9/11 AND THE MAINSTREAM PRESS
Address given at the National Press Club on June 22, 2005
by Dr. David Ray Griffin
[David Ray Griffin is professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology,
where he taught for over 30 years (retiring in 2004). He has authored or edited
over two dozen books, including "God and Religion in the Postmodern
World," "Religion and Scientific Naturalism," and "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing
Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11."]
After the attacks of 9/11, I accepted the blowback thesis, according to which
the attacks were payback for US
foreign policy. About a year later, a colleague suggested that the attacks were
orchestrated by our own government. My response was that I didn't think the
Bush administration---even the Bush administration---would do such a thing. A
few months later, another colleague suggested that I look at a website
containing the massive 9/11 timeline created by Paul Thompson. This timeline, I
found, contained an enormous number of reports, all from mainstream sources, that
contradicted the official account. This started a process that led me to
publish The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush
Administration and 9/11, which summarized much of the evidence that had been
discovered by previous researchers---evidence, I concluded, that provided a
"strong prima facie case for official complicity."
In a criminal trial, once the prosecution has presented its initial case, the
defense asks the judge for a dismissal on the grounds that a prima facie case
for guilt has not been presented. However, if the judge declares that such a
case has been made, then the defense must rebut the various elements in the
prosecution's case. The defense cannot simply ignore the prosecution's case by
stating that it is "too outrageous to be dignified by a response." If
the defense fails to offer a convincing rebuttal, the prima facie case is
presumed to be conclusive.
The Bush administration responded to the charges against it as a defense
attorney would, declaring them too outrageous to be taken seriously. President
Bush himself advised people, perhaps especially reporters, not to tolerate
"outrageous conspiracy theories." What the president really meant is
that people should not tolerate any outrageous conspiracy theories except his own,
according to which 19 Arab Muslims defeated the most powerful and sophisticated
defense system in history and also defeated the laws of physics, bringing down
three steel-frame building in a way that perfectly mimicked controlled
demolition.
In any case, what was needed at that stage was someone to play the role of the
judge, determining, from an impartial perspective, whether a prima facie case
for the guilt of the Bush administration had been made.
This role should have been played by the press. But the mainstream press
instead offered itself as a mouthpiece for the administration's conspiracy
theory.
The role of the impartial judge has, nevertheless, been played by civil
society, in which tens of millions of people in this country and around the world
now accept the 9/11 truth movement's contention that the Bush administration
was complicit in the attacks.
The fact that the president was finally forced to appoint a 9/11 commission
provided an opportunity for the Bush administration to rebut the allegations
made against it. You might assume that the 9/11 Commission would have played
the role of an impartial jury, simply evaluating the evidence for the competing
conspiracy theories and deciding which one was more strongly supported.
The Commission's investigative work, however, was carried out by its staff, and
this staff was directed by the White House's man inside the Commission, Philip
Zelikow, a fact that the mainstream press has not emphasized. Under Zelikow's
leadership, the Commission took the role of the prosecution for the Bush
administration's brief against al-Qaeda. In doing so, it implicitly took the
role of the defense for the Bush administration. Accordingly, an important
question to ask about The 9/11 Commission Report, especially since we know that
the Commission had many copies of The New Pearl Harbor, is how well the
Commission rebutted the prima facie case against the Bush-Cheney
administration, which was summarized in that book.
In a second book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I
showed that the Commission simply ignored most of that evidence and distorted
the rest. I will summarize a few of the 115 sins of omission and distortion
that I identified.
The New Pearl Harbor reported evidence that at least six of the alleged
hijackers are still alive. David Harrison of the Telegraph interviewed two of
the men who supposedly died on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania,
one of whom said that he "had never even heard of Pennsylvania," let alone died there.
The Associated Press reported that Waleed al-Shehri, supposedly on Flight 11,
contacted the U.S. embassy
in Morocco
about two weeks after 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report, nevertheless, suggested
that al-Shehri was responsible for stabbing one of the flight attendants
shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.
The New Pearl Harbor cited reports that although Mohamed Atta, the supposed
ringleader, had been portrayed as a devout Muslim ready to meet his maker, he
actually loved alcohol, pork, and lap dances. Zelikow's commission, however,
said that Atta had become "fanatically" religious. They also claimed
that they could find no credible explanation as to why Atta and the other
hijackers went to Las Vegas.
The mainstream press has let the Commission get away with these obvious
contradictions.
People who have seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 know that President Bush
was in a classroom in Sarasota when he was told
that a second plane had struck the World
Trade Center,
a sign that the country was suffering an unprecedented terrorist attack. And
yet the president just sat there. Many critics have asked why he did not
immediately assume the role of commander-in-chief, but the more important
question is why the highly trained Secret Service agents did not immediately
rush him to safety. Bush's location had been highly publicized. They should
have worried that a hijacked airliner was bearing down on them at that very
moment. And yet they allowed the president to remain at the school another half
hour, thereby implying that they knew the president was not a target.
The 9/11 Commission's only response was to report that "the Secret Service
told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the President] to run out
the door." The Commissioners evidently accepted the implied suggestion
that maintaining presidential decorum was more important than protecting the
president's life. The mainstream press has had no comment on this remarkable
response to that remarkable incident.
Another big question created by the official story is how the hijackers, by
crashing planes into the Twin
Towers, caused them and
Building 7 to collapse. One problem is that Building 7 was not struck by an
airplane, and steel-frame buildings had never before been caused to collapse by
fire alone, even when the fires had been much bigger, hotter, and
longer-lasting. The Commission avoided this problem by simply not mentioning
this fact or even, incredibly, that Building 7 collapsed.
Another problem, which I mentioned earlier, is that the collapses had all the
standard features of controlled demolitions. For example, all three buildings
came down at virtually free-fall speed. The Commission even alluded to this
feature, saying that the "South
Tower collapsed in 10
seconds." But it never explained how fire plus the impact of an airplane
could have produced such a collapse.
Controlled demolition was also suggested by the fact that the collapses were
total, with the 110-story Twin
Towers collapsing into a
pile of rubble only a few stories high. The core of each tower had consisted of
47 massive steel columns, which extended from the basements through the roofs.
Even if we ignore all the other problems in the official "pancake"
theory of the collapses, those massive steel columns should have still been
sticking up a thousand feet in the air. Zelikow's commission handled this
problem with the audacious claim that "the interior core of the buildings
was a hollow steel shaft."
James Glanz, a science writer for the New York Times, co-authored a book in 2003
entitled The Rise and Fall of the World
Trade Center.
This book contains an extensive discussion of the construction of the towers
around the 47 interior columns. And yet when the Commission in 2004 published
its incredible denial that these columns existed, the Times did not protest.
Another example: Breaking those massive steel columns would have required very
powerful explosives. Many survivors of the towers have reported hearing and
feeling explosions. But the 9/11 Commission failed to mention any of these
reports. William Rodriguez told the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors about
feeling and hearing a huge explosion in the sub-basement of the North Tower,
then rescuing people from its effects, but neither his name nor any of his
testimony is found in Zelikow's final report.
The mainstream press has also refused to report Rodriguez's story, even though
NBC News spent a day at his home taping it.
The Commission also failed to address the many reasons to conclude that the
Pentagon was not struck by Flight 77. The Commission in particular failed to
subpoena the film from the video cameras, confiscated by the FBI immediately
after the attacks, which could at least clear up one of the questions---whether
the attacking aircraft was a Boeing 757.
The Commission did allude to one problem---the fact that Hani Hanjour, the
alleged pilot, was known to be completely incompetent, incapable of flying a
Boeing 757, let alone performing the remarkable maneuver reportedly executed by
the aircraft that hit the Pentagon. The Commission handled this problem simply
by saying in one place that Hanjour was considered a "terrible pilot"
while saying elsewhere that he was given the assignment to hit the Pentagon
because he was "the operation's most experienced pilot." The
mainstream press has not pointed out this contradiction.
The Commission also failed to discuss the considerable evidence that Flight 93
was shot down by the US military, perhaps when passengers were about to wrest
control of it. The Commission dealt with this problem only indirectly, by
claiming that Vice President Cheney did not give the shoot-down order until
10:10, which was at least four minutes after Flight 93 crashed. In support of
this claim, the Commission said that Cheney did not enter the Operations Center
under the White House until almost 10:00 that morning. To make this claim,
however, the Commission had to contradict all prior reports. It also had to
delete Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony, given during the
Commission's public hearings, that when he got down there at 9:20, Cheney was
already in charge. Even such an obvious lie, supported by such blatant
suppression of evidence, has elicited no murmur from our mainstream press.
There are dozens of other omissions and distortions the press has allowed the
Commission to get away with. For example, the Commission's endorsement of the
claim by General Richard Myers that he was on Capitol Hill that morning ignores
Richard Clarke's report, in "Against All Enemies", that Myers was in
the Pentagon, participating in Clarke's videoconference. Also, the Commission's
account of why the hijacked airliners were not intercepted contradicts the
account that had been told since shortly after 9/11 not only by the U.S. military
but also by the press, in thousands of stories. But the press now, like Gilda
Radnor, says "Never Mind."
In any case, as these illustrations show, the 9/11 Commission, which had the
opportunity to rebut the prima facie case against the Bush administration,
failed to do so. This means that the publication of The 9/11 Commission Report
needs to be recognized as a decisive event, because it was the moment at which
the prima facie case against the Bush administration became a conclusive case.
What we need now is a press that will let the American people in on this
development---which is most important, given the fact that the official story
about 9/11 has provided the pretext for virtually every other horrible thing
this administration has done.
---
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
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{Invite (mankind, O Muhammad ) to the Way of your Lord (i.e. Islam) with wisdom (i.e. with the Divine Inspiration and the Qur'an) and fair preaching, and argue with them in a way that is better. Truly, your Lord knows best who has gone astray from His Path, and He is the Best Aware of those who are guided.}
(Holy Quran-16:125)
{And who is better in speech than he who [says: "My Lord is Allah (believes in His Oneness)," and then stands straight (acts upon His Order), and] invites (men) to Allah's (Islamic Monotheism), and does righteous deeds, and says: "I am one of the Muslims."} (Holy Quran-41:33)
The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: "By Allah, if Allah guides one person by you, it is better for you than the best types of camels." [al-Bukhaaree, Muslim]
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