<science@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:1160325349.517812.304010@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Yep!
>
> Michael Givel wrote:
>>
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003250424_911conspire09.html
>>
>> Close-up The 9/11 conspiracy plots thicken
>>
>> By Michael Powell
>>
>> The Wa****ngton Post
>>
>> HEESOON YIM / AP
>>
>> A helicopter flies over the smoldering Pentagon in Wa****ngton, D.C., on
>> Sept. 11, 2001. According to a recent poll, 12 percent of Americans
>> believe a cruise missile, not a hijacked airliner, struck the building.
>>
>> David Ray Griffin sees "massive complicity."
>>
>> NEW YORK - He felt no ****ver of doubt in those first terrible hours.
>>
>> He watched the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and
>> assumed al-Qaida had wreaked terrible vengeance. He listened to anchors
>> and military experts and assumed the facts of Sept. 11, 2001, were as
>> stated on the screen.
>>
>> It was a year before David Ray Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian
and
>> philosopher, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered
why
>> Bush listened to a child's story while the nation was attacked and how
>> Osama bin Laden, America's Public Enemy No. 1, escaped in the mountains
>> of Tora Bora.
>>
>> He wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to
>> intercept even one airliner. He read the 9/11 Commission re****t with a
>> swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian
>> official was reprimanded, much less ca****ered.
>>
>> "To me, the re****t read as a cartoon," Griffin said. "It's a much
greater
>> stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the
>> alternatives."
>>
>> Such as?
>>
>> "There was massive complicity in this attack by U.S. government
>> operatives."
>>
>> If that feels like a skip off the cliff of established reality, more
>> Americans are in free fall than you might guess. There are few more
>> startling measures of American distrust of leaders than the extent of
>> belief that the Bush administration had a hand in the attacks of Sept.
11
>> to spark an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
>>
>> 36 percent suspicious
>>
>> A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found
>> that 36 percent suspect the U.S. government promoted the attacks or
>> intentionally sat on its hands. Sixteen percent believe explosives
>> brought down the towers. Twelve percent believe a cruise missile hit
the
>> Pentagon.
>>
>> advertising Distrust percolates more strongly near Ground Zero. A Zogby
>> International poll of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3
>> percent believed the government "consciously failed to act."
>>
>> Establishment *****sments of the believers tend toward the
>> psychotherapeutic. Many academics, politicians and thinkers left, right
>> and center say the conspiracy theories are a case of one plus one
equals
>> five. It's a piling up of improbabilities.
>>
>> Thomas Eager, a professor of materials science at MIT, has studied the
>> collapse of the twin towers. "At first, I thought it was amazing that
the
>> buildings would come down in their own footprints," Eager says. "Then I
>> realized that it wasn't that amazing - it's the only way a building
that
>> weighs a million tons and is 95 percent air can come down."
>>
>> But the chatter out there is loud enough for the National Institute of
>> Standards and Technology to post a Web "fact sheet" poking holes in the
>> conspiracy theories and defending its re****t on the towers.
>>
>> Motley crew
>>
>> The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped
>> looking for truth from the government. A cacophonous and free-range a
>> bunch of conspiracists, they produce hip-hop inflected do***entaries
and
>> scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode. Every citizen is a
>> researcher.
>>
>> Did you see that the CIA met with bin Laden in a hospital room in
Dubai?
>> Check out this Pakistani site; there are really weird doings in
>> Baluchistan ...
>>
>> Peter Knight, senior lecturer in American studies at the University of
>> Manchester and editor of the 2002 book "Conspiracy Nation: The Politics
>> of Paranoia in Postwar America," called the movement "a strange beast,
an
>> amalgam of elements. You've got the anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war crowd -
you
>> know, if they lied about the war, maybe they lied about 9/11. Another
>> part is people merely interested in the anomalies, with no preconceived
>> political agenda.
>>
>> "Then you have the more traditional right-wing conspiracy part of the
>> continuum that believes a vast cabal has taken over the United States,
>> the mega-conspiracy of the right's new world order. To them, all of
these
>> things are connected. Each group inserts 9/11 into its pre-existing
>> conspiracy model."
>>
>> The academic wing is led by Griffin, who founded the Center for a
>> Postmodern World at Claremont University; James Fetzer, a tenured
>> philosopher at the University of Minnesota; and Daniel Orr, retired
>> chairman of the economics department at the University of Illinois.
>>
>> Professor suspended
>>
>> The movement's de facto minister of engineering is Steven Jones, a
>> tenured physics professor at Brigham Young University who has studied
>> vectors and velocities and tested explosives and concluded that the
>> collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled demolition,
>> sped by a thousand pounds of high-grade thermite.
>>
>> Jones has been placed on paid leave while the Mormon-church-owned
school
>> investigates his claims, it was announced Friday.
>>
>> The physicist published his views two weeks ago in the book "9/11 and
>> American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out."
>>
>> Former Reagan aide Barbara Honegger is a senior military-affairs
>> journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School in California. She's
>> convinced, based on her freelance research, that a bomb went off about
>> six minutes before an airplane hit the Pentagon - or didn't hit it, as
>> some believe the case may be.
>>
>> Then there's Morgan O. Reynolds, appointed by George W. Bush as chief
>> economist at the Labor Department. He left in 2002 and doesn't think
much
>> of his former boss.
>>
>> "Who did it? Elements of our government and M-16 and the Mossad. The
>> government's case is a laugh-out-loud proposition. They used patsies
and
>> lies and subterfuge and there's no way that Bush and Cheney could have
>> invaded Iraq without the help of 9/11," Reynolds asserts.
>>
>> They are cantankerous and sometimes distrust each other - who knows
where
>> the double agents lurk? But unreasonable questions resonate with the
>> reasonable. Colleen Kelly's brother, a salesman, had breakfast at the
>> Windows on the World restaurant on Sept. 11. After he died she founded
>> September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows to oppose the Iraq
>> war. She lives in the Bronx and gives a gingerly embrace to the
>> conspiracy crowd.
>>
>> "Sometimes I listen to them and I think that's sooooo outlandish and
>> bizarre," she says. "But that day had such disastrous geopolitical
>> consequences. If David Ray Griffin asks uncomfortable questions and
>> points out painful discrepancies, good for him."
>>
>> Griffin's book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the
>> Bush Administration and 9/11," sold more than 100,000 copies and became
a
>> movement founding stone. Last year he traveled through New England,
>> giving speeches. One evening in West Hartford, Conn., 400 mostly
>> middle-aged and upper-middle-class doctors and lawyers, teachers and
>> social workers sat waiting.
>>
>> Griffin took the podium and laid down his ideas with calm and cool. He
>> concluded:
>>
>> "It is already possible to know beyond a reasonable doubt one very
>> im****tant thing: The destruction of the World Trade Center was an
inside
>> job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists. The welfare of our republic
and
>> perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the
truth
>> about 9/11 exposed."
>>
>> The audience rose and applauded for more than a minute.
>>
>> No patience
>>
>> Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a
>> Boston-based left-leaning think tank, is no fan of the 9/11 Commission.
>> He believes a serious investigation should have led to indictments and
>> the firing of incompetent generals and civilian officials.
>>
>> But he has no patience with the conspiracy theorists.
>>
>> "They don't do their homework; it's a kind of charlatanism," says
Berlet.
>> "They say there's no debris on the lawn in front of the Pentagon, but
>> they base their analysis on a photo on the Internet. That's like
>> analyzing an impressionist painting by looking at a postcard.
>>
>> "I love 'The X-Files' but I don't base my research on it. My vision of
>> hell is having to review these [conspiracy] books over and over again."
>>
>> In the days after Sept. 11, experts claimed temperatures reached 2,000
>> degrees on the upper floors. Others claimed steel melted. Nope. What
>> happened, says Eager, the MIT materials-science professor, is that jet
>> fuel sloshed around and beams got rubbery.
>>
>> "It's not too much to think that you could have some regions at 900
>> degrees and others at 1,200 degrees, and that will distort the beams."
>>
>> The truth movement doesn't really care for Eager. A Web site casts a
>> fisheye of suspicion at the professor and his colleagues. "Did the MIT
>> have prior knowledge?" notes one chat room. "This is for sure another
>> speculative topic ... "
>>
>> Professsor Jones' suspension was re****ted Friday by The Associated
Press.
>> Peter Knight was quoted by McClatchy Newspapers.
>>
>> Copyright ) 2006 The Seattle Times Company
>
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