Rating: 
Summary: "The New Pearl Harbor" or "Plan of Attack"
Review: In this review, I compare David Ray Griffin's "The New Pearl Harbor" to Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack." Some have tried to depict Bob Woodward's book, "Plan of Attack", as a scathing indictment of Bush and his policies. They might be surprised to learn that if they go to the Bush/Cheney re-election website, www.georgewbush.com/, "Plan of Attack" is the first book cited on the suggested reading list, followed by books written by Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Lynne Cheney, John Podhoretz, David Frum, and Sean Hannity. Readers in the know must be raising an eyebrow and thinking, "Why on earth would George W. Bush want U.S. citizens to read Plan of Attack?" The answer is that Woodward's book portrays the president as a gutsy, unrelenting warrior against terror, blithe to break the rules, all in the name of a good cause. By design, Bush and others in his administration granted Woodward interviews. They wanted this information disclosed. "Plan of Attack" is just that, a plan to bolster the Bush/Cheney campaign! If anyone is looking to read a book that will never appear on the Bush/Cheney suggested reading list, I recommend "The New Pearl Harbor" by respected theologian and author David Ray Griffin. This book has earned a five-star rating on Amazon.com, and its readership is building momentum. If you read Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack," you're liable to be putty in Bush's hands. If you read David Ray Griffin's "The New Pearl Harbor," you'll never be putty in any president's hands!
Rating:
Summary: A Book Every American Should be Required to Read
Review: THE NEW PEARL HARBOR is a 214-page smoking gun against the official version of what happened on 9/11/01. This is quite interesting considering the fact that David Ray Griffin does not discount the official version out of hand. Quite to the contrary, Each chapter starts with a simple question such as chapter 2, titled: FLIGHT 77: WAS IT REALLY THE AIRCRAFT THAT STRUCK THE PENTAGON? From each question, Griffin takes us on two journeys. The first is the official version of what happened that day, and the second is based solely on the facts. This methodical, academic approach is brilliantly executed leaving the reader to think for his, or her, self. In every case, Griffin clearly shows that the official version is not supported by the evidence, whether that evidence be physical or circumstantial. Griffin's footnotes are filled with top-notch 9/11 Truth researchers, such as Paul Thompson, Nafeez Ahmed, Mike Ruppert and Thierry Meyssan to name a few. He gives credit where credit is do. Thank god prominent left-wing intellectuals, such as Richard Falk & Howard Zinn, have endorsed this book. The American Left has of course been hard on many Bush policies, but it has largely turned a blind eye to what really happened on 9/11. Hopefully this is the beginning of a mass awakening in this country. I have been down at Ground Zero every Saturday handing out educational literature about 9/11 for three months now as a cofounder of www.NY911Truth.org. As we can afford, we hand out free copies of Griffin's book to those who are interested in thinking for themselves. Everyone should read this book. The truth hurts, but it is time we start taking the pain. peace eternal
m>k<
Rating:
Summary: The most important book you will ever read
Review: The New Pearl Harbor:
Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11
David Ray Griffin, Northampton, MA, Olive Branch Press, 2004 Reviewed by Richard Curtis In this small book, David Ray Griffin, a professor for the last 30 years at the Claremont School of Theology, meticulously examines the known facts of the events of 9/11. At minimum we know that four commercial airlines were hijacked. We know that two of them crashed into the two tallest of the World Trade Center buildings. We know that three WTC buildings eventually collapsed. We know that something crashed into the Pentagon. And we know that a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Beyond that, the rest of the facts, as near as they can be determined, are completely inconsistent with the official version of those events as put forth by the Bush Administration, and some of those facts seem to suggest its direct involvement. Among the long list of anomalies between the official version and the known facts is the mysterious collapse of the 47-story building called WTC-7. It was not struck by an airplane and suffered no significant damage, yet on the evening of 9/11, it collapsed in a manner very similar to the collapse of the two larger buildings. More ominously the way these buildings collapsed resembled the way buildings behave when subjected to a controlled demolition, rather than the way buildings behave when ravaged by fire. Never before had a steel-framed building collapsed because of fire, but on 9/11, according to the official account, three buildings did. The details behind just these observations are voluminous and are only part of the reason why every American should read this book. Here are a few other of the many examples from Griffin's review of the facts: 1) It is standard procedure for the Air Force to intercept airplanes that show any sign of having been hijacked, this usually takes about 10 minutes and happens an average of 100 times per year. Yet on 9/11, three of the four planes flew for a half an hour without a fighter even being sent up to investigate. And when planes were "scrambled" they went up from a base two states away and apparently flew at one-half to one-quarter their normal speed. 2) Something crashed into the Pentagon that morning and we are told it was a Boeing 757, which is a large airline. Yet the hole in the building, according to photographs taken before the façade collapsed is no more than 18 feet in diameter. Also, although only the nose of a 757 would have gone inside the building, given the depth of the penetration, no sign of an airplane is visible in the photographs. We are told that the resulting fire melted all of the metal from the plane, yet we are also told that forensic examiners were able to identify human remains, which somehow were not burned up in a fire hot enough to melt aluminum and hardened steel. 3) Flight 73 crashed in Pennsylvania after it seemed as if passengers were about to wrest control of the plane from the hijackers. We are told it crashed as a result of this struggle. Why then did debris from the plane begin falling to the ground some eight miles from the "crash" site? Why do some witnesses report having heard a missile and in-air explosion? The above list of inconsistencies between the known facts and the Bush administration's claims about what happened represents only a tiny fraction of those discussed in the book. Griffin's presentation of the details is astounding, compelling, and incredibly disturbing. This may be the most disturbing book you ever read. One account that could do justice to all the known facts is that the Bush Administration not only allowed the events of 9/11 to transpire, but was actively involved in facilitating those events. Griffin notes that a thorough investigation might prove otherwise, but there has been no investigation into what happened only (what this reviewer sees as) a feeble examination of alleged intelligence failures. If the conclusion that seems most compelling from this account is true, we as a nation face a very serious problem. If the Bush administration is willing and able to kill so many Americans on American soil to pursue their extremist objectives, what else are they willing and able to do?
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Summary: Letting bad things happen in order to achieve great goals
Review: Until reading this book I have despised any conspiracy theory that involved persons in any American administration doing harm to their fellow Americans. But Dr. Griffin, a noted professor at the prestigious Claremont School of Theology, has written a dispassionate study of the many inconsistencies that are involved in the official version of what happened on 9/11, our surveillance of Middle Eastern terrorist networks before that time, and our pursuit of the true perpetrators since then. For example, when Flight 11's transponder went off at 8:20 a.m. and flight attendants reported at 8:21 a.m. that it had been hijacked when it turned 90 degrees to the south, F-16's are routinely supposed to scramble and head it off within ten minutes--long before it reached the North Tower. There is an average of 100 scramblings per year. We went zero for three on 9/11. How could we not protect against a plane going directly towards the Pentagon or the White House? One starts this book, wanting with all one's heart to believe that it was incompetence or surprise that day, but there are just too many other really strange things (about twenty more) noted by Griffin that warrant an even more complete investigation than what is going on now (April 2). Why? Because a lot of these elements, briefly captured by one media source or another, were swept away in our focus on the war and not brought back into the national consciousness. I must agree with the professor who wrote that "it is rare, indeed, that a book has this potential to become a force of history." This slim book is a MUST READ!
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Summary: As a former journalist ...
Review: As a former journalist, I am incredulous that this overwhelming abundance of evidence, all of which points to a story of incredible magnitude, has not been seriously and thoroughly investigated by the press. Watergate, exposed by Woodward and Bernstein, potentially pales into insignificance in comparison with the implications of the data and arguments offered in this extraordinarily well-researched and clearly written book. Prof. Griffin's courage and tenacity must be admired. This is a quick and chilling read. I highly recommend it.
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Summary: CALLING MICHAEL MOORE!
Review: Hey Mike; here's your next movie!!!!!!!!!
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Summary: Questions Still
Review: The 9/11 Commission deflected more questions than it answered. The Commission, moreover, never faced the barrage of questions that David Ray Griffin marshals in The New Pearl Harbor. Griffin's questions acquire power from their carefully researched context and organization. They are arranged so that succeeding clusters of questions implicate progressively higher levels of government. Most importantly, the argument is not chained, or deductive. It is cumulative. Many suspicions could be allayed, but remaining questions would still demand answers. Failure to deal with Dr. Griffin's questions will leave many Americans with a permanent distrust of government: distrust of government competence, distrust of government ethics, and distrust of our leaders' goodwill toward fellow Americans.
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Summary: You Think Philosophy is Unengaged? Read This Book.
Review: This book is a masterpiece of scholarship, organized presentation, and careful reasoning. Drawing no conclusions and making no accusations, Griffin simply brings together a mass of suggestive evidence and points out the acute need for a well-funded, unencumbered investigation. (Unfortunately the "9-11 commission," as it is known, shows every indication of going nowhere near the questions Griffin raises; the history of the Commission as Griffin recounts it is quite telling in this regard.) Whether any investigation could really get to the bottom of it is an open question in my mind. Just the problem of constructing a plausible account of what punched a hole in the Pentagon and why, and if it was not hit by Flight 77 then what happened to that plane and those people, is bewildering enough, let alone in combination with the similarly "disturbing questions" around other aspects of that day's events. Compare this case with the basic facts of passive complicity in the Pearl Harbor attack as John Toland ably sorts them out, 40 years after the fact, in his book Infamy. If only we had that kind of simplicity! One attack, some intercepted Japanese messages, some documents missing. In that case the task faced by "investigative" commissions was mostly how to construct cover-ups that at best seek to spread blame evenly between the traditional scapegoats and those actually responsible. If there does prove to have been complicity, as opposed to incompetence, in failing to prevent or defend against the 9-11 attacks, there is reason to be skeptical that our outrage will ever be sated by criminal prosecutions of government officials. For the time being we may have to be satisfied with a milder truth which a lot of people should be able to agree on and which is certainly more comfortable for most Americans to contemplate: a record of incompetence and malfeasance stretching from the deprioritizing of the threat of Islamic terrorism in favor of the problem of Iraq on day one of the Bush administration, to using disinformation and mass manipulation to pump up support for the Iraq invasion (which was thoroughly diversionary and even supposing it was necessary could have waited for a less disastrous moment), to the bungled top-level planning for the war, the prisoner abuse scandal, and so on. If there is one fact (brought out by this book) which shows that Bush could hardly be worse on the issue of national security it is that there were ample forewarnings of the attacks in the form of communications from several other countries and in the form of FBI intelligence intercepts, the latter apparently involving an alarming degree of specificity as to the how and where of the attacks, yet we were, to take the charitable view, thoroughly unprepared. This alone, without suggesting complicity, should have the effect of discrediting Bush in the minds of sensible people across the political spectrum. In the meantime this book can serve as a rallying point for a broad movement demanding truth and accountability. In supporting and promoting the book we can avow the wisdom of "hypotheses non fingo" and eschew, if we wish, the labels of conspiracy nut, Bush-hating liberal, or far-right libertarian. Finally, if Chip Berlet's critique of the book (at www.publiceye.org) were an undergraduate philosophy essay I would give it at best a D. He completely misapplies the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. One case of proximity in time and space is no proof of connection, but this does not mean it cannot be evidence for connection. Griffin's method is to accumulate pieces of evidence which may be weak on their own but as all converging on the same explanation make denial of that explanation less and less plausible. A good example is the 13 or so independent experiments of Jean Perrin which cumulatively made it unreasonable for scientists to doubt whether matter consists of atoms.
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Summary: The Book Is Dynamite -- Scary, Responsibly Written
Review: This is a supremely level-headed, responsible, and important book. It is very relevant now and deserves serious attention. Dr. Griffin's research has been thorough and most fair. He mostly uses the public record -- what's been out there that we haven't had the clarity or possibly the nerve to notice. The implications of what he has found about the government's actions around 9/11 are most disturbing. The evidence that Dr. Griffin organizes suggests strongly that our public servants in high office knew far more than they have told us about impending attacks -- by airplanes against buildings, no less. What does this imply? We need to pluck up our courage and find out. As Dr. Griffin points out, most people will not want to go down that road, but if we don't, we may have to go down another, much harder road -- the road of trying to take back control of our country from our former public servants. Dr. Griffin suggests that we need to go down that first uncomfortable road -- the road of unflinching and uncompromising examination of the facts around 9-11. His book helps us do that. There are many people who are scared to death of having it be widely read; so read reviews wisely. The book is dynamite. A must for every citizen. It gives us a start in conducting our own truly committed investigation into 9/11. I bought ten copies of the book, wrote instructions on the inside of the front cover to read it quickly and pass it on, then gave half to friends and sent half to a few major media editors/ columnists/ TV and radio issues-talk hosts, with a letter. If I could afford a hundred copies, I'd send them out as one-way messengers, too. The book deserves that kind of exposure, and it needs the participation of a few courageous people in the major media to get it. Understandably, media people won't want to take the personal or professional risk, and so they need to be enouraged -- respectfully. Help if you can; give away books, write letters to the media recommending the book as rational, concerned citizens needing answers to the disturbing questions that Dr. Griffin helps to articulate. -- Robert Brown
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Summary: Logic and Common Sense. Citizens must ask.
Review: A sensible and very well educated friend with conservative leanings recommended "The New Pearl Harbor" to me. I must admit to a large degree of skepticism as I began to read. I was taken aback when the author, Dr. Griffin himself, described my outlook exactly when he wrote in his Introduction, "I assumed that those who were claiming [that the official version of the events of 9/11 were questionable] must be "conspiracy theorists" in the derogatory sense in which this term is usually employed--which means, roughly, 'crackpots.' I knew that if they were right, this would be very important. But I was so confident that they must be wrong-----that I had no motivation to invest time and energy in tracking these writings down. I fully sympathize, therefore, with the fact that most people have not examined the evidence. Life is short and the list of conspiracy theories is long, and we all must exercise judgment about which things are worth our investment of time. I had assumed that conspiracy theories about 9/11 were below the threshold of possible credibility."
Dr. Griffin, however, discovered increasingly compelling evidence and was finally induced to investigate further. Dr. Griffin's investigation led him to believe that there were irreconcilable differences between the official version of events and actual data. His original intention was to write an article speaking to these discrepancies, but as the evidence mounted, his 'article' became a book.
As a reader, I like logic, common sense, and non-rhetorical evidence. That is exactly how information in Dr. Griffin's book is presented. He uses several main sources and numerous other sources that are well documented. He draws no specific conclusions except to say definitively that there must be a REAL investigation of the discrepancies between actual data and the official version of events.
If we citizens do not look at and ask about information that is placed so logically right in front of us, what is to become of our Republic? There are historical precedents in the U.S. for the government not being truthful with the people. Is it so out of the realm that it could happen again at some level? In my view, (coming from a 'has-been' cynic who is not big on "conspiracy theories"), this is a must read for every concerned citizen in our country. The evidence is, indeed, compelling enough to warrant a full and unfettered investigation. We cannot put our heads in the sand, no matter how appalling or distressing the results of the investigation might be. Citizens must read this book. I think they, too, will come away asking for this investigation.
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