Book Review: The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11

By David Ray Griffin

Clint Slaughter, M.D. 3/25/07
After finishing this book while waiting in LAX for a flight (CO2 offset for my treehugger bretheren), I took a very long, deep and thoughtful breath and sighed an even longer expletive.

This book, by author and philosophy professor David Ray Griffin, is an attempt to summarize the known evidence against the official explanation of 9/11. It is not a “conspiracy theory” book in the stigmatic sense. It is rather an extensive review of the many inconsistencies and fallacies of the current accepted theory and a presentation of a tremendous amount of contrary evidence that not only discredits the official explanation, but supports potential alternate theories. Mr. Griffin takes great care to explain that this is not an accusatory document and there are many possible explanations for this well-documented evidence. These explanations at the very least however, point to the widely accepted and well-supported fact that the Bush administration had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and that this information has been covered up. The explanations then imply the possibility of increasing levels of complicity, or cooperation, within the government in the attacks, all the way up to the horrifying possibility that our leaders have had a hand in planning and executing the 9/11 disaster depending on how the evidence is interpreted and how gaps of information are filled.

Again, this is not the focus of the book. It is rather to simply document evidence that has been collected thus far, garnering information from publicly known sources, documented interviews and includes a great deal of data and discussion from 4 other exhaustively documented books by Paul Thompson, Nafeez Ahmed, Michel Chossudovsky, and Thierry Meyssan. These authors have gone into much more depth in explaining sources and the stories behind the evidence and what started as an article to summarize this information, quickly turned into an entire book. If Mr. Griffin could not adequately summarize the extraordinary amount of evidence and documentation that indeibts the U.S Government for some level complicity and cover-up in the 9/11 attacks, I will not even attempt to present this data in this review. I will say, however, that this book is a well written, extensively researched discussion of facts, many of which the U.S. public already is aware of, and many that they do not want to know or recognize as even possible. The evidence and discussion ranges from the humiliating lack of response of NORAD and the FAA to the hijacked airplanes, to the implausible explanation of the small hole in the pentagon that couldn’t possibly have been made by a 757, to the shady ties between the Bush administration, the Bin Laden family, and the Pakistani secret service, and a myriad of subjects in between.

It is a daunting read, mostly because it forces us to suspend disbelief in order to absorb and process the world-shaking implications of what these pages discuss. Given the facts, Mr. Griffin and all but the most loyal “Bushies” have no choice but to come the final conclusion that the investigations into 9/11 thus far have been both orchestrated and obstructed by the Bush Administration and if justice is to ever be served, a fully independent, legal, and complete investigation into the events leading up to, during, and after the tragedy of 9/11/01 must be carried out. This investigation must include public hearings with subpoenas up to and including even our highest governmental officials with full disclosure, regardless of “national security” risks. This must be carried out in order to honor those that have fallen on that day, the 3236 American troops that have died in Iraq as of this writing, and the tens of thousands of civilians that we have killed in our misguided quest for vengeance.

This book should be required reading for every member of Congress, the Senate, state government officials, professors, students, and citizens. When these discussions enter the public forum unhindered by unfounded dismissals, candy-coated mockery, fear-mongering, threats, and screams of unpatriotism, the will of the people will certainly call for the investigation that is warranted into the most horrifying and world-changing event to occur on U.S. soil since the American Revolution.

As stated by Professor Richard Falk in the forward, “. . . It is rare indeed that a book has this potential to become a force of history.”