Books : 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press

Rating: - Facts and Gaps
In his book, Breakpoint (2007), Richard A. Clarke (President Bush's former top anti-terrorist adviser and now a novelist), tells a tale, set in the near future, about an attack on America's cyber-infrastructure. All the authorities immediately assume that China is behind the attack and proceed to find evidence supporting this view. (This aspect of the plot is reminiscent of Clarke's report that, after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld asked Clarke to find evidence to support the view that Iraq was behind these attacks.) The heroes of the novel are a small band of investigators, under the guidance of a wise-old counter-terrorist expert, who are cautioned on two occasions to ignore the common wisdom and stick to the facts. The group is told: "facts, gaps, theories, analysis," in that order, and warned that this might be a "false flag operation"--a domestic act of terrorism designed to look as if it was coming from outside the United States. As America's foremost expert on terrorism, Clarke knows all too well that things are often not as they seem and that large agencies, including the press, tend to engage in group- think. And if one is theory-driven, then one will find the facts to support that theory, and facts that do not fit that theory are overlooked.

To use the language of Clarke's novel, Griffin's new book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press, sticks mainly to "facts" and "gaps," or more precisely, facts and contradictory facts. Anyone who reads this book will see that the facts do not add up and do not support the dominant theory. For example, high-ranking government officials have explained that the reason that these attacks were successful is because prior to 9/11, no one could have imagined that civilian aircraft could be used to strike domestic targets. There is abundant evidence to the contrary. In October 2000, Pentagon officials carried out an emergency drill to prepare for the possibility that a commercial airliner might crash into the Pentagon. In May 2002, two medical clinics in the Pentagon held training exercises involving a scenario in which an aircraft was crashed into the Pentagon and in July of that year, just two months prior to the actual attacks, NORAD planned an exercise called Amalgam Virgo 02 that would simulate a scenario in which airliners hijacked within the United States would be used as weapons. So there is a "gap" between these facts and the statement of many high ranking officials, including President Bush. These facts do not support the theory that the attacks succeeded because the military had not foreseen the possibility of such attacks.

There are also discrepancies regarding the claims about when NORAD was alerted to the hijackings. For three years, NORAD officials said that they had been notified about United flight 175 at 8:43 a.m. In the 9/11 Commission report that time stands as 9:03--a twenty minute gap that is the difference between having enough time or not to intercept the flight. The dominant theory is that fighter planes were not scrambled to intercept flight 175 because they did not know it was hijacked until 9:03, but the facts do not support this.

And then there is Ted Olson's claim, made on at least two occasions, that he received two phone calls from his wife, Barbara, who was aboard the hijacked plane that flew into the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission Report states that, in all probability, he received four calls, not just two, while the FBI testified in a court of law that phone records show that Barbara Olson made one unsuccessful attempt to call her husband. The records, they say, show that her call lasted zero seconds. Who are we to believe, Ted Olson, the 9/11 Commission Report, or the FBI? Certainly they cannot all be correct. Insofar as the dominant theory is that of the 9/11 Commission's, then Ted Olson and the FBI must be lying. Or perhaps the FBI is correct and the 9/11 Commission got it wrong.

Griffin outlines twenty-two other instances of facts and contradictions that are in direct opposition with each other. In order for a theory to be credible it must internally consistent and explain known occurrences. The dominant theory is inadequate on both accounts.

Some will say that although Griffin does not spend much time developing theories in this book, he has in previous books, and therefore this book is already theory-laden even if it is hidden. Be that as it may, the facts remain. There are sworn testimonies, eye-witness accounts, pictures, videos, and reports, and if the dominant theory cannot explain these, then there is a need for a new theory that does.

It would be interesting for Richard Clarke to write a review of Griffin's book and to see what he makes of all the facts that contradict the theory developed in the 9/11 Commission Report.

---

Rating: - When a person constantly changes their story, doesn't it usually indicate they're lying?
As is announced with the promotion of this book, 9/11 Contradictions does not delve into possible alternative scenarios with respect to 9/11. It deals purely with internal contradictions within the official account of 9/11. This is already a quintessentially important point. Many people think, in simple black and white terms, of "official story" versus "conspiracy theories." This very thinking numbs the average mind into believing, if having not done the research, that there is "one" official story versus the "many" conspiracy theories. This in of itself is a fallacy, because though there is indeed one official story in the generic sense ("19 Muslim extremists attacked us because they hate our freedoms"), this story comes apart at the seams because the official accounts and testimonies contradict each other (and sometimes themselves) in so many ways. As this text deals only with internal contradictions within the official story, congress and the press can not be excused for not asking these questions out of fear of being tarnished with the "conspiracy theorist" tag in the pejorative sense of the term.

When a child lies to avoid getting in trouble, he often has to change his story in order to cover for himself. This is often because he didn't see a logistical problem with the first lie. Sometimes, the child doesn't even realize he's not keeping his story straight until the adult points out the inconsistencies in the story, at which time the child thinks (or says aloud) "Uhhh-ohh. I didn't think of that..."

With the 9/11 official account, the sources who endorse the official narrative have changed their story time and again. Perhaps they are confident that these inconsistencies will be erased down history's memory hole, but they are wrong; the internet is the greatest invention since the printing press when it comes to the exchange and rapid flow of information. For example, when Bush was notified of the second plane strike, we all know that he stayed in the classroom for at least 7 minutes and at the school for another half hour; however, on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, the White House issued a revisionist account, according to which Bush got up and left the room only seconds later. This revisionist account was clearly an attempt to squash uncomfortable questions about why the Secret Service did not whisk the President away, as indeed was the case with Dick Cheney, who was in the White House. The hard question, which journalists should be asking, is why the head of Bush's Secret Service did not whisk Bush away unless he somehow know that the Florida school was not a target. Perhaps in putting out their revisionist account about the Florida classroom, the White House never anticipated someone like Michael Moore to break through into the mainstream and make Bush's true behavior widely known.

Some information I was not previously aware of involves multiple changes of story by the Florida classroom teacher, Sandra Kay Daniels. Clearly she knew the truth, but in conjunction with the White House's 2002 revisionist account of Bush's behavior, Mrs. Daniels also supported the story that the President left almost immediately. Even more interestingly suspicious, she presented two different accounts, within two days, to support this revisionist history. According to an LA Times story on the one-year anniversary, Mrs. Daniels said: "I knew something was up when President Bush didn't pick the book up and participate in the lesson... He said, 'Mrs. Daniels, I have to leave now. I am going to leave Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan to do the speech for me.' Looking at his face, you knew something was wrong. He shook my hand and left." However, the next day, a NY Times article told a very different story, based on a 9/11/02 interview with Mrs. Daniels. In this account, it was a Secret Service agent, not Andy Card, who informed Bush of the second strike, and this agent said "Where can we get to a television?" Mrs. Daniels then reportedly said: "The President bolted right out of here and told me, 'Take over.' I knew something serious had happened, and then a short while later he came back and said, 'What we thought was an airline accident turned out to be a terrorist hijack.'" Mrs. Daniels even elaborated on the suddenness of Bush's disappearance: "My kids were so happy that morning - imagine the President sitting there shooting the breeze, and then poof, suddenly, he's gone." So even in support of Bush leaving the room quickly, Mrs. Daniels gives two contrasting scenarios. Why the multiple revisionism? Who is telling Mrs. Daniels what to say? What is being covered up?

Another point which for me is not new is the issue of Barbara Olson's calls to then solicitor-general Ted Olson. Mrs. Olson's supposed call is among the foundational cement in the definitiveness of the official account of 9/11, whereby airliners were hijacked by terrorists. Mr. Olson first claimed, on 9/11 itself, that Barbara phoned him twice, from a cell phone. On Sept. 14, however, Olson told FOX's Hannity & Colmes program that she called the department of justice, collect. He then speculated that this was because she did not have her credit cards with her and therefore couldn't make a normal-way call. This scenario, of course, would be consistent with not a cell phone call but a seatback airphone. Astonishingly enough, Mr. Olson changed his story again later that same night on Larry King, reverting back to cell phone. He said that the second call went dead because "signals coming from cell phones from airplanes don't work that well." Two months later, at a memorial service, Mr. Olson flip-flopped AGAIN, settling with airphone. Why so many self-contradictions on Mr. Olson's part? Not only does Olson contradict himself, he is contradicted by other sources, one of whom is the FBI. The FBI acknowledged, via documents released after the Moussaoui trial, that there were only two on-board phone call attempts by Barbara Olson, and these were unable to connect and therefore lasted "zero seconds." This SHOULD be front page news around the world. Where are our investigative journalists?

9/11 Contradictions lays out literally hundreds of internal contradictions within the official account of 9/11, some blatant, some subtle; but every one of these contradictions is important in that each undermines the credibility of the whole story, and journalists, as our "Fourth Estate," have an obligation, a responsibility, to look into these inconsistencies. Unfortunately, the First Amendment seems to only be alive and well on the internet and alternative media, for the corporate-controlled media has not looked into even one of these inconsistencies. Indeed when Michael Moore exposed Bush's classroom behavior to the mainstream, many pundits in the corporate media hopped onto the "Michael Moore is un-American!" bandwagon. The corporate media has clearly lost the trust of much of the American people for not asking the tough questions leading into the Iraq war; questions which, had they been vigorously addressed, might have averted the war from the get go. For this, hard 9/11 questions notwithstanding, they are already going to be remembered in history as the generation of media that failed its citizens. Whereas we look back to the days of Edward R. Murrow as an era of journalistic integrity, we will look back on this era's journalism with shame. Indeed, TV news commentators who spew forth the idea that 9/11 Truthers should be tased and kept in secret prisons will be viewed, in a couple decades, the way we now view Dr. Goebbels. However, the media just might begin to redeem themselves if they wake up and begin asking the hard questions about 9/11, and should they choose to take this red pill, Griffin's works are the perfect arsenal toward restoring true democracy in the United States.

---

Rating: - A compelling case for reframing the war on terror
Griffin uses rationality's purest tools to throw light on to the fraught territory of 9/11: clarity and reason.

His contradictions are undeniable, and cry out for responses from the corporate colossus of the mass media and the vast miasma of the military-industrial-banking consortium.

Those who call for 9/11 researchers to forget it and move on are precisely those who prevent the world moving on. The whole affair has to be reopened and the hideous secrets of the war machine revealed.

---

Rating: - 25 Irreconcilable Contradictions: The Crumbling Facade of the 9/11 Story
Finally, we have a book about September 11, 2001 that politicians and journalists can publicly discuss without fear of lending credence to "conspiracy theories". This book advances no theories. It simply exposes 25 astonishing internal contradictions that will haunt the public story of this unparalleled event for all time.

Until now, the persistent and disturbing questions surrounding the 9/11 issue have confused and alienated journalists and politicians, because:

1)The technical issues regarding the collapse of the towers, the failure of the military to intercept the flights, and the relatively minor damage to the Pentagon have been considered too complex for analysis in the media.

The present book requires no technical expertise from the reader, because each readable chapter revolves around one simple internal contradiction inherent in the public story. "If Jones says `P' and Smith says `Not P', we can all recognize that something must be wrong, because both statements cannot be true."

2)Many who have doubted the official story have offered alternative theories which have been dismissed as "conspiracy theories" by a press which places a high value on its own credibility.

This book offers no alternative theories to explain the contradictions within the public story. It simply presents the glaring contradictions that have never been probed by Congress or the media, for the reasons given above.

3)The 9/11 issue is six years old, journalists are busy people, and the world has moved on.

Though six years have passed, this matter is by no means closed, nor is the trail cold. "The accepted story about 9/11 has been used to increase military spending, justify wars, restrict civil liberties, and exalt the executive branch of the government." Indeed, this reviewer notes, the public story has recently been challenged in foreign forums (Japan Parliament, January 10, 2008, and at the European Parliament building in Brussels, February 26, 2008). Even the 9/11 Commissioners themselves have cast doubt on the credibility of the Commission Report in their January 2, 2008 New York Times article, "Stonewalled by the CIA."

Let us turn to the contradictions. But first, to quote Professor Griffin:

"Within the philosophy of science, there are two basic criteria
for discriminating between good and bad theories. First, a theory
should not be inconsistent with any of the relevant facts....
Second, it must be self-consistent, devoid of any internal contradictions. If a theory contains an internal contradiction, it is an unacceptable theory."

Unacceptable, for example, is the following internal contradiction, quoted verbatim from the chapter summaries that have been helpfully provided at the end of the book for consultation by truth-seeking investigative journalists and members of Congress:

"With regard to the identity of the plane spotted over the
White House around the time of the Pentagon strike: The military's denial that it was a military plane is contradicted by CNN footage of the plane's flight, which showed, as former military officers have agreed, that it was an Air Force E-4B." [Reviewer note: "The E-4B serves as the National Airborne Operations Center for the president, secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff or JCS." Cited from a current US Air Force factsheet.]

In an earlier book, "The New Pearl Harbor", Griffin had already noted that with regard to military flight interceptions, Standard Operating Procedures had been inexplicably dropped on September 11th. This reviewer surmises that because a complex mesh of defense systems could not have been fully disabled without coordination from a high military level, it was logical for Dr. Griffin to open the current volume by asking questions that the 9/11 Commission failed to ask: what were President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and General Richard B. Myers, Acting Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doing that morning? In each case, inexplicable contradictions emerge in the reports of their whereabouts---and the same applied to Vice President Dick Cheney.

In Part II, Griffin meticulously examines the disparities in the reported times at which the military was notified about the erratic behaviors of Flights 11, 175, 93, and 77. In every case, the striking contradictions he unearths are shown to require full and comprehensive investigation.

In Part III, probing questions regarding the pre-9/11 habits and tastes of the alleged hijackers are closely pursued through early press reports, with the astonishing revelation that they had taken up Western sexual and drinking practices, and could certainly not be characterized as devout Muslims ready to meet their maker. The contradictions revealed in the investigation of cell phone and airphone reports of their actions on the planes is nothing short of brilliant, negating as they do, the entire phenomenon of the aggregate onboard story.

Part IV deals with the strangely incompetent pilot, Hani Hanjour, who flew a giant airliner in an acrobatic dive, like a spiralling paper dart, into the Pentagon at ground level---a feat which a growing number of experienced pilots claim to have been impossible for anyone to do.

Part V deals with the towers themselves, including advance knowledge of their collapses, plus the extraordinary oral testimonies of dozens of firefighters who reported, among other things, massive explosions in the sub-basements of the buildings: a 50-ton hydraulic press reduced to rubble; a 300-lb. steel door wrinkled up like a piece of aluminum foil.

Each one of the 25 carefully researched contradictions represents a crumbling brick in the official facade that has been erected to shield the world from the truth about 9/11.

As a writer myself, and as a retired professional librarian of 30 years, it was a privilege to critique and provide bibliographic support for Dr. Griffin's book, and for the extensive research materials supplied in the footnotes. Throughout this process, I was able to witness firsthand the precise, methodical, and rigorous standards to which Dr. Griffin works. It is to be hoped that the exceptional quality and responsibility evident in his work will inspire people in Congress and the media to rise to the standards he sets with regard to this pivotal international issue.

---

Rating: - Griffin Takes Powerful New Approach to 9/11 Truth
9/11 CONTRADICTIONS by David Ray Griffin is the fifth of his books to examine the official account of the events of September 11, 2001. This brilliant and highly readable book takes a new yet simple approach to the truth about 9/11. It focuses entirely on contradictory statements made by members of the Bush administration, government departments and agencies, and official bodies such as the 9/11 Commission. All the statements that Griffin examines are official claims in direct conflict with other official claims. How could this be? Why would the government keep changing "the official story"? The public, of course, is expected to take all the statements as incontrovertibly true, yet they directly conflict with one another.

And why, if the government pronouncements are contradictory, haven't members of Congress and the mainstream media launched investigations to determine which are true and which are false, and to ask why are obvious falsehoods about the events of 9/11 being promulgated by the government? I say "obvious falsehoods" because, as Griffin explains in the Preface, "If [Transportation Secretary Norman] Mineta said "P," that is a fact. If the 9/11 Commission said "not P," that is a fact. And it is a fact that "P" and "not P" cannot both be true" (p. viii). The subtitle, "An Open Letter to Congress and the Press," indicates Griffin's hope that the juxtaposition of the contradictory claims the book provides will stimulate such investigations. But the book is really intended for the public at large, and its clear focus makes it the easiest to read of all Griffin's books on 9/11. Because of its relative simplicity it is a perfect introduction to the subject.

Drawing on government publications, media reports, testimony from the 9/11 Commission hearings, oral histories from the Fire Department of New York, and other official sources, Griffin documents masterfully 25 of the most serious contradictions, divided into five parts:

"Part I. Questions about Bush Administration and Pentagon Leaders," reveals the contradictory claims about the activities of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Richard Myers, Donald Rumsfeld and Ted Olson. In this part Griffin shows that Bush's long stay at the Florida school was initially confirmed and later denied by the White House, that various government spokespersons and the 9/11 Commission could not agree on where Cheney, Myers and Rumsfeld were at key times that morning, and that DOJ Solicitor General Ted Olson's claims to have received phone calls from his wife on Flight 77 were directly contradicted by the DOJ's FBI.

"Part II. Questions about the US Military," explores the many contradictions within government claims about when the military was alerted to the emergencies on the flights, whether the military could have shot down Flight 93, and whether it had envisioned 9/11-type attacks prior to that day.

"Part III. Questions about Osama bin Laden & the Hijackers," examines the contradictions in official claims about the religious devotion of the alleged hijackers, where the luggage with the Arabic-language flight manuals, attributed to Mohamed Atta, was found, whether cell phone calls from the flights provided evidence of hijackers, and the existence of hard evidence for Osama bin Laden's responsibility.

"Part IV. Questions about the Pentagon," spotlights contradictions in the official account of Hani Hanjour's flying skills, what caused the large hole in the interior C Ring wall of the building, and whether a sophisticated US military reconnaissance plane was overhead during the attack.

"Part V. Questions about the World Trade Center," exposes the contradictions in Rudy Giuliani's account of his foreknowledge of the catastrophic collapse of the Twin Towers, in the official claims about explosions in the towers and WTC 7 before they disintegrated, and in official statements concerning the presence of molten steel in the subbasements after the buildings came down.

When examined under Griffin's microscope, it becomes clear that the "official story" has kept changing over time, just like the stories criminals tell as they are interrogated. As holes in the government's explanations of the incomprehensible events opened up under questioning, to some degree from the press but primarily from the 9/11 truth movement, they were plugged by new claims. And virtually all of the new claims have been accepted by the press and Congress without asking how they could be true in light of the earlier, contradictory claims. You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that when the story keeps changing, doubt is cast on all of its versions. Any police investigator knows this, as should investigative journalists and elected representatives.

Of course, if Congress and the press won't do their jobs, it's up to the rest of us. With this authoritative dissection of the conflicting statements of the principal suspects, Griffin has done much of the pre-trial legwork already. The American public should not allow his selfless devotion to truth and justice to be squandered by inaction. This may be one of those things that representatives just cannot do for us.