Originally posted by mmiichael
As for David Ray Griffin,

Popular in the early days when specifics on 9/11 were still coming in. It's been clarified he has no comprehension of demolition and explosives, does no fact-checking, relies on now exposed as fraudulent sources like white supremacist Christopher Bollyn, uses ‘magical’ thinking with things like his “no plane” speculations, consistently denies overwhelming on the spot witness testimony, and on and on.

In a nutshell, Griffin is an Truther circuit opportunist and whack job.

Originally posted by mmiichael
This page elaborates:

www.oilempire.us...

Originally posted by mmiichael
My impression is you want to believe Mossad was involved in the planning and execution of 9/11.

Originally posted by scott3x
I'm currently reading Dr. Griffin's book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking and find that it's quite good.

Beesley was educated at Derby School, where he was a scholar, and afterwards at Caius College, Cambridge, again as a scholar. He took a First Class degree in the Natural Science tripos in 1903.[1]

In the first place, disabusing our minds again of the knowledge that the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, let us estimate the probabilities of such a thing happening. An iceberg is small and occupies little room by comparison with the broad ocean on which it floats; and the chances of another small object like a ship colliding with it and being sunk are very small: the chances are, as a matter of fact, one in a million. This is not a figure of speech: that is the actual risk for total loss by collision with an iceberg as accepted by insurance companies. The one-in-a-million accident was what sunk the Titanic.

Even so, had Captain Smith been alone in taking that risk, he would have had to bear all the blame for the resulting disaster. But it seems he is not alone: the same risk has been taken over and over again by fast mail-passenger liners, in fog and in iceberg regions. Their captains have taken the long--very long--chance many times and won every time; he took it as he had done many times before, and lost. Of course, the chances that night of striking an iceberg were much greater than one in a million: they had been enormously increased by the extreme southerly position of icebergs and field ice and by the unusual number of the former. Thinking over the scene that met our eyes from the deck of the Carpathia after we boarded her,--the great number of icebergs wherever the eye could reach,--the chances of _not_ hitting one in the darkness of the night seemed small.

screwloosechange.blogspot.com...

www.skeptic.com...

9/11: A Date That Will Live in Infamy

review by Richard Morrock

David Ray Griffin’s fanciful tale of Bush administration complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attack is a perfect example of the kind of conspiratorial thinking discussed by George Case. There isn’t much to be learned about the fateful events from Griffin’s silly book, but he gives us some useful insight into the origins of paranoia.

Most writers on a subject do what is called research on the material, which means reading books, conducting interviews, and tracking down documents. This consumes far too much time and effort for conspiracy buffs like Griffin. His approach consists of asking disturbing questions, ignoring the actual evidence, speculating about the possible answers, assuming the worst-case scenario, and then drawing up his indictment of the administration based on his assumptions, even where they are in flagrant contradiction to widely-known facts.

Starting with the dubious “who benefits argument?”, Griffin concludes that since President George W. Bush profited in terms of political capital from the 9/11 attacks, he had to be behind them. Given that premise, he argues that the U.S. government masterminded the whole catastrophe from beginning to end, with the al-Qaeda hijackers being either innocent bystanders or U.S. secret agents. The planes that hit the World Trade Center — Flights 11 and 175 — were actually piloted by remote control, with their command center at No. 7 WTC, the 45-story office building across a narrow side street from the North Tower. In addition, the impact of the planes did not cause the buildings to collapse; that was the work of controlled explosions set off inside the Towers.

As for the Pentagon, it was a guided missile or, no, maybe a military plane that hit the building, with Flight 77 disappearing inside the smoke and flames. And Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, PA, was actually shot down by the U.S. military because the passengers were on the brink of taking it over. The Bush administration didn’t want the hijackers taken alive, Griffin insists, because they presumably could have proven their innocence. How strange that 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui should have been kept alive after the 9/11 events, not to mention the mastermind of the affair, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, captured in Pakistan and now in U.S. custody.

One of the points Griffin raises is why the South Tower collapsed half an hour before the North Tower, although it was struck 15 minutes later. From this alleged discrepancy in the official story, Griffin concludes that the government had planted explosives in the WTC the previous weekend, using a power blackout as cover, and had dynamited the buildings. He never considers the other explanation: the South Tower collapsed faster because the plane impacted on a lower floor, and more floors were therefore set on fire. Any glance at the photograph of the second impact will show this.

He fails to explain why the government would have waited nearly an hour to explode its bombs in the South Tower, which would have allowed many people to escape; the North Tower didn’t collapse for one and 3/4 hours, and nearly all of the WTC workers who died were in the impacted floors or above. Did Bush’s remote control have a low battery?

Griffin actually does claim that No. 7 WTC, which collapsed at 5:20 pm, was blown up by explosives, and this is taken as proof that Washington was behind it. But what would the motive be? Blowing up an already-evacuated office building after thousands had died in the Twin Towers would seem like a waste of dynamite, not to mention office space. Did Bush think that public opinion had not been sufficiently inflamed by the 3,000 deaths? Do most Americans even know that a third office building, far smaller than the Towers, was also lost on that day? Griffin never explores that possibility that No. 7 was demolished because it had been contaminated by the white dust from the nearby North Tower. Explosives were used because, at 45 stories, No. 7 was too tall for a wrecking crane.

Jet fuel is kerosene, argues Griffin. Kerosene could not have caused a fire hot enough to melt steel, which happened at the Twin Towers. Perhaps Griffin has never attended a barbecue, where kerosene is used to ignite charcoal briquettes, and the charcoal fire then cooks the food. Something similar happened at the Twin Towers, where the jet fuel ignited carpets, furniture, books and papers, which then produced enough heat to bring down the burning floors; their impact on the floors below produced the force that led to the Towers’ collapse.

[…]

Why wasn’t the Air Force ordered to shoot down Flight 77 as it streaked through the sky on its way to hit the Pentagon? The official 9/11 Commission story is that planes were sent north to intercept Flight 11, with the White House and Pentagon unaware that it had already crashed in New York, and that the threat was coming from another plane, heading in from the west. Griffin believes that Vice President Dick Cheney, in charge of the situation in Washington while Bush was flying to Nebraska in Air Force One, deliberately avoided intercepting Flight 77 so that the Pentagon would be struck. One wonders what Donald Rumsfeld, still in his office at the Pentagon, might have had to say about that!
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911guide.googlepages.com...

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the claims of Dr. David Ray Griffin regarding the NIST investigation into the World Trade Center disasters, and find those claims to be unfounded. All 18 major claims are discussed and rigorously dismissed, and a further analysis of the text reveals an overwhelming density of factual and logical errors.

This paper refutes Dr. Griffin’s major claims, supporting with evidence that the aircraft impacts were expected to significantly damage the structures, that the resulting fires were of both sufficient temperature and duration to cause structural collapse, that a progressive collapse resulting in total destruction of the Towers was the likely result, and that the “controlled demolition” hypothesis is speculative and unsupported by any evidence. We also discuss the anticipated NIST report on World Trade Center Seven. The author highlights the fundamental sources of errors present in Dr. Griffin’s research and provides a template to evaluate future claims using resources available in open literature.

[…]

Anomaly hunting versus an actual theory

Upon reading Debunking 9/11 Debunking, the author was surprised to learn that nowhere in this book – and, to the best of the author’s knowledge, nowhere in Dr. Griffin’s previous books – does Dr. Griffin articulate his own hypothesis. His entire position can be summarized in two sentences:

“9/11 was an inside job.” We understand this to mean that Dr. Griffin believes that the United States Government was responsible.

“The World Trade Center buildings were destroyed in a controlled demolition.” Dr. Griffin has also clarified that he does not know whether explosives or incendiaries, a combination of the two, or what particular types were used.

Despite Dr. Griffin’s rumination over this theory for nearly five years, personal contact with numerous like-minded thinkers, and an assemblage of facts and arguments that, in his mind, are sufficient to refute the whole of the NIST investigation, there is no additional detail. This hypothesis falls well short of the basic standard of journalism – the six questions of “who, what, where, when, why, and how” – and as such is not a viable alternative to any complete hypothesis, let alone one as meticulously researched as that put forth by NIST.

[…]

Even if we neglect the fact that Dr. Griffin has badly misinterpreted or speculated wildly about the evidence that he has considered, and that he has ignored a vast amount of evidence and research, it is still not clear how to thread such disjoint and mutually exclusive requirements into a consistent hypothesis.

[…]

We are still lacking the who, the how, and certainly the why, but at least we have what, where and when covered. Supposing we are happy with this hypothesis, we can test it against the NIST theory to see which is superior. The theory above fails instantly – it cannot explain the seismographs, which show no explosions at all (except possibly during the precise instants of impact and collapse, hidden by the seismic signal of aircraft impact and falling structure), and it cannot explain how a few individuals survived inside the structure, just to name two reasons out of many. Some facets of the hypothesis are actually self-inconsistent even in this limited reading, for example the destruction and rotation, both allegedly by explosives, of the upper block. It also bears mentioning that such a hypothesis is hardly credible with respect to Occam’s Razor.

While we wait for Dr. Griffin to provide a coherent hypothesis, it is worth noting that the practice of anomaly hunting is common among conspiracy theorists, and is not a legitimate substitute for a well-reasoned position.