Dble T
09-13-2006, 03:30 AM
San Diego Tribune (Pg 1! but bad headline). It's a step in the right direction though, right...Jon? CNN (Paula Zahn of all people) also had the LooseChange911 guys on tonight so with stuff like this it is getting the word out. Never thought I'd see it but glad to welcome it.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060912/news_1n12conspire.html
Many Americans believe in conspiracy theories
http://www.signonsandiego.com/images/black.gif
By Michael Powell
THE WASHINGTON POST
September 12, 2006
NEW YORK – He felt no shiver of doubt in those first terrible hours.
He watched the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and assumed al-Qaeda 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.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/images/t.gifhttp://www.signonsandiego.com/images/t.gifAdvertisementIt was a year before David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why President 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 report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded, much less cashiered.
“To me, the report 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 widespread belief that the Bush administration had a hand in the attacks of Sept. 11 to spark an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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.
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.”
You could dismiss this as a louder than usual howl from the CIA-controls-my-thoughts-
through-the-filling-in-my-molar crowd. Establishment assessments 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 report on the towers.
The loose agglomeration known as the “9/11 Truth Movement” has stopped looking for truth from the government. They produce hip-hop inflected documentaries and scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode. Every citizen is a researcher. There's nothing like a triple, Google-fed epiphany lighting up the laptop at 2:44 a.m.
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 . . .
The academic wing is led by Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher who founded the Center for a Postmodern World; James Fetzer, a tenured philosopher at the University of Minnesota (Fetzer's an old hand in JFK assassination research); and Daniel Orr, the retired chairman of the economics department at the University of Illinois. 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. The university placed him on leave Friday, “concerned about the increasingly speculative and accusatory nature” of his statements.
Former Reagan aide Barbara Honegger is a senior military affairs journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. 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.
Catherine Austin Fitts served as assistant secretary of housing in President George H.W. Bush's administration and gained a fine reputation as a fraud buster; David Bowman was chief of advanced space programs under presidents Ford and Carter. Fitts and Bowman agree that the “most unbelievable conspiracy” theory is the one retailed by the government.
Then there's Morgan O. Reynolds, appointed by President George W. Bush as chief economist at the Labor Department. He left in 2002 and doesn't think much of his former boss; he describes Bush as a “dysfunctional creep,” not to mention a “possible war criminal.”
You reach Reynolds at his country home in the hills of Arkansas. His favored rhetorical style is long paragraphs without obvious punctuation: “Who did it? Elements of our government and MI6 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.”
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,” never reviewed in a major U.S. newspaper, sold more than 100,000 copies and became a movement founding stone. Last year, he traveled through New England, giving speeches in whitewashed churches and gymnasiums. He came to West Hartford, Conn., on a rainy autumn evening. Four hundred 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 important thing: The destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists,” he says. “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.
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,” Berlet says over the phone. “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.”
Now comes a loud sigh.
“I love 'The X-Files,' but I don't base my research on it,” he says. “My vision of hell is having to review these (conspiracy) books over and over again.”
Let's move on to Eager of MIT. “Demolition experts say, 'Ohhh, it's all science and timing.' Bull!” Eager says. “What's the technique? If 200,000 tons gives way, where do you think it's going? Straight down.”
In the days after Sept. 11, experts claimed temperatures reached 2,000 degrees on the upper floors of the twin towers. Others claimed steel melted. Nope. What happened, Eager says, 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 . . . ”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060912/news_1n12conspire.html
Many Americans believe in conspiracy theories
http://www.signonsandiego.com/images/black.gif
By Michael Powell
THE WASHINGTON POST
September 12, 2006
NEW YORK – He felt no shiver of doubt in those first terrible hours.
He watched the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and assumed al-Qaeda 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.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/images/t.gifhttp://www.signonsandiego.com/images/t.gifAdvertisementIt was a year before David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, began his stroll down the path of disbelief. He wondered why President 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 report with a swell of anger. Contradictions were ignored and no military or civilian official was reprimanded, much less cashiered.
“To me, the report 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 widespread belief that the Bush administration had a hand in the attacks of Sept. 11 to spark an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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.
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.”
You could dismiss this as a louder than usual howl from the CIA-controls-my-thoughts-
through-the-filling-in-my-molar crowd. Establishment assessments 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 report on the towers.
The loose agglomeration known as the “9/11 Truth Movement” has stopped looking for truth from the government. They produce hip-hop inflected documentaries and scholarly conferences. The Web is their mother lode. Every citizen is a researcher. There's nothing like a triple, Google-fed epiphany lighting up the laptop at 2:44 a.m.
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 . . .
The academic wing is led by Griffin, an eminent liberal theologian and philosopher who founded the Center for a Postmodern World; James Fetzer, a tenured philosopher at the University of Minnesota (Fetzer's an old hand in JFK assassination research); and Daniel Orr, the retired chairman of the economics department at the University of Illinois. 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. The university placed him on leave Friday, “concerned about the increasingly speculative and accusatory nature” of his statements.
Former Reagan aide Barbara Honegger is a senior military affairs journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. 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.
Catherine Austin Fitts served as assistant secretary of housing in President George H.W. Bush's administration and gained a fine reputation as a fraud buster; David Bowman was chief of advanced space programs under presidents Ford and Carter. Fitts and Bowman agree that the “most unbelievable conspiracy” theory is the one retailed by the government.
Then there's Morgan O. Reynolds, appointed by President George W. Bush as chief economist at the Labor Department. He left in 2002 and doesn't think much of his former boss; he describes Bush as a “dysfunctional creep,” not to mention a “possible war criminal.”
You reach Reynolds at his country home in the hills of Arkansas. His favored rhetorical style is long paragraphs without obvious punctuation: “Who did it? Elements of our government and MI6 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.”
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,” never reviewed in a major U.S. newspaper, sold more than 100,000 copies and became a movement founding stone. Last year, he traveled through New England, giving speeches in whitewashed churches and gymnasiums. He came to West Hartford, Conn., on a rainy autumn evening. Four hundred 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 important thing: The destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists,” he says. “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.
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,” Berlet says over the phone. “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.”
Now comes a loud sigh.
“I love 'The X-Files,' but I don't base my research on it,” he says. “My vision of hell is having to review these (conspiracy) books over and over again.”
Let's move on to Eager of MIT. “Demolition experts say, 'Ohhh, it's all science and timing.' Bull!” Eager says. “What's the technique? If 200,000 tons gives way, where do you think it's going? Straight down.”
In the days after Sept. 11, experts claimed temperatures reached 2,000 degrees on the upper floors of the twin towers. Others claimed steel melted. Nope. What happened, Eager says, 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 . . . ”