6/24/04 London Daily Mail review of The New Pearl Harbor
by Sue Reid
http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2004-06-24-dailymail.php
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At the Cannes Film Festival last week, a predominantly
American audience gave maverick film director Michael
Moore a standing ovation for his controversial film,
Fahrenheit 9/11. The movie, which won the coveted Palme
D'Or, is a blistering critique of the Bush
administration's motives for the "war on terror," and
even goes so far as to suggest that the Twin Tower
atrocities provided a convenient mandate for America to
invade Iraq.

Reaction to the film is one more sign of the growing
cynicism over the President's handling of the
catastrophic events of 9/11. Yet the questions that
Moore's movie pose scratch only the surface. Now, an
explosive book on the happenings of 9/11, which raises
even more controversial issues, is about to be
published. It will be damned in some quarters as
nothing other than the irresponsible ramblings of
conspiracy theorists or the wild rantings of anti-war
activists. Much of what it says has been criticised, and
flatly denied, by the White House and America's
intelligence services.

Yet its findings have garnered an enthusiastic response
from sections of America's intelligentsia and a former
British Cabinet Minister, the MP Michael Meacher, wrote
the foreword of the book. In it he says: "Never in
modern history has an event of such cataclysmic
significance been shrouded in such mystery. So many of
the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible
basis, and so many of the key actors have put forward
contradictory accounts only to be forced to retract or
cover up later."

Whether he is right or not, the book is tellingly
called The New Pearl Harbor, a pointed reference to the
theory that President Roosevelt cynically allowed a
Japanese assault on the U.S. fleet in 1941 to force
America into World War II.

The book makes some deeply unpalatable - and frankly
incredible - assertions, even querying if the Al Qaeda
attacks would have happened without the complicity of
America's most powerful politicians and policy-makers.
Written by the academic author and American theologian,
Professor David Ray Griffin of Claremont School of
Theology, California, it challenges almost every
official account of the day and among the disturbing
questions it asks are . . .

Why were no military fighters scrambled from the
nearest air force bases after the terrorists first
struck? How could a rookie pilot - one of the
terrorists - fly a 757 aircraft so precisely into the
American defence headquarters, the Pentagon? Was it
really an aircraft that pierced this well-protected
building or a military plane or missile? And who made
ten million dollars out of betting before 9/11 that
shares in the two airlines of the hijacked planes were
about to plummet?

To start to unravel this extraordinary story one must
go back to September 11, 2001 as President George Bush
flew into Florida, on Air Force One for what was
intended as the perfect photo opportunity. It was just
after 9am and the world's most powerful man was sitting
among seven-year-olds at a school in Sarasota listening
as they laboriously lisped from a favourite American
school book, My Pet Goat. The President was in good
humour, even cracking a corny joke and evoking laughter
among the watching teachers, TV crews and his secret
service men. Yet a terrorist maelstrom had already been
unleashed.

A little over one hour earlier and 1,200 miles away on
the Eastern seaboard, American Airlines Flight 11 had
left Boston at 7:59. Fifteen minutes later its radio
suddenly snapped off air. The first indication that it
might have been hijacked. The time was precisely
8:14am. Flight 11 should have been immediately
intercepted by fighter pilots sent up from nearby
McGuire Air Force Base, in New Jersey, who could have
made the journey to the World Trade Centre in three
minutes.

Interception is a standard - and mandatory - emergency
procedure in the U.S. in suspected hijacks and one that
had been used routinely in 67 air scares over America
in the nine months preceding 9/11. But, disturbingly,
fighter jets were instead ordered out of an air base
180 miles away in Cape Cod. And they flew so slowly
that they did not even arrive in time to stop the
second hijack attack on the south tower of the Trade
Centre. According to Griffin, "There are standard
procedures for situations such as this . . . and if
they had been followed American Airline Flight 11 would
have been intercepted by fighter jets within ten
minutes of any sign that it had been hijacked. Had the
plane then failed to obey the standard signal to follow
the fighter jets to an airport it would have been shot
down."

The two Cape Cod F-15 fighters, one piloted by a
Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy, set off at 8:52 when
there were still 11 minutes to go before the second
plane hit the World Trade Centre at 9:03am.

Lt-Col Duffy has since said that he was "on full blower
all the way" - a top speed of more than 1850mph, which
meant he could travel at 32 miles every minute.
"Allowing the standard 2.5 minutes for them to get
airborne and up to speed, the fighters should have
reached Manhattan in about eight minutes, having a full
three minutes left to shoot down the errant airline",
writes Professor Griffin. And yet as United Airlines
Flight 175, the second Boeing, crashed into the South
Tower, the F-15s were still 70 miles away. It took the
fighter pilots not eight minutes to reach downtown New
York but 19 minutes. It seems that instead of flying at
"full blower" they were travelling at a comparatively
leisurely 700mph. If this seems extraordinary,
Professor Griffin raises some other tantalising
questions about events that day.

He records that the Pentagon was hit by the hijacked
American Airlines Flight 77 at 9:38am, The aircraft,
with 58 passengers on board, had left Dulles Airport,
in Washington DC at 8:20am and suddenly disappeared
from radio contact at 8:46am. Astonishingly, no fighter
jets from Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles from
Washington D.C., were ever scrambled to intercept it.
Instead fighters were ordered from 130 miles away at
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. They finally arrived
after the Pentagon crash had already happened. Thought
to be flying towards Ohio, Flight 77 disappeared from
radar screens for half an hour. But the plane
astonishingly reappeared in airspace over Washington
D.C. at 9:24am. It was then that the pilot executed a
complex manoeuvre, turning almost a complete circle and
dropping the last 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes
to hit a wing of the Pentagon with perfect precision.

It was the sort of flying that you would expect only
from a seasoned airman. Yet at the cockpit controls was
a rookie, a terrorist named Hani Hanjour, who had been
such a bad trainee pilot that managers at his flying
school had reported him to aviation authorities five
times.

"A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a
puddle jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas brings
the plane in so low and flat that it clips the
electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon
and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of
this building at 460 miles per hour," says Griffin.

It is a puzzle that may never be solved because, in
another odd coincidence, no pictures exist of the
moment the aircraft penetrated the building. Jose
Velasquez, an employee at the petrol station opposite
the Pentagon, has stated that security cameras there
would have recorded the moment of impact. "But I've
never seen what the pictures looked like. The FBI were
here within minutes and took the film away," he told
reporters.

But even more bizarre is the damning physical evidence
which appears to show the Pentagon could never have
been struck by a Boeing 757, with a wing span of 125ft.
According to the White House, the Boeing penetrated the
Pentagon with such ferocity that it went completely
inside, disappearing from view before burning to almost
nothing. Crucial photos taken just after the fire
fighters arrived show a hole in the building's facade
of between 15ft and 18ft in diameter. It clearly
reveals there was no damage above the hole or on either
side of it.

So how did the giant Boeing aircraft fit into that
hole? The official account claims that the wings folded
back, or snapped, during the initial impact with the
reinforced structure of the Pentagon. They were pushed
inward towards the fuselage and then carried along with
the plane into the building. But, insists Professor
Griffin, this would be next to impossible. "For when
the plane's forward motion was suddenly reduced as the
nose hit the Pentagon, the wings could not have folded
back - unless the laws of kinetic energy were
momentarily suspended."

Instead the wings would have been propelled forward at
great speed, damaging the building on either side of
the main area of the point of contact of the plane.
Even more bewildering is what happened to the Boeing's
40ft-high tail. "Did it obligingly duck before entering
the building?" asks Griffin. "Whatever did hit the
Pentagon it did not cause nearly enough destruction for
the official story to be true. A Boeing 757, besides
being so tall and having such a wide wingspan, weighs
over 100 tons. Travelling at a speed of 250 to 440
miles per hour, it would have caused tremendous
devastation, far more than was evident at the crash
site."

But there is another intriguing element to this
particular poser. If the official story is correct, if
the hijacked aircraft did go right inside the Pentagon,
where are the remains now? We know that fingerprints
were taken from some of the dead passengers proving
that some human remains at least had survived the
resulting fire. Yet the fuselage, the tail, the wings
and the engines of the enormous Boeing - made of
heat-resistant aluminium and tempered steel - were all,
according to the official version of events, destroyed.
So, if the plane didn't hit the Pentagon, what did?

In what is the wildest of all the theories of The New
Pearl Harbour, the suggestion is that the Pentagon
wasn't hit by a plane at all but by a military missile
or military aircraft. Certainly, several onlookers
claim that it was a missile that so precisely pierced
the Pentagon that day. One of them asserts it was
making a shrill noise "like a fighter plane." But sent
by whom? And if indeed it was a missile, what on earth
happened to Flight 77, last thought to be heading for
Ohio? No one knows.

There are only unanswered questions, such as that posed
by Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband died in the World
Trade Centre. She apparently told a television show: "I
don't understand how a plane could hit our defence
department (The Pentagon) an hour after the first plane
hit the Twin Towers. I don't understand how that is
possible. I'm a reasonable person. But when you look at
the fact that we spend a half trillion dollars on
national defence . . . I think there were procedures
and protocols that were not followed on September 11."

One fact is certain about 9/11 and that concerns the
stock market dealings before the tragedy. An extremely
high volume of "put options" - a bet on the price of
shares falling - were purchased for the stock of Morgan
Stanley Dean Witter, the international financiers which
occupied 22 storeys of the World Trade Centre. Even
more telling were the volume of "put options" on
American and United Airlines, which owned the four
aircraft hijacked by the terrorists. On these two
airlines, and only these two, the level of share trade
went up by 1,200 per cent in the three days prior to
the catastrophe. As the shares dropped in response to
the terrorism, the value of these options multiplied a
hundred fold. Someone - and it may have been Bin Laden
himself - had made ten million dollars in profit. So
why weren't these dealings spotted?

"Any American intelligence officer looking at the stock
market put option purchases in the early September of
2001 would easily have concluded that in the near
future American and United aircraft were going to be
involved in some disaster. And that the target was
quite likely to be the World Trade Centre where Morgan
Stanley Dean Witter had their offices," speculates
Professor Griffin.

And then we must turn to the behaviour of George Bush
junior himself. America's CNN network broke into its
programming at 8:48 to report the first collision and
Flight 11's demise. But the President, says the White
House, was told of the horror at 9am when he arrived at
the Sarasota school. By then, 12 minutes after the
television announcement, millions of Americans knew of
the crash and much of the world, too. Strangely,
according to this official account, the President
appeared to be one of the last to hear this shocking
news. He reportedly told the principal of the school,
"A commercial plane has hit the World Trade Centre and
we're going ahead to do the reading thing anyway."

Then the Commander-in-Chief of the American military
settled down to hear pupils recite My Pet Goat, only
interrupted a few minutes later by a whispered message
in his ear from an aide that a second aircraft had hit
the World Trade Centre.

"He never asked if there had been any additional
threats, where the attacks were coming from, how to
best protest the country from further attacks. In the
middle of a modern day Pearl Harbor he simply turned
back to the matter in hand, the day's photo
opportunity," claims Griffin. So why was the President
not informed that something was possibly dreadfully
amiss by his secret service personnel riding in his car
and among his motorcade before he got to the school?
Why, when learning of the second crash into the South
Twin Tower - which transformed the events into a terror
attack rather than a terrible accident - did he not
leave the school immediately? He was on a pre-scheduled
and well-publicised photocall. The school and the
President, it might be assumed, were now Al Qaeda's
targets, too.

Instead Bush and his people dawdled at the school
before leaving in their scheduled motorcade on their
scheduled route to the airport. It was during that
journey that they reportedly were informed that the
Pentagon had been struck. Yet, mysteriously, still no
military escort was ordered for the President. Air
Force One took off without fighter jets to protect it.

"The implied question is, of course, a disturbing one,"
says Griffin. "Did the President, and at least the head
of his secret service, know that he was not a terrorist
target?" That is, of course, a theory that will rightly
come in for the most heated criticism when the book is
published here next month. But there is one more twist
to the strange tale. It rests on a statement made by
Bush himself about what he knew on the day of 9/11. He
says that he was sitting outside the Sarasota classroom
waiting for the start of the Pet Goat reading when he
saw the first plane crash into the Twin Towers on a
television monitor. "I saw the airplane hit the tower -
the TV was obviously on and I used to fly myself," he
was to explain later. The President recalls that he
turned to his security men, joking: "There's one
terrible pilot."

He repeated the story more than once in the months
after 9/11. Yet the footage of the first plane crashing
into the Twin Tower did not emerge for another 13 hours
(what millions of us saw was live footage of the second
plane). Shots of the first plane, taken accidentally by
a French documentary maker filming in Manhattan, were
only released publicly for television the following day.

So, according to Professor Griffin, President Bush
simply could not have seen that Flight 11 crash picture
on television. Nor could he have seen the second plane
crash, as he was in the classroom when it happened. But
did something else happen? Did the President, sitting
in the secure communications room set up by secret
services at the school, view secret images of the
crash; images transmitted by American intelligence onto
the monitor in that room as the attack actually
occurred?

It is an explosive theory, one that understandably will
be dismissed as risible nonsense. For alarmingly, if
U.S. intelligence did film the last moments of Flight
11 live, as it actually happened, it can only mean one
thing: that the Bush administration had prior knowledge
of the Al Qaeda terror assaults. This, of all the
theories propounded by Professor Griffin in The New
Pearl Harbor, is the one that will be condemned most
aggressively by those who wield power in America today.

Yet we should not forget the words President Bush
penned in his diary on the night of 9/11. Before going
to bed he wrote: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century
took place today." Will we ever know just what he meant?