Untrue Confessions
By EMILY HOROWITZ
http://www.counterpunch.com/horowitz10062008.html
Khemwatie Bedessie, a 39-year-old immigrant woman in New York City, was convicted last year of raping a 4-year-old at a daycare center in Queens, though the facts of the case strongly suggest she is innocent. Her conviction resulted solely from a confession, which she says is false and was coerced from her by a detective.
In the 1930s, the Supreme Court outlawed “the third degree” during police questioning. Interrogators can no longer beat people, keep them awake for days, or threaten them with death to get a confession. Rogue behavior still surfaces. Chicago is still investigating a police district that routinely applied electric shocks to suspects less than a generation ago. But this isn’t the Depression Era, and coercive interrogations are no longer supposed to be allowed.
It’s not the 1980s, either. That decade marked the eruption of the McMartin Preschool case, in which several California childcare workers, among them elderly women, were accused of most bizarre and extreme sex abuse against children. McMartin, with its claims of mutilated rabbits and sodomy in underground tunnels, turned into the longest and most expensive criminal case in U.S. history, before it collapsed in 1990, with acquittals and hung juries. Dozens of copycat cases from the same period have since been debunked, and today child protection authorities tell us they know child sex abuse investigations can go haywire, but they have ways to keep them on track so people aren’t treated unjustly.
Even so, Khemwatie Bedessie was accused and convicted without any substantial evidence, except for her confession. Was it really coerced and false, as she claims? We’ll probably never know for sure because police didn’t record the interrogation that led to her self-incriminating statements. Lack of recording is one reason Bedessie deserves the benefit of the doubt. Her interrogation should have been videotaped, just as all questioning should be when people are detained during investigation of serious crimes. Among law enforcement agencies around the country, videotaping is catching on, and that’s laudable. But even if taping becomes universal, it won’t come near to eliminating false convictions based on false confessions. To make a real dent in the problem, we need to first recognize that when it comes to investigating crimes, we’re still in the epoch of the Inquisition.
Bedessie case is instructive, and it has a back story. She is one of nine siblings from Guyana, and grew up very poor there. At age 3, she was kicked in the head by a donkey; after that she suffered bouts of writhing and foaming at the mouth, which her family calls “seizures” or “anxiety attacks.” She never received medical treatment for them, and because classmates teased her about the attacks she dropped out of school after fifth grade. She cannot add or subtract small numbers, and her writing looks like a 7-year-old’s. After coming to the United States five years ago, she lived with her mother and worked 11-hour shifts, doing cleaning at a small daycare center in Queens. There she was known by the children as “Teacher” and by their parents as “Anita.”
One preschooler was a boy I will call Sam. At Bedessie’s trial this spring, Sam’s mother testified that when she first put him in daycare at age two so she could take a job, she was anxious about leaving him. Soon she started asking him if anyone there was sexually abusing him. She asked randomly and frequently. “No, mommy,” Sam always replied.
Then, one day in winter 2006, Sam developed a fever and a rash on his buttocks. At the doctor’s, he was diagnosed with flu. But his mother, again, felt worried. Again, she asked him about abuse. This time Sam, now 4, said “yes.” Taken to a hospital, he told a nurse he’d been raped by “Anita” – not his name for Bedessie but his mother’s. A police officer was called, but Sam would not repeat the statement. And medical personnel did not change their diagnosis of the rash. They still made no finding that it was caused by sexual abuse.
That left nothing except a preschooler’s word – which was spotty, and could have been tainted by his mother’s constant questions. And there was another problem with the case: it is astronomically rare for females as old as Bedessie to commit sex crimes against tiny children. Given this fact, what is the probability that the rape of a 4-year-old by a middle-aged woman would be discovered purely by accident, by questioning a child whose original complaint – which triggered the questions to begin with – had nothing to do with sex abuse? The likelihood is miniscule. The most probable explanation for Sam’s allegation of rape is that it was false, evoked by his mother’s fears and the boy’s suggestibility.
Not surprisingly, the detective in charge of the case, Ivan Borbon, was getting nowhere after a week of investigating. But instead of calling it quits, he decided to bring Bedessie in for questioning. Wearing plain clothes and driving an unmarked car, Borbon arrived at the day care at 9 a.m. one day. Bedessie said she thought he was a child protection worker. Borbon did not alert her to the misconception, and he told her they were going to his “child protection” office. It turned out to be a police interrogation room. There, Bedessie later testified, Borbon began cursing at her and calling her a child molester. He displayed a tape recorder and said he’d “wired” Sam. He claimed he had, on tape, the sounds of Bedessie forcing the child to have intercourse with her in the daycare bathroom. Incredulous, she asked him to play the tape. He refused, cursed some more, and said Bedessie had two choices. She could say then and there that she had raped Sam and she would be released to go home. Or – as she put it at trial – she could continue to profess innocence and “go to Rikers and never see my mommy” again.
“I do whatever he tell me to do,” Bedessie later testified. She says she has no memory of confessing (family members say she dissociates when she has her “anxiety attacks”).
But she did make a confession, after only three hours in custody. It was videotaped. In her statement, she responds to questioning by describing being fully penetrated sexually, for several minutes, on a toilet, by preschooler Sam. She characterizes the penis of this 4-year-old as being as long as a ballpoint pen, and of “about two inch thickness.” She speaks a notably creolized English, and it is not clear she understands everything she is asked. At trial a year later, she said she did not know the meaning of the words “masturbation,” “stroking,” “orgasm” or “immoral.”
Bedessie’s attorneys tried to put a witness on the stand: Richard Ofshe, an internationally recognized expert in false confessions. The judge would not allow it. He said the jury could make up its own mind about the veracity of Bedessie’s incriminating videotape. After only a couple of hours’ deliberation, they convicted her.
Though Ofshe did not testify, he watched Bedessie’s confession and interviewed her before her trial. He finds her account of coercion very credible, and says many people make false confessions after much less time than the three hours it took for Bedessie to begin her statement. Her description of the interrogation, Ofshe says, sounds like many others he has heard, in which evidence later surfaced to show that the defendant was innocent, even though he or she had earlier confessed. Ofshe and every other researcher who has studied false confessions note that they are easily extracted by interrogators. That’s because of how interrogation works – even when it’s done legally.
The Arizona v. Miranda decision, with its caveats about the right to stay silent and its offers of lawyers, was issued by the Supreme Court in 1966. Since then, legal police questioning supposedly has dispensed with 24/7 marathons and physical assault. Now, interrogations concentrate on psychology. But even when everything is on the up and up , questioning in detention is no tea party. According to the law, cops can get people to talk by yelling, insulting them, invading their personal space, saying there’s evidence when there isn’t, and feigning sympathy about the crime (“After all, she was dressed like a slut. I know she was asking for it, huh?”).
A widely used training manual recommends that the interrogator physically crowd up next to the suspect and insist he or she is guilty, cutting off any bodily or verbal protestation of innocence. “The interrogator must rely on an oppressive atmosphere of dogged persistence,” advises the manual, “leaving the subject no prospect of surcease. He must dominate the subject and overwhelm him.” These techniques “suggest that only confession will bring interrogation to an end.” In this way, the manual instructs, it is possible “to induce the suspect to talk without resorting to duress or coercion.”
But, at some point on the continuum of trickery, duress and threats, cops can step over a line. The resulting confession is what most people think of when they read reports from organizations such as the Innocence Project. According to that group, in over of quarter of DNA exonerations, innocent defendants pleaded guilty or made false confessions. Many such confessions and pleas were produced because police officers promised leniency at sentencing in exchange for a confession. Such deals are not allowed. Or the interrogator threatened bodily harm, warning the suspect, for instance, that confessing would be the only way to avoid the death penalty. (Bedessie says that Borbon, the detective who interrogated her, told her about the terrible treatment accused child molesters get at Rikers. He said she could avoid going there by confessing).
According to a raft of social science and psychology research done over the past two decades, techniques like these are especially likely to produce false confessions when used on juveniles, the mentally ill, the poorly schooled, immigrants, and those with impaired cognition (Bedessie fits at least two of these categories).
It’s also agreed that illegal practices occur frequently in the interrogation room, and that cops later lie about them on the stand. And when there is an argument about veracity, research suggests that no group of people – not judges, prosecutors or juries – can tell whether a confession is true or false simply by reading a transcript or watching the video. That is why not just the confession should be recorded, but also the full interrogation that led up to it. The idea is to avoid methods that – as the Supreme Court has put it – “shock the conscience” and “offend the community’s sense of fair play and decency.”
Ten years ago, only two states were recording interrogations. Now, nine states and the District of Columbia do, and they are joined by more than 500 local police departments nationwide (some record only for murder cases, others for lesser felonies as well). Increasingly, taping is the trend. It’s spreading relatively slowly, but it’s spreading, says Northwestern University legal scholar Steven Drizin, an expert on false confessions who has advocated for taping for years. He thinks the scales would really tip if federal agencies started making recordings.
So far, the feds have said “no.” But last year, media eyebrows were raised when the DOJ released documents related to how eight U.S. Attorneys were fired under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ watch. Speculation is that one of the fired attorneys, Paul Charlton, in Arizona, was let go because he was investigating Republican Congressman Rick Renzi, a Bush loyalist, about a 2005 real estate deal. Either that or Charlton angered the DOJ for not prosecuting enough obscenity cases based on adult porn. Gonzales’ office demurred, saying that a major reason Charlton was canned was that he wanted to start a pilot project for the FBI and other federal agencies to start experimenting with videotaped interrogations. When the documents came out, one of them – from the FBI – objected to Charlton’s idea and commented that “as all experienced investigators and prosecutors know, perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to lay persons as a proper means of obtaining information from defendants.” More pointedly, the memo mentioned worries that jurors could find “proper interrogation techniques unsettling.”
Couple these anxieties with steady media attention to the problem of false confessions, and it might seem odd that judges, juries, and the public in general still find it so hard to believe that someone like Khemwatie Bedessie would say she was guilty if she wasn’t. Inside and outside the courtroom, what is the problem?
The most proximate answer is that, logistically speaking, the U.S. is heavily invested in a criminal justice system that would be paralyzed without confessions. Ninety-two per cent of felony convictions are obtained by plea bargains or confessions. That’s a far higher rate than in other countries (Italy’s, for example, is 8 per cent, and Norway doesn’t allow plea bargaining at all).
Relying on confessions to prosecute crimes is thrifty because it avoids the need for costly investigations. But it’s also very destructive to justice, according to Jerusalem University criminologist Boaz Sangero. Writing in a recent issue of Cardozo Law Review, he lists several problems. The first is that, after a suspect is apprehended, police tend to ignore serious investigation; instead, they focus on getting a confession. And once the confession is obtained, any other work going on at all typically ends. The push to handle cases this way encourages misbehavior in the interrogation room.
Further, reliance on confessions promotes disgraceful conditions of detention. Jails are often worse than prisons. Filth, bad food, lack of sunlight, crowding and violence pressure people to say they did something – anything, whether it’s true or not – just to get out of lockup. Then, because they’ve confessed, we figure it’s OK to keep others like them in awful cells – and to bring in more detainees for interrogation. It’s a vicious circle, and most who get trapped in it are poor, uneducated, and unacculturated. Their marginal status is bound up with the moralistic judgment that they are different from us, and therefore bad. Their badness reinforces our willingness to keep a bad system in place. It probably also allows us to export illegal interrogation – our 1930s-era torture, updated – to places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Beyond fear of the bad “other” and desire for a bargain, though, there’s a more fundamental, existential reason why dependence on self-incrimination is mean and unfair. As Sangero notes, any kind of interrogation which focuses on obtaining confessions – legal or illegal – probably violates people’s rights. That’s because, from the point of view of self-interest, confession makes no sense at all. People are asked to help themselves by condemning themselves. It is deeply irrational.
That irrationality is especially apparent in the many confessions made, even though they were not extracted directly by police questioning. In fact, as Sanjero notes, it’s possible that most confessions arise not from external coercion but from states of dependency and abjection that people internalized before they were ever interrogated.
Historical and legal records abound with examples. After Charles Lindbergh’s baby was abducted, over 200 people walked into police stations and said they were the kidnapper. More than 30 told authorities they were the murderer of a woman who came to be known as “The Black Dahlia” – a Hollywood actress whose mutilated body was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles in the 1940s. In a case that truly smacks of internalized abjection and desire for quick death, Heinrich Himmler lost his pipe while visiting a concentration camp during World War II. A search ensued, but on returning to his car Himmler found the pipe on his seat. Meanwhile, the camp commandant reported that six prisoners had already confessed to stealing it.
Since they are not products of police interrogation, no amount of videotaping will eradicate these confessions. Yet, we accept them. At least partly, this is because quick admissions of guilt are cheap, and easy on the justice system. But, more fundamentally, the very concept of confession is deeply embedded in our culture.
It was not always so. Ancient Jewish law barred criminal confessions. In Talmudic commentary – cited in the Supreme Court's Miranda decision, by the way – the rabbinical scholar Maimonides notes, “The court shall not put a man to death or flog him on his own admission.” Additional evidence and witnesses are needed, Maimonides explains, because the impulse to confess is, by definition, self-destructive. Of a man who professes guilt, there is always the possibility that he is “one of those who are in misery, bitter in soul, who long for death …perhaps this was the reason that prompted him to confess to a crime he had not committed, in order that he be put to death.”
Since the 1551 Council of Trent, however, the Roman Catholic Church has taught that confession is good for the soul – yea, even necessary, to save it and purge it of impurity. This religious notion has since been incorporated into law and into the modern, secular definition of the self. Being a fully realized person today requires full disclosure to family, friends, and even (in the case of writers, artists and public figures) to the polity: of one’s deepest emotions, darkest sexual impulses, and past misdoings. Confession isn’t just good for the self. We need confession to be a self.
But when self meets soul in the modern justice system, it’s a train wreck of contradiction. As Yale University comparative literature scholar Peter Brooks notes in his book Troubling Confessions, “That we continue to encourage the police to obtain confessions whenever possible implies a nearly Dostoevskian model of the criminal suspect … we want him to break down and confess, we want and need his abjection since this is the best guarantee that he needs punishment, and that in punishing him our consciences are clear.” On the other hand, our Mirandan insistence “that the suspect’s will must not be overborne, that he be a conscious agent of his undoing, of course implies the opposite, that we don’t want Dostoevskian groveling in the interrogation room, but the voluntary (manly?) assumption of guilt. Hence the paradox of the confession that must be called voluntary while everything conduces to assure that it is not.”
It wasn’t so long ago that masters of American jurisprudence were actively grappling with this contradiction. In the 1966 Miranda decision, Earl Warren recommended that the police find other evidence to solve a crime than the “cruel, simple expedient of compelling it from [the suspect’s] own mouth.” Twelve years before Warren made that statement, Abe Fortas, who later would replace Warren on the Supreme Court, wrote that “Mea culpa belongs to a man and his God. It is a plea that cannot be exacted from free men by human authority.”
Today, Sangero agrees with these liberal lawmakers from a bygone era. He wholly opposes the eliciting and use of confession to solve and prosecute crimes. But, if confession isemployed, he believes the case should never go forward unless meaningful evidence is first gathered from sources independent of the confession – evidence that strongly shows, rather than merely suggests, that the suspect committed the crime. Many people fear that such a policy would allow lots of guilty people to go free. Sangero dismisses their worries. Forensic science in the U.S. today is so sophisticated and high tech, he says, that police have only to use it. All that is required to convict criminals justly is that the cops do their job.
Sangero is very leery of putting too much emphasis on recording. Sure, he says, it’s needed. But narrowly focusing on videotaping reforms does not encourage the police to redirect investigations away from defendants’ self-incrimination and toward the gathering of independent evidence. Obsession with recording can encourage practices such as “non-detentive interviewing.” It’s an increasingly common ploy, in which suspects are seduced into chatting – as Bedessie was when she was visited by the supposed “child protection worker,” who turned out to be a policeman – without being read their Miranda rights. Only after the car door is locked, the drive has begun, and the interrogation room is sighted, does the suspect get officially detained and put before a camera. By then, for someone like Bedessie, it may well be too late to take exercise one’s Miranda rights.
Bedessie is now in the first year of a 25-year prison sentence. Her post-conviction legal work is being done by prominent Manhattan attorney Ron Kuby. He believes she has a good shot at having her conviction overturned because of the trial judge not letting the jury hear expert testimony about false convictions. Nowadays, that’s solid grounds for appeal, and even the assistant DA who prosecuted the case knows it. Pretrial, she advised the judge that it wouldn’t hurt the state’s case to let the defense put on a witness to warn jurors that Bedessie might have falsely incriminated herself. It wouldn’t matter because the confession spoke for itself. And no jury would think otherwise.
Emily Horowitz is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at St. Francis College (Brooklyn, NY). She serves as a director of the National Center for Reason and Justice (www.ncrj.org), an innocence project for people wrongly accused or convicted of crimes against children and a sponsor of Khemwatie Bedessie. She can be reached at ehorowitz@stfranciscollege.edu
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10/7/08
Quebec police arrest 9 Algonquin protesters, end blockade
www.cbc.ca
Quebec provincial police have broken up a blockade set up Monday by a group of Algonquin protesters on a western Quebec highway and have arrested nine people.
An activist at the scene alleged that police used tear gas to disperse the protesters, who were from the Barriere Lake reserve, about 300 kilometres north of Ottawa.
About 50 protesters set up barrels and logs around 6 a.m. ET Monday on Highway 117, which connects the Abitibi region to the Outaouais and Montreal regions. The blockade was at kilometre 362, near Grand-Remous, where the highway joins du Lac Rapide Road in La Vérandrye wildlife reserve. It remained peaceful into the afternoon.
However, the highway is the sole direct route between the Abitibi region and the rest of Quebec. The only other option is to circle around through Ontario.
The Algonquin protesters alleged that Canada and Quebec are not respecting agreements concerning economic development and resource management within their territory. They were also demanding that the federal government appoint an observer to oversee the selection of a new chief for the reserve.
They said the blockade would continue until those demands were met.
Quebec provincial police have broken up a blockade set up Monday by a group of Algonquin protesters on a western Quebec highway and have arrested nine people.
An activist at the scene alleged that police used tear gas to disperse the protesters, who were from the Barriere Lake reserve, about 300 kilometres north of Ottawa.
About 50 protesters set up barrels and logs around 6 a.m. ET Monday on Highway 117, which connects the Abitibi region to the Outaouais and Montreal regions. The blockade was at kilometre 362, near Grand-Remous, where the highway joins du Lac Rapide Road in La Vérandrye wildlife reserve. It remained peaceful into the afternoon.
However, the highway is the sole direct route between the Abitibi region and the rest of Quebec. The only other option is to circle around through Ontario.
The Algonquin protesters alleged that Canada and Quebec are not respecting agreements concerning economic development and resource management within their territory. They were also demanding that the federal government appoint an observer to oversee the selection of a new chief for the reserve.
They said the blockade would continue until those demands were met.
"En las comunidades neozapatistas se está ya construyendo un mundo nuevo"
Entrevista con el historiador mexicano Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas
Waldo Lao y Anna Feldmann
Rebelión
www.rebelion.org
Hace 14 años que los Zapatista surgieron en uno de los estados más pobres de México, Chiapas. Desde entonces se organizan y resisten ante los continuos embates, engaños y traiciones de los gobiernos neoliberales. Desde el año pasado, las bases militares se reorganizan en el área rebelde con la finalidad de destruir la autonomía de las comunidades Zapatistas. A continuación una entrevista con el historiador mexicano Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas1, quien hace un balance sobre la Otra Campaña y de los años de existencia del EZLN.
¿“Abajo y a la izquierda” fue el lema con el que los Zapatistas comenzaron la Otra Campaña, la cual propone una otra mirada, otra forma de hacer política. Organizar una nueva resistencia nacional frente al constante hostigante del neoliberalismo. Podrías hacer un breve análisis sobre la Otra Campaña?
C.A: En mi opinión, el movimiento de La Otra Campaña representa una nueva etapa de la digna lucha de los compañeros indígenas neozapatistas, y al mismo tiempo, el esfuerzo de transformar esa lucha, que hasta el año de 2005 fue predominantemente una lucha por los derechos y por el respeto a la identidad indígena, en una lucha mas vasta por las demandas centrales anticapitalistas de todas las clases y grupos subalternos de México, desplegada ahora en escala de toda la nación mexicana.
Así, podemos hablar de tres etapas en la lucha de los compañeros neozapatistas: la del fuego, que va desde 1983 hasta el 20 de enero de 1994, la de la palabra, que abarca desde enero de 1994 hasta junio de 2005, y la actual, la de La Otra Campaña, que arranca con la Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona y que se afirma claramente hasta el día de hoy.
En esta tercera etapa, el neozapatismo mexicano convoca doblemente, primero a todos los sectores, grupos, colectivos, partidos e individuos que se asumen ya abierta y concientemente anticapitalistas, y en segundo termino, a todos los grupos, sectores y clases subalternos de nuestro país, que ya no soportan los múltiples efectos del capitalismo y del neoliberalismo, y que están dispuestos a luchar pacifica e inteligentemente, y hasta las ultimas consecuencias, en contra de este sistema social capitalista, que es el origen central de todos nuestros problemas.
¿La propuesta de la “Otra Campaña”, es hacer una red o un diagnostico de las luchas populares, de visibilizar antiguos y nuevos conflictos que el gobierno siempre se ha negado a mirar, una búsqueda de crear un nuevo programa anticapitalista (una nueva fuerza política). Como te pareció la participación de la sociedad civil y de otras organizaciones en este proceso?
C.A: La primera etapa de La Otra Campaña se propuso recorrer el país entero, en una actitud sobre todo de ‘escuchar’ atenta de las experiencias, los problemas, las situaciones y los puntos de vista de todos los compañeros que aceptaron integrarse a esta iniciativa, respaldando la Sexta Declaración, y reafirmando su vocación de luchar desde abajo y a la izquierda en contra del capitalismo mexicano y mundial. Pienso que, en términos generales, esa etapa fue muy exitosa, pues con ese recorrido por todo el país, la Comisión Sexta logro realmente elaborar un mapa general del estado de los conflictos sociales y de las luchas y experiencias de lucha de todos los movimientos sociales que hoy existen en México.
Su éxito fue tan grande y tan rápido, que a la mitad de su recorrido, provoco el pánico y el odio de las clases gobernantes y dominantes en México, lo que se expreso en la sangrienta y criminal represión del digno pueblo de Atenco. Esa represión trataba de detener el crecimiento de La Otra Campaña, y su éxito cada vez mas grande, lo que solo logro de manera momentánea. Pues como resultado de ese recorrido inicial o primera etapa de La Otra Campaña, es que este movimiento tiene ahora presencia realmente nacional, con grupos que están presentes en los 32 estados y territorios de México, concentrando además a los mas nobles y mas concientes sectores anticapitalistas de todo el país. Así que creo que la respuesta de esa sociedad civil y de esos grupos y organizaciones realmente anticapitalistas fue bastante positiva y esperanzadora hacia el futuro.
¿Como ha sido la organización de estas entidades, como realizan sus acciones?
C.A: Es difícil responder a esta pregunta de manera general. Porque la presencia de La Otra Campaña varia en cada estado de México. No es lo mismo en Chiapas, donde las bases de la Otra Campaña se cuentan por cientos de miles (son en su inmensa mayoría las propias bases de apoyo del EZLN), que en Baja California Sur, en donde su presencia es mas reciente y cuantitativamente menor, o en el Distrito Federal, en donde su presencia es también enorme, pero se desglosa en sectores como el estudiantil, el obrero, el urbano popular, el de las organizaciones políticas, y un largo etcétera que seria difícil enumerar completamente.
Así que La Otra Campaña es una red de redes locales, red de movimientos sociales tan variada y múltiple como lo es el abanico de los sectores, grupos y clases subalternos del país. Y a tono con esa enorme variedad, es también la riqueza y diversidad de sus acciones.
¿Ante la continua ola de hostigamiento encabezada por el gobierno, los grupos militares y paramilitares sobre las comunidades Zapatistas, se dibuja una clara estrategia que desafía y tiene por finalidad el desarticular la autonomía de las comunidades y sus Juntas de Buen Gobierno. Cual es tu opinión?
C.A: Creo que la actual ofensiva del gobierno de Felipe Calderón, en contra de las comunidades indígenas neozapatistas de Chiapas expresa dos cosas: primero, que el crecimiento de La Otra Campaña ha sido tan rápido y tan exitoso, que les ha metido un gran miedo a las clases dominantes mexicanas. Y por eso, para tratar de frenarlo, han decidido hostigar a esas bases de apoyo del EZLN en Chiapas. Lo segundo, es que el gobierno de Felipe Calderón, que no tiene legitimidad política alguna, pues es fruto de un fraude electoral monumental, no excluye la posibilidad de la ‘salida militar’ al conflicto chiapaneco, y juega con la absurda idea de que es posible terminar con el EZLN o con La Otra Campaña, por medio de la fuerza. De ahí, entre otras cosas, su política abierta de criminalizar toda forma de protesta social, y su claro proyecto de militarizar el país entero, bajo el ridículo pretexto de palucha contra el narcotráfico.
Por lo demás, pienso que en ambos casos se equivoca el gobierno de Calderón, pues ese hostigamiento militar en Chiapas no detendrá el desarrollo de La Otra Campaña, y como lo demuestra la historia entera de nuestro país, la salida militar es siempre la peor de todas las salidas, pues en realidad en lugar de resolver el problema lo agudiza y lo radicaliza al extremo.
¿La nueva geografía o “la nueva justicia agraria” que sustentada bajo los intereses de algunos partidos políticos (apoyados por el gobierno) y organizaciones como la OPDIC, pretenden arrebatar de los Zapatistas las tierras que fueron retomadas desde inicios de 1994. Como ha sido la influencia (el papel) de estas organizaciones en la comunidades?
C.A: En mi opinión, esta ofensiva de quitarle las tierras a las comunidades neozapatistas es parte de un proyecto mas general, que es precisamente el de tratar de debilitar a las bases de apoyo del EZLN, por todos los medios posibles (hostigamiento militar, amenazas, impedimentos de trabajar la tierra, ofensiva jurídica, fomento de conflictos dentro de los pueblos y entre los pueblos, incremento de la presencia militar, despojo de tierras, construcción de nuevos caminos con la lógica de cercar a las comunidades neozapatistas, fomento de proyectos pseudo-ecoturísticos para dar pretexto a los despojos y hostigamientos, ofensiva ideológica tratando de deslegitimar al movimiento, etc.). Esto se hace para forzar a la Comisión Sexta a replegarse en el territorio chiapaneco e impedir que continúe su trabajo en escala nacional en torno de la vasta red de La Otra Campaña.
Pero una vez más, ese objetivo del gobierno fue logrado solo momentáneamente, pues muy pronto los neozapatistas saldrán otra vez de Chiapas, para retomar la segunda etapa de La Otra Campaña, la de la elaboración, desde abajo y a la izquierda, del Programa Nacional de Lucha.
Si el presidente Ernesto Zedillo financio la guerra y mando ordenes de aprensión para algunos zapatistas y Vicente Fox no consiguió resolver el conflicto en sus ya famosos y eternos “quince minutos”. ¿Que será del conflicto frente al gobierno conservador de Felipe Calderón?
C.A: Soy optimista a este respecto, pues pienso que Felipe Calderón ha estado fracasando en sus diversos intentos de reprimir y de destruir a La Otra Campaña y al EZLN. Su salida militar no tiene consenso ni siquiera en la mayoría de la propia clase dominante mexicana. Lo que no excluye que pudiera, desesperadamente, intentarla, pero creo que eso solo agudizaría su propia y galopante deslegitimación total.
Además, las políticas exagerada y salvajemente neoliberales que lleva a cabo, están alimentando a pasos acelerados el descontento social, lo que hace que en el imaginario popular, la muy próxima fecha del 2010 histórico mexicano este cada vez mas presente en la conciencia de todos los grupos y clases subalternos del país. Por eso, en los muros de toda la ciudad de Oaxaca, al día siguiente de la brutal represión del 25 de noviembre de 2006, se podía leer la consigna: ‘Nos vemos en el 2010’.
Y si a todo esto sumamos la actual situación de crisis terrible del capitalismo norteamericano, y con ello, de una buena parte del capitalismo mundial, podemos ser optimistas respecto al fracaso de esas tentativas y políticas represivas del gobierno de Calderón.
¿En estos 14 años de lucha, cuales consideras que han sido los avances dentro de las comunidades autónomas Zapatistas?
C.A: Creo que han sido realmente enormes, lo que puede constatarse cuando uno visita los Caracoles neozapatistas, y que se hizo especialmente evidente en los Tres Encuentros recientes de los Pueblos Zapatistas con los Pueblos del Mundo. En esas comunidades neozapatistas, a pesar de la gran escasez de recursos materiales y del cerco constante del ejercito mexicano, se esta ya construyendo un mundo nuevo, con una nueva y muy otra economía y un comercio muy otro, que nos están ya basados en la lógica de la acumulación del capital y de la obtención de la mayor ganancia. También se están creando unas relaciones de género muy diferentes a las patriarcales y capitalistas, y una sociedad solidaria, fraterna y no individualista, en donde el nosotros prevalece sobre el yo, y en donde los vínculos y el espíritu comunitarios dominan el conjunto de la vida social. Allí se esta desarrollando una nueva educación y una nueva pedagogía, maravillosa y muy avanzada desde todos los puntos de vista, además de una nueva cultura, una nueva forma del saber y formas también distintas del conocer. Y se esta gestando también otra política, otro gobierno, otra democracia, tan distintas a las capitalistas, que en mi opinión ya no deberían llamarse ni política, ni gobierno ni democracia, sino otros nombres igualmente nuevos y distintos.
Creo que estos son logros fantásticos y fundamentales de las comunidades, pues su valor además tiene un carácter universal, en mi opinión.
¿En Brasil se conoce poco sobre el conflicto en Chiapas, la verdad que poco se conoce sobre lo que ocurre en otros países de America Latina. Los grandes medios de comunicación monopolizan la información (como la red televisiva Globo, el periódico Estado de Sao Paulo y la Revista Veja de la colosal editora Abril), distorsionan y criminalizan la participación de los movimientos sociales. Cual ha sido la participación de los medios de comunicación en México frente al conflicto (en los últimos años)?
C.A: En México, existen también dos grandes grupos de televisión que deforman la información y desinforman a la gente, igual que en Brasil. Pero al lado de ellos existen, en el ámbito comercial, algunos pocos medios de comunicación mas críticos, que han difundido, en distintos momentos y de manera desigual, los logros y avances del neozapatismo, y mas recientemente de La Otra Campaña. Hablo del periódico La Jornada y de la revista Proceso, además de algunos pocos periodistas independientes como Carmen Aristegui, por ejemplo. Através de ellos, se ha roto esa desinformación sistemática de los grandes medios de comunicación, y se han podido difundir versiones más realistas y adecuadas de estos movimientos.
Pero también, además de esos medios críticos comerciales, están los medios alternativos de comunicación, que han jugado un papel esencial, y sobre todo en esta etapa de La Otra Campaña. Pues son ellos, sobre todo, los que han cubierto y siguen cubriendo ese vasto y cada día mayor abanico de la protesta social, en Oaxaca, en la ciudad de México, en Atenco, en Chiapas, en Jalisco, en el norte del país, en Jalapa, etc. Creo que su papel ha sido central y lo será cada vez más en el inmediato futuro.
¿Cual es la relación que tiene el EZLN con los Movimientos de América Latina, en especial con el MST (existen puntos en común) y en que se diferencia el Movimiento Zapatista de los otros movimientos Latinoamericanos?
C.A: Como tu sabes, desde hace tiempo ha habido una simpatía mutua entre los miembros del MST y del EZLN. Pero mas recientemente, en el año 2007 y a partir del Primer Encuentro de los Pueblos Zapatistas con los Pueblos del Mundo, se estableció una relación mas directa, cuyo primer fruto fue la organización, en julio de 2007, de una Mesa Redonda sobre la lucha por la Tierra y el Territorio, Mesa que precedió al Segundo Encuentro de los Pueblos Zapatistas con los Pueblos del Mundo y que se prolongo en este Segundo Encuentro. En esa Mesa y en el Segundo Encuentro participaron compañeros del MST, y también del grupo Vía Campesina, al que pertenece el MST. Después, un compañero del MST participo también en el Coloquio ‘Planeta Tierra: Movimientos Antisistémicos’ de diciembre de 2007.
Así que creo que hay una colaboración importante entre el MST y el EZLN, en especial en torno de este tema de la lucha por la defensa de la Tierra y del Territorio.
De otro lado, seria largo hacer el balance de las similitudes y las diferencias entre el EZLN y el MST, u otros movimientos de América Latina, pero creo que una diferencia importante, que valdría la pena reflexionar con más cuidado, es la de la actitud de los movimientos frente al Estado. Los neozapatistas rechazan toda ayuda del Estado, por el riesgo de cooptación y de limitación que implica este vinculo con las instituciones estatales, mientras que el MST no rechaza esa conexión. Así que a partir de la experiencia con el gobierno de Lula, que no ha cumplido para nada sus promesas al MST ni a los movimientos populares brasileños, valdría la pena repensar este vínculo, a la luz de la experiencia neozapatista.
¿Cual es tu opinión respecto al protagonismo del Subcomandante Marcos dentro del Zapatismo?
C.A: Creo que ese ‘protagonismo’ es mas bien una creación de los propios medios de comunicación mexicanos e internacionales, que un hecho real. Marcos ha insistido muchas veces en que el es solo Subcomandante, y que obedece las ordenes de los 23 Comandantes indígenas, los que a su vez mandan obedeciendo el mandato de las comunidades. Así que no hay tal protagonismo, que es más bien una invención de esos medios de comunicación.
¿Desde el proceso electoral del 2006, se noto un distanciamiento entre algunos intelectuales que apoyaban al EZLN. Como observas esta ruptura (y porque)?
C.A: Creo que es un proceso que debe explicarse, en parte, por el propio cambio de dimensión que representa la iniciativa de La Otra Campaña. Mientras el movimiento neozapatista estaba sobre todo en Chiapas, y luchaba principalmente por las demandas indígenas, fue apoyado por ciertos intelectuales que habían trabajado esos temas indígenas o temas de la historia o la situación chiapaneca en lo fundamental. Pero al volverse un movimiento nacional, que abarca además las demandas de todos los subalternos de México, los problemas y las exigencias de un apoyo o un acompañamiento intelectual del movimiento se complejizan y crecen. Y no todos los intelectuales que antes apoyaron al neozapatismo han sido capaces de dar ese salto hacia problemas mayores y más complejos. Y de ahí se derivan algunos de esos desencuentros.
Otra razón fue la decisión de algunos de esos intelectuales de apoyar la candidatura de Andrés Manuel López Obrador, pensando que ella podía representar un verdadero cambio social, lo que en mi opinión es una ilusión y un error de apreciación total. También, en otros casos, ha habido intelectuales que, después de haber apoyado por varios años al movimiento, han optado, frente a este cambio de tareas y de dimensión, por dedicarse más bien a su propia carrera académica personal.
¿En que medida las comunidades autónomas Zapatistas podrán resistir frente al continuo embate del gobierno y los grupos militares. Cual puede ser el panorama o sus posibilidades en los próximos años?
C.A: Como te decía antes, soy optimista al respecto. Estamos hablando de cientos de miles de indígenas, dignos, concientes y dispuestos a luchar hasta las ultimas consecuencias, como nos lo demostraron en enero de 1994, y como lo han reiterado en estos quince años de lucha. Además, esta ahora también el movimiento nacional de La Otra Campaña, que es cada día mas grande y mas fuerte, y que también esta dispuesto a luchar, de manera pacifica e inteligente, y hasta las ultimas consecuencias, en contra de esta represión del gobierno y de los grupos paramilitares apoyados por el. Así que soy optimista hacia el futuro, sobre todo pensando en que cada día esta mas cerca ese 2010 histórico que antes mencione. Creo que muy pronto, será verdad esa consigna: Nos vemos en el 2010!.
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waldo_lao@yahoo.com
1 Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, es doctor en economía por la México y posdoctor en Historia por la École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de París . Actualmente es investigador por la UNAM en el Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales y docente en la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH). Director de la revista Contrahistorias la otra mirada de Clío y fundador del Centro Immanuel Wallerstein en San Cristóbal de las Casas . Entre sus últimas publicaciones encontramos: Chiapas, planeta tierra. (Editorial Contrahistorias, 2006) América Latina en la encrucijada. (Editorial Contrahistorias, 2006) y Mandar Obedeciendo (Editorial Contrahistorias, 2007) entre otras.
Waldo Lao y Anna Feldmann
Rebelión
www.rebelion.org
Hace 14 años que los Zapatista surgieron en uno de los estados más pobres de México, Chiapas. Desde entonces se organizan y resisten ante los continuos embates, engaños y traiciones de los gobiernos neoliberales. Desde el año pasado, las bases militares se reorganizan en el área rebelde con la finalidad de destruir la autonomía de las comunidades Zapatistas. A continuación una entrevista con el historiador mexicano Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas1, quien hace un balance sobre la Otra Campaña y de los años de existencia del EZLN.
¿“Abajo y a la izquierda” fue el lema con el que los Zapatistas comenzaron la Otra Campaña, la cual propone una otra mirada, otra forma de hacer política. Organizar una nueva resistencia nacional frente al constante hostigante del neoliberalismo. Podrías hacer un breve análisis sobre la Otra Campaña?
C.A: En mi opinión, el movimiento de La Otra Campaña representa una nueva etapa de la digna lucha de los compañeros indígenas neozapatistas, y al mismo tiempo, el esfuerzo de transformar esa lucha, que hasta el año de 2005 fue predominantemente una lucha por los derechos y por el respeto a la identidad indígena, en una lucha mas vasta por las demandas centrales anticapitalistas de todas las clases y grupos subalternos de México, desplegada ahora en escala de toda la nación mexicana.
Así, podemos hablar de tres etapas en la lucha de los compañeros neozapatistas: la del fuego, que va desde 1983 hasta el 20 de enero de 1994, la de la palabra, que abarca desde enero de 1994 hasta junio de 2005, y la actual, la de La Otra Campaña, que arranca con la Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona y que se afirma claramente hasta el día de hoy.
En esta tercera etapa, el neozapatismo mexicano convoca doblemente, primero a todos los sectores, grupos, colectivos, partidos e individuos que se asumen ya abierta y concientemente anticapitalistas, y en segundo termino, a todos los grupos, sectores y clases subalternos de nuestro país, que ya no soportan los múltiples efectos del capitalismo y del neoliberalismo, y que están dispuestos a luchar pacifica e inteligentemente, y hasta las ultimas consecuencias, en contra de este sistema social capitalista, que es el origen central de todos nuestros problemas.
¿La propuesta de la “Otra Campaña”, es hacer una red o un diagnostico de las luchas populares, de visibilizar antiguos y nuevos conflictos que el gobierno siempre se ha negado a mirar, una búsqueda de crear un nuevo programa anticapitalista (una nueva fuerza política). Como te pareció la participación de la sociedad civil y de otras organizaciones en este proceso?
C.A: La primera etapa de La Otra Campaña se propuso recorrer el país entero, en una actitud sobre todo de ‘escuchar’ atenta de las experiencias, los problemas, las situaciones y los puntos de vista de todos los compañeros que aceptaron integrarse a esta iniciativa, respaldando la Sexta Declaración, y reafirmando su vocación de luchar desde abajo y a la izquierda en contra del capitalismo mexicano y mundial. Pienso que, en términos generales, esa etapa fue muy exitosa, pues con ese recorrido por todo el país, la Comisión Sexta logro realmente elaborar un mapa general del estado de los conflictos sociales y de las luchas y experiencias de lucha de todos los movimientos sociales que hoy existen en México.
Su éxito fue tan grande y tan rápido, que a la mitad de su recorrido, provoco el pánico y el odio de las clases gobernantes y dominantes en México, lo que se expreso en la sangrienta y criminal represión del digno pueblo de Atenco. Esa represión trataba de detener el crecimiento de La Otra Campaña, y su éxito cada vez mas grande, lo que solo logro de manera momentánea. Pues como resultado de ese recorrido inicial o primera etapa de La Otra Campaña, es que este movimiento tiene ahora presencia realmente nacional, con grupos que están presentes en los 32 estados y territorios de México, concentrando además a los mas nobles y mas concientes sectores anticapitalistas de todo el país. Así que creo que la respuesta de esa sociedad civil y de esos grupos y organizaciones realmente anticapitalistas fue bastante positiva y esperanzadora hacia el futuro.
¿Como ha sido la organización de estas entidades, como realizan sus acciones?
C.A: Es difícil responder a esta pregunta de manera general. Porque la presencia de La Otra Campaña varia en cada estado de México. No es lo mismo en Chiapas, donde las bases de la Otra Campaña se cuentan por cientos de miles (son en su inmensa mayoría las propias bases de apoyo del EZLN), que en Baja California Sur, en donde su presencia es mas reciente y cuantitativamente menor, o en el Distrito Federal, en donde su presencia es también enorme, pero se desglosa en sectores como el estudiantil, el obrero, el urbano popular, el de las organizaciones políticas, y un largo etcétera que seria difícil enumerar completamente.
Así que La Otra Campaña es una red de redes locales, red de movimientos sociales tan variada y múltiple como lo es el abanico de los sectores, grupos y clases subalternos del país. Y a tono con esa enorme variedad, es también la riqueza y diversidad de sus acciones.
¿Ante la continua ola de hostigamiento encabezada por el gobierno, los grupos militares y paramilitares sobre las comunidades Zapatistas, se dibuja una clara estrategia que desafía y tiene por finalidad el desarticular la autonomía de las comunidades y sus Juntas de Buen Gobierno. Cual es tu opinión?
C.A: Creo que la actual ofensiva del gobierno de Felipe Calderón, en contra de las comunidades indígenas neozapatistas de Chiapas expresa dos cosas: primero, que el crecimiento de La Otra Campaña ha sido tan rápido y tan exitoso, que les ha metido un gran miedo a las clases dominantes mexicanas. Y por eso, para tratar de frenarlo, han decidido hostigar a esas bases de apoyo del EZLN en Chiapas. Lo segundo, es que el gobierno de Felipe Calderón, que no tiene legitimidad política alguna, pues es fruto de un fraude electoral monumental, no excluye la posibilidad de la ‘salida militar’ al conflicto chiapaneco, y juega con la absurda idea de que es posible terminar con el EZLN o con La Otra Campaña, por medio de la fuerza. De ahí, entre otras cosas, su política abierta de criminalizar toda forma de protesta social, y su claro proyecto de militarizar el país entero, bajo el ridículo pretexto de palucha contra el narcotráfico.
Por lo demás, pienso que en ambos casos se equivoca el gobierno de Calderón, pues ese hostigamiento militar en Chiapas no detendrá el desarrollo de La Otra Campaña, y como lo demuestra la historia entera de nuestro país, la salida militar es siempre la peor de todas las salidas, pues en realidad en lugar de resolver el problema lo agudiza y lo radicaliza al extremo.
¿La nueva geografía o “la nueva justicia agraria” que sustentada bajo los intereses de algunos partidos políticos (apoyados por el gobierno) y organizaciones como la OPDIC, pretenden arrebatar de los Zapatistas las tierras que fueron retomadas desde inicios de 1994. Como ha sido la influencia (el papel) de estas organizaciones en la comunidades?
C.A: En mi opinión, esta ofensiva de quitarle las tierras a las comunidades neozapatistas es parte de un proyecto mas general, que es precisamente el de tratar de debilitar a las bases de apoyo del EZLN, por todos los medios posibles (hostigamiento militar, amenazas, impedimentos de trabajar la tierra, ofensiva jurídica, fomento de conflictos dentro de los pueblos y entre los pueblos, incremento de la presencia militar, despojo de tierras, construcción de nuevos caminos con la lógica de cercar a las comunidades neozapatistas, fomento de proyectos pseudo-ecoturísticos para dar pretexto a los despojos y hostigamientos, ofensiva ideológica tratando de deslegitimar al movimiento, etc.). Esto se hace para forzar a la Comisión Sexta a replegarse en el territorio chiapaneco e impedir que continúe su trabajo en escala nacional en torno de la vasta red de La Otra Campaña.
Pero una vez más, ese objetivo del gobierno fue logrado solo momentáneamente, pues muy pronto los neozapatistas saldrán otra vez de Chiapas, para retomar la segunda etapa de La Otra Campaña, la de la elaboración, desde abajo y a la izquierda, del Programa Nacional de Lucha.
Si el presidente Ernesto Zedillo financio la guerra y mando ordenes de aprensión para algunos zapatistas y Vicente Fox no consiguió resolver el conflicto en sus ya famosos y eternos “quince minutos”. ¿Que será del conflicto frente al gobierno conservador de Felipe Calderón?
C.A: Soy optimista a este respecto, pues pienso que Felipe Calderón ha estado fracasando en sus diversos intentos de reprimir y de destruir a La Otra Campaña y al EZLN. Su salida militar no tiene consenso ni siquiera en la mayoría de la propia clase dominante mexicana. Lo que no excluye que pudiera, desesperadamente, intentarla, pero creo que eso solo agudizaría su propia y galopante deslegitimación total.
Además, las políticas exagerada y salvajemente neoliberales que lleva a cabo, están alimentando a pasos acelerados el descontento social, lo que hace que en el imaginario popular, la muy próxima fecha del 2010 histórico mexicano este cada vez mas presente en la conciencia de todos los grupos y clases subalternos del país. Por eso, en los muros de toda la ciudad de Oaxaca, al día siguiente de la brutal represión del 25 de noviembre de 2006, se podía leer la consigna: ‘Nos vemos en el 2010’.
Y si a todo esto sumamos la actual situación de crisis terrible del capitalismo norteamericano, y con ello, de una buena parte del capitalismo mundial, podemos ser optimistas respecto al fracaso de esas tentativas y políticas represivas del gobierno de Calderón.
¿En estos 14 años de lucha, cuales consideras que han sido los avances dentro de las comunidades autónomas Zapatistas?
C.A: Creo que han sido realmente enormes, lo que puede constatarse cuando uno visita los Caracoles neozapatistas, y que se hizo especialmente evidente en los Tres Encuentros recientes de los Pueblos Zapatistas con los Pueblos del Mundo. En esas comunidades neozapatistas, a pesar de la gran escasez de recursos materiales y del cerco constante del ejercito mexicano, se esta ya construyendo un mundo nuevo, con una nueva y muy otra economía y un comercio muy otro, que nos están ya basados en la lógica de la acumulación del capital y de la obtención de la mayor ganancia. También se están creando unas relaciones de género muy diferentes a las patriarcales y capitalistas, y una sociedad solidaria, fraterna y no individualista, en donde el nosotros prevalece sobre el yo, y en donde los vínculos y el espíritu comunitarios dominan el conjunto de la vida social. Allí se esta desarrollando una nueva educación y una nueva pedagogía, maravillosa y muy avanzada desde todos los puntos de vista, además de una nueva cultura, una nueva forma del saber y formas también distintas del conocer. Y se esta gestando también otra política, otro gobierno, otra democracia, tan distintas a las capitalistas, que en mi opinión ya no deberían llamarse ni política, ni gobierno ni democracia, sino otros nombres igualmente nuevos y distintos.
Creo que estos son logros fantásticos y fundamentales de las comunidades, pues su valor además tiene un carácter universal, en mi opinión.
¿En Brasil se conoce poco sobre el conflicto en Chiapas, la verdad que poco se conoce sobre lo que ocurre en otros países de America Latina. Los grandes medios de comunicación monopolizan la información (como la red televisiva Globo, el periódico Estado de Sao Paulo y la Revista Veja de la colosal editora Abril), distorsionan y criminalizan la participación de los movimientos sociales. Cual ha sido la participación de los medios de comunicación en México frente al conflicto (en los últimos años)?
C.A: En México, existen también dos grandes grupos de televisión que deforman la información y desinforman a la gente, igual que en Brasil. Pero al lado de ellos existen, en el ámbito comercial, algunos pocos medios de comunicación mas críticos, que han difundido, en distintos momentos y de manera desigual, los logros y avances del neozapatismo, y mas recientemente de La Otra Campaña. Hablo del periódico La Jornada y de la revista Proceso, además de algunos pocos periodistas independientes como Carmen Aristegui, por ejemplo. Através de ellos, se ha roto esa desinformación sistemática de los grandes medios de comunicación, y se han podido difundir versiones más realistas y adecuadas de estos movimientos.
Pero también, además de esos medios críticos comerciales, están los medios alternativos de comunicación, que han jugado un papel esencial, y sobre todo en esta etapa de La Otra Campaña. Pues son ellos, sobre todo, los que han cubierto y siguen cubriendo ese vasto y cada día mayor abanico de la protesta social, en Oaxaca, en la ciudad de México, en Atenco, en Chiapas, en Jalisco, en el norte del país, en Jalapa, etc. Creo que su papel ha sido central y lo será cada vez más en el inmediato futuro.
¿Cual es la relación que tiene el EZLN con los Movimientos de América Latina, en especial con el MST (existen puntos en común) y en que se diferencia el Movimiento Zapatista de los otros movimientos Latinoamericanos?
C.A: Como tu sabes, desde hace tiempo ha habido una simpatía mutua entre los miembros del MST y del EZLN. Pero mas recientemente, en el año 2007 y a partir del Primer Encuentro de los Pueblos Zapatistas con los Pueblos del Mundo, se estableció una relación mas directa, cuyo primer fruto fue la organización, en julio de 2007, de una Mesa Redonda sobre la lucha por la Tierra y el Territorio, Mesa que precedió al Segundo Encuentro de los Pueblos Zapatistas con los Pueblos del Mundo y que se prolongo en este Segundo Encuentro. En esa Mesa y en el Segundo Encuentro participaron compañeros del MST, y también del grupo Vía Campesina, al que pertenece el MST. Después, un compañero del MST participo también en el Coloquio ‘Planeta Tierra: Movimientos Antisistémicos’ de diciembre de 2007.
Así que creo que hay una colaboración importante entre el MST y el EZLN, en especial en torno de este tema de la lucha por la defensa de la Tierra y del Territorio.
De otro lado, seria largo hacer el balance de las similitudes y las diferencias entre el EZLN y el MST, u otros movimientos de América Latina, pero creo que una diferencia importante, que valdría la pena reflexionar con más cuidado, es la de la actitud de los movimientos frente al Estado. Los neozapatistas rechazan toda ayuda del Estado, por el riesgo de cooptación y de limitación que implica este vinculo con las instituciones estatales, mientras que el MST no rechaza esa conexión. Así que a partir de la experiencia con el gobierno de Lula, que no ha cumplido para nada sus promesas al MST ni a los movimientos populares brasileños, valdría la pena repensar este vínculo, a la luz de la experiencia neozapatista.
¿Cual es tu opinión respecto al protagonismo del Subcomandante Marcos dentro del Zapatismo?
C.A: Creo que ese ‘protagonismo’ es mas bien una creación de los propios medios de comunicación mexicanos e internacionales, que un hecho real. Marcos ha insistido muchas veces en que el es solo Subcomandante, y que obedece las ordenes de los 23 Comandantes indígenas, los que a su vez mandan obedeciendo el mandato de las comunidades. Así que no hay tal protagonismo, que es más bien una invención de esos medios de comunicación.
¿Desde el proceso electoral del 2006, se noto un distanciamiento entre algunos intelectuales que apoyaban al EZLN. Como observas esta ruptura (y porque)?
C.A: Creo que es un proceso que debe explicarse, en parte, por el propio cambio de dimensión que representa la iniciativa de La Otra Campaña. Mientras el movimiento neozapatista estaba sobre todo en Chiapas, y luchaba principalmente por las demandas indígenas, fue apoyado por ciertos intelectuales que habían trabajado esos temas indígenas o temas de la historia o la situación chiapaneca en lo fundamental. Pero al volverse un movimiento nacional, que abarca además las demandas de todos los subalternos de México, los problemas y las exigencias de un apoyo o un acompañamiento intelectual del movimiento se complejizan y crecen. Y no todos los intelectuales que antes apoyaron al neozapatismo han sido capaces de dar ese salto hacia problemas mayores y más complejos. Y de ahí se derivan algunos de esos desencuentros.
Otra razón fue la decisión de algunos de esos intelectuales de apoyar la candidatura de Andrés Manuel López Obrador, pensando que ella podía representar un verdadero cambio social, lo que en mi opinión es una ilusión y un error de apreciación total. También, en otros casos, ha habido intelectuales que, después de haber apoyado por varios años al movimiento, han optado, frente a este cambio de tareas y de dimensión, por dedicarse más bien a su propia carrera académica personal.
¿En que medida las comunidades autónomas Zapatistas podrán resistir frente al continuo embate del gobierno y los grupos militares. Cual puede ser el panorama o sus posibilidades en los próximos años?
C.A: Como te decía antes, soy optimista al respecto. Estamos hablando de cientos de miles de indígenas, dignos, concientes y dispuestos a luchar hasta las ultimas consecuencias, como nos lo demostraron en enero de 1994, y como lo han reiterado en estos quince años de lucha. Además, esta ahora también el movimiento nacional de La Otra Campaña, que es cada día mas grande y mas fuerte, y que también esta dispuesto a luchar, de manera pacifica e inteligente, y hasta las ultimas consecuencias, en contra de esta represión del gobierno y de los grupos paramilitares apoyados por el. Así que soy optimista hacia el futuro, sobre todo pensando en que cada día esta mas cerca ese 2010 histórico que antes mencione. Creo que muy pronto, será verdad esa consigna: Nos vemos en el 2010!.
* * *
waldo_lao@yahoo.com
1 Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, es doctor en economía por la México y posdoctor en Historia por la École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de París . Actualmente es investigador por la UNAM en el Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales y docente en la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH). Director de la revista Contrahistorias la otra mirada de Clío y fundador del Centro Immanuel Wallerstein en San Cristóbal de las Casas . Entre sus últimas publicaciones encontramos: Chiapas, planeta tierra. (Editorial Contrahistorias, 2006) América Latina en la encrucijada. (Editorial Contrahistorias, 2006) y Mandar Obedeciendo (Editorial Contrahistorias, 2007) entre otras.
10/6/08
West Papuan guerrilla commander orders closure of Freeport mine
Human Rights Report 17 September 2008
Orders issued by General Kelly Kwalik of the West Papuan Liberation
Army (TPN) are confirmed to be the reason for a series of explosions
and shots being fired around the Freeport mine in West Papua in the
past week.
This information is based on communication with Kelly Kwalik's men in
Timika and documentation supplied by Kelly Kwalik. Kelly Kwalik
states the purpose of the guerrilla campaign is to 'Close Down
Mining' and to bring international attention to the situation at
Freeport and West Papua.
Kelly Kwalik has reported he is taking these actions both as a
traditional landowner of the Freeport mine area and as an Operational
Commander of the West Papua Liberation Army.
Kwalik has stated the reasons for his action as the ongoing tribal
conflicts caused by the mine, the ongoing abuses of the human rights
of the indigenous peoples, the destruction and pollution of the
environment associated with the mines operation and that the presence
of this company has invited many kinds of problems especially among
the people who are living in the surrounding of mining area.
Kwalik seeks also to address the problems in West Papua of lack of
political rights for West Papuan indigenous people and to express
their desire for political independence. Kwalik says, "The Closing of
this mining will be done until there is an West Papua nation which
has its own independence separated from NKRI (the unitary state of
Indonesian Republic)".
Kwalik say he supports for international sponsored dialogue as the
mechanism through which a negotiated settlement which can give
benefits to the West Papua people and the landowners at Freeport.
Paula Makabory representing the Institute for Papuan Advocacy & Human
Rights said. "We are able to confirm that Kelly Kwalik orders are the
reason why there has been gunshots and explosions around the Freeport
mining concession."
'The reports indicate that the guerrillas are targeting mine
facilities and infrastructure rather than civilians or security
forces in this action. Kelly Kwalik has clearly ordered that the mine
will be the target of guerrilla campaign until West Papua sovereignty
issues are resolved."
Matthew Jamieson also from Institute for Papuan Advocacy and Human
Rights said, "The commencement of this campaign has major
implications for the security of West Papuans in the Freeport area,
especially the traditional owners, because of the likelihood of
reprisals by the Indonesian security forces. In the past there has
been significant human rights abuse associated with the mine security
and we expect that there will be a significant increase military
activity because of these recent actions."
Matthew Jamieson went on to say, "Kelly Kwalik first attacked the
mine in 1972, significantly disrupting mining operations. This lead
to a sustained Indonesian military campaign and widespread reprisals,
including bombing and strafing villages, both in the immediate area
of the mine and elsewhere in the highlands where people had nothing
to do with the mine. Many thousands of local people were reportedly
killed at this time."
"Since then Kwalik group has been in the jungle operating outside
Indonesian control. Kwalik's principal political actions have been
maintaining a guerrilla force, evading capture by Indonesian security
forces and undertaking flag raising events in areas mostly outside
Indonesian military control."
"In 1995 the Indonesian military together with Freeport security were
accused of the killings of a large number of traditional landowners
including Kwalik's immediate relatives."
For Further information contact:
Paula Makabory +61 (0) 402547517
Matthew Jamieson +61 (0) 418291998
Matthew Jamieson
Institute for Papuan Advocacy & Human Rights
PO Box 1805, Byron Bay NSW 2481 Australia
matthew@hr.minihub.org
tel +61 (0) 418291998
Orders issued by General Kelly Kwalik of the West Papuan Liberation
Army (TPN) are confirmed to be the reason for a series of explosions
and shots being fired around the Freeport mine in West Papua in the
past week.
This information is based on communication with Kelly Kwalik's men in
Timika and documentation supplied by Kelly Kwalik. Kelly Kwalik
states the purpose of the guerrilla campaign is to 'Close Down
Mining' and to bring international attention to the situation at
Freeport and West Papua.
Kelly Kwalik has reported he is taking these actions both as a
traditional landowner of the Freeport mine area and as an Operational
Commander of the West Papua Liberation Army.
Kwalik has stated the reasons for his action as the ongoing tribal
conflicts caused by the mine, the ongoing abuses of the human rights
of the indigenous peoples, the destruction and pollution of the
environment associated with the mines operation and that the presence
of this company has invited many kinds of problems especially among
the people who are living in the surrounding of mining area.
Kwalik seeks also to address the problems in West Papua of lack of
political rights for West Papuan indigenous people and to express
their desire for political independence. Kwalik says, "The Closing of
this mining will be done until there is an West Papua nation which
has its own independence separated from NKRI (the unitary state of
Indonesian Republic)".
Kwalik say he supports for international sponsored dialogue as the
mechanism through which a negotiated settlement which can give
benefits to the West Papua people and the landowners at Freeport.
Paula Makabory representing the Institute for Papuan Advocacy & Human
Rights said. "We are able to confirm that Kelly Kwalik orders are the
reason why there has been gunshots and explosions around the Freeport
mining concession."
'The reports indicate that the guerrillas are targeting mine
facilities and infrastructure rather than civilians or security
forces in this action. Kelly Kwalik has clearly ordered that the mine
will be the target of guerrilla campaign until West Papua sovereignty
issues are resolved."
Matthew Jamieson also from Institute for Papuan Advocacy and Human
Rights said, "The commencement of this campaign has major
implications for the security of West Papuans in the Freeport area,
especially the traditional owners, because of the likelihood of
reprisals by the Indonesian security forces. In the past there has
been significant human rights abuse associated with the mine security
and we expect that there will be a significant increase military
activity because of these recent actions."
Matthew Jamieson went on to say, "Kelly Kwalik first attacked the
mine in 1972, significantly disrupting mining operations. This lead
to a sustained Indonesian military campaign and widespread reprisals,
including bombing and strafing villages, both in the immediate area
of the mine and elsewhere in the highlands where people had nothing
to do with the mine. Many thousands of local people were reportedly
killed at this time."
"Since then Kwalik group has been in the jungle operating outside
Indonesian control. Kwalik's principal political actions have been
maintaining a guerrilla force, evading capture by Indonesian security
forces and undertaking flag raising events in areas mostly outside
Indonesian military control."
"In 1995 the Indonesian military together with Freeport security were
accused of the killings of a large number of traditional landowners
including Kwalik's immediate relatives."
For Further information contact:
Paula Makabory +61 (0) 402547517
Matthew Jamieson +61 (0) 418291998
Matthew Jamieson
Institute for Papuan Advocacy & Human Rights
PO Box 1805, Byron Bay NSW 2481 Australia
matthew@hr.minihub.org
tel +61 (0) 418291998
The Ultimate 9/11 'Truth' Showdown
David Ray Griffin vs. Matt Taibbi
By Matt Taibbi and David Ray Griffin, AlterNet
Posted on October 6, 2008, Printed on October 6, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/100688/
A poll of 17 countries that came out September of this year revealed that majorities in only nine of them "believe that al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States." A Zogby poll from 2006 found that in America, 42% of respondents believed the US government and 9/11 Commission "covered up" the events of 9/11. It's safe to say that at least tens of millions of Americans don't believe anything close to the official account offered by the 9/11 Commission, and that much of the outside world remains skeptical.
Over the years, AlterNet has run dozens of stories, mostly critical, of the 9/11 Movement. Matt Taibbi has taken on the 9/11 Truth Movement head on in a series of articles, and most recently in his new book, The Great Derangement.
In April, I asked Taibbi if he would be interested in interviewing David Ray Griffin, a leading member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University and author of seven of books on 9/11, about his recent book, 9/11 Contradictions. After months of back and forths between them and some editorial delays, I'm pleased to share their written exchange -- all 24,000 words of it. What we have here are the preeminent writers on both sides of the 9/11 Truth argument; a one-of-a-kind debate. Because the questions and responses are quite long, I've woven them together in order. Enjoy. -- Jan Frel, AlterNet Senior Editor.
--
1. Matt Taibbi (May 16, 2008): In your first chapter, you seem to imply -- well, you not only imply, you come out and say it -- that you think the real reason George W. Bush didn't hurry to finish his reading of My Pet Goat might have been that "the Secret Service had no real fear of an attack." In other words, they knew the plan in advance, and the plan didn't involve an attempt on Bush's life, hence "no real fear." My question is this: if they knew about this whole thing in advance, why didn't they plan to make Bush look a little less like a paralyzed yutz at the moment of truth? If the purpose of the entire exercise was propaganda, wasn't it counterproductive to have the intrepid leader sitting there frozen with panicked indecision, a kid's book about goats in his hands, at the critical moment of his presidency? What possible benefit could that have served the conspirators?
David Ray Griffin responds (June 12, 2008): Matt, I appreciate this opportunity provided by you and AlterNet to respond to questions about my writings on 9/11, especially my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions, which is addressed specifically to journalists (as well as Congress).
Before responding to your first question, however, I need to address a theme that is implicit throughout your questions. I refer to your claim, which you have spelled out in previous writings, that those who believe 9/11 was an inside job must, to make this claim credible, present a complete theory as to how this operation was carried out.
You made this claim in the article in which you referred to "9/11 conspiracy theorists" as "idiots." They must be idiots, you said, because "9/11 conspiracy is so shamefully stupid." Saying that you could not give all your reasons for this claim, you wrote: "I'll have to be content with just one point: 9/11 Truth is the lowest form of conspiracy theory, because it doesn't offer an affirmative theory of the crime." By "an affirmative theory," you meant a "concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why." In the absence of such a theory, you went on to claim, "all the rest," including the "alleged scientific impossibilities," is "bosh and bunkum."
Recognizing that members of the 9/11 truth movement will argue that you are "ignoring the mountains of scientific evidence proving that the Towers could not have collapsed as a result of the plane crashes alone," you replied: "[Y]ou're right. I am ignoring it. You idiots. Even if it were not the rank steaming bullshit my few scientist friends assure me that it is, none of that stuff would prove anything."
Your argument here has two problems (aside from your self-contradictory statement that scientifically disproving the official account of how the Towers fell would prove nothing). First, like most people who defend the official account of 9/11, you use the term "conspiracy theorist" in a one-sided way, applying it only to people who reject the official account of 9/11. But that account is itself a conspiracy theory -- indeed, the original 9/11 conspiracy theory.
A conspiracy is simply an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime. One holds a conspiracy theory about some event (such as a bank robbery or a corporation defrauding its stockholders) if one believes that it resulted from such an agreement. A conspiracy theorist is simply someone who accepts such a theory.
According to the Bush-Cheney administration, the 9/11 attacks resulted from a conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and various members of al-Qaeda, including the 19 men accused of hijacking the airliners. This official account is, therefore, a conspiracy theory. (This is not a new point: I made it in my first book on 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor. I even made it in the title of my 2007 book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory. ) Accordingly, insofar as you accept this official account, you are a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. And yet you evidently do not consider yourself an idiot. Rather, you save that description, along with the term "conspiracy theorist," for those who reject the official conspiracy theory.
Looking aside from your selective name-calling, your one-sided use of the term would not be so bad except that it leads you to be one-sided in the demands you make: While demanding that rejecters of the official theory must provide an account of what happened that is both self-consistent and based on hard evidence, you do not seem concerned whether the official theory exemplifies those virtues. (I will illustrate this point in my responses to some of your other questions.)
In addition to this one-sidedness, there is a second problem with your claim that anyone challenging a theory must have a complete alternative theory: It is false. There are several ways to challenge a theory. You can cast doubt on it by showing that its alleged evidence does not stand up to scrutiny. You can show that a theory is probably false by pointing to evidence that apparently contradicts it. You can positively disprove a theory by providing evidence showing that it cannot possibly be true. The 9/11 truth movement has done all three with regard to the official account.
To make clearer why your claim is unreasonable, I'll use a method that you like to employ: I'll make up a story.
You and your best friend entered a contest and, on the basis of something you considered unfair, he won the rather sizable cash prize. A week later, he is found dead, killed by an arrow. Although you are heartbroken, you are arrested and charged with his murder.
The police claim that, being angry because you felt he had cheated you out of money and glory, you used a crossbow to shoot him from the roof of a nearby building. You hire an attorney to defend you, even though you are confident that, since the charge is false, the police could not possibly have any evidence against you.
At the trial, however, the prosecutor plays a recording on which your voice is heard threatening to kill your friend. He plays a video clip showing you going into the building carrying a case big enough to hold a disassembled crossbow. He presents a water bottle with your finger prints on it that was found on the roof.
In defending you, your attorney, having pointed out that the water bottle could have been planted, then argues that, since you did not make that call and never went into that building, the police must have fabricated evidence by using digital (voice and video) morphing technology. When the prosecutor rolls his eyes, your attorney cites William Arkin's 1999 Washington Post article, "When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing," which points out that voice morphing, like photo and video manipulation, is now good enough to fool anyone. With regard to why the police would have tried to frame you, your attorney suggests that the FBI may have asked the local police to put you away because of critical things you had written about the White House.
The prosecutor, smiling knowingly to the judge, says: "Oh my, a conspiracy theory." He then adds that, even if your attorney's speculations were true, which he doubted, it wouldn't matter: Your attorney could prove your innocence only by providing a complete and plausible account of the alleged conspiracy: Who ordered the frame-up and when, who carried it out, and how and where they did this. Your attorney replies that this is preposterous: You would not possibly have the resources and connections to do this.
In any case, your attorney says, he has scientific proof that the police's theory is false: A forensic lab has shown that the arrow that killed your friend could not possibly have flown the distance from the building's roof to the location where your friend was killed. He then asks the judged to dismiss all charges.
The judge, however, says that he's inclined to agree with the prosecution, especially if you are charging the government with engaging in a conspiracy: You need to provide a complete account of this alleged conspiracy. Not only that, the judge says, wickedly quoting a passage from one of your own writings: "In the real world you have to have positive proof of involvement to have a believable conspiracy theory." You must, he says, provide positive proof that the FBI and police conspired to frame you.
Your attorney protests, saying that, in spite of the fact that his client had articulated this requirement, it is absurd. The defense has done all it needs to do. Besides showing how all the evidence against the defendant could have been manufactured, it has shown that the government's theory is scientifically impossible.
The prosecutor objects, saying that the impossibility is merely alleged: He has some scientist friends who believe that the arrow could easily have traveled the distance in question.
The judge convicts you of murder.
Having shown you, I hope, that your demand for a complete theory, with positive proof, is unreasonable, I turn to your first question: "[If the Secret Service] knew about this whole thing in advance, why didn't they plan to make Bush look a little less like a paralyzed yutz at the moment of truth?" That's a good question, one that I myself asked near the end of The New Pearl Harbor, in a section entitled "Possible Problems for a Complicity Theory." Perhaps anticipating that you would come along, I pointed out that critics of the revisionist theory of 9/11 may well make the following claim:
[T]hese revisionists must do more than show that the official account is implausible. They must also present an alternative account of what happened that incorporates all the relevant facts now available in a plausible way. Furthermore, these counter-critics could continue, insofar as an alternative account is already contained, at least implicitly, in the writings of the revisionists, it could be subjected to a great number of rhetorical questions, to which easy answers do not appear to be at hand.
I then offered a series of such rhetorical questions, one of which was: Why would the president , after officially knowing that a modern-day Pearl Harbor was unfolding, continue to do "the reading thing"? And why would the president remain in his publicly known location, thereby appearing to demonstrate that he and his staff knew that no suicide missions were coming their way? Would not the conspirators have orchestrated a scene that made the Secret Service appear genuinely concerned and the president genuinely presidential?
I then pointed out that this and the other questions suggest that to accept the complicity theory would be to attribute a degree of incompetence to the conspirators that is beyond belief. But the truth may be that they really were terribly incompetent. With regard to the occupation of Iraq, the incompetence of the Bush administration's plans -- for everything except winning the initial military victory and securing the oil fields and ministries--has been becoming increasingly obvious. [This was written in late 2003.] Perhaps their formulation of the plan for 9/11, with its cover story, involved comparable incompetence. Perhaps this fact is not yet widely recognized only because the news media have failed to inform the American public about the many tensions between the official account and the relevant facts.
Moreover, I argued, whatever difficulty these rhetorical questions pose for a complicity theory, the problems in the official theory are far greater. After illustrating this point, I concluded:
Seen in this light, the fact that a complicity theory may not at this time be able to answer all the questions it might evoke is a relatively trivial problem . Furthermore, the fact that the revisionists cannot yet answer all questions would be important only if they were claiming to have presented a fully conclusive case. But they are not.
In my later writings, I emphasized this point -- that I am not attempting to provide a complete theory, partly because to do so would require groundless speculation, partly because there is no need. I did, however, state what I found the evidence to show on various matters, such as the fact that the World Trade Center buildings could have come down only through the use of explosives. I also clearly stated, after the first book, that I believed that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Air Force had been ordered to stand down, and that Dick Cheney was at the center of this operation. But this is very different from trying to offer a complete theory.
In the preface of the book about which you are asking questions, moreover, I pointed out that it contains not theory but simply an exposition of 25 contradictions within the official story.
One of these contradictions involves the story about Bush at the school. On the first anniversary of 9/11, the White House started telling a new story about what happened, saying that right after Andy Card told the president that a second WTC building had been hit, meaning that America was under attack, the president waited only a couple of seconds before getting up and leaving the room. The White House even got the teacher who was in the classroom to write two stories that repeated this lie.
Obviously the White House had come to believe that Bush's having remained in the classroom was a liability, not a benefit. (Some reporters had asked why the Secret Service had not hustled Bush away, thereby implicitly suggesting that perhaps the attacks were no surprise.)
Why the Secret Service had allowed Bush to stay, I wouldn't know. Perhaps it was thought essential that Bush make his scheduled address to the nation at 9:30. Or perhaps the planners were simply not very bright.
After the video surfaced on the Internet in 2003, in any case, the White House confirmed, when asked by a Wall Street Journal reporter, that Bush had in fact stayed for several minutes, explaining that his "instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room." The reporter evidently did not ask the White House why it had tried to get away with a lie.
The 9/11 Commission did not report that the White House had put out a false account in 2002. It did, however, ask the Secret Service why it permitted Bush to remain in the classroom. The Secret Service replied that "they were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door." The Commission evidently accepted that as a satisfactory answer.
In sum, I too would like to know why the planners did such a stupid thing. But I would think, Matt, that you should be concerned about why, if the attacks were a surprise, the Secret Service left Bush at the school, why the White House tried to change the story a year later (giving us two mutually inconsistent reports), and then why the press has not forced the White House to explain either of these events.
2. Matt Taibbi: If I'm following the implications of your early-chapter questions correctly, the Secret Service perhaps knew about the attack in advance (this is the implication of your chapter 1 question), while the Air Force needed to be explicitly ordered to stand down on the day of the attack (chapters 3 and 5). However, in later chapters (chapter 21, to be exact) you also mention the fact that the Secret Service was "very concerned, pointing up at the jet in the sky" when the mysterious "white jet" was flying over Washington -- the "white jet," incidentally, being an Air Force jet.
So according to your early chapters, the Secret Service knew that Bush wasn't going to be attacked, but the Air Force needed to be ordered to stand down; in the later chapter, the apparently-in-on-it Air Force sent a mysterious white jet up in the air over Washington for some unknown reason, while Secret Service agents, in the dark about the jet's purpose, point up at it with concern. Do you actually have a theory about which services may or may not have been in on this job, or do these kinds of inconsistencies just not bother you?
David Ray Griffin Responds: I'm pleased to see that you believe that a conspiracy theory, like any theory whatsoever, is not credible if it contains inconsistencies. I would think, therefore, that the 25 inconsistencies I have pointed out in the official conspiracy theory would lead you to consider it unworthy of credence. I have, however, seen no sign that you are troubled by these inconsistencies.
In any case, with regard to the apparent inconsistency you've pointed out in my own position, it is merely apparent. You elsewhere point out that it is a mistake to think of America's ruling class as monolithic. The same is true of the Air Force and the Secret Service. Only the top members of those organizations would have known about the plans for the attacks.
This difference was illustrated at the Sarasota school. As I reported, when the Secret Service agent who carried the president's phone saw the second WTC strike on television, he said to the sheriff: "We're out of here. Can you get everybody ready." But he was obviously overruled by the lead Secret Service agent, because the presidential party did not leave for another 30 minutes. The Secret Service agents at the White House disturbed by the white jet would have been equally in the dark.
The same division would have been true in the Air Force. Although General Richard Myers and some other top officers knew what was going on, the lower officers in charge of the interceptor pilots had to be ordered to stand down. So there is no inconsistency.
3. Matt Taibbi: If you were running this kind of conspiracy, why in God's name would you let the Mayor of New York -- a man who couldn't even keep his extramarital affairs a secret from the tabloids, a man whose own children bad-mouth him to the media every chance they get -- in on the secret? More to the point, if Rudy Giuliani did indeed, for some completely insane reason, have a part in this conspiracy, and in the absolutely impossible and implausible event that what you're implying took place and he did have foreknowledge of the towers coming down, on what planet would it make any kind of sense for this key conspirator to go blabbing his big criminal secret to Peter Jennings on television on the day of the big wedding? Can you explain why in the world he would ever do that?
There are two possibilities here: one is that Giuliani either misspoke or innocently communicated someone's fanciful guess about the towers coming down, and the other is that he inadvertently confessed to being part of the largest premeditated murder conspiracy in the history of the free world on live television. Why is the latter possibility more likely?
David Ray Griffin responds: You are referring to the fact that on 9/11, Rudy Giuliani told Peter Jennings of ABC News: "[W]e set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street , and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building."
Why did Giuliani say this on national television? I don't know, but it might have something to do with the fact that he's not generally considered the brightest, most discreet, person in the world.
In any case, I was surprised by your statement that it was "absolutely impossible that . . . he did have foreknowledge of the towers coming down." Philosophers generally talk about three kinds of impossibilities: logical impossibilities (such as making a round square), metaphysical impossibilities (such as traveling back to the past [where you might kill your grandfather before he had children]), and physical impossibilities (which are ruled out by the laws of physics in our particular universe, such as the law of the conservation of momentum). None of those kinds of impossibility apply here. Giuliani could have known the Twin Towers were going to come down if he knew that explosives had been set and were about to be detonated. Nothing "absolutely impossible" about that.
You argue that it is highly unlikely that Giuliani "inadvertently confessed." However, a confession would be a statement that most people would immediately recognize as such. Giuliani's statement that he was told the WTC was going to come down has been seen to imply foreknowledge only by those few individuals who know two things: that there would have been no reason to expect the buildings to come down unless they were known to be rigged with explosives, and that it was Giuliani's own people (in the Office of Emergency Management) who said the buildings were going to come down. So yes, he was careless, but he hardly "blabbed." He merely said something that was recognized to imply foreknowledge by the few people who knew the relevant facts.
That clarified, let's look at what you call the other possibility, although your statement actually articulates two possibilities: "that Giuliani either misspoke or innocently communicated someone's fanciful guess about the towers coming down." To begin with the first one: What would it mean to say that he "misspoke"? That would be no more plausible than Hillary Clinton's claim that she merely "misspoke" when she claimed she had come under sniper fire in Bosnia.
What about the other possibility -- that Giuliani simply repeated someone's "fanciful guess"? High-rise steel-frame buildings had never before come down on this planet because of any combination of external damage and fire. Such collapses had occurred for only one reason: their steel columns had been sliced with explosives. Surely someone's prediction that the WTC was going to collapse, made just a few minutes before the South Tower did and about 30 minutes before the North Tower did, could not plausibly be regarded as simply a "fanciful guess."
That Giuliani was aware that he should not have said that was made clear by the fact that, when confronted about his statement by a 9/11 activist group in 2007, he tried to deny it, saying: "I didn't know the towers were going to collapse." After a member of the group quoted exactly what he had told Jennings, Giuliani claimed that he had meant that "over a long period of time," meaning from 7 to 10 hours, the towers could collapse, "the way other buildings collapsed." However, no steel-frame high-rise buildings had ever collapsed after burning for 10, or even 18, hours. Moreover, Giuliani's statement to Jennings -- "we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building" -- was clearly referring to an imminent collapse, not one that might occur 7 or 10 hours later.
So yes, I believe that the most likely possibility is that Giuliani inadvertently revealed, to those people familiar with the relevant facts, that he and his people knew that the Towers were going to come down. This conclusion becomes even more evident when one is aware of the massive evidence, which I discussed in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, that the Twin Towers (along with WTC 7) did indeed come down because they were brought down with explosives.
One final point: You suggest that, if Giuliani did have a part in the conspiracy, it would have been for "some completely insane reason." But there may have been some perfectly rational (if evil) reasons. New York City avoided having to pay billions of dollars to have the asbestos removed from the buildings. Also, Giuliani may have believed that, by appearing to act heroically on 9/11, becoming "America's mayor," he might also be able to become America's president. And if this was a motive, it almost worked: He was regarded as the front-runner when the race for the Republican race began.
4. Matt Taibbi: What is more likely -- that an up-till-then poor pilot like Hani Hanjour got lucky and pulled off a highly-skilled maneuver, or that the plane was actually piloted by some other suicidal terrorist ordered by some secret bund of Pentagon conspirators to give up his life in order to attack his own? Or maybe you like the third option -- that thousands of witnesses who saw a plane hit the Pentagon were wrong, that the people who died on flight 77 didn't actually die then and there but at some other place and time, and it was actually a missile that hit the Pentagon?
Exactly what do you believe is the significance of Hani Hanjour's record of poor piloting? Do you believe someone else was flying the plane? Do you believe it wasn't a plane at all? Why don't you just come out and say what you think? Because we know this much: somebody piloted a jet liner into the Pentagon, and that somebody did a pretty good job of it. What does it matter if the ostensible pilot had a poor flying record? Who cares? Because unless you've got hard evidence that something else happened that day, that it wasn't Muslim hijackers but some other fanatical suicidal terrorist (for whoever it was was a fanatical suicidal terrorist) the detail is irrelevant. But you don't even have a theory about that day. Or do you? (Note: I fully expect you to respond by saying, "It's not our job to reveal what happened, it's only our job to raise questions." Which is a very convenient way of saying one of two things: either your evidence doesn't add up to any kind of coherent story, or you don't have the nerve to say in public what you really think the evidence suggests. Please, please disappoint me!).
David Ray Griffin responds: To begin with your final statement: I am puzzled why you would suggest that I, having written six books that suggest -- some of them very clearly -- that leading members of the Bush administration, including top Pentagon officials, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks for primarily imperialistic motives, might not "have the nerve to say in public" what I think.
Let me, in any case, examine the three possibilities you offer as to what happened at the Pentagon. Having read my chapter on Hanjour, you are presumably aware that aviation sources, immediately after 9/11 -- before Hanjour had been identified as the pilot -- said that "the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver," and that another story said, "Investigators are particularly impressed with the pilot who , just before [slamming into the Pentagon], performed a tightly banked 270-degree turn at low altitude with almost military precision." You are also presumably aware that Hanjour was said to have been a terrible pilot by several instructors, one of whom said, "he could not fly at all," and that another instructor, in the summer of 2001, refused to go up with Hanjour a second time.
And yet you believe that one of the likely possibilities is that "Hani Hanjour got lucky and pulled off a highly-skilled maneuver." Let's see what some men with more expertise say. Former Navy and Pan-American Airlines pilot Ted Muga said: "I just can't imagine an amateur even being able to come close to performing a maneuver of that nature." Former fighter and airline pilot Russ Wittenberg called it "totally impossible." Former 757 pilot Ralph Omholt said: "The idea that an unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory is simply too ridiculous to consider."
The other possibility you endorse is that "some other [Muslim] suicidal terrorist" flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The government has told us that there were five members of al-Qaeda on the plane. If Hanjour was not the pilot, it had to be one of the other four. Do you have a theory as to which one was up to the task? Muga, Wittenberg, and Omholt all doubt that anyone, including themselves, could have flown the reported trajectory in a 757. They are certain that no amateur could have done it, and any of the other men would have been amateurs with regard to 757s or any other "big birds" (as pilots call them).
What of the other possibility you offer -- "that thousands of witnesses who saw a plane hit the Pentagon were wrong." I wonder where you got that number. Even Popular Mechanics, which I had always considered the gold standard for reckless statements in support of the official theory, claims only that "hundreds of witnesses saw a Boeing 757 hit the building." The most extensive list of alleged witnesses of which I am aware contains only 152 people, and only some of them claim to have seen an airliner hit the Pentagon. A study of these, moreover, found that only 31 of them provided "explicit, realistic and detailed claims," that 24 of these 31 alleged witnesses "worked for either the Federal Government or the mainstream media," and that 21 of these testimonies contained "substantial errors or contradictions." Witness testimony, therefore, cannot establish the claim that Flight 77 or any airliner struck the Pentagon.
This is especially the case when we add the testimony of witnesses from inside the Pentagon. Captain Dennis Gilroy, the acting commander of the Fort Myer fire department, "wondered why he saw no aircraft parts." Captain John Durrer thought, "Well where's the airplane, you know, where's the parts to it? You would think there'd be something." Army officer April Gallop, who escaped from the building after being injured, said: "I don't recall at any time seeing any plane debris. I walked through that place to try to get out before everything collapsed on us . [S]urely we should have seen something?" ABC's John McWethy reported: "I got in very close . I could not, however, see any plane wreckage."
You say: "[W]e know this much: somebody piloted a jet liner into the Pentagon." I'm puzzled as to how you think you know this. The word "knowledge" means "justified true belief," so you cannot know something unless (1) it is true and (2) your belief that it is true is based on sufficient evidence. You ask what "hard evidence" I have for the view that the official story is not true. I provided a lot of this in Chapter 3 of Debunking 9/11 Debunking. Assuming that you place the same demands on the official conspiracy theory as you do on the alternative theory, what hard evidence is there for the claim that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon?
The authorities could have provided such evidence by showing reporters the various airplane parts that have unique serial numbers, including the flight data recorder, but they did not. They could have shown some of the 85 videos from cameras trained on the Pentagon, which the Justice Department admits having, but they have refused. One of the pieces of evidence offered by Rumsfeld in the first week was that the nose of Flight 77 was sticking out of the hole made in the Pentagon's C ring. But this claim, being ridiculous (the fragile nose could not have survived the impact with the reinforced outer wall), has been quietly dropped. In light of all this, plus the reported absence of airliner debris, I'm puzzled as to what hard evidence you believe exists. If you cite the DNA evidence, the truth is that we have no evidence that the bodies of the passengers actually came from the Pentagon (as I explain in Debunking 9/11 Debunking). Even if an airliner had hit the Pentagon, moreover, it might have been controlled remotely. So you do not know that someone piloted a plane into the Pentagon.
As to what really happened, I do not know. I am quite certain, however, that the official story, according to which Hani Hanjour (or some other al-Qaeda hijacker) piloted Flight 77 into the Pentagon, is false. There is no credible evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. One part of this evidence is the fact that Wedge 1 would have been, for several reasons, the least likely spot for Muslim terrorists to have struck. Another part of this evidence is the fact that the primary targeted area was the first floor of the Pentagon (92 of the 125 victims were on that floor ), which would have been impossible for a 757 to have hit -- especially without even scraping the Pentagon lawn (photographs showed that it was undamaged). I do not, therefore, merely "raise questions." I state that the official story is a lie.
5. Matt Taibbi: In chapter 21, you write about the "white jet," which you say may have been circling Washington when flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. "The claim that Pentagon officials were unaware of the approaching aircraft, which spiraled downward for three minutes before crashing," you write, "becomes implausible, making even more insistent the question of why the Pentagon was not evacuated."
Now, if I follow you correctly, your implication here is that officials in the Pentagon launched a jet into the airspace over Washington prior to the crash, and therefore knew that flight 77 was going to hit the Pentagon, and yet intentionally refused to evacuate their own personnel from the Pentagon building, ultimately incurring the deaths of over 100 of their own people. Do you have a theory about why they would engage in this seemingly pointless murderous/suicidal behavior? Or do you just implicitly believe that our government is capable of any and all nefarious behavior, not matter how insensible?
Because think about it: if the Pentagon was in on this job, why did they wait until the very last second to send that "white jet" into the air? Really, why would you wait until the last second, unless the whole situation was an unforeseen emergency, a surprise? And if they were really reacting to a surprise development, are you really ready to demand that congress investigate their failure to evacuate the world's largest office building within three crazed minutes? Remember, we have the luxury of knowing that the place ultimately crashed into the Pentagon. But that couldn't have been at all clear to those on the ground until the very last moments. So exactly what is there to be indignant about here? Are you upset that they failed to save the lives of those people who died at the Pentagon? Or are you implying that you believe they knew the ultimate destination of the attack all along and failed to act on purpose? Which is it? There is a very wide gap between those two propositions, but you leave your readers the option of choosing either. Why?
David Ray Griffin Responds: To fill in a few details for readers unfamiliar with the issue: The "white jet" in question was an E-4B, the Air Force's most sophisticated command and communications aircraft (often called a "flying Pentagon"). I did not say merely that "it may have been circling Washington" when the Pentagon was attacked; I presented evidence that this was indeed the case. The failure to evacuate cost 125 lives. The fact that the recent revelation of the E-4B's presence is embarrassing to the Pentagon is shown by the fact that, incredibly, its officials have denied that the plane over the White House was a military plane, even though there can be no doubt about this.
In your wording of the question, you say that the implication of my position is that the presence of this white jet meant that Pentagon officials "knew that flight 77 was going to hit the Pentagon." As my response to your third question shows, I do not believe that. My point is instead that, if the official story were true, they would have known this -- or at least that some airliner was approaching.
You say that an attack by the Pentagon on itself would have been "seemingly pointless murderous/suicidal behavior." In the first place, it certainly was not suicidal on the part of Rumsfeld and the top brass: Wedge 1, which was struck, was about as far as possible from their offices as possible (which is one of the reasons it would have been an unlikely target for Muslim terrorists angry about US foreign policy). None of the casualties, moreover, were connected to the US Air Force; all the victims were either in, or worked for, the Army or the Navy. Air Force officials did not kill any of "their own personnel."
Although the attack certainly was "murderous," I doubt very strongly that it was "pointless." I myself don't offer theories about what the point was, but this does not mean that a plausible theory cannot be provided. One suggested answer puts together two facts: first, the day before 9/11, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld stated at a press conference that the Pentagon was missing $2.3 trillion dollars; second, one of the most damaged areas was the Army's financial management/audit area. This combination of facts has led one 9/11 researcher, citing evidence that the "attack" began with explosives going off inside that area, to ask: "Were the auditors who could 'follow the money,' and the computers whose data could help them do it, intentionally targeted?"
You also ask: "if the Pentagon was in on this job, why did they wait until the very last second to send that 'white jet' into the air?" We don't know when the plane went up (we know only the time of the first reported sighting). The Pentagon clearly won't tell us, since it won't even acknowledge that the plane belonged to it. So we have no way of inferring that the military officials were reacting to a surprise event.
In any case, yes, even if Pentagon officials had had only three minutes notice, I would want Congress to ask why the evacuation alarms were not set off. There is no evidence that these were "three crazed minutes," and evacuations had been regularly rehearsed. What you call the "world's largest office building," moreover, had only five stories, so it would have been nothing like trying to evacuate the 110-story Twin Towers. In three minutes, therefore, a good percentage of the Pentagon employees could have gotten out of the building -- surely all 92 of those people who were killed on the first floor.
Accordingly, whether the victims were deliberately targeted by Rumsfeld and other Pentagon (especially Air Force) officials, or they were merely allowed to die because of a failure to set off the alarms, we should be outraged (not merely "indignant").
6. Matt Taibbi: Do you really think that people like Ted Olsen and Lisa Beamer are lying about receiving phone calls from their spouses in those last moments? Do you think someone would lose their spouse in a terrorist attack, and then moments later clear-headedly act a part in some devious conspiracy for the benefit of the press and the public? What exactly are you implying here? I mean, Jesus Christ -- they guy's wife died! Why would he lie about getting that call? Did someone call him and say, "Hey, Ted -- tough break about your wife. Can you do us a favor and pretend you got a call from her, pinning the attack on hijackers with box cutters?" Exactly how do you think that worked? Can you speculate, please, on what the instructions to Olsen with regard to his phony phone call might have sounded like?
David Ray Griffin responds: I don't want to be unkind, Matt, but these two questions make me wonder how well informed you are about 9/11. The name of the US Solicitor General was Ted Olson (not Olsen). More important, Lisa Beamer never claimed to receive a call from her husband, Todd Beamer. According to the official account, he called another woman named Lisa -- an Airfone employee named Lisa Jefferson -- and talked to her for the final 13 minutes of his life. He allegedly did this rather than accepting her offer to put him through to his wife, even though he reportedly assumed he was going to die. If you had asked whether I believe that this call occurred, I would have said no. Jefferson's report of this call was very important, however, because it was the source of Bush's "Let's Roll" slogan for the so-called war on terror.
With regard to Ted Olson, your argument is based on the assumption that his wife, Barbara Olson, really died, and that he truly loved her. Both of those things may well be true. But I certainly do not know that they are, and I suspect that you do not, either.
What we do know is that, although Ted claimed that he received two calls from his wife (during which she told him that Flight 77 had been hijacked by men with knives and box-cutters), the FBI has said otherwise. In a report on phone calls from the four airliners presented in 2006 at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called 20th hijacker), the FBI indicated that no such calls from Barbara Olson occurred. It did say that she attempted a call to the Justice Department. But the call, it said, was "unconnected" so that it lasted "0 seconds." This was the main point of Chapter 8 ("Did Ted Olson Receive Phone Calls from His Wife?") of 9/11 Contradictions, the book under discussion here.
In any case, if you accept the FBI's report, then there are two options: Either Ted Olson lied or else he, like many other people that day, was fooled by fake calls based on voice morphing technology. Either way, the belief that Barbara Olson called her husband from Flight 77 was based on deception. (This point, incidentally, is relevant to the question of whether Flight 77 could have struck the Pentagon, because this alleged call was the only evidence that it was still aloft after it disappeared from the FAA radar shortly before 9:00 AM.)
You may, incidentally, doubt the feasibility of voice morphing, in spite of my earlier reference to William Arkin's 1999 article (in which he reported that he heard the voices of Colin Powell and another general perfectly rendered). So let's look at the alleged cell phone calls from United Flight 93. According to news reports at the time, of the 37 reported phone calls from this plane, over a dozen were made on cell phones. A leading British paper, for example, said: "The phone calls began, 23 from airphones, others by mobile." Four of those mobile or cell phone calls were reportedly made by Tom Burnett to his wife, Deena Burnett. She knew he had called from his cell phone -- she reported to journalists, in a book, and on national TV -- because her Caller ID showed his cell phone number.
When the FBI presented its phone report to the Moussaoui trial, however, it said that of the 37 calls made from this flight, only two of them -- both of which occurred at 9:58, after the plane had descended to 5,000 feet -- were made from cell phones. (Members of the 9/11 truth movement had argued that successful cell phone calls from high-altitude airliners would have been impossible in 2001 [prior to the invention and installation of pico-cell technology].) All of Tom Burnett's calls were said to have been made on passenger-seat phones. Assuming that you accept the FBI's report, Matt, do you have a theory as to why Deena Burnett reported recognizing the number from her husband's cell phone? Believing that we surely cannot accuse her of either lying or misremembering, I myself have suggested a theory -- that the calls were faked by means of a device, at least one of which can be purchased on the Internet, that allows callers to fake other people's phone numbers as well as their voices.
If Deena Burnett was tricked, then it's possible that Ted Olson was, too. My own hunch, however, is that he simply invented the story. For one thing, he was very much an insider in the Bush-Cheney administration, being the attorney who successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the Florida recount in 2000 should be stopped (thereby making Bush president) and that Cheney did not have to reveal the participants at his secret energy-policy meeting in 2001. Also, if the calls really came to the Department of Justice, Olson could have provided evidence of this fact when the veracity of his story was challenged, but he never did.
7. Matt Taibbi: In chapter 19, you quote the Commission about Hanjour's piloting: The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation. To which you comment: "How could this instructor have had such a radically different view of Hanjour's abilities than all the others, right up through August of 2001?"
You do realize that the Commission's statement is not implying that the instructor was making a qualitative assessment of Hanjour's piloting skills, don't you? He was merely saying that Hanjour's ability to use a certain device implied a certain kind of experience/training. Similarly, the notion that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed described Hanjour as the "most experienced" pilot is also not a qualitative assessment of Hanjour's abilities. Todd Collins is "more experienced" than Ben Roethlisberger, too. Objectively speaking, even without taking into consideration Hanjour's skill level, he was the "most experienced." Do you really not grasp this distinction?
David Ray Griffin responds: Given the fact that early reports described the aircraft that hit the Pentagon as having been flown with "military precision," the claim that one (apparently unidentifiable) instructor believed that Hanjour may have been trained by a military pilot was not insignificant. Also, my statement was based not simply on the sentence from The 9/11 Commission Report that you quoted but also the previous one, which claimed that Hanjour had "successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by [this] instructor." With regard to whether "more experienced" implies a qualitative assessment, one of the main factors in judging whether pilots are qualified to take tests for various certificates and ratings is the number of hours they have logged in the air.
I am puzzled, moreover, by your assertion that, "[o]bjectively speaking, [Hanjour] was the 'most experienced.'" I am aware of no objective basis for that assertion. Furthermore, investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker interviewed Amanda Keller, a woman with whom Mohamed Atta (i.e., the man going by that name) had lived for a few months while he was attending flight school in Venice, Florida. She reported that Atta was already an experienced pilot when he entered the country and that he was allowed to fly other students, as if he were an instructor. Of all the alleged pilots, furthermore, Hanjour seemed to be the only one who failed to complete a single course of training.
I wonder, finally, why you included this point. If you had successfully argued that even the two apparently favorable statements about Hanjour in The 9/11 Commission Report do not really suggest that he might have been a fairly decent pilot after all, how would this help your defense of the official account?
8. Matt Taibbi: In chapter 10, you write about the apparent discrepancy between the military's position that its jets were 71 miles way from Manhattan at the time of the flight 175 crash, and the time those jets should have been there. "For example," you write:
the F-15s were reportedly airborne at 8:52 and one of the pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy, was quoted as saying that he 'was in full-blower all the way.' That would probably mean that the fighters were going about 1300 mph and hence about 22 miles a minute. At that speed, they would have covered the 180 miles from Otis to Manhattan in ten minutes (allowing two minutes to get up to speed and to slow down). Rather than being 71 miles away at 9:03 a.m., therefore, they should have already been there for a minute.
Now, what's more likely -- that a suburban Californian professor of Theology has his scrawled-on-a-napkin fighter-jet timeline math wrong, or that some dark conspiracy of White House confederates issued an unprecedented stand-down order in the missing minutes, an order that, despite being a de facto admission of responsibility for the greatest crime against American citizens ever committed by an American government, would subsequently be faithfully kept secret by all the ordinary rank-and-file military personnel who, up till that moment, had been kept in the dark? Can you explain to me why the latter scenario is more likely?
David Ray Griffin responds: Mathematics is the same for people of every occupation in every part of the world. The calculations are either right or wrong, no matter who does them. So rather than suggesting that my calculation might be wrong, why don't you pull out a napkin and see if you get a different result?
I based my calculation, incidentally, on a conservative estimate of the speed of the fighters. As I pointed out in a note: "Although the F-15 can fly at 1800 mph, this is only at very high altitudes, where the air is thin. For my calculation, I assumed that the fighters would have been traveling about half way between sea level, at which they can fly 915 mph, and 36,000 feet, at which they can fly 1650 mph." In the meantime, however, I have talked to pilots who say that the F-15s would have more likely gone up "to altitude." If they went full speed at 36,000 feet, they would have been going 1650 mph, hence 29 miles per minute, allowing them to cover the 180 miles in slightly over 6 minutes. Even if we generously allow a total of 5 minutes for ascent and descent, they would have arrived in Manhattan with at least two minutes to spare.
If your napkin gives the same result, I wonder if you have a theory as to why, according to the military, the F-15s were still 71 miles away. Your question, incidentally, is dealing with a position that the military defended only from September 2001 until the 9/11 Commission put out its report in July 2004. As I explained in the next section of Chapter 10, the Commission's new story claimed that the FAA, instead of notifying the military about Flight 175's difficulties at 8:43, failed to notify it until the airliner was hitting the South Tower at 9:03. This new story absolves the military of all possible blame for its failure to intercept Flight 175. Why did the 9/11 Commission change the story? I believe it did so precisely because it saw that the 9/11 truth movement had the math right -- that if the military had been notified about Flight 175's hijacking at 8:43, the F-15s could have easily intercepted it. (The Commission explicitly admitted this with regard to Flight 77, as I point out below.)
I am pleased, in any case, that you agree that if 9/11 was an inside job, it was "the greatest crime against American citizens ever committed by an American government." Given this view, I am puzzled why you seem less interested in the enormous body of evidence suggesting that it was indeed an inside job than in trying to pick away at a few pieces of this evidence.
Surely you cannot believe the Bush-Cheney administration incapable of such a crime. Surely you know, for example, that an order from the White House condemned thousands of Ground Zero workers to miserable lives and early deaths. As I reported in the introduction to Debunking 9/11 Debunking, the EPA was going to issue a warning that the air was unsafe to breathe (asbestos levels of four times the safe level had already been reported). The White House, however, ordered the EPA to declare that the air did not contain "excessive levels of asbestos" and was otherwise "safe to breathe." Over 50,000 of the workers have respiratory problems, over 350 have died, 600 more have cancer, and there are predictions that the deaths will far exceed those that occurred on 9/11 itself. Likewise, more Americans have already died in the Iraq war, which was based on lies, than on 9/11. No a priori argument can be given, therefore, that the administration would have been too moral to orchestrate 9/11.
8. Matt Taibbi: In the course of this entire book, did you pick up the phone once? Or is the whole thing based upon research of internet sources? I notice, for instance, that you seem not to have called Congressional Air Charters. Even your guess about the F-15 jet flying 1300 mph appears to be something you pulled from an internet source. I'm looking at your bibliography and I don't see a single original interview. Do I have that wrong?
David Ray Griffin responds: My work from the beginning has been devoted to summarizing and synthesizing the findings of those members of the 9/11 truth movement who have done original research of various types. In The New Pearl Harbor, for example, I took pains to point out that each point I made was derived from at least one of the major sources I used.
That said, I often found it necessary in my later books to contact various individuals. This was not true while I was working on 9/11 Contradictions, since it merely documents contradictions within the official story. With regard to Congressional Air Charters, about which you asked, I saw no point in trying to contact it, because a journalist, as I reported in note 23 of the Hani Hanjour chapter, had already tried and learned nothing. However, two experienced researchers did carry out extensive (but fruitless) searches on my behalf to find the "Eddie Shalev" cited by the Commission as support for its claim that an instructor at Congressional Air Charters had supervised Hanjour's "challenging certification flight."
Some of my previous books, however, did provide occasions for contacting people. While working on The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I had a lengthy telephone interview with Laura Brown of the FAA about a memo she had sent to the 9/11 Commission, clarifying the time at which the FAA had first contacted the military on the morning of 9/11. (I refer to it, in fact, in note 19 of Chapter 10 of 9/11 Contradictions.) Although I did "pick up the phone" in that case, I generally prefer to communicate by email. If you look at the notes for Chapter 9 (dealing with Flight 11), you will see references to several email letters from Colin Scoggins, an air traffic controller at the FAA's Boston Center who was cited in The 9/11 Commission Report. I exchanged dozens of email letters with him while I was working on Chapter 1 of Debunking 9/11 Debunking. At the same time, I was also corresponding extensively with Robin Hordon, who had previously worked at that same center. I have also consulted extensively with scientists and pilots while working on the flights, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center.
I'm afraid that this was a pretty boring answer, but I didn't want to dodge your question -- although I was puzzled about the reason for it. Since I am not applying for a prize for original research, is not the only important thing the accuracy of my information, rather than the methods I employed to get it?
10. Matt Taibbi: Just out of curiosity -- when you hear hoof beats, which animal comes to your mind first? Horses or zebras? Because throughout this book, you hear hoof beats and conclude that this or that juking of the timeline a few minutes in this or that direction is evidence of something extraordinarily sinister -- a something for which, of course, no concrete evidence exists. I look at the same evidence and I see the completely predictable behavior of a bunch of incompetent politicians rewriting history in order to cover their asses for their failure to protect the country on a day of crisis. Can you give me any reason why any of the discrepancies you're describing shouldn't be laid at the feet of pure political self-interest? Why is a cover-up of garden-variety incompetence less likely than a cover-up of criminal involvement?
And please don't say that a cover-up of mere incompetence is just as worth investigating as a cover-up of criminal involvement. The entire direction of your investigatory enterprise implies something far more sinister than base-level incompetence. And if you're going to make that implication, you need something a lot hotter than minor timeline discrepancies to make it stick. If you accuse someone of murder, you need real evidence, and you don't appear to have any at all. In other words, where are your zebra stripes?
David Ray Griffin responds: You suggest that all of the timeline discrepancies I have documented are "minor." Let's look at some of them.
As I mentioned earlier, the military had originally said that the FAA notified it about Flight 175 at 8:43, which was 20 minutes before the flight would strike the South Tower. But the 9/11 Commission claimed that this notification did not happen until 9:03, when the building was being struck. This 20-minute difference cannot be described as minor: It makes all the difference with regard to whether the military could have intercepted the flight.
Turning to the discrepancy about Flight 77: NORAD had said in 2001 that the notification from the FAA had come at 9:24. The 9/11 truth movement asked why, then, was the plane not intercepted before it struck the Pentagon at 9:38. The 9/11 Commission, agreeing that the 9:24 notification time "made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond," solved this problem by claiming that the military "never received notice that American 77 was hijacked." This claim, besides contradicting what NORAD had been saying for almost three years, also contradicted the aforementioned FAA memo sent to the Commission by the FAA -- which said that the FAA had actually notified the military long before 9:24. The Commission, besides simply ignoring this memo in its final report, also contradicted statements by the FBI and the Secret Service. The discrepancy cannot possibly be called minor.
The same is true of the discrepancy about Flight 93. The 9/11 Commission claimed that the military "first received a call about United 93 at 10:07," four minutes after it had crashed. But General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's Continental region, had testified that the military had been aware of the flight for over 20 minutes before it crashed. He and many other officials -- including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- even said that the military was tracking Flight 93 and was in position to shoot it down. Hardly a minor discrepancy, especially given the evidence that the military did shoot the plane down.
Another discrepancy involves the time at which Cheney went down to the bunker under the White House to assume control of events. Many witnesses, including Richard Clarke and Cheney's photographer, said that it was not long after 9:00. One of these, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, testified that when he got down there at 9:20, Cheney was already there. Mineta then told the Commission about a conversation between Cheney and a young man, which occurred about 10 minutes before the Pentagon was attacked. Although Mineta did not thus interpret it, the conversation is most naturally understood as Cheney's confirmation of a stand-down order. The 9/11 Commission Report, making no mention of Mineta's testimony, claimed that Cheney did not get down to the bunker until almost 10:00. Definitely not a minor discrepancy.
Still another major discrepancy involves the time at which Cheney issued the shootdown authorization. According to the 9/11 Commission, he did so "between 10:10 and 10:15." Richard Clarke, however, reported that he received it at about 9:50 -- over 10 minutes before Flight 93 went down.
Matt, you want to claim that all of the contradictions in the official story can be regarded as cover-ups of incompetence. However, as I have emphasized in previous books, most fully in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, the contradictions are not limited to the internal ones discussed in this book. The official story is also contradicted by much evidence, both documentary and physical, which cannot be explained away by an incompetence theory.
Incompetence cannot explain, for example, why three steel-frame high-rise buildings came down at virtually free-fall speed; why virtually all of the buildings' concrete was pulverized into tiny dust particles; why clusters of steel columns, weighing thousands of tons, were ejected out horizontally some 500 feet from the towers; why hundreds of tiny bone fragments were found on the roofs of nearby buildings; why some of the buildings' steel melted, even though the fires could not have gotten within 1,000 degrees F of the requisite temperature; why steel from the buildings had been thinned because of oxidation and sulfidation (which the New York Times called "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation"; why explosions were going off in the buildings long after all the jet fuel had burned up; why Giuliani's people knew in advance that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were going to collapse; and why 125 people were killed in a part of the Pentagon that could not have been hit by an airliner, especially one flown by an amateur.
You asked for evidence of murder by forces within our own government. That is some of it.
Let me comment in closing, however, that your concern for evidence seems one-sided. As you know (if you looked at Chapter 18), the Bush administration, after promising to provide proof that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, reneged. Tony Blair provided a document but it, he admitted, did "not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law." And recently, in spite of whatever proof you may think has been provided by videotapes allegedly showing bin Laden confessing, the FBI does not list 9/11 as one of the attacks for which he is wanted because, a spokesman admitted, "the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Moreover, all the evidence of hijackers on the planes can be seen to have been fabricated (like the cell phone calls) or planted (like the incriminating evidence in Atta's luggage and the passports that flew out of the planes and floated to the ground at the WTC site). Where is your concern that bin Laden and 19 Muslims have been charged with murder without any hard evidence? Given your moral concern, I would think you would be especially bothered by the fact that, on the basis of these unsubstantiated charges, hundreds of thousands -- by some counts, millions -- of people have already been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In any case, Matt, I thank you for this opportunity to discuss some issues related to "the greatest crime against American citizens ever committed by an American government." Let me suggest that you next interview physicist Steven Jones about "the alleged scientific impossibilities" in the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center. The exchange continues here
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone. He is the author of The Great Derangement (Spiegel and Grau, 2008).
David Ray Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University (California). His 34 books include seven about 9/11, the most recent of which is The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expos" (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/100688/
By Matt Taibbi and David Ray Griffin, AlterNet
Posted on October 6, 2008, Printed on October 6, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/100688/
A poll of 17 countries that came out September of this year revealed that majorities in only nine of them "believe that al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States." A Zogby poll from 2006 found that in America, 42% of respondents believed the US government and 9/11 Commission "covered up" the events of 9/11. It's safe to say that at least tens of millions of Americans don't believe anything close to the official account offered by the 9/11 Commission, and that much of the outside world remains skeptical.
Over the years, AlterNet has run dozens of stories, mostly critical, of the 9/11 Movement. Matt Taibbi has taken on the 9/11 Truth Movement head on in a series of articles, and most recently in his new book, The Great Derangement.
In April, I asked Taibbi if he would be interested in interviewing David Ray Griffin, a leading member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University and author of seven of books on 9/11, about his recent book, 9/11 Contradictions. After months of back and forths between them and some editorial delays, I'm pleased to share their written exchange -- all 24,000 words of it. What we have here are the preeminent writers on both sides of the 9/11 Truth argument; a one-of-a-kind debate. Because the questions and responses are quite long, I've woven them together in order. Enjoy. -- Jan Frel, AlterNet Senior Editor.
--
1. Matt Taibbi (May 16, 2008): In your first chapter, you seem to imply -- well, you not only imply, you come out and say it -- that you think the real reason George W. Bush didn't hurry to finish his reading of My Pet Goat might have been that "the Secret Service had no real fear of an attack." In other words, they knew the plan in advance, and the plan didn't involve an attempt on Bush's life, hence "no real fear." My question is this: if they knew about this whole thing in advance, why didn't they plan to make Bush look a little less like a paralyzed yutz at the moment of truth? If the purpose of the entire exercise was propaganda, wasn't it counterproductive to have the intrepid leader sitting there frozen with panicked indecision, a kid's book about goats in his hands, at the critical moment of his presidency? What possible benefit could that have served the conspirators?
David Ray Griffin responds (June 12, 2008): Matt, I appreciate this opportunity provided by you and AlterNet to respond to questions about my writings on 9/11, especially my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions, which is addressed specifically to journalists (as well as Congress).
Before responding to your first question, however, I need to address a theme that is implicit throughout your questions. I refer to your claim, which you have spelled out in previous writings, that those who believe 9/11 was an inside job must, to make this claim credible, present a complete theory as to how this operation was carried out.
You made this claim in the article in which you referred to "9/11 conspiracy theorists" as "idiots." They must be idiots, you said, because "9/11 conspiracy is so shamefully stupid." Saying that you could not give all your reasons for this claim, you wrote: "I'll have to be content with just one point: 9/11 Truth is the lowest form of conspiracy theory, because it doesn't offer an affirmative theory of the crime." By "an affirmative theory," you meant a "concrete theory of what happened, who ordered what and when they ordered it, and why." In the absence of such a theory, you went on to claim, "all the rest," including the "alleged scientific impossibilities," is "bosh and bunkum."
Recognizing that members of the 9/11 truth movement will argue that you are "ignoring the mountains of scientific evidence proving that the Towers could not have collapsed as a result of the plane crashes alone," you replied: "[Y]ou're right. I am ignoring it. You idiots. Even if it were not the rank steaming bullshit my few scientist friends assure me that it is, none of that stuff would prove anything."
Your argument here has two problems (aside from your self-contradictory statement that scientifically disproving the official account of how the Towers fell would prove nothing). First, like most people who defend the official account of 9/11, you use the term "conspiracy theorist" in a one-sided way, applying it only to people who reject the official account of 9/11. But that account is itself a conspiracy theory -- indeed, the original 9/11 conspiracy theory.
A conspiracy is simply an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime. One holds a conspiracy theory about some event (such as a bank robbery or a corporation defrauding its stockholders) if one believes that it resulted from such an agreement. A conspiracy theorist is simply someone who accepts such a theory.
According to the Bush-Cheney administration, the 9/11 attacks resulted from a conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and various members of al-Qaeda, including the 19 men accused of hijacking the airliners. This official account is, therefore, a conspiracy theory. (This is not a new point: I made it in my first book on 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor. I even made it in the title of my 2007 book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory. ) Accordingly, insofar as you accept this official account, you are a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. And yet you evidently do not consider yourself an idiot. Rather, you save that description, along with the term "conspiracy theorist," for those who reject the official conspiracy theory.
Looking aside from your selective name-calling, your one-sided use of the term would not be so bad except that it leads you to be one-sided in the demands you make: While demanding that rejecters of the official theory must provide an account of what happened that is both self-consistent and based on hard evidence, you do not seem concerned whether the official theory exemplifies those virtues. (I will illustrate this point in my responses to some of your other questions.)
In addition to this one-sidedness, there is a second problem with your claim that anyone challenging a theory must have a complete alternative theory: It is false. There are several ways to challenge a theory. You can cast doubt on it by showing that its alleged evidence does not stand up to scrutiny. You can show that a theory is probably false by pointing to evidence that apparently contradicts it. You can positively disprove a theory by providing evidence showing that it cannot possibly be true. The 9/11 truth movement has done all three with regard to the official account.
To make clearer why your claim is unreasonable, I'll use a method that you like to employ: I'll make up a story.
You and your best friend entered a contest and, on the basis of something you considered unfair, he won the rather sizable cash prize. A week later, he is found dead, killed by an arrow. Although you are heartbroken, you are arrested and charged with his murder.
The police claim that, being angry because you felt he had cheated you out of money and glory, you used a crossbow to shoot him from the roof of a nearby building. You hire an attorney to defend you, even though you are confident that, since the charge is false, the police could not possibly have any evidence against you.
At the trial, however, the prosecutor plays a recording on which your voice is heard threatening to kill your friend. He plays a video clip showing you going into the building carrying a case big enough to hold a disassembled crossbow. He presents a water bottle with your finger prints on it that was found on the roof.
In defending you, your attorney, having pointed out that the water bottle could have been planted, then argues that, since you did not make that call and never went into that building, the police must have fabricated evidence by using digital (voice and video) morphing technology. When the prosecutor rolls his eyes, your attorney cites William Arkin's 1999 Washington Post article, "When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing," which points out that voice morphing, like photo and video manipulation, is now good enough to fool anyone. With regard to why the police would have tried to frame you, your attorney suggests that the FBI may have asked the local police to put you away because of critical things you had written about the White House.
The prosecutor, smiling knowingly to the judge, says: "Oh my, a conspiracy theory." He then adds that, even if your attorney's speculations were true, which he doubted, it wouldn't matter: Your attorney could prove your innocence only by providing a complete and plausible account of the alleged conspiracy: Who ordered the frame-up and when, who carried it out, and how and where they did this. Your attorney replies that this is preposterous: You would not possibly have the resources and connections to do this.
In any case, your attorney says, he has scientific proof that the police's theory is false: A forensic lab has shown that the arrow that killed your friend could not possibly have flown the distance from the building's roof to the location where your friend was killed. He then asks the judged to dismiss all charges.
The judge, however, says that he's inclined to agree with the prosecution, especially if you are charging the government with engaging in a conspiracy: You need to provide a complete account of this alleged conspiracy. Not only that, the judge says, wickedly quoting a passage from one of your own writings: "In the real world you have to have positive proof of involvement to have a believable conspiracy theory." You must, he says, provide positive proof that the FBI and police conspired to frame you.
Your attorney protests, saying that, in spite of the fact that his client had articulated this requirement, it is absurd. The defense has done all it needs to do. Besides showing how all the evidence against the defendant could have been manufactured, it has shown that the government's theory is scientifically impossible.
The prosecutor objects, saying that the impossibility is merely alleged: He has some scientist friends who believe that the arrow could easily have traveled the distance in question.
The judge convicts you of murder.
Having shown you, I hope, that your demand for a complete theory, with positive proof, is unreasonable, I turn to your first question: "[If the Secret Service] knew about this whole thing in advance, why didn't they plan to make Bush look a little less like a paralyzed yutz at the moment of truth?" That's a good question, one that I myself asked near the end of The New Pearl Harbor, in a section entitled "Possible Problems for a Complicity Theory." Perhaps anticipating that you would come along, I pointed out that critics of the revisionist theory of 9/11 may well make the following claim:
[T]hese revisionists must do more than show that the official account is implausible. They must also present an alternative account of what happened that incorporates all the relevant facts now available in a plausible way. Furthermore, these counter-critics could continue, insofar as an alternative account is already contained, at least implicitly, in the writings of the revisionists, it could be subjected to a great number of rhetorical questions, to which easy answers do not appear to be at hand.
I then offered a series of such rhetorical questions, one of which was: Why would the president , after officially knowing that a modern-day Pearl Harbor was unfolding, continue to do "the reading thing"? And why would the president remain in his publicly known location, thereby appearing to demonstrate that he and his staff knew that no suicide missions were coming their way? Would not the conspirators have orchestrated a scene that made the Secret Service appear genuinely concerned and the president genuinely presidential?
I then pointed out that this and the other questions suggest that to accept the complicity theory would be to attribute a degree of incompetence to the conspirators that is beyond belief. But the truth may be that they really were terribly incompetent. With regard to the occupation of Iraq, the incompetence of the Bush administration's plans -- for everything except winning the initial military victory and securing the oil fields and ministries--has been becoming increasingly obvious. [This was written in late 2003.] Perhaps their formulation of the plan for 9/11, with its cover story, involved comparable incompetence. Perhaps this fact is not yet widely recognized only because the news media have failed to inform the American public about the many tensions between the official account and the relevant facts.
Moreover, I argued, whatever difficulty these rhetorical questions pose for a complicity theory, the problems in the official theory are far greater. After illustrating this point, I concluded:
Seen in this light, the fact that a complicity theory may not at this time be able to answer all the questions it might evoke is a relatively trivial problem . Furthermore, the fact that the revisionists cannot yet answer all questions would be important only if they were claiming to have presented a fully conclusive case. But they are not.
In my later writings, I emphasized this point -- that I am not attempting to provide a complete theory, partly because to do so would require groundless speculation, partly because there is no need. I did, however, state what I found the evidence to show on various matters, such as the fact that the World Trade Center buildings could have come down only through the use of explosives. I also clearly stated, after the first book, that I believed that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Air Force had been ordered to stand down, and that Dick Cheney was at the center of this operation. But this is very different from trying to offer a complete theory.
In the preface of the book about which you are asking questions, moreover, I pointed out that it contains not theory but simply an exposition of 25 contradictions within the official story.
One of these contradictions involves the story about Bush at the school. On the first anniversary of 9/11, the White House started telling a new story about what happened, saying that right after Andy Card told the president that a second WTC building had been hit, meaning that America was under attack, the president waited only a couple of seconds before getting up and leaving the room. The White House even got the teacher who was in the classroom to write two stories that repeated this lie.
Obviously the White House had come to believe that Bush's having remained in the classroom was a liability, not a benefit. (Some reporters had asked why the Secret Service had not hustled Bush away, thereby implicitly suggesting that perhaps the attacks were no surprise.)
Why the Secret Service had allowed Bush to stay, I wouldn't know. Perhaps it was thought essential that Bush make his scheduled address to the nation at 9:30. Or perhaps the planners were simply not very bright.
After the video surfaced on the Internet in 2003, in any case, the White House confirmed, when asked by a Wall Street Journal reporter, that Bush had in fact stayed for several minutes, explaining that his "instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room." The reporter evidently did not ask the White House why it had tried to get away with a lie.
The 9/11 Commission did not report that the White House had put out a false account in 2002. It did, however, ask the Secret Service why it permitted Bush to remain in the classroom. The Secret Service replied that "they were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door." The Commission evidently accepted that as a satisfactory answer.
In sum, I too would like to know why the planners did such a stupid thing. But I would think, Matt, that you should be concerned about why, if the attacks were a surprise, the Secret Service left Bush at the school, why the White House tried to change the story a year later (giving us two mutually inconsistent reports), and then why the press has not forced the White House to explain either of these events.
2. Matt Taibbi: If I'm following the implications of your early-chapter questions correctly, the Secret Service perhaps knew about the attack in advance (this is the implication of your chapter 1 question), while the Air Force needed to be explicitly ordered to stand down on the day of the attack (chapters 3 and 5). However, in later chapters (chapter 21, to be exact) you also mention the fact that the Secret Service was "very concerned, pointing up at the jet in the sky" when the mysterious "white jet" was flying over Washington -- the "white jet," incidentally, being an Air Force jet.
So according to your early chapters, the Secret Service knew that Bush wasn't going to be attacked, but the Air Force needed to be ordered to stand down; in the later chapter, the apparently-in-on-it Air Force sent a mysterious white jet up in the air over Washington for some unknown reason, while Secret Service agents, in the dark about the jet's purpose, point up at it with concern. Do you actually have a theory about which services may or may not have been in on this job, or do these kinds of inconsistencies just not bother you?
David Ray Griffin Responds: I'm pleased to see that you believe that a conspiracy theory, like any theory whatsoever, is not credible if it contains inconsistencies. I would think, therefore, that the 25 inconsistencies I have pointed out in the official conspiracy theory would lead you to consider it unworthy of credence. I have, however, seen no sign that you are troubled by these inconsistencies.
In any case, with regard to the apparent inconsistency you've pointed out in my own position, it is merely apparent. You elsewhere point out that it is a mistake to think of America's ruling class as monolithic. The same is true of the Air Force and the Secret Service. Only the top members of those organizations would have known about the plans for the attacks.
This difference was illustrated at the Sarasota school. As I reported, when the Secret Service agent who carried the president's phone saw the second WTC strike on television, he said to the sheriff: "We're out of here. Can you get everybody ready." But he was obviously overruled by the lead Secret Service agent, because the presidential party did not leave for another 30 minutes. The Secret Service agents at the White House disturbed by the white jet would have been equally in the dark.
The same division would have been true in the Air Force. Although General Richard Myers and some other top officers knew what was going on, the lower officers in charge of the interceptor pilots had to be ordered to stand down. So there is no inconsistency.
3. Matt Taibbi: If you were running this kind of conspiracy, why in God's name would you let the Mayor of New York -- a man who couldn't even keep his extramarital affairs a secret from the tabloids, a man whose own children bad-mouth him to the media every chance they get -- in on the secret? More to the point, if Rudy Giuliani did indeed, for some completely insane reason, have a part in this conspiracy, and in the absolutely impossible and implausible event that what you're implying took place and he did have foreknowledge of the towers coming down, on what planet would it make any kind of sense for this key conspirator to go blabbing his big criminal secret to Peter Jennings on television on the day of the big wedding? Can you explain why in the world he would ever do that?
There are two possibilities here: one is that Giuliani either misspoke or innocently communicated someone's fanciful guess about the towers coming down, and the other is that he inadvertently confessed to being part of the largest premeditated murder conspiracy in the history of the free world on live television. Why is the latter possibility more likely?
David Ray Griffin responds: You are referring to the fact that on 9/11, Rudy Giuliani told Peter Jennings of ABC News: "[W]e set up headquarters at 75 Barclay Street , and we were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building."
Why did Giuliani say this on national television? I don't know, but it might have something to do with the fact that he's not generally considered the brightest, most discreet, person in the world.
In any case, I was surprised by your statement that it was "absolutely impossible that . . . he did have foreknowledge of the towers coming down." Philosophers generally talk about three kinds of impossibilities: logical impossibilities (such as making a round square), metaphysical impossibilities (such as traveling back to the past [where you might kill your grandfather before he had children]), and physical impossibilities (which are ruled out by the laws of physics in our particular universe, such as the law of the conservation of momentum). None of those kinds of impossibility apply here. Giuliani could have known the Twin Towers were going to come down if he knew that explosives had been set and were about to be detonated. Nothing "absolutely impossible" about that.
You argue that it is highly unlikely that Giuliani "inadvertently confessed." However, a confession would be a statement that most people would immediately recognize as such. Giuliani's statement that he was told the WTC was going to come down has been seen to imply foreknowledge only by those few individuals who know two things: that there would have been no reason to expect the buildings to come down unless they were known to be rigged with explosives, and that it was Giuliani's own people (in the Office of Emergency Management) who said the buildings were going to come down. So yes, he was careless, but he hardly "blabbed." He merely said something that was recognized to imply foreknowledge by the few people who knew the relevant facts.
That clarified, let's look at what you call the other possibility, although your statement actually articulates two possibilities: "that Giuliani either misspoke or innocently communicated someone's fanciful guess about the towers coming down." To begin with the first one: What would it mean to say that he "misspoke"? That would be no more plausible than Hillary Clinton's claim that she merely "misspoke" when she claimed she had come under sniper fire in Bosnia.
What about the other possibility -- that Giuliani simply repeated someone's "fanciful guess"? High-rise steel-frame buildings had never before come down on this planet because of any combination of external damage and fire. Such collapses had occurred for only one reason: their steel columns had been sliced with explosives. Surely someone's prediction that the WTC was going to collapse, made just a few minutes before the South Tower did and about 30 minutes before the North Tower did, could not plausibly be regarded as simply a "fanciful guess."
That Giuliani was aware that he should not have said that was made clear by the fact that, when confronted about his statement by a 9/11 activist group in 2007, he tried to deny it, saying: "I didn't know the towers were going to collapse." After a member of the group quoted exactly what he had told Jennings, Giuliani claimed that he had meant that "over a long period of time," meaning from 7 to 10 hours, the towers could collapse, "the way other buildings collapsed." However, no steel-frame high-rise buildings had ever collapsed after burning for 10, or even 18, hours. Moreover, Giuliani's statement to Jennings -- "we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse. And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building" -- was clearly referring to an imminent collapse, not one that might occur 7 or 10 hours later.
So yes, I believe that the most likely possibility is that Giuliani inadvertently revealed, to those people familiar with the relevant facts, that he and his people knew that the Towers were going to come down. This conclusion becomes even more evident when one is aware of the massive evidence, which I discussed in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, that the Twin Towers (along with WTC 7) did indeed come down because they were brought down with explosives.
One final point: You suggest that, if Giuliani did have a part in the conspiracy, it would have been for "some completely insane reason." But there may have been some perfectly rational (if evil) reasons. New York City avoided having to pay billions of dollars to have the asbestos removed from the buildings. Also, Giuliani may have believed that, by appearing to act heroically on 9/11, becoming "America's mayor," he might also be able to become America's president. And if this was a motive, it almost worked: He was regarded as the front-runner when the race for the Republican race began.
4. Matt Taibbi: What is more likely -- that an up-till-then poor pilot like Hani Hanjour got lucky and pulled off a highly-skilled maneuver, or that the plane was actually piloted by some other suicidal terrorist ordered by some secret bund of Pentagon conspirators to give up his life in order to attack his own? Or maybe you like the third option -- that thousands of witnesses who saw a plane hit the Pentagon were wrong, that the people who died on flight 77 didn't actually die then and there but at some other place and time, and it was actually a missile that hit the Pentagon?
Exactly what do you believe is the significance of Hani Hanjour's record of poor piloting? Do you believe someone else was flying the plane? Do you believe it wasn't a plane at all? Why don't you just come out and say what you think? Because we know this much: somebody piloted a jet liner into the Pentagon, and that somebody did a pretty good job of it. What does it matter if the ostensible pilot had a poor flying record? Who cares? Because unless you've got hard evidence that something else happened that day, that it wasn't Muslim hijackers but some other fanatical suicidal terrorist (for whoever it was was a fanatical suicidal terrorist) the detail is irrelevant. But you don't even have a theory about that day. Or do you? (Note: I fully expect you to respond by saying, "It's not our job to reveal what happened, it's only our job to raise questions." Which is a very convenient way of saying one of two things: either your evidence doesn't add up to any kind of coherent story, or you don't have the nerve to say in public what you really think the evidence suggests. Please, please disappoint me!).
David Ray Griffin responds: To begin with your final statement: I am puzzled why you would suggest that I, having written six books that suggest -- some of them very clearly -- that leading members of the Bush administration, including top Pentagon officials, orchestrated the 9/11 attacks for primarily imperialistic motives, might not "have the nerve to say in public" what I think.
Let me, in any case, examine the three possibilities you offer as to what happened at the Pentagon. Having read my chapter on Hanjour, you are presumably aware that aviation sources, immediately after 9/11 -- before Hanjour had been identified as the pilot -- said that "the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver," and that another story said, "Investigators are particularly impressed with the pilot who , just before [slamming into the Pentagon], performed a tightly banked 270-degree turn at low altitude with almost military precision." You are also presumably aware that Hanjour was said to have been a terrible pilot by several instructors, one of whom said, "he could not fly at all," and that another instructor, in the summer of 2001, refused to go up with Hanjour a second time.
And yet you believe that one of the likely possibilities is that "Hani Hanjour got lucky and pulled off a highly-skilled maneuver." Let's see what some men with more expertise say. Former Navy and Pan-American Airlines pilot Ted Muga said: "I just can't imagine an amateur even being able to come close to performing a maneuver of that nature." Former fighter and airline pilot Russ Wittenberg called it "totally impossible." Former 757 pilot Ralph Omholt said: "The idea that an unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory is simply too ridiculous to consider."
The other possibility you endorse is that "some other [Muslim] suicidal terrorist" flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The government has told us that there were five members of al-Qaeda on the plane. If Hanjour was not the pilot, it had to be one of the other four. Do you have a theory as to which one was up to the task? Muga, Wittenberg, and Omholt all doubt that anyone, including themselves, could have flown the reported trajectory in a 757. They are certain that no amateur could have done it, and any of the other men would have been amateurs with regard to 757s or any other "big birds" (as pilots call them).
What of the other possibility you offer -- "that thousands of witnesses who saw a plane hit the Pentagon were wrong." I wonder where you got that number. Even Popular Mechanics, which I had always considered the gold standard for reckless statements in support of the official theory, claims only that "hundreds of witnesses saw a Boeing 757 hit the building." The most extensive list of alleged witnesses of which I am aware contains only 152 people, and only some of them claim to have seen an airliner hit the Pentagon. A study of these, moreover, found that only 31 of them provided "explicit, realistic and detailed claims," that 24 of these 31 alleged witnesses "worked for either the Federal Government or the mainstream media," and that 21 of these testimonies contained "substantial errors or contradictions." Witness testimony, therefore, cannot establish the claim that Flight 77 or any airliner struck the Pentagon.
This is especially the case when we add the testimony of witnesses from inside the Pentagon. Captain Dennis Gilroy, the acting commander of the Fort Myer fire department, "wondered why he saw no aircraft parts." Captain John Durrer thought, "Well where's the airplane, you know, where's the parts to it? You would think there'd be something." Army officer April Gallop, who escaped from the building after being injured, said: "I don't recall at any time seeing any plane debris. I walked through that place to try to get out before everything collapsed on us . [S]urely we should have seen something?" ABC's John McWethy reported: "I got in very close . I could not, however, see any plane wreckage."
You say: "[W]e know this much: somebody piloted a jet liner into the Pentagon." I'm puzzled as to how you think you know this. The word "knowledge" means "justified true belief," so you cannot know something unless (1) it is true and (2) your belief that it is true is based on sufficient evidence. You ask what "hard evidence" I have for the view that the official story is not true. I provided a lot of this in Chapter 3 of Debunking 9/11 Debunking. Assuming that you place the same demands on the official conspiracy theory as you do on the alternative theory, what hard evidence is there for the claim that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon?
The authorities could have provided such evidence by showing reporters the various airplane parts that have unique serial numbers, including the flight data recorder, but they did not. They could have shown some of the 85 videos from cameras trained on the Pentagon, which the Justice Department admits having, but they have refused. One of the pieces of evidence offered by Rumsfeld in the first week was that the nose of Flight 77 was sticking out of the hole made in the Pentagon's C ring. But this claim, being ridiculous (the fragile nose could not have survived the impact with the reinforced outer wall), has been quietly dropped. In light of all this, plus the reported absence of airliner debris, I'm puzzled as to what hard evidence you believe exists. If you cite the DNA evidence, the truth is that we have no evidence that the bodies of the passengers actually came from the Pentagon (as I explain in Debunking 9/11 Debunking). Even if an airliner had hit the Pentagon, moreover, it might have been controlled remotely. So you do not know that someone piloted a plane into the Pentagon.
As to what really happened, I do not know. I am quite certain, however, that the official story, according to which Hani Hanjour (or some other al-Qaeda hijacker) piloted Flight 77 into the Pentagon, is false. There is no credible evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. One part of this evidence is the fact that Wedge 1 would have been, for several reasons, the least likely spot for Muslim terrorists to have struck. Another part of this evidence is the fact that the primary targeted area was the first floor of the Pentagon (92 of the 125 victims were on that floor ), which would have been impossible for a 757 to have hit -- especially without even scraping the Pentagon lawn (photographs showed that it was undamaged). I do not, therefore, merely "raise questions." I state that the official story is a lie.
5. Matt Taibbi: In chapter 21, you write about the "white jet," which you say may have been circling Washington when flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. "The claim that Pentagon officials were unaware of the approaching aircraft, which spiraled downward for three minutes before crashing," you write, "becomes implausible, making even more insistent the question of why the Pentagon was not evacuated."
Now, if I follow you correctly, your implication here is that officials in the Pentagon launched a jet into the airspace over Washington prior to the crash, and therefore knew that flight 77 was going to hit the Pentagon, and yet intentionally refused to evacuate their own personnel from the Pentagon building, ultimately incurring the deaths of over 100 of their own people. Do you have a theory about why they would engage in this seemingly pointless murderous/suicidal behavior? Or do you just implicitly believe that our government is capable of any and all nefarious behavior, not matter how insensible?
Because think about it: if the Pentagon was in on this job, why did they wait until the very last second to send that "white jet" into the air? Really, why would you wait until the last second, unless the whole situation was an unforeseen emergency, a surprise? And if they were really reacting to a surprise development, are you really ready to demand that congress investigate their failure to evacuate the world's largest office building within three crazed minutes? Remember, we have the luxury of knowing that the place ultimately crashed into the Pentagon. But that couldn't have been at all clear to those on the ground until the very last moments. So exactly what is there to be indignant about here? Are you upset that they failed to save the lives of those people who died at the Pentagon? Or are you implying that you believe they knew the ultimate destination of the attack all along and failed to act on purpose? Which is it? There is a very wide gap between those two propositions, but you leave your readers the option of choosing either. Why?
David Ray Griffin Responds: To fill in a few details for readers unfamiliar with the issue: The "white jet" in question was an E-4B, the Air Force's most sophisticated command and communications aircraft (often called a "flying Pentagon"). I did not say merely that "it may have been circling Washington" when the Pentagon was attacked; I presented evidence that this was indeed the case. The failure to evacuate cost 125 lives. The fact that the recent revelation of the E-4B's presence is embarrassing to the Pentagon is shown by the fact that, incredibly, its officials have denied that the plane over the White House was a military plane, even though there can be no doubt about this.
In your wording of the question, you say that the implication of my position is that the presence of this white jet meant that Pentagon officials "knew that flight 77 was going to hit the Pentagon." As my response to your third question shows, I do not believe that. My point is instead that, if the official story were true, they would have known this -- or at least that some airliner was approaching.
You say that an attack by the Pentagon on itself would have been "seemingly pointless murderous/suicidal behavior." In the first place, it certainly was not suicidal on the part of Rumsfeld and the top brass: Wedge 1, which was struck, was about as far as possible from their offices as possible (which is one of the reasons it would have been an unlikely target for Muslim terrorists angry about US foreign policy). None of the casualties, moreover, were connected to the US Air Force; all the victims were either in, or worked for, the Army or the Navy. Air Force officials did not kill any of "their own personnel."
Although the attack certainly was "murderous," I doubt very strongly that it was "pointless." I myself don't offer theories about what the point was, but this does not mean that a plausible theory cannot be provided. One suggested answer puts together two facts: first, the day before 9/11, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld stated at a press conference that the Pentagon was missing $2.3 trillion dollars; second, one of the most damaged areas was the Army's financial management/audit area. This combination of facts has led one 9/11 researcher, citing evidence that the "attack" began with explosives going off inside that area, to ask: "Were the auditors who could 'follow the money,' and the computers whose data could help them do it, intentionally targeted?"
You also ask: "if the Pentagon was in on this job, why did they wait until the very last second to send that 'white jet' into the air?" We don't know when the plane went up (we know only the time of the first reported sighting). The Pentagon clearly won't tell us, since it won't even acknowledge that the plane belonged to it. So we have no way of inferring that the military officials were reacting to a surprise event.
In any case, yes, even if Pentagon officials had had only three minutes notice, I would want Congress to ask why the evacuation alarms were not set off. There is no evidence that these were "three crazed minutes," and evacuations had been regularly rehearsed. What you call the "world's largest office building," moreover, had only five stories, so it would have been nothing like trying to evacuate the 110-story Twin Towers. In three minutes, therefore, a good percentage of the Pentagon employees could have gotten out of the building -- surely all 92 of those people who were killed on the first floor.
Accordingly, whether the victims were deliberately targeted by Rumsfeld and other Pentagon (especially Air Force) officials, or they were merely allowed to die because of a failure to set off the alarms, we should be outraged (not merely "indignant").
6. Matt Taibbi: Do you really think that people like Ted Olsen and Lisa Beamer are lying about receiving phone calls from their spouses in those last moments? Do you think someone would lose their spouse in a terrorist attack, and then moments later clear-headedly act a part in some devious conspiracy for the benefit of the press and the public? What exactly are you implying here? I mean, Jesus Christ -- they guy's wife died! Why would he lie about getting that call? Did someone call him and say, "Hey, Ted -- tough break about your wife. Can you do us a favor and pretend you got a call from her, pinning the attack on hijackers with box cutters?" Exactly how do you think that worked? Can you speculate, please, on what the instructions to Olsen with regard to his phony phone call might have sounded like?
David Ray Griffin responds: I don't want to be unkind, Matt, but these two questions make me wonder how well informed you are about 9/11. The name of the US Solicitor General was Ted Olson (not Olsen). More important, Lisa Beamer never claimed to receive a call from her husband, Todd Beamer. According to the official account, he called another woman named Lisa -- an Airfone employee named Lisa Jefferson -- and talked to her for the final 13 minutes of his life. He allegedly did this rather than accepting her offer to put him through to his wife, even though he reportedly assumed he was going to die. If you had asked whether I believe that this call occurred, I would have said no. Jefferson's report of this call was very important, however, because it was the source of Bush's "Let's Roll" slogan for the so-called war on terror.
With regard to Ted Olson, your argument is based on the assumption that his wife, Barbara Olson, really died, and that he truly loved her. Both of those things may well be true. But I certainly do not know that they are, and I suspect that you do not, either.
What we do know is that, although Ted claimed that he received two calls from his wife (during which she told him that Flight 77 had been hijacked by men with knives and box-cutters), the FBI has said otherwise. In a report on phone calls from the four airliners presented in 2006 at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called 20th hijacker), the FBI indicated that no such calls from Barbara Olson occurred. It did say that she attempted a call to the Justice Department. But the call, it said, was "unconnected" so that it lasted "0 seconds." This was the main point of Chapter 8 ("Did Ted Olson Receive Phone Calls from His Wife?") of 9/11 Contradictions, the book under discussion here.
In any case, if you accept the FBI's report, then there are two options: Either Ted Olson lied or else he, like many other people that day, was fooled by fake calls based on voice morphing technology. Either way, the belief that Barbara Olson called her husband from Flight 77 was based on deception. (This point, incidentally, is relevant to the question of whether Flight 77 could have struck the Pentagon, because this alleged call was the only evidence that it was still aloft after it disappeared from the FAA radar shortly before 9:00 AM.)
You may, incidentally, doubt the feasibility of voice morphing, in spite of my earlier reference to William Arkin's 1999 article (in which he reported that he heard the voices of Colin Powell and another general perfectly rendered). So let's look at the alleged cell phone calls from United Flight 93. According to news reports at the time, of the 37 reported phone calls from this plane, over a dozen were made on cell phones. A leading British paper, for example, said: "The phone calls began, 23 from airphones, others by mobile." Four of those mobile or cell phone calls were reportedly made by Tom Burnett to his wife, Deena Burnett. She knew he had called from his cell phone -- she reported to journalists, in a book, and on national TV -- because her Caller ID showed his cell phone number.
When the FBI presented its phone report to the Moussaoui trial, however, it said that of the 37 calls made from this flight, only two of them -- both of which occurred at 9:58, after the plane had descended to 5,000 feet -- were made from cell phones. (Members of the 9/11 truth movement had argued that successful cell phone calls from high-altitude airliners would have been impossible in 2001 [prior to the invention and installation of pico-cell technology].) All of Tom Burnett's calls were said to have been made on passenger-seat phones. Assuming that you accept the FBI's report, Matt, do you have a theory as to why Deena Burnett reported recognizing the number from her husband's cell phone? Believing that we surely cannot accuse her of either lying or misremembering, I myself have suggested a theory -- that the calls were faked by means of a device, at least one of which can be purchased on the Internet, that allows callers to fake other people's phone numbers as well as their voices.
If Deena Burnett was tricked, then it's possible that Ted Olson was, too. My own hunch, however, is that he simply invented the story. For one thing, he was very much an insider in the Bush-Cheney administration, being the attorney who successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the Florida recount in 2000 should be stopped (thereby making Bush president) and that Cheney did not have to reveal the participants at his secret energy-policy meeting in 2001. Also, if the calls really came to the Department of Justice, Olson could have provided evidence of this fact when the veracity of his story was challenged, but he never did.
7. Matt Taibbi: In chapter 19, you quote the Commission about Hanjour's piloting: The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation. To which you comment: "How could this instructor have had such a radically different view of Hanjour's abilities than all the others, right up through August of 2001?"
You do realize that the Commission's statement is not implying that the instructor was making a qualitative assessment of Hanjour's piloting skills, don't you? He was merely saying that Hanjour's ability to use a certain device implied a certain kind of experience/training. Similarly, the notion that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed described Hanjour as the "most experienced" pilot is also not a qualitative assessment of Hanjour's abilities. Todd Collins is "more experienced" than Ben Roethlisberger, too. Objectively speaking, even without taking into consideration Hanjour's skill level, he was the "most experienced." Do you really not grasp this distinction?
David Ray Griffin responds: Given the fact that early reports described the aircraft that hit the Pentagon as having been flown with "military precision," the claim that one (apparently unidentifiable) instructor believed that Hanjour may have been trained by a military pilot was not insignificant. Also, my statement was based not simply on the sentence from The 9/11 Commission Report that you quoted but also the previous one, which claimed that Hanjour had "successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by [this] instructor." With regard to whether "more experienced" implies a qualitative assessment, one of the main factors in judging whether pilots are qualified to take tests for various certificates and ratings is the number of hours they have logged in the air.
I am puzzled, moreover, by your assertion that, "[o]bjectively speaking, [Hanjour] was the 'most experienced.'" I am aware of no objective basis for that assertion. Furthermore, investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker interviewed Amanda Keller, a woman with whom Mohamed Atta (i.e., the man going by that name) had lived for a few months while he was attending flight school in Venice, Florida. She reported that Atta was already an experienced pilot when he entered the country and that he was allowed to fly other students, as if he were an instructor. Of all the alleged pilots, furthermore, Hanjour seemed to be the only one who failed to complete a single course of training.
I wonder, finally, why you included this point. If you had successfully argued that even the two apparently favorable statements about Hanjour in The 9/11 Commission Report do not really suggest that he might have been a fairly decent pilot after all, how would this help your defense of the official account?
8. Matt Taibbi: In chapter 10, you write about the apparent discrepancy between the military's position that its jets were 71 miles way from Manhattan at the time of the flight 175 crash, and the time those jets should have been there. "For example," you write:
the F-15s were reportedly airborne at 8:52 and one of the pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy, was quoted as saying that he 'was in full-blower all the way.' That would probably mean that the fighters were going about 1300 mph and hence about 22 miles a minute. At that speed, they would have covered the 180 miles from Otis to Manhattan in ten minutes (allowing two minutes to get up to speed and to slow down). Rather than being 71 miles away at 9:03 a.m., therefore, they should have already been there for a minute.
Now, what's more likely -- that a suburban Californian professor of Theology has his scrawled-on-a-napkin fighter-jet timeline math wrong, or that some dark conspiracy of White House confederates issued an unprecedented stand-down order in the missing minutes, an order that, despite being a de facto admission of responsibility for the greatest crime against American citizens ever committed by an American government, would subsequently be faithfully kept secret by all the ordinary rank-and-file military personnel who, up till that moment, had been kept in the dark? Can you explain to me why the latter scenario is more likely?
David Ray Griffin responds: Mathematics is the same for people of every occupation in every part of the world. The calculations are either right or wrong, no matter who does them. So rather than suggesting that my calculation might be wrong, why don't you pull out a napkin and see if you get a different result?
I based my calculation, incidentally, on a conservative estimate of the speed of the fighters. As I pointed out in a note: "Although the F-15 can fly at 1800 mph, this is only at very high altitudes, where the air is thin. For my calculation, I assumed that the fighters would have been traveling about half way between sea level, at which they can fly 915 mph, and 36,000 feet, at which they can fly 1650 mph." In the meantime, however, I have talked to pilots who say that the F-15s would have more likely gone up "to altitude." If they went full speed at 36,000 feet, they would have been going 1650 mph, hence 29 miles per minute, allowing them to cover the 180 miles in slightly over 6 minutes. Even if we generously allow a total of 5 minutes for ascent and descent, they would have arrived in Manhattan with at least two minutes to spare.
If your napkin gives the same result, I wonder if you have a theory as to why, according to the military, the F-15s were still 71 miles away. Your question, incidentally, is dealing with a position that the military defended only from September 2001 until the 9/11 Commission put out its report in July 2004. As I explained in the next section of Chapter 10, the Commission's new story claimed that the FAA, instead of notifying the military about Flight 175's difficulties at 8:43, failed to notify it until the airliner was hitting the South Tower at 9:03. This new story absolves the military of all possible blame for its failure to intercept Flight 175. Why did the 9/11 Commission change the story? I believe it did so precisely because it saw that the 9/11 truth movement had the math right -- that if the military had been notified about Flight 175's hijacking at 8:43, the F-15s could have easily intercepted it. (The Commission explicitly admitted this with regard to Flight 77, as I point out below.)
I am pleased, in any case, that you agree that if 9/11 was an inside job, it was "the greatest crime against American citizens ever committed by an American government." Given this view, I am puzzled why you seem less interested in the enormous body of evidence suggesting that it was indeed an inside job than in trying to pick away at a few pieces of this evidence.
Surely you cannot believe the Bush-Cheney administration incapable of such a crime. Surely you know, for example, that an order from the White House condemned thousands of Ground Zero workers to miserable lives and early deaths. As I reported in the introduction to Debunking 9/11 Debunking, the EPA was going to issue a warning that the air was unsafe to breathe (asbestos levels of four times the safe level had already been reported). The White House, however, ordered the EPA to declare that the air did not contain "excessive levels of asbestos" and was otherwise "safe to breathe." Over 50,000 of the workers have respiratory problems, over 350 have died, 600 more have cancer, and there are predictions that the deaths will far exceed those that occurred on 9/11 itself. Likewise, more Americans have already died in the Iraq war, which was based on lies, than on 9/11. No a priori argument can be given, therefore, that the administration would have been too moral to orchestrate 9/11.
8. Matt Taibbi: In the course of this entire book, did you pick up the phone once? Or is the whole thing based upon research of internet sources? I notice, for instance, that you seem not to have called Congressional Air Charters. Even your guess about the F-15 jet flying 1300 mph appears to be something you pulled from an internet source. I'm looking at your bibliography and I don't see a single original interview. Do I have that wrong?
David Ray Griffin responds: My work from the beginning has been devoted to summarizing and synthesizing the findings of those members of the 9/11 truth movement who have done original research of various types. In The New Pearl Harbor, for example, I took pains to point out that each point I made was derived from at least one of the major sources I used.
That said, I often found it necessary in my later books to contact various individuals. This was not true while I was working on 9/11 Contradictions, since it merely documents contradictions within the official story. With regard to Congressional Air Charters, about which you asked, I saw no point in trying to contact it, because a journalist, as I reported in note 23 of the Hani Hanjour chapter, had already tried and learned nothing. However, two experienced researchers did carry out extensive (but fruitless) searches on my behalf to find the "Eddie Shalev" cited by the Commission as support for its claim that an instructor at Congressional Air Charters had supervised Hanjour's "challenging certification flight."
Some of my previous books, however, did provide occasions for contacting people. While working on The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I had a lengthy telephone interview with Laura Brown of the FAA about a memo she had sent to the 9/11 Commission, clarifying the time at which the FAA had first contacted the military on the morning of 9/11. (I refer to it, in fact, in note 19 of Chapter 10 of 9/11 Contradictions.) Although I did "pick up the phone" in that case, I generally prefer to communicate by email. If you look at the notes for Chapter 9 (dealing with Flight 11), you will see references to several email letters from Colin Scoggins, an air traffic controller at the FAA's Boston Center who was cited in The 9/11 Commission Report. I exchanged dozens of email letters with him while I was working on Chapter 1 of Debunking 9/11 Debunking. At the same time, I was also corresponding extensively with Robin Hordon, who had previously worked at that same center. I have also consulted extensively with scientists and pilots while working on the flights, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center.
I'm afraid that this was a pretty boring answer, but I didn't want to dodge your question -- although I was puzzled about the reason for it. Since I am not applying for a prize for original research, is not the only important thing the accuracy of my information, rather than the methods I employed to get it?
10. Matt Taibbi: Just out of curiosity -- when you hear hoof beats, which animal comes to your mind first? Horses or zebras? Because throughout this book, you hear hoof beats and conclude that this or that juking of the timeline a few minutes in this or that direction is evidence of something extraordinarily sinister -- a something for which, of course, no concrete evidence exists. I look at the same evidence and I see the completely predictable behavior of a bunch of incompetent politicians rewriting history in order to cover their asses for their failure to protect the country on a day of crisis. Can you give me any reason why any of the discrepancies you're describing shouldn't be laid at the feet of pure political self-interest? Why is a cover-up of garden-variety incompetence less likely than a cover-up of criminal involvement?
And please don't say that a cover-up of mere incompetence is just as worth investigating as a cover-up of criminal involvement. The entire direction of your investigatory enterprise implies something far more sinister than base-level incompetence. And if you're going to make that implication, you need something a lot hotter than minor timeline discrepancies to make it stick. If you accuse someone of murder, you need real evidence, and you don't appear to have any at all. In other words, where are your zebra stripes?
David Ray Griffin responds: You suggest that all of the timeline discrepancies I have documented are "minor." Let's look at some of them.
As I mentioned earlier, the military had originally said that the FAA notified it about Flight 175 at 8:43, which was 20 minutes before the flight would strike the South Tower. But the 9/11 Commission claimed that this notification did not happen until 9:03, when the building was being struck. This 20-minute difference cannot be described as minor: It makes all the difference with regard to whether the military could have intercepted the flight.
Turning to the discrepancy about Flight 77: NORAD had said in 2001 that the notification from the FAA had come at 9:24. The 9/11 truth movement asked why, then, was the plane not intercepted before it struck the Pentagon at 9:38. The 9/11 Commission, agreeing that the 9:24 notification time "made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond," solved this problem by claiming that the military "never received notice that American 77 was hijacked." This claim, besides contradicting what NORAD had been saying for almost three years, also contradicted the aforementioned FAA memo sent to the Commission by the FAA -- which said that the FAA had actually notified the military long before 9:24. The Commission, besides simply ignoring this memo in its final report, also contradicted statements by the FBI and the Secret Service. The discrepancy cannot possibly be called minor.
The same is true of the discrepancy about Flight 93. The 9/11 Commission claimed that the military "first received a call about United 93 at 10:07," four minutes after it had crashed. But General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's Continental region, had testified that the military had been aware of the flight for over 20 minutes before it crashed. He and many other officials -- including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- even said that the military was tracking Flight 93 and was in position to shoot it down. Hardly a minor discrepancy, especially given the evidence that the military did shoot the plane down.
Another discrepancy involves the time at which Cheney went down to the bunker under the White House to assume control of events. Many witnesses, including Richard Clarke and Cheney's photographer, said that it was not long after 9:00. One of these, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, testified that when he got down there at 9:20, Cheney was already there. Mineta then told the Commission about a conversation between Cheney and a young man, which occurred about 10 minutes before the Pentagon was attacked. Although Mineta did not thus interpret it, the conversation is most naturally understood as Cheney's confirmation of a stand-down order. The 9/11 Commission Report, making no mention of Mineta's testimony, claimed that Cheney did not get down to the bunker until almost 10:00. Definitely not a minor discrepancy.
Still another major discrepancy involves the time at which Cheney issued the shootdown authorization. According to the 9/11 Commission, he did so "between 10:10 and 10:15." Richard Clarke, however, reported that he received it at about 9:50 -- over 10 minutes before Flight 93 went down.
Matt, you want to claim that all of the contradictions in the official story can be regarded as cover-ups of incompetence. However, as I have emphasized in previous books, most fully in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, the contradictions are not limited to the internal ones discussed in this book. The official story is also contradicted by much evidence, both documentary and physical, which cannot be explained away by an incompetence theory.
Incompetence cannot explain, for example, why three steel-frame high-rise buildings came down at virtually free-fall speed; why virtually all of the buildings' concrete was pulverized into tiny dust particles; why clusters of steel columns, weighing thousands of tons, were ejected out horizontally some 500 feet from the towers; why hundreds of tiny bone fragments were found on the roofs of nearby buildings; why some of the buildings' steel melted, even though the fires could not have gotten within 1,000 degrees F of the requisite temperature; why steel from the buildings had been thinned because of oxidation and sulfidation (which the New York Times called "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation"; why explosions were going off in the buildings long after all the jet fuel had burned up; why Giuliani's people knew in advance that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were going to collapse; and why 125 people were killed in a part of the Pentagon that could not have been hit by an airliner, especially one flown by an amateur.
You asked for evidence of murder by forces within our own government. That is some of it.
Let me comment in closing, however, that your concern for evidence seems one-sided. As you know (if you looked at Chapter 18), the Bush administration, after promising to provide proof that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks, reneged. Tony Blair provided a document but it, he admitted, did "not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law." And recently, in spite of whatever proof you may think has been provided by videotapes allegedly showing bin Laden confessing, the FBI does not list 9/11 as one of the attacks for which he is wanted because, a spokesman admitted, "the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Moreover, all the evidence of hijackers on the planes can be seen to have been fabricated (like the cell phone calls) or planted (like the incriminating evidence in Atta's luggage and the passports that flew out of the planes and floated to the ground at the WTC site). Where is your concern that bin Laden and 19 Muslims have been charged with murder without any hard evidence? Given your moral concern, I would think you would be especially bothered by the fact that, on the basis of these unsubstantiated charges, hundreds of thousands -- by some counts, millions -- of people have already been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In any case, Matt, I thank you for this opportunity to discuss some issues related to "the greatest crime against American citizens ever committed by an American government." Let me suggest that you next interview physicist Steven Jones about "the alleged scientific impossibilities" in the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center. The exchange continues here
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone. He is the author of The Great Derangement (Spiegel and Grau, 2008).
David Ray Griffin is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University (California). His 34 books include seven about 9/11, the most recent of which is The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expos" (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/100688/
An Eagle named Consuelo
An Eagle named Consuelo
By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
A Temixtiani or gran maestra once taught me that human beings never
actually die… that they pass from the material world into the
spiritual world… that they never leave us.
For me, I think back to all the friends and family that have passed on
to spirit world. I know they are still with us. Sometimes I feel them.
Sometimes I sense them. Sometimes I can almost hear them speak, or
sing… or whisper. Yet to be honest, once in a while I do wish that I
could actually talk to them… to know they are actually here, with us,
among us.
Perhaps that makes me a doubting Thomas. Probably.
That's why years ago, I learned to write about people before they
passed on to spirit world… so that they can be recognized and honored…
and be aware that they are being recognized and honored.
That is why today, I write about a young woman, Consuelo Aguilar, who
has made a great impact on my life. My wife and I met her but a few
years ago when we lived in Wisconsin, and yet I feel it was her that
made it possible for us to connect with Raza Studies in Tucson… and to
also wind up teaching at Mexican American Studies at the University of
Arizona.
Consuelo is special. And at the same time, she is little different
than lots of young women across the country. Young women and young
men. She fights for dignity. She is from the school of young people
who sacrifice their lives to bring about change… who fight and
sacrifice to bring about peace, dignity and justice. In that sense,
young women and young men like her have always existed. It is they
that have always made the great changes in history. In this particular
case, she has made a great difference in Tucson… to this small world
we live in.
Consuelo works for Raza Studies – the department that has been under
siege by right-wing forces for years, particularly this past year –
perhaps because they teach a story much more ancient and far different
than the one about Columbus and the Pilgrims. She is a graduate of the
University of Arizona, long associated with Mexican American Studies,
as a student and as a community representative. She too has long-been
associated with MEChA – Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan –
long the Achilles heel of the ultra-right wing. Yes, MEChA is the
antithesis of hat-in-hand Mexicans that at one time accepted their
dehumanization. And yet beyond MEChA, she is an amazing community
organizer.
Not long ago, while preparing for the LSAT (because her dream has long
been to be a lawyer) – and while organizing against the relentless
attacks against Raza Studies – one day, she woke up, barely able to
speak. We all thought it was stress from organizing… from having to
fight off the right wing lunatics. Instead, after a series of medical
examinations, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. All
this – including her treatment – has taken place within the past few
months. Her cancer has been much more aggressive than anyone had
believed.
Soon, she will be going to a hospital in California for several months
of advanced treatment. Like any family facing similar circumstances,
her insurance will cover some of the costs, but not all.
I write this today, knowing that times nationwide are tough, but
Consuelo's life is precious and priceless. She will win. Her family
will win. She has already won. We've visited her several times in her
hospital bed, but the other day, I saw her in the hallway at Mexican
American Studies… what a miracle. She was there to celebrate the
birthday of someone I wrote about a few months ago – a legendary human
rights activist in her own right – Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith. What her
family needs is a little financial assistance from the community she
fights for… the community she has sacrificed for and the community she
represents.
While there is little doubt she is a warrior, I'd rather think of her
as an eagle – like her last name. There are few joys in life more
precious than to see the flight of an eagle. She reminds me of
Cuauhtémoc – the eagle that descends – as opposed to "The Eagle that
Falls." She descends and she ascends. Mostly, she soars.
In all the years as a writer, I've rarely asked for such help. And yet
I do today. But actually, for those of you who know me when I was on
trial a generation ago in California, I did ask for help… and I got
it. Sometimes, the only people helping me was the lowriding community
– from the homies in the hood… but the help did come. And that is why
I never forget. When I needed help, I got it and sometimes from
perfect strangers.
This that I write is not to strangers, perfect or otherwise. It is to
peoples who are part of a community under siege. We are all – not by
choice – part of a culture of resistance. But more pointedly, we are
part of a creation culture. Consuelo is creation – a creative force
for humanity. And this is what compels me to write this.
Patrisia and I will give $100 each to her family. For those of you who
are professionals, please consider matching this and ask your
professional organizations to contribute also. For those with less,
give less. For students, give what you can or get your organizations
to contribute. If you can give nothing but words, then give her that
and we will pass them along. If you have but prayers, send them and
she will receive them (she had new surgery on Wed.)
This eagle will once again fly.
* Separately, I have also asked University of Arizona Professor Raquel
Rubio Goldsmith for some words, along with those of Maya Bernal, a
protégé of Consuelo's to write a few words about Consuelo.
Raquel: There is nothing to add. Consuelo is a joy to any teacher.
Consuelo brings not only her dedication to social justice, but does so
in a multi-faceted way. From her robust mariachi voice (yes she was a
singer for a student mariachi band), to her elegant "chicana" taste in
clothes, her silent but energetic organizing talents to true belief in
community rights, Consuelo has been a gift to us in Mexican American
Studies. Her Master's thesis on the criminalization of immigrants is
a testament to respect for scholarly work as well as community needs.
Please join us in supporting Consuelo and her family now that they
need us.
Maya: It is difficult to share just a few words about such a wonderful
mujer. Consuelo has done so much for me and the community. She is
constantly working on events for the lucha, projects with her
students, droppin' knowledge and spreading hope for our people to see
better days. I have never known her to be doing nothing, or even one
task at a time. When she is not organizing her life, she is assisting
me organize mine. Since I first met Consuelo, through MEChA and public
protests in my early adolescence, she allowed me to tag along with her
and her comadres. This exposure made it possible for me to witness her
strength, her intelligence and her passion. Even at an early age she
helped me in becoming a stronger, smarter, critical thinker. Since
then she has taught me community organizing, event coordinating,
improved my lecture and public speaking skills, and checks me when I
occasionally lose my mind. Of course without even asking, she helps me
in applying for scholarships, creating my resume and introduces me to
the friendly faces at the University of Arizona. Where would I be
without Consuelo? Where would any of the students, teachers and this
community be without her? Consuelo takes part and accomplishes all
these amazing duties not seeking gratitude or praise or glory but
because they need to be done. Yet at the end of the day, Consuelo
still has the time and energy to be at her favorite rap and hip-hop
concerts, usually jammin' out in the front row or bustin' a move in
the back. Once Consuelo and her family have overcome this scratch on
the CD known as life, she will be back leading the fight. The fight
for change, the fight for social justice, the fight for human rights,
the fight of the people. Consuelo, I am grateful you saw the potential
in me to become somebody great.
Paz y Amor,
Maya Adela Bernal
1st Year Student, University of Arizona
* Please consider this letter as a form of tequio – and ancient and
Indigenous form of cooperation. One day we give to her. Another day,
somebody will give to us. It all comes back.
For donations, make check in the name of:
Consuelo Aguilar Benefit Donation Fund
Mail check to:
Consuelo or Mario Aguilar
7066 E. Calle Betelgeux
Tucson AZ 85710
In the memo, write: Wells Fargo 6988363328
Thanks
Roberto, Raquel & Maya
By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
A Temixtiani or gran maestra once taught me that human beings never
actually die… that they pass from the material world into the
spiritual world… that they never leave us.
For me, I think back to all the friends and family that have passed on
to spirit world. I know they are still with us. Sometimes I feel them.
Sometimes I sense them. Sometimes I can almost hear them speak, or
sing… or whisper. Yet to be honest, once in a while I do wish that I
could actually talk to them… to know they are actually here, with us,
among us.
Perhaps that makes me a doubting Thomas. Probably.
That's why years ago, I learned to write about people before they
passed on to spirit world… so that they can be recognized and honored…
and be aware that they are being recognized and honored.
That is why today, I write about a young woman, Consuelo Aguilar, who
has made a great impact on my life. My wife and I met her but a few
years ago when we lived in Wisconsin, and yet I feel it was her that
made it possible for us to connect with Raza Studies in Tucson… and to
also wind up teaching at Mexican American Studies at the University of
Arizona.
Consuelo is special. And at the same time, she is little different
than lots of young women across the country. Young women and young
men. She fights for dignity. She is from the school of young people
who sacrifice their lives to bring about change… who fight and
sacrifice to bring about peace, dignity and justice. In that sense,
young women and young men like her have always existed. It is they
that have always made the great changes in history. In this particular
case, she has made a great difference in Tucson… to this small world
we live in.
Consuelo works for Raza Studies – the department that has been under
siege by right-wing forces for years, particularly this past year –
perhaps because they teach a story much more ancient and far different
than the one about Columbus and the Pilgrims. She is a graduate of the
University of Arizona, long associated with Mexican American Studies,
as a student and as a community representative. She too has long-been
associated with MEChA – Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan –
long the Achilles heel of the ultra-right wing. Yes, MEChA is the
antithesis of hat-in-hand Mexicans that at one time accepted their
dehumanization. And yet beyond MEChA, she is an amazing community
organizer.
Not long ago, while preparing for the LSAT (because her dream has long
been to be a lawyer) – and while organizing against the relentless
attacks against Raza Studies – one day, she woke up, barely able to
speak. We all thought it was stress from organizing… from having to
fight off the right wing lunatics. Instead, after a series of medical
examinations, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. All
this – including her treatment – has taken place within the past few
months. Her cancer has been much more aggressive than anyone had
believed.
Soon, she will be going to a hospital in California for several months
of advanced treatment. Like any family facing similar circumstances,
her insurance will cover some of the costs, but not all.
I write this today, knowing that times nationwide are tough, but
Consuelo's life is precious and priceless. She will win. Her family
will win. She has already won. We've visited her several times in her
hospital bed, but the other day, I saw her in the hallway at Mexican
American Studies… what a miracle. She was there to celebrate the
birthday of someone I wrote about a few months ago – a legendary human
rights activist in her own right – Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith. What her
family needs is a little financial assistance from the community she
fights for… the community she has sacrificed for and the community she
represents.
While there is little doubt she is a warrior, I'd rather think of her
as an eagle – like her last name. There are few joys in life more
precious than to see the flight of an eagle. She reminds me of
Cuauhtémoc – the eagle that descends – as opposed to "The Eagle that
Falls." She descends and she ascends. Mostly, she soars.
In all the years as a writer, I've rarely asked for such help. And yet
I do today. But actually, for those of you who know me when I was on
trial a generation ago in California, I did ask for help… and I got
it. Sometimes, the only people helping me was the lowriding community
– from the homies in the hood… but the help did come. And that is why
I never forget. When I needed help, I got it and sometimes from
perfect strangers.
This that I write is not to strangers, perfect or otherwise. It is to
peoples who are part of a community under siege. We are all – not by
choice – part of a culture of resistance. But more pointedly, we are
part of a creation culture. Consuelo is creation – a creative force
for humanity. And this is what compels me to write this.
Patrisia and I will give $100 each to her family. For those of you who
are professionals, please consider matching this and ask your
professional organizations to contribute also. For those with less,
give less. For students, give what you can or get your organizations
to contribute. If you can give nothing but words, then give her that
and we will pass them along. If you have but prayers, send them and
she will receive them (she had new surgery on Wed.)
This eagle will once again fly.
* Separately, I have also asked University of Arizona Professor Raquel
Rubio Goldsmith for some words, along with those of Maya Bernal, a
protégé of Consuelo's to write a few words about Consuelo.
Raquel: There is nothing to add. Consuelo is a joy to any teacher.
Consuelo brings not only her dedication to social justice, but does so
in a multi-faceted way. From her robust mariachi voice (yes she was a
singer for a student mariachi band), to her elegant "chicana" taste in
clothes, her silent but energetic organizing talents to true belief in
community rights, Consuelo has been a gift to us in Mexican American
Studies. Her Master's thesis on the criminalization of immigrants is
a testament to respect for scholarly work as well as community needs.
Please join us in supporting Consuelo and her family now that they
need us.
Maya: It is difficult to share just a few words about such a wonderful
mujer. Consuelo has done so much for me and the community. She is
constantly working on events for the lucha, projects with her
students, droppin' knowledge and spreading hope for our people to see
better days. I have never known her to be doing nothing, or even one
task at a time. When she is not organizing her life, she is assisting
me organize mine. Since I first met Consuelo, through MEChA and public
protests in my early adolescence, she allowed me to tag along with her
and her comadres. This exposure made it possible for me to witness her
strength, her intelligence and her passion. Even at an early age she
helped me in becoming a stronger, smarter, critical thinker. Since
then she has taught me community organizing, event coordinating,
improved my lecture and public speaking skills, and checks me when I
occasionally lose my mind. Of course without even asking, she helps me
in applying for scholarships, creating my resume and introduces me to
the friendly faces at the University of Arizona. Where would I be
without Consuelo? Where would any of the students, teachers and this
community be without her? Consuelo takes part and accomplishes all
these amazing duties not seeking gratitude or praise or glory but
because they need to be done. Yet at the end of the day, Consuelo
still has the time and energy to be at her favorite rap and hip-hop
concerts, usually jammin' out in the front row or bustin' a move in
the back. Once Consuelo and her family have overcome this scratch on
the CD known as life, she will be back leading the fight. The fight
for change, the fight for social justice, the fight for human rights,
the fight of the people. Consuelo, I am grateful you saw the potential
in me to become somebody great.
Paz y Amor,
Maya Adela Bernal
1st Year Student, University of Arizona
* Please consider this letter as a form of tequio – and ancient and
Indigenous form of cooperation. One day we give to her. Another day,
somebody will give to us. It all comes back.
For donations, make check in the name of:
Consuelo Aguilar Benefit Donation Fund
Mail check to:
Consuelo or Mario Aguilar
7066 E. Calle Betelgeux
Tucson AZ 85710
In the memo, write: Wells Fargo 6988363328
Thanks
Roberto, Raquel & Maya
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