A 9/11 Gov’t Conspiracy? "I Wouldn’t Be Surprised"

dJewish Daily Forward: A 9/11 Gov’t Conspiracy? ‘I Wouldn’t Be Surprised,’ Says Tikkun Editor

Courtesy Of: Forward.com
By Daniel Treiman
Published: February 6, 2007
www.forward.com

Rabbi Michael Lerner, the longtime activist and editor of Tikkun magazine, has published an essay saying he is open to the possibility that the American government may have been behind the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“I would not be surprised to learn that some branch of our government conspired either actively to promote or passively to allow the attack on 9/11,” Lerner wrote in an essay published in the new book, “9/11 and American Empire: Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out.”

Lerner added that he would also not be surprised if it turned out that the attacks were not the result of a government conspiracy.

“I am agnostic on the question of what happened on 9/11,” he wrote in his essay for the book, which includes articles by other contributors arguing that a government conspiracy was behind the September 11 attacks.

“As other authors in this collection have shown, there are huge holes in the official story and contradictions that suggest that we do not know the whole story.”

...Lerner, the founder of Tikkun and the newly formed Network of Spiritual Progressives, is arguably the most prominent contributor to “9/11 and American Empire.”

...The book in which Lerner’s essay appears is billed as having been “inspired by” David Ray Griffin’s “The New Pearl Harbor,” a seminal text of the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement.

The new book includes an essay by Griffin in which he makes the case that the September 11 attacks were likely “orchestrated, like many previous false-flag attacks, by U.S. agents as a pretext for a war to expand the American empire.”

In his own essay for “9/11 and American Empire,” Lerner wrote:

“For those who watched the reactionary political uses made of this tragedy, it’s easy to conjure up a variety of possible conspiratorial motives that would have led the president, the vice president, or some branch of the armed forces or CIA or FBI or other ‘security’ forces to have passively or actively participated in a plot to re-credit militarism and war. We’ve learned enough about the subsequent ways that the Bush administration lied to the American public to no longer be shocked if there had been some active involvement by them in these deeds.”

But, Lerner immediately added,

“Neither would I be surprised if, when all the archives were opened and all the communications revealed, it turned out that there was some other non-conspiratorial explanation for elements of the story that currently seem to make no sense.”

Lerner told the Forward that he has good reason to be suspicious of the government.

“I’ve had a lot of personal experience of government lying and doing things that are very destructive and pretending that they weren’t doing it,” Lerner said.

“I was part of antiwar demonstrations in which violence was done and the violence later turned out was being done by police agents. I had that personal experience…. After that, nothing surprises me about what this government would do to achieve what its perceived ends are. Nothing would surprise me. That doesn’t mean I believe it. That doesn’t mean that I believe that that’s actually happening right now.”

...Still, his essay offered words of encouragement to those who are engaged in such theorizing.

“I salute the people in this collection of articles who are doing an amazing job of examining what may prove to be one of the most perverse conspiracies in the history of democratic governments,” Lerner wrote.