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by Nick Welsh
Author David Ray Griffin
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 that crashed 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 Unocal 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.
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