Sep 11, 2011

The Day After: Theologians for 9/11 Truth

I became involved in the 9/11 Truth movement when I discovered that two of my most respected professors of theology from my grad school days, process theologian John Cobb and James Douglas, theologian of nonviolence and author of JFK and the Unspeakable,  had become  spokespersons for the movement. Jim Douglas is one of the founders of Religious Leaders for 9/11 Truth. Jim entitled his 2010  lecture tour promoting his book, JFK, OBAMA and the UNSPEAKABLE.  Jim believes that "the same interest groups that executed this 1963 coup have also formed the  'shadow government' that attacked the US on 9/11, and holds the US and the world hostage to this day." Hence, the topic of James’ talk, “JFK, Obama, and the Unspeakable.” "The same interest groups (with larger representation today from international finance) hold the same 'deep political' power as in 1963 at the time of Kennedy's assassination. Those who have eyes, let them see; those who have ears, let them hear." (National Catholic Reporter's  review of Jim Douglas's book, JFK and the Unspeakable.)


John Cobb is a close colleague of the leading spokesperson for 9/11 Truth, theologian David Ray Griffin, both of them Professors Emeriti from the Claremont School of Theology. See below for Professor Cobb's endorsement of Griffin's newest book, which Amazon claims is out of stock in the very week in which it was published. 















(Amazon claims that the book is "temporarily out of stock" in the very week in which it was published! The book's US publisher, Interlink, insists Amazon has the book in stock. The UK publisher also insists the same, though Amazon/UK says the book will be shipped in 7 to 12 days. It seems fairly clear that someone 'got' to Amazon to restrict the sales of this book during the period of the 10 year anniversary. You can buy Prof. Griffin's book as a Google ebook, or direct from the publishers' online stores: www.interlinkbooks.com and Haus Publishing).

Advance Praise for David Ray Griffin s 9/11 Ten Years Later

Anyone who has actually studied Griffin's writings on 9/11 knows that the evidence against the truth of the official account is overwhelming. It is not surprising that the mainstream response has been to ridicule and ignore rather than to engage in reasoned discussion. What is disappointing is that leading liberals and responsible journalists have joined in by affirming ideas that contradict basic science and condescendingly rejecting solid research without examining it. In this book, Griffin describes the behavior of these journalists and attempts, in a remarkably charitable spirit, to understand it.
John B. Cobb, Jr., author of The Earthist Challenge to Economism and (with Herman Daly) For the Common Good

In this, his tenth book on 9/11 and its consequences, David Ray Griffin continues to report the facts and marshal the evidence that the mainstream media continue to ignore. Having previously demolished the official 9/11 story, Griffin now explains how the government got away with its crime against democracy.
Paul Craig Roberts, formerly assistant secretary of the treasury and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has most recently written How the Economy Was Lost

Why yet another book on 9/11? Because, as David Ray Griffin points out clearly and persuasively, 9/11 continues to be not only the greatest crime in American history, but also the most strenuously covered up, and certainly the crime with the greatest political consequences. He shows how over a decade the events of 9/11 and the reports on them have been used to attack the American democratic system. Above all, he documents the success of this attack by the refusal of the media, the academy, and religious institutions to openly discuss these matters, and by the numbers of critics who at one extreme have made fools of themselves in echoing the Orwellian official version, and at the other extreme have been either fired or silenced after their dissent from it.
Peter Dale Scott, poet, former Canadian diplomat, professor at the University of California (Berkeley), and author of American War Machine.

Our civilization cannot survive if we do not confront the unanswered questions about 9/11. David Ray Griffin does that with the same clarity and meticulous documentation that characterized his preceding books. Frightening as the enormity of the truth about 9/11 may be, we should also bear in mind that it is a window of opportunity for addressing a whole range of problems threatening the lives of our children and grandchildren. I am sure those who follow will recognize David Ray Griffin's body of work as one of the most important contributions of the last decade. 
Niels Harrit, Associate Professor Emeritus, Nano-science Center, Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen --.

'David Ray Griffin establishes himself, alongside Seymour Hersh, as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths.' - Richard Falk, professor emeritus, Princeton 


Haus Publishers' Description:
Ten years on from the 9/11 disaster, Griffins highly thought-provoking and controversial new book exposes the false claims behind the official account of the events, rebuts the justification for war in Afghanistan and demonstrates how the real threat to America's democracy lies in its people's nationalist faith and resulting self inflicted blindness. 

He demonstrates how the official story would have required at least a dozen miracles - understood as events that contradict the laws of science - and questions why otherwise rational journalists have blindly endorsed such a presentation. He also reinforces his claim that the controlled demolition of Building 7 was 'hidden in plain sight', that reported phone calls from the plane were faked, and that the intensely contested issue of the Pentagon - whether or not it was stuck by Boeing 757 - is quite unimportant. Ultimately, in the wake of Osama Bin Laden's death in May this year, Griffin seeks to resolve how involved the man really was in the planning of the attacks, and questions whether he was a convenient scapegoat for U.S. leaders with a hidden agenda.



 Amazon Review:

David Ray Griffin in his new book, 9/11 TEN YEARS LATER: WHEN STATE CRIMES AGAINST DEMOCRACY SUCCEED, takes stock of what we know, after the passage of a decade of intensive grassroots research and analysis, about what really happened that day, and of the present state of the 9/11 truth movement - its strengths and its weaknesses, and how it can move forward most effectively. The book is a combination of important lectures given by Griffin in the last few years, revised and updated for publication, and of completely new essays on key topics, such as the strong evidence that the phone calls from the hijacked airliners must have been faked, and the powerful consensus about the Pentagon events that has been achieved by the movement.

The first four chapters highlight the strongest evidence that 9/11 was an inside job and the clearest implications of that evidence: the lack of evidence that Muslims attacked the US on that day (making clear that the ten-year-long series of wars on Muslim nations is morally and legally unjustified); the multiple occasions on which the laws of physics were miraculously inoperative in the destruction of the World Trade Center, if the official account so ferociously defended by erstwhile critics of government like Bill Moyers, Robert Parry, Alexander Cockburn and many others is to be believed; and the extraordinary case of WTC 7's classic demolition, which has been assiduously covered up by the mainstream media and government agencies (its collapse was never even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, and the final report on its destruction issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in November 2008 was fraudulent).

Chapter 5, "Phone Calls From The 9/11 Planes: Why They Are Not Authentic," examines all the evidence that has been discovered regarding phone calls from the hijacked airliners. The phone calls have been a crucial part of the official story of the day's events, purportedly establishing that the planes were hijacked by Arab Muslims and that Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. But after a careful, critical analysis Griffin is forced to conclude that the phone calls were not made from the planes. First he shows that there is no evidence that the alleged hijackers actually were ever onboard any of the planes, and further, that the failure of any of the eight pilots to "squawk" the hijack code into their transponders is "strong evidence that the official story about the 9/11 planes -- that the cabins were taken over by hijackers - is false." He then shows that the calls to Deena Burnett, which registered on her caller ID as calls from her husband Tom Burnett's cell phone (he was a passenger on board Flight 93), could not have been completed because cell phone technology in 2001 was not capable of completing calls from airliners at high elevation. Griffin concludes the calls had to have been faked, and suggests that they were faked by voice morphing, already a well-established technical capability at the time. After examining the claims made for many other calls, including those for Barbara Olson, wife of then Solicitor General Ted Olson, which were the basis for the claim that Flight 77 was still in the air and subsequently crashed into the Pentagon, Griffin concludes that "the evidence that the `calls from the planes' were faked is strong, ... far stronger than the evidence for the view that the calls were made by passengers and flight attendants, describing the activities of Middle-Eastern hijackers."

Chapter 6 discusses Vice President Dick Cheney's changing account of his whereabouts and activities at key times during the morning of 9/11. After admitting on national TV five days later that he had been present and in charge in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the basement of the White House before the Pentagon was attacked, he changed his story in November and claimed he did not reach the PEOC until after the Pentagon attack. Griffin shows that the 9/11 Commission Report upheld Cheney's otherwise unsupported second account, which absolved him of responsibility during two key incidents, the Pentagon attack and the destruction of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. He shows further that much evidence, ignored by the Commission, contradicted Cheney's second story, including Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's testimony before the Commission, Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke's published account of the morning, and reports from ABC News on the first anniversary of 9/11, all of which the Commission buried without mention.

The gem of the book is the seventh chapter, "The Pentagon: A Consensus Approach." In this very detailed analysis Griffin shows that the 9/11 truth movement has developed a complex, broad-based refutation of the official story of what happened at the Pentagon (that "the Pentagon was attacked by American Airlines Flight 77... under the control of al-Qaeda"). He examines fourteen facts which have been established by independent researchers, upon which there is universal agreement, and any one of which is enough to demolish the official account. Griffin argues that the movement should concentrate its Pentagon energies on further strengthening and advocacy of these points of agreement, and avoid dissipating time, energy and trust on a question which has taken up much of these resources in recent years, the question of "what hit the Pentagon?" He shows that this question is unanswerable with the evidence available; only a genuine investigation of the 9/11 attacks will enable it to be answered.

Chapter 8 illuminates the psychology of resistance to the truth about the 9/11 events which is so widespread, arguing that the real faith of the nominally-Christian US is "nationalist faith." The critique of the official story laid out by the 9/11 truth movement is literally unthinkable for many, even for devout Christians whose religion calls upon them to avoid all kinds of idolatry, including nationalism. Griffin concludes that "[w]hen Christian faith is subordinated to faith in American goodness ... it becomes a blinding faith, producing Christians with eyes wide shut."

The subtitle of the book indicates that the 9/11 attacks, in being a false-flag operation carried out by elements of the US government, were a "State Crime Against Democracy" or SCAD, with the primarily political purpose of imposing policies by force upon the country, and that the failure to carry out a genuine investigation, arrest the perpetrators and reverse the policies adopted by the government after 9/11 means that the operation has succeeded. But only to this point in time: the future is still open. Griffin provides in a powerful conclusion (Ch. 9, "When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed") suggestions for how the 9/11 truth movement can continue to press forward to the necessary investigation of the 9/11 crimes and the reversal of the tragic course taken by the US while under the control of the criminals.

This superb book is written with the usual clarity, logic and argumentative power readers have come to expect from David Ray Griffin, which he has now employed in ten books on the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 TEN YEARS LATER continues his advance at the cutting edge of 9/11 truth, and should be read by everyone who wants to take stock of what the movement has achieved and how to press on into a future in which illegal, immoral wars have been stopped and the country's democratic ideals reaffirmed. 

2 comments:

colkoch said...

The one fact I can't get my head around is why authorization for the decision to use military air craft against rogue civilian air craft was taken from NORAD and given to Donald Rumsfeld a few weeks before 9/11 and then quietly given back to NORAD on 9/12. That seems to be a little too coincidental for my brain to handle, and my brain has been trained to handle a lot of synchronicity.

Richard Demma said...

One of many very disturbing coincidences, Colleen. But I suppose we will 'never' find out the truth - which means maybe in 75 years, or unless someone has a deathbed confession (which actually happened with the JFK assassination). The other disturbing 'coincidence' along the same lines - where WAS Donald Rumsfeld during all of this, particularly in the minutes leading right up to the 'attack' against the Pentagon (by whatever force). Ensconced in his office. That is 'uber' weird. However, I do believe there is a Providence about such things and a special timing about their exposure. A power wiser than our own may know that exposure of the 'truth' at this time would be too socially disruptive. That doesn't keep me from admiring and supporting these very courageous investigators who face such ridicule and opposition.