Foreword
to "The New Pearl Harbor"
written by David Ray Griffin
By
Richard
Falk,
Professor emeritus, Princeton University
TFF
associate
June 16, 2004
Foreword to THE
NEW PEARL HARBOR:
Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and
9/11 by David Ray Griffin.
David Ray Griffin has written an
extraordinary book. If carefully read with only a 30%
open mind, it is almost certain to alter negatively the
way we understand the workings of constitutional
democracy in the United States at the highest levels of
government. As such, this is a disturbing book, depicting
a profound crisis of political legitimacy for the most
powerful sovereign state in the history of the world, and
furthermore, a country embarked on the first ever
borderless war with no markers of victory and defeat. If
The New Pearl Harbor receives the sort of public and
media attention that it abundantly deserves, it should
alter the public debate, and exert a positive influence
on how the future unfolds. It is rare, indeed, that any
book has this potentiality to become a force of
history.
What makes The New Pearl Harbor so
special is that it explores the most sensitive and
controversial terrain&emdash;the broad landscape of
official behavior in relation to the 9/11
disaster&emdash;in the best spirit of academic detachment
coupled with an exemplary display of the strongest
scholarly virtue: a willingness to allow inquiry to
follow the path of evidence and reason wherever it leads.
And it leads here to explosive destinations that raise
severe doubts about the integrity and worldview of our
leadership in those parts of the government that exercise
the greatest control over the behavior and destiny of the
country, particularly in the area of national security,
including war overseas and the stifling of liberties at
home. But Griffin's relentless questioning on the basis
of evidence assembled by others that cannot be reconciled
with the official accounts of 9/11 is just that. It does
not purport to be conclusionary or accusatory. What it
does do brilliantly is to create an overwhelming argument
for a comprehensive, unhampered, and fully funded
investigation, with suitable prominence, of the entire
story of how and why 9/11 happened, as well as why such
an unprecedented breakdown of national security was not
fully and immediately investigated as a matter of the
most urgent national priority. There are so many gaping
holes in the official accounts of 9/11 that no plausible
coherent narrative remains, and we must go forward as if
the truth about these traumatic events no longer matters.
Griffin shows, with insight and a
firm grasp of the many dimensions of global security
policy of the Bush Administration, that getting 9/11
right, even belatedly, matters desperately. The layer
upon layer of unexplained facts, the multiple efforts by
those in power to foreclose independent inquiry, and the
evidence of a pre-9/11 blueprint by Bush insiders to do
what they are doing on the basis of a 9/11 mandate is why
the Griffin assessment does not even require a reader
with a normally open mind. As suggested, 30% receptivity
will do, which means that all but the most dogmatically
blinded adherents of the Bush presidency will be
convinced by the basic argument of The New Pearl
Harbor.
It should be underscored that this
book does not belong in the genre of "conspiracy
theories." It is a painstakingly scrupulous look at the
evidence, and an accounting of the numerous discrepancies
between the official account provided by the U.S.
Government and the best information available. It
refrains from explaining these discrepancies, except by
implication. It refrains also from pointing fingers at
those who are responsible for this disregard of the
obligation of our democratically elected government to
show respect for the right of citizens to know the truth
about the momentous events that have shaken the
foundations of the republic as never before. A growing
number of observers here and abroad no longer consider
the United States to be a republic, but more accurately
understood as an empire, aspiring to be the first truly
global empire in history.
Of course, it is fair to wonder, if
Griffin has the facts straight, why this story of the
century has not been clearly told before. Why has the
media been asleep? Why has Congress been so passive about
fulfilling its role as a watchdog branch of government,
above all protective of the American people? Why have
there been no resignations from on high by principled
public servants followed by electrifying revelations?
There have been questions raised here and there and
allegations of official complicity made almost from the
day of the attacks, especially in Europe, but no one
until Griffin has had the patience, the fortitude, the
courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together
in a single coherent account. Part of the difficulty in
achieving credibility in relation to issues that are so
profoundly disturbing to public confidence in the basic
legitimacy of state power is that the accusatory voices
most often heard are strident and irresponsible, making
them easily dismissed as "paranoid" or "outrageous"
without further consideration of whether the concerns
raised warrant investigation. In contrast, Griffin's tone
and approach is calm and his argument consistently
well-reasoned, making the basic drift of the analysis
impossible for a fair-minded reader to ignore.
But there are troubling forces at
work that block our access to the truth about 9/11. Ever
since 9/11 the mainstream media has worked hand-in-glove
with the government in orchestrating a mood of patriotic
fervor making any expressions of doubts about the
official leadership of the country appear to be
conclusive evidence of disloyalty. Media personalities,
such as Bill Maher, who questioned, even casually, the
official narrative were given pink slips, sidelined, and
silenced, sending a chilling message of intimidation to
anyone tempted to voice dissident opinions. Waving the
American flag became a substitute for critical and
independent thought, and slogans such as "United We
Stand" were used as blankets to obscure whatever critical
impulses existed. It is here that the Pearl Harbor
antecedent becomes so relevant, an earlier occasion on
which a dramatic, surprise attack galvanized the country
for war, shut down robust pre-attack anti-war dissent
once and for all, and ended meaningful policy debate.
As with Pearl Harbor there are
ample reasons to receive news of massive attack with some
skepticism. As with the difficulties of the Roosevelt
presidency in rallying the country for war, here too, the
neocon advisers shaping the foreign policy of the Bush
Administration had been frustrated by their inability to
mobilize the country for war. These prominent advisors
had made no secret of their fervent wish for some sort of
hostile attack of dramatic magnitude that would awaken
the American people to their sense of the dangers of the
post-cold war world, as well as of the opportunities for
global domination, a vision of global empire that was
openly embraced by neocon leading lights. One of the most
ardent proponents of this outlook, Donald Rumfeld,
Secretary of Defense, acknowledged in an apparently
unguarded moment, during a TV interview with Jim Lehrer
on the second anniversary of the attacks, that 9/11 was
"a blessing in disguise." Such a sentiment, besides being
monumentally insensitive to the suffering of families of
the victims, confirms long after the fact that 9/11 was
not at all experienced by the leadership in Washington as
a national tragedy, but rather was precisely the mandate
for which they were so impatiently waiting!
What is increasingly
demonstratable, beyond conjecture and circumstantial
evidence, is that the Iraq War was planned before 9/11 by
the Bush insiders, and that it went ahead despite its
manifest irrelevance to the real national security
interests of the United States. This irrelevance, or
worse, was disguised only because it was possible to
connect Iraq, by way of fabricated evidence and confusing
rhetoric, with the blinding patriotism generated by 9/11.
From the perspectives of law, morality, and politics, the
war seemed so unjustifiable that most of America's
traditionally subordinate NATO allies, who had been
accustomed for decades to go along with whatever
Washington proposed in the security area, finally balked
at lending their support for the Iraq War.
Now even reactionary establishment
figures, most notably to date, Paul O'Neill, former
Secretary of the Treasury, are beginning to come forth
with disclosures that undermine the official presentation
of the case for the Iraq War. It has been reported in
January 2004 that an official report prepared under the
auspices of the Army War College has concluded that the
Iraq War was neither "relevant" to the terrorist threat
or "necessary" for American security. It now appears
conclusively that the supposedly documented claims that
Iraq posed a danger to the United States because of its
arsenal of weaponry of mass destruction was crafted by
spin doctors in the White House and Pentagon, suppressing
evidence from their own intelligence agencies that did
not fit in with their war plans and building a case based
on information about weaponry of mass destruction that
has proved altogether false. What was, perhaps, the most
deplorable facet of this war scenario was the cynical
suggestion that Saddam Hussein had to be eliminated
because he was connected with the 9/11 attacks.
That this contention was swallowed
by over half of the American people without even a shred
of evidence is a frightening demonstration of how much
room for maneuver is possessed by the White House and
Pentagon at this point in our national history, and makes
even contentions that we are flirting with a fascist
future seem prudent, rather than being hysterical and
irresponsible. Even the realities of a hostile
occupation, the mounting casualties, and the failure to
find a single weapon of mass destruction have yet to
generate the tidal wave of public criticism of the Iraq
policies that one would expect in a healthy democratic
republic. Only now after months of disappointment and
failure in Iraq are issues about the viability of the
occupation and exit plans being discussed, although
timidly, in the media. It remains to be seen whether
"regime change" in Baghdad will live up to the claims of
Washington to bring "democracy" to Iraq and the region
rather than either civil war or a grotesque authoritarian
sequel to the cruel brutality of Saddam Hussein's
dictatorial rule.
As the spell cast by patrioteering
has begun to wear off, there is another related dynamic
at work to keep us from the truth, what psychiatrists
describe as "denial." The unpleasant realities of the
Iraq occupation make it difficult for most Americans to
acknowledge that the whole undertaking, including
especially the death and maiming of young Americans, was
based on the willful distortion of realities by the
elected leadership of the country. This unpleasantness is
magnified many times over if what is at stake is the
possibility that the terrible events of 9/11 were from
the outset, or before, obscured by deliberately woven
networks of falsehoods. Part of the impulse to deny is to
avoid coming face-to-face with gruesome realities that
are embedded in the power structure of government that
controls our lives. In an important sense, Griffin's book
could serve as a much antidote for this process of
collective denial that has paralyzed the conscience and
consciousness of the nation during these past few years.
At the very least, it should give rise to a debate that
is late, but far better late than never. Long ago Thomas
Jefferson warned that "the price of liberty was the
vigilance of the citizenry."
There is no excuse at this stage of
American development for a posture of political
innocence, including an unquestioning acceptance of the
good faith of our government. After all, there has been a
long history of manipulated public beliefs in
high-profile situations, especially bearing on matters of
war and peace. Historians are in increasing agreement
that the facts were manipulated in the explosion of USS
Maine to justify the start of the Spanish-American War
(1898), with respect to the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor to justify the previously unpopular entry into
World War II, in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident
of 1964 that was used by the White House to justify the
dramatic extension of the Vietnam War to North Vietnam,
and, of course, most recently to portray Iraq as
harboring a menacing arsenal of weaponry of mass
destruction justifying recourse to a war defying
international law and the United Nations. The official
explanations of such historic events as the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the assassination
of President Kennedy have also not stood up to scrutiny
by objective scholars. In these respects, the breaking of
trust between government and citizenry in the United
States has deep historical roots, and is not at all
merely a partisan indictment of the current leadership
associated with the right wing of the Republican Party.
But it does pose for all of us a fundamental, haunting
question. Why should the official account of 9/11 be
treated as sacrosanct and accepted at face value,
especially as it is the rationale for some of the most
dangerous undertakings in the whole history of the
world?
A central point here that
distinguishes 9/11 from some of the historical
antecedents, and especially Pearl Harbor itself, is that
the policy favored by the elected leadership seemed in
greater accord with the values and interests of the
society than the isolationist sentiments of the
citizenry. World War II was a notable, necessary, and
just cause. American participation was essential for the
effort to defeat the Nazi drive for world domination in
collaboration with Japanese militarism and Italian
fascism. In contrast, the White House response to 9/11 is
avoiding the real challenges to security posed by
political extremists associated with the al Qaeda network
and leading this country in directions that are
destructive of our most cherished values and endangering
world order in apocalyptic ways that even put human
survival at risk.
As Griffin shows, it is not
necessary to accept every suspicious fact as
demonstrative of the failure of the official account of
9/11 to put reasonable doubts to rest. His approach is
based on the cumulative impact of the many soft spots in
what is officially claimed to happened, soft spots that
relate to advance notice and several indications of
actions facilitating the prospects of attack, to the
peculiar gaps between the portrayal of the attack by the
media and government and independent evidence of what
actually occurred, and to the unwillingness of the
government to cooperate with what meager efforts at
inquiry have been mounted. Any part of this story is
enough to vindicate the basic call by David Ray Griffin
that this country and the world deserves a thorough,
credible, and immediate accounting of the how and why of
that fateful day. We have been repeatedly told that 9/11
"changed everything," but what it did not change was the
appalling reluctance of the American people to demand
truthfulness from their government with respect to vital
happenings of ultimate consequence. Recall Ben Franklin's
celebrated response when asked what the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia had accomplished: "a republic,
if you keep it."
Order THE
NEW PEARL HARBOR here
©
TFF & the author 2004
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