The Beginning of the End? Notes on David Ray Griffin's 9-11 talk

The Beginning of the End?

(C) 2005 by David Patnode

April 18, 2005

I attended a lecture tonight at the UW-Madison campus by Christian theologian David Ray Griffin. This is the author of "The New Pearl Harbor — Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11". His most recent book is "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions". The title speaks for itself.

The lecture this evening was reported to be the first of its kind — the first time a formal lecture has challenged the official 9/11 story. In addition, it was being recorded for broadcast on C-SPAN! The lecture was entitled "9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious People Respond?" He started off with some definitions of "religious people" (apparently Christianity isn't the only religion), and "American Empire" — the conservatives would have you believe America is the world's first "benign" empire, but I think the point is pretty debatable. Then he gets into the heart of the lecture with a discussion of 9/11. He categorizes people into 4 groups:



People who believe the official story that the 9/11 attacks were a surprise attack orchestrated by 19 Islamic Al-Qaeda terrorists.

People who believe 9/11 was used opportunistically by the Bush administration to advance an agenda.

People who believe that the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the attacks but did not stop nor prevent them. No national polls have been taken, but one Zogby poll in New York City showed 50% of the people thought Bush knew.

People who believe the Bush administration orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.

Griffin goes on to describe how religious people in each of these groups would justify the "war on terror":



If you believe these were surprise attacks by terrorists, the war is justified then as "punishing evil", and you'd have no suspicion of American imperialism.

Those who consider Bush to be opportunistic with respect to 9/11 would probably categorize America's response as worse than the attacks themselves; they would tend to recognize that these attacks were most likely a "blowback" or response for decades of poor US-Mideast foreign policy.

People who believe the Bush administration knew about the attack, and let it happen anyway, would be angry. Very angry. For an administration that emphasizes the importance of "sanctity of life" to let thousands of innocent Americans die, to justify starting a war where hundreds of thousands of more people will die, that's worse than just hypocrisy. That smacks of treason.

If the third group is angry, the ideas of the 4th group are too horrible too think about — to consider that an American president and his administration would develop, orchestrate, and execute an attack against the American people — that's unthinkable! Or is it?

And there's where the lecture jumps into the serious questions and contradictions that anyone who's read any of the 9/11 Truth sites or "The New Pearl Harbor" is well aware. I'll reiterate what David Griffin spoke about this evening, but these questions are but a drop in the barrel.

He first brought up evidence to support the third group — that the Bush administration must have known about the 9/11 attacks. He spoke for a bit about the FBI and the testimony to the 9/11 Commission that the FBI had no knowledge of these attacks. Which, incidentally, is contradicted by a number of FBI agents & personnel. Attorney David Schippers (the lead prosecutor in the case against former President Clinton) announced within days after the attacks that he had been allegedly approached by several FBI agents weeks before warning of an impending attack — including details of where & when. The agents allegedly told him to stop their investigation by superiors, and when Schippers tried to get some answers Attorney General Ashcroft wouldn't return his calls.

Another little piece of damning evidence comes from the financial markets. Griffin reported that days before the attacks there were extraordinarly high "put options" placed on United Airlines, American Airlines and one of the firms that occupied several floors of the World Trade Center. Put options are essentially bets that the stock price is going to fall. So obviously somebody knew about the attacks and planned to profit off of them, and Griffin argues that the intelligence community keeps tabs on the financial markets to watch for things like this (at least, I believe that's what he said, my notes are vague).

Then we get into the really good stuff — 4 examples that Griffin presents to support the argument that not only did the Bush administration know about the attacks, it was actively involved in planning them:



The US military failed to stop the attacks and gave 3 different stories for why it failed. To start, the standard operating procedure for the FAA is to alert the military at the earliest sign that a plane might have been hijacked, and the military standard operating procedure is to have the nearest base scramble fighters to intercept the flight in question. This process takes 10-20 minutes, and Griffin says it happens about 100 times a year, so there's no excuse for these procedures not to have been followed on 9/11/2001.

First story: No fighters were in the air until after the Pentagon was hit, some 90+ minutes after the FAA reported the first hijacking.

Second story: They did send up fighters, but the FAA responded too slowly and the fighters didn't get there in time. If this story is accurate, then someone at FAA broke standard operating procedure — why has no one been held accountable for this? And even then, Griffin argues, the fighters still should have gotten there in time.

Third story: This was the story "made up" by the 9/11 Commission that the FAA gave insufficient warning about the first plane and NO warnings about the other planes. This directly contradicts the military's (second) story, which it had been using for the previous 3 years, as well as the many credible & mutually supporting stories of people involved (no details were given).

Obviously, not all 3 of these stories can be true. Either the military, the 9/11 Commission, or both, are lying. And why would they lie, but as a cover up?



The attacks on the Pentagon — the official story is that Flight 77 was crashed into the Pentagon. Assuming this is the case — how?

The Pentagon is the world's best defended site, within a couple miles of Andrews Air Force Base. The military claims there were no fighter squadrons on alert, which Griffin says is ridiculous.

The United States military boasts of the best radar system anywhere — they claim they don't miss anything in North American airspace, and the system is designed to track multiple targets simultaneously (as it would need to if America were under attack from a foreign air force or ICBM missle attack). So how'd they miss a commercial airliner headed right for the Pentagon?

The Pentagon is equipped with anti-aircraft missle batteries that attacks anything within range that's not equipped with a US military transponder. Which means either the missle batteries were deactivated on 9/11 or Flight 77 had a US military transponder. Neither of which is a promising explanation.

etc

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