Thom Hartmann: OK, what happened on 9/11? That’s a subject of great controversy, debate and discussion. And let’s get into it. First, we’re going to have David Aaronovitch on. National Geographic has a new special, it’s premiering on Monday, next Monday August 31 where they’re putting to the forensic test, science versus, what they’re suggesting, science versus conspiracy. Or science and conspiracy I guess. And then in our second segment after we talk with David Aaronovitch, David Ray Griffin is going to drop by and we will put some of the same questions to him and it will be an interesting juxtaposition. David welcome to the show.
David Aaronovitch: Hi there, how are you doing?
Thom Hartmann: Great. And in fact you interviewed David Ray Griffin for this, did you not?
David Aaronovitch: The program interviewed him, I’m actually one of the voices on the program. If you like, a counter weight to David Ray Griffin, because I’m what might be described as a conspiracy skeptic. And I’ve written a book which will come out in America next year about history of conspiracy theories and why they’re so attractive and why people seem to want them. And I kind of hold up that bit of it on the program and so on. But I’ve watched the program over here in London in the last couple of days and it does exactly the thing that you say, it takes a number of scientific propositions around about 9/11 and tests them and then puts some of them back to people like David Ray Griffin and see how they react. It’s quite interesting.
Thom Hartmann: We’re talking with David Aaronovitch. His new book “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History” will be out in the United States next year. August 31st the National Geographic channel putting on this video. Um, David you, in the movie, you talk about how there are, you break out all the various categories of conspiracy theorists and one of the ones that I thought was interesting was the category of those folks who think that the government let it happen vs. the government of the United States, the Bush Administration specifically I guess, made it happen. How, the 'made it happen' part seems to be a bit more of a stretch. But the 'let it happen', you know the Bush Administration had warnings from Israeli intelligence, British intelligence. The CIA flew a guy especially down to Crawford Texas on August 6th to hand deliver a memo; they were so freaked out about it, to George Bush, he was on vacation, he refused to leave vacation. He literally patted the guy on the head and said, 'okay, you’ve covered your ass, now get back to Washington, DC'. Um, basically did nothing. Dick Cheney had been put in charge of the counter terrorism task force and the energy task force when they came into office. The energy task force was meeting regularly with the oil companies and in fact had already planned on how to carve up Iraq. The counter terrorism task force, though, didn’t meet until September. It had basically never met during the presidency. Isn’t the 'government let it happen' theory have some credibility?
David Aaronovitch: Well, I mean I can see why people are attracted to it and there’s a very good overwhelming reason why people would want to believe it, which is that you want to believe essentially that the government has sufficient intelligence and sufficient organizational capacity to learn to be able to distinguish from all the different informations it gets what the real threats are and to take action in time. And when it doesn’t do that, then one likes to imagine that it’s because they’ve decided to do it. Rather than because actually they’re clearly incompetent. Agencies have incredible rivalry and actually there are kinds of warnings going on all the time and it’s really difficult, genuinely difficult, to be able to distinguish one from the other, which is what I think really happened. So I can see why they lit on ‘let it happen’, um which is essentially the same thing was argued about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wasn’t it, about Pearl Harbor?
Thom Hartmann: Still is.
David Aaronovitch: Still is argued by some people, yeah, that he let it happen on purpose because he wanted a European war. It’s much the same. I think some people would prefer to believe that. And as you say…
Thom Hartmann: Well, Condi Rice didn’t really help that argument after the fact when she said nobody could have imagined somebody hijacking an airplane and flying it into a building as a way of harming the United States when in fact in March, at the G8 meeting I believe it was, in, as I recall, it was in Italy, George W. Bush actually had to stay on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean overnight because there was a very specific warning that Al-Qaeda specifically was going to hijack a commercial jetliner and crash it into the hotel complex in which he was staying. That became public information.
David Aaronovitch: I would have to check out some of the particularities of something like that.
Thom Hartmann: And that was pre 9/11.
David Aaronovitch: There’s a very interesting book that’s just been published over by you in the states, I got a hold of an early copy called “The Ground Truth” by a guy called John Farmer who was one of the counsels to the commission looking into 9/11. And I think the picture that really emerges from a very thorough piece of work that he’s done is just how little the government really did know and understand about what was going on. And what he really does show is that in the period between the first hijacking and the time when the final plane, flight 93, crashed to the ground, there was not a single moment in which the government was in any way in control of what was going on or really actually knew what was going on. And that I think, in many ways, that’s a more terrifying prospect than the prospect in the way that your government is bad. There’s the fact that government can’t do these sort of things. So if you’re asking me what I think the attraction of that proposition is, it’s that I can see why for a skeptic, maybe such as yourself, also it's more attractive, that proposition, than the ‘made it happen on purpose’ which requires you believe a kind of level of organization and malevolence which is sort of truly historic.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah. The, one of the centerpieces of the movie is the argument that it was not an airplane that hit the Pentagon and that the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center were not in themselves capable of bringing down those buildings the way that they came down. And tell us what you all did in the movie or what was done in the movie that essentially, arguably, debunked that.
David Aaronovitch: Well, one of the key pieces of science has been as a result of the people who believe that there was a conspiracy, that it was an inside job, have said that there was a controlled demolition that was somehow happened in the period immediately after the planes hit the twin towers. And the official version, we call the official version which is the version that most of the scientific organizations and the government believe, is that the fire created by the jet fuel created sufficient heat in order to weaken the steel supports throughout the building. When these weakened, the weight of the floors on top brought the building down inside it’s own footprint. That’s essentially their argument. So what the program did was actually the relatively simple thing of seeing at what temperature a steel beam in a gasoline fire would actually bend, would be weakened.
Thom Hartmann: Gasoline or kerosene, because jet fuel is kerosene.
David Aaronovitch: Yes, kerosene fire, kerosene fire. And it was the same as the jet fuel. And actually it happened at a considerably lower temperature than the temperature leading to melt and at a temperature that easily could have been happening inside the World Trade Center buildings at that time. In other words, it really deals with the possibility of the question of is this possible. The answer, pretty clearly seems to be yes. And then puts those results back to some of the people who believe in the ‘made it happen on purpose’ conspiracy to see what they say about this. And you won't be very surprised to find that they don’t accept it.
Thom Hartmann: Right, right. And in fact I’m sure we’ll hear that from David when we talk with him.
David Aaronovitch: Well, he says on the program that actually he’s not convinced because it was only one beam. But I think the question for him is what does he think would happen differently with lots of beams? I wasn’t at all clear about that from his answer.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah. Has anybody done any investigation into the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania? There’s been speculation that perhaps that flight was actually shot down, that Dick Cheney had put out a ‘shoot down that plane’ order. Did you get into that in the film?
David Aaronovitch: No, no. It’s flight 93 isn’t it?
Thom Hartmann: Yes, flight 93.
David Aaronovitch: There was a considerable amount of work done on the Pentagon flight. I think actually because we do have the flight box recording and also the phone calls that were made from flight 93 and also people who support conspiracy theory actually have backed off theories about flight 93 a bit. And there is no, because there is no evidence whatsoever, I mean there just isn’t any actual evidence of any kind that it was shot down, of any sort. It wasn’t felt necessary to go into it. Whereas there has been much greater suggestions about a missile hitting the Pentagon. So there was more emphasis placed in the program about whether or not it was.
Thom Hartmann: The program argues strongly that it wasn’t a missile and it wasn’t a bomb, it was an airplane.
David Aaronovitch: It wasn’t a missile, it wasn’t a bomb, it was an airplane. Certainly. It’s done experimentation to show what the difference between an implosion and an explosion, a striking of the building, and so on. But also, there is significant amount of aircraft debris in front of the Pentagon. There are the engines discovered inside, the DNA of the passengers discovered, and so I would have thought very, very difficult things in order to fake in the minutes and hours immediately after an explosion such as that.
Thom Hartmann: Okay. David Aaronovitch. He’s narrating and helped put together the National Geographic program that will be up Monday August 31 on 9/11, Science and Conspiracy. And also the author of the upcoming book, “Voodoo Histories: The role of conspiracy theory in modern history.” David, thanks for dropping by.
David Aaronovitch: Thank you very much.
Thom Hartmann: Good speaking with you. 16 minutes past the hour. David Ray Griffin up next.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
