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(More customer reviews)A theologist raising a lone voice against a high crime of state reminds one immediately of the Nazi scourge and the almost lone voice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom Hitler hanged a few days before the end, to rob him of any sense of victory or redemption that he might have enjoyed.
The Bush regime presented a similarly hard face of universalist missionary zeal, albeit not uniformed, with a messianic vision of putting the world to rights, an enormous military machine with which to do it, curfew-lite civil rights, and a consumer economy in a state of overheated boom. The post-9/11 regime granted the attacks religious icon status, with pictures of brave firemen at Ground Zero being played to children in school across the nation over the sound of the Stars and Stripes every morning.
The so-called War on Terror was declared, although it was strangely at odds with the Americans' indulgent attitude to terror as practised by the US-funded IRA in the UK, with the government of Mrs Thatcher being blown out of their beds at three in the morning at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, and vast swathes of commercial real estate gutted in Manchester and London. Suddenly, America was rising up in righteous fury.
It now seems that America's righteous fury was directed into wars that the Bush regime had long been planning behind the scenes. Indeed, the 9/11 attacks might have been a pre-emptive measure against a war in Afghanistan that the Pentagon was already plotting. Or, perish the thought, did they occur as a pretext for that war?
Dr Griffin, a student of "postmodern process theology", whose latest academic work was entitled "Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion", does not come down either way in his study of the "disturbing questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11".
Neatly timing his book to coincide with the Presidential elections, Dr Griffin is content simply to rehearse all the arguments long published on the internet and to categorise them by stages of criminality, rather like a judge would in a court when considering the sentence. Judgement in this book would start with impeachment, disgrace and exile, and end with stringing from a lamp-post like Mussolini.
If any misdeed mentioned by Dr Griffin in this cool, rational appraisal of the evidence is ever endorsed by a brave whistle-blower, Bush and his team are toast.
Dr Griffin freely admits that he is advocating the writings of others, from Jared Israel and Mike Ruppert to Thierry Meyssan and Paul Thompson, author of the enormous 9/11 timeline. Unlike them, however, he does not get mixed up in detail. For example, he ignores whether there were hijackers or not, because it is not vital to the argument. He never mentions Israel or Mossad, thus avoiding the wrath of the ADL, Harvard university and a huge chunk of the American intelligensia. He sifts out the nuggets and lays them out in a beautifully organised case, categorising the charges by eight degrees of complicity. The logic of the evidence is inexorable, starting with the most screaming fact of all: standard procedure was ignored in all four hijackings, meaning that the airliners cruised to their targets without being intercepted---and the administration first said that no scramble was ordered until after Flight 77 had hit the Pentagon, then changed their story. That very fact is the most egregious case of gross incompetence, yet nobody's head has rolled. Indeed, the incompetence argument is denied every time by the absence of consequences for the culpable.
Dr Griffin presents the evidence that no airliner ever hit the Pentagon, and suggests that Flight 93 was only shot down when it appeared that the "Let's roll!" crowd of rebellious passengers were about to beat the hijackers.
He examines the evidence that the Twin Towers were felled by demolition charges, as was WTC 7, crammed with top-secret offices, seven hours later.
He examines all the evidence of collusion before the event, including the implication of Pakistan's security service, and lists all the benefits to the regime afterwards.
Finally, he takes his whole case and puts all the arguments that dismantle it, e.g. if only Ted Olsen's evidence suggests Flight 77 was hijacked, did Ted Olsen sacrifice his celebrity wife for the White House? This and many other examples could easily be put straight by the independent inquiry that Griffin is calling for. Finally, Griffin turns to the incompetence theory (already scuppered by the complete absence of rolling heads) and points out the enormous number of major coincidences that have to be accepted to allow it. They defy belief.
This book should put the Bush team on the run; perhaps they already are. Things have moved on radically since this work was conceived about a year ago. Bush's enemies have a leader in John Kerry, and they have missiles, in the form of torture photographs and videos obtained from perverts at Abu Ghraib jail. The images are being leaked almost daily, and Bush's poll ratings plunge with every fresh issue. He is holed below the water-line and sinking visibly. Senior Pentagon figures are calling for the whole team to be fired. Their days seem to be numbered.
However, another aspect of Dr Griffin's book holds true. If any of the "disturbing questions" have equally disturbing answers, we can expect a huge affirmation to occur in the form of an atrocity that will apotheosize the dim-witted president, enshrine his administration in the sacred blood of unending war and condemn Grifin's questions to the rubbish dump of history.
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