Parlez-vous Griffon?

With the upcoming launch of 11 Septembre — Omissions et manipulations de la commission d'enquête in Paris on April 7, this blog will try to make an exhaustive list of the editions of David Ray Griffin's books on the subject of 9/11 fraud thus far. We will then proceed to cover other books and blogs.



First of all, there was The New Pearl Harbor, in its US, foreword by Richard Falk, edition. Then there was an edition with new cover photos; the firemen at the World Trade Center and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.



Then followed the UK edition, with its Michael Meacher foreword instead of Richard Falk, and with a different, orange, cover, as well as 11 settembre, la nuova Pearl Harbor, the Italian edition.



Here followed an updated edition with a new afterword, and Griffin's new book, The 9/11 Commission Report — Omissions And Distortions.



Finally, you have the UK edition of the same, with a different cover design, and the brand new Danish book entitled Det nye Pearl Harbor — Foruroligende spørgsmål om Bush administrationen og 11. september.

Griffin suggests International Tribunal

The following is an email exchange between Emanuel Sferios, the webmaster of SeptemberEleventh.org, and philosophy of religion professor David Ray Griffin. It was posted today to the newsgroup misc.activism.progressive:

A message from David Ray Griffin, March 19, 2005

Hi David,

What are your feelings about the 9/11 truth movement these days? How do you think we've done? Are you frustrated like so many others? (I'm not doing much these days. Just occasional action alerts.)

Emanuel

Response from Dr. Griffin:

Emanuel,

I have been afraid that your response is widespread. It's certainly understandable. People like you (I was a Johnny Come Lately) worked so long and hard to try to expose the lies about 9/11 clearly and widely enough to make a difference in the election, and then all this work apparently went for nought. (I say "apparently" because it's quite possible that the exposure was great enough — as suggested by the Zogby poll — to tip the balance, but then the election was stolen through voting machines and other types of fraud.)

My own view, however, is that it is precisely at times of apparent failure that it is most important for a core group to keep working away and even intensify their efforts. I myself, at least, have not slowed down. I still do one or 2 radio interviews per week. I've agreed to do a couple lectures (which I hope will be good enough to be published). I will probably go to Europe for the publication of the French translation of my 2nd book. I am willing to do this, even though I don't enjoy travel, because I think the best hope is for an international tribunal and want to support this movement.

So my hope is that after a period in which people who were working so hard needed a rest, partly out of fatigue and partly because of the great disappointment, the movement will recover and even exceed its previous energy. For one thing, I agree with those who think that the hit pieces in the Washington Post and Popular Mechanics and on CNN are a good sign, because they suggest that at least part of the complicit establishment believes that the movement was generating enough steam that the strategy of simply ignoring it was no longer sufficient.

In terms of strategy, I think — and I hope I'm not just biased because I've written the major book on this thus far — that the best strategy now would be to focus the attack on The 9/11 Commission Report. I say this for three reasons: First, the news media and the general public (as witnessed by the overwhelming majority of the reviews on Amazon) have accepted this Report as definitive. As long as that impression stands, then all radical critiques of the official story will seem to have been disproved and thereby relegated to the category of "conspiracy theories." With the audience we need to reach, therefore, it does no good to continue to refine our accounts of what really happened (e.g., war games, what really hit the Pentagon). Before people will be ready to pay any attention, we need to show — not merely say — that The 9/11 Commission Report is basically false.

Second, it may be easier to get mainstream reporters to cover this angle, because the criticisms can less easily be dismissed as "conspiracy theories," since the focus, rather than being on the question of whether the Bush administration is responsible for mass murder to advance its agenda, is simply on the factual question of whether the Commission has written untrue things. For example, if a reporter focused on the question of whether the core of each of the Twin Towers consisted of 47 massive steel columns or a "hollow steel shaft," he or she might be able to get it published. The same with the question of whether Cheney didn't go to the PEOC until 9:58, or whether he was already there, as all previous reports said and as Norman Mineta said to the Commission itself, by 9:20. Likewise why the Commission didn't probe the contradiction between Myers' account of his whereabouts that morning and Richard Clarke9s account. I would think we could get some reporter to point out these contradictions.

The 3rd reason I think this would be the best approach would be that, although this approach seems less threatening at first glance, its results could be very telling. That is, if it would become widely known that the Commission had told even a few such whoppers, this awareness would rather clearly suggest that they trying to cover up something. In this regard, I have been studying the way in which the public came to reject the official story about the JFK assassination. The main factor in the early years was the concerted attack on the Warren Report leveled by people such as Mark Lane, Vincent Salandria, and Sylvia Meagher. One can point out, of course, that even turning public opinion was to no avail. But the perpetrators of that crime and cover-up did a much better job, by quickly destroying and fabricating evidence (falsifying the autopsy report, photographs, and x-rays and replacing the brain), so that most of the physical evidence seemed to support the official story. The perpetrators of 9/11 were not nearly as clever and thorough. So the result might be quite different with this case.

Those are my thoughts, for what they are worth. Thanks for asking.

DG

The 9/11 Meme War

A superb site, the 911review.com is, and while I will definitely have to read this reveiling site more thoroughly and write a longer piece about it, I will start by just giving you a few quotes:

Trojan Horses

The 9/11/01 attack is a complex psychological operation carefully designed to conceal the truth, in spite of numerous obvious red flags in the fraudulent official story. As such it relies on the dissemination of memes that overpower rational consideration of the evidence. One of the most important memes is the idea that all people who question the basic tenets of the official story are loony conspiracy theorists, whose ideas are not worthy of consideration. Part of the construction of this meme was to make the attack so audacious that even a straightforward accounting of the basic facts sounds too outrageous to possibly be true.

The ideas that the Twin Towers were destroyed by explosive demolition and that top-level administration officials were involved in the planning and execution of the attack are so painful that most people reflexively reject them, even if that means ignoring mountains of evidence. Nevertheless the perpetrators run the risk that these ideas will gain currency and begin to be examined with some objectivity if the loony conspiracy theory meme fails to maintain its hold.

An effective tool for reinforcing this meme is the introduction of theories that that have no basis in evidence, such as the idea that no planes hit the towers. The association of these ideas with the careful research of investigators in the 9/11 Truth Movement stands to set back the cause of awakening the larger public to the facts of the attack.

With a rundown of 9/11 sites to trust or not, and some of the gravest errors, together with a closer look at the Left gatekeepers and both the Myth and what really happened, this site is a treasure trove.

But can it be trusted? :-)

The Fear Factor

New York based quarterly Social Research writes that their decision to organize the conference «Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses,» was motivated by «the painful recognition that we are living at a time, not the first, of collective fear — fear that is encouraged by our government and exacerbated by our media.»:

This sense of vulnerability, and the fear it engendered, quickly became the justification for so much that our government had done since in the name of protecting us. It has been the justification for two wars, and for «slashing away» our constitutional protections, all in the name of fighting terrorism. The Justice Department now claims the power to hold American citizens in prison indefinitely, without access to lawyers, simply because they have been labeled «enemy combatants.» Terrorism suspects have been held in secret detention for many months, some with no access to an attorney, while their hearings, when they occur, are closed to the public and the press. Treatment amounting to the torture of prisoners, both in Iraq and in Guantánamo, has been tolerated, if not authorized. Questioning the legitimacy of these actions, including the preemptive war on Iraq, is explicitly seen by many as un-American, as aiding and abetting the enemy. These actions, we are told, are necessary to combat and eliminate the very sources of our fears. How can we legitimately oppose them?

When using the weapon of public fear, you can get away with just about anything, as shown in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares.

In fact, it is even possible that a government may have invented an enemy altogether: A non-existent enemy that will take ages to fight, and that will keep the home population in fear and check for as long as the rulers want.

Peter Phillips — a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored (a media research organization) — says in his recent essay Threshold Fears and Unanswered Questions About 9/11:

A threshold concept facing Americans is the possibility that the 9/11 Commission Report was on many levels a cover-up for the failure of the US government to prevent the tragedy. Deeper past the threshold is the idea that the report failed to address sources of external assistance to the terrorists. Investigations into this area might have lead to a conclusion that elements of various governments — including our own — not only knew about the attacks in advance, but also may have helped facilitate their implementation. The idea that someone in the Government of the United States contributed support to such a horrific attack is inconceivable to many. It is a threshold concept that is so frightening that it brings up a state of mind akin to complete unbelievability.

«It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.» — Eric Hoffer, 1954, quoted from Mike Lozon's America's fear factor in the Holland Sentinel.

— Now that we know, what can we do?

There's a Second Wave, a new «smoldering resurgence of the 9/11 skeptics movement», fueled by new books and groups, says John Kaminsky in his latest essay:

But then I noticed my book orders were spiking. Ten booklets here, 20 there, an occasional hundred for a meeting that someone had scheduled. Then it began to dawn on me. People were handing them out, trying to convince others. A whole new group of people was turning on to the real 9/11 story.

Finally, after years of brainwashed obedience to the clumsy media lies, the tragedy-forced patriotism, the false statements of our leaders were finally being perceived. People finally were finally waking up. New converts to the 9/11 skeptics movement were beginning the long, painful journey to that horrific realization - our leaders killed their own people merely for profit, and now were killing thousands more, every day, all over the planet, for the same evil purpose.

And people began calling me, telling me about their meetings. I didn’t dare believe it was a second wave. But the calls kept coming.

There is a Second Wave, for sure, and this fresh, new blog is part of it. And when it comes to not repeating the mistakes of the first wave, I couldn't agree more with Kaminsky:

The first thought I had was that the second wave shouldn’t make the same mistakes the first wave did. The first wave failed. The perps, so far, have gotten away with their evil deeds. In fact, one of the so-called leaders of the first wave, Mike Ruppert, has declared the 9/11 issue dead. Good. He’s retired. We don’t need him. He was the prime saboteur of the first wave, ruining the first big 9/11 forum in San Francisco with his oil company propaganda.

The second wave should know that peak oil has nothing to do with 9/11. It’s a disinformational distraction. Peak oil is a trend that may or may not be true. Most honest people think it’s just another oil company ruse to jack up prices. But even if it is a serious social problem, it has nothing to do with 9/11, the crime of the century, about which most of the public has been told nothing but lies.

So it appears we were all «Rubiconned» by a former LAPD cop, still playing his wargames of deception and deceit. Oh Lucy... Mike Ruppert has almost exclusively been focusing on the wrong issues, directing the attention away from the obvious:

There is one issue, and one issue only. It is the issue that will hang them.

The time the towers took to fall.

Meanwhile on Usenet, the webmaster at SeptemberEleventh.org was alerted by David Ray Griffin to a blog post by William Pitt at truthout.org, expressing it all in just one sentence:

A History of the Bush Administration in One Sentence

Just because the Supreme Court set a poison precedent and appointed Bush, who brought in his crowd of neocon yahoos that no one discussed during the 2000 campaign because we 'Muricans vote for the man and not the mob of frothing dogs that come in his wake, just because the twin bill of unreasonably massive tax cuts were combined with economic depth-charge that was the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal that was umbilically connected to the White House, just because the economy (not to mention our whole psyche) absorbed another blow when four commercial airplanes somehow managed to pierce the most impenetrable air defense system in the history of the universe, fooling the entire intelligence community as well if you believe what you hear on Fox despite a blizzard of warnings and a raft of information from the previous administration, just because a bunch of anthrax got mailed to Democrats by the Ashcroft wing of the Republican Party in what were obvious assassination attempts and yet nothing but nothing has been done about it, just because the 9/11 attack was
immediately and I mean the day after immediately grasped as an excuse to invade Iraq, just because virtually everyone in the administration lied with their bare faces hanging out about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, terrorism ties in Iraq, so break out the plastic sheeting and duct tape because we're all gonna die, just because they did this in no small part to win the 2002 midterms by any means necessary, just because 1,502 American soldiers have been killed looking for the 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which is 1,000,000 lbs.) of sarin and mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, arial drones to spray the aforementioned stuff, and let's not forget the uranium from Niger for use in Iraq's robust nukular program, all of which was described to the letter by Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, all of which remains on the White House website on a page titled 'Disarm Saddam Hussein,' just because the medical journal Lancet estimates that as many as 198,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed as well in the war to get at this stuff, just because none of the stuff was there, and by the way nonee of the stuff was there, and did I mention that none of the stuff was there, just because the idea that Hussein was allied with bin Laden was laughable because Osama has wanted Saddam's head on his battle standard for decades, just because the true source of world terrorism, which is Wahabbist extremism in Saudi Arabia, goes completely unaddressed because the Houses of Bush and Saud have been partnered for decades, just because so much of 9/11 and this 'War on Terra' has to do with business arrangements going awry between these two Houses, just because a deep-cover CIA agent who was working to track any person or nation or group that would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists got her cover and her network blown by Administration officials who wanted to shut her husband and any other potential whistleblowers the hell up, just because the front company she was working out of called Brewster Jennings and Associates was likewise blown, thus torpedoing other agents and their networks, just because absolutely all of this went virtually unreported by the mainstream media until it was too late, if it was reported at all, just because dangerous spies like Ahmad Chalabi used Judy Miller and the New York Times to disseminate the lie that Iraq was riddled with weapons, thus opening the floodgates for the rest of the media to repeat the lie because once the Times says it, it must be true, just because this lack of reporting combined with an astounding level of cheerleading from the aforementioned media combined with some good old-fashioned vote fraud in places like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico gave the aforementioned group of yahoos four more years and a congressional majority in both houses of congress, just because this means the Iraq war will continue and Iran will probably be next and draconian legislation further restricting our rights will get passed along with things like the Bankruptcy bill and media reform of any kind will be nowhere on the menu, just because a lot of the Justices on the Supreme Court are sure to step down or die soon and Bush will be able to recraft that high court for the next 20 years, just because the Christian Reconstructionists are becoming mainstream with their goal of having every American singing "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me" in a droning monochromatic hypnotized voice all day every day...

...doesn't mean anyone should be worried or anything. Get a grip.

Don't worry, be happy.