Little by little, the idea of a 9/11 conspiracy leached into the mainstream. In March 2006, Charlie Sheen became the first Hollywood star to declare himself a supporter of the Truth movement. His doubts, he told a radio host, had begun on the day of the attacks, watching coverage of the planes flying into the World Trade Center. “It just didn’t look like any commercial jetliner I’ve flown on any time in my life and then when the buildings came down later on that day I said to my brother, ‘Call me insane, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?’ ”6 In September 2006, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the cult film director David Lynch, when asked about Loose Change in an interview on Dutch television, said that it wasn’t necessary to believe everything in Avery’s documentary to still have significant doubts about the generally accepted (or official) version of events. “You look back,” said Lynch, “and you remember what you saw, and what you were told, and now, you have questions.”7 That same week, James Brolin, the actor husband of Hollywood and music legend Barbra Streisand, interviewed on the ABC show The View, had urged the program’s audience to look at a 9/11 Truth website.
“Mobile Phones Don’t Work from Altitude, Simple as That”
It was early 2006, and I was writing a piece in Florida, and I found myself, along with others, having a salad lunch with Bob, a very young-looking sixty-year-old who had made his money in property and retired early. When the subject of 9/11 came up, Bob was all over it like a lurching puppy. He was certain that 9/11 was a conspiracy by the government, and what made him certain, the magic bullet, were the mobile phone calls from the flights. It was scientifically impossible, said Bob, for a mobile phone call to be made from an airplane once it was in the sky. There had been studies; there was a report by a leading professor; there had been attempts to replicate the circumstances of mobile calls; and all had concluded that it couldn’t be done.
The 9/11 Commission report (the official “official” version) contained details of a number of calls made between passengers and crew on the hijacked planes and people on the ground. The accounts given in these calls were critical in determining the means by which the hijackers had taken over the planes and in suggesting what weapons they had used or had access to. They included a call made by Peter Burton Hanson to his father, Lee, in Connecticut from United Flight 175 from Boston to Los Angeles at 8:52 a.m. Hanson told his father that hijackers might have taken over the cockpit, adding, “An attendant has been stabbed, and someone else up front may have been killed.” Seven minutes later, on the same flight, a male attendant spoke to the United Airlines office in San Francisco and said that the plane had been hijacked, another attendant had been stabbed and both pilots killed, and that he thought the hijackers were flying the plane. At 8:59 a.m., Brian Sweeney called his mother, Louise Sweeney, and said that the passengers were thinking of storming the cockpit. A minute later, Lee Hanson got another call from his son: “It’s getting bad, Dad. A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace. They said they have a bomb. The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down. Don’t worry, Dad, if it happens, it’ll be very fast. My God, my God.” At 9:03 a.m., the Commission reported, both Lee Hanson and Louise Sweeney saw on their TVs an aircraft slam into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. It was carrying their children.
Or so the world believed—as it believed that Betty Ong, flight attendant on AA11, the plane that hit the North Tower, called American Airlines and was speaking to a supervisor in Reservations, Lydia Gonzalez, as the aircraft headed across the water toward lower Manhattan. On the same flight was attendant Madeline Sweeney, whose last words to colleagues on the ground were: “I see the water. I see the building. I see buildings . . . Oh my God!” Most famous were the calls made by the dozen passengers and crew from Flight 93, who spoke to relatives, colleagues, and emergency services. From these conversations, it was concluded that they had rushed the cockpit.
Naturally, when Bob told us around that Miami table that all these calls were impossible, we were in no position to contradict him. I had certainly never tried to make a call on my mobile from altitude, nor had the other three at lunch that day. It’s probable that Bob’s information originated in a “study” carried out by Professor A. K. Dewdney of the University of Western Ontario in Canada, a longtime contributor to Scientific American magazine. This exercise consisted of him boarding planes and making a large number of calls at various altitudes, from which he concluded that mobile phones were altogether useless at altitudes above eight thousand feet and pretty much useless below that level.
If this were true, then how might one account for the parents who say they spoke to their children, the ground staff who were audio witnesses to their colleagues’ last moments, or the widely available recording of Betty Ong’s dialogue with Lydia Gonzalez? They would have to have been manufactured, as charged by Dylan Avery in Loose Change. “For starters,” he argued, “the calls themselves are extremely peculiar. Most of them are only a couple of sentences long, before the callers end the conversation, only to call back later.” Betty Ong did not sound to him like a woman on a hijacked plane who had just witnessed several murders should sound. “Why is nobody in the background screaming?” he demanded. As to Madeline Sweeney’s call, Avery was contemptuous. “ ‘I see buildings. Water. Oh my God!’ Madeline was a flight attendant out of Boston for twelve years. I think she would have recognized Manhattan. The cell phone calls were fake. No question about it.”8
One fairly obvious problem with judging the provenance of the calls is that many of them seem to have been made through the Airfone service but were reported, usually in the early days after 9/11, as having been cell phone calls. Reporters may not have been aware of the difference, and those receiving the calls were hardly likely to have made the distinction. Even so, mobile use at altitude is, in fact, possible. According to Marco Thompson, president of the San Diego Telecom Council, if a plane is slow and flying over a city, mobiles in it will work to an altitude of around ten thousand feet. Even at thirty thousand feet, a cell phone “may work momentarily while near a cell site, but it’s chancy and the connection won’t last.”9 Other mobile service providers concur with Thompson.
Anecdotally, there are plenty of examples of people who have successfully used their mobiles on planes, or who have witnessed other people doing so. But at least as relevant is a piece of research carried out in 2004, into the possible dangers of the use of mobiles and other emitting electronic devices on aircraft. On the incidence of use, the authors revealed, “Our research shows clearly that, in violation of FCC and FAA rules, calls are regularly made from commercial aircraft. Results from our analysis imply that calls from on board scheduled commercial aircraft in the eastern United States occur at a rate of one to four per flight.” The research, using specialized equipment, was carried out by Bill Strauss, an expert in aircraft electromagnetic compatibility; M. Granger Morgan, head of Carnegie Mellon’s department of engineering and public policy and a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering; Jay Apt, professor in the department of engineering and public policy; and Daniel D. Stancil, professor in Carnegie Mellon’s department of electrical and computer engineering.10 Bob’s likely source, Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, is, by contrast, not an engineer or an expert in electronics; he describes himself as “a mathematician, environmental scientist, and author of books on diverse subjects,” though he was the coordinator of a group calling itself the Scientific Panel Investigating Nine-Eleven.
A convert to Islam in the mid-1970s, Dewdney has written extensively on the near impossibility of Muslims’ being involved in suicide bombings, and to support this view evolved a detailed hypothesis—which he named Operation Pearl—as to what had really happened on September 11, 2001. For people who found the long version of this scenario “too convoluted to understand” or had “a slight comprehension problem,” Dewdney devised this synopsis:
Four commercial passenger jets (American Airlines Flights 11 and 77 and United Airlines Flights 93 and 175) take off and shortly after the pilots are ordered to land at a designated airport with a military presence. Two previously prepared planes (one a Boeing 767, painted up to look like a United Airlines jet and loaded with extra jet fuel) take off and are flown by remote control to intercept the flight paths of AA 11 and UA 175 so as to deceive the air traffic controllers. These (substituted) jets then fly toward Manhattan; the first crashes into the North Tower and (eighteen minutes later) the second crashes into the South Tower. A fighter jet (under remote control), or a cruise missile, crashes into the Pentagon. Back at the airport the (innocent) passengers from three of the Boeings are transferred to the fourth (UA 93). This plane takes off, flies toward Washington, and is shot down by a U.S. Air Force jet over Pennsylvania, eliminating the innocent witnesses to the diversion of the passenger planes. Under cover of darkness later that evening the other three Boeings are flown by remote control out over the Atlantic, are scuttled and end up in pieces at the bottom of the ocean.11
Enter the Dean
In 2004, two major changes happened in the life of American academic David Ray Griffin, longtime resident of Claremont, a prosperous medium-size college town hugging the mountains thirty miles east of Los Angeles. The first was that he retired after teaching for thirty-one years at the Claremont School of Theology and became professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology. The second was that he wrote a book effectively accusing the American government of murdering nearly three thousand of its own citizens so as to take over parts of the world, before pinning the blame on innocent Muslims.
As millennial theologians went, Griffin was a celebrated one. When a Handbook of Christian Theologians was compiled in the mid-1990s, Griffin was one of the sixty selected for inclusion. At the Claremont School of Theology, Griffin had been an advocate of process theology, a religious metaphysics based on the teachings of the late-Victorian English-born philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essential idea of process theology seems to be to pull together and integrate the various different aspects of human existence—religion, science, art—into a single coherent explanation. It is, in a sense, suspicious of “facts,” seeking instead to capture the experience of change, which makes one wonder whether a Henry Lincoln or a Michael Baigent might not have been very much at home in Griffin’s Center for Process Studies in Claremont, where the professor remained codirector even after retirement, pleasantly running down his years in a town (annual average temperature 63 degrees Fahrenheit) nicknamed the “City of Trees and Ph.D.’s.”
Then along came 9/11, or, rather, along came 9/11 conspiracy theories on the Internet. As Griffin told it to the San Francisco Chronicle, he was at first skeptical. “I can remember my exact words . . . I said, ‘I don’t think that even the Bush administration could perpetrate such a thing.’ ” The spark that helped him change his mind was provided by a “fellow professor” who sent Griffin an e-mail with links to 9/11 conspiracy websites. “Knowing her to be a sensible person,” Griffin later wrote, “I looked up some of the material on the Internet.” What he found was a timeline from an “independent researcher,” Paul Thompson, which highlighted the failure of the U.S. military to scramble planes to intercept the hijacked aircraft. After that, wrote Griffin, “I happened to read” Gore Vidal’s book Dreaming War, “which pointed me” to The War on Freedom by Nafeez Ahmed, “an independent researcher in England.” Griffin also discovered the writings of “French researcher” Thierry Meyssan, which argued that no plane had ever hit the Pentagon.12
In other words, Griffin, the dispassionate scholar, didn’t go out looking for conspiracies; they came looking for him. OK, he was inclined to be very critical of the administration, but he was skeptical nonetheless about the idea of an inside job. But then things happened or pointed him in certain directions. Of course, another kind of skeptic might observe that there were certain other directions, such as those in which researchers debunked conspiracy theories, that Griffin was obviously not pointed in. In any case, the professor’s retirement was over before it had begun.
The first fruit of Griffin’s studies was his book The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004). This turned out to be one of those rare works where the reality of the book exceeds the purported ambition. Griffin stated that he sought merely to raise “disturbing questions” about the accepted version of the events of 9/11, with the aim of persuading Americans that a full inquiry would be justified. He was not himself arguing that there had been a conspiracy, but that the problems raised by certain researchers and critics needed an answer. “I have not independently verified the accuracy of this evidence,” he admitted, “I claim only that these revisionists have presented a strong prima facie case for official complicity . . . If a significant portion of the evidence summarized here holds up, the conclusion that the attacks of 9/11 succeeded because of official complicity would become virtually inescapable.”13
The New Pearl Harbor was greeted in certain circles with something approaching rapture. “A courageously impeccable work . . . Griffin painstakingly marshals the evidence pro and con, and follows where it leads,” wrote a professor of philosophy and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Where it led, according to the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at Berkeley, was to “demonstrate a high level of probability that the Bush administration was complicit in allowing 9/11 to happen in order to further war plans that had already been made.” The professor of religion and political science at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania felt that Griffin had created “a list of unresolved puzzles strongly suggestive of some sort of culpable complicity by U.S. officials in the event.”
This last comment gave the game away. A list of unresolved puzzles isn’t really suggestive of anything other than a lack of resolution, unless you think you know the answers. Griffin’s book, far from being a dispassionate look at the conflicting evidence, was in fact a lengthy argument in favor of a conspiracy theory implicating the U.S. government in the murder of its own citizens. Griffin simply hadn’t decided which conspiracy theory he favored. The comment in the paperback edition of The New Pearl Harbor by British former government minister Michael Meacher, that Griffin’s technique was “to raise questions fearlessly and then test possible answers rigorously against all the available evidence,” was misplaced. In fact, although Griffin’s work did include some critical analyzes of the official version, at no point did he subject the claims of the revisionists to the same scrutiny, or indeed any real scrutiny at all. He bought the whole shop.
Almost immediately, The New Pearl Harbor filled a large gap in 9/11 conspiracism. Its author, with his conventional clothes, soft and rather boring voice, and low-key didacticism, was the antithesis of a swivel-eyed Idaho conspiracy nut. Possessing the easy authority of the teacher who has been lecturing to the slightly inferior for several decades, he appealed to the middle-aged professionals—the doctors, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and academics (often retired)—who felt sidelined by Republican administrations. At meetings from Santa Rosa, California, to West Hartford, Connecticut, Griffin received standing ovations from some of America’s best-educated people, after he had finished his speech with a peroration like this: “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. The welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed.”14
This was conspiracism for the most delicate of constitutions, and Griffin was generous. After The New Pearl Harbor came The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (2006), Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to “Popular Mechanics” and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (2007), 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Con
gress and the Press (2008), and The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up and the Exposé (2008).
Fairly soon, David Ray Griffin had been nicknamed the “dean” of the 9/11 Truth movement, the man who seemed to give to the assortment of geeks, teenagers, far leftists, far rightists, strange millionaires, and perpetual dissidents composing the coalition that characteristic they lacked above all—gravitas. Yet Griffin’s books all exhibit the same general and fatal tendency: lofty incredulity about the official accounts of September 11 and tolerant credulity toward the arguments of anyone challenging them. In itemizing the critiques of the accepted account and in seeming to endorse them, Griffin generally ignored the problem that most, if not all, of these arguments had been rebutted, and usually by people with far better qualifications or expertise than those who promoted them. The magazine Popular Mechanics, for example, created a team of nine researchers, who consulted more than seventy experts and professionals in the fields of engineering and aviation with the goal of examining the sixteen most common claims about 9/11 made by conspiracists. The result, said the editors, was that the magazine was able to debunk every single one by dint of “hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense.”15 One example should suffice to demonstrate the ease with which Griffin’s contentions can be demolished: the question of what exactly hit the Pentagon.
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Page 28
