Product Description

Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world's strongest and most technologically sophisticated country?

Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad.

Contributors include Richard Falk, Daniele Ganser, David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Karin Kwiatkowski, John McMurtry, Peter Phillips, Morgan Reynolds, Kevin Ryan, Peter Dale Scott, Ola Tunander.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #278942 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 247 pages

About the Author
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. His next book is entitled The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. A poet, he was a winner in 2002 of the Lannan Poetry Award.

Customer Reviews

A Supplement Only
I bought 9/11: THE INTELLECTUALS SPEAK OUT as a supplement to Webster Griffin Tarpley's 9/11: SYNTHETIC TERROR. I was however disappointed. The only virtue that Griffin and Scott's book has over Tarpley is their rejection of his absurd notion that President Bush was "out of the loop" when the "rogue elements" in our government staged 9/11. As they say, "Bush's location had been highly publicized. And if the attacks were a complete surprise, executed solely by foreign terrorists, the Secret Service agents would have no idea how many planes had been hijacked. They would have had to assume that the president himself might be one of the targets. For all they would have known, a hijacked airliner might have been headed toward the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it. And yet these agents, trained to respond instantly in such situations, allowed the president to remain in the classroom another ten minutes." (p. 13). In other words, the White House knew in advance what the targets would be.

Where this book fails miserably is in its lack of explanation of how a terrorist attack could have been staged using real airliners with the ensuing real casualties. Here Tarpley does much better, in attributing this to the Global Hawk system, through which ground control can turn an airliner into a drone controlled by themselves. Originally designed to prevent hijackings, it can all too easily be used to simulate them (Tarpley, pp. 193-196). Both books spend a lot of time debunking the notion that the airliners alone could have been responsible for the collapse of the World Trade Center. But what is this "rogue element" within our government which staged these attacks? Unfortunately, Griffin and Scott do little to correct Tarpley's flawed thesis that they constitute a small cabal and that the problem they pose can be solved by "working through the system". In fact the criminals can be found throughout our entire executive branch and to some extent in the two other branches of government as well. They represent the totalitarian state which has been growing up within our democracy over the decades. They are the real terrorists, and traitors to the American Republic, and must be removed by any means necessary.

911 and the American Empire, the Intellectuals Speak Out
David Ray Griffin's newest book is a must read for people who think. Each chapter is written by a different author to give the reader the "big picture" on 911, putting it into proper context. Most people are unaware of the credible information presented in this book which is well referenced in scholarly fashion. This work is most convincing that the actual conspiracy theory is the media's official account on 911. Any intelligent person that reads this book will understand that the actual facts and science contradict the official story and that 911 had to be an inside job. Thank you Dr. Griffin for your work in getting the truth out.
N. Monastero
Escondido, CA

Recoil Not
As soon as I heard Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" appear as the definitive soundtrack for all things 9/11 during the initial grim days of this national tragedy, I had the sneaky suspicion that the event itself would wrap around us as an emotional blanket of perpetual grief and fear, smothering us to the cause of this effect, but warming us to a nationalistic zeal unmeasured in our history. There are countless books chronicalling the arrogance, calumny, deception, and criminality of the Bush administration, and even if all of his minions and Bush himself were jailed for their collective crimes against humanity, what they have done in all other constitutional and other matters pales in comparison to what "9/11 and the American Empire" suggests they've done in regard to 9/11 itself. I normally recoil from the culture of conspiracy, choosing to seek a sober, data-driven, argument for cause and effect relationships. In many ways this book achieves that in a refreshingly cold-hearted way. Subtracting the emotion from its charge, the authors argue cooly for the plausibility that a cadre of neo-cons were dedicated to advancing American hegemony, ignoring the rationale it takes to warrant Empire, and ignoring the lessons history has given them to recoil from pursuing Empire. If you have your own suspicions about the nature of anything 9/11, you owe it to your own curiosity to read this book. When it settles on you that a greater truth is out there beyond what the vapid mass media reports, then you'll have to decide for yourself whether to recoil from a harder truth that our government is in the grips of a new kind of fascism, or just turn away, shrug in disbelief, and change the channel and hope for the best.Finally, those who dismiss any scholarship on seeking the truth on 9/11 should embrace skepticism for its own sake, for doubting the motives of those who have abused authority and power is at the very core of democratic thinking and the very founding of our constitutional republic. The secrecy of the Bush administration, couched as it is in claims of national security, is cause for great concern. The very fact, verifiable even in the most flaccid journal of mass media, that Bush did NOT want 9/11 investigated suggests culpability.Though I do not want to believe my country's leaders would concoct such a monstrous offense to America and the world, I believe skepticism warrants a vigorous investigation into this terrible tragedy.