9/11 and the Mainstream Press

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Sat, 13 Aug 2005 09:41:21 -0700 (PDT)

9/11 and the Mainstream Press

 

 

 

 

 

9/11 and the Mainstream Press

 

by Dr. David Ray Griffin

SeptemberEleventh.org

Friday, Jul 29, 2005

 

 

http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2005-07-29-pressclub.php

 

 

 

For DVDs of Dr. Griffin's lectures,

 

Address given at the National Press Club

July 22, 2005

 

 

 

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 " [t]he 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 " [t]he 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.

 

 

 

 

 

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