In 1992,
Albert Wohlstetter, who had inspired Perle and Wolfowitz and
other neocons, expressed exasperation that nothing had been done
about “a dictatorship sitting on the world’s second largest pool
of low-cost oil and ambitious to dominate the Gulf.”¹²²
(Wohlstetter’s statement reflected his conviction, expressed
back in 1981, that America needs to establish forces, bases, and
infrastructure so as to enjoy unquestioned primacy in the
region.¹²³)

    In 1996, the
“Clean Break” paper, written for Israel by Perle and other
neocons, proposed that Israel remove from power all of its
enemies in the region, beginning with Saddam Hussein. This 1996
document, in the opinion of Arnaud de Borchgrave, president of
United Press International, “provided the strategic
underpinnings for Operation Iraqi Freedom seven years later.”¹²⁴

    In 1997,
Wolfowitz and Khalilzad published a statement arguing that
“Saddam Must Go.”¹²⁵

    In 1998,
Kristol and Kagan, in a New York Times op-ed entitled
“Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,” called for “finishing the job left
undone in 1991.”¹²⁶ Wolfowitz told the House National
Security Committee that it had been a mistake in 1991 to leave
Saddam in power. Also, writing in the New Republic, he
said: “Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the
vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region.”¹²⁷
And the afore-mentioned letter to President Clinton from
PNAC---signed by Cheney, Kristol, Perle, and Wolfowitz, among
others---urged him to “take the necessary steps, including
military steps,” to “remov[e] Saddam’s regime from power.” Then,
getting no agreement from Clinton, PNAC wrote a similar letter
to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, then the leaders of the House
and the Senate, respectively.¹²⁸

    In 2000,
PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, pointing out that
“the United States has for decades sought to play a more
permanent role in Gulf regional security,” added: “While the
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force
presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of
Saddam Hussein.”¹²⁹

    Given the fact
that Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons were
given central positions in the new Bush administration, it is
not surprising to learn, from two former members of this
administration, that it came into office intent on attacking
Iraq. Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the treasury and hence
a member of the National Security Council, has said that within
days of the inauguration, the main topic was going after Saddam,
with the question being not “Why Saddam?” or “Why Now?” but
merely “finding a way to do it.”¹³⁰ Richard Clarke,
who had been the National Coordinator for Security and
Counterterrorism, confirmed O’Neill’s charge, saying: “The
administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on
its agenda.”¹³¹

    Until the
attacks of 9/11, however, no one had found “a way to do it.” As
neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: “At the beginning of the
administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn’t
doable. . . . That changed with September 11.”¹³² Bob
Woodward makes the same observation in Bush at War,
saying: “The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave the U.S. a
new window to go after Hussein.”¹³³

    However, even
9/11, by itself, was not a sufficient basis for getting the
American people’s support for an attack on Iraq. Not for lack of
effort by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. On the afternoon of 9/11
itself, Rumsfeld said in a note to General Richard Myers—-the
acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--that he wanted the
"best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam
Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]."¹³⁴
In the following days, both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz argued that
Saddam's Iraq should be, in Woodward’s paraphrase, “a principal
target of the first round in the war on terrorism.”¹³⁵

Colin Powell, however, argued that both the American people and
other countries would at that time support an attack on
Afghanistan, to do something about al-Qaeda, but not an attack
on Iraq, since there was no evidence that it had anything to do
with 9/11. He added, however, that after a successful campaign
in Afghanistan, a war on Iraq would become more feasible. Bush
accepted this argument.¹³⁶ In doing so, he was not
rejecting the proposal to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq,
merely postponing its implementation: A plan for going to war in
Afghanistan that Bush signed on September 17 also directed the
Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of
Iraq.¹³⁷

    Stephen
Sniegoski, explaining why the attack on Iraq could not be
launched immediately, says: “[A]lthough the 9/11 atrocities
psychologically prepared the American people for the war on
Iraq, those horrific events were not sufficient by themselves to
thrust America immediately into an attack on Iraq.” A “lengthy
propaganda offensive” would also be needed.¹³⁸

    This
propaganda offensive involved convincing a majority of the
American people of the truth of two false claims: that Saddam
Hussein had been behind 9/11 and that he possessed, or soon
would possess, weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear
weapons, with which he could attack America. This part of the
story is too well known to need much rehearsal. The point to
emphasize here is that although this later propaganda was
necessary, its success depended on 9/11. Halper and Clarke say
that “it was 9/11 that provided the political context in which
the thinking of neo-conservatives could be turned into
operational policy.”¹³⁹ Sniegoski, spelling out the
point more fully, says:  

The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful.
Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist enemy,
even though they weren’t exactly sure who that enemy was. . . .
Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible
to the administration’s propaganda that the United States had to
strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States. . . .
It wasn’t that difficult to channel American fear and anger into
war against Iraq.¹⁴⁰ 

    Much of this
channeling was done by the Bush-Cheney administration,
especially Bush and Cheney themselves. In August of 2002, for
example, Cheney declared that “there is no doubt that Saddam
Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction . . . [and] is
amassing them to use . . . against us.”¹⁴¹ In
October, Bush said that, having “experienced the horror of
September the 11th, . . . America must not ignore the threat
gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot
wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in
the form of a mushroom cloud.”¹⁴²

The administration was greatly aided in this propaganda
offensive by neoconservatives outside the government, who
“linked their preexisting agenda (an attack on Iraq) to a
separate event (9/11).”¹⁴³ Through their incessant
propaganda---most widely spread in Lawrence Kaplan and William
Kristol’s The War over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s
Mission---“Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were morphed into the
same enemy” and “the war on terror and war in Iraq were joined
at the hip.”¹⁴⁴

This propaganda campaign was enormously successful. Shortly
before the war on Iraq was launched, the two key ideas in the
campaign---that Saddam Hussein had played a direct role in the
attacks of 9/11 and that he was a threat because he had weapons
of mass destruction---were accepted by 70 percent of the
American people.¹⁴⁵ As a result, point out Halper and
Clarke, the Bush-Cheney administration was “able to build the
environment surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 2001
into a wide moral platform from which to launch a preemptive
strike.”¹⁴⁶

That this propaganda campaign would be successful would have
been predictable. As Hermann Göring, one of the top Nazi
officials, said: “[I]t is the leaders of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag
the people along. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked.”¹⁴⁷

Accordingly, the fact that there were no Iraqis among the
alleged hijackers does not mean that the desire for a pretext to
attack Iraq could not have been one of the imperial motives
behind the attacks of 9/11. The crucial precondition for the war
in Iraq was a psychological state of mind in the American
public---one of fear and anxiety combined with a desire for
revenge---that would countenance the new doctrine of
preemptive-preventive war. This state of mind was abundantly
created by 9/11. Then, just as the ensuing propaganda offensive
against Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban created
almost unanimous acceptance of the war in Afghanistan, the
propaganda offensive directed at Saddam Hussein was rather
easily able to channel this fear, anxiety, and desire for
revenge into a widespread feeling that a war to bring about
regime change in Iraq was justified.  

Conclusion 

The attacks of
9/11 allowed the imperialist agenda of leading neoconservatives
to be implemented. Can we infer from this effect that the hope
to have this agenda fulfilled was one of the motives for the
9/11 attacks? Of course not. One of the basic principles of
criminal investigations, however, is the question: Who benefits?
Those who most benefit from the crime are usually the most
likely suspects. But an answer to that question cannot by itself
be used as proof of the suspects’ guilt. The prosecution must
also show that the suspects had the means and the opportunity to
commit the crime. It must also present evidence that the
suspects actually committed the crime---at least indirect
evidence, perhaps by showing that they were the only ones who
could have done it.

    I have
elsewhere presented evidence---what I first called prima
facie evidence but now call overwhelming evidence¹⁴⁸---that
9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by leading members of the
Bush-Cheney administration. This evidence includes many reasons
to conclude that the official accounts of the World Trade Center
collapses, the attack on the Pentagon, the crash of United
Airlines Flight 93, and the failure of the U.S. military to
intercept the other flights cannot be true. This evidence also
includes many reasons to conclude that The 9/11 Commission
Report involved a systematic cover-up of dozens of facts
that conflict with the official conspiracy theory about 9/11,
according to which the attacks were conceived and carried out
entirely by al-Qaeda---evidence that instead points to official
complicity. One example of this evidence is the fact that the
Commission changed by about 45 minutes the time at which Vice
President Cheney went down to the Presidential Emergency
Operations Center under the White House, thereby indicating that
he could not have been responsible, as evidence suggests, for
allowing the strike on the Pentagon and ordering the downing of
UA 93.¹⁴⁹

    Many people,
to be sure, feel that there is no need to examine the evidence
that the attacks were arranged by members of the Bush
administration because they feel certain, on a priori
grounds, that it simply would not have done such a thing. Having
addressed most of those grounds elsewhere,¹⁵⁰ I have
here dealt with only one of them, which is often phrased as a
rhetorical question: What motive could they possibly have had
for arranging attacks on their own citizens?

Having suggested that the motive was to have a pretext to turn
the neocon agenda into national policy, I should add that it is
probably only the neocons in office, and even only some of them,
who should be suspected of involvement in the planning for 9/11.
To say that 9/11 allowed the agenda of the neocons in general to
be implemented does not imply that many or even any neocons
outside the government were involved in the planning for, or
even had advance knowledge of, the attacks of 9/11. About eight
months after 9/11, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan
wrote pieces urging the Bush-Cheney administration to undertake
an investigation to see if the attacks might have been
prevented. Gary Dorrien, reporting that this call “earned a
sharp rebuke from Cheney,” adds that “the Bush administration
had no intention of allowing an investigation on that subject.”¹⁵¹

    No genuine
investigation has been carried out to this day. If Congress
would authorize such an investigation, the American people, I am
convinced, would see that the grounds for impeaching Bush and
Cheney are even stronger than those that have been part of the
public discussion thus far. They would also see that the reasons
for opposing the war in Iraq are even stronger than those
publicly discussed thus far, because it was from the start an
imperialistic war based on a false-flag operation (as well as
additional lies). They would even see that, although many
critics of the administration have said that we should pull our
troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, our attack on
that country was no more legitimate.

This essay is a revised version
of “Imperial Motives for a ‘New Pearl Harbor,’” chap. 6 of David
Ray Griffin,

Christian Faith and the Truth Behind
9/11
: A Call to Reflection and Action
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006). Griffin is professor
emeritus at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate
University. His most recent books are Whitehead’s Radically
Different Postmodern Philosophy and Debunking 9/11
Debunking.

------------- 

Notes 

1.
Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The
Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 4. Halper and Clarke, identifying with
the Reagan presidency, criticize the ideological agenda of the
neocons from what they call a “center-right” perspective (5-7). 
 

2.
Stephen J. Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11: The
Origins of the U.S. War on Iraq.” In D. L. O’Huallachain and J.
Forrest Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy,
Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (Vienna, Va.: IHS Press,
2005), 81-109, at 81-82.  

3.
Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New
Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16.  

4.
Dorrien’s examples are “William Bennett, Peter Berger, Francis
Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ernest Lefever,
James Nuechterlein, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Novak,
Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and James Q. Wilson” (Imperial
Designs, 15).  

5.
Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors,” The Nation, February
23, 2004, online; quoted in Justin Raimondo, “A Real Hijacking:
The Neoconservative Fifth Column and the War in Iraq,” in
O’Huallachain and Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again, 112-24,
at 123.  

6.
Norman Podhoretz, “After the Cold War,” Commentary 92
(July 1991), and “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Commentary
101 (March 1996); both cited in Andrew J. Bacevich, The New
American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 80.  

7.
Irving Kristol, Wall Street Journal, March 3, 1986;
quoted in Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics,
Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993), 117.
 

8.
Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar
World,” National Interest, Winter 1989: 47-49.   

9.
Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs,
1990.  

10.
Krauthammer, “Bless Our Pax Americana,” Washington Post,
March 22, 1991.  

11.
Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidance,” February 18,
1992. Although Libby is usually considered the person who wrote
this draft, Gary Dorrien says that it was actually written by
Wolfowitz’s aide Zalmay Khalilzad, who had been briefed on what
it should say by Wolfowitz and Libby---with additional input
from Andrew Marshall, Richard Perle, and Albert Wohlstetter (Imperial
Designs, 39).  

12.
Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and
Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 44.  

13.
Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No
Rivals Develop: A One Superpower World,” New York Times,
March 8, 1992 (http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm);
Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude
a Rival Superpower,” Washington Post, March 11, 1992
(http://www.yale.edu/strattech/92dpg.html).    

14.
Wall Street Journal, March 16, 1992.  

15.
Quoted in Barton Gellman, “Aim of Defense Plan Supported by
Bush,” Washington Post, March 12, 1992.  

16.
Quoted in Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would
Preclude a Rival Superpower.” 

17.
Bacevich, American Empire, 45.  

18.
Paul Wolfowitz, “Remembering the Future,” National Interest,
Spring 2000 (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_2000_Spring/ai_61299040).
 

19.
Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 39.  

20.
David Armstrong, “Dick Cheney’s Song of America,” Harper’s,
October, 2002.  

21.
Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 142.  

22.
Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush
Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New
Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1).
Lemann further reported that the first major product of this new
thinking was a brief prepared by Wolfowitz to be presented to
Cheney on May 21, 1990, at which time Cheney was also supposed
to hear Colin Powell’s proposal for revising U.S. foreign policy
but did not. Cheney then, on the basis of Wolfowitz’s proposal,
briefed President Bush, who delivered a major foreign policy
address on August 2 (the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait). 

23.
Brinkley’s statement is quoted in “Cheney Is Power Hitter in
White House Lineup,” USA Today, August 28, 2002, which is
quoted in Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 120.
 

24.
Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 42.  

25.
“Defense Strategy of the 1990s,” Department of Defense, 1992. 

26.
Lemann, “The Next World Order.”  

27.
“Defense Strategy for the 1990s,” Department of Defense,
January, 1993. Lemann, in “The Next World Order,” reported that
although this was an unclassified and hence “scrubbed” version
of the official document, “it contained the essential ideas of
‘shaping,’ rather than reacting to, the rest of the world, and
of preventing the rise of other superpowers.” 

28.
Zalmay Khalilzad, From Containment to Global Leadership?
America and the World after the Cold War (Rand Corporation,
1995).  

29.
Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 81.  

30.
Robert Kagan, “American Power: A Guide for the Perplexed,”
Commentary 101 (April 1996). 

31.
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Foreign Policy and the
Republican Future,” Weekly Standard, October 12, 1998.  

32.
Robert Kagan, “The Clinton Legacy Abroad,” Weekly Standard,
January 15, 2001; quoted in Bacevich, The New American
Militarism, 85.  

33.
Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 110.  

34.
Ibid., 126.  

35.
Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 68, 130.  

36.
Project for the New American Century, “Statement of Principles,”
June 3, 1997 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm).
 

37.
Project for the New American Century (henceforth PNAC),
Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources
for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org).
 

38.
Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 142-43; Sniegoski,
“Neoconservatives, Israel, and 911,” 94-95.  

39.
Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Time, March 5, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2001/03/05/doctrine.html).
 

40.
Krauthammer’s statements, originally published in Emily Eakin,
“All Roads Lead To D.C.,” New York Times, Week In Review,
March 31, 2002, are quoted in Jonathan Freedland, “Is America
the New Rome?” Guardian, September 18, 2002.  

41.
Robert Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the
World,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003.  

42.
See John McMurtry, “9/11 and the 9/11 Wars: Understanding the
Supreme Crimes,” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott,
eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out
(Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006).  

43.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic
Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York:
Vintage Books, 1987).  

44.
Paul Kennedy, “The Eagle Has Landed,” Financial Times,
February 22, 2002.  

45.
Bacevich, American Empire, 244.  

46.
This distancing is especially evident in Bacevich’s later book,
The New American Militarism.  

47.
Claes Ryn, “The Ideology of American Empire,” in O’Huallachain
and Sharpe, eds., Neoconned Again, 63-79, at 65.  

48.
Norman Podhoretz, “The Reagan Road to Détente,” Foreign
Affairs 63 (1984), 452; “The Neo-Conservative Anguish over
Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine, May 2,
1982; both quoted in Bacevich, The New American Militarism,
74.  

49.
Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 133.  

50.
“Joint Vision 2010” (http://www.dtic.mil/jv2010/jvpub.htm).
 

51.
General Howell M. Estes III, USAF, United States Space Command,
“Vision for 2020,” February 1997 (http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usspac/visbook.pdf). 

52.
“Joint Vision 2020” (http://www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm).
 

53.
Bacevich, American Empire, 127. 

54.
PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 4.  

55.
Ibid., 38, 54, 30.  

56.
Ibid., iv, 6, 50, 51, 59.  

57.
Ibid., 62.  

58.
Ibid., 51.  

59.
Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 45.  

60.
Ibid., 44-46; Bacevich, The New American Militarism,
152-64, 167-73. Richard Perle, who also became a Wohlstetter
disciple at a young age, said of Wolfowitz: “Paul thinks the way
Albert thinks” (Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 46).  

61.
“Andrew Marshall,” Source Watch, Center for Media &
Democracy (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Andrew_Marshall).
 

62.
Report of the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security
Space Management and Organization (http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/spaceabout.html),
7. 

63.
Ibid., 15.  

64.
This according to the Washington Post, January 27, 2002.
 

65.
Robert Kagan, “We Must Fight This War,” Washington Post,
September 12, 2001; Henry Kissinger, “Destroy the Network,”
Washington Post, September 11, 2001 (http://washingtonpost.com);
Lance Morrow, “The Case for Rage and Retribution,” Time,
September 11, 2001. 

66.
“Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” New
York Times, October 12, 2001. 

67.
Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order: The Bush
Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power,” New
Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1).
The phrase in the inside quotation marks is a direct quote from
Rice; the rest of the statement is Lemann’s paraphrase.  

68.
“Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on
Terrorism and Foreign Policy,” April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov). 

69.
Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2002), 32.  

70.
“September 11, 2001: Attack on America: Remarks by the President
in Telephone Conversation with New York Mayor Giuliani and New
York Governor Pataki 11:00 A.M. EDT; September 13, 2001,”
available at

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/president_009.htm;
“Bush Vows to ‘Whip Terrorism,’” Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001.  

71.
Lemann, “The Next World Order.”  

72.
Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack, 6:42 PM,
September 11, 2001 (available at

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/dod_brief02.htm).
According to the transcript, the question was asked by Secretary
Rumsfeld. But the flow of the discussion suggests that it came
from a reporter. In either case, the 9/11 attacks were
interpreted to mean that greater military spending was needed,
“especially for missile defense.” 

73.
Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 173 (the second
phrase in quotation marks was taken by Bacevich from Thomas E.
Ricks, “For Rumsfeld, Many Roadblocks,” Washington Post,
August 7, 2001).  

74.
Ibid., 173.  

75.
Perle’s statement is quoted by Bacevich (ibid., 173-74) from
Neil Swidey, “The Mind of the Administration,” Boston Globe,
May 18, 2003.  

76.
The National Security Strategy of the United States of
America, September 2002, henceforth NSS 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html),
29-30. 

77.
NSS 2002, 28.   

78.
In using this hyphenated term, I follow the precedent of
Catherine Keller in “Omnipotence and Preemption,” in David Ray
Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., Richard Falk, and Catherine Keller,
The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).  

79.
Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First: Pentagon Would Preclude
a Rival Superpower”; cited in Halper and Clark, America Alone,
141.  

80.
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, “A Clean
Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” June 1996
(http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm). 

81.
PNAC, “Statement of Principles,” 1997 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm) 

82.
PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, May 29, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).
 

83.
Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 91.  

84. “President Bush Delivers Graduation
Speech at West Point,” June 1, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html). 

85.
NSS 2002, cover letter.  

86.
NSS 2002, 6, 15. 

87.
Ibid., 15.  

88.
Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 142.  

89.
Max Boot, “Think Again: Neocons,” Foreign Policy,
January/February 2004 (http://www.cfr.org/publication/7592/think_again.html),
18.   

90.
The fact that Zelikow was “involved in the drafting” of this
document was revealed on PBS in Frontline’s “Interview
with Barton Gellman” on January 29, 2003, shortly after Zelikow
had become executive director of the 9/11 Commission. According
to Gellman, a staff writer for the Washington Post,
Zelikow had told him this during a telephone conversation the
previous day. The fact that Zelikow was the primary
drafter of NSS 2002 was revealed in James Mann, Rise
of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York:
Viking, 2004), 316, 331.  

91.
Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 316.  

92.
Ibid., 331.  

93.
Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow, “Catastrophic
Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” Foreign Affairs,
November/December 1998, 80-94 (available at

http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/ct-tnd.htm).  

94.
Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice chair,
respectively, of the 9/11 Commission, say in their preface to
The 9/11 Commission Report that they had “sought to be
independent, impartial, . . . and nonpartisan” (xv). In their
later book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11
Commission (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), they reaffirm
that they had been determined to be “nonpartisan and
independent” (29).  

95.
According to Kean and Hamilton themselves, Zelikow provided the
“overarching vision” for the report and, with the aid of his
former coauthor Ernest May, prepared the outline, which he
presented to the staff, assigning “different sections and
subsections of it to individual staff members” (Without
Precedent, 273). Finally, although various members of the
Commission’s staff wrote the first drafts of the various
chapters, we learn from May, revised drafts were then produced
by the “front office,” which was headed by Zelikow (Ernest May,
“When Government Writes History: A Memoir of the 9/11
Commission,” New Republic, May 23, 2005).  

96. Statement of the Family Steering
Committee for The 9/11 Independent Commission, March 20, 2004 (www.911independentcommission.org/mar202004.html).
 

97.
David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2005), chap. 10,
“Possible Motives of the Bush Administration.”   

98.
“President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference,”
April 13, 2004 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-20.html).
 

99.
“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation,”
September 11, 2001 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html).
 

100.
“Bin Laden Is Wanted: Dead or Alive, Says Bush,” Telegraph,
September 18, 2001 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/18/wbush18.xml).
 

101.
“White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You’” (CNN.com,
September 21, 2001).
 

102.
Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, “Taliban Willing To Talk, But
Wants U.S. Respect” (http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/focus/terrorism/archives/1001/w01taliban.html). 

103.
For the various kinds of evidence, see David Ray Griffin, The
New Pearl Harbor, chap. 8, or The 9/11 Commission Report:
Omissions and Distortions, chap. 6.  

104.
Francis Boyle, “No Proof, No Investigation, No Accountability,
No Law” (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fab051702.html).
Boyle points out that a White Paper, entitled “Responsibility
for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States,” was
provided by British Prime Minister Tony Blair on October 4,
2001. But it began with the disclaimer that it ”does not purport
to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a
court of law.” 

105.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Most Wanted Terrorists (http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm);
the statement, made by Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative
Publicity for the FBI, is quoted in Ed Haas, “FBI says, ‘No Hard
Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’” Muckraker Report, June
6, 2006 (http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html). 

106.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy
and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books,
1997), 35-36.  

107.
Ibid., 36. 

108.
Ibid., 212.  

109.
Ibid., 212, 24-25.  

110.
“Senate Foreign Relations Committee Testimony—-Zbigniew
Brzezinski, February 1, 2007,” Information Clearing House (http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/258/52).

 

111.
See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), chaps. 12 and 13, entitled “Romancing the Taliban:
The Battle for Pipelines.” 

112.
Ibid., 75-79, 175.  

113.
Julio Godoy, “U.S. Taliban Policy Influenced by Oil,” Inter
Press Service, November 16, 2001.  

114.
This according to Niaz Naik, the highly respected Pakistani
representative at the meeting, as reported in George Arney,
“U.S. ‘Planned Attack on Taleban,’” BBC News, Sept. 18, 2001. In
a story in the Guardian entitled “Threat of U.S. Strikes
Passed to Taliban Weeks Before NY Attack” (September 22, 2001),
one of the American representatives was quoted as confirming
that this discussion of military action did occur.  

115.
The Frontier Post, October 10, 2001, cited in Nafeez
Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America was
Attacked September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree, Calif.: Tree of
Life, 2002), 227.   

116.
Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy,
and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2004), 178-79.  

117.
On his career, see “Zalmay Khalilzad,” Source Watch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Zalmay_Khalilzad).
 

118.
Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2002, quoting from the Israeli
newspaper Ma'ariv.  

119.
Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 182-83.  

120. That Wolfowitz made this
comment in a statement to the Commission was reported by
Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. The statements by Gorelick and
Rumsfeld are quoted in “Day One Transcript: 9/11 Commission
Hearing,” Washington Post, March 23, 2004 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17798-2004Mar23.html).
 

121.
Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 86-87, citing
Arnold Beichman, “How the Divide over Iraq Strategies Began,”
Washington Times, November 27, 2002.  

122.
Albert Wohlstetter, “Help Iraqi Dissidents Oust Saddam,” Wall
Street Journal, August 25, 1992.  

123.
Wohlstetter, “Meeting the Threat in the Persian Gulf,” Survey
25 (Spring 1981): 128-88; discussed in Bacevich, The New
American Militarism, 191.  

124.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, “All in the Family,” Washington Times,
September 13, 2004, online.  

125.
Paul D. Wolfowitz and Zalmay M. Khalilzad, “Saddam Must Go,”
Weekly Standard, December 1997.  

126.
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,”
New York Times, January 30, 1998.  

127.
“Prepared Testimony of Paul D. Wolfowitz,” House National
Security Committee, U.S. Congress, September 16, 1998; Wolfowitz,
“Iraqi Rebels with a Cause,” New Republic, December 7,
1998.  

128.
PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).
PNAC, Letter to Gingrich and Lott on Iraq, May 29, 1998 
(http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm). 

129.
PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 14.  

130.
O’Neill is quoted to this effect in Ron Susskind, The Price
of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education
of Paul O’Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). O’Neill
repeated this point in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in
January of 2004. Susskind, whose book also draws on interviews
with other officials, said that in its first weeks the Bush
administration was discussing the occupation of Iraq and the
question of how to divide up its oil (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml).
 

131.
Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on
Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 264. 

132.
Quoted in Elizabeth Drew, “The Neocons in Power,” New York
Review of Books, 50/10 (June 12, 2003)

133.
Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002),
83.  

134.
Reported by CBS News, September 4, 2002. This note, written by
Rumsfeld’s top aide, Stephen Cambone (who participated in PNAC’s
project to produce Rebuilding America’s Defenses), is now
available online (http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/dod-staffers-notes-from-911-obtained.html).
 

135.
Bob Woodward, Bush at War, 48-49. 

136.
Ibid., 49, 83-85. 

137.
Glenn Kessler, "U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past,"
Washington Post, January 12, 2003 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43909-
2003Jan11.html). 

138.
Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 101.  

139.
Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 230.  

140.
Sniegoski, “Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11,” 108-09.  

141.
“Remarks by the Vice President to the Veterans of Foreign Wars
103^rd National Convention,” August 26, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html).
 

142.
“Remarks by the President on Iraq,” October 7, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html).
 

143.
Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 203; see also the
entirety of their chap. 7, “The False Pretences.”

144.
Ibid., 210, 209.  

145.
Ibid., 201, 214.  

146.
Ibid., 218.  

147.
Quoted in Gustave Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York:
Farrar, Straus, & Co, 1947), 278. Gilbert was reporting a
conversation he had with Hermann Göring on the evening of April
18, 1946, while the Nuremberg trials were going on. 

148.
I called it prima facie evidence in my first book on the
subject, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the
Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch,
2004), xxiii. I call the evidence “overwhelming” in Debunking
9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other
Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Olive Branch,
April 2007). This latter book is now my most complete case
against the official theory and hence my most complete argument
that 9/11 was an inside job.  

149.
David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2005), 241-44.  

150.
See the introduction to Debunking 9/11 Debunking.  

151.
Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 168, citing Kristol and Kagan,
“Time for an Investigation,” Weekly Standard, May 27,
2002: 9-10, and Kagan and Kristol, “Still Time for an
Investigation,” Weekly Standard, June 10, 2002: 9-10.