 |
| Jerome Hauer loves you. |
Impacts and Fires
Before the non-toxic dust had even begun to settle, Jerome Hauer was on national television telling Dan Rather that the towers had collapsed because of the impacts of the planes crashing into them, plus the intense fires which raged until the towers could no longer hold their own weight.
His insight was a blessing which set the investigation on the right track from the beginning.
Osama bin Laden
Poor Dan Rather, confused as always, wondered whether the scope of the attack might suggest that it had been perpetrated by a "state-sponsored actor", meaning an intelligence organization with virtually unlimited resources. We can be thankful that Jerome Hauer quickly dismissed this odd notion and assured us all that the attack bore "the fingerprints of somebody like Osama bin Laden."
Bingo! Did we ever hit the jackpot that time! And since there was nobody else like Osama bin Laden, we knew exactly who Jerome Hauer was talking about, even though he did not have to bear the burden of having said anything specific.
Health and Human Services
At the time, Jerome Hauer was serving our nation as a national security advisor with the Department of Health and Human Services. Clearly his background in counter-terror and his knowledge of biological warfare made him the perfect guest for Dan Rather's national audience.
We're fortunate that Hauer was on TV that day, rather than doing the job for which he was paid. We're also lucky that he told us who was behind the atrocity even as it was unfolding, so we didn't have to wonder about that aspect of the mystery for very long.
Expert Analysis
Dan Rather, apparently unconvinced, wondered aloud how Jerome Hauer could be so certain of what he was saying. But Hauer assured him that "it doesn't take a rocket scientist" to figure out what was happening.
And it's a good thing it didn't. Jerome Hauer was definitely not a rocket scientist. So if the problem had been more difficult to solve, his expert analysis might not have carried as much weight as it did.
The Magic Phone Calls
Jerome Hauer's quick and correct deductions as to the identity of the attacker appear even more astonishing in retrospect than they did at the time because most of what we know about what happened on the hijacked planes, and most of what we know about the hijackers, came from phone calls that the passengers on the hijacked planes made to their loved ones on the ground.
And those of us not connected to any nation-wide illegal warrantless surveillance programs could not possibly have known what the doomed passengers had said to their loved ones until the loved ones got home from work and checked their messages.
But fortunately, all the loved ones seemed to agree that as far as they could tell, the story Jerome Hauer was telling was essentially correct.
"I Knew Who It Was"
Of course some of the loved ones were at home at the time, and able to answer the calls when they came in. And some of these people said, "I knew who it was because I saw the caller-ID on my display."
This settled the matter for good until it was shown that cell phones can't make connections with the satellite phone network while moving fast. And nobody had ever claimed that the hijacked planes were slow. So this was a bit of a problem.
Luckily, the FBI was able to solve the problem by announcing that the calls had been made from air-phones, which could make connections while moving fast, rather than cell phones, which could not do so.
The Story Fell Apart
The story fell apart when some clowns happened to remember the bit about the caller-ID and asked how the air-phone in the plane could have known the cell phone number of the passenger who was using it.
And surely without knowing the cell phone number, the air-phone could not have deduced the passenger's caller-ID. So even if the air-phone had been able to "impersonate" the cell-phone, so to speak, it still would not have been able to make the passenger's caller-ID appear on the loved one's display.
There was something wrong with this picture, or so it seemed to a few clowns at the time. But as in so many other instances, the clowns eventually had to admit they were incorrect when it turned out that there were many things wrong with that picture.
Considerable Momentum
But the train set in motion by Jerome Hauer had developed considerable momentum while this information was gradually coming to light and it looked as though the train would be impossible to stop.
Certain clowns continued to try to stop it in various ways, sometimes even camping out on the tracks as it was approaching.
Needless to say, the collisions between the train and the clowns have always worked out in favor of the train.
And that is a very lucky circumstance indeed, especially if your name happens to be Jerome Hauer.
Meanwhile
The FBI's convoluted descriptions of these mysterious calls were so maddeningly complex that only people who had spent their whole lives trying to decipher complex sets of documents could even follow the story as it morphed from one impossibility to the next. And some of the most foolish clowns threw up and fell asleep over this issue. [1]
 |
| David Ray Griffin hates you. |
A Danger to Society
The whole sad story might have been lost in the non-toxic dust if David Ray Griffin hadn't stumbled along just when he represented the greatest danger to our society.
Despite his obvious presentation skills and his admirable way with words, David turned out to be handicapped by two exceptionally unfortunate circumstances, only one of which was his fault.
Not His Fault?
Obviously I'm speculating when I say this, but I don't think anyone could seriously blame the man for being so bloody smart. That's probably not his fault, at least according to the psychologists. He was probably just born that way, in their view.
On the other hand, David's career choices were almost certainly his responsibility, and he had become a danger to the state by virtue of his long-time studies in the field of comparative religion.
What??
You may not see the connection, but I can explain. We're talking about a brilliant man who had spent most of his adult life studying weird ancient documents which were full of contradictions but believed by scholars to be describing the same events. That's what he did for work.
For fun, David turned his skills to the 9/11 documents, and he was utterly unfazed by the contradictory stories being thrown around by people who were obviously still trying to figure out how they could explain away all the obvious inconsistencies in the obviously fraudulent yarn they had been spinning.
"Relax, clowns!"
David looked at the most confusing aspects of the situation, the things that had caused so many clowns to throw up and go to sleep, and he said, more or less, "Relax, clowns! I got your backs!"
Those who know him will realize I'm paraphrasing here. And that's inevitable, I suppose, since he is far more articulate than I am.
But the point was: He's good at this. He's very, very good. He's spent many years trying to figure out which (if any) of the events described in contradictory ancient documents could possibly have happened at all, and if so, whether they could have happened in the way that the documents said they did.
Comparative Studies
There were two main differences between the sort of work David had always done for a living and the sort of work he started doing after 9/11. It helped that the 9/11-related documents were easier to read, since they were written in modern English rather than an ancient language he would have needed to learn. If you've ever heard him speak or read anything he's written, you will know that he doesn't need to learn any more English.
On the other hand, the ancient documents were mostly written by people who didn't know very much (compared to modern researchers, for example) and the disagreements between them could plausibly be accounted for by ignorance and confusion. But the contradictions in the contemporary documents seemed to be almost intentional.
That wasn't a big problem, and this wasn't the first time David had seen documents describing events that simply could not have happened, so he wasn't surprised with the wild stories the government was selling. It was just like work, only easier.
The FBI's Phone Records
When David Ray Griffin turned his eagle eye to the FBI's records of the phone calls made by the passengers on the four doomed flights, he found some very interesting details which had been overlooked by everybody else. And he wrote : [2]
The most famous of the reported calls from the flights supposedly came from Barbara Olson, the well-known commentator on CNN who was married to Ted Olson, who was then the US solicitor general. Olson reported that his wife had called him twice from American Airlines Flight 77, stating that hijackers with knives and boxcutters had taken over the plane. Besides providing evidence of hijackers, this call also provided the only evidence that Flight 77 was still aloft (it had disappeared from radar and there had been reports of an airliner crash nearby). Although Olson went back and forth on the question of whether his wife had used a cell phone or an onboard phone, he finally settled on the latter.The Most Remarkable Coincidence
In the first edition, I challenged this claim on the basis of evidence from American Airlines that their Boeing 757 (which is what Flight 77 was) had no onboard phones. After publishing the book, however, I became worried, because of some new evidence, that that statement from American Airlines, made in 2004, had referred only to their 757s at that time -- that their 757s in 2001 may well have had onboard phones. So I published a retraction, saying that the claim was uncertain.
That retraction, however, evoked new evidence, including a statement made by American Airlines in 2006 that their 757s in 2001 had had no onboard phones, so that anyone calling out from Flight 77 had needed to use a cell phone. Barbara Olson, therefore, could not have used a passenger-seat phone. That left open, of course, the possibility that Ted Olson was correct when he said that his wife had used her cell phone.
However, the evidence from the Moussaoui trial ruled out this possibility. In its report on AA 77, it listed one attempted call from Barbara Olson, which was “unconnected” and hence lasted “0 seconds.”
This was an astounding discovery. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. And yet it had undercut the testimony of the DOJ’s former solicitor general, saying in effect that the two calls that he reported had never happened.
It was the most remarkable coincidence. Most of what we "knew" about what happened on the allegedly hijacked plane came to us from a CNN commentator who was married to a high-ranking official in the Bush administration, and she passed on all the relevant information in a call that lasted 0 seconds.
In this light, it is even more amazing that Jerome Hauer made such a good guess as to the source of the terror, considering that some of the most important information of the day had not yet been reported by the solicitor general of the United States, who didn't learn it during a phone call from his wife, even though that call was never connected. It's almost as if they had a sick sense or something. And it was another strange situation.
Full of Holes
Not one of the major news outlets was interested in the story, and neither of course were Fox nor CNN. So nobody except a few clowns realized how insane you have to be to believe the official story, now that so many holes had been shot through it.
There were even a few clowns who denied that any shooting had been necessary, since the story was full of holes before anybody even started shooting.
Just Another Day's Work
For David Ray Griffin, it was just another day at the office, except that this job was quite a bit easier than what he usually did at the office.
If I was reading the situation correctly at the time, a few clowns were just a bit humiliated because they thought they should have been the ones to spot the FBI saying that Ted and Barbara Olson had only spoken once while she was aboard the plane, and that their conversation had only lasted zero seconds.
A few other clowns were jealous because David was getting all the attention, and he didn't even seem to want it.
But the vast majority of the clowns raised their glasses to toast his dedication to fine research and his careful attention to picky details.
King of the Clowns
I thought he could have been elected King of the Clowns on the spot if he had wanted the job. But David Ray Griffin is not a clown.
He has a good sense of humor and a fine way with words, so it's fun to listen to him, but he doesn't wear a puffy red nose in public, and that's one of the signatures. Despite his calm and rational mode of analysis, and his equally calm and rational style of presentation, he received no more respect or attention from the American public than he would have received had he been a mud-wrestler.
And despite the fact that he's never shown any evidence of being a clown himself, or even wanting to become one, he certainly could have been one of the greats. Maybe the greatest!
Nothing Left at All
Needless to say, there wasn't much left of the official story after David started shredding it, but he kept shredding little bits of it until there was nothing left at all.
All this shredding was very unfortunate from the point of view of somebody like Jerome Hauer. There wasn't anything left to support the story he had told so confidently to somebody like Dan Rather as the attacks were unfolding. But none of this made any difference, for, you know, all the usual reasons.
A Timely Precaution
So it appears that Jerome Hauer pulled a fast one and got away with it, and for a brief moment it seemed that perhaps Jerome Hauer owed the American people an explanation.
But then we found out that he had already paid his debt by advising the White House to start taking Cipro as a precaution against anthrax, even before any of the letters containing anthrax had been mailed to the President's most powerful political and media opponents.
We can't even begin to fathom how much damage this insightful precaution might have prevented if even one of those letters had accidentally been sent to a Bush supporter.
Keen Intuition
Apparently Hauer's expertise in biological weapons of mass destruction, such as those which were later found in Iraq, enabled him to predict what sort of attack might be coming next.
And his intimate knowledge of international terrorism must have honed his intuition so well that he was able to give the White House valuable advice before anyone else could possibly have been able to do so.
Too Modest By Half
Several years ago, some clown on the internet, having pieced together certain elements of Jerome Hauer's story, started writing about him fairly often. This clown had the vague impression that Jerome Hauer had not received enough credit for his contributions and was trying to re-establish a certain "balance of coverage", if we can put it that way.
Sadly, Jerome Hauer declined to take any credit for what he had done. He was too modest by half; it was a sad day for said clown.
Glowing Terms
Fortunately, Jerome Hauer didn't simply refuse to take the credit that was due and vanish, the way some of our most noble heroes have done. The clown's heart rose in his sunken chest when Mr. Hauer sent him email.
The email described the clown's humble research in glowing terms, saying the "nonsense" was "a source of great laughter." The clown was happy to have brought some joy into Mr. Hauer's dismal life.
Undeserved Compliments
Surprisingly, Jerome Hauer refused to sink to the level of mere ad hominem praise, saying that the clown "must have inherited a gene for creativity and one for stupidity." Clearly these compliments were undeserved, but the clown accepted them with grace, as was his wont.
Thrilled
The clown was secretly so thrilled that he could barely type, so I've been compelled to correct a few spelling errors in the following passage, none of which made any difference to the tone or the meaning of the clown's heartfelt response.
Message Sent
The clown replied as follows (or at least he would have replied as follows had he managed to spell all the words correctly):
You may be quite correct about my genes for creativity and stupidity. But I also have genes for truth and justice.According to the clown's "logic": Had there been an innocent explanation for Jerome Hauer's astonishing conduct on America's darkest day, he would have been willing to share it, if only for the thrill of making the clown retract his nonsense and apologize for having written it.
If you can convince me that I'm wrong about you, I'll publish a retraction and an apology.
I can't say I'd do it gladly, but I'd much rather get the story right than pretend to be infallible.
So ... What do you mean by "nonsense"? Specifically:
[1] Did you talk to Dan Rather on 9/11/2001?
[2] Did you tell him the towers "collapsed" because of the "intense heat" of the fires and the impact of the airplanes?
[3] Did you tell him the attack bore the "fingerprints of somebody like bin Laden"?
[4] And if so, how could you have known these things at the time, when they still haven't been proven to this day?
I look forward to your response since I think it might help me to understand what actually happened.
The clown had phrased his questions in such a way that had Jerome Hauer failed to answer them, or even had there been a long delay between the questions and the answers, the clown could feel justified in the conclusions he had drawn.
But he didn't want to jump to any of those conclusions, so he has waited patiently for a reply. It's been more than 13 years now, and it's starting to look as if either (1) Jerome Hauer is guilty as charged and should be hanged by the neck until dead, at least 3000 times in the United States and several million times overseas, or (2) there's a good explanation for his apparent misconduct and he would be happy to share it, but he can't find an e-stamp, and he can't send an e-mail without one.
 |
| The traditional French method. |
The clown cannot imagine any other possible explanation for such a long delay, but he doesn't want to defame the legacy of a national hero over something as trivial as 3000 murders. So he's still waiting to hear from Mr. Hauer, but his patience is running thin.
 |
| The traditional American method. |
He's been telling both his friends that if he doesn't hear from Mr. Hauer in the next twenty years, give or take, he's going to call the police.
there's still time to change the road you're on
Our Lucky Stars
But in the meantime we can all thank our lucky stars for Jerome Hauer, without whom so much of the War on Terror might have unfolded very differently, and of course for all the other selfless Americans who turned up on all the major networks (plus Fox and CNN) and said virtually the same thing over and over, 24 hours a day, for the next two weeks. Or they might have been Israelis. Not that anyone can tell the difference nowadays.
We can also thank our lucky stars that David Ray Griffin didn't get interested in mud wrestling because he could have been a dangerous opponent if anyone had been listening.
Listen: Peter Gabriel: Mother Of Violence
It's getting hard to breathe
It's getting so hard to believe
to believe in anything at all
Notes:
