for those of you who believe that public demonstrations are meaningful, , there will be a Peace in the Middle East Demonstration , in Sacramento, this Saturday, August 26th, from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm, at 16th & Broadway. purpose: ,to make the following demands for peace inthe Middle East:

1) that Israel immediately release all of the democratically elected Palestinian representatives that the Israeli military has kidnapped from Palestinian territory and is now holding in Israeli prisons;

2) that all Israeli military personnel immediately get out of Gaza and Lebanon, and that Israel stop its policy of aggression in both regions;

3) that U.S. representatives stop their blanket support for Israel and recognize that peace in the Middle East means a free Palestine that includes the right of return; and

4) that all U.S. military personnel immediately get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

for more info (916) 444-8314

      next item: Ending the Occupation One Soldier at a Time. the statement of lt ehren watada:     "It is my conclusion as an officer of the armed forces that the war  in Iraq is not only morally wrong but a horrible breach of American  law. The war and what we're doing over there is illegal."
       Bob Watada speaks about his son, Lt. Ehren Watada, who is the first U.S. commissioned officer to refuse to participate in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Tomarrow nite, Thursday, August 24, 2006, 7pm at the     Newman Center, 5900 Newman Ct , Sacramento.            Sliding scale donation     to benefit Lt Watada's legal defense fund.                       More information: 916-448-7157

Aug 23 commentary "For links to the articles I read on the air, guest websites, archived shows, my commentaries, a listener's discussion forum, and the text of Mark Stanneart’s latest commentary, visit: www.rabblerousing.org."

Well I don’t normally comment on fiction but this one is too weird to pass up. I speak of course about the great swiss cheese airliner bomb plot. Lets start with the 24 or so young british muslims arrested for allegedly being about to fly across the atlantic as passengers in 10 different airplanes, carrying in their luggage unspecified liquid explosives which would detonate in mid air. It’s the stuff Hollywood would love. A few problems with this scenario. None of the arrested had air line tickets. Most didn’t even have passports. Last time I checked you need both to fly across the atlantic. One assumes that upon arrest, the authorities searched their residences and businesses thoroughly. Granted its an assumption, but that is what these guys get paid for. No explosives nor fuses nor components for making timing devices were discovered. Zilch. Ok since I wrote this, mainstream media is now reporting that yes indeedi, british police are now quoted, "we have found bomb-making equipment. There are chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, electrical components, documents and other items," said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Metropolitan Police's anti-terrorism unit. "We have also found a number of video recordings - these are sometimes referred to as martyrdom videos. My comment: we shall see how much of this allegedly incriminating evidence turns up in court. So far, it makes the story more convincing, but is it true or manufactured evidence? And btw, hydrogen peroxide is available at any drug store, and as far as I know and is not a component of explosive devices. So one must ask if this is highly incriminating evidence of a bomb plot or incriminating the brit govt in phony stories. Say, how do we know there was a plot in the first place? Impeccable source. The tips came from Pakistan, that great ally and shining example of all that is good and noble in the world. Keep firmly in mind that the American cia has a direct say in which Pakistani is appointed to head their isi which is their version of the cia. That fact is so weird that its almost unbelievable but its a fact non the less. Couple that with the curious fact that A previous head of the isi was forced to retire when it was revealed that he was the very dude who wired mohammad atta 100, 000 large ones just before mohammed allegedly took over an airplane and flew it into the wtc tower. At least we are told good ole mohammed did that. there are folks that claim it didn’t happen that way, and we may never know for sure, but what is undisputed fact is that atta’s working capital came from the Pakistani isi, which is controlled by the cia. So any story coming out of Pakistan and the isi must be viewed with just a tad of skepticism. The more one looks at it, the more every player in the Pakistani govt begins to look like the villain in a b grade movie. But the real kicker to this fanciful tale is that, purportedly, one muslim family did in fact board an aircraft with liquid explosives in their luggage and a detonating device. How do we know this? Because our govt along with the brits, claim that they were tipped off and even alerted the pilot that there was a bomb aboard, but then curiously instructed him that he should continue to fly to the states, whereupon the bomber would be arrested on American soil, and old glory would fly proudly as a nasty terrorist plot was foiled. The pilot, whose brain was obviously still functioning, ignored this sterling advice and immediately turned his plane around and landed back in London airport. Hello? What is wrong with this picture? If the plot was to have the liquid explosive bomb detonate in mid air, not even small pieces of the plane would have made it to the states now would it? We would have had agents waiting in a us airport to arrest terrorists who hadn’t quite made it to the us because they had just blow themselves and the plane they were traveling in into the mid atlantic. At that point, just how were the authorities going to justify their decision to instruct the pilot to continue flying to the states? I mean really now. Excuse me for attempting to be logical, but either there was reasonable threat of a bomb aboard that plane or there wasn’t. you get my drift? This whole story has more holes in it than swiss cheese. Who makes up this nonsense? And the capper? Get this. Homeland securities solution was to have every airline passenger flying between the states and britian dump all their liquids into a single barrel at the airport. Very dramatic. All sorts of who knows what liquids being dumped into the same barrel, right at the check points. So we now have an unsupervised chemistry experiment taking place at every check in point on the eastern seaboard. If I were a terrorist, I would simply have a chemist friend figure out what combination of liquids, when dumped into a barrel would explode, preferably with time delay so the perpetrators would be long gone when the explosion took place, but if we have a few extra actors to sacrifice, then let the explosion happen immediately upon contact. The homeland security clown confiscates your liquid, self importantly walks over to the barrel and adds your liquid to the mix, and oooops, scratch one airport. Now Ask yourself: which would do more damage to America, a bomb going off in a plane in mid air over the atlantic, or inside an airport, at a homeland security checkpoint, after the geniuses at homeland security created the very conditions for the disaster. . Which would do more to strike terror into the hearts and minds of Americans? Now that would be a plot worthy of a bad Hollywood movie. Im sorry but I just don’t buy this whole "the terrorists are out to get us" business. I think its bs from beginning to end. If any terrorists really wanted to attack America it would be childs play. Sporting events, theatrical performances, subway systems, every reservoir, every mall in America,. They are all easy targets. Much easier than airplanes and airports. This is all media theater, solely for political effect. don’t believe a bit of it. All smoke and mirrors by the american govt to terrorize its own people into acquiescing the formation of a police state.

Related item: Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. 12 out of one thousand. Of these 12 %, most are charged with offences not related to terrorism. Including being in the country illegally, and even for unpaid parking tickets. Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical. Then there is this from jean hedon writing from quebec Canada: BTW another possible explanation for this whole UK Terror plot charade is that "they" needed to stage this to show people they are always doing their utmost to catch all the "terrorists" and when their next Big false "Terror Attack" rolls on, they will be able to protect their backs for failing to prevent it by saying that despite their best efforts, this one plot had slipped through the cracks of their continuous "vigilance". And then "they" will rush the world head long into the slippery abyss of World War III by bombing the hell out of Iran.

Next item: I was semi conscious when Nixon was president, but I do recall that he did more to wake up sleeping America than anyone gives him credit for. As his presidency wallowed in and eventually sank in a series of illegalities, mainstream lethargic Americans finally awoke from their stupor and realized that they had voted for a criminal with no moral scruples and the ethics of a junkie in need of a fix. I was a hippy back then and I had to be very careful which bar or even restaurant I went into. There could be people inside who would beat me up based on how I looked and the politics I symbolized. Until Nixon. As redneck America slowly woke up to the fact that they had been had, big time, the rednecks had to grudgingly admit that the hippies had been right, and they had been conned by Nixon and his republicans. One could postulate that geo w bush is serving a similar valuable function. If al gore had claimed his victory instead of cowardly slinking off into the weeds, our foreign policy might not have changed that much. After all, gore is an oil man too, his family money comes from occidental petroleum and is also heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry. But king geo the feeble minded and the mad prince cheney stole the victory, and ever since have been taking us so far off the charts that even folks that would vote for Hitler if he ran as a republican are starting to, dare I say it, think a bit about where the neo cons are leading us. So historically, the bush cheney madness might serve some usefull purpose. If we and out nation survive their reign.

Next item: Nevada county is about to lease diebold electronic voting machines. So this next article is quite timely. Its titled Pull the Plug written by Aviel Rubin in  Forbes Magazine     04 September 2006 Edition Aviel Rubin,is professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and author of Brave New Ballot: The Battle To Safeguard Democracy In The Age Of Electronic Voting. You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives.

    I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p with a GPS unit, and I chose my car (Infiniti M35x) because it had the most gadgets of any vehicle in its class. My 7-year-old daughter uses e-mail. So why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century-as one of my critics puts it?

    The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to computerize voting. In 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which handed out $2.6 billion to spend on voting machines. Most of that cash was used to acquire Direct Recording Electronic voting machines.

    Yet while computers are very proficient at counting, displaying choices and producing records, we should not rely on computers alone to count votes in public elections. The people who program them make mistakes, and, safeguards aside, they are more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. Even an event as common as a power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a magnetic card that holds votes to permanently lose its data. The only remedy then: Ask voters to come back to the polls. In a 2003 election in Boone County, Ind., DREs recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer than 6,000 registered voters. Though election officials caught the error, it's easy to imagine a scenario where such mistakes would go undetected until after a victor has been declared.

    Consider one simple mode of attack that has already proved effective on a widely used DRE, the Accuvote made by Diebold (nyse: DBD - news - people ). It's called overwriting the boot loader, the software that runs first when the machine is booted up. The boot loader controls which operating system loads, so it is the most security-critical piece of the machine. In overwriting it an attacker can, for example, make the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a completely fabricated result. To stage this attack, a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to the computer's memory card slot.

    Further, an attacker can modify what's known as the ballot definition file on the memory card. The outcome: Votes for two candidates for a particular office are swapped. This attack works by programming the software to recognize the precinct number where the machine is situated. If the attack code limits its execution to precincts that are statistically close but still favor a particular party, it goes unnoticed.

    One might argue that one way to prevent this attack is to randomize the precinct numbers inside the software. But that's an argument made in hindsight. If the defense against the attack is not built into the voting system, the attack will work, and there are virtually limitless ways to attack a system. And let's not count on hiring 24-hour security guards toprotect voting machines.

    DREs have a transparency problem: You can't easily discover if they'vebeen tinkered with. It's one thing to suspect that officials have miscounted hanging chads but something else entirely for people to wonder whether a corrupt programmer working behind the scenes has rigged a computer to help his side.

    My ideal system isn't entirely Luddite. It physically separates the candidate selection process from vote casting. Voters make their selections on a touchscreen machine, but the machine does not tabulate votes. It simply prints out paper ballots with the voters' choices marked. The voters review the paper ballots to make sure the votes have been properly recorded. Then the votes are counted; one way is by running them through an optical scanner. After the polls close, some number of precincts are chosen at random, and the ballots are hand counted and compared with the optical scan totals to make sure they are accurate. The beauty of this system is that it leaves a tangible audit trail. Even the designer of the system cannot cheat if the voters check the printed ballots and if the optical scanners are audited.

    Aviel Rubin, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and author of Brave New Ballot: The Battle To Safeguard Democracy In The Age Of Electronic Voting.

Well, Nevada co is now one step closer to losing control of our govt. that folks is called fascism. The introduction of diebold electronic voting machines into our county on the surface seems benign and harmless. What the hey, we are only following the dictates of federal law. Sayth our supervisors. And on the surface level they are correct. Only problem is that once in the door, these machines will not leave. And all the problems associated with them will infest our voting system. No electronic voting machine mfgr will allow inspection of their program codes. expert after expert has demonstrated the dangerous and pruposeful flaws built into these machines. The mfgrs are in control, not the people, not even the govt. Step by step we are losing control of those who govern us. It’s a fascinating process. just like nazi germany, step by step, law by law, corporate fascism takes control. And our sups, so adamant just few short years ago when nh 2020 was proposed, that citizens rights triumphed over federal control, when faced with the federal mandate for electronic voting machines, have caved in without a whimper. No mention that this fed law has the possibility of of corrupting our entire electoral system. Not even a thought to tell the feds to shove their hava mandate where the sun doesn’t shine. One wonders what would happen if our board of sups had the cojones to tell the state and the feds that we wont comply until all doubts concerning these machines are satisfied. What would nev co lose? Fed money? Anything else? what would we gain? for starters we would get back a quarter of a million dollars of our tax money to use for our citizens. more important than money, we would go on record as caring about and protecting our sacred electoral system. instead we rolled over like dogs.

Ok, ive read many articles on the absurdities of the govt ver of 911. I still assume that some of my listeners desire to have material they can use to convince friends and relatives to at least accept the possibility that their govt is lying to them. Big time. This article may serve that purpose. it will be on my web site rabblerousing.org for those of you who wish to use it. If we don’t spread the truth about 911, who will? It was written By Steve Bhaerman for publication in the bohemian of santa rosa ca. here is what he wrote about his following article: "I just found out that the article I wrote for the Bohemian up here in Santa Rosa about David Ray Griffin will be run as a cover story in both Metro Santa Cruz and Metro Silicon Valley the week of September 11th!  This is huge. This particular story received over 100 letters -- four times as many as the Bohemian has ever gotten about anything -- and they were ALL positive.  Readers praised the courage of the Bohemian editors and were heartened and relieved that someone was printing the truth.  Griffin's latest book, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11:  A Call to Reflection and Action was published by Westminster John Knox Press -- the official Presbyterian Church publisher.  You can only imagine what a buzz this has caused.

here is the article: titled Non-conspiracy theorist David Ray Griffin takes aim at the official 9-11 story
I found myself in Santa Rosa's Church of the Rose to hear Dr. David Ray Griffin, author of a book on the 9-11 attacks called The New Pearl Harbor, as well as The 9-11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Griffin, a soft-spoken retired professor of theology with sandy, graying hair, proceeded to calmly and quietly dismantle the official 9-11 story. The room was filled to standing with people of all ages, many of whom attended the church. As Griffin made his case for how the official story could never have happened the way they said it did, I looked around me. Everyone was riveted, and yet I could detect no fear, no paranoia in the room.

People were hearing his message--the essentials of which are that our government likely knew about or had something to do with the 9-11 attacks--and yet there was something about his delivery that was reassuring. I've heard David Ray Griffin twice since then, once at a small gathering of world government advocates, the other time at the prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Each event had a similar ambiance: a calm, thoughtful, scholarly presentation without the least hint of sensationalism or personal glory.
Whatever one's assumption of what a "conspiracy theorist" is like, David Ray Griffin doesn't fit the mold, perhaps because he's really a nonconspiracy theorist. While he methodically deconstructs the official story, he doesn't spin his own alternative yarn to fill the vacuum. Instead, he allows audience members to draw their own conclusions. As for conspiracy theories, he explains, "the official story is itself a conspiracy theory. As the accepted 'conspiracy theory' goes, a cadre of al Qaida operatives conspired to hijack four jetliners, did so undetected and were able to complete their mission with no interception or even interference from the best-prepared air force on the face of the earth."

Even more unusual, Griffin says, "the crime was solved immediately, and the official story was in place before the day of the attack was over. Within 48 hours, our president stood at the National Cathedral surrounded by Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi and an imam, and used this religious setting to declare a holy war on terror."
If we were to contrast the smoothness of the post-9-11 operation with the aftermath of Katrina, we are left with the question: How can a president so inept in one setting have been so "ept" in another?
While Griffin professes no formulated alternative theory of what did happen, he offers a clue in the title of his first book. A New Pearl Harbor refers to a passage in a document called Project for the New American Century--the neocons' blueprint for what they call "pax Americana"--which says that for the American people to accept the overt military mission of creating security through world domination, a "new Pearl Harbor" would be needed. Griffin believes that the 9-11 attacks were just that.

This is a pretty serious--and horrific--assertion to make: that the leaders of our country would see fit to sacrifice some 3,000 civilians so that we could launch a preemptive attack on a perceived enemy. And yet, Griffin is quick to point out, our history is rife with just such incidents, from the "remember the Maine" boosterism preceding the Spanish-American war to the Gulf of Tonkin lie that launched U.S. involvement in Vietnam to the Pearl Harbor attacks themselves. Indeed, recent scholarship on Pearl Harbor suggests that President Roosevelt knew of the attack plan in advance and even purposely provoked the Japanese, because he knew it was the only way we could join the war against Germany. This in itself offers a dicey moral dilemma: Is it justified to sacrifice thousands of lives to save millions of lives?

During the Cold War, two more chilling examples of so-called false flag operations have come to light. (False flag operations are covert situations conducted by governments or other organizations that are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities.) In his recent book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Dr. Daniele Ganser, a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies, Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, reports that NATO, guided by the CIA, supported terrorist attacks on civilians in various European countries to discredit the left and create fear on the part of the populace.
In Italy, right-wing terrorists, supplied by a secret army (named "Gladio," Latin for "sword"), carried out bomb attacks in public places, blamed them on the Italian left and were thereafter protected from prosecution by the military secret service. As right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explains in Ganser's book, "The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

In our own country during the early '60s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the command of Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer came up with a similar plan to provoke an attack on Cuba. According to NSA myth-buster James Bamford in his 2001 Random House publication Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, the Joint Chiefs called for undercover operation of terror within the United States that included plans for "innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war."
President John F. Kennedy nixed the plan immediately, and it was never put into action. But it did have the approval of top military brass, and with the right president--or the wrong one--it could very well have come about.

In the aftermath of 9-11, Griffin initially dismissed any speculation that the attacks could have been an inside job. "I subscribed to the 'blow-back' theory," Griffin says. "After generations of exploitation and interference by Western powers, these people had such fury that they had to lash out any way they could."
At the time, Griffin, who was close to retirement from his position at Claremont School of Theology, was working on a book on global democracy. In the wake of 9-11, he decided that he needed a special chapter on U.S. imperialism. He worked on that chapter for over a year before he came to the view that 9-11 was an inside job. "As much as I knew about prior false flag operations, as much as I knew or thought I knew about the nefariousness of the current regime, my first take was not even the Bush administration could or would do such a thing."
It wasn't until a colleague sent Griffin an e-mail with Paul Thompson's timeline--an exact, minute-by-minute accounting of the events of Sept. 11 based entirely on mainstream media accounts--that he changed his mind. "The most glaring anomaly," Griffin now says, "was that none of the hijacked planes were intercepted, even though all of them would have been, had standard procedure been followed."

According to Gen. Ralph Eberhart, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), from the time the FAA senses something is wrong, it takes about a minute to contact NORAD, after which NORAD, Eberhart says, can scramble fighter jets "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States." So what happened on that morning?
The government has given three conflicting answers to this question.
Since a full 32 minutes elapsed between the time the first hijacked airliner was detected and the time it crashed into the World Trade Center, it initially appeared that "stand down" orders must have been issued to suspend standard procedures. Indeed, the first reports from both NORAD and Gen. Richard Myers, the acting chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that no jets were scrambled until after the Pentagon was hit at 9:38am.

By Sept. 13, however, the original story had morphed into an explanation that "the planes were scrambled but arrived too late." The delays were blamed on the FAA, said to have been slow in notifying NORAD. If that were the case, Griffin points out, it was strange indeed that no FAA personnel were fired or even cited for the breakdown in procedures and the resulting disaster. (Griffin notes, moreover, that the FAA flawlessly handled--on the same day--the unprecedented task of grounding thousands of domestic flights.)
Meanwhile, Griffin reports, transportation secretary Norman Mineta testified that at 9:20am--about 18 minutes before the Pentagon was hit, allegedly by Flight 77--he went down to the shelter conference room under the White House. According to Mineta, a young man walked in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out," and later, "The plane is 30 miles out." When the young man reported, "The plane is 10 miles out," he also asked the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?"

"Of course the orders still stand," Cheney is alleged to have replied. "Have you heard anything to the contrary?"
When Mineta was asked by the 9-11 Commission how long after he arrived the conversation occurred, Mineta said, "Probably about five or six minutes," which would have placed it around 9:25 or 9:26am. However, in the final version of the story, The 9/11 Commission Report maintained that no one in our government knew about the approaching aircraft until 9:36am, too late to shoot it down. How did the Commission deal with this apparent contradiction? Like just about every other piece of testimony that conflicted with the official story, Griffin avers, they ignored it.
"With regard to the question 'Do the orders still stand?'" Griffin says, "Mineta seemed to assume those orders were to shoot the plane down. But really, the young man's question makes sense only if the orders were to do something unexpected--that is, not to shoot the plane down."

So what did happen? Whodunnit?
Again, Griffin prefers to focus on the circumstantial framework for examining the evidence. "You have a suspect who changes his story three times. Does this make him more or less suspicious?"
Of course, the top echelon of leaders in this country aren't exactly your usual run-of-the-lineup perps--which, according to Griffin, is why those who've pointed fingers at the emperor's bare buttocks in this case have been marginalized like a bunch of tinfoil-headed kooks. No argument about this. I've asked a number of savvy authors and commentators why they haven't taken on the unanswered questions and unquestioned answers around 9-11. Their answers have been pretty much the same: It's just too big a stretch for most Americans to believe their own government could have had anything to do with it. However, in an exceedingly underreported Zogby poll done just last month, 42 percent of adults polled believe the U. S. government and the 9-11 Commission "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence" that contradicts the official explanation of the attacks.
Perhaps what these reluctant commentators really meant is that they would be committing career suicide by questioning the official story. So why and how is David Ray Griffin different? And why is he spending his retirement traveling around the country writing and talking about something that conventional wisdom insists people don't want to hear?

Perhaps it has something to do with Griffin's background in "process theology." Process theology is specifically designed to answer such post-Holocaust questions as, how could a loving God have allowed such a thing to happen? Griffin has written or co-authored a dozen books and articles on the subject, and roughly the answer is this: We, as creations of the Creator, have free will to choose how and what we create in this life. This very often results in what we call "evil." On the other hand, our greatest power as human beings is to bring that loving God to earth by creating good instead.
To those who assert "God is dead," process theology says no, Griffin reasons. The loving God is alive in our thoughts and words and deeds. God doesn't intervene to set things right unilaterally. Rather, that spirit--through us--embodies divine love. In other words, the world changes--if we change it. Divine power, he says, is "persuasive, not controlling."

While Griffin's faith may be deep, it certainly isn't narrow. He recently edited a book called Deep Religious Pluralism.
"I've written two books on the problem of evil, so I've been dealing with the topic for a long time," Griffin says. "Frankly, as soon as I saw the evidence that 9-11 was an inside job, I wasn't surprised. I had studied the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, the Japanese butchery of the Chinese in Manchuria, our use of nuclear weapons in Japan in spite of their imminent surrender. I've seen the depth of evil in collective situations. It's an old, old story, and this is just the latest chapter. Once the nation-state announces it is threatened, everything else gets pushed to the back burner. That's what we're seeing now."

Griffin's intention just over three years ago was to write an article for Harper's on what he then believed to be "foreknowledge and thwarted intelligence." But the more evidence he saw that the attacks were likely orchestrated by our own government, the more he felt a book was needed. Since none of the American investigators had been able to get a book published at that time, Griffin figured that as a published author he had a better chance.
And so, in 2004, the book got published. But you'd never learn this from mainstream magazines and newspapers, which have yet to publish a review of The New Pearl Harbor, which has sold over 100,000 copies. Nor will you see him on mainstream TV, which has yet to invite him to appear.
Griffin seems unperturbed by this, and points out that each week and each month the alternative account of 9-11 gains wider credence. Is he afraid? Does he feel in danger? "Well," he jokes, "there are two possibilities. Either they leave me alone, or they take me out. If they leave me alone, I get to enjoy my old age and write my systematic theology. If they take me out, my 9-11 books go right to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. So it's a win-win situation."
More seriously, he points to his Christian faith and says that Christian history is full of examples of the faithful who stuck their necks out for the truth. "If we who believe in everlasting life fear death," he says, "what does that say about our faith?"
Other than standing for his faith, what does Griffin hope to accomplish by exposing the 9-11 story as a lie? As an advocate for a worldwide democratic order, he sees this story as an example of "governmental lawlessness" so egregious that its exposure could call into question the continuation of the present system with its "anarchical competition between nation states." First, however, people must be willing to think the unthinkable, and to be willing to look at the evidence that it is our own nation that has become the evil empire.

This is a formidable barrier to cross. Ever since the notion of the "Big Lie" was first put forth to describe the tactics of the Third Reich, it has become a cliché that the bigger the lie, the harder it is for people to see the truth. This is especially so when the official version takes on the status of what theologian Griffin calls "sacred myth."
"The 'truth' of the official 9-11 story," explains Griffin, "must be taken on faith. It is not a matter of debate or even discussion. Anyone who brings up anything that contradicts the official story is either ignored or denounced as a conspiracy nut.
"However," he continues, "when the official account of 9-11 is stripped of its halo and treated simply as a theory rather than an unquestionable dogma, it cannot be defended as the best theory to account for the relevant facts. When challenges to it are not treated as blasphemy, it can easily be seen to not correspond with reality."

And so David Ray Griffin continues to make presentations, do interviews and get his version of the truth to "break the soundless barrier
His hope? That enough Americans wake up and call for a re-investigation, and that those who know more will feel safe enough to come forward. But first, he says, we Americans must muster the will and courage to face the situation squarely in the face.
As a postscript to my interview with David Ray Griffin, I am reminded of a March 30 article by journalist Doug Thompson published on OpEdNews.com. In it, Thompson recalls a 1981 encounter with the late John Connally, the former governor of Texas who was wounded in the Kennedy assassination. In an unguarded moment, Thompson asked Connally, "Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald fired the gun that killed Kennedy?"
"Absolutely not," Connally said. "I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission."
"So why not speak out?" Thompson asked.
"I will never speak out publicly about what I believe," Connally replied, "because I love this country and we needed closure at the time."

Now here we are more than 40 years after that devastating perpetration and we have to wonder, how well did "closure" serve us? As we see daily the fruits of self-serving secrecy and unchecked power, it might be time for some disclosure instead.