If you saw the tap of the jet hitting the pentagon, you would know, it did
not look like a jet, but a missile.

"Noah's Dove" <noahdove7@lightspeed.ca> wrote in message
news:1157839568.971491.104570@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
9/11 conspiracy theorists multiply
Many Americans suspect U.S. government involvement or complicity
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14723997
Helayne Seidman / The Washington Post
David Ray Griffin, Christian theologian and author of "The New Pearl
Harbor," talks on his cell phone before a lecture about the destruction
of the World Trade Center at St. Marks Church in the East Village.
Updated: 7:11 a.m. PT Sept 8, 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.
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.
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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." White-haired and courtly,
Griffin sits on a couch in a hotel lobby in Manhattan, unspooling words
in that reasonable Presbyterian minister's voice. "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 in order 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.
Related content
Vote: Do you believe any 9/11 conspiracy theories?
Discuss: Your thoughts on 9/11 conspiracy theories
Distrust near Ground Zero
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.
Yeah, as if . . .
The loose agglomeration known as the "9/11 Truth Movement" has stopped
looking for truth from the government. As cacophonous and free-range a
bunch of conspiracists anywhere this side of Guy Fawkes, 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, who founded the Center for a
Postmodern World at Claremont University; 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's 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.
'Possible war criminal'
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. Catherine Austin Fitts served as
assistant secretary of housing in the first President 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 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 President Bush as a
"dysfunctional creep," not to mention a "possible war criminal."
CONTINUED
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