Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (39 page)

A convert to Islam in the mid-1970s, Dewdney has written extensively on the near impossibility of Muslims’ being involved in suicide bombings, and to support this view evolved a detailed hypothesis—which he named Operation Pearl—as to what had really happened on September 11, 2001. For people who found the long version of this scenario “too convoluted to understand” or had “a slight comprehension problem,” Dewdney devised this synopsis:

Four commercial passenger jets (American Airlines Flights 11 and 77 and United Airlines Flights 93 and 175) take off and shortly after the pilots are ordered to land at a designated airport with a military presence. Two previously prepared planes (one a Boeing 767, painted up to look like a United Airlines jet and loaded with extra jet fuel) take off and are flown by remote control to intercept the flight paths of AA 11 and UA 175 so as to deceive the air traffic controllers. These (substituted) jets then fly toward Manhattan; the first crashes into the North Tower and (eighteen minutes later) the second crashes into the South Tower. A fighter jet (under remote control), or a cruise missile, crashes into the Pentagon. Back at the airport the (innocent) passengers from three of the Boeings are transferred to the fourth (UA 93). This plane takes off, flies toward Washington, and is shot down by a U.S. Air Force jet over Pennsylvania, eliminating the innocent witnesses to the diversion of the passenger planes. Under cover of darkness later that evening the other three Boeings are flown by remote control out over the Atlantic, are scuttled and end up in pieces at the bottom of the ocean.
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Enter the Dean

In 2004, two major changes happened in the life of American academic David Ray Griffin, longtime resident of Claremont, a prosperous medium-size college town hugging the mountains thirty miles east of Los Angeles. The first was that he retired after teaching for thirty-one years at the Claremont School of Theology and became professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology. The second was that he wrote a book effectively accusing the American government of murdering nearly three thousand of its own citizens so as to take over parts of the world, before pinning the blame on innocent Muslims.

As millennial theologians went, Griffin was a celebrated one. When a
Handbook of Christian Theologians
was compiled in the mid-1990s, Griffin was one of the sixty selected for inclusion. At the Claremont School of Theology, Griffin had been an advocate of process theology, a religious metaphysics based on the teachings of the late-Victorian English-born philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The essential idea of process theology seems to be to pull together and integrate the various different aspects of human existence—religion, science, art—into a single coherent explanation. It is, in a sense, suspicious of “facts,” seeking instead to capture the experience of change, which makes one wonder whether a Henry Lincoln or a Michael Baigent might not have been very much at home in Griffin’s Center for Process Studies in Claremont, where the professor remained codirector even after retirement, pleasantly running down his years in a town (annual average temperature 63 degrees Fahrenheit) nicknamed the “City of Trees and Ph.D.’s.”

Then along came 9/11, or, rather, along came 9/11 conspiracy theories on the Internet. As Griffin told it to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, he was at first skeptical. “I can remember my exact words . . . I said, ‘I don’t think that even the Bush administration could perpetrate such a thing.’ ” The spark that helped him change his mind was provided by a “fellow professor” who sent Griffin an e-mail with links to 9/11 conspiracy websites. “Knowing her to be a sensible person,” Griffin later wrote, “I looked up some of the material on the Internet.” What he found was a timeline from an “independent researcher,” Paul Thompson, which highlighted the failure of the U.S. military to scramble planes to intercept the hijacked aircraft. After that, wrote Griffin, “I happened to read” Gore Vidal’s book
Dreaming War
, “which pointed me” to
The War on Freedom
by Nafeez Ahmed, “an independent researcher in England.” Griffin also discovered the writings of “French researcher” Thierry Meyssan, which argued that no plane had ever hit the Pentagon.
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In other words, Griffin, the dispassionate scholar, didn’t go out looking for conspiracies; they came looking for him. OK, he was inclined to be very critical of the administration, but he was skeptical nonetheless about the idea of an inside job. But then things happened or pointed him in certain directions. Of course, another kind of skeptic might observe that there were certain other directions, such as those in which researchers debunked conspiracy theories, that Griffin was obviously not pointed in. In any case, the professor’s retirement was over before it had begun.

The first fruit of Griffin’s studies was his book
The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11
(2004). This turned out to be one of those rare works where the reality of the book exceeds the purported ambition. Griffin stated that he sought merely to raise “disturbing questions” about the accepted version of the events of 9/11, with the aim of persuading Americans that a full inquiry would be justified. He was not himself arguing that there had been a conspiracy, but that the problems raised by certain researchers and critics needed an answer. “I have not independently verified the accuracy of this evidence,” he admitted, “I claim only that these revisionists have presented a strong prima facie case for official complicity . . . If a significant portion of the evidence summarized here holds up, the conclusion that the attacks of 9/11 succeeded because of official complicity would become virtually inescapable.”
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The New Pearl Harbor
was greeted in certain circles with something approaching rapture. “A courageously impeccable work . . . Griffin painstakingly marshals the evidence pro and con, and follows where it leads,” wrote a professor of philosophy and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Where it led, according to the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at Berkeley, was to “demonstrate a high level of probability that the Bush administration was complicit in allowing 9/11 to happen in order to further war plans that had already been made.” The professor of religion and political science at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania felt that Griffin had created “a list of unresolved puzzles strongly suggestive of some sort of culpable complicity by U.S. officials in the event.”

This last comment gave the game away. A list of unresolved puzzles isn’t really suggestive of anything other than a lack of resolution, unless you think you know the answers. Griffin’s book, far from being a dispassionate look at the conflicting evidence, was in fact a lengthy argument in favor of a conspiracy theory implicating the U.S. government in the murder of its own citizens. Griffin simply hadn’t decided which conspiracy theory he favored. The comment in the paperback edition of
The New Pearl Harbor
by British former government minister Michael Meacher, that Griffin’s technique was “to raise questions fearlessly and then test possible answers rigorously against all the available evidence,” was misplaced. In fact, although Griffin’s work did include some critical analyzes of the official version, at no point did he subject the claims of the revisionists to the same scrutiny, or indeed any real scrutiny at all. He bought the whole shop.

Almost immediately,
The New Pearl Harbor
filled a large gap in 9/11 conspiracism. Its author, with his conventional clothes, soft and rather boring voice, and low-key didacticism, was the antithesis of a swivel-eyed Idaho conspiracy nut. Possessing the easy authority of the teacher who has been lecturing to the slightly inferior for several decades, he appealed to the middle-aged professionals—the doctors, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and academics (often retired)—who felt sidelined by Republican administrations. At meetings from Santa Rosa, California, to West Hartford, Connecticut, Griffin received standing ovations from some of America’s best-educated people, after he had finished his speech with a peroration like this: “It is already possible to know beyond a reasonable doubt one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists. The welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed.”
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This was conspiracism for the most delicate of constitutions, and Griffin was generous. After
The New Pearl Harbor
came
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions
(2005),
Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action
(2006)
, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to “Popular Mechanics” and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory
(2007),
9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press
(2008), and
The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up and the Exposé
(2008).

Fairly soon, David Ray Griffin had been nicknamed the “dean” of the 9/11 Truth movement, the man who seemed to give to the assortment of geeks, teenagers, far leftists, far rightists, strange millionaires, and perpetual dissidents composing the coalition that characteristic they lacked above all—gravitas. Yet Griffin’s books all exhibit the same general and fatal tendency: lofty incredulity about the official accounts of September 11 and tolerant credulity toward the arguments of anyone challenging them. In itemizing the critiques of the accepted account and in seeming to endorse them, Griffin generally ignored the problem that most, if not all, of these arguments had been rebutted, and usually by people with far better qualifications or expertise than those who promoted them. The magazine
Popular Mechanics
, for example, created a team of nine researchers, who consulted more than seventy experts and professionals in the fields of engineering and aviation with the goal of examining the sixteen most common claims about 9/11 made by conspiracists. The result, said the editors, was that the magazine was able to debunk every single one by dint of “hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense.”
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One example should suffice to demonstrate the ease with which Griffin’s contentions can be demolished: the question of what exactly hit the Pentagon.

The Hole That Was Too Small

“[Thierry] Meyssan’s arguments,” wrote Griffin in that first 2004 work, “combined with those of other critics, do provide many reasons for concluding that it was not Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon.”
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There were, Griffin argued, “insuperable difficulties” for the contention that the plane had crashed into the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense because “whatever did hit the Pentagon simply did not cause nearly enough destruction for the official story to be true.”
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This was evident largely because “the orifice created by the impact . . . was at most 18 feet in diameter. Is it not absurd to suggest that a Boeing 757 created and then disappeared into such a small hole? . . . Can anyone seriously believe that a 125-foot-wide airplane created and then went inside a hole less than 20 feet wide? . . . It was actually technically difficult to do as little damage to the Pentagon as was done.” Whatever else the evidence suggested, it “proves that it was not a Boeing 757 that went inside the Pentagon’s west wing.”
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There were not many precedents in 2004 for a large commercial airliner being flown deliberately and at speed into the side of a substantial building. So, throughout Griffin’s discussion of the crash of Flight 77, there was a notion, only partly expressed, of what he thought ought to have happened when plane and structure came together so cataclysmically. This idea seems to have been informed to an extent by
Tom and Jerry
cartoons in which the cat, Tom, when propelled through a wall, leaves his entire profile, whiskers and all, outlined in the brick. So, argued Griffin, if you had a plane, consisting of fuselage and wings, you broadly ought to see a hole equal to or larger than the shape of a fuselage with wings. Since that wasn’t what you saw, it couldn’t have been a plane, no matter what other evidence there was for it being just that.

In fact, Griffin’s measurements were wrong. The 2003 report into the Pentagon crash compiled by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Structural Engineering Institute gave a width of ninety feet to the hole but explained that the wings had been destroyed by the reinforced columns of the Pentagon as the plane entered the building and disintegrated. Mete Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, designed several simulations of the disaster, and their results were all consistent with Flight 77 striking the Pentagon.

Professor Sozen would have had difficulty otherwise, because the physical evidence for the official version, far from being absent was overwhelming. Fully 184 of the 189 people known to have been aboard Flight 77 or killed in the Pentagon, were identified (mostly through DNA testing) from remains found at the site. Wreckage from a large plane was also found, as one might expect, though few of the pieces were very big. There are photographs of parts of the plane on the lawn in front of the building, and pictures of engine and other parts inside. Aviation engineers from the website
Aerospaceweb.org
examined photographs of two pieces of wreckage from the Pentagon “and found them to be entirely consistent with the Rolls-Royce RB211-535 turbofan engine found on a Boeing 757 operated by American Airlines. The circular engine disk debris is just the right size and shape to match the compressor stages of the RB211, and it also shows evidence of being attached to a triple-shaft turbofan like the RB211.”
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