- Early in 2007, Interlink Books published my Debunking
9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the
Official Conspiracy Theory. The stimulus for my writing this book was the
appearance in August 2006- just before the fifth anniversary of 9/11-of
four publications intended to bolster the official account by debunking
the alternative view, according to which 9/11 was an inside job. The most
explicit and well-known of these publications was a book by Popular Mechanics
entitled Debunking 9/11 Myths.
-
- My book's introduction and conclusion dealt with the
irresponsible way the press, including the left-leaning press, has dealt
with this issue. One of their failings, I showed, was simply to accept
the official reports -especially The 9/11 Commission Report and the report
on the World Trade Center put out by the National Institute for Science
and Technology (NIST) - as neutral, scientific reports. They
thereby ignored the fact that the 9/11 Commission was run by Philip Zelikow,
who was virtually a member of the US. Bush administration, and that NIST
is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce and hence of the Bush administration (which
has distorted science for political purposes to an unprecedented extent).
-
- The book's four chapters then demonstrated that none
of the documents of August 2006 actually served to debunk the claims of
the 9/11 truth movement. The first two chapters dealt with two documents- including
a new book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission
- that tried, by creating a completely new story, to debunk
the claim that the U.S. military's failure to intercept four hijacked airliners
could have occurred only if there had been a stand-down order. I argued
that this new story was too inherently implausible, as well as too contradictory
of previous statements by the military, to be worthy of belief.
-
- The third chapter dealt with NIST's reports on the Twin
Towers, showing that they are political, not scientific, documents, because
they ignore all evidence not consistent with NIST's theory, such as testimony
showing that massive explosions had occurred and that steel had melted- even
though the fires could not have gotten even close to the temperature needed
to melt steel (which means that there had to have been another
source of energy).
-
- The fourth and longest chapter dealt with the Popular
Mechanics book, which discusses all the issues (the failures to intercept,
the WTC, the Pentagon, and United 93). My critique showed this book to
be filled with distortions and outright lies. Although the Popular Mechanics
book has been used as the basis for two TV specials intended to bolster
the official story- one on the BBC and one on the History Channel
in the USA (which is partially owned by the Hearst Corporation, which puts
out Popular Mechanics) - the fact that the public is increasingly
seeing through this book's deceptions is shown by recent reviews on Amazon.com.
-
- My book, although it has yet to be reviewed by a single
mainstream publication in the United States, has been supported by well-respected
political commentators from the left and the right. Howard Zinn wrote:
"Considering how the 9-ll tragedy has been used by the Bush administration
to propel us into immoral wars again and again, I believe that David Ray
Griffin's provocative questions about 9-ll deserve to be investigated and
addressed." Paul Craig Roberts, who was the assistant secretary of
the US Treasury during the Reagan administration, wrote: "Professor
Griffin is the nemesis of the 9/11 cover-up. This new book destroys the
credibility of the NIST and Popular Mechanics reports and annihilates his
critics."
-
- My book was even endorsed by a former senior official
of the CIA, Bill Christison, who had for the first five years after 9/11,
he admitted, studiously avoided looking at the evidence that it might have
been an inside job. He called my book "a superb compendium of the
strong body of evidence showing the official US government story of what
happened on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a monstrous series
of lies."
-
- Book reviewers in mainstream publications were evidently
not moved even by Publishers Weekly. Although it had dismissed my first
two books about 9/11 as "ridiculous" and "pure speculation,"
it said of Debunking 9/11 Debunking: "All but the most dogmatic readers
will find Griffin's evidence - from the inconsistencies between
NORAD tapes and the 9/11 Commission Report to rigorous exploration into
the physics of the collapse detailed and deeply unnerving."
-
- Another source widely used to determine whether a book
is worthy of review is Choice, put out by the American Library Association.
It has recently spoken, saying: "Griffin exhibits exceptional skill
in detailed scholarly analysis.
-
- He concludes with a call to the reader, and all of us,
to bring these issues into full public discussion and to expose the truth
about 9/11, whatever it may be. Indeed, such 'truth' has certainly not
yet been revealed due to extensive gaps and contradictions in official
theories that he documents in detail." Whether this endorsement will
lead to any reviews remains to be seen.
-
- In any case, I was motivated to put out the Revised and
Updated Edition primarily because of new information about the alleged
phone calls from passengers on the flights to relatives, through which
reports of hijackers on the airplanes reached the public.
-
- In the first edition, I presented extensive evidence
that reported cell phone calls from the airliners, including the approximately
10 reported cell phone calls from United 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania),
could not have occurred, because the cell phone technology at the time
did not allow calls to be made from airliners flying at a high altitude
(Flight 93 was at 34,300 to 40,700 feet when the calls were reportedly
made).
-
- I argued not that the relatives of the passengers had
lied about receiving the calls but that they had been duped- by means of
voice morphing, which is now perfected to the point that, advertisers brag,
you can fool your spouse. Even after my book appeared, Popular Mechanics
continued to claim, on the basis of very weak evidence, that high-altitude
cell phone calls were indeed possible (see the History Channel
special, "9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction").
-
- However, as I reported in the Revised and Updated Edition
of my book, the FBI had in 2006 presented, as evidence in the trial of
Zacarias Moussaoui (sometimes called "the 20th hijacker"), a
report on phone calls from the four airliners. According to this report,
there were only two cell phone calls from United 93, and they were made
at 9:58, shortly before the plane crashed, when it was down to 5,000 feet.
When the FBI had to present evidence in a court of law, therefore, it would
not claim that any high-altitude cell phone calls had occurred.
- (These two low-altitude calls from Flight 93 were, according
to the FBI report, the only two cell phone calls made from all four flights).
-
- The most well known of the reported cell phone calls
from Flight 93 were four calls that Deena Burnett reported receiving from
her husband, Tom Burnett.
- She knew that he had used his cell phone, she reported
on several TV shows and later in her book, because she saw his Caller ID
number. However, as I reported, there are now devices, such as "FoneFaker,"
that will produce the person's Caller ID as well as his or her voice. Deena
Burnett and the others, I believe, were not lying; they were duped.
-
- The most famous of the reported calls from the flights
supposedly came from Barbara Olson, the well-known commentator on CNN who
was married to Ted Olson, who was then the US solicitor general. Olson
reported that his wife had called him twice from American Airlines Flight
77, stating that hijackers with knives and boxcutters had taken over the
plane. Besides providing evidence of hijackers, this call also provided
the only evidence that Flight 77 was still aloft (it had disappeared
from radar and there had been reports of an airliner crash nearby).
- Although Olson went back and forth on the question of
whether his wife had used a cell phone or an onboard phone, he finally
settled on the latter.
-
- In the first edition, I challenged this claim on the
basis of evidence from American Airlines that their Boeing 757 (which is
what Flight 77 was) had no onboard phones. After publishing
the book, however, I became worried, because of some new evidence, that
that statement from American Airlines, made in 2004, had referred only
to their 757s at that time - that their 757s in 2001 may well
have had onboard phones. So I published a retraction, saying that the claim
was uncertain.
-
- That retraction, however, evoked new evidence, including
a statement made by American Airlines in 2006 that their 757s in 2001 had
had no onboard phones, so that anyone calling out from Flight 77 had needed
to use a cell phone. Barbara Olson, therefore, could not have used a passenger-seat
phone. That left open, of course, the possibility that Ted Olson was correct
when he said that his wife had used her cell phone.
-
- However, the evidence from the Moussaoui trial ruled
out this possibility. In its report on AA 77, it listed one attempted call
from Barbara Olson, which was "unconnected" and hence lasted
"0 seconds."
- This was an astounding discovery. The FBI is part of
the Department of Justice. And yet it had undercut the testimony of the
DOJ's former solicitor general, saying in effect that the two calls that
he reported had never happened. The implication is that unless Ted Olson
had, like Deena Burnett, been duped, he had lied. Although this should
have produced front-page headlines, it has thus far not been reported by
any mainstream publication.
-
- The Revised and Updated Edition of "Debunking 9/11
Debunking" provides the documentation for these reports from American
Airlines and the FBI, which pretty thoroughly undermine the idea that any
of the reported calls were genuine: If the cell phone calls were faked,
why should we believe that the reported calls from onboard phones were
genuine?
-
- This new edition also contains more quotations from former
military officers calling the official conspiracy theory impossible.
-
- It also contains a report on Rudy Giuliani's problematic
response to a group of activists who asked him, with camera running, how
he knew that the Twin Towers were going to collapse. (He had told Peter
Jennings on ABC News on 9/11 itself that he had been warned.) Given the
fact that he Giuliani is currently the front-runner for the Republican
presidential nomination, evidence that he had inside information on the
collapse of the towers- an event for which there was no historical
precedent-should certainly be investigated.
-
- This new edition has garnered some further endorsements.
I was especially pleased to get one from former CIA case officer Robert
Baer (the author of See No Evil, which inspired the movie Syriana), because
he had written a critical review of my first book, The New Pearl Harbor.
Having more recently, like Bill Christison, become convinced that 9/11
was an inside job, he wrote: "Until we get a complete, honest, transparent
investigationnot one based on 'confession' extracted by torture - we
will never know what happened on 9/11. David Griffin will never let this
go until we get the truth."
-
- Also, hoping that my new book would be found even more
convincing than my earlier ones, I was very pleased to see that John Whitbeck,
an international law specialist, had written: "After reading David
Ray Griffin's previous books on the subject, I was over 90% convinced that
9/11 was an inside job. Now, after reading Debunking 9/11 Debunking, I
am, I regret to say, 100% convinced."
- The implications of this conclusion are, of course, enormous.
But will you see the evidence for this conclusion discussed in the mainstream
press? Don't hold your breath.
-
-
- False
Flag Section has more related reports
-
- http://rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/new-evidence-that
-the-official-story-about-911-is-indefensible/1449/
|
