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9/11, An Inside Job?
A Review Essay Based on David Ray Griffin's Research (Part I)
David Ray Griffin: The New Pearl Harbor: Disturhing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press (2004)
David Ray Griffin: The 9/11 Connnission Report: Omissions And Distortions, Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press (2005)
A: The Air Defense Stand-down
We must speak the tnith about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. -President G.W. Bush to the U.N. General Assembly, 11/10/01
Was 9/11 an inside job? David Ray Griffin addresses this question in two books that critically examine the official account of the events of 9/11. Griffin's books are masterpieces of concise compilations of the available plausible evidence suggesting that the attacks must have resulted from complicity at the highest levels of the United States government. This review essay treats both books as a unit, summarizes some of his most important findings, and includes relevant material from other researchers.
Like most Americans, Griffin, a retired professor of Philosophy at the Claremont School of Theology (California), at first viewed critics of the Bush administration's account as crackpots. It seemed to him that conspiracy theories on this subject were below the threshold of possibility. In the 18 months following 9/11, he had not looked at any of the evidence challenging the government's theory-that the attacks were the responsibility of 19 Arab hijackers led by Osama Bin Laden. It seemed to him, as he writes in his introduction, "beyond belief that the Bush administration-even the Bush administration-would do such a heinous thing." (The New Pearl Harbor, FJSTPH], xvii-xviii)
But in the spring of 2003 a colleague prodded him to look at researcher Paul Thompson's 9/11 timeline that is strictly limited to mainstream sources.1 Griffin was "surprised, even amazed, to see how much evidence he had found that points to the conclusion that the Bush administration did indeed intentionally allow the attacks of 9/11 to happen." Griffin began to look at the work of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, an independent researcher in England, whose book "directly challenges the accepted wisdom about 9/11 which is that it resulted from a...