911 Truth Movement – Part 1

 

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 account of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Adherents of the movement discuss different hypotheses about how the attacks happened 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 by sympathetic writers as “9/11 skeptics.” Members of the movement hold diverse views on other political issues.

“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 generally rejecting the term “conspiracy theorists”.

Adherents

Adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement come from diverse social backgrounds.  The movement draws adherents from both the left and the right. The Conservative supporters of the movement often come from a Libertarian background.

Prominent adherents of the movement include, among others, theologian David Ray Griffin, physicist Steven E. Jones, software engineer Jim Hoffman, architect Richard Gage, film producer Dylan Avery, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives Cynthia McKinney, actors Daniel Sunjata, Ed Asner, and Charlie Sheen, political science professor Joseph Diaferia and journalists Thierry Meyssan and Robert Fisk.

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 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, though this is likely the result of new media technologies, such as online social networks, blogs, etc.

Views

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 allege 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. According to these allegations, 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 of the 9/11 Truth movement 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 October 2004, the organization 9/11 Truth released a statement, signed by nearly 200 people, including many relatives of people who perished on September 11, 2001, that calls for an investigation into the attacks. It also asserted that unanswered questions would suggest that people within the administration of former President G. W. Bush may have deliberately allowed the attacks to happen. Actor Edward Asner, former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, former assistant secretary of housing Catherine Austin Fitts, author Richard Heinberg, Enver Masud, founder of The Wisdom Fund, professors Richard Falk of the University of California, Mark Crispin Miller of New York University, Douglas Sturm of Bucknell University, Burns H. Weston of the Iowa Law School and others signed the statement. In 2009, Van Jones, a former advisor to President Obama, said he hadn’t fully reviewed the statement before he signed and that the petition did not reflect his views “now or ever.”

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, chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, 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).^{[citation needed]}

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 alleged examples. He has characterized the 9/11 Commission Report as “a 571-page lie”.

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.”

To Be Continued In Another Post ..