potomac http://nospeedbumps.com Newsvine - Get Smarter Here Full List of Blogs (5 links) » Most Blogged About Articles On http://washingtonpost.com | On the web Save & Share Tag This Article Saving options 1. Save to description: Headline (required) Subheadline Byline 2. Save to notes (255 character max): Subheadline Blurb None 3. Tag This Article 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 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 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 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. David Ray Griffin, whose book "The New Pearl Harbor" is a foundation of the "9/11 Truth Movement." (Helayne Seidman - For The Washington Post) The Disbelievers In Politics, Folks, It's Never Pretty Two Bodies, One Mind Superman, Without The X-Ray Vision 'Survivor' Host's Geoethnic Studies, From Soup to Mutts Style Section Who's Blogging? Read what bloggers are saying about this article. Kinshasa On The Potomac http://nospeedbumps.com Newsvine - Get Smarter Here Full List of Blogs (5 links) » Most Blogged About Articles On http://washingtonpost.com | On the web Save & Share Tag This Article Saving options 1. Save to description: Headline (required) Subheadline Byline 2. Save to notes (255 character max): Subheadline Blurb None 3. Tag This Article 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. 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 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. Bush as chief economist at the Labor Department. He left in 2002 and doesn't think much of his former boss; he describes 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 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 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. 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." David Ray Griffin, whose book "The New Pearl Harbor" is a foundation of the "9/11 Truth Movement." (Helayne Seidman - For The Washington Post) The Disbelievers In Politics, Folks, It's Never Pretty Two Bodies, One Mind Superman, Without The X-Ray Vision 'Survivor' Host's Geoethnic Studies, From Soup to Mutts Style Section Who's Blogging? Read what bloggers are saying about this article. Kinshasa On The Potomac http://nospeedbumps.com Newsvine - Get Smarter Here Full List of Blogs (5 links) » Most Blogged About Articles On http://washingtonpost.com | On the web Save & Share Tag This Article Saving options 1. Save to description: Headline (required) Subheadline Byline 2. Save to notes (255 character max): Subheadline Blurb None 3. Tag This Article 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 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." 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.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
|
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|