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