The New Pearl Harbor Was the Bush Administration Complicit in 9/11? Book Review by Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether December 2003
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/nPearlHarbor.html
Until recently I dismissed the suggestions that the Bush administration might have been complicit in allowing 9/11 to happen as groundless "conspiracy theory." I regarded the federal investigative bureaucracies as suffering from a "lock the barn door after the horse has escaped" syndrome. American government agencies seemed to me to be full of repressive energy and exaggerated overreach after some atrocity had occurred, but remarkably incompetent when it came to preventing something in advance. There is no question that the Bush administration has profited greatly from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but I did not imagine that they could have actually known they were being planned and deliberately allowed them to happen.
Thus it was with some skepticism that I agreed to read the new book written by David Ray Griffin, a process theologian from the Claremont School of Theology (Claremont, California), that argues the case for just such complicity. This book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, is due for release in January, 2004. Griffin admits that he too was skeptical toward such suggestions until he began to actually read the evidence that has been accumulated by a number of researchers, both in the United States and Europe. As he became increasingly convinced that there was a case for complicity, he planned to write an article, but this quickly grew into a book.
(snip)
Griffin writes in a precise and careful fashion, avoiding inflammatory rhetoric. He argues for a high probability for the Bush Administration's complicity in allowing and facilitating the attacks, based not on any one conclusive piece of evidence, but the sheer accumulation of all of the data. He concludes by calling for a genuinely independent investigative effort that would examine all this evidence. He himself plans to send the book to the Kean Commission presently charged with that task, even though he has doubts about its real independence.
I personally found Griffin's book both convincing and chilling. If the complicity of the Bush Administration to which he points is true, then Americans have a far greater problem on their hands than even the more ardent anti-war critics have imagined. If the administration would do this, what else would they do to maintain and expand their power?
Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether has been a pioneer Christian feminist theologian for over three decades and is among the most widely read theologians in the world. Her book, Sexism and God-Talk, a classic in the field of theology, remains the only systematic feminist treatment of the Christian symbols to date. With wide-ranging scholarship, Dr. Ruether has written and edited over thirty books and hundreds of articles and reviews.
>From: "Chip Berlet" <cberlet at igc.org>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
>Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Review of Griffin's 9-11 book
>Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 19:32:48 -0400
>
>Hi,
>
>This book by David Ray Griffin is largely a compilation and restatement
>of materials from a variety of print and electronic sources, as the
>author points out in his Introduction and Acknowledgments. Griffin's
>book reflects a relentless disregard of substantial evidence from
>multiple sources that contradict the claims he is making. Griffin
>repeatedly uses fallacies of logic in his presentation rendering whole
>sections of the book refutable on this basis alone.
>
>While Griffin repeatedly refers to the "claims" of "critics" of the
>"official" account of the events of 9-11-01, he is clearly endorsing
>these views. In a number of cases Griffin becomes an apologist for
>authors (such as Thierry Meyssan or Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel)
>whose work has been thoroughly demolished by an armada of writers across
>the political spectrum. Griffin accomplishes this by selectively
>highlighting certain aspects of their work while sidestepping their most
>lurid and outlandish assertions in which they claim the functioning of
>vast conspiracies on the flimsiest of evidence.
>
>I am frankly puzzled and saddened that Richard Falk, Howard Zinn, and
>Rosemary Radford Reuther-persons for whom I have tremendous respect-have
>lent their names to this seriously flawed book.
>
>Chip Berlet
>Senior Analyst
>Political Research Associates
>Webmaster
>http://www.publiceye.org
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Joseph Wanzala [mailto:jwanzala at hotmail.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 3:14 PM
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Review of Griffin's 9-11 book
> >
> >
> >
> > http://www.interlinkbooks.com/New_Pearl_Harbor.html
> >
> > Griffin On structuralism vs. conspiracy theory:
> >
> > "To some extent, this fact reflects a matter of principle---a
> > concern that
> > devoting attention to possible conspiracies is diversionary.
> > Some of the
> > reasons for this wariness are valid. One concern is that a
> > focus on exposing
> > conspiratorial crimes of present office-holders may reflect the naive
> > assumption that if only we can replace those individuals with
> > better ones,
> > things will be fine. Underlying that worry is the concern
> > that a focus on
> > conspirators can divert attention from the more important
> > issue of the
> > structural problems in the national and global order that need to be
> > overcome. But although these dangers must be guarded against,
> > we should also
> > avoid a too strong dichtomy between structural and
> > conspiratorial analysis.
>
><<SNIP>>
>
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