Hijacked truth?

[TRUTH]

While the 9/11 Commission Report inquiry has its share of critics, Jonathan Gold's misgivings about the official findings go far beyond skepticism. In fact, the 33-year-old Plymouth Meeting resident is convinced the report is covering up Bush administration complicity in the deadly terrorist attacks.

Gold's unorthodox view has caused many jaws to drop and heads to shake. When asked for proof, he calmly rattles off a long list of like-minded people, and what he called a growing body of "evidence" that the government orchestrated the attacks as a pretext for the global war on terror.

"There's so much evidence out there," he said.

For those who scoff at him, he recommends comparing the official Sept. 11 account to the Cooperative Research Center's Sept. 11 times lines, reading David Griffin's "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions" and entries on 911Truth.org just for starters.

A quick glance at the Internet's voluminous material critical of the 9/11 Commission Report published in 2004 could be this generation's Warren Report.

Gold was not always a skeptic, admitting his conversion to Sept. 11 truth seeker was a gradual process. But by 2002, he was convinced the official story was a monumental cover-up.

His suspicion grew with the Bush administration's initial reluctance to cooperate with a probe into the Sept. 11 attacks, and when former Sen. Tom Daschle was asked to limit the scope of the investigation.

Considering nearly 3,000 people had been killed, Gold was irked it took the Sept. 11 survivors - dubbed "The Jersey Girls" - 441 days to persuade the administration to hold public hearings on the disaster.

"If you had a loved one murdered, would you want the police to wait to investigate the crime," he asked.

There are still too many unanswered questions and inconsistencies, according to 911Truth.org, an advocacy group that wants to expose what its media coordinator Mike Berger called "the government's official conspiracy theory" that took the nation to war.

"The reason we are doing this is, we believe the attacks were used to justify our unpopular foreign policy decisions," Berger said.

As a member of 9/11 Truth's steering committee, Gold spent many hours on the Internet reading about the disaster and writing for his online bulletin board, yourbbsuck.com, but eventually gave up the committee duties because it was too time consuming.

The truth adherent's views vary, Gold said, but many believe that the World Trade Center towers were rigged with explosives to ensure their collapse, that the Pentagon may have been hit by a missile instead of an airliner and that Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville after it was shot down.

"I believe it was shot down," Gold said.

The 9/11 Truth site questions why the U.S. air defense system failed to intercept the airliner that struck the Pentagon, and why Bush lingered at the Florida school after hearing of the Trade Center was hit. Some say the president's dawdling is just more proof that he had prior knowledge of the attacks.

Griffin, a retired professor Claremont School of Theology in California, studied the day's timelines and the official report, and concluded jet fighters that should have scrambled within minutes to intercept the hijacked planes were ordered not to take off.

By the time F-16 jets from Langley Air Force Base, in Hampton, Va., were in the air at 9:30 a.m., it was too late to pursue Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon eight minutes later. The base is more than 100 miles from Pentagon.

Though the 9/11 Report details delays and confused communications between the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) during the hijackings, Griffin sees something sinister.

"I was struck by the contradictions of why there were no (fighter jet) interceptions," Griffin said. "I think it was just an old-fashioned stand down order."

Justification for allowing the terrorist attacks was foreshadowed, Griffin said, in "Rebuilding America's Defense," written in 2000 by the neo-conservative group, Project for The New American Century.

The project's members included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and current United Nations ambassador John Bolton.

"It's kind of scary when you think about it, because these are the people now in power," Gold said.

Griffin said the "neo-cons" anticipated going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq long before the Sept. 11 attacks to ensure a steady supply of oil.

"This was a perfect fit for a neo-conservative plot ... to get absolute military authority," he said.

Temple University psychology professor Frank Farley called the Sept. 11 skeptics' notions ridiculous.

"It just doesn't pass the test of reasonableness," he said.

Government conspiracy myths have a long history in popular culture, Farley said, but now kooky ideas spread like wildfire with the millions of Internet users online and few qualified authorities to vet outrageous claims.

"The Internet just feeds (conspiracy claims)," he said. "In a world of information overload, it's getting harder and harder to separate the wheat from the chaff."

Farley predicted the explosion of misinformation would only get worse over time. Spencer Meredith, a political science professor at New York's Rochester Institute of Technology, was more optimistic.

"The impact of this is negligible, and long-term it's marginal," Meredith said.

People who believe the government is malicious and highly capable of wrongdoing are more inclined to buy into Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, Meredith said.

"It starts with a mistrust of government," he said. "They don't like Bush."

For anyone doubting Flight 77 didn't crash into the Pentagon, Arlington County Fire Department Chief Scott McKay begs to differ. He and Arlington firefighters were the first on the disaster scene on Sept. 11 and worked on shoring up the collapsed structure.

"Inside the building, there was a (airline) nose gear with wheels and passenger seats," he said, as well as human remains.

As for the World Trade Center towers, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) spent more than three years analyzing the collapses, according to Michael Newman, a NIST spokesman, and published its "Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Towers" in 2005.

To perform the evaluation, the federal agency used 236 pieces of steel from the ground zero site, studied thousands of video and still pictures of the catastrophe and simulated the impacts and fires in several laboratories.

The study concluded that the airliners' extreme impacts severed the buildings' perimeter support columns, and the subsequent fires weakened other exposed steel.

"(The crashes) dislodged so much of the fire-proofing material (on the supports), that it left a lot of steel vulnerable to the fire," Newman said.

If the fire-proofing had not been torn away, the towers would have remained standing, he said.

The NIST report did not find any evidence that the towers had been sabotaged with explosives, as 911 Truth advocates have suggested.

"These folks have a right to their opinion," Newman said. "But we spent three-and-a-half years on the investigation and wrote recommendations, and we stand behind them."

Keith Phucas can be reached at kphucas@timesherald.com or 610-272-2500, ext. 211.

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