by David Ray Griffin
This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Trinity Episcopal Church of Santa Barbara, Saturday, March 25, 2006.
In this essay, I offer a Christian critique of the American empire in light of 9/11, and of 9/11 in light of the American empire. Such a critique, of course, presupposes a discussion of 9/11 itself, especially the question of who was responsible for the attacks. The official theory is that the attacks were planned and carried out entirely by Arab Muslims. The main alternative theory is that 9/11 was a “false flag” operation, orchestrated by forces within the US government who made it appear to be the work of Arab Muslims. …
I will argue that the attacks of 9/11 were false flag attacks, orchestrated to marshal support for a so-called war on terror against Muslim and Arab states as the next stage in creating a global Pax Americana, an all-inclusive empire. I will conclude this essay with its main question: How should Christians in America respond to the realization that we are living in an empire similar to the Roman empire at the time of Jesus, which put him to death for resistance against it.
The original posting of this article was split between parts 1 and 2: It is now a single article here.
by David Ray Griffin
April 28, 2006
Part I
Note: This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Trinity Episcopal Church of Santa Barbara, Saturday, March 25, 2006; a DVD of this presentation will be available at the end of May. The views expressed in articles posted at 911Truth.org reflect the opinion of the individual writer, and are not necessarily those of 911Truth.org or the steering committee.
In this essay, I offer a Christian critique of the American empire in light of 9/11, and of 9/11 in light of the American empire. Such a critique, of course, presupposes a discussion of 9/11 itself, especially the question of who was responsible for the attacks. The official theory is that the attacks were planned and carried out entirely by Arab Muslims. The main alternative theory is that 9/11 was a “false flag” operation, orchestrated by forces within the US government who made it appear to be the work of Arab Muslims.
Originally, a false flag attack was one in which the attackers, perhaps in ships, literally showed the flag of an enemy country, so that it would be blamed. But the expression has come to be used for any attack made to appear to be the work of some country, party, or group other than that to which the attackers themselves belong.
I will argue that the attacks of 9/11 were false flag attacks, orchestrated to marshal support for a so-called war on terror against Muslim and Arab states as the next stage in creating a global Pax Americana, an all-inclusive empire. I will conclude this essay with its main question: How should Christians in America respond to the realization that we are living in an empire similar to the Roman empire at the time of Jesus, which put him to death for resistance against it.
1. False Flag Operations
The evidence that 9/11 was a false flag operation is very strong. Many Americans, however, reject this idea on a priori grounds, thereby refusing even to look at the evidence. The main a priori assumption is that America’s political and military leaders simply would not commit such a heinous act. This assumption is undermined, however, once we know something about the history of false flag operations.
False Flag Operations by Other Countries
Far from being rare in the history of warfare, false flag operations are very common. They have been especially popular with imperial powers wanting to expand their empires.
In 1931, Japan, which had been exploiting Manchuria for resources, decided to take over the whole province. To have a pretext, the Japanese army blew up the tracks of its own railway near the Chinese military base in Mukden, then blamed the sabotage on Chinese solders. This “Mukden incident” occurred almost exactly 70 years prior to 9/11, on September 18, 1931. It is, in fact, referred to by the Chinese as “9/18.”1
A year and a half later, the Nazis, less than a month after taking power, started a fire in the German Reichstag, then blamed it on Communists. Their proof that Communists were responsible was the “discovery” on the site of a feeble-minded left-wing radical, who had been brought there by the Nazis themselves.2 They then used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to arrest thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, shut down unfriendly newspapers, and annul civil rights.3
That was 1933. Six years later, Hitler wanted a pretext to attack Poland. The solution, known as “Operation Himmler,” was to have Germans dressed as Poles stage 21 raids on the Polish-German border. In some cases, as in the raid on the Gleiwitz radio station, a dead German convict dressed as a Pole was left at the scene. The next day, Hitler, referring to these 21 “border incidents,” presented the attack on Poland as a defensive necessity.4
More germane to the question of 9/11, of course, is whether American leaders would do such things.
U.S. Wars Based on False Charges of Enemy Aggression
In 1846, President James Polk, anxious to expand the American empire, had the U.S. army build a fort on the Rio Grande, some 150 miles south of the commonly accepted border between Texas and Mexico. After 16 US soldiers died in a skirmish, Polk told Congress that Mexico had “shed American blood upon the American soil.” This claim was called “the sheerest deception” by a congressman named Abraham Lincoln.5 Nevertheless, the Mexican-American war was on and in 1848, Mexico, being out-gunned, signed a peace treaty ceding away half of its country, including California, for a paltry sum.6
In 1898, the United States falsely accused Spain of blowing up a battleship, the USS Maine, which President McKinley had sent, uninvited, to Havana Harbor. This accusation, which led to the chant “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain,” was used as a pretext to start the Spanish-American war, through which America took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In the latter case, the United States, after helping the Filipinos defeat the Spanish, went to war against the Filipinos, claiming that they had fired on American soldiers. A quarter of a million Filipinos died in the resulting slaughter, which provoked the usually ironic William James to say: “God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles.”7 Many years later, General Arthur MacArthur admitted that American troops had fired first to start a pre-arranged battle.8
In 1964, a false account of an incident in the Tonkin Gulf was used to start the full-scale war in Vietnam, which brought about the deaths of over 58,000 Americans and some two million Vietnamese.9
Of course, we might be tempted to reply, although Americans have done such things to enemy nations (“All’s fair in love and war”), they would never deliberately kill citizens of friendly countries for political reasons. That assumption, however, is undermined in a recent book, NATO’s Secret Armies, by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. This book demonstrates that during the Cold War, the United States sponsored false flag operations in many countries of Western Europe in order to discredit Communists and other leftists to prevent them from coming to power through elections.10
Italy suffered a wave of deadly terrorist attacks in the 1970s, including a massive explosion at the Bologna railway station that killed 85 people.11 Between 1983 and ’85, Belgium suffered a series of attacks, known as the “Brabant massacres,” in which hooded men opened fire on people in shopping centers, “reduc[ing] Belgium to a state of panic.” At the time, all these attacks in Italy, Belgium, and other countries were blamed on Communists and other leftists, often by virtue of planted evidence.12
In the 1990s, however, it was discovered that the attacks were really carried out by right-wing organizations that were coordinated by a secret unit within NATO, which was guided by the CIA and the Pentagon.13 A former member of the organization that carried out the massacres in Belgium, which was funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, explained that the plan was to “make the population believe that these terrorist attacks were done by the Left.”14 The former head of Italian counter-intelligence, in explaining the motivation behind the attacks in Italy, said: “The CIA wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left.” To achieve this goal, he added, it seemed that “the Americans would do anything.”15
Operation Northwoods
If Americans would do anything to achieve their political goals in Europe, would they do similar things within America itself? Early in 1962, which was shortly after Fidel Castro had overthrown the pro-American dictator Batista, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented President Kennedy with a plan, called Operation Northwoods. This plan described “pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba,” partly “by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” Possible actions to create this image included a “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area . . . and . . . Washington” and a “Remember the Maine” incident, in which: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guant·namo Bay and blame Cuba.” Although President Kennedy did not approve this plan, it had been endorsed by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.16
2. The Probable Motive for 9/11
US political and military leaders, as these examples show, have been fully capable of orchestrating false flag operations that would kill innocent people, including American citizens, to achieve political goals. The political goal during the Cold War was to prevent and overthrow left-leaning governments. But what motive could US leaders have had for orchestrating the attacks of 9/11, a decade after the Cold War had ended? Actually, it was precisely the end of the Cold War that provided the likely motive: the desire to create a global Pax Americana.
Whereas the world during the Cold War was bipolar, the demise of the Soviet Union created in some minds—the minds of that group known as neoconservatives, or neocons—the prospect of a unipolar world. In 1989, Charles Krauthammer published a piece entitled “Universal Dominion,” in which he argued that America should work for “a qualitatively new outcome—a unipolar world.”17 A year later, he said the United States, as the “unchallenged superpower,” should act unilaterally, “unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”18
The most important neocon has been Dick Cheney. In 1992, the last year of his tenure as secretary of defense, he had two of his assistants, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, write a draft of the Pentagon’s “Defense Planning Guidance,” which said America’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.”19 Andrew Bacevich, who is a conservative but not a neoconservative, has called this draft “a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.”20 An article in Harper’s calls it an early version of Cheney’s “Plan . . . to rule the world.”21
During the rest of the 1990s, while the Republicans were out of White House, the unipolar dream kept growing. In 1996, Robert Kagan said the United States should use its military strength “to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony.”22
In the following year, William Kristol, the son of neocon godfather Irving Kristol, founded a unipolarist think tank called the Project for the New American Century, often called PNAC. Its members included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, and many other neocons who would become central members of the Bush administration in 2001. In September of 2000, PNAC published a document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Reaffirming “the basic tenets” of the Cheney-Wolfowitz draft of 1992, this document said that “America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend [its present] advantageous position” and thereby “to preserve and enhance [the] ‘American peace.'”23
What would it take, according to these neocons, to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? Basically five things. First, control of the world’s oil. As Robert Dreyfuss, a critic of the neocons, says, “who[ever] controls oil controls the world.”24 For the neocons, this meant bringing about regime change in several oil-rich countries, especially Iraq. Some neocons, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, had wanted the first President Bush to take out Saddam in 1990.25 They continued to advocate this policy throughout the 1990s, with PNAC even writing a letter to President Clinton in 1998, urging him to use military force to “remov[e] Saddam’s regime from power.”26 After the Bush-Cheney administration took office, attacking Iraq was the main item on its agenda. The only real question, reports former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, was “finding a way to do it.”27
A second necessary condition for the envisaged Pax Americana was a transformation of the military in the light of the “revolution in military affairs”—RMA for short—made possible by information technology. At the center of this RMA transformation is the military use of space.28 Although the term “missile defense” implies that this use of space is to be purely defensive, one neocon, Lawrence Kaplan, has candidly stated otherwise, saying: “Missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America. It’s a tool for global domination.”29
In any case, implementing this transformation will be very expensive, which brings us to a third requirement: an increase in military spending. The end of the Cold War made this requirement challenging, because most Americans assumed that, since we no longer had to defend the world against global Communism, we could drastically reduce military spending, thereby having a “peace dividend” to spend on health, education, and the environment.
A fourth neocon requirement for a Pax Americana was a modification of the doctrine of preemptive attack. Traditionally, a country has had the right to launch a preemptive attack against another country if an attack from that country was imminent—too imminent to take the matter to the UN Security Council. But neocons wanted the United States to act to preclude threats that might arise in the more or less distant future.30
These four developments would require a fifth thing: an event that would make the American people ready to accept these imperialistic policies. This point had been made in The Grand Chessboard, a 1997 book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. Brzezinski is not a neocon but he shares their concern with American primacy (as indicated by the subtitle of his book: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives). Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power, Brzezinski argued that America must get control of this region. However, Brzezinski counseled, Americans, with their democratic instincts, are reluctant to authorize the military spending and human sacrifices necessary for “imperial mobilization,” and this reluctance “limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation.”31 But this impediment could be overcome, he added, if there were “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”32 The American people were, for example, willing to enter World War II after “the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”33
This same idea was suggested in PNAC’s document of 2000, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Referring to the goal of transforming the military, it said that this “process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”34
3. Opportunities Created by the New Pearl Harbor
When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, they were treated like a new Pearl Harbor. President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary on that night: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.”35 Many commentators, from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time magazine, said that America should respond to the attacks of 9/11 in the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor.36 Rumsfeld said that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.” President Bush and Condoleezza Rice also spoke of 9/11 as creating opportunities.37
And it did, in fact, create opportunities to fulfill what the neocons had considered the other necessary conditions for bringing about a Pax Americana. With regard to oil, the Bush administration had, during the summer of 2001, developed a plan to attack Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with a puppet regime, thereby allowing UNOCAL to build its proposed pipeline from the Caspian Sea and the US military to build bases in the region.
The official story of 9/11, according to which it was carried out by members of al-Qaeda under the direction of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, provided the needed pretext for this operation. In 2004, Rumsfeld told the 9/11 Commission that prior to 9/11, the president could not have convinced Congress that the United States needed to “invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban.” 38
9/11 also provided a necessary condition for the attack on Iraq. It did not provide a sufficient condition. The administration still had to wage a propaganda offensive to convince the public that Saddam was involved in 9/11, was connected to al-Qaeda, and illegally possessed weapons of mass destruction. But 9/11 was a necessary condition. As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: “At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn’t doable. . . . That changed with September 11.”39 Historian Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why 9/11 made the attack on Iraq possible, says:
The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren’t exactly sure who that enemy was. . . . Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration’s propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States.40
Sniegoski’s view is supported by Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker. Lemann says that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration that, in Lemann’s paraphrase,
the reason September 11th appears to have been “a transformative moment” is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public’s usual resistance to American military involvement overseas.41
The new Pearl Harbor also opened the way for the revolution in military affairs. Prior to 9/11, Bacevich reports, “military transformation appeared to be dead in the water.” But the “war on terror” after 9/11 “created an opening for RMA advocates to make their case.”42
9/11 also allowed for great increases in military spending, including spending for space weapons. On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing at the Pentagon. Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked:
Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending?43
Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later.
The new Pearl Harbor also paved the way for the new doctrine of preemptive warfare. “The events of 9/11,” observes Bacevich, “provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.”44 Bush alluded to this new doctrine at West Point the following June.45 It was then fully articulated in the administration’s 2002 version of the National Security Strategy. The president’s covering letter said that America will “act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed.”46 The document itself said:
Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. . . . We cannot let our enemies strike first. . . . [T]he United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.47
4. 9/11 as a False Flag Operation
If 9/11 provided the “tailor-made opportunity” for enunciating this new doctrine, as Bacevich has observed, it equally provided the opportunity to realize all the other things that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons had been dreaming about during the previous decade. Should not this fact lead us to suspect that 9/11 was not simply a godsend? In any criminal investigation, the first question is always cui bonoówho benefits? Why should we not apply this principle to 9/11? Let us now look at some evidence, to see if it supports the view that 9/11 was a false flag operation, orchestrated to produce precisely the effects that it did in fact produce.
The Alleged Hijackers
The official account of 9/11, by blaming the attacks on Arab Muslims, provided a basis for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq wars—not a legal basis, but an emotional basis sufficient to marshal support from a the American people and Congress. But there are many problems with this official story.
For one thing, the alleged hijackers are portrayed as devout Muslims, ready to meet their maker. Mohamed Atta, called the ringleader, is said by the 9/11 Commission to have become very religious, even “fanatically so.”48 But some journalists found that he loved cocaine, alcohol, gambling, pork, and lap dances. Several of the other alleged hijackers reportedly had similar tastes.49
Also, the flight manifests that have been released for the four flights have no Arab names on them.50
It appears, moreover, that evidence was planted. Authorities allegedly found two of Atta’s bags at the Boston airport. These bags contained Atta’s passport and his will along with various types of incriminating evidence. But why would Atta have planned to take his will on a plane that he planned to fly into the World Trade Center?51
The Legend of Osama bin Laden
There are also many problems in the official story about Osama bin Laden. In June of 2001, when he was already America’s “most wanted” criminal, bin Laden reportedly spent two weeks in the American Hospital in Dubai, where he was visited by the local CIA agent.52
Also, after 9/11, when America was supposedly trying to get bin Laden “dead or alive,” the U.S. military evidently allowed him to escape on at least four occasions, the last one being the “battle of Tora Bora,” which the London Telegraph labeled “a grand charade.”53
Moreover, although the Bush administration promised that Secretary of State Colin Powell would provide a white paper with proof that the attacks had been planned by bin Laden, this paper was never produced. And although the Taliban said that it would hand bin Laden over if the United States presented evidence of his involvement in 9/11, the Bush administration refused.54
Finally, although this administration claims that bin Laden admitted responsibility for the attacks in a video allegedly found in Afghanistan, the man in this video has darker skin, fuller cheeks, and a broader nose than the Osama bin Laden of all the other videos. We again seem to have planted evidence. Indeed, within the 9/11 truth movement, this video is known as “the fake bin Laden video.”55
Reasons to believe that 9/11 was a false flag operation are also provided by various features of the attacks that could not have been accomplished by the alleged hijackers. One of these is the destruction of the World Trade Center.
5. The Destruction of the World Trade Center
According to the official explanation, the Twin Towers and Building 7 collapsed primarily from their fires—plus, in the case of the Twin Towers, the impact of the airplanes. But this explanation faces several formidable problems.
First, many people have been led to believe that the steel in these steel-frame buildings was melted by the fires. But steel does not begin to melt until 2800 degrees F, whereas open fires burning hydrocarbons such as kerosene—which is what jet fuel is—can in the most ideal circumstances rise only as high as 1700 degrees.
Second, the fires in these three buildings were not very big, very hot, or very long-lasting, compared with fires in some steel-frame high-rises that did not collapse. A fire in Philadelphia in 1991 burned 18 hours; a fire in Caracas in 2004 burned 17 hours. But neither of these fires resulted in even a partial collapse.56 By contrast, the north and south towers burned only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed. Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, had fires on only a few floors, according to all the photographic evidence57 and several witnesses.58
The collapse of Building 7 has been recognized as especially difficult to explain. The FEMA report said that the most likely scenario had “only a low probability of occurrence.”59 The collapse of building 7 was not even mention in the 571 pages of The 9/11 Commission Report, even though this collapse was, according to the official account, a historic event: the first time a steel-frame high-rise had ever collapsed from fire alone. The latest official report, put out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has claimed that the Twin Towers collapsed because the airplanes knocked the fire-proofing off the steel,60 but it has yet to explain why Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, also collapsed.
A third problem with the official account is that total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never, either before or after 9/11, been brought about by fire alone, or fire combined with externally produced structural damage. All such collapses have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as “controlled demolition.”
A fourth problem is that the collapses of these three buildings all manifested many standard features of controlled demolition. I will mention six:
1. The collapses began suddenly. Steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag. But if you look at videos available on the Web, you will see that the buildings are perfectly motionless up to the moment they begin to collapse.61
2. These huge buildings collapsed straight down, instead of toppling over, which would have caused enormous death and destruction. This straight-down collapse is the whole point of the type of controlled demolition known as implosion, which only a few companies in the world are qualified to perform.62
3. All three buildings collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, which means that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, were offering no resistance to the upper floors.
4. The collapses were total collapses, resulting in piles of rubble no more than a few stories high. This means that the enormous steel columns in the core of each building had to be broken into rather short segments—which is what explosives do.
5. Fifth, great quantities of molten steel were produced, which means that the steel had been heated up to several thousand degrees. Witnesses during the clean-up reported, moreover, that sometimes when a piece of steel was lifted out of the rubble, molten metal would be dripping from the end.63
6. Dozens of people, including journalists, police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and firefighters, reported that explosions went off prior to and during the collapses of the north and south towers. For example, Fire Captain Dennis Tardio said: “I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another, boom, boom, boom.”64 Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: “It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.”65
One more feature of the collapses of the Twin Towers was that virtually everything except the steel—all the desks, computers, and concrete—was pulverized into tiny dust particles.66
The official theory cannot explain one, let alone all, of these seven features—at least, as physicist Steven Jones has pointed out, without violating several basic laws of physics.67 But the theory of controlled demolition easily explains all of them.
This evidence for controlled demolition contradicts the idea that al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible. They could not have obtained access to the buildings for all the hours needed to plant the explosives. Agents of the Bush-Cheney administration, by contrast, could have gotten such access, given the fact that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III—the president’s brother and cousin, respectively—were principals of the company in charge of security for the WTC.68 Al-Qaeda terrorists would also probably not have had the courtesy to ensure that these huge buildings came straight down, rather than falling over onto other buildings. They also would not have had the necessary expertise.
Another relevant fact is that evidence was destroyed. An examination of the buildings’ steel columns could have shown whether explosives had been used to slice them. But virtually all of the steel was quickly sold to scrap dealers, trucked away, and sent to Asia to be melted down. It is usually a federal offense to remove anything from a crime scene. But this removal of thousands of tons of steel, the biggest destruction of evidence in history, was allowed by federal officials.
Evidence was also apparently planted. The passport of one of the hijackers on Flight 11 was allegedly found in the rubble, having survived not only the fire but also whatever caused everything in the north tower except its steel to be pulverized into dust.69
NOTES
1. On the Mukden incident, see Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Religions throughout History (New York: Norton, 1997), 164-66; Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 40; and “Mukden Incident,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2006 (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9054193).
2. The question of responsibility for the Reichstag fire had long remained controversial. But the dominant view, that the fire was set by the Nazis themselves, was confirmed in 2001 with the publication of Der Reichstagbrand: Wie Geschichte Gemacht Wird, by Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel (Berlin: Edition Q, 2001). This book presents ample evidence of Nazi responsibility, including the testimony of a member of the SA, who said that he was in the subterranean passageway that night and saw other SA members bringing explosive liquids to the Reichstag. Bahar and Kugel have, accordingly, substantiated the position contained in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 191-93.
3. Wilhelm Klein, “The Reichstag Fire, 68 Years On” (review of Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel, Der Reichstagbrand), World Socialist Website, July 5, 2001 (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jul2001/reic-j05.shtml).
4. See “Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. II: Criminality of Groups and Organizations” (http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-02/nca-02-15-criminality-06-05.html); Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2001), 221; and “Gleiwitz Incident,” Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident#References).
5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980; New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 150. Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (1960; New York, Norton, 1974), 143.
6. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, 146.
7. Quoted in Zinn, A People’s History, 307.
8. Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 57-62.
9. George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How American Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987),220; Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 119.
10. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 53-54.
11. Ibid., 5.
12. Ibid., 138-39.
13. Ibid., 9-11, 27-29, 241-43.
14. Ibid., 142-43, 146.
15. Ibid., 82, 120. On the evidence linking NATO and the United States to the Bologna massacre, see ibid., 25, 81.
16. This memorandum can be found at the National Security Archive, April 30, 2001 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430). It was revealed to US readers by James Bamford in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency (2001: New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 82-91.
17. Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World,” National Interest, Winter 1989: 47-49.
18. Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, 1990.
19. Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidance,” February 18, 1992. It might be thought, incidentally, that Dick Cheney cannot be called a neoconservative because he (a) was never a liberal and (b) is not Jewish. But although the term “neoconservative” originally referred to people who had moved to the right after having been on the left, the second- and third-generation neocons, as Gary Dorrien points out, “had never been progressives of any kind” (Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16. Also, as Dorrien points out, from the beginning of the movement “a significant number of prominent neocons were not Jews” (ibid., 15). As former neocon Michael Lind says: “[N]eoconservatism is an ideology, . . . and [Donald] Rumsfeld and Dick . . . Cheney are full-fledged neocons, . . . even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists” (Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors,” The Nation, Feb. 23, 2004, online; quoted in Justin Raimondo, “A Real Hijacking: The Neoconservative Fifth Column and the War in Iraq,” in D. L. O’Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq [Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005], 112-24, at 123.
20. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.
21. David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harper’s, October, 2002.
22. Robert Kagan, “American Power: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Commentary 101 (April 1996).
23. PNAC (Project for the New American Century), Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org), iv.
24. Robert Dreyfuss, “Oil-Control Formula,” July 18, 2005 (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050718/oilcontrol_formula.php).
25. Stephen J. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11: The Origins of the U.S. War on Iraq.” In D. L. O’Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005), 81-109, at 86-87, citing Arnold Beichman, “How the Divide over Iraq Strategies Began,” Washington Times, Nov. 27, 2002.
26. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).
27. O’Neill is quoted to this effect in Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). O’Neill repeated this point in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in January of 2004. Susskind, whose book also draws on interviews with other officials, said that in its first weeks the Bush administration was discussing the occupation of Iraq and the question of how to divide up its oil (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml).
28. PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, iv, 6, 50, 51, 59.
29. Lawrence Kaplan, New Republic 224 (March 12, 2001), cover text; quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, 223.
30. PNAC’s letter to Clinton in 1998, for example, urged him to “undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.”
31. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36.
32. Ibid., 212.
33. Ibid., 212, 24-25.
34. Ibid., 51.
35. This according to the Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2002.
36. Robert Kagan, “We Must Fight This War,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2001; Henry Kissinger, “Destroy the Network,” Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2001 (http://washingtonpost.com); Lance Morrow, “The Case for Rage and Retribution,” Time, Sept. 11, 2001.
37. “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” New York Times, October 12, 2001. On Rice, see Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1), and Rice, “Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy,” April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov); on Bush, see “Bush Vows to ‘Whip Terrorism,'” Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001, and Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.
38. See “Day One Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearing,” Washington Post, March 23, 2004 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17798-2004Mar23.html).
39. Quoted in Elizabeth Drew, “The Neocons in Power,” New York Review of Books, 50/10 (June 12, 2003). Bob Woodward made the same observation, saying: “The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave the U.S. a new window to go after Hussein” (Bush at War [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002], 83).
40. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 108-09.
41. Nicholas Lemann “The Next World Order: The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1).
42. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 173.
43. Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack, 6:42 PM, Sept. 11, 2001 (available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/dod_brief02.htm).
44. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 91.
45. “President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point,” June 1, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html). America’s security, Bush said, “will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action.”
46. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html), cover letter.
47. Ibid., 15.
48. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 116.
49. “Terrorist Stag Parties,” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001298).
50. The flight manifest for AA 11 that was published by CNN can be seen at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA11.victims.html. The manifests for the other flights can be located by simply changing that part of the URL. The manifest for UA 93, for example, is at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/ua93.victims.html.
51. For this and other problems in the story about Atta’s bags, see Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 180-83.
52. Richard Labeviere, “CIA Agent Allegedly Met Bin Laden in July,” Le Figaro, Oct. 31, 2001. This story was also reported in Anthony Sampson, “CIA Agent Alleged to Have Met Bin Laden in July,” Guardian, Nov. 1.
53. Telegraph, Feb. 23, 2002; discussed in David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2005), 60.
54. “White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You'” (CNN.com, Sept. 21, 2001). Four weeks after the attacks began, a Taliban spokesman said: “We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused. Why?” (Kathy Gannon, AP, “Taliban Willing To Talk, But Wants U.S. Respect” [http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/1001/w01taliban.html]).
55. See “The Fake bin Laden Video” (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/osamatape.html).
56. “High-Rise Office Building Fire One Meridian Plaza Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” FEMA (http://usfa.fema.gov/fire-service/techreports/tr049.shtm); “Fire Practically Destroys Venezuela’s Tallest Building” (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/venezuela_fire.html).
57. A photograph taken by Terry Schmidt can be seen on page 63 of Eric Hufschmid’s Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, Calif.: Endpoint Software, 2002) or on Schmidt’s website (http://www.nycwireless.net/Images/wtc2/). According to Schmidt, this photo was taken between 3:09 and 3:16 PM, hence only a little over two hours before Building 7 collapsed. It shows that on the north side of the building, fires were visible only on floors 7 and 12. Therefore, if there were more fires on the south side, which faced the Twin Towers, they were not big enough to be seen from the north side.
58. Chief Thomas McCarthy of the FDNY said that while the firefighters “were waiting for 7 World Trade to come down,” there was “fire on three separate floors” (Oral History of Thomas McCarthy, 10-11). Emergency medical technician Decosta Wright said: “I think the fourth floor was on fire. . . . [W]e were like, are you guys going to put that fire out?” (Oral History of Decosta Wright, 11). These quotations are from the 9/11 oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department at the end of 2001 but released to the public (after a court battle) only in August 2005, at which time they were made available on a New York Times website (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html).
59. FEMA Report #403, World Trade Center Building Performance Study, May 2002 (www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm), Ch. 5, Sect. 6.2, “Probable Collapse Sequence.”
60. “[T]he towers withstood the impacts and would have remained standing were it not for the dislodged insulation (fireproofing) and the subsequent multifloor fires,” Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers (Draft), June, 2005: xliii and 171.
61. See Jim Hoffman’s website (http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html) and Jeff King’s website (http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.king2/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html), especially “The World Trade Center Collapse: How Strong is the Evidence for a Controlled Demolition?”
62. Implosion World (http://www.implosionworld.com/dyk2.html).
63. Professor Allison Geyh of Johns Hopkins, who was part of a team of public health investigators who visited the site shortly after 9/11, wrote: “In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel,” Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, Late Fall, 2001. Dr. Keith Eaton, who somewhat later toured the site with an engineer, said that he was shown slides of “molten metal, which was still red hot weeks after the event” (The Structural Engineer, Sept. 3, 2002: 6). On the dripping steel, see Trudy Walsh, “Handheld APP Eased Recovery Tasks,” Government Computer News, 21/27a, Sept 11, 2002 (http://www.gcn.com/21_27a/news/19930-1.html) and Jennifer Lin, “Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero,” Knight Ridder, May 29, 2002 (http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/news/attacks/4522011.htm).
64. Dennis Smith, Report from Ground Zero: The Story of the Rescue Efforts at the World Trade Center [New York: Penguin, 2002], 18.
65. For the testimony of Banaciski and dozens of other members of the Fire Department of New York, see David Ray Griffin, “Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories,” 911Truth.org, January 18, 2006 (https://911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192).
66. Jim Hoffman, “The North Tower’s Dust Cloud: Analysis of Energy Requirements for the Expansion of the Dust Cloud Following the Collapse of 1 World Trade Center,” Version 3, 9-11 Research.wtc7.net, Oct. 16, 2003 (http://911research.wtc7.net/papers/dustvolume/volume.html). The available evidence, Hoffman says, suggests that the dust particles were very small indeed—on the order of 10 microns. Also Colonel John O’Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said: “At the World Trade Center sites, it seemed like everything was pulverized” (“The World Trade Center: Rise and Fall of an American Icon,” The History Channel, September 8, 2002).
67. Stephen E. Jones, “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?” In David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink, 2006); also available at www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html. See also David Ray Griffin, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True,” in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, March, 2006), and in Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006); also available at 911Review.com (http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html). For videos of the WTC collapses, see “9/11/01 WTC Videos” (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/index.html).
68. Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 31-32.
69. See Morgan and Henshall, 9/11 Revealed, 68.
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