The 9 11 Commission and David Ray Griffin

http://www.flybynews.com/cgi-local/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1123024424,95688,

David Ray Griffin spoke at the National Press Club on June 22, 2005.

David Ray Griffin wrote The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.

Griffin points out:

1. At least six of the alleged hijackers are still alive. David Harrison of the Telegraph interviewed two of the men who supposedly died on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, one of whom said that he "had never even heard of Pennsylvania," let alone died there. The Associated Press reported that Waleed al-Shehri, supposedly on Flight 11, contacted the U.S. embassy in Morocco about two weeks after 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report, nevertheless, suggested that al-Shehri was responsible for stabbing one of the flight attendants shortly before Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.

2. Although Mohamed Atta, the supposed ringleader, had been portrayed as a devout Muslim ready to meet his maker, he actually loved alcohol, pork, and lap dances. The 9 11 commission, however, said that Atta had become "fanatically" religious.They also claimed that they could find no credible explanation as to why Atta and the other hijackers went to Las Vegas. The mainstream press has let the Commission get away with these obvious contradictions.

3. President Bush was in a classroom in Sarasota when he was told that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, a sign that the country was suffering an unprecedented terrorist attack. And yet the president just sat there. He remained at the school for another half hour. Bush's location had been highly publicized.

4. How did the hijackers, by crashing planes into the Twin Towers, cause them and Building 7 to collapse. Building 7 was not struck by an airplane, and steel-frame buildings had never before been caused to collapse by fire alone, even when the fires had been much bigger, hotter, and longer-lasting. The Commission avoided this problem by simply not mentioning this fact or even, incredibly, that Building 7 collapsed.

The collapses had all the standard features of controlled demolitions. For example, all three buildings came down at virtually free-fall speed. Controlled demolition was also suggested by the fact that the collapses were total, with the 110-story Twin Towers collapsing into a pile of rubble only a few stories high.

Many survivors of the towers have reported hearing and feeling explosions. But the 9/11 Commission failed to mention any of these reports. William Rodriguez told the 9/11 Commission behind closed doors about feeling and hearing a huge explosion in the sub-basement of the North Tower, then rescuing people from its effects, but neither his name nor any of his testimony is found in Zelikow's final report.The mainstream press has also refused to report Rodriguez's story, even though NBC News spent a day at his home taping it.

5. The Commission failed to subpoena the film from the video cameras, confiscated by the FBI immediately after the attacks, which could clear up one of the questions - whether the attacking aircraft was a Boeing 757.

6. The Commission did allude to one problem - the fact that Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot, was known to be completely incompetent, incapable of flying a Boeing 757, let alone performing the remarkable maneuver reportedly executed by the aircraft that hit the Pentagon.

The Commission handled this problem simply by saying in one place that Hanjour was considered a "terrible pilot" while saying elsewhere that he was given the assignment to hit the Pentagon because he was "the operation's most experienced pilot."

7. The Commission also failed to discuss the considerable evidence that Flight 93 was shot down by the US military, perhaps when passengers were about to wrest control of it. The Commission dealt with this problem only indirectly, by claiming that Vice President Cheney did not give the shoot-down order until 10:10, which was at least four minutes after Flight 93 crashed.

In support of this claim, the Commission said that Cheney did not enter the Operations Center under the White House until almost 10:00 that morning. To make this claim, however, the Commission had to contradict all prior reports. It also had to delete Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony, given during the Commission's public hearings, that when he got down there at 9:20, Cheney was already in charge.

8. The Commission's endorsement of the claim by General Richard Myers that he was on Capitol Hill that morning ignores Richard Clarke's report, in Against All Enemies, that Myers was in the Pentagon, participating in Clarke's video conference.

www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2005-07-29-pressclub.php

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