Why is David Ray Griffin Obsessed with Benjamin Chertoff

As I mentioned in the comments on a previous post, David Ray Griffin devotes two entire pages to the claim that Popular Mechanics editor Benjamin Chertoff is somehow related to Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. In a recent radio interview, he continues this insanity:

Host: Would you say that the book is a genuinely independent publication?

DRG: Well it’s questionable. One thing that makes one suspicious is the fact that they go to great lengths to try to disguise the fact that young Benjamin Chertoff is a cousin of Michael Chertoff the head of Homeland Security. Now one author, who had written about this suggested that you now, maybe this was even set up. You know, I don’t get into this type of speculation. One might infer that. And uh, they go to great lengths, and even claim that their not sure, they doubt that Ben is a cousin. This is one of the most hilarious parts of the book, because here is a guy who is on their staff and yet Meigs, the new editor, editor in chief of Popular Mechanics is claiming that his crack staff was able to, in just a few months to figure out the truth about why the airplanes were not intercepted, why the World Trade Center buildings came down, what really happened at the Pentagon, and so on. And yet they couldn’t discover whether a fellow working on their own staff was related to the Director of Homeland Security.

They even twist words. The quotation by the man who wrote that story, he called up, this was Christopher Bollyn, he called up Ben Chertoff’s mother. He was curious, is Ben related to Michael Chertoff? And she said, “Oh of course, he’s his cousin.” Well, when you read that in Popular Mechanics, it gets transmuted into “she said it’s possible he might be a distant cousin”. So there seems to be an attempt through dishonesty to disassociate the book from Benjamin Chertoff, if you look at the cover, the inside cover, you do not see his name mentioned, even though, the book for the most part is “word for word” repetition of the original article and Benjamin Chertoff has said he was the senior researcher of that article, and yet reading this book for the most part you would assume that he really didn’t have anything to do with it.

He even goes on from there, but I got tired of typing.

Why does he think this is some type of cover-up? Does he think it is the job of private employers to conduct intensive background checks of their employees to find out who they might have as distant relatives? Would this somehow tell us more about what happened on 9/11? This sounds more like some call for some type of a Willis Carto/Christopher Bollyn style racial purity law, than the science and logic that he claims to follow. This man isn't a scholar, he is a paranoid rumormonger, who bases his attacks on accusations of blood guilt, written by a known anti-Semite, who attacks people based on their ethnic heritage.