Enough conspiracy theories, already

Progressive, The, Oct, 2006 by Matthew Rothschild

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 By David Ray Griffin. Second edition. Olive Branch Press. 254 pages. $15.

The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions By David Ray Griffin Olive Branch Press. 339 pages. $18.

Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action By David Ray Griffin Westminster John Knox Press. 246 pages. $17. 95.

Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts By the editors of Popular Mechanics Hearst Books. 170 pages. $14.95.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."--Carl Sagan

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."--Napoleon

At almost every progressive gathering where there's a question and answer period, someone or other vehemently raises 9/11 and espouses a grand conspiracy theory.

If you haven't had the pleasure of enduring these rants, please let me share.

Here's what the conspiracists believe:

9/11 was an inside job.

Members of the Bush Administration ordered it, not Osama bin Laden.

The Twin Towers fell because the Bush Administration got agents to plant explosives at the base of those buildings.

Building 7, another high-rise at the World Trade Center that fell on 9/11, also came down by planted explosives.

The Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77 but by a smaller plane or a missile.

And the Pennsylvania plane did not crash as a result of the revolt by the passengers but was brought down by the military.

I'm amazed at how many people give credence to these theories. Everyone's an engineer. People who never even took one college science course can now hold forth at great length on how the buildings at the World Trade Center could not possibly have collapsed in the way they did and why the Pentagon could not have been struck by that American Airlines jet.

Problem is, some of the best engineers in the country have studied these questions and come up with perfectly logical, scientific explanations for what happened.

The American Society of Civil Engineers and FEMA conducted an in-depth investigation of the World Trade Center. The team members included the director of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the senior fire investigator for the National Fire Protection Association, professors of fire safety, and leaders of some of the top building design and engineering firms.

The investigation concluded that massive structural damage caused by the crashing of the aircrafts into the buildings, combined with the subsequent fires, "were sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures."

The National Institute of Standards and Technology did its own forty-three-volume study of the Twin Towers. It also concluded that a combination of the crash and the subsequent fires brought the towers down: "In each tower, a different combination of impact damage and heat-weakened structural components contributed to the abrupt structural collapse."

Popular Mechanics, first in its March 2005 cover story and now in its expanded book, Debunking 9/11 Myths, takes apart the most popular contentions of the conspiracists. "In every case we examined, the key claims made by conspiracy theorists turned out to be mistaken, misinterpreted, or deliberately falsified," the book says.

I made a few calls myself, including to Gene Corley, who conducted the American Society of Civil Engineers/FEMA study, and to Mete Sozen, structural engineering professor at Purdue, who was one of the principal authors of "The Pentagon Building Performance Report" of January 2003, which was done under the auspices of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Structural Engineering Institute. I also contacted engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the country, and none of them puts any stock in the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Of course, any conspiracy theorist worth his or her salt will claim that all these people are in on the plot.

And that I, a Rothschild no less, am in on it, too.

Get over it.

The guru of the 9/11 conspiracy movement is David Ray Griffin, an emeritus professor not of engineering but of philosophy and theology at the Claremont School of Theology. First in The New Pearl Harbor and then in The 9/11 Commission Report." Omissions and Distortions and now in Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, Griffin has peddled his conspiracy theory.

He's not alone, of course. A myriad of websites devote themselves to this subject, and several films are circulating on it, including Loose Change. There's even a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which insists "the World Trade Center was almost certainly brought down by controlled demolitions." Most prominent among these is Steven E. Jones, professor of physics and astronomy at Brigham Young University, whose primary field is not engineering but cold fusion, according to Debunking 9/11 Myths.

The conspiracy theories are particularly popular on the left for a couple of understandable reasons. It's undeniable that Bush has ceaselessly seized on 9/11 to justify his warmaking abroad and his repressive policies at home. And then there's the notorious phrase in a document of the Project for the New American Century, the fount of neoconservativism, whose members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and a host of other hawks who flew into the Bush Administration. That line, from the September 2000 study "Rebuilding America's Defenses," argues for transforming the U.S. military posture into a much more aggressive one, and for expanding the Pentagon's budget to reach $500 billion a year. The authors recognized that this transformation would be difficult to achieve quickly "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor."