On Monday’s LewRockwell.com, law professor Butler Shaffer eloquently defends, as he exemplifies, the rational temper. Implicitly amplifying Blanshard’s concerns, Shaffer regards mockers of hypotheses alternative to the Kean-Zelikow Commission Report (hereafter KZCR) as denigrators of “the epistemological inquiry that is at the base of our character and intelligence: how do we know what we know?”:

. . . To even consider the possibility that a given event might have been produced by a conspiracy, is to run the risk of being labeled a “paranoid” or a “wacko.” As we have no desire to appear foolish in the eyes of others, we give in to such intimidation and preface our opinions with the aforesaid mantra. . . . While some of these presentations [of alternative 9/11 hypotheses] test one’s credulity, others have provided purported evidence which, if true, would lead intelligent minds to demand further investigation. To say this, however, is not to give credence to any particular theory that one might offer as a counter-explanation to the “official” one. It is only to suggest that a further examination might be merited.

To ask empirically based questions is not to make an accusation, but only to pursue the “cui bono?” question as a point of departure for uncovering wrongdoing. . . . The answer to the “cui bono” question does not necessarily identify the culprit, but it is a very rational place from which to begin asking questions. To be a suspect is not to be accused. . . .

Professor Shaffer then draws upon the Wikipedia entry for “Operation Northwoods,” a “black-flag operation” that the U. S. military never carried out, but incontrovertibly planned:

. . . The plan was to have terrorist acts committed in various American cities—including Washington, D.C.—in which people would be shot; bombings would take place and planes hijacked; while “evidence” would be fabricated implicating the Castro regime with such acts. One proposal in the plan called for the destruction of an empty drone plane – which, people would be told, carried American college students on a holiday. All of these contrived “attacks” would then be used as a justification for an attack on Cuba. This plan had the written support of all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including its chairman [General Lyman L. Lemnitzer—AF].

The necessary caveat follows:

That top U.S. government officials could concoct such a deadly plan as a pretext for war in no way proves that 9/11 was a similarly contrived event. What it does do, however, is strip away some of the high-school civics class veneer of the state that leads most Americans . . . to dismiss in knee-jerk fashion and without any felt need to examine the evidence, the idea that their government could engage in such calculated wrongdoing. . . .

Shaffer will not be misunderstood:

I want to emphasize, again, that I am not even suggesting that persons other than Al Qaeda operatives were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. . . . I am, however, suggesting that a number of critics of the “official” explanation have offered enough thoughtful evidence and factual analysis to warrant a thorough investigation of these events. The inquiry should be conducted by competent men and women with no preconceived agenda – whether as defenders or critics of governmental behavior – and without fear of asking any and all empirically related questions.

Shaffer’s words imply that KZCR does not qualify as the needed “thorough investigation.” To show it does not qualify has been David Ray Griffin’s explicit burden in recent years. To the degree that he has shouldered it successfully, to that degree he is within his cognitive rights to offer an alternative explanation.

But Griffin’s critics do not condescend to rebut his putative refutation. Their practice demonstrates a preference for pecking away at one or two of his sentences outside the context of that substantial effort. They apparently do not accept the latter, but will not say why. They seem content to try to discredit Griffin’s alternative theory. But if his refutation remains unanswered, their views on his alternative are irrelevant.

Professor Shaffer concludes:

Suspicion and guilt are not synonymous words. At the same time, however, intellectually respectable thinking demands a willingness to pursue any inquiry wherever it may lead. . . . But there is another factor – what I call “existential courage” – that must remain at the forefront of our efforts to live as human beings, rather than as servo-mechanisms to the institutional order. . . . What have we become that we regard any questioning of this arrangement as the products of “irresponsible” or “paranoid” minds? Why should free and energized minds be fearful of asking any questions, particularly those we have been told it is improper to ask?

I endorse Professor Shaffer’s article in letter and in spirit. As if to supply him with a current illustration of what we need existential courage to stomach, Alexander Cockburn arrives on the scene with one of his more poorly reasoned (and copyedited) rants. Expanding his recent piece in The Nation, this performance begins:

You trip over one fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracy nuts—the ones who say Bush and Cheney masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—in the first paragraph of the opening page of the book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. “In many respects,” Griffin writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself… In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes… not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them.”

It goes downhill from there.

The people who have a problem with KZCR are “nuts”—an epithet he monotonously employs a dozen times (not counting the title). Between two citations of Griffin in his second paragraph, Cockburn observes that “[o]ne characteristic of the nuts is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency, thus many of them start with the racist premise that ‘Arabs in caves’ weren’t capable of the mission.” Inadvertently or not, Cockburn creates the impression that this characterization of Arabs is owned by Griffin, the eminently gracious and liberal Christian theologian of deep religious pluralism.

Whether it was substantively, not just theoretically, possible that Laden, Atta & Co. could have arranged to satisfy all the conditions necessary for the events of 9/11 to unfold—the free-fall collapse of the Towers’ inner cores, the NORAD-FAA communications foul-up, the put options on the hi-jacked airlines, to name a few—is a topic worthy of reasonable people to consider. Cockburn’s attempt to rule it out of court simply by smearing Griffin reveals more about Cockburn’s mentality than Griffin’s.

Cockburn’s exercise in character assassination takes a break to deliver some down-home realism about how the world allegedly works. This strategy of evading the evidence against KZCR surfaces frequently in debates. One hears, for instance, of the “raw absurdity of life,” a phrase found in the recent Washington Post article which absurdity, I guess, is superior in explanatory power to human action:

They [i.e., the “nuts”] appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because if they did they’d know that minutely planned operations—let alone responses to an unprecedented emergency—screw up with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality, weather and all the other whims of providence.

Apparently they screw up except when carried out by Al Qaeda, in which case everything gels and plan-implementation whirrs like a Switch watch.

And certain contributors to the recently published 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, e.g., Princeton’s Richard Falk, University of Basel’s Danielle Ganser, or (Oslo-based) International Peace Research Institute’s Ola Tunander, will be dismayed to hear that they “appear to have read no military history” (assuming they care what Alexander Cockburn thinks). I cannot recommend 9/11 and the American Empire, edited by Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, too highly.

Cockburn frames the controversy as a forensic battle between prosecution (here, the good guys) and defense (the bad guys). He suggests that KZCR’s disparagers are like those infamous defense lawyers who get murderers (Al Qaeda) off by exploiting weaknesses in the prosecution’s case (KZCR).

. . . minute focus of a death penalty defense team on one such weak link often leads to a distorted view of the whole case. I remember more than one case where, after weeks of interviewing witnesses at one particular crime scene, the defense’s investigator had collected enough witness reports to mount a decent attack on this aspect of the prosecution’s overall case. . . . But when . . . I saw the prosecution’s whole case . . . it became clear enough to me . . . that the accused were incontestably guilty. But even then, such cases had a vigorous afterlife, with the defense trying to muster up grounds for an appeal, on the basis of testimony and evidence withheld by the prosecution, faulty rulings by the judge, a prejudiced jury member and so on. A seemingly “cut and dried case” is very rarely beyond challenge, even though in essence it actually may well be just that, “cut and dried.”

Translation: 9/11 nuts disserve society as a de facto murderer’s “dream team” who drone the political equivalent of “if the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit.” Of course, this begs the question, namely, who’s guilty and therefore in need of such expert assistance to escape justice.

Cockburn might take a look at some of his unwitting allies. When BYU Physics Professor Steven Jones was reported to have claimed that terrorists could not have set the explosive charges which, according to his hypothesis, brought down the Twin Towers, a decidedly non-leftist philosopher whom I respect ignored Jones detailed argument for the hypothesis and instead raised, rather abstractly, a mere non-impossibility (greater-than-zero probability).

What is that theoretical possibility? That al-Qaeda could have infiltrated the government and subsequently set the charges undetected. He provided no evidence, but only conjectured the theoretical (i.e. , non-contradictory) possibility that, for all that Jones has shown to the contrary, might actually be the case.

Now, does this philosopher accept Jones’ hypothesis of controlled demolition, remaining agnostic only about the charge-setters’ identity? He doesn’t say. Instead he ends his post with “Epicycle upon epicycle . . . .” without explaining the precise relevance of a certain episode in the history of science to Jones’ rejection of KZCR.

The desperate attempt to save a hypothesis at all costs more accurately describes the engineers who keep tweaking their computer models until they get the results that conform to KZCR (who came to their conclusions without their expertise). I understand that the engineering report that will show how Tower No. 7 collapsed won’t be ready until next year! Epicycle upon epicycle indeed.

(Incidentally, the above-linked article says the “State Department has released a rebuttal to Jones' theory in a 10-thousand page report.” Ten thousand pages to rebut a paper that takes up 31 pages, including reference notes, in 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out? That’s a ratio of more than 322:1, or one fat book per page. Sounds like government to me.)

The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions by Griffin was an examination of the “whole case.” Cockburn just doesn’t like Griffin’s conclusions, so he ridicules them and its author. He knocks the stuffing out of his imagination’s strawmen, but leaves Griffin’s exercise in reasonableness standing.

Griffin himself employs the courtroom analogy differently, taking on the role of prosecuting attorney himself with the Bush administration as the defendant. In another book he co-authored earlier this year, Griffin claims that the failure of KZCR “to answer the prima facie case for the claim that the Bush administration was itself responsible for 9/11” is forensically significant:

In a criminal trial, it is the responsibility of the defense attorneys, once the prima facie case has been made, to rebut the various kinds of evidence presented by the prosecuting attorneys. If they fail to do this, then the prima facie case is deemed by the judge or the jury to be conclusive. The 9/11 Commission had the opportunity to rebut the prima facie case against the Bush administration but failed to do so. It would not be unreasonable, therefore, to conclude that the prima facie case can now be considered a conclusive case. (The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God, Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, p. 21)

As he put it elsewhere, “the official story has never been publicly defended against informed criticism by any member of NIST, the 9/11 Commission, or the Bush administration.” Let’s put that in the active voice:

No member of NIST, the 9/11 Commission, or the Bush administration has ever defended the official story against informed criticism.
And neither has Alexander Cockburn.

Certain leftist theoreticians give the impression that were they to become convinced that Griffin was right to pin 9/11 on the Bush administration, they would, apparently, be distressed. Why? Because to their ideological way of thinking, that truth would take many an activist’s eye off the main enemy. And so Cockburn laments:

The nuts disdain the real world because, like much of the left and liberal sectors, they have promoted Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, instead of being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more than usual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally favor in imperial leaders.) The Conspiracy Nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction . . . .

Ergo, the 9/11 nuts couldn’t be right. Period.

But such ideological types have nothing to fear on this score. From believing that KZCR is a “571-page lie” (Griffin) nothing political follows apodictically. My fallible, probable judgment that Griffin has made a sustainable case against the Bush gang does not entail, for example, that I must enlist in his campaign for “global democratic governance.” Flood the anarchocapitalist anti-democrat and Griffin the anti-capitalist global democrat are politically “poles apart.” In particular, I deem his idea that international anarchy is (in the sense he specifies) a “cause of war” to be gravely mistaken, and I am working on an article that shows why.

Why some of Griffin’s fellow socialists and some of my fellow libertarians view interest in the etiology of 9/11 as a distraction will remain a mystery to me. If libertarians may argue that the State cannot protect its citizens, a fortiori they may suggest, if the facts so warrant, that in at least one instance a state directly murdered many of them.

I’m sure Griffin has no qualms about the support and even collaboration his efforts have enjoyed from Paul Craig Roberts, Karen Kwiatkowski, Morgan Reynolds, or any other contributor to LewRockwell.com.

Instead of barricading ourselves in our respective ideological cocoons, peering at each other through “distorting prisms,” and casting each other into outer darkness as “nuts,” let us together storm the barricades that conceal the truth.

Actually, there is a sense in which this statement is true. US officials have explained why the US military did not prevent the attacks. The problem, however, is that they have given three explanations, each of which is contradicted by the others and none of which is a satisfactory explanation. I will explain.

According to standard operating procedures, if an FAA flight controller notices anything that suggests a possible hijacking, the controller is to contact a superior. If the problem cannot be fixed quickly (within about a minute), the superior is to ask NORAD—the North American Aerospace Defense Command—to send up, or "scramble," jet fighters to find out what is going on. NORAD then issues a scramble order to the nearest air force base with fighters on alert.

The jet fighters at NORAD's disposal could respond very quickly: According to the US Air Force website, F-15s can go from "scramble order" to 29,000 feet in only 2.5 minutes, after which they can fly over 1800 miles per hour.50 Therefore--according to General Ralph Eberhart, the head of NORAD—after the FAA senses that something is wrong, "it takes about one minute" for it to contact NORAD, after which, according to a spokesperson, NORAD can scramble fighter jets "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States."51 These statements were, to be sure, made after 9/11, so we might suspect that they reflect a post-9/11 speed-up in procedures. But an Air Traffic Control document put out in 1998 warned pilots that any airplanes persisting in unusual behavior "will likely find two [jet fighters] on their tail within 10 or so minutes."52

If these procedures had been carried out on the morning of 9/11, AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 would have been intercepted before they could have reached Manhattan, and AA Flight 77 would have been intercepted long before it could have reached the Pentagon.

Such interceptions are routine, being carried out about 100 times a year. A month after 9/11, the Calgary Herald reported that in the year 2000, NORAD had scrambled fighters 129 times. Do these scrambles regularly result in interceptions? Just a few days after 9/11, Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesperson, told the Boston Globe that "[NORAD's] fighters routinely intercept aircraft."53 Why did such interceptions not occur on 9/11?

During the first few days, the public was told that no fighter jets were sent up until after the strike on the Pentagon at 9:38. However, it was also reported that signs of Flight 11's hijacking had been observed at 8:15. That would mean that although interceptions usually occur within "10 or so" minutes after signs of trouble are observed, in this case 80 or so minutes had elapsed before fighters were even airborne. This story suggested that a "stand-down" order had been issued.

Within a few days, however, a second story was put out, according to which NORAD had sent up fighters but, because notification from the FAA had been very slow in coming, the fighters arrived too late. On September 18, NORAD made this second story official, embodying it in a timeline, which indicated when NORAD had been notified by the FAA about each airplane and when it had scrambled fighters in response.54

Critics showed, however, that even if the FAA notifications had come as late as NORAD's timeline indicated, NORAD's jets would have had time to make the interceptions.55 This second story did not, therefore, remove the suspicion that a stand-down order had been given.

Hoping to overcome this problem, The 9/11 Commission Report provided a third account, according to which, contrary to NORAD's timeline of September 18, 2001, the FAA did not notify NORAD about Flight 175 until after it had struck the south tower or about Flight 77 until after it had struck the Pentagon. But there are serious problems with this third story.

One problem is the very fact that it is the third story. Normally, when a suspect in a criminal investigation keeps changing his story, we get suspicious. Let's say that the police ask Charlie Jones where he was Saturday night. He says he was at the movie theater, but they say, "No, the movie theater has been closed all week." Then Charlie says, "Oh, that's right, I was with my girl friend." But, the police say, "No, we checked with her and she was home with her husband." If at that point Charlie says, "Oh, now I remember, I was home reading my Bible," you are probably not going to believe him. And yet that's what we have here. The military told one story right after 9/11, another story a week later, and a third story through The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004.

A second problem with this third story is that it contradicts several features of the second story, which had served as the official story for almost three years.

For example, NORAD's timeline of September 18, 2001, had indicated that the FAA had notified it about Flight 175 exactly 20 minutes before it hit its target and about Flight 77 some 14 minutes before the Pentagon was struck. The 9/11 Commission maintains that both of these statements were "incorrect"—that, really, there had been no notification about these flights until after they hit their targets. This, it claims, is why the military had failed to intercept them.56 But if NORAD's timeline was false, as the Commission now claims, NORAD must have been either lying or confused. But it is hard to believe that it could have been confused one week after 9/11. So it must have been lying. But if the military's second story was a lie, why should we believe this third one?

Further scepticism about this third story arises from the fact that it is contradicted by considerable evidence. For example, the Commission's claim that the military did not know about Flight 175 until it crashed is contradicted by a report involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD's headquarters in Colorado. According to a story in the Toronto Star, Jellinek was on the phone with NORAD as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower. He then asked NORAD: "Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with?"--to which NORAD said "yes."57

The 9/11 Commission's claims about Flights 175 and 77 are also contradicted by a memo sent to the Commission by Laura Brown of the FAA. Her memo stated that at about 8:50 the FAA had set up a teleconference, in which it started sharing information with the military about all flights. She specifically mentioned Flight 77, indicating that the FAA had been sharing information about it even before the formal notification time of 9:24. Her memo, which is available on the Web,58 was discussed by the 9/11 Commission and read into its record on May 23, 2003.59 But Zelikow's 9/11 Commission Report fails to mention this memo.

Because of these and still more problems, which I have discussed in my book on the 9/11 Commission's report and also in a lecture called "Flights of Fancy",60 this third story does not remove the grounds for suspicion that a stand-down order had been issued.

There is, moreover, ear-witness testimony for this suspicion. An upper management official at LAX, who needs to remain anonymous, has told me that he overheard members of LAX Security--including officers from the FBI and LAPD—interacting on their walkie-talkies shortly after the attacks. In some cases, he could hear both sides of the conversation. At first, the LAX officials were told that the airplanes that attacked World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been intercepted because the FAA had not notified NORAD about the hijackings. But later, he reports, they were told that NORAD had been notified but did not respond because it had been "ordered to stand down." When LAX security officials asked who had issued that order, they were told that it had come "from the highest level of the White House."61

50.Cited in Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 140.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 141.

53.See the Calgary Herald, Oct. 13, 2001, and Glen Johnson, "Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks," Boston Globe, Sept. 15, 2001. At an average of 100 scrambles a year, fighters would have been scrambled about 1000 times in the decade prior to 9/11. One of the many falsehoods in an essay entitled "9/11: Debunking Myths," which was published by Popular Mechanics (March 2005), is its claim that in the decade before 9/11, there had been only one interception, that of golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet. This essay's "senior researcher," 25-year old Benjamin Chertoff, has (on a radio show) tried to reconcile this claim with the fact that fighters are scrambled about 100 times per year by saying that these statements speak only of scrambles, not interceptions. But Chertoff's position would require the claim that only one of the 1000 scrambles in that period resulted in interceptions—that the other 999 fighters were called back before they actually made the interception. Besides being highly improbable, this interpretation contradicts Major Snyder's statement that interceptions are carried out routinely.

54.Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 141-43.

55. Ibid., 139-48.

56. Ibid., 192.

57. Ibid., 176.

58. Laura Brown, "FAA Communications with NORAD on September 11, 2001," available online.

59.National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, May 23, 2003. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, who read the memo into the record, reported that he had been told that it had been authored by two "high level individuals at FAA, Mr. Asmus and Ms. Schuessler." However, I was told by Laura Brown during a telephone conversation on August 15, 2004, that she had written the memo.

60.Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 155-226; "Flights of Fancy: The 9/11 Commission's Incredible Tales of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93," Global Outlook, 12 (Fall-Winter 2006), and in Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

61."My Observation of LAX Security Events on 9/11," by an Upper Management LAX Official. Although this official needs to remain anonymous, he has said that he would be willing to take a polygraph test if his anonymity could be protected.

1. The omission of evidence that at least six of the alleged hijackers - including Waleed al-Shehri, said by the Commission probably to have stabbed a flight attendant on Flight 11 before it crashed into the North Tower of the WTC - are still alive (19-20).

2. The omission of evidence about Mohamed Atta - such as his reported fondness for alcohol, pork, and lap dances — that is in tension with the Commission's claim that he had become fanatically religious (20-21).

3. The obfuscation of the evidence that Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner into the Pentagon (21-22).

4. The omission of the fact that the publicly released flight manifests contain no Arab names (23).

5. The omission of the fact that fire has never, before or after 9/11, caused steel-frame buildings to collapse (25).

6. The omission of the fact that the fires in the Twin Towers were not very big, very hot, or very long-lasting compared with fires in several steel-frame buildings that did not collapse (25-26).

7. The omission of the fact that, given the hypothesis that the collapses were caused by fire, the South Tower, which was struck later than the North Tower and also had smaller fires, should not have collapsed first (26).

8. The omission of the fact that WTC 7 (which was not hit by an airplane and which had only small, localized fires) also collapsed - an occurrence that FEMA admitted it could not explain (26).

9. The omission of the fact that the collapse of the Twin Towers (like that of Building 7) exemplified at least 10 features suggestive of controlled demolition (26-27).

10. The claim that the core of each of the Twin Towers was "a hollow steel shaft" - a claim that denied the existence of the 47 massive steel columns that in reality constituted the core of each tower and that, given the "pancake theory" of the collapses, should have still been sticking up many hundreds of feet in the air (27-28).

11. The omission of Larry Silverstein's statement that he and the fire department commander decided to "pull" Building 7 (28).

12. The omission of the fact that the steel from the WTC buildings was quickly removed from the crime scene and shipped overseas before it could be analyzed for evidence of explosives (30).

13. The omission of the fact that because Building 7 had been evacuated before it collapsed, the official reason for the rapid removal of the steel - that some people might still be alive in the rubble under the steel - made no sense in this case (30).

14. The omission of Mayor Giuliani's statement that he had received word that the World Trade Center was going to collapse (30-31).

15. The omission of the fact that President Bush's brother Marvin and his cousin Wirt Walker III were both principals in the company in charge of security for the WTC (31-32).

16. The omission of the fact that the west wing of the Pentagon would have been the least likely spot to be targeted by al-Qaeda terrorists, for several reasons (33-34).

17. The omission of any discussion of whether the damage done to the Pentagon was consistent with the impact of a Boeing 757 going several hundred miles per hour (34).

18. The omission of the fact that there are photos showing that the west wing's façade did not collapse until 30 minutes after the strike and also that the entrance hole appears too small for a Boeing 757 to have entered (34).

19. The omission of all testimony that has been used to cast doubt on whether remains of a Boeing 757 were visible either inside or outside the Pentagon (34-36).

20. The omission of any discussion of whether the Pentagon has a anti-missile defense system that would have brought down a commercial airliner - even though the Commission suggested that the al-Qaeda terrorists did not attack a nuclear power plant because they assumed that it would be thus defended (36).

21. The omission of the fact that pictures from various security cameras - including the camera at the gas station across from the Pentagon, the film from which was reportedly confiscated by the FBI immediately after the strike - could presumably answer the question of what really hit the Pentagon (37-38).

22. The omission of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's reference to "the missile [used] to damage [the Pentagon]" (39).

23. The apparent endorsement of a wholly unsatisfactory answer to the question of why the Secret Service agents allowed President Bush to remain at the Sarasota school at a time when, given the official story, they should have assumed that a hijacked airliner might be about to crash into the school (41-44).

24. The failure to explore why the Secret Service did not summon fighter jets to provide air cover for Air Force One (43-46).

25. The claims that when the presidential party arrived at the school, no one in the party knew that several planes had been hijacked (47-48).

26. The omission of the report that Attorney General Ashcroft was warned to stop using commercial airlines prior to 9/11 (50).

27. The omission of David Schippers' claim that he had, on the basis of information provided by FBI agents about upcoming attacks in lower Manhattan, tried unsuccessfully to convey this information to Attorney General Ashcroft during the six weeks prior to 9/11 (51).

28. The omission of any mention of the FBI agents who reportedly claimed to have known the targets and dates of the attacks well in advance (51-52).

29. The claim, by means of a circular, question-begging rebuttal, that the unusual purchases of put options prior to 9/11 did not imply advance knowledge of the attacks on the part of the buyers (52-57).

30. The omission of reports that both Mayor Willie Brown and some Pentagon officials received warnings about flying on 9/11 (57).

31. The omission of the report that Osama bin Laden, who already was America's "most wanted" criminal, was treated in July 2001 by an American doctor in the American Hospital in Dubai and visited by the local CIA agent (59).

32. The omission of news stories suggesting that after 9/11 the US military in Afghanistan deliberately allowed Osama bin Laden to escape (60).

33. The omission of reports, including the report of a visit to Osama bin Laden at the hospital in Dubai by the head of Saudi intelligence, that were in tension with the official portrayal of Osama as disowned by his family and his country (60-61).

34. The omission of Gerald Posner's account of Abu Zubaydah's testimony, according to which three members of the Saudi royal family - all of whom later died mysteriously within an eight-day period - were funding al-Qaeda and had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks (61-65).

35. The Commission's denial that it found any evidence of Saudi funding of al-Qaeda (65-68).

36. The Commission's denial in particular that it found any evidence that money from Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa, went to al-Qaeda operatives (69-70).

37. The denial, by means of simply ignoring the distinction between private and commercial flights, that the private flight carrying Saudis from Tampa to Lexington on September 13 violated the rules for US airspace in effect at the time (71-76).

38. The denial that any Saudis were allowed to leave the United States shortly after 9/11 without being adequately investigated (76-82).

39. The omission of evidence that Prince Bandar obtained special permission from the White House for the Saudi flights (82-86).

40. The omission of Coleen Rowley's claim that some officials at FBI headquarters did see the memo from Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams (89-90).

41. The omission of Chicago FBI agent Robert Wright's charge that FBI headquarters closed his case on a terrorist cell, then used intimidation to prevent him from publishing a book reporting his experiences (91).

42. The omission of evidence that FBI headquarters sabotaged the attempt by Coleen Rowley and other Minneapolis agents to obtain a warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer (91-94).

43. The omission of the 3.5 hours of testimony to the Commission by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds - testimony that, according to her later public letter to Chairman Kean, revealed serious 9/11-related cover-ups by officials at FBI headquarters (94-101).

44. The omission of the fact that General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency (the ISI), was in Washington the week prior to 9/11, meeting with CIA chief George Tenet and other US officials (103-04).

45. The omission of evidence that ISI chief Ahmad had ordered $100,000 to be sent to Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11 (104-07).

46. The Commission's claim that it found no evidence that any foreign government, including Pakistan, had provided funding for the al-Qaeda operatives (106).

47. The omission of the report that the Bush administration pressured Pakistan to dismiss Ahmad as ISI chief after the appearance of the story that he had ordered ISI money sent to Atta (107-09).

48. The omission of evidence that the ISI (and not merely al-Qaeda) was behind the assassination of Ahmad Shah Masood (the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance), which occurred just after the week-long meeting between the heads of the CIA and the ISI (110-112).

49. The omission of evidence of ISI involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Reporter Daniel Pearl (113).

50. The omission of Gerald Posner's report that Abu Zubaydah claimed that a Pakistani military officer, Mushaf Ali Mir, was closely connected to both the ISI and al-Qaeda and had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks (114).

51. The omission of the 1999 prediction by ISI agent Rajaa Gulum Abbas that the Twin Towers would be "coming down" (114).

52. The omission of the fact that President Bush and other members of his administration repeatedly spoke of the 9/11 attacks as "opportunities" (116-17).

53. The omission of the fact that The Project for the New American Century, many members of which became key figures in the Bush administration, published a document in 2000 saying that "a new Pearl Harbor" would aid its goal of obtaining funding for a rapid technological transformation of the US military (117-18).

54. The omission of the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, who as head of the commission on the US Space Command had recommended increased funding for it, used the attacks of 9/11 on that very evening to secure such funding (119-22).

55. The failure to mention the fact that three of the men who presided over the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks - Secretary Rumsfeld, General Richard Myers, and General Ralph Eberhart - were also three of the strongest advocates for the US Space Command (122).

56. The omission of the fact that Unocal had declared that the Taliban could not provide adequate security for it to go ahead with its oil-and-gas pipeline from the Caspian region through Afghanistan and Pakistan (122-25).

57. The omission of the report that at a meeting in July 2001, US representatives said that because the Taliban refused to agree to a US proposal that would allow the pipeline project to go forward, a war against them would begin by October (125-26).

58. The omission of the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book had said that for the United States to maintain global primacy, it needed to gain control of Central Asia, with its vast petroleum reserves, and that a new Pearl Harbor would be helpful in getting the US public to support this imperial effort (127-28).

59. The omission of evidence that some key members of the Bush administration, including Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, had been agitating for a war with Iraq for many years (129-33).

60. The omission of notes of Rumsfeld's conversations on 9/11 showing that he was determined to use the attacks as a pretext for a war with Iraq (131-32).

61. The omission of the statement by the Project for the New American Century that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein" (133-34).

62. The claim that FAA protocol on 9/11 required the time-consuming process of going through several steps in the chain of command - even though the Report cites evidence to the contrary (158).

63. The claim that in those days there were only two air force bases in NORAD's Northeast sector that kept fighters on alert and that, in particular, there were no fighters on alert at either McGuire or Andrews (159-162).

64. The omission of evidence that Andrews Air Force Base did keep several fighters on alert at all times (162-64).

65. The acceptance of the twofold claim that Colonel Marr of NEADS had to telephone a superior to get permission to have fighters scrambled from Otis and that this call required eight minutes (165-66).

66. The endorsement of the claim that the loss of an airplane's transponder signal makes it virtually impossible for the US military's radar to track that plane (166-67).

67. The claim that the Payne Stewart interception did not show NORAD's response time to Flight 11 to be extraordinarily slow (167-69).

68. The claim that the Otis fighters were not airborne until seven minutes after they received the scramble order because they did not know where to go (174-75).

69. The claim that the US military did not know about the hijacking of Flight 175 until 9:03, when it was crashing into the South Tower (181-82).

70. The omission of any explanation of (a) why NORAD's earlier report, according to which the FAA had notified the military about the hijacking of Flight 175 at 8:43, was now to be considered false and (b) how this report, if it was false, could have been published and then left uncorrected for almost three years (182).

71. The claim that the FAA did not set up a teleconference until 9:20 that morning (183).

72. The omission of the fact that a memo by Laura Brown of the FAA says that its teleconference was established at about 8:50 and that it included discussion of Flight 175's hijacking (183-84, 186).

73. The claim that the NMCC teleconference did not begin until 9:29 (186-88).

74. The omission, in the Commission's claim that Flight 77 did not deviate from its course until 8:54, of the fact that earlier reports had said 8:46 (189-90).

75. The failure to mention that the report that a large jet had crashed in Kentucky, at about the time Flight 77 disappeared from FAA radar, was taken seriously enough by the heads of the FAA and the FBI's counterterrorism unit to be relayed to the White House (190).

76. The claim that Flight 77 flew almost 40 minutes through American airspace towards Washington without being detected by the military's radar (191-92).

77. The failure to explain, if NORAD's earlier report that it was notified about Flight 77 at 9:24 was "incorrect," how this erroneous report could have arisen, i.e., whether NORAD officials had been lying or simply confused for almost three years (192-93).

78. The claim that the Langley fighter jets, which NORAD had previously said were scrambled to intercept Flight 77, were actually scrambled in response to an erroneous report from an (unidentified) FAA controller at 9:21 that Flight 11 was still up and was headed towards Washington (193-99).

79. The claim that the military did not hear from the FAA about the probable hijacking of Flight 77 before the Pentagon was struck (204-12).

80. The claim that Jane Garvey did not join Richard Clarke's videoconference until 9:40, after the Pentagon was struck (210).

81. The claim that none of the teleconferences succeeded in coordinating the FAA and military responses to the hijackings because "none of [them] included the right officials from both the FAA and the Defense Department" - although Richard Clarke says that his videoconference included FAA head Jane Garvey as well as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, the acting chair of the joint chiefs of staff (211).

82. The Commission's claim that it did not know who from the Defense Department participated in Clarke's videoconference - although Clarke's book said that it was Donald Rumsfeld and General Myers (211-212).

83. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that he was on Capitol Hill during the attacks, without mentioning Richard Clarke's contradictory account, according to which Myers was in the Pentagon participating in Clarke's videoconference (213-17).

84. The failure to mention the contradiction between Clarke's account of Rumsfeld's whereabouts that morning and Rumsfeld's own accounts (217-19).

85. The omission of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony, given to the Commission itself, that Vice-President Cheney and others in the underground shelter were aware by 9:26 that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon (220).

86. The claim that Pentagon officials did not know about an aircraft approaching Pentagon until 9:32, 9:34, or 9:36 - in any case, only a few minutes before the building was hit (223).

87. The endorsement of two contradictory stories about the aircraft that hit the Pentagon - one in which it executed a 330-degree downward spiral (a "high-speed dive") and another in which there is no mention of this maneuver (222-23).

88. The claim that the fighter jets from Langley, which were allegedly scrambled to protect Washington from "Phantom Flight 11," were nowhere near Washington because they were mistakenly sent out to sea (223-24).

89. The omission of all the evidence suggesting that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77 (224-25).

90. The claim that the military was not notified by the FAA about Flight 93's hijacking until after it crashed (227-29, 232, 253).

91. The twofold claim that the NMCC did not monitor the FAA-initiated conference and then was unable to get the FAA connected to the NMCC-initiated teleconference (230-31).

92. The omission of the fact that the Secret Service is able to know everything that the FAA knows (233).

93. The omission of any inquiry into why the NMCC initiated its own teleconference if, as Laura Brown of the FAA has said, this is not standard protocol (234).

94. The omission of any exploration of why General Montague Winfield not only had a rookie (Captain Leidig) take over his role as the NMCC's Director of Operations but also left him in charge after it was clear that the Pentagon was facing an unprecedented crisis (235-36).

95. The claim that the FAA (falsely) notified the Secret Service between 10:10 and 10:15 that Flight 93 was still up and headed towards Washington (237).

96. The claim that Vice President Cheney did not give the shoot-down authorization until after 10:10 (several minutes after Flight 93 had crashed) and that this authorization was not transmitted to the US military until 10:31 (237-41).

97. The omission of all the evidence indicating that Flight 93 was shot down by a military plane (238-39, 252-53).

98. The claim that Richard Clarke did not receive the requested shoot-down authorization until 10:25 (240).

99. The omission of Clarke's own testimony, which suggests that he received the shoot-down authorization by 9:50 (240).

100. The claim that Cheney did not reach the underground shelter (the PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center]) until 9:58 (241-44).

101. The omission of multiple testimony, including that of Norman Mineta to the Commission itself, that Cheney was in the PEOC before 9:20 (241-44).

102. The claim that shoot-down authorization must be given by the president (245).

103. The omission of reports that Colonel Marr ordered a shoot-down of Flight 93 and that General Winfield indicated that he and others at the NMCC had expected a fighter jet to reach Flight 93 (252).

104. The omission of reports that there were two fighter jets in the air a few miles from NYC and three of them only 200 miles from Washington (251).

105. The omission of evidence that there were at least six bases with fighters on alert in the northeastern part of the United States (257-58).

106. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that NORAD had defined its mission in terms of defending only against threats from abroad (258-62).

107. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that NORAD had not recognized the possibility that terrorists might use hijacked airliners as missiles (262-63).

108. The failure to highlight the significance of evidence presented in the Report itself, and to mention other evidence, showing that NORAD had indeed recognized the threat that hijacked airliners might be used as missiles (264-67).

109. The failure to probe the issue of how the "war games" scheduled for that day were related to the military's failure to intercept the hijacked airliners (268-69).

110. The failure to discuss the possible relevance of Operation Northwoods to the attacks of 9/11 (269-71).

111. The claim - made in explaining why the military did not get information about the hijackings in time to intercept them - that FAA personnel inexplicably failed to follow standard procedures some 16 times (155-56, 157, 179, 180, 181, 190, 191, 193, 194, 200, 202-03, 227, 237, 272-75).

112. The failure to point out that the Commission's claimed "independence" was fatally compromised by the fact that its executive director, Philip Zelikow, was virtually a member of the Bush administration (7-9, 11-12, 282-84).

113. The failure to point out that the White House first sought to prevent the creation of a 9/11 Commission, then placed many obstacles in its path, including giving it extremely meager funding (283-85).

114. The failure to point out that the Commission's chairman, most of the other commissioners, and at least half of the staff had serious conflicts of interest (285-90, 292-95).

115. The failure of the Commission, while bragging that it presented its final report "without dissent," to point out that this was probably possible only because Max Cleland, the commissioner who was most critical of the White House and swore that he would not be part of "looking at information only partially," had to resign in order to accept a position with the Export-Import Bank, and that the White House forwarded his nomination for this position only after he was becoming quite outspoken in his criticisms (290-291).

I will close by pointing out that I concluded my study of what I came to call "the Kean-Zelikow Report" by writing that it, "far from lessening my suspicions about official complicity, has served to confirm them. Why would the minds in charge of this final report engage in such deception if they were not trying to cover up very high crimes?" (291)

© Copyright David Ray Griffin, Global Research, 2005

For the "crime" of examining certain details of the Holocaust, David Irving sits in a jail down the street from the International Atomic Energy Commission’s headquarters in Vienna, which is now reviewing Iran’s compliance with its guidelines for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The other day Vice-President Dick Cheney, representing a country that unapologetically holocausted Japanese civilians during World War II, preached to the Zionist choir about the need to inflict “meaningful consequences” on Iran unless it drops its pursuit of uranium enrichment. Cheney is mum, of course, about Israel’s nuclear capability and its “Samson option” — both underwritten by the U.S. taxpayer.

2. On September 10, 2001, it just so happens that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) deployed search and rescue teams to New York City. Don't believe me? Maybe you'll believe Rudolph Giuliani. (There is even a link there to listen to the Real Audio of Giuliani discussing FEMA.)

3. On September 11, 2001, it just so happens that George W. Bush's younger brother, Marvin Bush, was the principal in a company called Securacom that provided security for the World Trade Center, United Airlines, and Dulles International Airport. And it just so happens that, according to its present CEO, Barry McDaniel, the company had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center "up to the day the buildings fell down." Don't believe me? Check this out

4. On September 11, 2001, building 7 of the World Trade Center complex was intentionally pulled down even though it only had moderate fire damage and was in no danger of collapsing. Don't believe me? Well, the building's owner, Larry Silverstein, admitted on PBS that the building was intentionally pulled down. Check this out. Oh yeah, it just so happens that building 7 included offices for the CIA, Department of Defense, the Office of the Mayor, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IRS. Don't believe me? Check out this page which includes a New York Times article. Also check out this, 22 minute video. Warning, this video may make you sick to your stomach. [Links provided here.--The Flogger]

5. It just so happens that 4 of the 19 alleged hijackers are still alive. Don't believe me, well maybe you'll believe the FBI, yes the FBI! Check out this BBC News article.

Yeah, I know, this is all just a crazy conspiracy theory, right? After all, its perfectly plausible that the common explanation for 9/11, which was presented to us within 48 hours of the attacks without ever being changed, modified, or altered thereafter, is exactly the way it happened. Its perfectly plausible that, at that time, under the stress of the attacks, and during the weeks of anthrax scare that followed, that we citizens were capable of adequately viewing the evidence presented to us and that we were capable of diligently questioning it all. Yeah, its perfectly rational to accept the story we have heretofor been given. Thus, you are probably better off dismissing this all as just 'insane' and forgetting all about it....

Thousands of young Americans have died in Iraq for, in George Galloway’s plain words, “a pack of lies.” But if anyone aiming to expose the latter happens to enjoy some standing in academia, he had better provide peer review-quality research! Listen to BYU officialdom after they momentarily dislodged their lips from the Federal-grant teat:

“Professor Steven Jones' hypotheses and interpretations of evidence regarding the collapse of World Trade Center buildings are being questioned by a number of scholars and practitioners, including many of BYU's own faculty members. Professor Jones' department and college administrators are not convinced that his analyses and hypotheses have been submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review.”

Yes, we all know how effectively the peer review process rules out political and financial influence in academic affairs.

Professor Jones has punched a hole in the cover-up of mass murder at the point where his professional expertise is germane. All his “respectable” colleagues and bosses can do, however, having swallowed the 9/11 Commission camel, is strain at the gnat of academic protocol that he has allegedly failed to honor.

Now, when will these exigent minds, so “not convinced” of the central claim of Professor Jones and Professor Griffin regarding controlled demolition, simply refute it? Is not the implicit charge of mass murder grave enough to demand that they at least try?

On Oct. 15th and 16th, New Yorkers filled two venues to hear the prominent theologian and author of two books on 9/11 give a presentation entitled "The Destruction of the Trade Towers: A Christian Theologian Speaks Out." Dr. Griffin has continued to blaze a trail of courage, leading where most media and elected officials have feared to tread. His presentation went straight to the core of one of the most powerful indictments of the official story, the collapse of the towers and WTC 7.

Dr. Griffin included excerpts from the firemen's tapes, which were recently released as a result of a prolonged court battle led by victim's families represented by attorney Norman Siegel and reported in the NY Times. He also included statements by many witnesses. These sources gave ample testimony giving evidence of explosions going off in the buildings. A 12-minute film was shown for the audiences, who saw for themselves the undeniable evidence for controlled demolition.

Dr. Griffin listed ten characteristics of the collapses, which all indicate that the buildings did not fall due to being struck by planes or the ensuing fires. He explained the buildings fell suddenly without any indication of collapse. They fell straight into their own footprint at free-fall speed, meeting virtually no resistance as they fell—a physical impossibility unless all vertical support was being progressively removed by explosives severing the core columns.

The towers were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 and 160 mile per hour winds, and nothing about the plane crashes or ensuing fires gave any indication of causing the kind of damage that would be necessary to trigger even a partial or progressive collapse, much less the shredding of the buildings into dust and fragments that could drop at free-fall speed.

The massive core columns-the most significant structural feature of the buildings, whose very existence is denied in the official 9/11 Commission Report--were severed into uniform 30 foot sections, just right for the 30-foot trucks used to remove them quickly before a real investigation could transpire.

There was a volcanic-like dust cloud from the concrete being pulverized, and no physical mechanism other than explosives can begin to explain how so much of the buildings' concrete was rendered into extremely fine dust.

The debris was ejected horizontally several hundred feet in huge fan shaped plumes stretching in all directions, with telltale "squibs" following the path of the explosives downward. These are all facts that have been avoided by mainstream and even most of the alternative media.

Again, these are characteristics of the kind of controlled demolitions that news people and firefighters were describing on the morning of 9/11. Those multiple first-person descriptions of controlled demolition were hidden away for almost four years by the City of New York until a lawsuit finally forced the city to release them.

Dr. Griffin's study of these accounts has led him beyond his earlier questioning of the official story of the collapses, to his above-quoted conclusion: The destruction of the three WTC buildings with explosives by US government terrorists is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact that has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's important to note that Dr. Griffin is one of many prominent intellectuals—including the likes of Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Peter Dale Scott, Richard Falk, Paul Craig Roberts, Morgan Reynolds and Peter Phillips—who have seen through the major discrepancies of the official explanation of 9/11 and have risen to challenge it. These brave individuals represent the tip of an ever-growing iceberg of discreet 9/11 skeptics.

Indeed, 9/11 skepticism appears to be almost universal among intellectuals who have examined the evidence, since there has not yet been a single serious attempt to refute the case developed by Dr. Griffin and such like-minded thinkers as Nafeez Ahmed and Mike Ruppert.

As for the general public, polls have shown that a strong majority of Canadians (63%, Toronto Star, May '04) and half of New Yorkers (Zogby, August 2004) agree that top US leaders conspired to murder nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11/01.

How, then, can the mainstream US media continue to ignore the story of the century? Perhaps the best answer was given by Dr. Griffin himself in the conclusion of his talk, and is worth quoting at length:

"The evidence for this conclusion (that 9/11 was an inside job) has thus far been largely ignored by the mainstream press, perhaps under the guise of obeying President Bush's advice not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories." We have seen, however, that it is the Bush administration's conspiracy theory that is the outrageous one, because it is violently contradicted by numerous facts, including some basic laws of physics.

"There is, of course, another reason why the mainstream press has not pointed out these contradictions. As a recent letter to the Los Angeles Times said: "'The number of contradictions in the official version of . . . 9/11 is so overwhelming that . . . it simply cannot be believed. Yet . . . the official version cannot be abandoned because the implication of rejecting it is far too disturbing: that we are subject to a government conspiracy of 'X-Files' proportions and insidiousness.'

"The implications are indeed disturbing. Many people who know or at least suspect the truth about 9/11 probably believe that revealing it would be so disturbing to the American psyche, the American form of government, and global stability that it is better to pretend to believe the official version. I would suggest, however, that any merit this argument may have had earlier has been overcome by more recent events and realizations.

"Far more devastating to the American psyche, the American form of government, and the world as a whole will be the continued rule of those who brought us 9/11, because the values reflected in that horrendous event have been reflected in the Bush administration's lies to justify the attack on Iraq, its disregard for environmental science and the Bill of Rights, its criminal negligence both before and after Katrina, and now its apparent plan not only to weaponize space but also to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike.

"In light of this situation and the facts discussed in this lecture---as well as dozens of more problems in the official account of 9/11 discussed elsewhere---I call on the New York Times to take the lead in finally exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11. Taking the lead on such a story will, of course, involve enormous risks. But if there is any news organization with the power, the prestige, and the credibility to break this story, it is the Times. It performed yeoman service in getting the 9/11 oral histories released. But now the welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed. I am calling on the Times to rise to the occasion.

Dr. Griffin's speech given at the University of Wisconsin earlier this year, entitled "9/11 and the American Empire," was broadcast twice on C-SPAN. In late September Dr. Griffin was asked to give expert testimony at hearings sponsored by Cynthia McKinney and the Congressional Black Caucus investigating the 9/11 Commission Report. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Claremont College in California.

The events were sponsored by NY911truth.org, WBAI and the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth: * Kevin Barrett Coordinator

Mr. Petiya believes that this conclusion is “silly.” His first argument is that such a conspiracy could not “have gone forward without anyone knowing about it.” To think it could have would indeed be silly. But the question is whether those who knew about it could have resisted talking about it, and many large-scale efforts have been kept secret for a long time.

Petiya’s second argument is that “the Bush administration would [not] have been capable of thinking up such an idea and carrying it out [in] less than eight months.” But as I pointed out in my book, there is good reason to believe that the plan had been formulated long before it was certain that George W. Bush would become president.

Petiya also considers it “craz[y]” to think that the WTC was brought down by explosives. One reason is that no one could have snuck explosives into the buildings. But he might think otherwise if he realized that the CEO of the company in charge of security was the president’s cousin, Wirt Walker III, that the president’s brother Marvin was one of its directors, and that parts of the buildings were reportedly blocked off to everyone except “engineers” in the weeks preceding 9/11.

Petiya believes that the towers collapsed “because of the impact of the planes and the resulting fires.” But perhaps he is unaware that WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, also collapsed. He may also be unaware that fire has never before caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse, even when the fires were much bigger, hotter, and longer-lasting than the fires in the Twin Towers or Building 7. He may be unaware, in other words, that every previous total collapse was produced by using explosives in the procedure known as “controlled demolition.” He may also be unaware that all 3 buildings showed at least 10 of the standard features of controlled demolition (such as sudden onset, straight down collapse, virtually free-fall speed, and the production of huge dust clouds from pulverized concrete). Petiya believes it is much more plausible that the buildings collapsed because their steel melted, but he must be unaware that steel does not melt until it gets above 2770F, whereas open fires burning hydrocarbons, such as jet fuel (i.e., kerosene), cannot get above 1700F.

It turns out, in other words, that once one is aware of these (and several more) relevant facts, what is crazy is the belief that the buildings could have come down without the use of explosives.

Petiya is “outraged” that my article was published because it is “counterproductive to the peace movement.” I don’t know if he would still hold this view if he, after looking at the evidence, concluded that my article was correct about 9/11. But he might, in any case, be interested to know that my books have been endorsed by Richard Falk, Marcus Raskin, Rosemary Ruether, and Howard Zinn. So perhaps there is room in the peace movement for people who believe that the best way to stop the present administration is to expose its complicity in the very event it uses as its justification for all its other outrages.

David Ray Griffin


LETTER TO THE EDITOR

As a person deeply committed to the cause of peace and justice around the world, and deeply opposed to the Bush administration's bungled efforts to bring the 9/11 conspirators to justice and its misguided disaster in Iraq, I feel obligated to respond to what is unquestionably a grave error on the part of the
Active for Justice newsletter. I was shocked by the assertions made by David Ray Griffin in his article about the mysteries of 9/11 and outraged that any sensible peace organization would publish it.

Some of the questions raised by Griffin I found interesting and, to an extent, legitimate, particularly about the failures of the Pentagon's defenses. However, his overall implication that the attacks were aided or orchestrated from within the U.S. government is silly. I cannot believe that such a conspiracy could have gone forward without anyone knowing about it. I don't think the Bush administration would have been capable of thinking up such an idea and carrying it out less than eight months after it took office, even if it were looking for an excuse to attack Iraq or any other country. As Iraq has proven, foresight is not one of their talents.

The suggestion that explosives were placed in the World Trade Center to cause the collapse ranks high among the craziest things I have ever heard. Nobody, government or terrorist, would have been able to sneak thousands of explosives into the towers without being exposed. As suprising as it might seem that the towers collapsed because of the impact of the planes and the resulting fires, it is completely plausible. The huge explosions caused by the planes and the fires burning for an hour melted the steel support structure, and once the top floors of the tower fell downward onto the floors immediately below, the weight and force of the upper floors continued to crush every level down, one on top of the other. This scenario makes much more sense than someone deliberately planting explosives. Mr. Griffin points to the aspects of the attack which lead him to think it was an inside job, but does he deny that planes were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists? Is he going to write something later which says that CIA agents were the hijackers? Or that someone paid bin Laden to delcare in his most recent video message that he ordered the attacks?

I recently visited the site of the WTC in New York, where so many innocent people died that day. My aunt lives five blocks north of it, and was among the thousands fleeing from lower Manhattan on that morning. She, like me, has been hurt and angered by the policies of the Bush administration since 2001, but she and all New Yorkers would find Griffins article deeply insulting. Absolutely, grave mistakes wer