David Ray Griffin is the elder statesman of the 9/11 Truth Movement; he comes across as a benevolent, well spoken academic, but a close examination of his rhetoric reveals otherwise.
People are right to question the official narrative of 9/11; they are right to question any government inquiry – methodology and findings. We know governments can’t be trusted, nor can their agents. People can also see something which is far different from what it appears.
Imagine you are walking down your high street, and on the other side of the road you see two big men attempting to force a small woman into a car. She is resisting and screaming but nobody is helping her; why are they ignoring this kidnapping? What you are actually seeing is two plainclothes police officers arresting a suspect who has jumped bail.
And when you see a plane crash into a building it is what?
During the OJ Simpson trial, a detective named Mark Fuhrman was asked about his attitude to blacks, in particular had he used the dreaded N word in the past ten years. Me? Of course not, I’d never do anything like that. Then a tape was produced on which he was heard to do exactly that. So all his evidence was tainted, right? In fact, the entire case against Simpson was a stitch up by racist police officers. Heck, the victims were probably still alive and had been relocated to Costa Rica as part of a top secret government disinformation programme.
This is the sort of twisted logic used by hard core 9/11 Truthers, and the fact that they have been able to recruit a number of dissenting academics and similar big names into their ranks does not alter this one whit.
Recently, David Ray Griffin appeared at the Toronto hearings into 9/11; his speech here was somewhat more reserved than this speech, which according to its credits was delivered on Octobert 3, 2004. At least one of the facts that he claims here was true is no longer true; this is the claim that never before in history have steel framed buildings collapsed because of fire – which can be found at about 10 minutes 10 seconds. See for example this refutation.
The claims relating to the free fall of the Twin Towers and Building 7 (including the manufactured controversy over Larry Silverstein) have likewise long been shown to have no basis in fact.
The 9/11 Truthers can’t be unaware of this, but they continue to peddle the nonsense that the Twin Towers couldn’t have collapsed as they did due to the plane crashes.
As well as contributing to the on-line Journal Of 9/11 Studies, Griffin has written a number of books on 9/11 including 9/11 And American Empire; The 9/11 Commission Report; The 9/11 Conspiracy; and 9/11 Contradictions. If their content is an amplification of his speeches, then frankly it is little wonder they have not been reviewed by the mainstream media.
It would serve no purpose to make an exhaustive analysis of his claims here, others have done so, but here are a few points.
The 9/11 Commission was the Bush Administration investigating itself.
If one accepts the dubious premise that people within the Bush Administration ordered 9/11, that claim is true. In Britain, an investigation of this nature would probably have been carried out by a High Court judge, as was the inquiry into serial killer Harold Shipman. While this particular inquiry was extremely thorough and left no stone unturned, any investigation involving the government or the legal authorities is subject to the claim or insinuation of whitewash, but as no less than 72 police officers lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks, and others – like James Zadroga – died years afterwards, one would have expected the NYPD to have left no stone unturned if there was any (sane) suggestion that anyone other than the hijackers was involved in these atrocities. In fact, we know there were, on the finance side. In his authoritative book on Al-Qaeda, Jason Burke estimates the cost of the entire operation at half a million dollars, less than the price of a small house in Central London.
In this earlier speech, Griffin makes several attempts at humour, which the audience appears to find humorous, but which aren’t in fact funny at all. He covers the claim that the ringleader of the gang, Mohamed Atta, is said to have eaten pork, drank alcohol and used prostitutes, things devout Moslems never do. Something else devout Moslems never do is commit indiscriminate mass murder, a fact that seems to have eluded him, but if he were to ask Sahib Bleher or David Pidcock – both Western converts to Islam – they would have put him in the picture.
Griffin even manages to cast suspicion on New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who said he knew the buildings were going to collapse. How could he know that, asks Griffin? Obviously, Giuliani didn’t know it, but even large buildings have a tendency to collapse when they are severely weakened by fire. Any intelligent 9 year old could have worked out there would be some sort of collapse of each building, from the point of impact, which would at the very least have brought down the floors above it.
They treated Giuliani like a hero – well, wasn’t he?
At around 26 minutes into his speech, Griffin asks why didn’t the Secret Service whisk George Bush out of the Florida school where he was spending the morning when they realised America was under attack? Then he points out that Dick Cheney did get this treatment. The obvious question is where was Dick Cheney? Right!
In fact, there was some indeed some concern that the President may have been targeted at the school, and he was rushed out fairly promptly; furthermore, his plane took off in the opposite direction because there were unidentified people at the other end of the runway.
The gullibility of this esteemed emeritus professor knows no bounds; not only does he believe a missile rather than a plane hit the Pentagon, but he makes much of the FBI turning up and confiscating inter alia all video footage of it. Why would they do this? Because it was evidence, dummy! Neither the Feds nor the police like outsiders – including film crews – walking all over their crime scenes. One of the problems the authorities face in the aftermath of such tragedies is trophy hunters and others (ghouls) who turn up to collect wreckage.
In view of some of the piffle peddled by 9/11 Truthers, another genuine concern might be the planting of evidence.
The most curious thing about all these great exposers of the US Government black operation known as 9/11, is that they all appear to be making a comfortable living out of it, and the hidden hand much beloved of conspiracy theorists hardly affects them at all. For example, when Jesse Ventura made a documentary about 9/11, he was welcomed at the Pentagon. Griffin has had no problem either publishing or distributing his books; Alex Jones, who makes such a big thing about all manner of government cover ups gets a fair amount of mainstream media coverage. True, things may have been different thirty years ago, but the 9/11 Truthers are able to hold meetings freely, while some people are not.
Anyone who holds a dissenting view of AIDS will be frozen out of academia; anyone who holds a dissenting view of race and intelligence – ie all men are dumb but some races are dumber than others – will be subjected to vilification throughout the halls of academe, and may even be physically attacked; while anyone attempting to disseminate a dissenting opinion about the Holocaust may be dragged into court and even imprisoned; this has actually happened in Germany, and even in Canada, and adherents of these causes are not necessarily conspiracy theorists, some of them simply believe that the establishment and media of the Western so-called democracies constitutes an enormous lie machine – as do the 9/11 Truthers – but clearly the powers-that-be find some lies more intolerable than others.
The core of truth at the heart of 9/11 is that the tragedy has been exploited to pursue policies – both foreign and domestic – that have been disastrous for the United States, for the West, and to some extent for the whole world. If America isn’t yet a police state as far as the general public is concerned, anyone who falls foul of the Federal Government big time is likely to be trampled over, dragged into court, denied due process, and if not incarcerated for years, then certainly to face financial and professional ruin. Why that hasn’t happened to David Ray Griffin or Alex (if they kill me they’ll make me a martyr) Jones is perhaps the greatest 9/11 mystery of all.
[The above op-ed was first published September 14, 2011.]
Back To Digital Journal Index