Unquestioned Answers
Nonconspiracy theorist David Ray Griffin takes aim at the official 9/11
story
By Steve Bhaerman
ABOUT 10 years ago, I was asked to perform comedy at a conference I
quickly dubbed "the Paranoids Conference." Each presenter had a dark
tale to tell of abductions, drug running, assassinations and other
nefarious horrors too terrible to mention. There were whispers of
government agents in our midst, so when it was my turn to perform, I
said I was with the CIA. I paused while the audience gasped. "That's
the Comedians Institute of America." It got a laugh, but no amount of
laughter could counterbalance the toxicity of the atmosphere. I
couldn't wait to leave.
Fast-forward to a sunny Sunday afternoon early last year when I found
myself in Santa Rosa's Church of the Rose to hear Dr. David Ray
Griffin, author of a book on the 9/11 attacks called The New Pearl
Harbor, as well as The 9-11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions. Griffin, a soft-spoken retired professor of theology with
sandy, graying hair, proceeded to calmly and quietly dismantle the
official 9/11 story. The room was filled to standing with people of all
ages, many of whom attended the church. As Griffin made his case for
how the official story could never have happened the way they said it
did, I looked around me. Everyone was riveted, and yet I could detect
no fear, no paranoia in the room.
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People were hearing his message-the essentials of which are that our
government likely knew about or had something to do with the 9/11
attacks-and yet there was something about his delivery that was
reassuring. I've heard David Ray Griffin twice since then, once at a
small gathering of world government advocates, the other time at the
prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Each event had a
similar ambiEnce: a calm, thoughtful, scholarly presentation without
the least hint of sensationalism or personal glory.
Whatever one's assumption of what a "conspiracy theorist" is like,
David Ray Griffin doesn't fit the mold, perhaps because he's really a
nonconspiracy theorist. While he methodically deconstructs the official
story, he doesn't spin his own alternative yarn to fill the vacuum.
Instead, he allows audience members to draw their own conclusions. As
for conspiracy theories, he explains, "the official story is itself a
conspiracy theory. As the accepted 'conspiracy theory' goes, a cadre of
Al Qaeda operatives conspired to hijack four jetliners, did so
undetected and were able to complete their mission with no interception
or even interference from the best-prepared air force on the face of
the earth."'
Even more unusual, Griffin says, "the crime was solved immediately, and
the official story was in place before the day of the attack was over.
Within 48 hours, our president stood at the National Cathedral
surrounded by Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi and an imam, and used
this religious setting to declare a holy war on terror."
If we were to contrast the smoothness of the post-9/11 operation with
the aftermath of Katrina, we are left with the question: How can a
president so inept in one setting have been so "ept" in another?
False Flags
While Griffin professes no formulated alternative theory of what did
happen, he offers a clue in the title of his first book. A New Pearl
Harbor refers to a passage in a document called Project for the New
American Century-the neocons' blueprint for what they call "pax
Americana"-which says that for the American people to accept the
overt military mission of creating security through world domination, a
"new Pearl Harbor" would be needed. Griffin believes that the 9/11
attacks were just that.
This is a pretty serious-and horrific-assertion to make: that the
leaders of our country would see fit to sacrifice some 3,000 civilians
so that we could launch a pre-emptive attack on a perceived enemy. And
yet, Griffin is quick to point out, our history is rife with just such
incidents, from the "remember the Maine" boosterism preceding the
Spanish-American war to the Gulf of Tonkin lie that launched U.S.
involvement in Vietnam to the Pearl Harbor attacks themselves. Indeed,
recent scholarship on Pearl Harbor suggests that President Roosevelt
knew of the attack plan in advance and even purposely provoked the
Japanese, because he knew it was the only way we could join the war
against Germany. This in itself offers a dicey moral dilemma: Is it
justified to sacrifice thousands of lives to save millions of lives?
During the Cold War, two more chilling examples of so-called false flag
operations have come to light. (False flag operations are covert
situations conducted by governments or other organizations that are
designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities.)
In his recent book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and
Terrorism in Western Europe, Dr. Daniele Ganser, a senior researcher at
the Center for Security Studies, Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich, reports that NATO, guided by the CIA, supported terrorist
attacks on civilians in various European countries to discredit the
left and create fear on the part of the populace.
In Italy, right-wing terrorists, supplied by a secret army (named
"Gladio," Latin for "sword"), carried out bomb attacks in public
places, blamed them on the Italian left and were thereafter protected
from prosecution by the military secret service. As right-wing
terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explains in Ganser's book, "The reason
was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian
public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security."
In our own country during the early '60s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
under the command of Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer came up with a similar plan
to provoke an attack on Cuba. According to NSA myth-buster James
Bamford in his 2001 Random House publication Body of Secrets: Anatomy
of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, the Joint Chiefs called
for undercover operation of terror within the United States that
included plans for "innocent people to be shot on American streets; for
boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a
wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami and
elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit;
planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be
blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as
well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch
their war."
President John F. Kennedy nixed the plan immediately, and it was never
put into action. But it did have the approval of top military brass,
and with the right president-or the wrong one-it could very well
have come about.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Griffin initially dismissed any speculation
that the attacks could have been an inside job. "I subscribed to the
'blowback' theory," Griffin says. "After generations of exploitation
and interference by Western powers, these people had such fury that
they had to lash out any way they could."
At the time, Griffin, who was close to retirement from his position at
Claremont School of Theology, was working on a book on global
democracy. In the wake of 9/11, he decided that he needed a special
chapter on U.S. imperialism. He worked on that chapter for over a year
before he came to the view that 9/11 was an inside job. "As much as I
knew about prior false flag operations, as much as I knew or thought I
knew about the nefariousness of the current regime, my first take was
not even the Bush administration could or would do such a thing."
Three Different Stories
It wasn't until a colleague sent Griffin an email with Paul Thompson's
timeline-an exact, minute-by-minute accounting of the events of Sept.
11 based entirely on mainstream media accounts-that he changed his
mind. "The most glaring anomaly," Griffin now says, "was that none of
the hijacked planes were intercepted, even though all of them would
have been, had standard procedure been followed."
According to Gen. Ralph Eberhart, head of North American Aerospace
Defense Command (NORAD), from the time the FAA senses something is
wrong, it takes about a minute to contact NORAD, after which NORAD,
Eberhart says, can scramble fighter jets "within a matter of minutes to
anywhere in the United States." So what happened on that morning?
The government has given three conflicting answers to this question.
Since a full 32 minutes elapsed between the time the first hijacked
airliner was detected and the time it crashed into the World Trade
Center, it initially appeared that "stand down" orders must have been
issued to suspend standard procedures. Indeed, the first reports from
both NORAD and Gen. Richard Myers, the acting chair of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, indicated that no jets were scrambled until after the
Pentagon was hit at 9:38am.
By Sept. 13, however, the original story had morphed into an
explanation that "the planes were scrambled but arrived too late." The
delays were blamed on the FAA, said to have been slow in notifying
NORAD. If that were the case, Griffin points out, it was strange indeed
that no FAA personnel were fired or even cited for the breakdown in
procedures and the resulting disaster. (Griffin notes, moreover, that
the FAA flawlessly handled-on the same day-the unprecedented task
of grounding thousands of domestic flights.)
Meanwhile, Griffin reports, transportation secretary Norman Mineta
testified that at 9:20am-about 18 minutes before the Pentagon was
hit, allegedly by Flight 77-he went down to the shelter conference
room under the White House. According to Mineta, a young man walked in
and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out," and later,
"The plane is 30 miles out." When the young man reported, "The plane is
10 miles out," he also asked the vice president, "Do the orders still
stand?"
"Of course the orders still stand," Cheney is alleged to have replied.
"Have you heard anything to the contrary?"
When Mineta was asked by the 9/11 Commission how long after he arrived
the conversation occurred, Mineta said, "Probably about five or six
minutes," which would have placed it around 9:25 or 9:26am. However, in
the final version of the story, The 9/11 Commission Report maintained
that no one in our government knew about the approaching aircraft until
9:36am, too late to shoot it down. How did the Commission deal with
this apparent contradiction? Like just about every other piece of
testimony that conflicted with the official story, Griffin avers, they
ignored it.
"With regard to the question 'Do the orders still stand?'" Griffin
says, "Mineta seemed to assume those orders were to shoot the plane
down. But really, the young man's question makes sense only if the
orders were to do something unexpected-that is, not to shoot the
plane down."
So what did happen? Whodunnit?
Again, Griffin prefers to focus on the circumstantial framework for
examining the evidence. "You have a suspect who changes his story three
times. Does this make him more or less suspicious?"
Collective Evil
Of course, the top echelon of leaders in this country aren't exactly
your usual run-of-the-lineup perps-which, according to Griffin, is
why those who've pointed fingers at the emperor's bare buttocks in this
case have been marginalized like a bunch of tinfoil-headed kooks. No
argument about this. I've asked a number of savvy authors and
commentators why they haven't taken on the unanswered questions and
unquestioned answers around 9/11. Their answers have been pretty much
the same: It's just too big a stretch for most Americans to believe
their own government could have had anything to do with it. However, in
an exceedingly underreported Zogby poll done just last month, 42
percent of adults polled believe the U. S. government and the 9/11
Commission "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence" that
contradicts the official explanation of the attacks.
Perhaps what these reluctant commentators really meant is that they
would be committing career suicide by questioning the official story.
So why and how is David Ray Griffin different? And why is he spending
his retirement traveling around the country writing and talking about
something that conventional wisdom insists people don't want to hear?
Perhaps it has something to do with Griffin's background in "process
theology." Process theology is specifically designed to answer such
post-Holocaust questions as, How could a loving God have allowed such a
thing to happen? Griffin has written or co-authored a dozen books and
articles on the subject, and roughly the answer is this: We, as
creations of the Creator, have free will to choose how and what we
create in this life. This very often results in what we call "evil." On
the other hand, our greatest power as human beings is to bring that
loving God to earth by creating good instead.
To those who assert "God is dead," process theology says no, Griffin
reasons. The loving God is alive in our thoughts and words and deeds.
God doesn't intervene to set things right unilaterally. Rather, that
spirit-through us-embodies divine love. In other words, the world
changes-if we change it. Divine power, he says, is "persuasive, not
controlling."
While Griffin's faith may be deep, it certainly isn't narrow. He
recently edited a book called Deep Religious Pluralism.
"I've written two books on the problem of evil, so I've been dealing
with the topic for a long time," Griffin says. "Frankly, as soon as I
saw the evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, I wasn't surprised. I had
studied the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, the Japanese butchery of
the Chinese in Manchuria, our use of nuclear weapons in Japan in spite
of their imminent surrender. I've seen the depth of evil in collective
situations. It's an old, old story, and this is just the latest
chapter. Once the nation-state announces it is threatened, everything
else gets pushed to the back burner. That's what we're seeing now."
Griffin's intention just over three years ago was to write an article
for Harper's on what he then believed to be "foreknowledge and thwarted
intelligence." But the more he saw evidence that the attacks were
likely orchestrated by our own government, the more he felt a book was
needed. Since none of the American investigators had been able to get a
book published at that time, Griffin figured that as a published author
he had a better chance.
But it was far from automatic. Richard Falk, a Princeton professor of
international law and practice, had personally recommended Griffin's
book to several publishers. Every one of them turned it down. "Not for
us," said one rejection tersely. At dinner one night, Falk suggested
Interlink Books, a tiny publisher that had published a recent book of
his. Interlink took the book, but only because of a quirky coincidence.
The editor was dubious. But knowing Griffin was a theologian, she asked
her father, a minister, if he'd ever heard of the guy. "David Ray
Griffin?" said her father. "I have all of his books!"
And so, in 2004, the book got published. But you'd never learn this
from mainstream magazines and newspapers, which have yet to publish a
review of The New Pearl Harbor, which has sold over 100,000 copies. Nor
will you see him on mainstream TV, which has yet to invite him to
appear.
Griffin seems unperturbed by this, and points out that each week and
each month the alternative account of 9/11 gains wider credence. Is he
afraid? Does he feel in danger? "Well," he jokes, "there are two
possibilities. Either they leave me alone, or they take me out. If they
leave me alone, I get to enjoy my old age and write my systematic
theology. If they take me out, my 9/11 books go right to the top of the
New York Times bestseller list. So it's a win-win situation."
More seriously, he points to his Christian faith (Disciples of Christ
is his own background), and says that Christian history is full of
examples of the faithful who stuck their necks out for the truth. "If
we who believe in everlasting life fear death," he says, "what does
that say about our faith?"
Myth-Informed?
Other than standing for his faith, what does Griffin hope to accomplish
by exposing the 9/11 story as a lie? As an advocate for a worldwide
democratic order, he sees this story as an example of "governmental
lawlessness" so egregious that its exposure could call into question
the continuation of the present system with its "anarchical competition
between nation states." First, however, people must be willing to think
the unthinkable, and to be willing to look at the evidence that it is
our own nation that has become the evil empire.
This is a formidable barrier to cross. Ever since the notion of the
"Big Lie" was first put forth to describe the tactics of the Third
Reich, it has become a clich=E9 that the bigger the lie, the harder it
is for people to see the truth. This is especially so when the official
version takes on the status of what theologian Griffin calls "sacred
myth."
"The 'truth' of the official 9/11 story," explains Griffin, "must be
taken on faith. It is not a matter of debate or even discussion. Anyone
who brings up anything that contradicts the official story is either
ignored or denounced as a conspiracy nut.
"However," he continues, "when the official account of 9/11 is stripped
of its halo and treated simply as a theory rather than an
unquestionable dogma, it cannot be defended as the best theory to
account for the relevant facts. When challenges to it are not treated
as blasphemy, it can easily be seen to not correspond with reality."
And so David Ray Griffin continues to make presentations, do interviews
and get his version of the truth to "break the soundless barrier." With
Falk, John B. Cobb Jr. and Catherine Keller, Griffin co-authored the
just-published anthology The American Empire and the Commonwealth of
God: A Political, Economic, Religious Statement. His own contribution
portrays the 9/11 attacks as orchestrated to promote the American
empire. Publishing in July is his newest book, Christian Faith and the
Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action.
His hope? That enough Americans wake up and call for a reinvestigation,
and that those who know more will feel safe enough to come forward. But
first, he says, we Americans must muster the will and courage to face
the situation squarely in the face.
As a postscript to my interview with David Ray Griffin, I am reminded
of a March 30 article by journalist Doug Thompson published on
OpEdNews.com. In it, Thompson recalls a 1981 encounter with the late
John Connally, the former governor of Texas who was wounded in the
Kennedy assassination. In an unguarded moment, Thompson asked Connally,
"Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald fired the gun that killed Kennedy?"
"Absolutely not," Connally said. "I do not, for one second, believe the
conclusions of the Warren Commission."
"So why not speak out?" Thompson asked.
"I will never speak out publicly about what I believe," Connally
replied, "because I love this country and we needed closure at the
time."
Now here we are more than 40 years after that devastating perpetration
and we have to wonder, how well did "closure" serve us? As we see daily
the fruits of self-serving secrecy and unchecked power, it might be
time for some disclosure instead.
http://www.metroactive.com/metro/09.06.06/9-11-0636.html
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