By Russ Wellen

Interlink, 214 pages, $15

On September 11, 2001, a sizeable claim was staked on the public's imagination by the conspiracy theory—for the first time since JFK's assassination, which seems quaint in comparison. What is it about these two words that leech the credibility from any interpretation of events to which they're applied? What American with his head screwed on right would be caught dead straying into that province in France, the realm of theory?

As David Ray Griffin writes in The New Pearl Harbor, "It almost seems to be a requirement of admission into public discourse to announce that one rejects conspiracy thinking." Which is how the professor of religion at Claremont School of Theology in California himself first reacted to alternate versions of 9/11. Until, that is, Griffin, at the urging of an equally sensible colleague, checked out the two eye-opening 9/11 timelines posted by David Thompson on the website for the Center of Cooperative Research.

Primed then to consider, in the words of his book's subtitle, "Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11," he wrote The New Pearl Harbor. Besides Thompson's work, Griffin incorporates that of Nafeez Ahmed in England, Thierry Meyssan in France and Michel Chossudovsky in Canada. Not an investigative journalist, all Griffin is calling for is a full investigation.

Stop laughing. Sure the 9/11 Commission barely scratched the surface, but as a theologian Griffin is obligated to show unbridled faith in humanity.

Evidence in plain sight, documented with an effusion of footnotes like overgrown foliage, constitutes the bulk of The New Pearl Harbor.

Who among us didn't wonder why jets failed to intercept Flights 11 and 175? Griffin quotes the commander in chief of the Russian Air Force: "As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up."

When we first saw the president's reaction in the classroom, we may have been inclined to cut him some slack. After all, who wouldn't have been rattled? But when you learn that before he arrived at the school it was already clear to the FAA, NORAD, the Pentagon, the White House and the Secret Service that three commercial airliners had been hijacked, one flown into the North Tower, and a second on the way, you can't help but reel that slack back in.

How many are aware that not only did the aircraft that hit the Pentagon leave a hole no larger than 18 feet in diameter, but that it also disappeared entirely into the building? After Griffin points out the obvious—that an airliner, with its fragile nose full of instruments, isn't built to penetrate—he explains that even the fire chief in charge, who saw only an incinerated object, was unable to identify it as an airliner.

Wasn't there something familiar about the collapse of the towers that you couldn't put your finger on? Perhaps the subsequent sight of the demolition of a structure like Philadelphia's old Veteran's Stadium might have jogged your memory. Then, in the face of protests, the steel column beams and trusses were removed and recycled even more rapidly than Rumsfeld ramped up for the invasion of Iraq.

Now for the easy part—motive. Griffin rounds up the usual suspects: an excuse to pass the Patriot Act; oil-political dominance; and a chance to demonstrate our vulnerability to attacks from above. Missile Defense is particularly dear to the hearts of Rumsfeld; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and the commander of NORAD, General Ralph Eberhart, who was in charge of air traffic on 9/11.

Small consolation can be obtained, however, from the existence of precedents to state-sponsored—or allowed—attacks on U.S. soil. Years of rumors culminated in Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (Free Press, 2001), in which author Robert Stinnett sympathizes with a president who, desperate to commit the isolationist American public to World War II, failed, despite warnings, to prevent the attack. One is thus left to wonder if the neocons' well-documented worship of interventionist Churchill at the expense of Roosevelt is, in fact, a smoke screen shielding their appropriation of Roosevelt's ruse.

The leap of faith it takes to embrace a conspiracy theory is often ridiculed. But this leap pales before the gaping gorge across which a mind must vault to adopt means to an end as extreme as 9/11.

We owe David Ray Griffin a debt of gratitude for lending his impeccable credentials and sobriety of tone to the questions surrounding 9/11, and thus reducing the stigma invoked by the words "conspiracy theory." There's no Bilderberg power elite here ordering men in black to do their bidding—just an elected official and his appointees whose arrogance invites us to imagine the unimaginable. Needless to say, none of this diminishes the threat of terror. It just brings it closer to home. o