David Ray Griffin. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. 2004.

I mention I've read this, people scoff, and nobody wants to know anything about it—it's an argument people won't even listen to, much less try to argue against—which is unpleasant but shows how in fact it is possible that elements of our government could commit unspeakably atrocious crimes against our people—precisely because they are unspeakable, unthinkable

Most everybody will dismiss these ideas with the pejorative "conspiracy theory" without any interest in looking at the evidence. This book is a well-reasoned outline of those disquieting explanations that address the many loose ends of what has been known about the events of that tragic day.

The burden the author has shouldered demands volumes—every source ought to be written into the sentence alongside its allegation with a frank analysis of how strong it seems. Every argument ought to be presented alongside an alternative explanation. Of course, it's unfair that this burden should fall to him but not to the 911 Commission or those who parrot the official 911 conspiracy theory that 19 men armed with box cutters brought down four airplanes due to some careful planning and staggering amounts of incompetence spread across the FBI, CIA, INS, cutoms, airport security, and the White House, incompetence that nobody was ever reprimanded for.

To his credit, the author does try to explore this incompetence theory, but this part of the book gets pretty confusing. He lists all the incidents of incompetence and points out how unlikely a coincidence it is that they should all coincide. But this doesn't serve to interrogate his own theory as he would seem to pretend—doing that would require a study of the sources. Many "facts" appeared in single news sources and have never been corroborated, such as the fact that some of the hijackers trained at U.S. military bases and even had the base listed as their addresses on their drivers' licenses. This fact alone, if true, should be powerful enough to stop trains. But it appeared in newspapers briefly, was denied, and disappeared.

The New Pearl Harbor could be analyzed by breaking down the various ideas into a list from most believable (that the airplane over Pennsylvania was shot down, which is how it seemed at the time) to most difficult to swallow (that what hit the Pentagon was a remote-controlled cruise missile (in which case, then where is the jet?). I could have written this sort of book view but it made me crazy and I had to stop thinking about it. Which again goes to show that unthinkable crimes are possible to get away with.