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Summary: I just love a good conspiracy theory, don't you?
Review: It's comforting to know that there are many sociopathic, delusional, paranoid whackos out there who can actually write well. Yes, I've visited hundreds of those idiotic websites claiming our civil liberties are under some sort of assault by what Hillary Clinton called, "The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy." Yep, and 9/11 was a false flag operation, jointly orchestrated by the Project For The New American Century Neocons and Israel. Why? So that we could invade Afghanistan, put in a pipeline, and get all that oil from the Caspian Sea Basin. Additionally, we used the New Pearl Harbor to go after Iraq in order to grab all that oil. Oh, and by the way, did you know Al Qaeda doesn't really exist? It's a front, jointly created by the CIA and the Mossad. It was manufactured in order to terrorize Americans into buying into the whole scam, and we gladly gave up our civil liberties by backing the Patriot Act. Oh, and WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7 were all controlled demolitions. The planes couldn't have brought down the towers because the fires weren't hot enough to melt steel. You see there were underground thermite explosions, which caused pools of molten steel to form at the base of each building. Israel benefits because America continues to go after Israel's Arab enemies. They also continue to get financial backing from us. We benefit because we continue to maintain an ever expanding military presence in the Middle East. It's all about the oil. Here's another thing: You can't criticize Israel or you're an Anti-Semite. Israel is off limits. Jews, who criticize Israel, are known as "Self-Hating Jews." I love that term. What else? All those planes were unusually under booked. There were no hijackers and the planes were taken over by remote control. A missile hit the Pentagon, not a plane. Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was really shot down. And the dog ate my homework. The phony corporate media won't report all this because they love Bush. He gives them the bulk of the tax cuts. GE, Disney, Fox, Viacom, Time Warner, and News Corp. It's all one big, giant conspiracy, and everyone is in on it. So you'd better be careful, because Big Brother really is watching you. Orwell was right. Here's the thing: It is hard to believe that terrorists would take over planes and crash them into buildings. It can't happen here. Never. Why? Listen, we go to work every day, we mow our lawns, we play golf, we fight termites. We have time shares, and we have mortgages. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, there is a war going on. There is brutality, poverty, and bombs. Lots of bombs. It was inevitable. It had to eventually reach our shores. It can't happen here? It finally did. And you can do one of two things. You can come up with bizarre explanations in order to deny the fact that what just happened really did happen, and now we have to deal with it. Or you can accept the notion that we are now part of a global war against terror, which we cannot afford to lose. There's a lot at stake, here. We can never go back to the age of Wally and the Beav. If we fight this war, however, we can still have America. It will never be the same America. I can't imagine the founding fathers could have pondered such a scenario. But we can win this war, and we have to win this war. There really is no choice. My advice is stop wasting time with desperate notions and fantasy. Let's protect what we have. Let's learn our lesson. Other than being delusional and self-contradicting, the author can actually string a few coherent sentences together, and it really is a fun read. This work, however, is pure fiction, and anyone who takes it seriously should seek professional help.
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Summary: David Ray Griffin a National Hero -& will go down in history
Review: David Ray Griffin has written a thoughtful, well researched analysis that leaves the reader unable to make any other conclusion than the obvious -- BUSH ET AL WERE COMPLICIT IN THE 9-11 ATTACKS, that left our nation helpless and undefended for an hour and a half on 9-11. The most protected building in the world, the "Pentagon", was hit by the 4th hijacked commercial jet liner an hour and a half after the first plane was hijacked, with NO INTERCEPTOR JETS ARRIVING until it was too late. Building #7 of the WTC collapses without being struck by a plane. The facts are undeniable. America has been bamboozeled by the most corrupt, most secretive president in American history. Bush should not be voted out of office, he should be impeached immediately and then criminally prosecuted. -- Bill Douglas, National 911Visibility.org Project
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Summary: A Wake Up Call
Review: The most disturbing fact about Dr. Griffin's book, The New Pearl Harbor, is that it was not written by a "wild-eyed conspiracy theorist," but by a brilliant Christian theologian who has the courage of a Hebrew prophet. Every American should read this book---especially, every Christian American.
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Summary: The New Pearl Harbor
Review: This book is vital for anyone who values democracy. It raises valid and thoughtful questions about what took place on 9/11. David Ray Griffin, in his book, The New Pearl Harbor, demonstrates that a precedent for administrative manipulation occurred when Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor, which set the stage for World War II. This fact is well documented and widely known. The present administration has repeatedly stonewalled all attempts at a real investigation. The president picked the investigators and instructed them to focus on how to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy and not even to look into the causes and participate in the "blame game."
David Griffin has been Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at the Claremont School of Theology for more than 30 years, and is the author or editor of over 20 books. He wrote this book to clarify some of the questions his students were asking and the problems they were having understanding the story that was published immediately after the attack at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon. He dispassionately analyzes the events of 9/11 and writes meticulously in very clear and easy-to-follow logic. Griffin's research is impeccable and well documented. There are 41 intriguing pages of footnotes with reliable sources that give this book an honest validation.
Griffin covers the flight patterns and times of all four airliners involved that fateful day and asked why defense jets weren't scrambled, when it was standard procedure for military jets to be scrambled for all highjacked airlines. He reviews the times the FAA knew flight 175was highjacked and the plane's transponder was shut down which required immediate notification to NORAD for scrambling; but there was a 26 minute delay. Why wasn't standard procedure practiced that day? Andrews Air Force Base claimed all its jets were down that day.
One of the most confounding pieces of evidence is that the "physical evidence suggesting that what hit the Pentagon could not have been a Boeing 757 coexists with testimony of several witnesses that the aircraft that did hit the Pentagon was far smaller than a 757." So what did hit the Pentagon? Griffin offers suggestions in an effort to correlate the evidence, but he has no answer. This is one of the questions that needs to be examined by very thorough investigation.
There are many more. Many of the chapters of the book have questions for titles. Did US Officials Have Advance Information about 9/11? Did US Officials obstruct Investigations Prior to 9/11? Did US Officials Have Reasons for Allowing 9/11? Did US Officials Block Captures and Investigation after 9/11? Is Complicity by US Officials the Best Explanation? It is in this latter chapter that Griffin lists the 38 problems that rule out coincidence on that tragic day and in the time of fallout afterward.
Griffin suggests there is some form of complicity by government officials. He lists "eight possible views in ascending order of seriousness--meaning the seriousness of the charge against the Bush administration that the view would imply." They range from "Construction of a False Account": the administration having no complicity and withholding information for reasons of National Security to "White House Involved in Planning: An eighth possible view is that the White House was a party to planning the attacks."
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Summary: Abu Gharb may lead to greater questioning
Review: The book highlights how poorly US media has performed in its its efforts to investigate the 9/11 tragedy. In the light of the current scandal at Abu Gharb prision in Iraq one hopes that a new questioning environment will begin to emerge in the US. With newly empowered journalists emerging in the wake of the photos/abuse scandal many of the questions posed in this book may, at last, be examined. We may be on the verg of an unprecedented crisis in the US if solid evidence of complicity in 9/11 by the Bush Administration comes to light. This books provides a valuable starting point for investigators. The answers to the many questions posed must lead one to believe that the American public is in for a very tough period ahead, in which some terrible facts about the leadership of the country will have to be taken on board.
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Summary: 9/11: The world's greatest magic show?
Review: Were the attacks of September the 11th the daring exploits of crazed Muslims seeking to deliver a fatal blow to the economic engine of the United States? Or were they a carefully crafted plan among elite insiders within the Bush Administration to kick start a war and invigorate a new American Imperium? Both radical Muslims and Bush insiders (Neocons) have reasons to want a larger war, a "clash of civilizations," but did Muslims really have the means to carry out such a large terrorist operation while eluding the prying eyes of the NSA, CIA, foreign intelligence, and the FBI? David Griffin takes the details of 9/11 apart a piece at a time, looks it over, and comes to the conclusion that the standard storyline about Muslims hijackers simply strains credulity. In fact, I think most people have very little knowledge of the precise events of 9/11 and have too quickly and naively bought the government storyline. If there were a real investigation into the events of 9/11 it would not start with the premise of how did Arab hijackers get away with it, but were Arab hijackers really part of the story at all? Why were the response times to the first hijacked airline, AA flight 11, so slow? We knew that the flight was hijacked by 8:18 a.m., but the Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., well over an hour later. Why were fighters not scrambled to protect the air space of New York and Washington D.C.? Did someone give orders for the fighters to "stand-down" or was it just bungling incompetence? Even if we concede there was a collapse in normal protocol, what tranformed pitiful Arab pilots into top gun showmen? The hijacker, Hanji Hanjour, who crashed flight 77 into the Pentagon was engaging in aerial manuevers that would bedazzle the best fighter pilots. Radio operator at Dulles, Danielle O'Brien, first thought Flight 77 was a US military aircraft heading to protect D.C. based on its speed and aerial acrobatics. The flight then descends 7000 feet and acts as if it's starting a landing approach, except it's moving at 450 mph, when it crashed perfectly into the lower wall of the Pentagon. Can a pilot who cannot land a Cesna align a Boeing 757 to perfectly impact the Pentagon, leaving the lawn in pristine condition? Even if it's conceded that both towers could collapse solely due to the impact of two large Boeings, what brought down WTC7? The FEMA report was inconclusive, but owner, Larry Silverstein, in a PBS documentary, said he made the decision to "pull it." This is a frank admission, and suggests there were bombs already in WTC7 long before 9/11. Of course this also raises the possibility that there were also bombs, C-4 explosives, in the two world trade towers. The Neocons in the Bush Administration have long sought a greater war with Islam, and believe it's paramount that America assume its role as the new Imperium. These ideas first began to germinate during the first Bush Administration when Paul Wolfowitz, now assistant Sec. of Dec, wrote a memo proposing a new strategy for American foreign policy: to prevent the emergenge of any new rival. Then we have a 1996 Foreign Affairs essay written by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan arguing for a "benevolent global hegemony." In 1997 Bill Kristol formed a new think tank, Project for the New American Century, where the infamous essay Rebuilding America's Defenses called for incrases in defense spending, a new American cavalery to police the world, the development of space weapons, unilateralism, but the observation that this "tranformation" would require another "catastrophic and catalyzing event, like another Pearl Harbor." They got their wish. It might be easier to think that only radical Muslims could carry out such a bloodthirsty attack, but evidence clearly shows the Neocons also have a motive and have benefitted from the terrorist attack. Before the ruins even finished smouldering we had Neocons like Norman Podhoretz writing essays entitled How to Win World War IV. Griffin's book really eviscerates the mainstream story about 9/11, but another book needs to complement the information in this book with one that highlights neocon perfidy. At the end of the day, there is a good case to be made that the 19 hijackers were not suicidal Arab pilots, but key administrators who continue to walk the halls of power in the Bush Administration.
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Summary: Dante's Call
Review: One of Dante's shining stars is his frontal attack on complacency. In paraphrase he said: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of turmoil, find excuses rather than speaking their hearts clearly. Griffin will not be one burning in hell. Instead, he calls on all of us to raise our voices, in questioning, and in supporting the process of democracy through that questioning. And all thinking citizens who read this book will find their voices rising amid the clamor and obfuscation that is the current political climate today. Questions like Griffin articulates are tough. They do not have simple or easily digestible answers. In fact to get ANY truthful answer will be an arduous task indeed, as the champions of power in Washington D.C. seek to cloud all of our collective memories with instant images of fear and self-righteousness. Griffin is a remarkable thinker and writer. He is lucid in the middle of the most misrepresented moments of our recent history. He calls upon each of us to stand firm in our need for truth; not just something that smells or tastes good. But hard and maybe even bitter truth. Perhaps even truth that frightens us more than the fear being created by the charleton administration currently trying to render democracy into an "American Messianic Nationalism," to quote a recent phrase by another scholar, Rosemary Radford Ruether. If we all demand answers to the questions raised by Griffin's scholarship, we might contribute to the reconciliation between our democratic dreams and our failing reality. The questions are clearly stated, thoroughly researched and documented, and presented in language anyone with an open mind and a curious spirit can engage. The problem lies in the resistance to answering those questions, which is the central theme of our current administration, supported largely by the partisan, and highly charged religious rhetoric of our daily political life. The Congress is largely mute, or worse, complicit in its unwillingness to demand accountability and truth. Read this book, and find yourself confronted with Dante's call to Patriotism. Be prepared; if you cannot rise to the occasion, perhaps ignoring the truth will be an easier placebo than the medicine curently being prescribed by the spin-doctors of Washington.
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Summary: Makes Watergate Look like a Walk in the Park
Review: This is indeed, in my opinion, the book of the century about the crime of the century. Since other reviewers have pretty well covered the major anomalies in the government's official story compared with the facts of the non-hijackings and the controlled demolitions of the towers, etc., I'll just mention things that particularly reached out and bit me. Griffin reminds us that there are several U.S. precedents for fabricating a pretext for war, "...most notoriously for the wars against Mexico Cuba and Vietnam" and it is widely known that FDR allowed the original Pearl Harbor strike to happen to get us into WW II, but I'd not known before reading this book about "Operation Northwoods." Seems President Eisenhower asked the CIA to come up with a pretext to invade Cuba. So they came up with a plan of covert operations "...in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention." But after the Bay of Pigs "fiasco", JFK took responsibility for Cuba away from the CIA and assigned it to the Department of Defense. Kennedy was then given a plan, signed by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that described "...pretexts which would provide justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba." It was important, the memorandum said, "to camouflage the ultimate objective." The plan listed possible scenarios: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area...we could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)" or [says the plan], "It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner..." Gosh, doesn't this have a familiar ring to it? And Operation Northwoods was proposed way back in 1962! There's more: "An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplication for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time, the duplication would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone." Then the drone and actual aircraft would rendezvous and the passengers evacuated. "When over Cuba, the drone will transmit on the international distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal." The above gives me some small hope that the passengers of Flight 77 may still be alive - somewhere. Fortunately, Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods . There is also a precedent for this. A heinous plan to annex Hawaii through subterfuge was rejected by President Grover Cleveland but was accepted by the next president William McKinley (who was also the one who used the Maine incident to justify entering the war against Spain in order to take control of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines). So if anyone, after reading about these precedents can still say they find it unbelievable that our beloved government could possibly fabricate information which would result in the deaths of innocent people, all I can say is, "Stay as sweet as you are." Another thing that jumped out at me was that if there was mere incompetence in the events of 9/11, as our government claims, why were there no reprimands? Some honest whistleblowers in the FBI, for instance and others who were zealous in pointing out discrepancies (including reporters) subsequently lost their jobs and some died under mysterious circumstances, but those who went with the program and at the very least could rightfully be accused of gross incompetence were not reprimanded, but in many cases promoted. Why? And the lies - by Bush, by Condoleezza Rice, by Cheney, by Ashcroft - caught redhanded they were - a matter of public record, and the American public doesn't even seem to notice. I believe that we in this country are in the throes of a mass psychosis brought on by an orchestrated fear. Griffin points out that the Bush Administration has repeatedly stonewalled all attempts at an investigation into 9/11 and Bush insisted on picking the investigators while instructing them to focus on how to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy and not to even look into the causes and participate in the "blame game." We are told that we must move on. For anybody who still believes that our government was not complicit in the events of 9/11, I challenge you to read this book. Read all the footnotes. Check all the facts for yourselves. Just read it and then tell me: Is this the crime of the century or what?
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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!
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Summary: Every American needs to read Griffin's book!
Review: I found Griffin's book a profoundly disturbing compendium of all the arguments for why there has been a conspiracy around 9/11. He begins with a table of eight levels of complicity, from little to overwhelming and lets the reader decide where along the scale reality may lie. Two reminders of my Yale training jumped to mind: one was Leslie Weatherhead's distinction between the permissive and ordaining wills of God; some things God allows to happen; other things God directs to happen. (Application. Since it is overwhelmingly clear the the Bushies knew such an attack was coming, did they--so overwhelmed with a passion to get into a war with Iraq--simply allow the events of 9/11 or actually conspire and were involved in various ways in their happening?) The other "ancient artifact" is Griffin's style of presentation. It reminded me deeply of St. Thomas' Summas, more Contra Gentiles than Theologica. Griffin methodically lays out the argument, gives you counter arguments and leads you to the profoundly disturbing conclusion that not only was there complicity, there was conspiracy.
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