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.