kind of ashamed and profoundly disappointed not just on this issue but on several issues as to how universities manage to ignore deep questions and after forty years in the institution you get to see what those are now nine eleven is really one of the most dramatic cases i've ever seen and that's how my friend peter dale scott talks about me prevents he talks about events which we don't spend too much time trying to universities they are recognized for their research powerhouses their education their student life and their tradition of open discourse on campus but are there certain lines universities mediately following the tragic events of september eleventh two thousand and one that condemn a community quickly adopted the official story of that fateful day as described by the bush administration that a group of arab hijackers led by osama bin laden managed to hit precious landmarks without any interference because of intelligence failures on that day the nine eleven commission whose mandate was a provide the fullest possible account of the events of september eleventh also restated this conclusion in their five hundred seventy one page commissioner court throughout the years government officials and the media for the reinforce the story which has served as  foundation of the war on terror akademi at large has also maintained this version of events in their christiane and publications but have universities critically examined the official story is taboo to do so why do several academics identify themselves with the story when they are harsh critics of the u s administration's war on terror these questions are of crucial  growing number within that demick community there's a transformative event which involves so called global war on terror and military budgets are reformulated foreign policy restrictions of civil rights so massively important a watershed event what's the university doing now writing so material postmodern critiques of it that are they asking the basic question what happened on the day who did it not supposed to ask i think it's just considered oh we're not going there it's just not it's a subject to be avoided but not and if you ask people know there's no taboo about it it's just that it's not my area or it's all too confusing or who needs it through so many other areas that we can critique the stablish move on it's interesting to see that in the academy the case of the invasion of iraq has received a considerable amount of attention and that has exposed a considerable number of serious crimes and yet nine eleven doesn't get the same treatment nine eleven is still considered out of bounds i think one of the ways to register the fact that nine eleven is is something of a taboo subject in the academy is to look at the scholarship that actually has been published about nine eleven there's been very little examination of the the evidence examination of the nine eleven commission report they have all kind of stories of bill and balanced a story with the official story but they won't criticize it that tends to be a general path within academia even among left wing often publications that are about nine eleven and some particular way they they they they work from a presumption they work from an idea of nine eleven rather than  specific set of evidence and they certainly don't interior gate those presumptions very much the response of many progressive thinkers is best exemplified by nom chomsky in his book nine eleven and international bestseller in a paragraph chomsky state has written soboth the perpetrators of nine eleven has been hard to find and long after the source of anthrax attack was localized t government weapons laboratories it has still not been a dent fide nevertheless despite the senate evidence the national conclusion of both nine eleven is presumably correct academia is by nature very very focused very specialized and right away you have therefore so blind spots that make it difficult for academics to go beyond a certain area there's also this notion of society is being very structured and of being creative there are structures in which individual action does not have much impact so for a lot of even marxist academics or leftist bucket enix even for them who you've got to be critical of a government story they're more interested in the blog broader structural aspects of society they don't want to look at this thing called september eleventh  except obviously in terms of how it's how it's affected society sense that they're not interested in the events there are a number of of recent books in cultural studies for example looking at  nine eleven in film in television these books you would think would have to establish some kind of explicit narrative so when we're talking about nine eleven in film what exactly what are we talking about but they're their treatment of the actual gaps in the story of the ambiguities in the nine eleven commission report their treatment of the demonst errors in the report or omission is is negligible so they may spend a few pages in a two or three hundred page book addressing nine eleven  skepticism and usually it is treated in a kind of dismissive tone last year i went through it decided to go through journals of history and i said ok let's narrow it down to journals of contemporary american history journals that ought to be dealing to some extent with global war on terror nine eleven and so on and i looked at every issue since september eleventh two thousand and one i did not find a single article that raised the question who did it or is the governmental narrative accurate you know they assumed it was accurate they sometimes question what was done in response to it and they were critical of that there are lots of sense to post modern post colonial articles that were very complicated and sophisticated you know reading nine eleven and interpreted nine eleven and nine eleven as narrative of nine eleven the script but as far as i could tell it wasn't a single one that actually said what happened on that day what kind of historian is that what does it say both the business plan of history right now none of the books i can think of make any reference to the many book lengths studies of the evidence that have been done by people such as david ray griffin even if you don't agree with everything in griffin's analysis  there are parts of it that are undeniably legitimate and deserve to be examined by scholars so so there's clearly and an intention there to simply avoid the discussion altogether david ray griffin a professor emeritus of the philosophy of religion at claremont school of theology has offered over thirty books a dozen of which are devoted to exposing contradictions omissions and distortions within the nine eleven official story despite endorsements from distinguished scholars and former cia officers his literature remains on examined by the larger academic community one possible explanation for this broader perception i think is what communication scholars call the spiral of silence theory the spiral us of silence addresses the the basic question are we more willing to express our beliefs when we perceive support for those beliefs and less willing to disclose them when we think they are not widely shared so it's about your perception of public opinion and how that perception shapes your willingness to express certain ideas so the echo chamber of the corporate controlled media often gives the impression that certain ideas are more widely held then perhaps they are if you look at the public opinion polls regarding nine eleven there was a global opinion poll done that showed only forty six percent of respondents believed al qaeda were behind the nine eleven attacks so you might take from that that there's a great deal of misinformation circulating you know you might draw a number of conclusions from that but at the very least i think it demonstrates that there is a considerable amount of skepticism for whatever reason so we can't simply proceed from the belief that the dominant opinion is in is entirely one hundred percent congruity with the official nine eleven commission report and therefore i think there is at least in part because of that there there is a legitimate see to exploring forms of nine eleven skepticism academically when it comes to al qaeda and why most academics seem to accept the official governmental narrative bin laden and al and so on you know i'm going to be fairly blunt first before i'm blunt i want to say look the university professors are very overworked these days they tend to teach huge numbers of students they have to publish they have to do this and that so many of the reasons why they they haven't caught on are quite mundane they're run off their feet they're supposed to be specialists and they're they don't have time to just read around most of them have read almost nothing on nine eleven because it too busy doing other things so there's nothing very complicated there's not like they're doing something evil it's like most people in society haven't taken the time or had the time to look into it having excuse them a little bit in that way i'm not going to be quite critical i'm going to say that i think the main reasons they accept the official story are timid of tea and laziness timidity because you know it takes a certain  intellectual courage to question a story that's being promoted so heavily by almost every government in the world and by the mainstream media and by most academics the mainstream media especially since nine eleven label skeptics of official stories as conspiracy theorists in the pejorative sense of the term the larger academic community has also maintained this approach in its discourse in publications and you'd think universities would be smart enough to see through vilification and thought stoppers like conspiracy theory but for the most part they don't they don't experience these are people getting together to decide how to commit crimes or immoral acts and moreover nine eleven was obviously the result of a conspiracy somebody conspired maybe it was al qaeda maybe somebody else so it's quite silly to dismiss this is a conspiracy theory and yet under reflectively without thinking about it they used this and i even think the term conspiracy theory works especially well in universities perhaps even better than outside because university people have a tendency i'm afraid towards arrogance that in other words people outside of the university believe all kind of nutty things you know they think elvis is still alive or u f o s are here but we in the universe to have critical thinking we're disciplined thinkers we would never believe that so we in the university know that history is a very messy thing and you know i mean it's not created by of people with handlebar mustache as you know with all kinds of impersonal forces interacting with other forces and contingencies and accidents and the interaction of personality and institutional but they're the in the great unwashed some people who want to have a comforting simplistic view of the universe think that history unfolds simply through bad people getting together in back rooms and planning it on that that's the conspiracy theories and we therefore are above that and when we call so many conspiracy theories we're not just calling them an idiot or a moron though if we get really i will do that too but we're implying that we're more intellectually sophisticated and university people are very vulnerable to thought processes that allow them to feel a bit supporter that way so my response took me a while to see understand the way to respond to this in order to make an and epistomological break with just this normalised on seeing and refusal to engage facts by saying oh you mean your fishel conspiracy theory and that has worked very well in terms of then turning the table so to speak now becomes the onus is on the person who's brought up conspiracy theory to justify the most prominent conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories and like terrorism plans remained largely on examined by universities after nearly forty years operation northwoods was declassified it home for shooting innocent people on american streets hijacking planes blowing up a u s ship and with the support of clandestine media the goal was to blame it on cuba as a pretext for war it was proposed and signed by every member of the joint chiefs of staff perhaps the most recent case that the academy has yet to connect the dots in relation to the events of nine eleven or then through acts attacks although the bush administration and the media implicated iraq the alleged nine eleven hijackers or al qaeda and general investigations traced anthrax to a u s by weapons laboratory since blaming a middle eastern group had failed the f b i then pointed their fingers at a domestic individual however senator patrick lee who was giving indications of blocking the patriot act became a target of anthrax and was convinced many people were involved i do not believe  before the excess trees after the fact i believe there are others who could be charged with murder ok that's somehow we're not going to look at that alternative story we're going to be forbidden so here's where we get into taboo it's forbidden it is untouchable it is  who raise the issue are themselves attacked the taboo against knowing the facts is here and coded into the identity structure itself in the background nine eleven justified any violation of international a constitutional law as essential to the war on terrorism john mcmurtry a professor of philosophy of international renown became one of the first economics to publicly question the official story of an i eleven and presented a paper entitled why is there a war in afghanistan two months after nine eleven in which he asked the question who benefits from the tax within the next two days the wall street journal called him osama mcmurtry the globe and fox news followed quickly with that home and denunciation and his colleagues a couple of harvard fame notified mcmurtry that they're reporting him to the f b i and the cia academics flooded his university with e mails to its president and his department chair demanding that mcmurtry be fired in the end the university maintain mcmurtry professorship on grounds of academic freedom the united states or very possibly he would be in one of the torture chambers of some arab state of the bush operad it's not even in favor of the bush apparatus why would they be identifying with that story and indeed from aggressively so there's certainly i don't think i don't think many of us would have in other words to see our own government our own society is very stable as very resistant to any kind of interior corruption and that's uncomfortable alliances with the nation and the state how is the situation how are the universities at the university of new hampshire in two thousand and six william woodward a professor of psychology express his view in class that the bush administration allowed the nine eleven attacks to occur a number of students and local politicians insisted that he be fired and said there are limitations to academic freedom of speech some universities on the other hand raise new issues of the hundreds of professors that began analyzing nine eleven which really distinguished professor at the university of toronto became the first second demick in north america to teach a course that goal of course was definitely to subject the official elements in the official story to the test of evidence elements that were in the official report or the official version do not correspond to reality or in some cases there were stories shown how the official narrative was shaped by excluding certain elements and they including then has done a whole series of other volumes each one with its meticulous even handed prose poem which is really important and students work with that and then their own independent research is online and in newspaper archives that the students pursue more specialized topics in two thousand and class students devoted five weeks to critically examine david ray griffin scholarship on nine eleven students deconstructed chapter with insightful critiques and were impressed by griffin's rigor and balance research towards the end of the semester one student told the class the result was unanimous professor vora beige noted that students trained in logic and who studied the arguments of the new pearl harbor a carefully recognized that the official nine eleven narrative cannot survive rational scrutiny a result that was similar to the university of toronto class many of griffin's analyses focused on the contradictions omissions and distortions in the nine eleven commission's report which has brought attention to examining the nine eleven commission itself it's it's amazing that this is you know any investigation of any crime or any event becomes less and less possible as time goes by for women who lost their husbands on nine eleven referred to as the jersey girls motivated several nine eleven victims family members to compile well researched questions regarding the failures and activities of government officials on the morning of nine eleven and calls for an investigation despite the bush administration's efforts to avoid any investigation for over a year the jersey girls were successful in gaining media attention which pressure that ministration and led to the formation of the nine eleven commission one of the reasons to be suspicious of the nine eleven commission report is because of the executive director this is the man who is the head of  staff who did the actual work of producing the report is the man who decide what topics would be pursued what topics were not would not be pursued he's the one who we are told outlined the document chapter title subheadings before the investigation work of the commission even began so in other words he framed the narrative in advance ok and he obviously framed it the fit with the narrative that already been created by the  this is the executive director of the commission philip zelikow he was a close colleague of condit liza rice they had coauthored a book together he had worked on  national security with the first bush presidency he coauthored the national security doctrine for the bush jr presidency he was in every sense a bush white house insider and at the same time he had control over which witnesses were called before the commission what questions could be asked of them and he had control of the final edit of the nine eleven commission report so that by itself should never have been allowed and in fact the jersey girls did call for his resignation when they learned about his his background  obviously nothing was done about it we also know from philip sheehan's book the commission that karl rove was in fact the principal individual karl rove bush's senior aide was pretty the principal individual responsible for trying to avoid having any investigation at all the more more incriminating is the fact that zelikow remained in contact with with the bush white house with karl rove specifically while the commission was in progress and that that was explicitly not not allowed by its mandate and he talked about you know how civil liberties would have to be greatly wrists restricted if this were to happen foreign policy would have to be rewritten which in the end he did i mean he helped write the new defense  l the president should be given extra powers in advance he also published on the creation of public myth or what he preferred to call public presumptions stories special special the stories that touch people in a nation and draw the nation together and doesn't they may be true they may not be true but they dominate people's consciousness he's written about this before nine eleven and then he goes on and off there's an effect in time eleven commission report which is a boat such a traumatizing it's just very very strange the entire mandate of the nine eleven commission  is paradoxical i'll read it directly here from page sixteen of the preface our aim has not being to assign individual blame our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding nine eleven and to identify lessons learned so how can you claim to conduct a comprehensive investigation of nine eleven if simultaneously it's not your goal to blame anyone what if you actually came across evidence that you know that proved someone was directly involved and what are you going to ignore that evidence so it's it begins from a paradoxical place it also begins from a set of historical parameters that are extremely narrow ok so they decide purposefully i think purposely to to begin with the mid one nine hundred ninety s or so that's where their story begins and they tell you about the history of al qaeda and that way they don't have to tell stories about a substantial worldwide organization so for example the nine eleven commission report describes al qaida in the following way on page sixty seven they write the inner core of  continued to be a hierarchical top down group with defined positions tasks and salaries so it sounds very much like your average corporation however as the former c to the united states and all western values some of them hate each other some of them get along some of them are very very small splinter groups but it's not like i b m with an organizational chart with black lines and chains of command and things like that so there you have someone from the inside of the national security state in the united states contradicting quite explicitly what the nine eleven commission report tells us  others academics have sort of reiterated this professor andrew silkie for example the director of terrorism studies at the university of east london has said and i quote directly again to begin with al is not a traditional terrorist organization it does not have a clear hierarchy military mindset and centralized command at best al qaida is a network of affiliated groups sharing religious and it illogical backgrounds but which often interacts sparingly so why i guess we have to ask would the nine eleven commission go to such great lengths to portray al qaeda as this worldwide organization and dozens of countries with salaried position when top intelligence experts and talk top academics in the field of to terrorism studies tell us that in fact the opposite is of how the legal system in the west works is generally this isn't true for all countries but the basic system you say in england united states and you know canada is an adversarial system you know you have the prosecutor you have the defense and they tell competing narratives they give different explanations of what happened the people who are accused in other words have a voice they have an advocate they're supposed to be presumed innocent and of course nine eleven commission does not even attempt to replicate a legal procedure and most importantly just like the warren commission as as russell pointed out there is no spokesperson for the accused there's nobody who's appointed to represent al qaeda or to tell vair point of view or to explain where bin laden was or what he was doing or any of that so in effect we get a monologue you know we hear only one voice through the whole document and it's all pushing one story all anomalies all difficulties can be put to one side the whole point of of the the  the idea of competing parties and adversarial system is that hopefully in that debate and the rough and tumble the truth will emerge how was the truth  monologue told by people who were very close to the u s government people like the executive director philip zelikow i think i think one thing one way in which the media contribute to  this notion of al qaeda as this worldwide organization that threatens to threatens the you know american way of life is by using al qaeda in connection with just about every terrorist incident that that happens anywhere so when when journalists use phrases such as inspired by qaeda you know this attack was either inspired by or the group that committed the attack was linked to al qaeda what exactly does that mean it's not clear is this some kind of video logical  affinity that they have if as buzzy krongard says you only have to have an antipathy toward the united states to to be considered part of al qaeda well then you know half the planet could could fit that description and example in the nine eleven commission report of the exaggeration of al qaeda is capacity there are many such examples but one example point two is on page one hundred eighty in which the commission writes the terrorist plots that were broken up at the end of one thousand nine hundred nine displays a variety of operations that might be attributed however indirectly to al qaida and i think you know that's an indicative phrase however indirectly it's basically says you know we're beyond the sort of you know trying to connect kevin bacon to other actors here we're basically saying this al qaeda is this a more focused thing that we can and we can apply in almost any circumstance so i think we need we need a better definition of it otherwise it only contributes to the expansion of this so called war on terror i think the most common reason given by average people you know why they believe al qaeda is behind nine eleven is the confession video that was released in december two thousand and one the you know in relation to that there was the admission the washington post published a story in which the they revealed that the cia had actually prepared a fake tape of osama bin laden and his alleged followers and the idea of the tape was to portray bin laden as a pedophile and they had done a similar project they were actually working on a similar project  spread a tape about saddam hussein and to try to discredit him in the arab world so we actually have a mission from the cia that they have created a fake tape of osama bin laden now that doesn't prove that the confession video is you know of the same kind of fakery but certainly it shows some kind of intent was there so we're reading the nine eleven commission report and we find the footnote was for us the footnotes this is why it looks like scholarship it's big and heavy it's got little print it's got a lot of footnotes and they're in even smaller print so it's got it's made to look like an academic work so you say well that's interesting one study revealed that twenty five percent of the footnotes in the nine eleven commission report are based on tortured testimony  it's even more condensed when you consider that most of that torture testimony belongs to chapters five and seven of the report which deal with the alleged al qaeda al  on on page one forty six of the nine eleven commission report the commissioners admit that they were not allowed to meet with the alleged al qaeda detainees they were not allowed to submit questions to the detainees they were not even allowed to submit questions to the alleged interior gaiters they were told that it would interrupt the interrogation process process which we now know has consisted of one hundred eighty three water xin one month they even admit they give one little part of the page in which they say well you know a lot of that we've based on here is from people held in detention we can't be sure that this is accurate we weren't allowed to interview them or talk to these detainees were even allowed to talk to the people interrogated them so it's kind of secondhand but we decided you know to go ahead they didn't just go ahead they made at the core of their story and they don't discuss their the fact that red cross that he'd made stuff up of course you'd make stuff up they don't discuss that they don't discuss the moral implications system a logical implications what does it mean to to base a story on that kind of testimony it's obs in the days leading up to nine eleven there was unusual market activity indicating possible for knowledge of the attacks that later entered into the peer reviewed literature with regard to the stalks of the very airliners that crashed into the towers the commission stated in a single salute that it was kindly suspicious trading on its face however they dismissed it by stating that the individual in rome had no conceivable ties to al you're doing some kind of investigation of what how it happened you don't presume anything now what happened on the data on american airlines and united airlines are the both them both stocks coincidentally were around thirty two dollars a week before nine eleven and then afterwards the stock fell from around thirty to around eighteen when the stock market opened one week later so obviously you can make a lot of  movements in put options in either of those stocks before nine eleven the court option is one of several methods that you can take advantage of knowing something is going to happen to the stock price for happens in to supporting that it's going to happen and if it does happen in the direction expected to happen then you can make a lot of money and when i say that you can buy a put option to be able to sell a stock later you're buying the option to sell you're not selling you're buying the option to sell but if i have bought the option to sell i can also sell my option to sell ok so that the normal data that you get in and publication adds those two together and then they look at a ratio of that total quantity to another thing which is called a call option which is the opposite of being able to sell a stock at the option of being able to buy a stock that gives you a put call investigate the issue of whether there was insider trading on american airlines and united airlines stocks on before nine eleven when i say confidential data i mean he was actually given  to argue is significant because the public data are not that detail then he made an analysis put options which occurred in these two airline and focus on the days before nine eleven up to nine eleven so by post money was able to to look at the individual call and put options and distinguish that which was a sale from that which was a purchase so never he had clean data and the rest of us can't really get ahold of and from that data he done made an analysis of of all the of was the pattern and the levels in which there was selling put options are should be buying a put option what is the level of the buy put options extraordinary in the days before nine eleven or not and that's it was published in the journal of business journal of business is a peer reviewed journal where in which they get in the article they have to send enough for review from other scholars in the field it obviously is a very mainstream public and what do you want to call it business school publication so it's an outstanding place for a such a cub publication to have appeared but what's amazing is i've never seen analysis afterwards and now this is where more than four years later i still have yet to see anybody conner his work and yet it's a it's extremely important work i mean you would think i mean i i am and i have been in the condom attrition i know this how this work this work is done if you push if you publish anything to that particularly interesting some some other people are going to make other articles from a contrary point of your criticize your data methodology or something i for example if you do a study of what is the cause of crime or you're doing a study of does capital punishment increase or decrease of probability of crime where you've got a lot of people and in those articles and they had to take different positions and some of them are extremely critical of the other one in this particular case extreme i mean this is really hit you this is death the three thousand people and the point is nobody's contesting is results which it it  in addition to the humanities and social sciences the civil engineering community also adopted the official story and maintain critical perspectives generally outside their discourse that nick designed an eminent professor of civil engineering at northwestern university within just hours of the time worked out an entire explanation arguing that the towers were doomed to collapse and submit it to the journal of engineering mechanics on september thirteenth just two days after nine eleven to explain the entire collapse in the context of a lack of physical and visual evidence designed to argue that when the supporting columns failed or buckled the upper portion of roughly a dozen stories above the aircraft impact remain rigid as they arise some eighty stories below it and then pulverized itself without referring to the actual sizes or strengths of the columns in the towers and without specifying whether columns were open sections or closed box columns design proposes own theoretical model of a steel column in the towers a three hinge bending model he assumed that his model provided the greatest resistance because it dissipates or absorbs the kinetic energy of the falling upper portion of the tower into three different bending regions of each column along with several other assumptions he concluded that his work is the definitive explanation as his calculations are consistent with the towers coming down within ten to twelve seconds although many engineers have argued from a strictly physics point of view that such an explanation is incorrect bizarre and maintain in his subsequent papers that all critics of his explanation are outside the community of structural engineering i believe that in certain circles let's say civil engineering or structural engineering it is a taboo and there is some kind of understanding that you are going to be x you are going to lose all your credentials to respectability we have full scale testing equipment or a variety of structural systems looting color frames we do a lot of that kind of research in civil engineering up until the time of the nine eleven collapses we made efforts to make sure that our structures had an adequate safety factor and had a rob built in redundancy in other words if a particular element within a structure failed it wouldn't mean that the entire structure would fail and we were able to succeed in that direction  guess until nine eleven and suddenly the world changed as far as structural engineering is concerned or towers one and two fessor been sent from northwestern propose the simplified model which i take issue with in terms of its ability to predict the amount of energy dissipated when one story comes crashing down on another story degree to which a call long is subject to buckling or not since the core and premature in towers one and two were box columns coral believes that they were not very slender the columns would not only bend as bizarre maintains but they would also tend to crush which would significantly dissipate much of the energy of the falling upper stories square tube such as what i'm holding here subject to a compression to just see what happens when indeed we do crush it a good percentage of the story height and that's what we've endeavored to do here and of course found that we get a much higher resistance over the period of the travel of the cross head of the testing machine than if we simply had a plastic hinge develop in the middle in the past professor's toms was big and low tech abraham wicks derived a formula describing the resistance offered by columns being crushed when they were studying for an automobile crash tests to further this or search professor corals team found that crushing offered six times more resistance than the three hinged bending model these resistances were then applied into a multi story building model to see if the entire model would collapse if an entire story was removed even with the worst picky formula that reduces the assumed resistance by fifty percent we're finding that the for the computer runs that we've done very few result in complete collapse and if now we modify our model based on these tests that i've been describing i'm quite certain that w find that none of our buildings will collapse and the next stage then is to move to building seven if you were to go through to it to the common man or woman and ask them about building seven i don't think you will find enough people who who know what building seven if you were to go ahead just a little bit and build them wait a minute there's a building that collapsed mysteriously on that day