Planning 9/11

David Ray Griffin, in a speech entitled “9/11 and the American Empire,” given at the university of Wisconsin (Madison) in April of 2005, explores the disturbing questions raised by the incident of 9/11/2001. Griffin taught for thirty years as professor of theology at Claremont College before retiring in 2004, when he wrote a bestseller entitled “The New Pearl Harbor,” which was endorsed by the famed historian Howard Zinn. It sold over 100,000 copies.

Griffin asserts that, not only did the Bush administration have foreknowledge of the attacks on 9/11 and did nothing to prevent them, but was complicit in bringing them about. Even further, Griffin explains the big picture – why it was necessary for the Bush gang to “stage” this “new Pearl Harbor”: that, in order to secure U.S. dominance of the world and its resources in the hegemony of a true empire, the Bush globalists would need another shattering event such as Pearl Harbor to instill the
fear and anger of the people and motivate them to accept a war on those blamed for the attacks … a “War on terrorism.”

Griffin begins by phrasing the Bush agenda in terms of moral principles of religious tradition, that: “Thou shalt not covet …
thy neighbor’s oil; Thou shalt not murder thy neighbors in order to steal their oil; Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbors, accusing them of illicitly harboring weapons of mass destruction in order to justify killing them to steal their oil.”

Griffin then provides evidence which makes it clear that this “new Pearl Harbor” was, indeed, planned and executed from the
highest levels of the U.S. government. As Griffin puts it, “… there is no escape from the frightening conclusion that 9/11
was engineered by the Bush administration and its Pentagon,” and was used as, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, “an opportunity to refashion the world” in the terms of a dominant American Empire.

Griffin then restates: “…the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own leaders, and that they did this to provide the
justification, the fear, and the funding for the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ which would be used as a pretext for enlarging the (American) empire. “I will illustrate this point with one of the most brazen examples of the use of 9/11 to get funding. Shortly before the current Bush administration took office, about a year before, a document entitled ‘Rebuilding America’s
Defenses’ was published by an organization called ‘The Project For The New American Century,’ founding members of which included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

“This document focused primarily on getting more tax monies allocated for the technical transformation of the U.S. military, with the centerpiece of this technological transformation being the U.S. Space Command’s project to weaponize, and thereby control, space. ‘Because this transformation will be very expensive,’ the document said, it will probably proceed very slowly,
unless America suffers some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.’ It is interesting that, then, on the night of 9/11 itself, President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary … ‘The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today.’

“In The Project For The New American Century’s (year 2000) document, we read, ‘While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the ummediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The U.S. military is now intending several permanent bases in Iraq, which has the world’s
second largest known supply of oil reserves. The attacks of 9/11, again, provided the pretext as the Bush administration deceived the majority of the American people into believing that Saddam was connected with Osama Bin Laden and even directly responsible for the attacks of 9/11.

“We can now see, furthermore, that some political and military leaders are so fanatically infected with these perverted values that they are willing to kill thousands of their own citizens, then endlessly use a deceptive account of these attacks to justify a war on ‘terror,’ in the name of which they claim the right to do virtually anything they wish, ignoring all principles of international law and morality.

“It is clear that the mainstream press in America is complicit in the coverup of the truth about the American Empire in general and 9/11 in particular. For example, my second book, which exposes many outrageous lies, has not been reviewed by a single mainstream newspaper, magazine, (or) television station ….”