9/11 truth movement

Supporters of the 9/11 Truth movement at a Los Angeles demonstration, October 2007

9/11 Truth movement is the collective name of loosely affiliated organizations and individuals who question the mainstream interpretation of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Adherents of the movement discuss and propagate 9/11 conspiracy theories and call for a new investigation into the attacks. Some of the organizations state that there is evidence that the United States government may have been either responsible for or knowingly complicit in the September 11 attacks. Motives given include the use of the attacks to initiate the launch of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in creating the opportunities to curtail civil liberties. Members of the movement are often referred to as "truthers," "conspiracy theorists," occasionally as "9/11 deniers," and "9/11 skeptics." Members of the movement hold diverse views on other political issues.

Characteristics

Name

“9/11 Truth movement” is the collective name of loosely affiliated organizations and individuals that question whether the United States government, agencies of the United States or individuals within such agencies were either responsible for or purposefully complicit in the September 11 attacks. The term is also being used by the adherents of the movement. Adherents also call themselves “9/11 Truthers,” “9/11 skeptics” or “truth activists,” while rejecting the term “conspiracy theorists”.

Adherents

Adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement come from diverse social backgrounds. Many adherents are politically liberal, while the movement also includes people on the right.

According to Christopher Hodapp and Alice Von Kannon, anti-Semites have joined the movement, and accusations of anti-Semitism have been directed against the 9/11 Truth movement. Several truth movement websites and organizations maintain statements and pages explicitly rejecting Holocaust Denial, anti-semitism and other forms of racism. One site, 911Review.com, which hosts the page, "Holocaust Denial Versus 9/11 Truth", states that, "It is easy to find writers and websites that openly mix 9/11 skepticism with Holocaust denial." Chip Berlet, speaking on NPR's Fresh Air in June 2009, stated, "I have to say in fairness to the 9/11 Truth Movement, they have tried to keep some of the anti- Semitism out of it with varying degrees of success, but good for them that they did that."

Prominent adherents of the movement include, among others, theologian David Ray Griffin, the physicist Steven E. Jones, software engineer Jim Hoffman, architect Richard Gage, film producer Dylan Avery and journalist Thierry Meyssan.

According to Lev Grossman of TIME magazine, support for the 9/11 Truth movement is not a “fringe phenomenon”, but “a mainstream political reality”. Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and author of the book Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, says that the “the amount of organisation” of the movement is significantly stronger than the organization of the movement related to doubts about the official account of the assassination of former United States President John F. Kennedy.

Views

See also: 9/11 conspiracy theories

Many adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement suspect that United States government insiders played a part in the attacks, or at the very least knew they were coming and let them occur anyway.

Those within the movement who argue that insiders within the United States government were directly responsible for the September 11 attacks, often suggest that the attacks were planned and executed in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration. This would have given the Bush administration the justification to clamp down on civil liberties and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure future supplies of oil. In some cases, hawks in the White House, especially former Vice President Dick Cheney, and members of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, have been accused of involvement in or awareness of the alleged plot.

Many adherents allege that the buildings of the World Trade Center have been destroyed by controlled demolition, a theory of major importance for the 9/11 Truth movement.

Communication

The Internet plays a large role both in the communication between adherents and between local groups of the 9/11 Truth movement and in the dissemination of the views of the movement to the public at large.

History

Both before and after the 9/11 Commission Report, there were skeptics of the official account published. Among others, Michael Ruppert and Canadian journalist Barrie Zwicker, published criticisms or pointed out purported anomalies of the mainstream account of the attacks. French author Jean-Charles Brisard and German authors Mathias Bröckers and Andreas von Bülow published books critical of media reporting and advancing the controlled demolition thesis of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.

In September 2002, the first “Bush Did It!” rallies and marches were held in San Francisco and Oakland, California organized by The All People's Coalition.

In 2006, Steven E. Jones, who became a leading academic voice of the demolition theory, published the paper “Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse?”. He was placed on paid leave by Brigham Young University following what they described as Jones's “increasingly speculative and accusatory” statements in September, 2006, pending a review of his statements and research. Six weeks later, Jones retired from the university.

In the same year, 61 legislators in the U.S. State of Wisconsin signed a petition calling for the dismissal of a University of Wisconsin assistant professor Kevin Barrett, after he joined the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Citing academic freedom, the university provost declined to take action against Barrett.

Several organizations of family members of people who have died in the attacks are calling for an independent investigation into the attacks. In 2009, a group of people, including 9/11 Truth movement activist Lorie Van Auken and others who have lost friends or relatives in the attack, appealed to the City of New York to investigate the disaster. The organization New York City Coalition for Accountability Now is collecting signatures to require the New York City Council to place the creation of an investigating commission on the November 2009 election ballot.

9/11 Commission Report reaction

To the consternation of the families and adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement, many of the questions that the 9/11 Family Steering Committee put to the 9/11 Commission were not asked in either the hearings or in the Commission Report. Lorie Van Auken, one of the Jersey Girls, estimates that only 30% of their questions were answered in the final 9/11 Commission Report, published July 22, 2004. The story of the Families Movement and their monitoring of the commission is documented in the film 9/11: Press for Truth (2006).

The 9/11 Family Steering Committee produced a website summarizing the questions they had raised to the Commission, indicating which they believe had been answered satisfactorily, which they believe had been addressed but not answered satisfactorily, and which they believe had been generally ignored in or omitted from the Report.

In addition, the 339-page book The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions by David Ray Griffin, claimed that the report had either omitted information or distorted the truth, providing 115 examples. He summarizes his book in the article The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-page lie, claiming that “the entire Report is constructed in support of one big lie: that the official story about 9/11 is true.”

On May 26, 2008 college professor Blair Gadsby began a protest and a hunger strike outside the offices of Senator and Republican Party Nominee for President John McCain's office demanding to see McCain. Arizona Republican State Senator Karen Johnson joined the protest in support. On June 10 Johnson with Gadsby as her guest and other 9/11 Truth movement members in the audience spoke before the Arizona State Senate espousing the controlled demolition theory and supporting a reopening of the 9/11 investigation. In response to a question, McCain, who wrote the foreword to a book published by the magazine Popular Mechanics, that aims at debunking the theories, said he did not meet Gadsby, adding: “Because I don't take well to threats.”

NIST Report reaction

Immediately after the collapses of the Towers and Building 7, eyewitness testimony referring to explosions, along with features of the collapses caught on film led many people, including some news anchors, to suspect that explosives had been pre-planted within the buildings. Within hours, the explanation that the impact damage and fires had led to a "progressive collapse" was presented in the mainstream media. And in weeks and months that followed, articles in scientific journals explained that the global collapses of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers were inevitable, with most asserting that the impact damage and intense heat of the fires caused the floor trusses and the vertical columns to weaken and fail, and the "pancake" effect of floors crashing down on top of one another brought down the entire structure. The initial government investigation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Report (May 2002), reached similar conclusions, but recommended a more thorough investigation. The full Report into the collapses of the Twin Towers by the official investigators, NIST, was published in June 2005.

Following the NIST Report, numerous responses were written by members of the 9/11 Truth movement. Many of these responses claimed that it ignored key evidence suggesting an explosive demolition, "distorted reality" by using deceptive language and diagrams, and attacked straw man arguments, such as the 2005 article by Jim Hoffman entitled, Building a better mirage: NIST's 3-year $20,000,000 Cover Up of the Crime of the Century.

In the fall of 2005, physicist Steven Jones, a professor at Brigham Young University at the time, announced a paper criticizing the NIST Report and describing his hypothesis that the WTC towers had been intentionally demolished by explosives. This paper garnered some mainstream media attention, including an appearance by Jones on MSNBC. This was the first such programming on a major cable news station. As of November 2006, Jones had not published his research in peer-reviewed mainstream journals. Jones has been criticized by his university for making his claims public before vetting them through the approved peer review process and has since been placed on paid leave. He continues to remain a focus of public interest for his 9/11 research.

Accordingly, in April 2007, some 9/11 victims' family members and some members of the new Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice submitted an additional request for correction to NIST, containing their own views on the defects in the report. NIST responded to this request in September 2007 supporting their original conclusions; the originators of the request wrote back to them in October 2007, asking them to reconsider their response.

Criticism

The movement has attracted the attention of some major mainstream media publications. An editor of the magazine TIME noted that the movement is "a mainstream political reality" after citing a poll in which 36% of Americans believe the government either allowed the attacks to occur, or were involved in carrying out the attacks themselves. The editor also declared that "The theories prompt small, reasonable questions that demand answers that are just too large and unreasonable to swallow." The movement receives criticism from a variety of sources. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote that he has "two basic gripes with the 9/11 Truth Movement":

"The first is that it gives supporters of Bush an excuse to dismiss critics of this administration. I have no doubt that every time one of those Loose Change dickwads opens his mouth, a Republican somewhere picks up five votes.... Secondly, it's bad enough that people in this country think Tim LaHaye is a prophet and Sean Hannity is an objective newsman. But if large numbers of people in this country can swallow 9/11 conspiracy theory without puking, all hope is lost."

MIT engineering professor Thomas W. Eagar was at first unwilling to acknowledge the concerns of the movement, saying "if (the argument) gets too mainstream, I'll engage in the debate." In response to physicist Steven Jones publishing a hypothesis that the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition, Eager stated:

"These people (in the 9/11 truth movement) use the "reverse scientific method"… they determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn't fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion."

Organizations

Since the publication of the official reports, a number of interconnected 9/11 Truth movement organizations have been formed to research the events of the day, to promote the 9/11 Truth movement and 9/11 conspiracy theories to the general public, and to try and force a new investigation.

911 Truth

This organization was launched in June 2004 and has become the central portal for all the 9/11 Truth movement organizations. It is run by Janice Matthews (Executive Director), David Kubiak(International Campaign Advisor) and Mike Berger (Media Coordinator), among others, and its advisory board includes Steven Jones, Barrie Zwicker and Faiz Khan.

The organization co-sponsored the Zogby Polls that have shown an increasing number of people believing the government has covered-up the real story of 9/11. A few of its sister and spin-off organizations include the 9/11 Visibility Project and Justice For 9/11. It also organizes gatherings and events, promotes "scholarly" research, warns about the discrediting effect of extreme alternative theories, and attempts to affect mainstream media coverage.

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

See also: Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is an organization of architectural and engineering professionals who advocate September 11 conspiracy theories and are calling for a new investigation into the cause of the destruction of the Twin Towers and 7 WTC. The group is collecting signatures for a petition to the United States Congress that demands "a truly independent investigation with subpoena power" of the September 11 attacks, and in particular "a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives that might have been the actual cause of the destruction" of the World Trade Center buildings. Richard Gage, a San Francisco Bay area based architect, founded Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in 2006.

Investigations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) have concluded that the buildings collapsed as a result of the impacts of the planes and of the fires that resulted from them. Gage criticized the government agency NIST for not having investigated the complete sequence of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and claims that "the official explanation of the total destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers has explicitly failed to address the massive evidence for explosive demolition." To support its position, the group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth points to the "free fall" pace of the collapse of the buildings, the "lateral ejection of steel", and to the "mid-air pulverization of concrete".

Scholars for 9/11 Truth

The original 'Scholars for 9/11 Truth', founded by Dr. James H. Fetzer and Dr. Steven Jones on December 15, 2005, was a group of individuals of varying backgrounds and expertise who rejected the mainstream media and government account of the September 11 attacks.

Initially the group invited many ideas and hypotheses to be considered, however, leading members soon came to feel that the inclusion of some theories advocated by Fetzer—such as the use of directed energy weapons or small nuclear bombs to destroy the Twin Towers—were insufficiently supported by evidence and were exposing the group to ridicule. By December 2006, Dr. Steven Jones and several others set up a new scholars group titled Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, whose focus was in the use of the scientific method in analysis. The original members took a vote on which group to join and the majority voted to move to the new group. By 2007, James Fetzer had been openly rejected by the 9/11 Truth Movement, banned from and criticized on popular forums and no longer invited to public 9/11 events.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice

Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice (STJ) formed in January 2007 and is "a group of scholars and supporters endeavoring to address the unanswered questions of the September 11, 2001 attack" with a focus on scientific research. The group is composed of more than 700 members, including Richard Gage, Steven E. Jones, Jim Hoffman, David Ray Griffin, Peter Phillips, former Congressman Daniel Hamburg, and Kevin Ryan. Most members support the theory that the World Trade Center Towers were destroyed through explosive demolition.

In 2008 and 2009, several Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice members published essays in science and engineering journals. In April 2008, a letter by members Steven E. Jones, Frank Legge, Kevin Ryan, Anthony Szamboti and James Gourley, was published in The Open Civil Engineering Journal. In July 2008, an article by Ryan, Gourley and Jones was published in the Environmentalist. In October 2008, an essay describing what the author considers fundamental errors in a Bažant and Verdure paper was published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics by member James R. Gourley. And in April 2009, as reported by major Danish newspapers, Danish chemist and STJ member Niels H. Harrit, of the University of Copenhagen, and eight other authors, some also STJ members, published a paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, titled, 'Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe'. The paper concludes that chips consisting of unreacted and partially reacted super-thermite are present in the samples of the dust.

9/11 CitizensWatch

Main article: 9/11 Citizens Watch

The group was formed in 2002 by John Judge and Kyle Hence and, along with the Family Steering Committee, played an active role in calling for the establishment of the 9/11 Commission, and monitoring the commission closely.

William Rodriguez at American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 and the NeoCon Agenda in Los Angeles, California, June 24/5, 2006.

Hispanic Victims Group

Main article: William Rodriguez

The Hispanic Victims Group is a group created after the 9/11 attacks, founded by William Rodriguez, an adherent of the 9/11 Truth movement. The group was one of the key forces behind the creation of the 9/11 Commission. William Rodriguez, as founder of the group, was a member of the Families Advisory Council for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

We Are Change

The We Are Change, founded by 9/11 Truth activist Luke Rudkowski, is a grassroots organization based out of New York City that has chapters worldwide. The group stages street protests and confronts people they suspect have knowledge of or involvement in the attacks and has organized 9/11 anniversary events . In addition to 9/11 truth activities the group has lobbied for legislation aiding and raised money for sick first responders. Several politicians and entertainers have actively supported the group. The organization staged a protest march at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The group filmed protests in an effort to catch illegal action by protesters or police.

Conferences

Members of the 9/11 truth organizations, such as the Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, regularly hold meetings and conferences to discuss alternative theories about 9/11 and to strategize about how best to achieve their goals. Many of these conferences are organized by 911truth.org, and some have been covered by the international media.

Internal critique

While there is general agreement within the movement that individuals within the United States government (but not necessarily the government as a whole) are responsible for the attacks, alternative theories differ about what may have happened. There have been a number of articles and responses written by members critiquing the methods and theories of other members, often in a scholarly format, as in the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

While Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice states that they advocate the use of the scientific method and civil research activities over public debate, Jim Fetzer's group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, has said that the scientific method is unnecessary and that any imaginable theory is worthy of advocating to the public. For example, reporting on a conference involving Fetzer's group, a Madison Times article stated: "By Sunday the conference had covered weather control, weapons from space, and the idea that the planes that struck the towers never existed at all."

Major media

Books

Authors of 9/11 Truth movement literature is theologian David Ray Griffin. His two books, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (March 2004), which outlined a methodical, deductive framework for researching 9/11, and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (October 2004), became best-sellers. His Debunking 9/11 Debunking (May 2007) looks at the way magazines such as Popular Mechanics have sought to debunk the alternative 9/11 theories. His most recent work, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the cover-up, and the exposé (2008), was written to update his original book, The New Pearl Harbor, reflecting information and insights from five major developments that have occurred since his original publication.

In September 2004, the interactive "Complete 9/11 Timeline" website by Paul Thompson, which is a collection of mainstream media reports presented chronologically, was made into the book The Terror Timeline.

Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (October 2004) identified potential key insider suspects in the 9/11 attacks and provide an examination of their context: petroleum, geopolitics, narco-traffic, intelligence and militarism. Webster Tarpley's Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (2005) described a link between 9/11 and previous accusations of false flag state-sponsored terrorism such as Gladio or the Red Brigades.

Films

Films made by the 9/11 Truth movement include: Loose Change:Final Cut (2007) by Korey Rowe, Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State (2005) by Alex Jones, 911 Mysteries: Demolitions (2006), The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw (2004) by Barrie Zwicker, and 9/11: Blueprint for Truth (2007) and updated 2008 Edition (2008) by Richard Gage.

These documentaries present a range of alternate theories about how the attacks might have been carried out.

9/11 Press for Truth (2006) documents the struggle by the Jersey Widows to open a full investigation of the events, and their frustration while monitoring the 9/11 Commission as part of the Family Steering Committee. The film, partly based on The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson, also looks at warnings received by the US government prior to September 11 and instances during the US invasion of Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda managed to escape from US forces and flee into Pakistan.

Alex Jones, 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorists are the subject of a documentary New World Order directed by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel that debuted on the Independent Film Channel on May 26, 2009. The documentary, while not endorsing the movement, is described as the giving the movement "more sympathetic, or less critical, airing than they've yet had (except among the converted)".

Mainstream media coverage

• 2002 September 15 – New York Magazine
• 2004 March 25 – The Christian Science Monitor
• 2006 July 28 – National Post (Toronto, Canada)
• 2006 August – Vanity Fair
• 2006 September 3 – San Francisco Chronicle,
• 2006 September 5 – The Guardian (United Kingdom)
• 2006 September 6 – Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
• 2008 June 7 – Financial Times Magazine

See also

• Amateur investigators researching the 2001 anthrax attacks
• Casualties of the September 11, 2001 attacks
• Collapse of the World Trade Center
• Criticisms of the 9/11 Commission Report
• Health effects arising from the September 11, 2001 attacks
• Project for a New American Century
• USA PATRIOT Act
• War games in progress on September 11, 2001
• World Trade Center bombing (1993)
• World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories

External links

• 911truth.org