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.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.
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. 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 . . . "
they present a good arguement, and i'm tempted to believe that bush would most definitly have done something like this to further his own agenda...but i really don't want to believe our government would do such a thing, i suppose it wouldn't be the firsrt time though.
it's just depressing that a government that's supposed to be an example for the rest of the world is as corrupt as those they take extreme steps to quelch
What bugs me about all the 9/11 conspiracy theories is the lengths they'll go to in order for their theories to get as far from what actually happened as possible. For example, if you look in the article I posted earlier, they talk about a guy trying to convince people that there weren't actually any planes crashing into the WTC. No planes... I don't know what that dude is smoking, but he must be paying primo for it.
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Topic: 1 in 3 suspect government involvement in 911 (Read 3262 times)