Planning 9/11

David Ray Griffin, in a speech entitled "9/11 and the American Empire," given at the university of Wisconsin (Madison) in April of 2005, explores the disturbing questions raised by the incident of 9/11/2001. Griffin taught for thirty years as professor of theology at Claremont College before retiring in 2004, when he wrote a bestseller entitled "The New Pearl Harbor," which was endorsed by the famed historian Howard Zinn. It sold over 100,000 copies.

Griffin asserts that, not only did the Bush administration have foreknowledge of the attacks on 9/11 and did nothing to prevent them, but was complicit in bringing them about. Even further, Griffin explains the big picture - why it was necessary for the Bush gang to "stage" this "new Pearl Harbor": that, in order to secure U.S. dominance of the world and its resources in the hegemony of a true empire, the Bush globalists would need another shattering event such as Pearl Harbor to instill the
fear and anger of the people and motivate them to accept a war on those blamed for the attacks ... a "War on terrorism." 

Griffin begins by phrasing the Bush agenda in terms of moral principles of religious tradition, that: "Thou shalt not covet ...
thy neighbor's oil; Thou shalt not murder thy neighbors in order to steal their oil; Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbors, accusing them of illicitly harboring weapons of mass destruction in order to justify killing them to steal their oil."

Griffin then provides evidence which makes it clear that this "new Pearl Harbor" was, indeed, planned and executed from the
highest levels of the U.S. government. As Griffin puts it, "... there is no escape from the frightening conclusion that 9/11
was engineered by the Bush administration and its Pentagon," and was used as, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, "an opportunity to refashion the world" in the terms of a dominant American Empire.