THE NEW PEARL HARBOR

Much has been made of 'failures of intelligence' in the recent UK and US reports on events surrounding the decision to invade Iraq and the aftermath of 9/11. In both cases, so-called 'independent commissions' have had their remits tightly defined in order to exclude critical questions that might have shed more light on the events. The Butler Committee was less politicised than the US Independent Commission on 9/11 where majority Republicans ensured minimal political fallout. What is less well-known is that the Commission was to focus on the future and not on assessing blame - although George Tenet resigned a few weeks before the publication of the report. This means, as David Ray Griffin points out in this brilliant analysis, that it 'approached its task by simply taking for granted the incompetence theory, so that the question of official complicity would not even be explored'.

I imagine that many readers of this review will be in the same position as I was before I read Griffin's book. We are all cautious when it comes to full scale conspiracy theories and tend to discount the wilder reports to be found on the Internet. Reading this book by theologian and philosopher David Ray Griffin, however, cannot fail to make the reader challenge the assumption that the US government was not involved in any way in allowing the events of 9/11 to occur. He begins by observing that the neo-conservatives themselves had said that their agenda would be much harder to pursue in the absence of a 'New Pearl Harbor' to galvanise the necessary anger and momentum; then, following the events, they all pointed out how 9/11 had created an opportunity to implement long-standing foreign policy goals. Next, there is a track record for the US government creating 'incidents' as a pretext for going to war. Even so, Griffin 'had assumed that conspiracy theories about 9/11 were below the threshold of possible credibility' before he began assessing the evidence. Before embarking on this exercise, he carefully elaborates eight variants of complicity in ascending order of seriousness, which means that the reader can gauge the level of implication as the story unfolds.

In Part I, Griffin considers inconsistencies and implausibilities of the official account of events: how could the hijackers' missions have succeeded? Was it really Flight 77 that struck the Pentagon? Why was Flight 93 shot down? Why did the President act as he did? These in turn raise a host of other subsidiary questions that need to be considered: Why were Flights 11 and 175 not intercepted, especially since aircraft had been scrambled to intercept flights on 63 previous occasions in 2001? Why did the WTC buildings collapse when the fires were not hot enough to melt the steel frames? Why did the second tower collapse before the first? And why did WTC 7 collapse later in the day when it was not hit at all? How come the North Tower collapsed in eight seconds, which is free fall speed, if there were no explosives inside the tower? And why were earthquakes recorded at Columbia University at the precise moment of the collapses and in a pattern consistent with cascading explosives? Griffin does not give simplistic answers to these questions, but probes their adequacy in relation to the facts.

The next chapter looks at the evidence that what hit the Pentagon cannot have been a Boeing 757. Photographic evidence shows that the hole in the façade was only between 15 and 18 feet in diameter, which would correspond only to the nose going inside, and yet we are informed that the whole plane went in! Griffin shows that the physical evidence is better explained by a missile piercing the side rather than a plane smashing into it. Again, how is it conceivable that no plane was sent to intercept when the Pentagon is the very nerve centre of US security? Other questions relate to the technical difficulty of executing the manoeuvre and the claim that Flight 77 was lost for half an hour. Official responses to the kind of theories discussed here are dismissed as an insult to the dead, with no detailed refutation whatsoever. This leads to 'only two possible conclusions: our government and military leaders were either incredibly incompetent or criminally complicit'.

The second part looks at the wider context: Did US officials have advance information about 9/11 (even the official reports now admit this)? Did US officials obstruct investigations prior to 9/11? Did US officials have reasons for allowing 9/11? And did US officials block captures and investigations after 9/11? The answer to all these questions has to be yes, if Griffin's thorough analysis is to be believed. One chapter details pre-9/11 plans to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq, much of which is common knowledge and is virtually set out in the Plan for a New American Century (PNAC). The 'New Pearl Harbor' highlighted US vulnerability and was then used as a pretext for a massive increase in defence spending, this time extending to 'full spectrum dominance' of space. A particularly interesting section discusses the role of the Pakistan Secret Service (ISI) and its links with the CIA as well as al-Qaeda.

Part 3 sums up the evidence discussed in an arresting manner. 24 strands are presented that point to a degree of official complicity in the attacks; then these are subjected to critical scrutiny. If one rejects a complicity (conspiracy) theory, then one has to accept what Griffin calls a 'coincidence theory' involving 38 elements where each conjunction of events is held to be entirely coincidental. This arguably requires even greater credulity than accepting the complicity theory. Griffin concludes by saying that the revisionists have presented a strong prima facie case for official complicity that warrants the kind of full and entirely impartial investigation that is vanishingly unlikely to be permitted. He adds that to say that the revisionist case is convincing would 'require a judgement that the evidence they cite is reliable', a task that is arguably beyond the resources of a single individual. I can't but agree with Griffin's conclusion, having studied his book, which should be required reading for anyone really trying to understand the events surrounding 9/11.