A book of essays edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott
I originally got this book because I am very excited about Peter Dale Scott’s future book, which he has released a sample chapter from . Little did I expect to find the perfect 911 truth book. This book is a collection of essays from credible academics and whistleblowers. This book is an investigation with a vast breadth of information. The best part is this volume is broken in to smaller easier to consume portions, thusly it is anything but challenging. I have not finished reading all the essays, but I couldn’t help but suggest this to everyone already. I want to transcribe a few essays, but I do not want to give anyone an excuse not to get this bad ass book, so i’m going to transcribe the preface. I will not be rechecking for spelling errors and I type incredibly fast, so….deal with it.
[Begin Transcription]In the period since September 11, 2001, some researchers outside the mainstream of public discourse have increasingly been discovering and presenting evidence that contradicts the official account of what happened that day, including the official account of who was ultimately responsible for the attacks. Given the role that 9/11 has played in subsequent history-serving as the rationale both for a global “war on terror,” which has thus far targeted Afghanistan and Iraq, and for extreme reductions in the civil liberties of Americans-the discovery that the official narrative about 9/11 was a lie would be a discovery of first importance. And yet thus far the mainstream media and most members of the academy have refused to explore the evidence that has been presented for this alternative narrative.The main rationale for ignoring this evidence, insofar as a rationale is given, is that the so-called evidence need not be taken seriously because it has been presented by “conspiracy theorists.” If analyzed, however, this charge provides no basis for discounting the proffered evidence.For one thing, we are all conspiracy theorists. A conspiracy occurs whenever two or more people conspire in secret to do something illegal, such as robbing a bank, defrauding investors, or having a spouse killed. Our newspapers and television news shows are filled with stories about conspiracies. Insofar as we believe any of these stories, we are conspiracy theorists. A second problem is that the official narrative about 9/11 is itself a conspiracy theory, alleging that the attacks were orchestrated entirely by Arab-Muslim members of al-Qaeda under the inspiration of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.In light of these two considerations, an alternative theory about 9/11 cannot rationally be dismissed out of hand on the grounds that it is a conspiracy theory. Instead, the question becomes: which of the two conspiracy theories is the more probable? And the only way to answer this question is to examine the relevant evidence, asking which of the competing hypotheses can better accommodate all the relevant evidence in a consistent and otherwise plausible way.Confronted with this argument, journalists, editors, and educators may reply that the above term “conspiracy theorists” in a pejorative way, they have a more particular meaning in mind. They mean people who tend to see conspiracies, especially involving the US government, everywhere; who do not construct their theories on the basis of evidence but select and construe evidence in terms of their preconceived theories; and who, insofar as they appeal to evidence, use it to make wild inferences based on leaps of logic. Conspiracy theorists in this sense of the term can certainly exist within what has been called the 9/11 Truth movement. But there are bad and every crazy theorist in every field, from quantum and relativity physics to evolutionary theory to the history of religion. Crazy theorists in these fields do not discredit the sensible ones. The same should be true in relation to 9/11 studies-assuming, of course, that this field of study has some sensible theorists.This book, by demonstrating that it does, makes clear that alternative accounts of 9/11 cannot be dismissed on the grounds that they are offered only by people who fit the label of “conspiracy theorists” in the pejorative sense. All of the eleven contributors to this volume were well-respected members of establishment organizations before they got involved in the question of 9/11. Ten of them had earned the Ph.D. Nine of them were professors at well-regarded universities; one was employed at Underwriters Laboratories; one was a military officer in the Pentagon. The combined weight of their testimony cannot be dismissed lightly. This combined testimony points to a twofold conclusion: the official account of 9/11 is false and this false account ahs been used to support an agenda that has been worked out in advance-the further extension of the American empire, most immediately in to Afghanistan and Iraq.Some of the chapters in this volume focus primarily on reasons to doubt the official account of 9/11. Some of them focus primarily on the way 9/11 has been exploited to further the American empire. And others deal somewhat equally with both issues.The chapter by David Ray Griffin, which is based on a lecture that inspired this volume, presents an overview of the most important evidence suggestive of complicity by the US government in the attacks of 9/11. Then, pointing to evidence that the motive would have been to advance the American empire, he argues that this connection reinforces the contention, already apparent on other grounds, that the project to create an all-inclusive American empire must be considered, on the basis of moral norms that are common to all traditions, an immoral project. The next three chapters focus primarily on evidence against the official account of 9/11. Karen Kwiatkowski assesses this account from her perspective as a former military officer, a scientist, an academic, and a person who was present at the Pentagon on 9/11. Pointing out that the 9/11 Commission contained no people capable of assessing the evidence from a scientific perspective, she says that it did not answer or even address any of her questions about the official story. Especially valuable is her eyewitness testimony about the west wing of the Pentagon shortly after it was struck, in which she reports that she saw neither the debris nor the damage that would be expected from an attack by an airliner. The chapter by physicist Steven Jones zeroes in on the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7 of the World Trade Center. He points to many features of these collapses that cannot be explained by the official theory, according to which the collapses were caused by fire (and, in the case of the Twin Towers, by airplane damage). He then shows that it is more probable that the buildings were destroyed in controlled demolitions, triggered by pre-set explosives. Kevin Ryan, whose whistle-blowing action while he worked for Underwriters Laboratories is mentioned by Jones, argues that the question of the true cause of the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings is of utmost importance, because it was what psychologically prepared Americans for the so-called War on Terror. Agreeing with Jones on the unscientific nature of the official report on the WTC collapses, which was put out by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), Ryan describes some of the behind-the-scenes details in the failure by Underwriters Laboratories to protest NIST’s distortion of evidence that it had supplied. The next two chapters discuss background information that may be important to unraveling the truth about 9/11. Peter Dale Scott focuses on the role of drugs and oil in American covert operations, especially the operation in Afghanistan in the 1980s involving so-called “Arab Afghans.” Saying that the American people have been misled about the origins of al-Qaeda, he describes its origin in the use of drug-trafficking Muslims by the United States and American petroleum companies in their quest to control oil. He suggests that secrecy in foreign policy formation has led to short sighted and disastrous strategies and that Congress should not give still more money to the very agencies that helped create the al-Qaeda network in the first place. Swiss historian Daniele Ganser’s contribution is relevant to one of the main a priori reasons Americans have had for rejecting the idea that 9/11 could have been orchestrated by our own government: the assumption that American political and military leaders simply would not do such heinous thing. He presents evidence, widely discussed in Europe during the 1990s but hardly at all in the United States, that during the Cold War, the CIA and NATO supported various right-wing movements in a “strategy of tension” to prevent left-wing electoral victories. The methods included staging “false-flag” terrorist attacks that would be blamed on the left to discredit them and justify their suppression. The next three chapters discuss problems in the ability of the American public to engage in a rational discussion about the truth of 9/11. Morgan Reynolds, as the first former member of the Bush-Cheney administration to declare 9/11 a false-flag operation, discusses the response by the academy: silence by most of it and ridicule and intimidation by his former university, Texas A&M, whose president, Robert Gates, was previously director of the CIA. Reynolds suggests that this kind of intimidation exercised by Gates may reflect a widespread problem within the academy, which would help explain the failure of most of its members to discuss the big lie of 9/11 and its connection to the government’s global domination project. Richard Falk, from whom Reynolds derived the phrase “global domination project,” suggests that the Bush administration probably either allowed the 9/11 attacks, or conspired to cause them, in order to facilitate this project. Discussing the official management of suspicion in relation to 9/11 is itself suspicious, he suggests that the inability to discuss the truth about 9/11 reflects a fear that dark secrets will be exposed. But until the truth about 9.11 is publicly discussed, Falk suggests, its paralyzing effect will prevent us from facing the structural deficiencies in the present global order. John McMurtry observes that the official story about 9/11 is transparently false; that the wars declared after 9/11 were in fact its strategic reasons; and that the so-called “liberation of Iraq” is an instance of what international law has determined to be “the supreme crime.” To explain why most Americans cannot see these obvious truths, McMurtry proposes the concept of a ruling group-mind, which screens out everything that does not fit its preconceptions. One of the many novel elements in McMurtry’s analysis is his explanation of why orchestrating 9.11 would have been entirely rational for the bush administration adnt he class it serves, given their goals and their ability to control any subsequent investigation. The final two chapters discuss the likely forces behind 9.11 in terms of the goal of global domination. Ola Tunander observes that the major effect of 911 has been to allow policies that were developed by influential US thinkers during the 1990s to establish a “Pax Americana” to be put in to practice under the guise of a global war on terror. Given the way in which state terrorism has been used in prior years, we can probably best understand 9/11 as an example of the kind of false-flag terrorism described in ganser’s chapter, used this time, however, to apply the “Strategy of tension” to the world as a whole.The idea of a group with a global domination agenda is explored in the chapter by sociologist Peter Phillips and two of his students. The global domination group, understood as the current version of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” is seen as as segment of the higher circle policy elites-the segment witht he most to gain from a US policy of global domination. Phillips suggests that investigations to determine ultimate responsibility for 9/11 and its cover-up might well begin with this group, the central members of which he seeks to identify. The various chapters contain, of course, much more than can be indicated in these thumbnail sketches. Each chapter presents as multitude of facts that have seldom appeared on mainstream radio and television or in mainstream newspapers and magazines. These facts, and the connections between them, have also thus far been largely absent in college and university classrooms, even in departments most germane to discussing the various kinds o evidence, such as departments of physics, chemistry, architecture, engineering, aeronautics, history, political science, economics, sociology, philosophy, and religion. The publication of the present volume-along with the establishment of a new organization, Scholars for 9/11 Truth (for which one of our contributors, Steven Jones, serves as co-chair)-signals the beginning of a new phase of the 9/11 Trust movement, one in which scholars will play an increasingly larger role. (see also Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 [Amsterdam: El sevier, 2006].) We hope that this book, besides convincing members of the public and the mainstream media of the seriousness and importance of the issues raised by this movement, will aos encourage specialists in the fields not represented in this volume to examine the relevant evidence that their educations have prepared them to evaluate. We have put out this volume in the conviction that 9/11 was not only the largest and least-investigated homicide in American history but perhaps also the largest hoax, with extremely fateful consequences for human civilization as a whole. If our educational community cannot address this issue, then it risks remaining merely “academic” in the worst sense of the term.[END TRANSCRIPTION]
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