[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: 9/11 News - Vancouver Sun reviews The New Pearl Harbor

[Paul Etxeberri]

>
>
>http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2004-12-11-vancouversun.php
>
>A Theologian Asks the Hard Questions About 9/11
>By Douglas Todd
>The Vancouver Sun
>Dec 11, 2004
>
>David Ray Griffin is one of the most respected philosophers of religion in
>North America. He is the author or editor of more than 24 academic books,
>including works co-written with the deans of world religions, Huston Smith
>and Martin Marty. He has lectured around the world, including at UBC.
>
>Griffin is one of those profiled in the prestigious volume, A Handbook of
>Christian Theologians. He's painstakingly probed countless philosophical
>challenges, from the question of why there is evil to the relationship
>between science and religion, for which he's won numerous awards.
>
>So why did this soft-spoken professor from the high-ranking
>Methodist-rooted School of Theology at Claremont, Calif., feel it
>necessary to risk his hard-earned reputation as a religion scholar to
>write one of the most incredible -- in all senses of the word -- political
>books of 2004?
>
>Because no one else in mainstream America seemed prepared to do it...
>
>The result? Griffin's book, The New Pearl Harbour: Disturbing Questions
>About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Interlink Publishing, $22.50) has
>already sold an astonishing 80,000 copies.
>
>Griffin's unflinching analysis of the unanswered questions surrounding the
>Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington has made
>Amazon.com's bestseller list despite receiving virtually no reviews in
>North America's mainstream media. That's unlike in Britain, where he's had
>solid coverage, including a three-page spread in London's mass-circulation
>Daily Mail.
>
>Personally, when people ask how a group of Muslim extremists could have
>pulled off the devastating suicide attacks against the U.S., in spite of
>the country's global intelligence network and massive defence arsenal, I
>tend to side with the German philosopher, Goethe, who once said: "Why look
>for conspiracy when stupidity can explain so much?"
>
>But when Griffin, who's known for his careful approach to philosophical
>problems, poses a series of questions suggesting the administration of
>George W. Bush had been warned about the terrorist attacks and did
>nothing, it's enough to make you shudder. The implications would make the
>Watergate scandal look like a Sunday brunch.
>
>In effect, The New Pearl Harbour fleshes out in 214 pages the question
>asked in the final moment of Michael Moore's Academy-award-winning
>documentary, Fahrenheit 911. That's when the filmmaker wonders aloud: What
>exactly was Bush thinking as he sat in front of a bunch of school children
>reading a book titled My Pet Goat, knowing two jetliners had been flown
>into the World Trade Center?
>
>Griffin's book is titled The New Pearl Harbor for two reasons. One,
>because that's what Bush wrote in his diary on the evening of Sept. 11:
>"The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." But also because
>members of the Bush administration in 2000 helped author the document,
>Project for the New American Century, which opined it would be difficult
>to galvanize Americans to support military expansion in Afghanistan, Iraq
>and elsewhere unless a "new Pearl Harbor" occurred.
>
>Here are a few of the questions Griffin looks into:
>
>* Why did the Bush administration say it didn't anticipate the Sept. 11
>attacks when the CIA and FBI had repeatedly told it al-Qaida was planning
>to hijack planes and fly them into U.S. targets, including the World Trade
>Center and the Pentagon?
>
>* Why were standard procedures that could have prevented the tragedy not
>followed when the four hijacked planes went off course, including
>immediately sending up jet fighters to shoot down passenger planes that
>fail to obey orders?
>
>* Why has there been no physical evidence a jet plane crashed into the
>Pentagon? Independent onlookers say they saw a missile fly into the
>building. Video evidence shot by a nearby gas station's security cameras
>was confiscated by government officials.
>
>* Why did Bush, despite knowing about first one, then two, World Trade
>Center crashes, delay his response to them for up to 30 minutes and
>instead continue to read a children's book? Why was he not whisked away by
>his security agents, who are trained to believe he's a logical target of
>terrorists?
>
>* Who made tens of millions of dollars by betting on the stock market in
>the weeks before Sept. 11 that shares in the two airlines that owned the
>hijacked planes were about to plummet?
>
>The Bush administration has brushed off all such questions. For his part,
>Griffin doesn't argue the Bush administration was actually complicit in
>the attacks. Some of the professor's fans have regretted his cautiousness,
>because he won't compile a grand theory about why the attacks may have
>been allowed to happen. He consistently avoids inflammatory rhetoric.
>
>Griffin, however, has clearly shown the gross inadequacies of the 9/11
>Commission, which the Bush administration demanded be restricted to
>looking only at how to stop another terrorist assault.
>
>Griffin's supporters, including top Christian theologians, say he achieved
>his key goal, which was to provide an overwhelming body of evidence to
>show it's necessary to conduct a thorough probe into how the attacks
>happened in the first place.
>
>In the past month, Harper's Magazine and the New York Times have
>tentatively started to catch up with Griffin's questions. Harper's, for
>instance, published a cover feature titled, "Whitewash as public service:
>How the 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation," by Benjamin DeMott,
>which also asks whether it was sheer incompetence or something else that
>made the attacks possible.
>
>For his part, Griffin says he's been overwhelmed by the positive responses
>he's received to his book, which has sold 50,000 copies in the U.S. almost
>solely by word of mouth. In an e-mail interview, Griffin said he's only
>received about a dozen denunciations. Many families of those who died in
>the World Trade Center attack are among his supporters. Two of his many
>high-placed admirers are Canadians; former Liberal defence minister Paul
>Hellyer and Michael Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa.
>
>Griffin continues to believe the religious and philosophical questions
>he's devoted his career to answering are important, but, as a Christian,
>he feels a more urgent need to take on the geo-political developments that
>have elevated the planet onto high alert. Two weeks ago he released a
>follow-up book with the same publisher, titled The 9/11 Commission Report:
>Omissions and Distortions.
>
>dtodd at png.canwest.com
>
>__________________________________


-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand