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/st...principles.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/relea...0020601-3.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/relea...040413-20.html).

99. “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation,” September 11, 2001 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...010911-16.html).

100. “Bin Laden Is Wanted: Dead or Alive, Says Bush,” Telegraph, September 18, 2001 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...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/f...01taliban.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...lmay_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...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 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in592330.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/200...-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 103rd National Convention,” August 26, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20020826.html).

142. “Remarks by the President on Iraq,” October 7, 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0021007-8.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.

152. 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), the first half of which presents a summary of the most important evidence against the official account of 9/11, with special attention to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

End