Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Journalism 2014

Chapter 3: Correcting the Record, and Resistance to Evidence

When the first September 11 conspiracy theories began to propagate, I thought they were embraced by a very small fringe element of “crazies.” I assumed they would soon be a minor footnote to the story, such as skeptics who do not believe U.S. astronauts really walked on the moon. I also naïvely thought that any reasonable, thinking person could easily be convinced that so-called questions surrounding the attack on the Pentagon could be resolved with the undisputed facts at hand.
My first inkling that this might not be the case was when I got a call from a journalist in France asking about my assessment of Thierry Meyssan’s allegations in L’Effroyable Imposture. After about 10 minutes on the phone, I realized that my explanation that I was at the crash site and saw and photographed parts of the plane was having no effect, and I was in fact having a discussion with a doubter, whose mind was made up. I remember ending the conversation with something I had heard years before. “It’s good to have an open mind about these things,” I said, “but if your mind is too open your brain can fall out. That’s what I think has happened to these folks who don’t believe it was a plane.” And when I asked him about what I considered the major flaw in the missile theory: “If it didn’t hit the Pentagon, what happened to American Airlines flight 77 and all on board?” the journalist replied that he did not have to resolve every inconsistency to know that the basic story was a lie.
At that point I began to wonder how smart people could believe such nonsense.
One factor that was fueling suspicions about the Pentagon was the lack of any photographic evidence, unlike the attacks in New York, where there was dramatic video of the planes flying into the World Trade Center towers. I began making a full-court press with my Pentagon sources to find out if there was any video, and to get my hands on it. I had two promising leads. One source told me there was imagery from a security camera. Another source told me a security camera at the nearby Doubletree hotel in Pentagon City had also captured the attack. The Doubletree lead turned out to be true, but unhelpful. The FBI had confiscated the video, and although I talked to one of the hotel employees who watched it, he could not recall what it showed.  Years later, in 2006, I would obtain the full video, in response to a FOIA request, and it showed the smoke from the fireball, but not the plane, which was flying so low it was blocked by the Pentagon building.
But on September 11, at least one Pentagon security camera, I was told, did capture the plane as it hit. I pleaded with various Pentagon officials to release the video, using the now growing conspiracy theories as a basis for my argument for making it public as soon as possible. If they would release the video, I reasoned, it might put to rest some of the irresponsible, and frankly infuriating, allegations of “inside job” and “cover-up.”
The appeal went to the highest levels of the Pentagon, and the answer was “no.” The Justice Department said the video would be evidence in the upcoming trial of al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and therefore could not be released. [1] I thought the decision to withhold the video was a public relations mistake, as did a senior aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. That Pentagon official arranged to have a CD-ROM of the images leaked to me at my Pentagon office several hours later, and I immediately put them on the air. I thereby became the first reporter to publish the images, although the Associated Press was provided with the same pictures within an hour of when I showed them on CNN. While images became widely available and circulated on the Internet, they were not officially released for four more years.

Figure 7 - Security camera images first obtained and broadcast by CNN, March 7, 2002.

If I thought the photographic evidence would quell the debate I was quickly proved wrong. Blog sites seized on the low-resolution images as evidence it was NOT a plane, but that the white blurry shape looked to them more like a missile. And while it is true that if what hit the building was in fact a mystery, the images alone would be inconclusive. But that was the frustrating thing. The pictures were not an isolated piece of evidence. They were just one more link in a solid chain of evidence that was consistent and conclusive.
I would return to the subject many times over the years I was at CNN. At one point I contacted a forensic crime scene animator, Michael Wilson, who helped me show graphically how all the evidence fit and was consistent with a plane hitting the Pentagon.[2]
When I left CNN I wrote an entry on my blog, LineofDeparture.com, again giving my eyewitness account, laying out all the evidence, and posting the photographs I took at the scene in an attempt to debunk the myths that were now so linked to my September 11 reporting.[3]
Some of the comments I received:
“The pictures posted have no significance. They only further reinforce the fact that no Boeing Plane hit the Pentagon. That is a sick and futile effort to enforce an unenforceable lie. Barbara Olson is alive and well. The phone calls were Phony calls. That was proven using an unusual approach by implementing common sense. False Flag attack, pure and simple and the coverup was so obvious only a fool would believe otherwise and only a shill or disinfoagent would attempt to defend the obvious lie.”  Jean


“A few photographs are just that — photographs. They become evidence of Flight 77 when backed up by forensic evidence that they came from Flight 77 — some of the parts would have serial numbers that could be matched to the logs. Then there's contradictory evidence I lay out in my September 11, 2010 article "Pentagon Transcripts, Official Records Belie "The 9/11 Commission Report'." I challenge you to a debate.” Enver Masud


I did in fact try engaging directly with some of the more thoughtful doubters, spending in some cases hours talking with them, attempting to use logic to explain why their theories did not fit the facts. But the facts did not seem to matter.
As an experiment, I decided to agree to be interviewed by a 9/11 truther whom I met at a conference, Victor Thorn. He was an affable, pleasant person, who seemed genuinely confused about whether a plane hit the Pentagon. So I agreed to talk to him by phone. I recorded the conversation for my records, with his permission. I explained how my comments about “no evidence of a plane” were taken out of context. I shared the pictures I took of the wreckage. I tried to convince him that no theory or other evidence provided any creditable alternative explanation.
Thorn subsequently published his article on a website called American Free Press.[4] When his article was posted, I found that it trotted out the same old canard about me reporting “no evidence of a plane,” and then said I had later objected “as possible damage control” that my comments were taken out of context. Thorn then added, ominously “But were they?”[5]
The rest of the article was an indictment of my failure to follow all the false leads that are the focus of the Pentagon 9/11 conspiracy theorists.  Why, he wanted to know, had I not interviewed any structural engineers to determine why the plane’s five-ton engines didn’t create any holes?   Why had I not interviewed pilots to get their opinion about whether Hani Hanjour could have flown the Boeing 757?  Why did I not pursue the theory that documented cell phones calls were impossible, given the technology of the time.
He characterized my dismissal of those lines of inquiry as “immaterial.”  But in fairness he did sum up my hour-long discussion with this one paragraph, which is accurate, as far as it goes:
He justified this lack of intellectual and journalistic curiosity with the following mantras: (a) All evidence points in only one direction, (b) There are no plausible alternatives, (c) These aren’t relevant lines of questioning, and (d) All this might make sense if we didn’t know whether American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. But we do know that for a fact, so all this other debate and analysis is irrelevant.

Thorn’s conclusion: “Unfortunately, McIntyre still does not realize that this type of lazy elitist arrogance is why a growing number of Americans don’t trust the corporate media.”
 Once again, I had failed. Another mind not changed. I began to wonder if anything could change the mind of a true disbeliever.
A much more concerted and comprehensive attempt to correct the record and counter the false beliefs about the September 11 attacks was launched by the editors of Popular Mechanics.  In 2006, the magazine editors published a book, Debunking 9/11 Myths, which reported that they analyzed and definitively disproved the 20 most prominent conspiracy claims including that a missile from a military jet, not a Boeing 757, struck the Pentagon.[6]
The authors said they “consulted more than 300 experts and sources in such fields as air traffic control, aviation, civil engineering, fire fighting and metallurgy.” They said their conclusions were based on “hard facts and irrefutable evidence, including photographs, transcripts, scientific studies, expert testimony, and other documentation.”
In a chapter on the Pentagon, the editors addressed the question about debris, the size of the hole in the Pentagon, and quoted other witnesses on the scene.  One was first responder, Allyn Kilsheimer, who said he held in his hand part of the tail section of the plane and saw the black box as well as uniforms from crew members and body parts. [7]
The authors had high hopes that by deploying facts and irrefutable evidence, the conspiracy theories would fade away.
In an endorsement for the book, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine wrote:
Even though I study weird beliefs for a living, I never imagined that the 9/11 conspiracy theories that cropped up shortly after that tragic event would ever get cultural traction in America, but here we are with a plethora of conspiracies and no end in sight. What we need is a solid work of straightforward debunking, and now we have it in Debunking 9/11 Myths. The Popular Mechanics article upon which the book is based was one of the finest works of investigative journalism and skeptical analysis that I have ever encountered, and the book-length treatment of this codswallop will stop the conspiracy theorists in their fantasy-prone tracks. A brilliant exemplar of critical thinking. [8]

And so it might have been expected that the age of September 11 conspiracy theories would come to a crashing end under the weight of indisputable facts and evidence. But it did not.
It turns out skeptic Michael Shermer should have been a bit more skeptical of his own predictions.  Instead of stopping the conspiracy theorists “in their fantasy-prone tracks,” the 9/11 “truthers” piled more coal into the locomotive of faulty logic and took off like a runaway freight train.
Enter: Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory.[9]  The new book, which is twice as thick as the Popular Mechanics tome, vigorously disputes almost every aspect of the Popular Mechanics investigation, turning the tables by labeling the widely-accepted and government reported version of events, “the official conspiracy theory.” That’s right, the editors of Popular Mechanics, along with a majority of Americans stood accused of being the “true believers,” essentially official conspiracists who themselves are blind to facts and impervious to logic.
The book is impressive in its attention to detail and careful in its presentation of facts. Take, for example, my infamous “no evidence of a plane” description. Popular Science explains that away by saying “very little wreckage was visible from McIntyre’s vantage point,” glossing over entirely the essential missing context, namely that’s not actually what I was saying. [10]
By contrast, none of the nuance was lost on the Debunking 9/11 Debunking author David Ray Griffin, who points out, quite correctly, I was “not, to be sure, denying a plane struck the Pentagon.” In fact he said my statement “supported the official view.” He accused Popular Mechanics of assuming incorrectly that I was too far away to see anything.
“This interpretation, however, is based on the false assumption that McIntyre’s ‘vantage point’ was the media area in front of the Citgo gas station, from which the interview was taped. He in reality was talking about his ‘close-up’ inspection of the area around the strike zone.”[11]
 Yes, thank you. That’s right, except for the reference to a “taped” interview.
It was in fact a live report, although the immortalized recording of it is now an Internet video. And while accurately presenting my words, Griffin then went on to use my description of “small pieces of wreckage” to support the notion that the Pentagon scene was not consistent with a 757 crash.  And therefore, he effectively turns my testimony into evidence for his side.
Again, it is not my intent to belabor the point of the misuse of my words or re-argue the case for the “official conspiracy theory.” Rather, I note that the result of Popular Mechanics’ laudable journalistic effort to disprove what it called “the fantasies of 9/11 conspiracists” was not gratitude or contrition, but even more certitude that all their sophisticated fact-checking was wrong:
In his conclusion, David Ray Griffin writes:
PM (Popular Mechanics) has not presented convincing evidence the Pentagon was struck by flight 77, or even a Boeing 757. It has not answered the objections to this claim based on insufficient fire, impact damage, and debris. It has not provided a plausible explanation for the hole in the C-ring. It has not shown why we should not find suspicious the FBI’s destruction of evidence and refusal to release videos. It has not mentioned the reasons to doubt Hani Hanjour piloted a 757 into Wedge 1… It is hard to imagine how PM’s attempt in this chapter – to debunk the claim the Pentagon strike was an inside job – could have failed more thoroughly.[12]

At this point it might well seem that rational people would be justified in throwing up their hands and declaring the battle to correct the record a hopeless cause.
Can that be the final answer, that many otherwise intelligent people are simply entitled to their wacky beliefs, and we should stop trying to inform them against their will?
Here’s how Senator John McCain answered that question in the forward he wrote to Debunking 9/11 Myths:
The conspiracy theorists chase any bit of information, no matter how flimsy, and use it to fit their preordained conclusions. They ascribe to the government, or to some secretive group, powers wholly out of proportion to what evidence suggests. And they ignore the facts that present in plain sight.
We cannot let these tales go unanswered. [13]

McCain calls the false narratives “a distraction from the proper lessons of 9/11,” which he says “shakes Americans’ faith in their government at a time when that faith is already at an all-time low.”
McCain and many others call for the unfounded accusations surrounding the September 11 attacks to be confronted with facts.  But as I discovered, facts alone are not enough to persuade people with firm convictions.  And the reasons get to the heart of the challenge of debunking any myth, namely, as cartoonist Walt Kelly famously put it: “We have met the enemy… and he is us.”[14]


[1] Moussaoui was a French citizen arrested in the U.S. in connection with the 9/11 attacks. He would plead guilty in 2006.
[2] Jamie McIntyre, “Sept. 11 Mythbusting,” CNN, 2006.
[3] McIntyre, “The Immortal 9/11 Conspiracy,” 2010. lineofdeparturearchives.blogspot.com.
[4] AmericanFreePress.net.
[5] Victor Thorn, “Victor Thorn Interviews Former CNN Reporter Who Was First on Scene at Pentagon on 9/11,” AmericanFreePress.net, November 9, 2010. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/former_cnn_reporter_243.html

[6] David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, Debunking 9/11 Myths, Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up To The Facts (New York: Hearst, 2006).
[7] Dunbar and Reagan, Debunking 9/11 Myths, 65.
[8] Ibid, inside front cover.

[9] David Ray Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanic and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2007).
[10] Dunbar and Reagan, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, 97.
[11] David Ray Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, 269.
[12] Ibid, 288.

[13] Dunbar and Reagan, Debunking 9/11 Myths, xiv-xv.
[14] Walt Kelly, The Pogo Papers, (New York: Simon and Shuster, June 1953).