And While We're On the Subject of Faith Based Delusions

Digby dug this up:

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has tumbled into a new dispute over the Sept. 11 attacks of five years ago. Its Presbyterian Publishing Corp. has issued "Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11" (Westminster John Knox), containing perhaps the most incendiary accusations leveled by a writer for a mainline Protestant book house. Author David Ray Griffin tells of concluding that "the Bush-Cheney administration had orchestrated 9/11 in order to promote this (American) empire under the pretext of the so-called war on terror."
"No other interpretation is possible," he asserts.

Okay, a few things straight off. I dislike George W. Bush and his band of dour thugs about as much as is psychologically safe (and sometimes a little more, which is why I refuse to watch the man on television). I've no doubt that he's committed many crimes and wrecked many lives. Still, I don't believe for one second Bush or anyone in his administration orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. My reason: look at the things the administration has tried to orchestrate over the last six years. If this administration had planned the collapse of the World Trade Center, you could still go to the north tower and get a nice piece of fish at the Windows on the World restaurant. The Bush administration may radiate malice, but eptitude and subtlety are beyond them.

The administration did indeed seize on 9/11 as a reason to launch an imperialistic project, but if 9/11 hadn't happened they'd have found some other reason. By now it should be clear that for the administration and its surrogates the answer to any foreign policy problem on the map, however remote or small, was to invade Iraq and occupy it for a huge amount of time. If a suicide-bombing penguin had blown up a research station in Antarctica, Bush would have rolled the tanks into Baghdad.

The comments section over at Digby seems caught up in the question of whether the Presbyterians, or their publishing imprint, are liberal or conservative. This is neither here nor there. The question is whether the allegations the book is making come even within the neighborhood of truth. The publisher defends the books author by saying that he "applies Jesus' teachings to the current political administration" and presents "an abundance of evidence and disturbing questions that implicate the Bush administration." That's nice, but leaving aside my lack of interest in what Jesus may have thought of George W. Bush's behavior, it doesn't appear that the author's evidence or questions differ all that much from those of other 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who spend more time worrying over apparent weaknesses in the official story (the metallurgy of the buildings, the odd coincidences) than they do building a credible foundation for their own competing theory of how the towers fell. That's not the path to good history (though it does reflect the same habits of mind that produced another religious product--intelligent design), and it's not the way to discredit the administration. Why play around with fantasy when the facts are bad enough?