DR Griffin, et al

For the last few days I have been in a running email conversation with a fellow named Richard Curtis. Richard is the guy with the enormously broad shoulders who I mentioned in my previous post about Griffin and the 9-11 stuff. Richard said that someone had turned him on to my reference to him here and he thought to write me because, obviously, I just didn’t understand all the arguments. I wrote back that I had been paying attention to all this stuff from day one and why do you guys always assume that if someone doesn’t agree they just don’t have all the facts? We went back and forth for several days, me saying that the Griffin meeting at Town Hall was like going to a Scientology church, him calling me an asshole, me saying that I would not have a theologian do my thinking for me, him calling me an asshole and a jerk, me saying that he was the first to use such language, and so on. Richard Curtis is apparently a heavy weight in the local 9-11 Truth movement. In an op-ed that he wrote for the Seattle Post Intelligencer he is listed as “an adjunct professor of philosophy at Seattle University and a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.” So I went to check out “Scholars for 9/11 Truth,” and there was quite a list of them. 140 of them, I think. I began to read their credentials. I have to admit that I stopped after a while – there were 20 who were directly involved in theology and religion and about 7 who were not. This disturbs me. With all due respect, and with no insult intended, religion and theology are based on belief, and belief should have no part in something like this. If a person believes that 9-11 was an inside job then they can certainly build a case to prove it. Or at least to prove to the satisfaction of someone else who has already made up their mind. It should be noted that Seattle University is a religious school.

So why do these people always assume that disagreement can only be due to insufficient evidence? And why is it not alarming – or at least paralytically funny – that David Ray Griffin was giving a sermon the day after his lecture at Town Hall? I think its funny. By the way, one of Griffin's big blows that night was the part where the passenger on the doomed airplane called his mother and identified himself as “Mark Bingham.” The point, of course, was that if this had been the real Mark Bingahm he would never have said it like that. He would have just said < "Mom, this is Mark." Everybody applauded. Score for Griffin! But I found this recently from an online blog:

- Obviously DRG didn't take the time to research Mark's mom, Alice Hoagland, and her explanation on the Discovery Channel documentary "The Flight That Fought Back" or try to interview her himself. DRG and the 911 "researchers" never want to dig any further, because it might spoil their wild inferences and implications. ... This is the explanation the mom gave on "The Flight That Fought Back": "Mark's Mom: Once in a while he would say that. He would call up, and he was, he was a young businessman, and used to, used to introduce himself on the phone as Mark Bingham, and he was trying to be, uh, strong, and level-headed, and, and strictly business. "Mom, this is Mark Bingham".
texasjack 06.02.07 - 10:15 pm

No great shakes, but jeeze, Griffin could have at least looked into interviews that the guy’s mother made. The thing about theology is that once the error is revealed it still doesn’t matter. It's like Galileo and the Center Of the Universe. The church just reinterprets itself. Readily available photographs of airplane wreckage at the Pentagon don’t matter. Eyewitnesses don’t matter. It’s the belief that counts. If it was a missile that hit the Pentagon instead of an airplane then where the heck are all those passengers? Out in Area 51 somewhere? This is downright silly.

Anyway, not to beat a dead horse but this is my last email to Richard Curtis. It explains my position on the whole thing. His response to it was that this was the sort of letter he was expecting from me the first time – reasoned, calm, etc. I don’t even know this guy and he’s correcting my writing style and giving me grades. I’m sure he’s a nice fellow…

......

Richard,

Manachem Begin had a tactic that he used called Provoke and Respond. Its typical playground bully stuff. I bother you long enough until you punch me and then I can really beat the crap out of you and take everything you've got and call it self defense. Israel has been doing that to the Palestinians for years. The cops do it to the Blacks in the inner city, red necks do it to Indians, it's the bully. There is a law at the foundation of our country that said if a land was maintained by the people living on it then it was there's - unless they attacked, in which case the land could be taken. So we always made sure that we were attacked. Its useful to be the victim. Bush knows this, as does Cheney and all the rest. To assume that because these people went into high gear immediately after the 9-11 attacks is proof that they orchestrated these attacks themselves is not very smart. It ignores an entire field of activity which is at the core of our country's behavior. Provoke and respond. They didn't have to do it themselves. All they had to do was keep pushing until somebody pushed back. They had their intelligence people watching Bin Laden and all the others and they knew something was coming. It was in their best interest to allow it so they never really worked much to head it off. And when it did come all those plans that had been fine tuned over the years were set in place.

To assume and insist that the attacks were an inside job is one of the worst kinds of distraction. It keeps everybody from looking at what the US is actually doing by bothering all these people and stirring up all these conflicts. It gets us off the hook. And it insults the intelligence of the victims who retaliate - who methodically over a period of years lay their plans, gather their tools, and go to work when we are looking the other way. The best way for me to attack you by surprise is for me to convince you that I am stupid, too stupid to be dangerous. As long as you feel superior I have the advantage.

The US as it exists today is a sociopath with a loaded gun. We have to take the gun out of its hands and get it into therapy. We have no right to tell its victims how to respond, nor to demand that they all be the romantically beautiful victims that we would like them to be. Some of them are religious fanatics with visions of theocratic grandeur. But this has been coming for a long time. Have you read Ward Churchill's piece? He was right on the money. And like I said, that's the thing that needs to be said. Nobody cares if you stand out on the street and scream that 9-11 was an inside job. Nothing will happen. The cops won't come and nobody will get mad. But if you start to explain and to say in clear and concise language that the events of that day were in fact the logical and inevitable response to years of official bullying you will get beat up, harassed, lose your job, and so on. Because that's the thing that can't be said but must be said. That is the elephant in the living room.

Cheney is just a bit player in history. Bush is just the weak son of a dysfunctional father. At our time in history the world has come in anonymous disguise to slap us in the face and its about time. My first thought when I saw those towers burning on TV was "What took you so long?" And that's the real thing.

So you can keep doing what you're doing, I don't care. I think Griffin is a fraud and I think most of the people who go to these events are deluded. And I think that the longer we spend spinning our wheels in the safe but romantic confines of these Hollywood-like convolutions the longer we will put off doing what needs to be done. You are doing exactly what they want you to do - paying attention to something that doesn't matter and wasting energy on buffoonery.

So I'm done. It's been an interesting exchange. See ya later,

Jim Page