Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

Robot Dreams, a collection of short stories by the late Isaac Asimov, is a brilliant, cheery piece of work focusing on human-robot interaction, technology and society, and questions of philosophy in science. From long, heart-wrenching stories about couples endowed with strange technology, explorers finding new horizons in space, the great powers of the universal computer, or logical paradoxes in programming, there’s something here for every SF buff.

The slant is definitely hard sci-fi. This book won’t be easily understood by someone not technically minded, for it deals with computers, physics, and mathematics generally and casually.

Still, if you’ve never read Asimov and are ready to jump right in, this might be a good place to start. The stories are interesting, fresh, and with unexpected endings!

David Ray Griffin’s The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions is troubled on premise alone. In the introduction, he writes:

A fourth reason to scrutinize the 9/11 Commission’s final report, therefore, is to see whether it puts [...] the suspicion that the Bush administration planned the 9/11 attacks as well as the more widespread suspicion that the Bush administration was at least complicit in the sense of deliberately not preventing them. I will primarily address this fourth question. (4)

In presenting this particular conspiracy theory as a valid contender to the theory of events and rationale put forth by the official 9/11 Commission Report, Griffin has to cast them both as sketchy conspiracy theories. In this way, the official account becomes tainted with the connotations that come with the term “conspiracy theory”–crackpot, irrational, paranoid—and the actual conspiracy theory becomes legitimized. In actuality, the Commission Report presents a well-reasoned and highly factual account which would be extremely difficult to criticize without the use of sophistry to break down its authority.

One of the tools Griffin uses to install a sense of preemptive doubt into the minds of the reader is the word “theory,” which to a layperson implies a strong sense of uncertainty and fallacy. No word could be farther from the truth in describing the 9/11 Commission Report when taken in that sense. Formally, the Commission Report does present a theory, but scientifically that theory has been validated and reconstructed from evidence by a scientifically motivated party of intelligent fact-finders. Thus, the official theory and the conspiracy theory cannot be compared. The official theory is a theory in the scientific sense, while Griffin’s conspiracy theory is a theory in the lay sense–i.e. a set of unfounded ideas. To use the same word with two different meanings is just another technique to confuse the reader into equating the legitimacy of the Commission Report and Omissions and Distortions.

Another way Griffin creates confusion rather than clarity is when he assumes conclusions he has not yet proved, such as the legitimacy of his alternate theory:

[An impartial investigation] would have tried to investigate equally the two basic theories about the attacks: that the attacks were planned and carried out solely by followers of Osama bin Laden, and that the attacks were able to succeed only because of the complicity of the Bush administration itself. (10)

Here he repeats the conclusions about his alternate conspiracy theory without having given any reasoning as to why it should be considered equal with the official 9/11 account. For example, I could construct Elliott’s 9/11 Theory here:

A band of desperate Canadian computer hackers reprogrammed the flight computers of 4 commercial airlines to crash into the banking centers of America in order to erase tracks of a hacking operation gone wrong….

Pointing my finger at a particular group (say, the Bush administration) does not lend immediate credence to my theory. Without proper development, I cannot draw conclusions about from a premise which has not yet been accepted as a realistic alternative. So, claiming that the Commission Report should have immediately considered the two theories that Griffin proposes assumes that there are two reasonable theories without proof thereof.

Griffin’s apology to the Commission Report starts with the most sensational and un-provable topics first, and the most factual and analytical last. Common sense suggests that the order of topics in a book, if not chronological, would be in order of importance. To place material which is clearly an implausible imaginative stretch at the front of the book implies that material is the most relevant to a discussion of the problems with the 9/11 report. This is then a paradox. Take, for example, the section labeled “Six Alleged Hijackers Still Alive,” which reads:

One problem is that at least six of the nineteen men officially identified as the suicide hijackers reportedly showed up alive after 9/11. (19)

The problem with this is that either stolen identities or mistaken identities provide a simpler, more convincing explanation to a question with no physical evidence than the theory that the 9/11 hijackers are actually alive. A Saudi embassy official was quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying, “You cannot throw a stone in Saudi Arabia without hitting an Al Ghandi,” implying that the hijackers may have been simply using the Arabic equivalents of the English surname “Smith” to disguise themselves. Simply turning up six men with the same names as the 9/11 hijackers used does not mean that they are the hijackers, or that the Commission Report got their names wrong.

Griffin also unfairly assumes that a lack of shown proof is the same as a lie. When discussing the passenger manifests of the four planes, he writes:

Do we have any publicly available proof that any of the 19 men named by the FBI and the 9/11 Commission were on any of the four planes that day? The shocking answer is: No. We have been told that their names were on the flight manifests. [...] Presumably the 9/11 Commission, with its subpoena power, could have obtained copies. (23)

But, it does not seem shocking to me that the 9/11 Commission has access to documents outside of the reach of an everyday citizen. It is likely that much primary material has been classified to prevent public meddling. So, merely because Griffin cannot find a way to get his hands on the manifests of the four 9/11 flights does not mean either that they do not exist, or that they do not contain the alleged 19 suicide hijackers’ names. Here is where we trust that the 9/11 Commission Report with its extensive staff and fact-checking is correct. We have no way of telling either way, but it is unreasonable to assume a deliberate government cover-up when a simpler explanation serves. Griffin’s unwillingness to trust even the most basic facts presented in the 9/11 Omissions Report taints his investigation and leads his readers down a path of paranoia.

David Ray Griffin is a 67 year old professor of theology at the Claremont School of Theology. Why, then, is he writing an entire chapter about structural problems with the 9/11 towers’ collapse? I would feel better if the chapter were left off to a structural engineer or any kind of scientist, rather than a theologian with an undisclosed agenda. When he writes that:

Fire had never before caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse, even when the fire was a very energetic, all-consuming one. (25)

And Popular Mechanics writes:

“Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F,” notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. “And at 1800 degrees it is probably at less than 10 percent.”

I am more likely to believe Popular Mechanics, who enlist certified experts in the field of inquisition rather than listen to a theologian talk about structural engineering, thermodynamics, or explosives. While Griffin may or may not have debatable points regarding the collapse of the 9/11 towers, he does not adequately certify himself. If Griffin will not present himself as worth listening to in this field, why even write the chapter?

What is an omission? When we read that “the commission adds, ‘further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11′” (54) and Griffin quotes the San Francisco Chronicle saying, “This volume of purchases raises suspicions that the investors had advance knowledge of the strikes” (53), can we count this as an omission of the 9/11 report, or simply a figment of Griffin’s imagination. Clearly, it is not an omission according to the 9/11 Commission Report, which discusses in some detail their considerations of the so-called insider trading that may have occurred around 9/11. After looking at the facts, they rejected this hypothesis. Griffin may or may not believe them, but he cannot call it an omission and blame its logic, which is not given in the report itself, as faulty.

However, Griffin shines when he is able to write about political reasons for the absence of factual information. For example, when discussing possible funding from Pakistan’s ISI, he writes:

Surely Dr. Philip Zelikow, who has produced several scholarly books, would have given the directive for a [search on books with 9/11 in the title]. In this light, can we really believe the Commission’s statement that it had seen “no evidence that any foreign government—or a foreign government official—supplied any funding?” (107)

Here, Griffin is using his wide survey knowledge of the 9/11 attacks to find omissions from the 9/11 Commission Report which have both objective and political importance. If Pakistan were involved in funding the 9/11 terrorists, the public and history itself should know, for pure truth’s sake. However, releasing information connecting Pakistan and the 9/11 attacks into the news media would politically damage relations with Pakistan for a long time. Pakistan, as a new nuclear power, is critical US-India relations as well as its own. So, as Griffin postulates, because we could not afford to offend them, the 9/11 Commission Report conveniently ignores facts which put Pakistan in a publicly unfavourable light. To me, this is more reasonable than his earlier material about material structure and unfounded claims of conspiracy: start reading at chapter 9.

Reading the 9/11 Commission Report, I’m struck by the extent to which they attempt to create heroes of the rescue workers responding to the disasters at the World Trade Center, instead of painting them in a more realistic and foolhardy light. As far as I can tell, the only real hero of the WTC evacuation was Morgan Stanley, who ordered the evacuation of twenty of its floors in the South Tower only minutes after the first impact, around 8:49, while the deputy safety fire director decided to wait until he could contact his boss, around 9:02, to start the evacuation (287-289).

The time it took to get the emergency staff on scene was excellent–perhaps only ten minutes had passed before hundreds of police and firefighters arrived. However, the text used to describe it is unusually melodramatic:

The FDNY response began within five seconds of the crash (289)

Whether or not this statement is actually true–it may be hard to verify–it’s clear that the use of such a sharp time-specifier is intended not convey a fact, but an emotional impression of urgent immediacy. When the commission describes how the second 9/11 plane hit, they create another exaggeration to further their agenda of heroism:

What had been the largest and most complicated rescue operation in city history instantly doubled in magnitude (293)

Actually, striking a second tower does not double the size of the rescue operation, but only the scope of the damage to WTC assets. The rescue operation itself, already mobilized in response to the first plane, does not need to substantially redeploy to respond to a second instance of the same threat. An analogy should be made to a fire breaking out in a residential neighborhood. An excessive number of firefighters respond and begin to put out the fire when the house next door catches aflame, as well. Obviously the “rescue operation” does not “instantly double in magnitude,” as the firefighters who were not fully utilized at the first site will simply divide their efforts and work more efficiently.

I have two last jabs at the Heroism chapter. First, when the commission writes, “Many civilians were in awe of the firefighters” (299), are they intending to impress us with a sort of group hypnosis, intoning the virtue of the firefighters and its (so-called) universal acknowledgement? Second, the commission selectively looks at the firefighters it apologizes for:

Climbing up stairs with heavy protective clothing and equipment was hard work even for physically fit firefighters (299)

Well, this implies that all of the firefighting personnel were in excellent shape, rather than acknowledging that the men were actually a mix of elite troops and fat grunts waiting for their retirement to roll around.