The New Pearl Harbor
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The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9-11 (2004, ISBN 1-56656-552-9) is a book written by David Ray Griffin, a retired professor of philosophy at the Claremont School of Theology. It draws analogies between the September 11, 2001 attacks and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The title is taken from the 2000 paper "Rebuilding America's Defenses" produced by the Project for the New American Century, which noted that only a "new Pearl Harbor" would enable the military and governmental transformations the group desired.[1] Conspiracy theorists believe the sentence was an ominous prediction of the September 11 attacks.
In the book Griffin presents pieces of evidence and arguments which he believes support a conclusion that the George W. Bush administration was complicit in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Griffin also cites and analyzes the claims of others who believe the collapse of the World Trade Center was a controlled demolition, an assertion which most engineers deny. Although Griffin previously cited researchers claiming American Airlines Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon, his focus in the book is on the alleged demolition of the World Trade Center and the alleged discrepancies in the 9/11 Commission Report timeline of events on 9/11.
[edit] Critical response
Critics of the book argue that many of the claims in the book are easily refuted, and that there are many leaps of logic.[2] Griffin rejects such criticisms [3] and has debated his critics.[4]
According to former CIA agent Robert Baer, writing in the Nation Magazine:
- "What's notable about Griffin's take on these events is how easily he leaps to larger evils, a conspiracy at the top. Griffin is a thoughtful, well-informed theologian who before September 11 probably would not have gone anywhere near a conspiracy theory. But the catastrophic failures of that awful day are so implausible and the lies about Iraq so blatant, he feels he has no choice but to recycle some of the wilder conspiracy theories, several of which were popularized by Thierry Meyssan in L'Effroyable Imposture (9/11: The Big Lie), a bestseller in France. [5].
Baer adds that Griffin's subtitle, Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, "suggests this book is a search for truth, but don't let that fool you. His mind is all but made up."
Howard Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States, calls The New Pearl Harbor, "the most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation on the Bush administration's relationship to that historic and troubling event."[6]
