David Ray Griffin: Stuck on Stupid

As I have mentioned in the past, Grifter has two new books coming out on 9-11; here's a snippet of the publisher's PR for one of them:

Turning next to debates within the 9/11 Truth Movement, Griffin reinforces his claim that the reported phone calls from the airliners were faked....

As I have pointed out in the past, Grifter knows that once you accept the phone calls as real, much of the conspiracy theory garbage becomes untenable.

Griffin On Barrett's Show

I downloaded this a few days ago (MP3 file), but it seemed almost quaint and trite to discuss in the aftermath of Bin Laden's death. David has apparently recovered enough from last summer's stroke to go back out on tour. This year's version is apparently to be entitled, "Why Does Bill Moyers Accept Miracles?" but you can be sure that Grifter will be performing all his greatest hits, including "Flight 77 Didn't Hit the Pentagon" and "The Phone Calls Were Voice-Morphed".

Here's a brief synopsis of the interview:

Opening-13:00: Griffin and Barrett discuss the origin of David's trutherism. He was "late" to the party, not getting into it until 2003 when a colleague turned him onto a website. What site is not discussed, but I suspect it's Eric Hufschid's.

13:00-18:00: LIHOP versus MIHOP. Griffin comes down firmly in the MIHOP camp, stating that the WTC controlled demolition evidence is very strong and therefore LIHOP is no longer tenable.

19:00-30:00: Griffin urges more time be spent on the Pentagon in the Troof Movement, precisely because it is so controversial. Brief discussion of the April Gallop lawsuit.

30:00-End: Faked phone calls. Yep, no kidding, Grifter spends almost half of the interview expounding on his view that the phone calls were faked. We get voice-morphing. We get Deena Burnett's caller ID showing her husband's cellphone was used to call her. And (most annoying of all) we get Grifter's speculation that they were not confident of Todd Beamer's voice morphing and so that's why he didn't want to talk to his wife. No, you lying con artist, that's not the reason why. Beamer explained to the operator that his wife was having a difficult pregnancy, and he didn't want her to lose the baby. Grifter closes up with the Barbara Olson phone calls.

I'd call him a maggot, but that would be an insult to baby flies.

Five More Questions for the Troofers

Over at Counterknowledge, as a sequel to the 15 questions asked in December.

(3) To those who believe that the airphone calls by passengers to their loved ones were “morphed”: how exactly did the conspirators know how to get voice samples for the 59 crew and passengers aboard AA77, and the 40 aboard UA93? How did they predict which passengers would be aboard - notably Jeremy Glick (scheluded to take a flight the day before he boarded UA93) and Lauren Grandcolas (who was supposed to board a later flight on 11th September, but actually found a seat on UA93)? How did they anticipate (and prepare the appropriate responses for) questions their loved ones would ask once they received the calls? And how is it that their relatives didn’t notice anything untoward about the comments and responses their loved ones made (other than the obvious fact that the latter were due to die in a grotesque terrorist attack)?

Let me add here the case of Linda Gronlund, passenger on Flight 93:

Joseph DeLuca called his Dad; his girlfriend, Linda Gronlund, called her sister, Elsa Strong.

Elsa Strong says, "She said, 'Hi, Else, this is Lin. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you.' And she said, 'Please tell Mom and Dad how much I love them.' And then she got real calm and said, 'Now my will is in my safe and my safe is in my closet. and this is the combination.' And she just told me the combination of her safe. and then she just said, 'I don't know if I'm ever going to get a chance to tell you again in person how much I love you, but I'm really going to miss you.' And she said goodbye."

How did the government know the combination to Linda Gronlund's safe, and where it was located?

Griffin's Voice-Morphing Technology Takes a Big Hit

Ron Wieck, also known as Pomeroo, kept digging at particular points in the 9-11 conspiracy nuts narrative. As I discussed a couple months ago, David Ray Griffin essentially endorsed the voice-morphing claims in his speech in Vancouver a few months ago, although of course he retained a fig leaf of deniability by using the locution that "The 9-11 Truth Movement, by getting empirical, discovered that voice-morphing...."

Indeed, this is such a crackpot claim that even Dylan a few months ago announced that he was dropping it from the Final Cut. Of course, it was the voice-morphing claims that made me see red about Loose Change in the first place; otherwise I would have laughed it off as a kookumentary.

Anyway, Ron contacted the inventor of the voice-morphing technology cited in Loose Change who says:

Purveyors of conspiracy theories have claimed that the events of 9/11 were the result of a massive government plot and cover-up. (See, for example, (www.loosechange911.com.) According to their version of events, there were no hijackers. Instead, the World Trade Center buildings were blown up by explosives planted inside the buildings rather than, or at least in addition to, the effects of the passenger airplanes crashing into them. They claim that the government (or the CIA or someone other than Osama bin Laden and the hijackers) was behind 9/11.

However, a major problem for their allegation, given that they claim there were no hijackers, is that the passengers on United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania called home with desperate messages to loved ones, in which they said there were hijackers. Accordingly, the conspiracy theory purveyors have needed to claim that someone (namely, me) created the voices of the passengers in those phone calls. That allegation is plainly outrageous and demeaning to the memories of those courageous passengers.

I originally developed the technology of voice morphing, the technology by which it is possible to make someone seem to say something they did not say (see www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm ) and coined the phrase. Therefore, I know what would have been required to create such bogus calls. Practical considerations preclude making counterfeit telephone calls in this situation. For example, it is necessary to have samples of the voices of the people to be imitated. In situations like this, where the goal is to participate in an unconstrained conversation, the voice sample must be extensive. I cannot imagine how I might have obtained extensive samples of the voices of the passengers on Flight 93, especially not knowing which of them would call home. Additionally, in this situation it would be necessary to know what someone would say to his or her loved ones under such circumstances. What pet names would be used? What references would be made to children and other loved ones? Do believers actually suppose that the government (or I) listens in to everyone’s pillow talk? In a separate essay, I will cover the technical aspects of voice morphing, which will further demonstrate the implausibility of the scenario set forth by the purveyors of conspiracy theories.

Whether such wild-eyed theories are worth being concerned about is problematic. However, in their own words, their conspiracy theory organization “has grown from a cult following to a grassroots organism that can no longer be contained” (op cit). I have received email from a high school social studies teacher who told me that her students actually believe that I did everything the purveyors of conspiracy theories say I did. Why they would so mistrust their government and be so naïve with regard to technical issues are interesting questions, albeit matters well beyond the scope of this essay.

Great job by Ron, as usual. I do apologize to my readers and him for not highlighting this post earlier; I saw it a couple days ago but got distracted by something else. Kudos as well to Dr. Papcun for his work.

Griffin Buys Into Voice-Morphing for Phone Calls

Sheesh, this one's so absurd that even Dylan Avery has decided to "pull" it from Loose Change FC. In his Vancouver speech (MP3 file here), Griffin buys into some of the wackiest nonsense the 9-11 Denial Cult has come up with (42:00):

"But how does the 9-11 Truth Movement handle the fact that so many relatives of passengers claimed that they received calls from these passengers? Are we--do we have to charge that they're all lying or that they were deluded? No, although there was not the cellphone technology at that time to explain their--these flights (sic) there was another kind of technology called voice-morphing. It was already sufficiently perfected in 1999 as demonstrated by a test involving the voice of General Carl Steiner (sp?) who was quite well-known. As a Washington Post story reported, General Steiner was heard to say, 'Gentlemen, we have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States Government.' Everybody in that room would have sworn that that was General Steiner. There is even a device that can fake the Caller ID Number. The technology was available in other words to fool the people who received these calls, to make them think they were really hearing voices of their loved ones. Whether Ted Olsen was a victim of this trickery or whether he simply lied about the call from his wife, is something we will not know until there is a real investigation into 9-11.

I would encourage Dr. Griffin to listen to Cee Cee Lyles phone call from Flight 93 to her husband's answering machine (presented at the Moussaoui trial), and tell us once again that he thinks that phone call was made via voice-morphing technology.

One of the things that continually amazes me about the 9-11 Deniers is the way they believe the government created this incredibly complex and vast plot but forgot to handle little things like putting the names of the hijackers on the flight manifests (yet another ridiculous claim that Griffin recycles).

Update: Note also that although Griffin states that he does not believe the families were "deluded", in fact he actually does believe it. Deluded means deceived. Griffin appears to be confusing deluded with delusional, which means "a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact." Like David Ray Griffin's false belief that the phone calls were faked.