9/11 and the Mainstream Press by Dr. David Ray Griffin

Address given at the National Press Club
July 22, 2005

After the attacks of 9/11, I accepted the blowback thesis, according to which the attacks were payback for US foreign policy. About a year later, a colleague suggested that the attacks were orchestrated by our own government. My response was that I didn’t think the Bush administration---even the Bush administration---would do such a thing. A few months later, another colleague suggested that I look at a website containing the massive 9/11 timeline created by Paul Thompson. This timeline, I found, contained an enormous number of reports, all from mainstream sources, that contradicted the official account. This started a process that led me to publish The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, which summarized much of the evidence that had been discovered by previous researchers---evidence, I concluded, that provided a "strong prima facie case for official complicity."
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The Bush administration responded to the charges against it as a defense attorney would, declaring them too outrageous to be taken seriously. President Bush himself advised people, perhaps especially reporters, not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories." What the president really meant is that people should not tolerate any outrageous conspiracy theories except his own, according to which 19 Arab Muslims defeated the most powerful and sophisticated defense system in history and also defeated the laws of physics, bringing down three steel-frame building in a way that perfectly mimicked controlled demolition.
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In any case, what was needed at that stage was someone to play the role of the judge, determining, from an impartial perspective, whether a prima facie case for the guilt of the Bush administration had been made.

This role should have been played by the press. But the mainstream press instead offered itself as a mouthpiece for the administration’s conspiracy theory.

The role of the impartial judge has, nevertheless, been played by civil society, in which tens of millions of people in this country and around the world now accept the 9/11 truth movement’s contention that the Bush administration was complicit in the attacks.

The fact that the president was finally forced to appoint a 9/11 commission provided an opportunity for the Bush administration to rebut the allegations made against it. You might assume that the 9/11 Commission would have played the role of an impartial jury, simply evaluating the evidence for the competing conspiracy theories and deciding which one was more strongly supported.

The Commission’s investigative work, however, was carried out by its staff, and this staff was directed by the White House’s man inside the Commission, Philip Zelikow, a fact that the mainstream press has not emphasized. Under Zelikow’s leadership, the Commission took the role of the prosecution for the Bush administration’s brief against al-Qaeda. In doing so, it implicitly took the role of the defense for the Bush administration. Accordingly, an important question to ask about The 9/11 Commission Report, especially since we know that the Commission had many copies of The New Pearl Harbor, is how well the Commission rebutted the prima facie case against the Bush-Cheney administration, which was summarized in that book.

In a second book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I showed that the Commission simply ignored most of that evidence and distorted the rest. I will summarize a few of the 115 sins of omission and distortion that I identified.

The New Pearl Harbor reported evidence that at least six of the alleged hijackers are still alive. David Harrison of the Telegraph interviewed two of the men who supposedly died on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, one of whom said that he "had never even heard of Pennsylvania," let alone died there. The Associated Press reported that Waleed al-Shehri, supposedly on Flight 11, contacted the U.S. embassy in Morocco about two weeks after 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report, nevertheless, suggested that al-Shehri was responsible for stabbing one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.
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Another big question created by the official story is how the hijackers, by crashing planes into the Twin Towers, caused them and Building 7 to collapse. One problem is that Building 7 was not struck by an airplane, and steel-frame buildings had never before been caused to collapse by fire alone, even when the fires had been much bigger, hotter, and longer-lasting. The Commission avoided this problem by simply not mentioning this fact or even, incredibly, that Building 7 collapsed.
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Definately worth the read, be sure to check out the whole article!

Super special thanks to septembereleventh.org for the first report from the National Press Club from the D.C. Emergency Truth Convergence!