Thinking Unthinkable Thoughts - Nick Welsh interviews David Ray
Griffin
Theologian Charges White House Complicity in 9/11 Attack
1st April 2004
There’s nothing
the least bit wild-eyed or hysterical about David Ray Griffin. In person,
he’s disarmingly calm, and speaks in the unflappably precise
and deliberate style of a lifelong academic. Which is exactly what
Griffin is. A respected philosopher of religion at the Claremont School
of Theology since the 1970s and longtime Santa Barbara resident, Griffin
is now raising questions that even President Bush’s harshest
critics are afraid to think, let alone ask aloud.
In his latest book, The New Pearl Harbor — released just two weeks
ago — Griffin all but accuses the Bush administration of taking
a dive on September 11 and giving Al Qaeda terrorists an unobstructed
shot at the World Trade Center. According to Griffin, a case can be made
that the Bush administration arranged the attack, or allowed it to happen.
He is aware that he may be dismissed as a conspiracy nut, but given the “transcendent
importance” of the issue, Griffin is willing to assume that risk
and has taken to repeating Michael Moore’s line on the subject: “Personally,
I’m not into conspiracy theories except those that are true.” I
met with Griffin over coffee to discuss his book and the September 11
investigation. The following is an edited account of their conversation.
Nick Welsh:
Is there a smoking gun that shows the Bush administration knew 9/11 was
likely to happen and did nothing about it?
David Ray
Griffin:
I think there are four. One is the fact that standard operating procedures
for dealing with possibly hijacked airplanes were not followed on 9/11.
Those procedures call for fighter jets to be sent out immediately upon
any sign that a plane may have been hijacked. These jets typically get
to the plane within no later than 15 minutes anywhere in the United States.
And on that day, there were four airplanes that went for a half-hour
or more after they were hijacked without jets intercepting them.
What’s
the official explanation of that?
I’m afraid the press has not done its job. They have not forced
government officials to explain why standard operating procedures were
not followed that day, nor have they pressed the FAA (Federal Aviation
Administration) to explain why they didn’t report these hijackings
as they were supposed to. The official story is that [the fighter jets]
were very late.
And the other
smoking guns?
The second strongest piece of evidence I would say is the crash at the
Pentagon. The physical evidence contradicts so violently the official
account, that the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757 — Flight 77,
that is. The physical evidence, photographs, and eyewitness testimony
say that the Pentagon was hit by something that caused a hole no larger
than 18 feet in diameter. The story the Pentagon put out, and was published
by the Washington Post, was that the hole in the Pentagon was five stories
high and 200 feet wide. If you look at the photographs taken by Tom Horan
of the Associated Press — that’s just not the size of the
hole.
But if the hole was only 18 feet wide, it had to have been created by
something other than a Boeing. Whatever went into the Pentagon pierced
six reinforced walls. This was the west wing, the part of the Pentagon
being refurbished and reinforced. These walls were extra strong, and
yet whatever it was went through six walls creating a hole about seven
feet in diameter in the sixth wall. This had to have been something with
a very powerful head on it. A Boeing 757 has a very fragile nose, and
would not have pierced through all those walls; it would have been crushed
by hitting the Pentagon. And given that it only penetrated these three
rings, the rest of the aircraft would have been sitting outside on the
yard. And yet the photographs taken just as the fire trucks got there — very
shortly after the crash — show no plane whatsoever.
What do they
show?
They show no aircraft whatsoever. And everyone agrees on this. The official
story is that the whole aircraft went inside the Pentagon. The problem
with that — the firefighters in there would have seen the airplane.
They would have seen the engines, they would have seen the aluminum fuselage,
but they reported nothing. Ed Plower, the fire chief, when asked what
he saw, said, “I didn’t see any big pieces, no fuselage,
no engines, no nothing.” But about a month later, when asked he
said, “Oh yes, I saw all that.” His memory had had time to
be refreshed.
If what you’re
saying is accurate — that it was a missile — then what
happened to the plane and all the people on it?
That’s why I stress I’m not trying to give an account of
what really happened. I have no idea what happened to Flight 77.
President
Bush has also been criticized for behaving somewhat bizarrely that
day.
As he and the Secret Service got word that a second plane had crashed
into the World Trade Center and that three planes had been hijacked,
there could have been no possible doubt in their mind that the United
States was under terrorist attack ... The most horrendous attack the
United States had ever suffered. And they would have had to assume that
one or more of them were heading toward President Bush himself. And so
upon learning about this, the Secret Service surely would have whisked
him away immediately. In fact, one Secret Service agent on the scene
said, “We’re out of here.” But obviously he got overruled
because President Bush stayed there. After Andrew Card reported the second
crash on the World Trade Center, the president just nodded as if he understood
and said, “We’re going to go ahead with the reading lesson.” And
he sat there another 15 minutes listening to the children read a story
about a pet goat. This was a photo op and when it was over he lingered
around talking to the children and talking to the teacher.
Bill Sammon, of the Washington Times, wrote a very pro-Bush book, yet
he comments how casual and relaxed the president was given the fact he’d
just learned the country was under attack. He said Bush took his own
sweet time and in fact called him “Our Dawdler in Chief.” And
then the president went on national TV, going forward with an interview
that had been planned and announced in advance . . . then they took their
regularly scheduled motorcade back to the airport. In other words, [Bush
and the Secret Service] showed no fear whatsoever that they would be
targeted for attack, which strongly suggests they knew how many aircraft
were being hijacked and what their targets were.
Couldn’t
it have been that he was trying to project calm in the eye of the
storm, that this was Bush projecting Churchillian resolve in the
face of calamity?
People who want to believe such things can, of course, imagine such scenarios.
But the president in a situation like that does not make the decisions;
the Secret Service team makes the decisions. And the guys in the Secret
Service are trained to be ready for a catastrophe like this where they
make snap decisions and whisk the president to safety immediately. They
would have had an escape route planned; they would have had contingencies
planned — they always do. It is at least not very plausible to
think they would have remained there and endangered the lives of all
the children and teachers at that school in order to exude that Churchillian
confidence.
What about
the plane thatcrashed down?
We know that on Flight 93, which crashed over Pennsylvania, the passengers
were trying to get control of the aircraft. They had decided the hijackers
did not have bombs and probably didn’t even have guns. And because
their plane didn’t take off until a half-hour after the others,
they knew that the others had crashed into the World Trade Center — so
they knew they were going to die anyway, even if they didn’t do
anything. So as one of the passengers is saying, “They’re
doing it, they’re forcing their way into the cabin, they’re
going to make it.” As soon as that happened, with the FBI listening
in, the plane went down. There was a whoosh, then the sound of wind.
And people on the ground reported hearing what Vietnam veterans said
sounded like a missile. Furthermore, there was debris from the plan eight
miles from the crash site, suggesting the plane had been hit and stuff
started falling out. And one of the engines was found over a mile from
the crash site. Of course, if it had been a missile that downed the plane,
it most likely would have been a heat-seeking missile that would have
found the engine and knocked it off.
Why would
the government have an interest in doing this? So
the hijackers couldn’t speak to anyone?
That would be a very good reason. If it were a conspiracy and the hijackers
knew about it, it would have been very threatening to those who made
the plan to have anybody left alive. Again, I don’t pretend to
know, but that’s at least a plausible scenario. There were many
rumors that day that the plane was shot down, but the government denied
it.
You suggest
that the World Trade Center buildings must have been detonated with
explosives to account for the heat generated and the speed the structures
collapsed on themselves. That sounds extreme. What’s the evidence?
The evidence is cumulative — several things that point to controlled
demolition. First, a steel-framed building, according to all the reading
I’ve done, has never collapsed solely because of fire. They will
bend and buckle in a very large all-consuming fire that lasts for a very
long time. But they have never collapsed.
But it was not just fire — it was fire and impact at the same time.
The twin towers were very large buildings and extremely well built with
a lot of redundancy. Even people who believe the official theory say
that the crash of the plane into the towers should have been insignificant,
that the shock would have been immediate, but it was over very soon and
that the buildings were extremely solid and stable and not moving. In
the south tower, much of the fuel from it spilled outside as it collided
into the corner. So there was a giant firebomb which looked very impressive,
but what that means is that most of the fuel was burned up within a minute,
so there was not much fuel inside. Therefore, the fire in the south tower
had almost gone out in less than an hour. And that brings us to another
strange fact about the towers. If the official story were correct, that
the combination of the crash and the fire brought the buildings down,
we would expect the north tower to have come down first, because it was
hit first. And yet the south tower collapsed first. It collapsed in less
than an hour. That makes perfect sense if you’re willing to accept
that it was caused by controlled demolition, meaning the building was
wired with explosives. And if the official story has it that the buildings
were brought down by fire, you’d want the buildings to go down
before the fire had completely gone out.
What you’re
suggesting sounds like something from. X-Files. But on X-Files, you
always had agents Scully and Mulder trying to get the truth out.
Here we don’t have any Scullys and Mulders. You’d think
this whole new unilateral expression of military supremacy might
have opponents within the administration coming unglued and that
they’d be leaking info damaging to Bush, but we don’t
hear those voices. Why not?
Members of the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies have taken
oaths to not reveal things they’ve been told not to reveal ...
and if they violate this oath, repercussions may occur. You have a wife
and children, and somebody says to you, “If you go public with
that I cannot guarantee the safety of your family.” Would you go
public with that? You have to choose between your family’s welfare
and the welfare of the nation, and your story might not do that much
good. You might just be denounced as a conspiracy kook. The press would
ignore you, belittle you. People might look into your past and find that
you had done some things you’re not so proud of. People would learn
very quickly to keep their mouths shut.
Let’s
say there has been this complicity. To what end?
There were several benefits that could have been anticipated from 9/11.
One was the so-called Patriot Act. It did appear that the Patriot Act,
given how fast it was rushed into Congress, voting had already been prepared.
The Patriot Act is so large that it’s inconceivable it could have
been written after 9/11. Rushing it through Congress when most members
had not even read a small portion of it was clearly one benefit, giving
the government increased powers.
Also, there was the desire to wage war in Afghanistan to force out the
Taliban and put an American-friendly government in place because of the
desire of Unical and other gas companies to build an oil pipeline, which
they felt was too dangerous with the Taliban in power. There was a meeting
in Berlin in July 2001, a final effort to get an agreement between the
Taliban and the United States that would allow a sort of joint government,
where the Taliban would share power with more American-friendly leaders.
The Taliban refused, at which point they were told, “If you don’t
take our carpet of gold, we’ll bury you under a carpet of bombs.” The
Pakistani representative at this meeting said the Americans told him
that the war would start before the snows came that October. And after
9/11 happened, there was exactly the right amount of time for the U.S.
forces to get organized to begin the war, and the war began on October
7.
Another benefit is that many senior members of the Bush administration
had for a long time wanted to attack Iraq. Getting control of the oil
there was one motive; the more general motive was to secure a military
presence in that part of the world.
Don’t
you think it’s a good thing that Saddam Hussein was taken out,
and don’t you think Bush had a moral obligation to do so because
it was his father who was responsible for building up Hussein in
the first place?
Certainly you can say there were some benefits to the people of Iraq.
But if we had an obligation to take out Saddam Hussein then we have obligations
to take out many other nefarious leaders around the world, many of whom
are far worse, believe it or not, than Saddam Hussein. And the sorry
history is that we have in fact supported such leaders and that Saddam
Hussein was in power only because of American support. He remained in
power after gassing the Kurds became common knowledge. Donald Rumsfeld
himself visited Saddam at that period. Actually our aid to Saddam went
up after we knew that he had done this.
So you think
this is mostly about oil.
It is to a significant extent about oil, given the projections that the
world is beginning to run out of oil. The United States wants to get
control of it because our way of life, which is so dependent upon oil,
is nonnegotiable. And also because military dominance itself runs to
great extent on oil. But it’s not just about oil. It’s about
geopolitical dominance. And this brings up the U.S. Space command. In
the document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” published
in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century — an organization
founded by people such as [Richard] Perle and [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Dick]
Cheney and Rumsfeld — there is a statement in there that says we
need to move forward with this revolution in military affairs. The central
feature of this is the augmentation of the U.S. Space Command through
which the United States would have what’s called now Full Spectrum
Dominance. In addition to having dominance over land, air, and sea, we
would have dominance in space. But building the space stations and the
satellites for the weaponization of space will be an extremely expensive
undertaking. One projection has the first stage of it being about a trillion
dollars. So an enormous amount of money has to be shifted from the American
taxpayers and other parts of the economy to the military and the space
command. The document states that such a revolution in military affairs
will probably proceed very slowly absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event such as a new Pearl Harbor.
Hence the
title of your book . . . You’ve complained the American media
has been asleep at the switch on this. How do you account for this?
It is very difficult for Americans to face the possibility that their
own government may have caused or deliberately allowed such a heinous
event. Secondly, one can understand that insofar as the media is owned
by companies like General Electric, which is one of the largest makers
of weapons, stations like NBC that are owned by GE would not wish to
publicize these connections. And finally, 9/11 was immediately treated
not only as a matter of patriotism but almost as a religious event. Bush
declared his war on terrorism from the national cathedral. And so from
then on, any questioning of the official account could be and was criticized
as being undemocratic and almost sacrilegious.
I at least hope that if we can begin to get a public discussion of 9/11
and of the many, many discrepancies between the official story and what
at least appear to be the facts, that some of those people might be emboldened
to step forward.
How has researching
and writing this book affected you personally?
I fear that
our democracy is in much worse shape than I had imagined, and that even
the appearance of democracy we now have might be quickly swept aside.
Source: Santa
Barbara Independent
www.independent.com/news/news906.htm
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