9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out

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]

The US federal government has no direct complicity in the 911 attacks

As the majority of people in our country believe(60% of new yorkers) the U.S. Government did not have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. I want to explore the facts and assumptions shared by this group. For the purposes of this blog I will assume that there was no foreknowledge in any branch of government, (like the administration)I will ignore warnings from Russia and the Mossad that were delivered to the white house, and will even ignore the wargames on 9/11 which were being co-ordinated by Dick Cheney.Shit I’ll ignore the August 6th PDB entitled: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” which refers specificallly to plane attacks and was published in the 9/11 commission report. I’ll ignore the massive troop movements of British and US military prior to 9/11. Basically I am going to BE IGNORANT for the purpose of this blog.

Under this mindset there are two large mutually exclusive schools of thought.
1. 9/11 is a result of Muslim Fundamentalism.
2. 9/11 is a result of imperialist foreign policy.

I intend to investigate both schools of thought and I argue these are the only 2 schools of thought when it comes to 9/11 compartmentalization.

1. 9/11 Is A Result of Muslim Fundamentalism

We’ll start with the simple one: 9/11 happened because of radical Islamists. There are again two divergent schools of thought under this assumption:

(a.)-Islam itself is a threat to western civilization
(b.)-Wahabbism is the threat.

(1.a.) As I write my own subjectivity should be apparent, which is good because then you can take me with a grain of salt and critically assess even the points I present in a good light. The only reason I bring up my own biases is because I believe (1.a.) is the assumption of the “all around ignorant idiot”. This is the assumption which is forceed down our throat on 24 propaganda disseminators. This is also one of the arguments brought up in the intellectual class under one of the most famous living political scientists: Samuel Huntington(his pen name), who wrote the “Clash of Civilizations”(the essay is available free online, look for the link in my profile).To understand such a eurocentric attitude in the public, one must trace it to its’ intellectual birth.Huntington sums his argument up: “These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, “Western civil wars,” as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center- piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.”(from the essay not the book)I’d say its a pretty nice piece of forecasting. If one believes that 9/11 is a result of Islamic Fundamentalism and that all Islam poses a threat to the west, I think they’d agree with Huntington that 9/11 was a non-west entity thrusting itself in to the category of “movers and shapers of history”. Of course defining Islam as the enemy(or defining any enemy of your country) also makes whatever your country stands for just and right. This school of thought likes their history and news to be oversimplified to an incredible degree, they need what Chomsky called Emotionally Potent Oversimplifications in order to go through life. They do not want the opportunity to be paralyzed by choice, they see it as a blessing that someone else is making the decision. Democracy is a great responsibility and there are many who do not want the responsibility, they instead revel in the “freedom” of not having the responsibility of choice. I believe this category of (1.a.) is the largest category of 9/11 compartmentalizers.

(1.b.) This next school of thought is similar to the first in the respect that it is part of the same overarching idea of Islam as evil, but move away from the oversimplifications at that point. These are the people who have done cursory research on international relations or have a little more detailed view of Islam. They understand there are only 2 wahabbi regimes in history: the House of Saud and the Taliban, both of whom were heavily involved in the attacks of 9/11 and involved in the reaping of profit from 9/11. These individuals agree with Huntington, but fancy themselves smarter and more humane, because they recognize the specific sect of Islam that is the threat to “western civilization”. The book that I think carries some great information on “Wahabbism” is “House of Bush, House of Saud” by Craig Unger. As I look through this book and various articles I literally cannot quote anything. This is because I promised to function under the assumption that the U.S. government doesn’t share direct culpability. Everything one finds on Wahabbism is overshadowed by U.S. involvement.



Ok I’m going to take leave from the original assumptions and operative definitions I have to function under on this blog for this category to give my true opinion and some facts. The facts show that the Taliban was built brick-by-brick by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate of Pakistan which has been and still is funded with U.S. taxpayer money(and/or CIA dirty money). The citation for this is the George Washington University-National Security Archives, in the 9/11 source files, under the “lessons from the last war” sections. If anyone has not read those, I urge you to check them out, learning the details of what the Mujahadin were and the tasks they undertook are incredibly important puzzle pieces. The declassified documents are very blatant in their discussion of how the Taliban was created and why. It was not only UNOCAL’s pipeline it was also geopolitical considerations in avoiding the creation of an independent state “Pashtoonistan” on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan(which would of course take some territory from both states). The fact of the matter is that Wahabbists’ control a lot of oil, so we’re willing to do whatever they say, most important of which at the time was “not embarrassing the Saudis”. The example of this is the World Assembly of Muslilm Youth a group funneling money to Jihadis was being investigated by the FBI. This group was run by 2 Bin Ladens (I can only remember Abdullah’s first name off the top of my head), we’d all heard of the tanzania bombings, the khobar towers, and the uss cole so the name Bin Laden and his organization Al-Qaeda is well known. The FBI investigation of the WAMY was quashed by the White House(citation:Greg Palast). So I see Saudis ordering the U.S. around, lets see how our boy Tim Osman…sorry sorry…Usama Bin Laden says about that. (now i’m back functioning under the no culpability assumption, and I found my excerpt from Unger): ”...Robert Jordan, the Baker Botts attorney who had been nominated earlier as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, finally testified in confirmation hearings before the Senate. Jordan, who had represented President Bush during the Harken insider trading fracas…Jordan was not asked about nor did he comment on the fact that many high-level Saudis refused to accept that Saudis were involved in the attacks, and instead blamed 9/11 on unnamed ‘Zionists’...Jordan’s approach to Saudi Arabia was not out of sync with the policies that had linked the United States and the Saudis for several decades, policies that were deeply flawed because they were blind to the rise of Islamist terror, but that in many ways had been spectacularly fruitful for the United States, producing a stable, secure flow of oil that had lasted for decades. No two figures played a bigger role in those policies than George H.W. Bush and James Baker…Now,however, even in the wake of one of the worst catastrophes in American history, the Bush administration continued to ignore the Saudi role in terrorism. It had approved the Saudi evacuation and it continued to act as if the House of Saud and the Saudi merchant elite could in no way be complicit with the act of terror that had just taken place.”-pg 262



2. 9/11 is a result of Imperialist Foreign Policy

Ok now we get in to the gritty area that forced me to put the word “direct” in my title. (1.a.) functions on a complete lack of western culpability and (1.b) sees a certain small level of culpability in the fact that the US made the Taliban a contender for the national controller of the “state” and the protection afforded to oil-rich wahabbists.  This is where I again have to remind myself that I am functioning under the assumption that the US has no direct culpability, which means I have to incorrectly assume that the things Osama Bin Laden says are not efforts at social control to manipulate people who have been socialized in to a middle-east muslim culture and use them as tools for his(and his allies) betterment. Instead I will assume(as I must, in order to be consistent in the assumption that the US has no direct culpability) that: Bin Laden is an islamic revolutionary who truly believes in the moral ends of his cause. So straight from the horses mouth:
From CNN interview Peter Arnett with Usama Bin Laden, March 1997Peter Arnett: “You’ve declared a jihad against the United States. Can you tell us why? And is the jihhad directed against the US government or the United States’ troops in Arabia? What about US civilians in Arabia or the people of the United States?” Usama Bin Laden: “We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical. it has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of the Land of the Prophet’s Night Journey. And we believe the US is directly reponsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. The mention of the US reminds us before everything else of those innocent children who were dismembered, their heads and arms cut off in the recent explosion that took place in Qana [in Lebanon]. This US government abandoned even humanitarian feelings by these hideous crimes. It transgressed all bounds and behaved in a way not witnessed before by any power or any imperialist power in the world. They should have been sensitive to the fact that the qibla of the Muslims raises the emotion of the entire Muslim world. Due to its subordination to the Jews, the arrogance and haughtiness of the US regime has reached such an extent that it occupied the qibla of the Muslims, who are more than a billion in the world today. For this and other acts of aggression and injustice, we have declared jihad against the US, because in our religion it is our duty to make jihad so that God’s word is the one exalted to the heights and so that we drive the Americans away from all Muslim countries. As for what you asked, whether jihad is directed against US soldiers, the civilians in Saudi Arabia, or against the civilians in America, we have focused our declaration on striking at the soldiers in Saudi Arabia. This country has in our religion a significance of its own over the other Muslim countries. In our religion, it is not permissible for any non-Muslim to stay in our country. Therefore, even though American civilians are not targeted in our plan, they must leave. We do not guarantee their safety, because as a result of the US government’s targeting of Muslim civilians and executing more than 600,000 Muslim children in Iraq by preventing food and medicine from reaching them. So, the US is responsible for any reaction, because it extended its war against troops to civilians. This is what we say. As for what you asked regarding the American people, they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and in other places, and its support of its client regimes who filled their prisons with our best children and scholars. We ask that God may release them.”


Ok so that is the guy who supposedly led the group that attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and he is saying the entire “jihad” on the U.S. is a result of military imperialism. So it contradicts (1.a.) and (1.b.), because from his point of view its not civilization and not fundamentalist Islam, but a direct result of western violence perpetrated upon Muslims.
I would like to know what others think. I believe these 2 categories(and the subcategories) are the only ways in which individuals can compartmentalize the attacks on 9/11 and avoid ever even considering the assertion that the U.S. Government(particularly the Pentagon and White House) has some level of culpability in the attack of 9/11.
Now to speak from outside my original assumption I’d just like to give my opinion: If you don’t believe the US government has some level of culpability (whether direct or through proxy) in the 9/11 attacks, you are an idiot.
But I forgive you, we have been conditioned to make that compartmentalization very easy.
And it doesn’t take “conspiracy theory” to conclude there was culpability. My favorite was in fact published in the 9/11 commission report(as I mentioned earlier). The Aug. 6th PDB “Bin Ladin determined to Strike in U.S.”, put that in the context of the khobar, tanzania embassy, and Uss COLE. Now put ALL THAT in the context of the words Usama Bin Laden spoke in 1997. Why didn’t they take the PDB seriously?
With that info do you really think it was a good idea (for example) to quash investigation of Bin Laden family members running a “charity” near DC(WAMY)?
What I’m trying to establish is that if there wasn’t criminal complicity, then at the very least what we have seen is the worst leadership in security matters in the history of our country.
Well then why was the administration re-elected?
Compartmentalization of the constituents’ minds, which was facilitated by the mass media’s use of 9/11 as a stimulus to condition people with trauma based mind control, but that is a psychological matter. What I am primarily concerned with is this idea of: official story or conspiracy theory.Where there is no middle ground to assume that the government will obviously lie, omit, and obfuscate. While simultaneously understanding that cult leaders will do the same fucking thing.
The truth lies somewhere in-between I believe.