The Eleventh Day

Washington and is shot down by a U.S. Air Force jet over Pennsylvania.” The three original Boeings were flown “by remote control out over the Atlantic,” and then scuttled.

That is but a taste of the sort of theory many could read and some apparently believed—though there are more, yet more bizarre. Who are the theories’ proponents? Dewdney is professor emeritus of computer science and adjunct professor of biology at Canada’s University of Western Ontario. North holds a Ph.D. in history. Vialls, now deceased, said he was a “British aeronautical engineer.” Valentine has described herself as a writer, researcher, and human rights activist. Meyer apparently holds a double honors degree in philosophy and mathematics from a leading Australian university.

There is more one should know about some of them. North describes himself as a Christian Reconstructionist and the magazine he edits as “an attempt to apply biblical principles to economic analysis.” Cuba, Vialls declared as late as 2004, would “soon be used as ‘point man’ in a grand plan to deny American warships and other vessels safe transit through the Gulf of Mexico.… America will collapse in six months.” The Southeast Asia tsunami that same year, he theorized, was a “nuclear war crime.”

Carol Valentine, who ran a “Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum,” claimed that Branch Davidian followers did not perish by fire in Texas in 1993. They had, rather, been secretly shot earlier, or shot while trying to escape, by the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command.

Peter Meyer, for his part, cheerfully acknowledges having indulged over a long period in the use of psychedelic drugs—including LSD. He developed computer software for “Timewave Zero,” a program illustrating a “theory of time, history and the end of history” as revealed “by an alien intelligence.” He reportedly “hopes to be present at the end of history in 2012.”

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AND THEN THERE ARE the books. As early as spring 2002 came one with a title that said it all— 9/11: The Big Lie. This was the work of Thierry Meyssan, a Frenchman whose biographical note describes him as president of the Voltaire Network for freedom of speech and secretary of the Radical Left Party. According to the book’s cover, The Big Lie was “based exclusively on documents published by the White House and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as statements by American civilian and military leaders.”

Meyssan’s book was a best-seller, reportedly selling more than 200,000 copies in France and half a million internationally, and eighteen editions in other foreign languages. It was largely lambasted by the media in the West—ignored at first in France—and praised elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In the United Arab Emirates, where Meyssan was invited to speak, he was introduced as a man “with the spirit of an investigative journalist, of a thinker.” Al Watan, a prominent newspaper in Saudi Arabia, trumpeted the book on its front page.

The idea that the Pentagon had been struck by a Boeing airliner on 9/11, Meyssan claimed, was “nonsense,” a “loony tale.” “Only a missile of the United States armed forces transmitting a friendly code,” he wrote, “could enter the Pentagon’s airspace without provoking a counter-missile barrage.”

The attacks on the World Trade Center had occurred “under the eye of the intelligence services, who observed but did not intervene.” And: “We are asked to believe that these hijackers were Arab-Islamic militants.… The first question that should be asked is ‘Who profits?’ ” Meyssan asked whether the ensuing FBI investigation was “meant to hide from view domestic American culpability and justify the military operations to follow.” The 9/11 attacks, he concluded, were “masterminded from inside the American state apparatus.”

That, the “truth” camp’s dominant message, has been gotten over—couched in beguilingly moderate tones —by a theologian. David Ray Griffin, professor of religion and theology at Claremont School of Theology in California for more than three decades, has churned out no fewer than nine books on 9/11. He has become known as the “dean” of opposition to 9/11 orthodoxy.

Griffin makes stunning leaps, slipped in amidst phrases like “the evidence suggests” and “the many reasons to” in his books. The evidence on the destruction of the World Trade Center and other factors, he has said, “show that the attacks must have been planned by our own political and military leaders.” He is evidently a full-fledged MIHOP man.

If the engine of the movement has been the Internet, it is the Web documentary film Loose Change—through its several incarnations since 2005—that has carried the message to a vast audience. The film is a fricassee of factoids, its ingredients largely clips from broadcast footage, laced with the voices of skeptics and served up over about two hours. While the film does not hand down a verdict in as many words, it makes no secret of its producers’ belief in MIHOP. It is Ministry of Propaganda stuff delivered, ironically, via the Internet, the ultimate medium of free speech.

By mid-2010, the producers say, 125 million people had viewed Loose Change on Google alone. In the words of producer Korey Rowe, who served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, “This is our generation’s Kennedy assassination.” Originally made for some $2,000 and available free on the Internet, the film has since gone into edition after edition. The latest update cost $1 million, and writer-director Dylan Avery moved to Los Angeles to write a feature film script.

In its most recent, 2009, edition, the makers of Loose Change no longer bothered to veil its message. They changed the title to Loose Change 9/11—An American Coup. “America was hijacked on September 11, 2001,” an earnest voice intones at the end, “by a group of tyrants ready and willing to do whatever is necessary to keep their stranglehold on the United States of America. A group beyond any one man [a picture of President Bush appears on the screen], or any one administration [a picture of President Obama appears]. Until there is a new investigation into the events, we will not go away. We will not be silent. Ask questions. Demand answers.”

David Griffin, usually careful to appear judicious, academically careful, at one stage acted as script consultant for Loose Change. He has, moreover, been quoted as saying he is doing what he can “to get the cabal who engineered 9/11 for imperialistic and plutocratic reasons stopped before they do still more damage to our country and our planet.” The “cabal” he had in mind, Griffin had long since made clear, was the Bush administration.

Many who have voiced support for the professor, to one degree or another, have been educated, professional people. Richard Falk, Princeton University’s Milbank professor emeritus of international law—and currently the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories of Palestine—lent credibility to Griffin’s first book with a glowing foreword. Falk has written, “It is not paranoid to assume that the established elites of the American governmental structure have something to hide, and much to explain.”

PROFESSIONALS WITH IDEAS like Griffin’s have associated themselves with Internet groups reflecting their expertise—Scholars for 9/11 Truth, the Scientific Panel Investigating 9/11, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Veterans for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth, and so on. Such skeptics include men and women from differing fields of expertise, some distinguished, some even prominent. Here is a sample.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth, originally headed jointly by James Fetzer, now professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota—a specialist on the philosophy of science—and Steven Jones, professor emeritus of physics at Brigham Young University, focused specifically on the collapses. Following a series of disagreements and a split into two separate groups—with perhaps a thousand members between them—Fetzer and Jones offer differing perspectives.

According to Fetzer, members of his group “believe that the government not only permitted 9/11 to occur but may even have orchestrated these events to facilitate its political agenda.” Fetzer claimed that his group has “established beyond reasonable doubt that the Twin Towers were destroyed by a novel form of controlled demolition from the top down … and that, whatever may have hit the Pentagon, multiple lines of argument support the conclusion that it was not a Boeing 757.” Perhaps, he theorized, “high-tech weapons of the directed energy kind” were used against the Trade Center.

Dr. Jones has called for “discretion and discipline” and strict adherence to “the Scientific Method.” He, too, however, espouses the hypothesis that the Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition. He, too, asserts that 9/11 was an “inside job,” that “the case for accusing ill-trained Muslims of causing all the destruction on 9/11 … just does not add up.”

The academic doubters found apparently reputable allies in other walks of life. Glenn MacDonald, a former