Conspiracy thinker muddies some real 911 questions

C-SPAN brings alternate 911 theorist to national TV


David Ray Griffin speaking in Madison, WI, broadcast on C-SPAN 2 on a Saturday afternoon

The perfect thing to do over my lunch on this rainy afternoon in Maine was to try to find some baseball on TV. No such luck, the Red Sox game at Fenway has been rained out. So totally by accident I ran into a 90-minute talk by David Ray Griffin, author of a couple of books that basically promote a variety of 911 conspiracy theories.

While I am not one to off-handedly dismiss such discussion, Griffin does bug me. His case is very provocative and deserves to be taken seriously. But it is weakened by uncritical acceptance that certain aspects of the 911 events are automatically indicative of a government conspiracy.

For example, he mentions the common conspiracy complaint that the ``pancake'' theory of how the twin towers collapsed is impossible because the buildings dropped in ``freefall''. As one of the thousands of websites promoting this idea describes it, this theory says that the buildings fell so fast because there was ``virtually no resistance from the floors below, or the 47 massive steel columns in the central core of each Tower. As many analysts agree this defies the laws of physics.''

Well, they did not exactly drop as if in freefall, and the rate they dropped is in fact totally plausible from a pancake theory of floor-by-floor failure. This is because the dynamic forces on a structure after it begins collapse, in the manner of the twin towers, are much, much bigger than the static forces while a structure vertically is at rest. When resting gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, the stopping forces that must be generated to prevent collapse due to required change of momentum compressed into very small periods of time quickly become enormous. Those who promote the conspiracy on the basis of ``physics'' I have often found to be sorely lacking in knowledge of physics.

To convince yourself of the huge increase of force from the static to the dynamic situation, set an egg on a hard table. The shell is just fine while sitting there still. Now drop the egg from a height of one inch or so. Cracks pretty easy, doesn't it!

Not only that, despite what Griffin says about the conspiracy of silence, I just cannot buy the notion that the utterly massive job of wiring the towers with explosives could be kept quiet. I'll remain agnostic, but you'll have a harder time convincing me of this one than you will of convincing me that there exists an interested God who actually listens to prayers.

Meanwhile, I do have my own deep questions about 911. The site I like that raises a ton of them is Paul Thompson's Center for Cooperative Research. To his credit, Griffin in his C-Span talk pointed listeners in Thompson's direction. I like this site because it relies exclusively on public information relayed by mainstream sources. There is so much information in Thompson's ``timelines'' that I could not even begin to discuss it all here.

I'll mention an area that has troubled me about the official 911 investigations and stories for a long time -- accounts of financing of the 911 terrorists. I have blogged about this before, shortly after the 911 Commission report was issued. Do read Thompson's essay on Saeed Sheikh. Afterward, you will not take a thing that is reported about the ``capture'' of terrorists and propaganda lines that usually begin with ``significant victory in the worldwide effort to destroy the al-Qaida'' without a grain of salt and a huge dose of skepticism.

Here's a good question to pile on to the ones I raised last July about al-Qaida paymaster ``Sheikh Saeed al Masri'' mentioned in the 911 Commission Report. About a month or two after the Commission report was published, a monograph concerning terrorist financing was issued by Commission staff. The monograph is completely inconsistent with the main report, in that no paymaster named Sheikh Saeed al Masri seems to exist. Instead, we learn from the monograph that

The hijackers received assistance in financing their activities from two facilitators based in the United Arab Emirates: Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a.k.a. Ammar al Baluchi (Ali), and Mustafa al Hawsawi. To a lesser extent, Binalshibh helped fund the plot from Germany.

As I asked in July with respect to Sheikh Saeed al Masri: Is ``Mustafa al Hawsawi'' another pseudonym for Saeed Sheikh? The Thompson article reveals a tangled web of names and misdirected media references to this terrorist, who possibly has deep connections to US intelligence through its long and sordid cooperative role with the Pakistani ISI. Untangling some of these threads would help illuminate the origins of 911. I am sure David Ray Griffin and I would agree that the public deserves such illumination.