THE GRIFFIN TAKES WING
Aug 21, 2006
Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 appears to be two books in one. The first, “Part I: Evidence That 9/11 Was A False-Flag Operation”, is both an updated summary of government actions and physical facts which contradict the official 9/11 story, and a witness to Griffin’s developing conviction that yes, elements of the Bush administration, the military and intelligence agencies must have been involved in 9/11’s planning and execution.
In his earlier book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, Griffin assembled the evidence unaccounted for by the official story, and set up a framework in which to try to understand it. He imagined eight levels of possible administration complicity, from simply capitalizing on an unexpected, external event to advance a previously formed agenda, through intentionally allowing the expected attacks, to, finally, the possibility of active involvement in bringing them about. Disturbing questions indeed. He called for a genuine investigation.
In the subsequent The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Griffin, after studying the long-awaited report, decimated the Commission’s claim to be, in the words of its chairman, “independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan”, and demonstrated its conscious attempt to misdirect public concern away from both the “disturbing questions” with their possible administration involvement, and toward the putative incompetence of the FAA and intelligence agencies which, according to the Commission, gave Bush the bad information he had acted upon. Griffin’s reading of the report confirmed his original suspicions. Why would those in charge of the investigaton need to so grossly mislead were they not trying to cover up some very high crimes and misdemeanors?
His newly published third book expresses Griffin’s now even greater certainty that 9/11 must have been “an inside job”: Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 is a clear indictment of government entities for having planned and executed the events of 9/11, and orchestrated a coverup incompetent enough to enable the 9/11 research community to flourish, but brilliantly effective nonetheless — largely through the complicity of the mainstream media, and the practice of secrecy brought to its highest level by this administration.
While “terrorism” or “incompetence” might possibly be used to explain some of the events, only an assumption of government involvement can explain its key elements: the non-functioning of normal NORAD procedures, the controlled demolition of the WTC buildings (now conclusively demonstrated and agreed on by all members of the research community), and the missile or other military aircraft which perforated the Pentagon (again, it is generally agreed that it could not have been a 757 which did the damage.) Griffin concludes that no “terrorist hijacker” or Al-Qaida USUALLY SPELLED AL-QAEDA operation would have access to the preparation time or the materials to effect these actions, and that only high government or military officials could call for them.
Griffin’s account of current 9/11 research is generally up-to-date, and concentrates on the evidence most clearly suggesting complicity. He begins by confronting the first and major hurdle that all “truthers” must confront: “I can’t believe our government would do such a thing,” a statement which often signals the end of any conversation.
In the chapter “9/11 and Prior False-Flag Operations”, he traces the well-documented practice, first by other countries, then with respect to US support of false-flag operations of its allies, then initiation of its own wars, and finally with the recently discovered “Operation Northwoods”, a Joint Chiefs of Staff proposal to kill American citizens, blame the deaths on Cuba, and thus gain public support for an attack on the island. Operation Northwoods was vetoed by JFK, but did make it, unhindered, all the way to his desk, as one legitimate way to proceed. The chapter ends with a consideration of 9/11, per se, as a false-flag operation,
which blamed the event on an unlikely group of alleged hijackers, run by Osama bin Laden from his laptop in a cave. Griffin underlines the
impossibilites involved and the blatently planted “evidence“.
His second and third chapters, “Explosive Testimony” and “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True”, demonstrate conclusively, with extensive documentation from physicists, engineers, architects, and first-hand witnesses, that the three WTC buildings must have been, and were, brought down by well-executed controlled demolitions. Although he cies the work of physicist Steven Jones, he could not, because of the publication deadline, include Jones’ later work: a chemical analysis of WTC debris samples used for memorials, each showing the presence of thermate, the agent used in demolition to melt steel and slice it up in sizes convenient for removal. Thermate-driven reactions also account for the molten steel found in the sub-basements of each building.
In the critique of the 9/11 Commission Report, Griffin spends 45 pages examining the timeline complexeties concerning why the U.S. military was unable to intercept any of the planes. Because those chapters involved so many details, and were hard for a reader to grasp, Griffin uses the fourth chapter of his current book, “Flights of Fancy: The 9/11 Commission’s Incredible Tales of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93” COMMA as a short précis of his earlier findings. He concludes that the Commission’s story of FAA incompetence, and its exoneration of the military is most unlikely, and that the military, along with high-level administration figures, principally Dick Cheney, must have been in on the “stand-down”.
But the obvious question “Who ordered a NORAD stand-down?”, while essential, is too simple to really address the investigations by the 9/11 research community. Rather than a simple phone call being made, and a nationwide order being given, it seems that on the day of 9/11, there had been scheduled more than a dozen terrorism drills, each of which took aircraft out of the area, also inserting fictional radar signals sent to air traffic controllers as part of the exercise. “Is this a drill, or is this real?” one of them was recorded asking when deviant aircraft showed up on his screen. The net result was a seriously compromised defense and reigning confusion at critical moments. The question then becomes, “How was such a concatenation of drills arranged?” As in other areas, recorded voice tapes have been mysteriously lost, and paper records mistakenly shredded. While Griffin convincingly demonstrates that the official story is preposterous, he does not lead the reader into the emerging labyrinth of the drill strategy, one that is particularly important to note as more and more military exercises and Homeland Security drills are held. Drills “going live“ remain a potent weapon of both action and paralysis.
In the chapter that concludes the first half of the book, “Bush Administration Responsibility for 9/11: From a Prima Facie to a Conclusive Case” Griffin summarizes his previous discussions, and adds one additional factor — the unusual, most suspicious purchase of “put options“ in the week before the attacks, market bets that the stock of American and United Airlines would precipitously fall. Much money was made.
There are, of course, huge questions left unanswered here, questions that neither Griffin, nor the 9/11 research community feels competent to discuss, focused as researchers are on the hardest evidence. “What happened to the passengers?” “How might people involved be kept from whistle-blowing?” “Why do intelligent Americans who are most suspicious of the administration believe the 9/11 official story — of all its lies, the most crucial?” Answers to such questions would be merely speculative, and speculation — theorizing on the basis of little or no evidence — is exactly NOT what the 9/11 truth movement is about. The first part of Griffin’s new book is an excellent 80-page primer of many evidence-based contradictions in the official story, and their far-most likely explanation — that of government planning and execution.
A Once and Future Griffin
In the second part of his book, David Ray Griffin emerges, as if from a phone booth, in his birthright costume of theologian. For thirty years prior to his appearance as one of the chief critics of the 9/11 official story, he was a professor of theological studies, and the author or editor of several important books in the field, often focusing on the process philosophy of Whitehead and Hartshorne, and its application to the longstanding “problem of evil“. “Part Two: A Christian Critique of 9/11 and American Imperialism” directs the reader’s attention to that dimension of what might otherwise seem to be a purely secular problem. His 5-chapter argument is this briefly this:
His opening move is to establish the US’s “imperial motives for “A New Pearl Harbor”. {DELETE: THIS WAS SHOWN IN PART I: and the fact that the government had both the means and the opportunity to plan and execute the events of the attacks.] In his his history and critique of the neocons, he shows that 9/11 can surely be understood as a means to turn their agenda into policy.
Griffin then shifts focus to examine Jesus’ revolutionary relationship to the Roman Empire as a model for authentic Christianity today. He introduces the theologically crucial notion of “the demonic” in a “non-mythological” form“ — i.e., not anthropomorphized as “the devil” or “Satan”. His view is that the demonic is “a real power with genuine autonomy, that is driving the world in a direction that is diametrically opposed to divine purposes.” How is such a power possible in a universe created by an omnipotent, all-knowing, beneficent god? Ah — the “problem of evil” arises.
Griffin’s answer centers on a reading of Genesis which postulates not God’s creation of the universe from nothing, but rather God’s shaping of a pre-existing chaos, a material with its own properties, some of which are resistant to divine values, and capable of developing, in its multi-billion-year evolution, the capacity to threaten divine purpose. Thus, he arrives at the idea of two opposing forces — not the standard, simplistic “good and evil”, but rather a divine force and — with the emergence of a
human civilization capable of becoming demonic. The question then arises: To which force is our contemporary western culture, and its most force-filled representative, the US, committed? Griffin demonstrates in no uncertain terms that America must be seen as “the chief embodiment of demonic power”, acting in almost every arena in ways completely at odds with the divine teachings of the Christ.
The implication for a Christ-inspired church is clear: the church must take the lead in an attempt to break free from our gathering, planetary catastrophe, to teach and preach the disparity between America’s actions and Christian goals, using the 9/11attacks on its own people as the most instructive example of the demonic in action.
Separation of Church and...?
Secular thinkers and activists may find the second part of Griffin‘s book at best irrelevant and at worst, delegitimizing of the 9/11 research movement. There is, they might say, already enough religious language out there clouding the grossly military-political activities of the country and its allies, and inviting the world into a crusade of religious war. Whatever one’s private religious beliefs or traditions, 9/11 truthwork is best kept secular. And if this book is to be called anything, it should be titled The Truth Behind 9/11 and Christian Faith, rather than the other way around, since that is the order in which the material is presented, and the order of its practical usefulness. In fact, why not publish it as two separate books, since “Christian Faith” at the head of the title may keep many from picking it up at all? Let the general public buy the 9/11 truth book, and the Christians buy the Christian faith one. This is what many may say.
But Griffin has a savvy tactic here, titling the book the way he does, publishing it with a major Presbyterian publisher in a “political/religious” market niche. Not only does such reflect his long-held, and deeply-developed personal beliefs, but this strategy wants to, and may, open up a powerful new ally for the secular activist attempt to change our political trajectory. The various Christian church denominations include hundreds of millions of people who might be brought to see the tension between governmental action and the core beliefs to which they subscribe. In the eighties, the churches were in the forefront in Latin American, anti-imperialist battles. Liberation theology, the preferential option for the poor — remember those? Politically, Griffin is hoping to encourage a reemergence of an activist church by framing the current struggles in church-crucial terms. Regardless of what secularists might think of the ultimate “truth-value” of such framing (if there is no God who made the world...etc.) the mobilization of mainline churches in political struggle, in the potentially tranformative 9/11 truth movement, is likely to be an important, positive addition, especially as a contrast to the fundamentalist movements seeking to hasten the apocalypse. Nietzsche once observed that “the last Christian died on the cross.” If that has been too-much the case till now, Griffin would change it by using this book to challenge mainline churches to engage full-tilt on the side of their professed values.
The griffin was a beast with the front of an eagle and the hindquarters of a lion, depicted in medieval iconography as a guardian of the road to salvation. Though long extinct in the imagination, I’m hoping this particular reincarnation may fly — at least as well as a 757.