Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about 9/11? How could so much go wrong at once, in the world's strongest and most technologically sophisticated country? Both the government and the mainstream media have tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists." This volume shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different academic disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, the authors are united In the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend Imperial control at home and abroad.

Although it not entirely clear whether all of the contributors agree with the final conclusions of editors Griffin (emeritus, Claremont School of Theology) and Scott (U. of California at Berkely), these 11 essays collectively argue that attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001, have not been satisfactorily explained by government officials and that US government officials were complicit in the attacks, motivated by the intention to exploit them to advance an imperial agenda. Some chapters cast doubt on the work of the 9-11 commission's presentation of the physical evidence, including the argument that the World Trade Center towers collapsed due to fire and not controlled explosives. Others discuss present historical background on the ties between oil companies and Islamic fundamentalist groups and on previous CIA staging of "false-flag" terrorist operations. Still others explore reasons for why (what they see as) transparent truths about 9-11 are so easily dismissed by the society at large. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)