It also comes at a time when the White House and intelligence officials are reviewing whether to declassify one of the country’s most sensitive documents — known as the “28 pages.” They have to do with 9/11 and the possible existence of a Saudi support network for the hijackers while they were in the U.S.

For 13 years, the 28 pages have been locked away in a secret vault. Only a small group of people have ever seen them. Tonight, you will hear from some of the people who have read them and believe, along with the families of 9/11 victims that they should be declassified.

Bob Graham: I think it is implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn’t speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many of whom didn’t have a high school education– could’ve carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States.

Bob Graham: I think they are a key part.

Former U.S. Senator Bob Graham has been trying to get the 28 pages released since the day they were classified back in 2003, when he played a major role in the first government investigation into 9/11.

Bob Graham: I remain deeply disturbed by the amount of material that has been censored from this report.

At the time, Graham was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-chair of the bipartisan joint congressional inquiry into intelligence failures surrounding the attacks. The Joint Inquiry reviewed a half a million documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and produced an 838 page report — minus the final chapter which was blanked out — excised by the Bush administration for reasons of national security.

CONTINUED

The post 60 Minutes Covers Declassification of the 28 Pages appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

A top F.B.I. official unexpectedly arranges a meeting at Dulles International Airport outside Washington with Mr. Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after he has pressed for information on a bureau terrorism inquiry. Mr. Graham, a Democrat, is then hustled off to a clandestine location, where he hopes for a breakthrough in his long pursuit of ties between leading Saudis and the Sept. 11 hijackers.

This real-life encounter happened in 2011, Mr. Graham said, and it took a startling twist.

“He basically said, ‘Get a life,’ ” Mr. Graham said of the F.B.I. official, who suggested that the former senator was chasing a dead-end investigation.

Mr. Graham, 78, a two-term governor of Florida and three-term senator who left Capitol Hill in 2005, says he will not relent in his efforts to force the government to make public a secret section of a congressional review he helped write — one that, by many accounts, implicates Saudi citizens in helping the hijackers.

“No. 1, I think the American people deserve to know the truth of what has happened in their name,” said Mr. Graham, who was a co-chairman of the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks. “No. 2 is justice for these family members who have suffered such loss and thus far have been frustrated largely by the U.S. government in their efforts to get some compensation.”

Mr. Graham’s focus on a possible Saudi connection has received renewed attention because of claims made by victims’ families in a federal court in New York that Saudi Arabia was responsible for aiding the Sept. 11 hijackers and because of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the F.B.I. in Florida.

In sworn statements in the two cases, Mr. Graham has said there was evidence of support from the Saudi government for the terrorists. He also says the F.B.I. withheld from his inquiry, as well as a subsequent one, the fact that the bureau had investigated a Saudi family in Sarasota, Fla., and had found multiple contacts between it and the hijackers training nearby until the family fled just before the attacks.

Despite the F.B.I.’s insistence to the contrary, Mr. Graham said there was no evidence that the bureau had ever disclosed that line of investigation to his panel or the national commission that reviewed the attacks and delivered a report in 2004.

“One thing that irritates me is that the F.B.I. has gone beyond just covering up, trying to avoid disclosure, into what I call aggressive deception,” Mr. Graham said during an interview in a family office in this Miami suburb, which rose on what was a sprawling dairy farm operated by Mr. Graham’s father, also political leader in Florida.

CONTINUED

The post Bob Graham Pursues Claims of Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Attacks appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify.

“I think it is the right thing to do,” said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts and an author of a bipartisan resolution encouraging President Obama to declassify the section. “Let’s put it out there.”

White House officials say the administration has undertaken a review on whether to release the pages but has no timetable for when they might be made public.

Mr. Lynch and his allies have been joined by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was a leader of the inquiry. He has called for the release of the report’s Part 4, which dealt with Saudi Arabia, since President George W. Bush ordered it classified when the rest of the report was released in December 2002.

Mr. Graham has repeatedly said it shows that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks. “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” Mr. Graham said last month as he pressed for the pages to be made public.

Relatives of those killed on Sept. 11 as well as plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia have also demanded that the pages be made public, seeing them as the vital link that they believe connects an important ally of the United States to the deadly attacks. They say the pages, Part 4 of the report, could also help in determining the source of current funding for terrorist activities.

CONTINUED

The post New Light Cast on Secret Pages of 9/11 Report appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Good, but with a few major changes. Rossini was drinking club soda instead of the expensive cabernets he quaffed when I first knew him as a high-flying FBI official in Washington a decade ago, when he was a special assistant to the bureau’s chief spokesman, John Miller (now with the New York City Police Department). “I’ve cut back,” he said. “Feeling good.”

But when I ask him how he’s really doing, the light in his eyes dims. “Well, you know, I still miss the job,” he said, shaking his head. A boneheaded move—showing confidential FBI documents to his actress-flame Linda Fiorentino, who said she was researching a script about L.A. wiretapper extraordinaire Anthony Pellicano—cost him his career in 2008 and nearly landed him in jail.

“What’s past is past,” he said. But not all of it. He quickly told me of an encounter the day before on a street in Yonkers, where he keeps an apartment. He’d run into a close family friend who’d lost relatives at the World Trade Center on 9/11. “Mark,” she told him, “you’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

“She says that every time I see her,” he said, his mouth turning down. But now, at 53, six years out of the bureau, he’s making a determined effort to do just that—to close some of the gaping holes in the official 9/11 narrative, which blames the attacks on a vague “intelligence failure.”

Rossini is well placed to do just that. He’s been at the center of one of the enduring mysteries of 9/11: Why the CIA refused to share information with the FBI (or any other agency) about the arrival of at least two well-known Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States in 2000, even though the spy agency had been tracking them closely for years.

That the CIA did block him and Doug Miller, a fellow FBI agent assigned to the “Alec Station,” the cover name for CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, from notifying bureau headquarters about the terrorists has been told before, most notably in a 2009 Nova documentary on PBS, “The Spy Factory.” Rossini and Miller related how they learned earlier from the CIA that one of the terrorists (and future hijacker), Khalid al-Mihdhar, had multi-entry visas on a Saudi passport to enter the United States. When Miller drafted a report for FBI headquarters, a CIA manager in the top-secret unit told him to hold off. Incredulous, Miller and Rossini had to back down. The station’s rules prohibited them from talking to anyone outside their top-secret group.

All these years later, Rossini still regrets complying with that command. If he had disobeyed the gag order, the nearly 3,000 Americans slaughtered on 9/11 would probably still be alive. “This is the pain that never escapes me, that haunts me each and every day of my life,” he wrote in the draft of a book he shared with me. “I feel like I failed, even though I know it was the system and the intelligence community on the whole that failed.”

The various commissions and internal agency reviews that examined the “intelligence failure” of 9/11 blamed institutional habits and personal rivalries among CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) officials for preventing them from sharing information. Out of those reviews came the creation of a new directorate of national intelligence, which stripped the CIA of its coordinating authority. But blaming “the system” sidesteps the issue of why one CIA officer in particular, Michael Anne Casey, ordered Rossini’s cohort, Miller, not to alert the FBI about al-Mihdhar. Or why the CIA’s Alec Station bosses failed to alert the FBI—or any other law enforcement agency—about the arrival of Nawaf al-Hazmi, another key Al-Qaeda operative (and future hijacker) the agency had been tracking to and from a terrorist summit in Malaysia.

Because Casey remains undercover at the CIA, Rossini does not name her in his unfinished manuscript. But he wrote, “When I confronted this person…she told me that ‘this was not a matter for the FBI. The next al-Qaeda attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia and their visas for America are just a diversion. You are not to tell the FBI about it. When and if we want the FBI to know about it, we will.’”

Rossini recalled going to Miller’s cubicle right after his conversation with Casey. “He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.… We were both stunned and could not understand why the FBI was not going to be told about this.”

It remains a mystery. None of the post-9/11 investigating bodies were able to get to the bottom of it, in part because Rossini and Miller, who continued to work at Alec Station after the attacks, didn’t tell anyone what happened there. When congressional investigators came sniffing around, they kept their mouths shut.

CONTINUED

The post The Inside Information That Could Have Stopped 9/11 appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The post Media Roots Interviews Jon Gold appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

The report, released by a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committees in December 2002, contains 28 redacted pages that family members and victims say would shed new light on the hijackings. At the time the report was released, the Bush administration classified the material, but numerous sources reported it dealt with the Saudis.

“Flight 93 was supposed to have hit the Capitol Dome,” imposing a special obligation on Congress to get to the bottom of the matter, said Alice Hoagland, whose son Mark Bingham was one of the passengers who rushed the cockpit, thwarting that part of the attack. The plane crashed in Shanksville, Pa.

In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the crash in Shanksville, including the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudis.

The small group was joined at a press conference at the Cannon House office building attended by Reps. Walter B. Jones, R-N.C., Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who are calling for passage of a House resolution requesting that the Obama administration make the information public.

“This is the beginning of a long process,” Jones said. “I do not believe that we as a nation will be strong unless we reveal what the 28 pages say.”

The Saudi government for years has been embroiled in litigation filed by victims, their families and insurers that suffered billions in losses at ground zero accusing the kingdom of providing financial support to Islamist charities that in turn funded al-Qaida.

One of the suits, filed by the Philadelphia firm of Cozen O’Connor, alleges the Saudis continued their support even after they were warned in the late 1990s by a delegation of senior U.S. officials of the link between the charities and terrorists.

The lawsuit, filed in 2003, has taken a long and winding road through the federal court system. In 2005, federal District Judge Richard Conway Casey granted the request of the Saudi government and an affiliated charity, the Saudi High Commission for the Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to be removed as defendants.

Casey ruled then that the charities were too far removed from the government to establish responsibility.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld Casey’s ruling in 2008, but on different grounds. It found that under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, suits alleging a foreign government’s involvement in terrorism can only go forward with what amounted to a sign off by the U.S. State Department. And in the case of Saudi Arabia, there had been none.

But in a surprising development, the 2nd Circuit reversed itself in December, effectively reinstating Saudi Arabia as a defendant. The court said it decided to change course because it allowed a related lawsuit to go forward on similar grounds.

Jones and Lynch introduced the resolution late last year calling on the Obama administration to make public the redacted 28 pages. At the time, Jones described the redacted material, which he had read, as “shocking.”

The 9/11 victims have gotten key support from former Sen. Bob Graham, D., Fla., who was co-chair of the joint investigation and who was one of the first on Capitol Hill to accuse the Saudi government of involvement in the attacks. Graham also provided a sworn statement in the Cozen lawsuit alleging that an obscure Saudi national who provided assistance to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid Al-Mihdhar, likely was working for the Saudi government. Graham said that Omar Al-Bayoumi was “acting at the direction of elements of the Saudi government” when he helped Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar find an apartment in San Diego and provided them financial assistance before the hijackings.

The post Renewed Effort To Declassify Key Portion Of 9/11 Report appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

But today, Santa would like to tell you all about something very naughty, something very, very naughty indeed. Dear children, have you not heard? Why, 9/11 was an inside job! Oh, ho, ho, my, yes it was!

I mean, look at the facts, boys and girls! We already know the Bush administration was itching to go to war in Iraq, now, don’t we? Yes, indeed we do, my darling ones! The Downing Street memo proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Then you look at the Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, the one headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Ignored! Why, children, they threw that briefing aside like used wrapping paper on Christmas morning, didn’t they?

And remember, sweet little ones, Bin Laden never claimed responsibility for the attacks until 2004. Do you know how many years that is, boys and girls? Something was up the government’s sleeve, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: It wasn’t sugar plums, oh, no! No, it was the ties between the bin Laden and Bush families. They’ve been under the mistletoe for decades, if you catch your old pal Kris Kringle’s meaning! I’ve checked my list twice, and it seems Arbusto Energy, a Bush business, had financial connections to Salem bin Laden, half-brother of Osama. The CIA actually helped create and fund al-Qaeda right around the time Bush Senior was the agency’s director—ho, ho, ho, ol’ H.W. stuffed their pockets as fat as a Christmas goose!

Now, as for the towers themselves: The type of steel they used melts at a temperature of about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, and as I’m sure all you smart little boys and girls know, jet fuel burns at 1,500 degrees, tops. My darlings, you’d need quite a Yule log to create that extra 1,200 degrees, wouldn’t you? Oh, what a glorious sight it would be!

Of course, you do know what they found in the Ground Zero debris, don’t you? Would you like St. Nicholas to tell you? Well, then, hop up on his lap and I’ll whisper it in your ear: traces of nano-thermite. Does that jingle any bells upstairs? Nano-thermite is an explosive compound, children, capable of making the biggest Christmas cracker you ever saw! So what in the name of Donner and Blitzen was it doing in the world’s largest banking complex? Was Lehman Brothers or one of the insurance companies stockpiling explosives? No, children. You find nano-thermite where there’s been a controlled demolition. Ever see a controlled demolition, little ones? That’s where the whole building plummets straight downward like a plumb bob and every floor is destroyed. Even if the building is struck in the middle.

Oh, dear, perhaps ol’ Santa has just gone a little nutty in the head, like dear Mrs. Claus repeatedly likes to claim! Perhaps, much like Mrs. Claus, Santa would be better off pretending the facts don’t exist. But you believe, don’t you, children? You believe in Santa’s theory.

Now, I’m not saying the hijackers weren’t naughty. They were very, very naughty indeed. But if you want to really talk naughty, there’s not enough coal in Santa’s sack for a government that throws its own citizens under the sleigh just to gain political power.

Ho, ho, ho, so many questions dance through Santa’s head! What about the six eyewitnesses who saw a low-flying jet immediately after Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, children? Why was debris from the flight found miles away from the crash site? And why did the BBC incorrectly report that 7 World Trade Center had collapsed moments before it actually did? Talk about a snow job, eh, young ones? Why, it’s a veritable winter wonderland!

Perhaps this Christmas, Santa will bring some of you very well-behaved—and discreet—young children some nice, shiny new computers to play with, so you can go to 911truth.org, watch “Loose Change” on YouTube, and see for yourselves. Because if you ask Santa, the truth needs to come out in order to properly honor the memory of the victims and awaken a duped populace, slumbering away in their cozy beds, living in dreamland. We can close our eyes and drink the government eggnog, or we can raise our voices and demand to know what really happened. Isn’t that right, boys and girls?

Well, I’ve still got a lot of toys to build before Christmas Eve, my little ones, but I’ll be visiting you all very soon—ho, ho, ho, that is if I’m not jailed as an enemy combatant for asking simple questions!

Because that’s what they fucking do, you know.

The post The Onion: "Ho, Ho, Ho! 9/11 Was An Inside Job!" appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action. Officials at the Counterterrorism Center of the C.I.A. grew apoplectic. On July 9, at a meeting of the counterterrorism group, one official suggested that the staff put in for a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place, two people who were there told me in interviews. The suggestion was batted down, they said, because there would be no time to train anyone else.

That same day in Chechnya, according to intelligence I reviewed, Ibn Al-Khattab, an extremist who was known for his brutality and his links to Al Qaeda, told his followers that there would soon be very big news. Within 48 hours, an intelligence official told me, that information was conveyed to the White House, providing more data supporting the C.I.A.’s warnings. Still, the alarm bells didn’t sound.

On July 24, Mr. Bush was notified that the attack was still being readied, but that it had been postponed, perhaps by a few months. But the president did not feel the briefings on potential attacks were sufficient, one intelligence official told me, and instead asked for a broader analysis on Al Qaeda, its aspirations and its history. In response, the C.I.A. set to work on the Aug. 6 brief.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush officials attempted to deflect criticism that they had ignored C.I.A. warnings by saying they had not been told when and where the attack would occur. That is true, as far as it goes, but it misses the point. Throughout that summer, there were events that might have exposed the plans, had the government been on high alert. Indeed, even as the Aug. 6 brief was being prepared, Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi believed to have been assigned a role in the 9/11 attacks, was stopped at an airport in Orlando, Fla., by a suspicious customs agent and sent back overseas on Aug. 4. Two weeks later, another co-conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested on immigration charges in Minnesota after arousing suspicions at a flight school. But the dots were not connected, and Washington did not react.

Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t ever know. And that may be the most agonizing reality of all.

The post 9/11 Warnings Revealed: CIA Reports Attack ‘Will Occur Soon’ appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Somebody posts a photo on a message board with a title like “Image of the Pentagon Impact area on 9/11. How the hell can anyone with a brain think this was caused by a Boeing 757?” I click. It’s a low-resolution ground-level shot of the smoking Pentagon. Using Photoshop, or MS Paint maybe, somebody has drawn a pair of circles — one around some flames on the left and another around a damaged piece of wall on the right. I go to the comments.

Ah, yes, there it is: the single missile theory.

The SMT is pretty simple: What if it wasn’t Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon, but a cruise missile (or, as per the most extreme iterations, a missile cloaked in a hologram to make it look like a plane)? No matter how wildly it swerves from most eyewitness accounts, not to mention the official account described in the 9/11 Commission Report, the SMT has likely persisted because (A) that hole in the wall looks kinda small and (B) unlike the attacks on the World Trade Center, no clear footage of the attack on the Pentagon has been released.

All we have is five frames from a parking lot security camera that seem to show the plane crossing the Pentagon lawn and exploding on the western wall. Other footage, from traffic cams and such, was supposedly confiscated by federal investigators soon after the attack and has not yet seen the light of day.

The SMT really bugs me. By the time the Pentagon was attacked, the perpetrators had already proven they could hijack planes and fly them into buildings. Why would they need a missile an hour later? I wrote something to that effect on the message board. Most people said they didn’t know. One person said this:

“I don’t think there were any planes. There is a video out there that compiles footage from all news broadcasts around the planet and surmises they were all off of one feed. Seriously, if there is no plane at the Pentagon or the field, then why would there be one at the WTC? It’s too easy, the people that were called in as ‘witnesses’ all worked for the networks and therefore are inherently biased based on the BS we are being fed.”

That’s one of the nagging little problems with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Just when you think you’ve found a starting point to discuss the issues, the rabbit hole goes even deeper. The answer is often a larger conspiracy.

The bigger problem with the 9/11 Truth Movement is that there’s no such thing as a unified, coherent 9/11 Truth Movement.

On Jan. 31, 2011, Jon Gold drove from his home in Plymouth Meeting to Washington, D.C., and handcuffed himself to the White House fence. He had a big, professionally made sign that read, “We were LIED to about 9/11.” Even though he’d hyped the stunt on his website for a month beforehand, his friend with a video camera was the only other activist to show up and support him. Police, park police and maybe even Secret Service did stop by at various times. He was eventually freed with bolt-cutters and arrested.

Gold is the kind of guy journalists like to call “a man without a country.” He believes his actual country has covered up the true nature of its biggest tragedy. And the people you’d think would be his people, the truthers, he wants nothing to do with.

One of the 260-plus videos Gold has uploaded onto his YouTube channel illustrates his feelings about most of his “fellow” activists. Circus music. A title card that says, “The following crap hurts the cause of 9/11 Justice.” Then a laundry list of the stuff that often gets his peers labeled as crackpots: missiles, holograms, CGI, mini-nukes, laser beams from space, chemtrails (more on those later), man-made earthquakes, UFOs, the Illuminati, the Jews, plane-swaps, hijackers who didn’t die, and about a dozen other things.

“It’s sad. There are people on the fringe, the authors, who constantly write books, who promote crappy information, and people who mean well pick up on this and they start pushing it.” This is Gold, when he and I meet up for coffee near South Street. “There was a time back in 2006 when we were very, I don’t know if you would say powerful, but we had a lot of members and the media started to focus on us. But who did they focus on? They focused on people like Kevin Barrett, who [says] Israel’s responsible for everything, you know? They focused on Webster Tarpley [a promoter of the “9/11 was an inside job” idea], who’s just a charlatan. They focused on the fringe.”

Gold laughs when I ask whether he ever finds himself arguing with that fringe.

“All the time. I call them out as often as possible because I want there to be clear evidence that I am not associated with those people.”

After Sept. 11, Gold got swept up in the “patriotic binge” — waving the flag, supporting the war. Some of that started to erode as he watched the news. He remembers CNN reporting Jan. 29, 2002, that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney each separately asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the scope of the post-9/11 investigation. Says Gold: “And I thought, why would the vice president and the president, of all people, not want to know exactly how and why this happened so as to make sure it could never happen again?”

Then there was the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief, eventually made public, titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” “After that came out and I saw that we were being lied to, and then I saw how they were using the 9/11 attacks, I just — I was furious, and it was off to the races.”

He’s been at it for nearly a decade. “I’m very old-school 9/11 Truth, which means I support the families and I support the responders,” he says. That’s something you don’t hear in most truther rhetoric: mentions of the 2,977 who died, and their families, and the first responders, and their quest for health care. Gold helped fund the 2006 documentary 9/11: Press for Truth, in which the families of victims, like the Jersey Girls, express their frustration in getting answers from the government about who knew what ahead of time, which warnings we ignored, and why more wasn’t done that day. Gold also tends to cite mainstream sources, like FBI documents and news reports, on his website and at public appearances. He espouses no theory.

“I know more about 9/11 than probably most people on the planet, and I don’t know what happened that day, I don’t know who was ultimately responsible. But I look at 9/11 as a crime as opposed to an act of war, and as with every crime, there are suspects for that crime, and along with Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 19 hijackers, elements within our government and other governments had more than earned the title of suspect for the crime. More than earned.”

I’m on the second floor of an unmarked building in Northern Liberties watching a cartoon about the evils of the Federal Reserve Bank. There are about 20 of us, maybe fewer, sitting on couches. The plot revolves around a cool dude telling his clueless friend about how the Fed — depicted as a monstrous, black tentacled beast — is a privately owned and utterly unregulated money-sucker. The movie’s kinda funny and mostly pretty straightforward. There’s a lot of Google-able stuff about the gold standard. But it does take a dubious detour to explain how JFK got assassinated not long after announcing his intentions to end the Fed. During the quieter parts, we can hear the jubilant outbursts of a yoga class through the walls.

Not 9/11-related, as far as I know. Why am I here? Well, this is a public meeting by a group currently called Truth, Freedom, Prosperity, but they used to call themselves Philly 9/11 Truth, and they still list that as one of their concerns, along with financial and economic freedom, alternative energy technologies, “legalization of nature,” etc.

After the movie, organizer Michael Salvi, a friendly guy in a mock-Phillies T-shirt (“Liberty” in the team’s script on the front, “Ron Paul” on the back), leads an open forum discussion. A couple people discredit the JFK thing, there’s talk about what the average person can do about the Fed, somebody asks if he should buy gold for “when the whole thing comes crashing down.”

Then a guy in the front row tilts the discussion to numerology, the occult and, I think, the Illuminati. He points out, for reasons I don’t pick up on, that Oswald, Osama and Oslo all begin with the same two letters. He adds 9 and 1 and 1 and comes up with 11, an important number in occult circles. People let him speak, but the conversation quickly returns to financial talk. Jon Gold would not enjoy a meeting like this.

Salvi says he shows films that will stimulate conversation, and he’s not endorsing their messages 100 percent. As for 9/11, it’s still something he and the group are concerned with, but it’s on the backburner to the economy discussions.

“Some of the theories are really sexy. George Bush had full knowledge. This person was told to do this. This country was involved. It’s all very exciting and enticing, but I just don’t know,” he says. “The one thing that I can get behind is that aliens with missiles … ” He’s joking.

The bottom line for him is that the official story sounds fishy. “I certainly don’t believe the stories that 19 guys were able to get four planes with box cutters and took it over with these red bandannas on and crashed the planes into these buildings and everything but their passports burned up. Including the black box.”

In the lobby outside the screening room, I score a DVD on legalizing marijuana and some fliers: Better Living Through Alchemy, How Mind Control Works, The War on Consciousness, and a bunch about ending the Fed. Somehow I fail to pick up the paper on Satanism.

Knowing that people in the Truth movement are always getting dismissed as kooks, I ask Salvi about the fliers.

“It just kinda comes with the territory,” he says. He used to get nervous about bringing together such disparate opinions on touchy subjects, but he says things have never gotten too heated. The fliers are part of the group’s general air of open-mindedness.

“We have 700 members in our group. I’m less worried about offending the mass public by some perception. I’m more worried about offending the person who shows up at every meeting that we throw, at every event that we do, who’s been super supportive. And for me to turn around — and I may not know about what they do, and they’re super passionate — for me to just to tell them they can’t do it, it’s the exact opposite of freedom.”

Jon Gold and I are Facebook friends now, which means I’m only one degree of separation from well-known anti-war/anti-Bush activist Cindy Sheehan. She and Gold are real-life friends. They got arrested together at a protest in March of last year.

Gold’s always filling his Facebook wall with videos of congressional hearings, public statements, news reports, things like that. He posts a 2004 clip of Bush in the Rose Garden addressing the press after meeting with the 9/11 Commission. The point is to remind you that Bush and Cheney agreed to only meet with the commission together, in private, and not under oath.

“I’m glad I took the time,” Bush is shown saying. “This is an important commission, and it’s important that they ask the questions they ask so that they can help make recommendations necessary to better protect our homeland. It was — I enjoyed it.” Yes, Bush actually said he enjoyed it. It had been expected that the president would be grilled a little on why he didn’t react right away when the nation was under attack, and why no fighter jets were scrambled in time to intercept hijacked planes. The president, however, characterized the meeting as a “cordial conversation.”

Gold points me to the link and asks what I think of it. I tell him it reminded me how frustrating it was living in the Bush era. The supposed leader of the free world came off daily like a bumbling fool who thinks he’s slick. Gold doesn’t exactly see it that way.

“People often say incompetence, but these individuals weren’t incompetent. They came in office, they wanted to go to war. They did go to war. They wanted to make billions for their corporate friends, they did that. They wanted to expand executive power, they did that. They committed so many crimes during their eight years [in] office and remained Teflon-coated throughout,” says Gold. “There was no accountability at all.”

The 9/11 Commission Report was supposed to do that, but several things remain problematic, including its lack of reference to World Trade Center 7 (the third skyscraper to collapse that day) and apparent conflicts of interests on the board (including Bush’s national security strategist Philip Zelikow). That’s why so many people say they want a new investigation into 9/11. But does Gold think a fair shake is possible the next time around?

“It has to be away from the government. There has to be subpoena power, people have to be put under oath, which George Bush and Dick Cheney refused to do. I don’t know, maybe an international body of some kind. It can’t take place in D.C.”

A few weeks ago, Gold had told me to stay tuned, that on Aug. 11, something “huge” was going to happen. That gave me pause. Gold’s a gentle-giant type, built like a Mack truck but soft-spoken and calm. I briefly imagined him doing something dangerous, then dismissed it. He had been led from the White House fence to the police car like a diner whose table was ready.

The date came and I didn’t see anything on CNN, or MSNBC, or anywhere, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for, either.

Gold finally sends me a link to the Atlantic‘s blog:

“Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism czar, believes that former CIA director George Tenet and other top aides hid intelligence that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.”

Eventually I see the story a few other places, but it doesn’t earn a “breaking news” banner or make a ripple in the general consciousness.

“Does this happen a lot? Something that seems pretty huge and newsworthy doesn’t get coverage in the media?” I ask him.

“Happens too often,” he says. “The media loves to focus on the fringe, forget the family members asking questions, and ignore everything except the theories.”

That’s why there’s really no such thing as a solitary, unified 9/11 Truth Movement. Just a fractured bunch of people with wild theories on one side, a quest for answers on the other side, and a thousand points in between. “Even the [phrase] 9/11 Truth is, like, toxic,” says Gold. “I refer to myself now as an advocate for 9/11 justice as opposed to a 9/11 truther.”

Not sure what reverse numerology SEPTA was using when it decided to rename its regional rail lines, but I eventually find my way to a small town on the Main Line one rainy night, for a screening by a group that meets regularly to watch films about 9/11. On the way, I read Popular Mechanics ‘ 2005 article “Debunking the 9/11 Myths,” which I found online. Basically, the writers line up the dubious claims from conspiracy sites (mostly related to physics and engineering) and counter them with data and interviews. On the Pentagon’s tiny plane hole: “A crashing jet doesn’t punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building.” It’s pretty convincing stuff.

The counterpoint is a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, whose site is loaded with documents about thermite, thermate, nano-thermite — chemicals that can melt steel and which they say were found at Ground Zero. That’s what I’m hoping to see at this screening: the nitty-gritty conspiracy science, diagrams of WTC7, evidence of explosives, that sort of thing.

Sadly, for me, this group has many interests. The night I’m there, the feature is What in the World Are They Spraying?, a documentary about chemtrails. Not 9/11-related. See those planes painting neat-looking stripes of clouds in the sky? Those are poisonous chemtrails, supposedly, created to either reduce the population or kill off all crops that don’t use Monsanto-patented seeds.

In the lobby after the movie, I pick up a short stack of DVDs (WTC Twin Towers: Explosive Evidence, 9/11 Blueprint for Truth, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, Terrorstorm, Nine Years of War Based on a Lie and more), a pile of reading material and a slap bracelet made for a bygone rally.

I meet up with some members of the group at a nearby restaurant. I tell them I’m a reporter, and they’re cool with it, but they balk at being recorded. They don’t even want me naming the restaurant in this article, even though it’s mentioned online, because, as one woman says, “Homeland Security is right down the road.” She gestures over her shoulder with her thumb. I look. I really don’t know the area.

So I scribble feverishly in my notebook as the conversation goes from chemtrails to the “Patriot Slavery Act” to the New World Order, mostly led by the charming lady with a book by her side called How Can I Share My Faith Without an Argument? She has no doubt 9/11 was “an inside job,” and points to the “teeny tiny” hole in the Pentagon and laughs at the idea that a passenger jet like Flight 77 could’ve caused it. I consider whipping out the Popular Mechanics article, but the conversation moves on to MK Ultra mind control and, eventually, how the state of Pennsylvania is exploding old ammunition in the Ramapo fault line in an effort to trigger a major earthquake. She read about it on online. She’s also a two-time Bush voter who now regrets it, and a birther.

It’s hard to tell how much everybody else at the table is on board with what she’s saying. The guy directly across from me is interested in End the Fed-type stuff, so we talk about that for a while. He recommends I check out conspiracy radio host Alex Jones. I tell him about a YouTube video that compiles a couple years’ worth of Jones’ various predictions — nuclear disasters, wars, assassinations — and none of them seem to come true. The guy says Jones is basically showing his listeners the cards that might be played by those in power.

Finally I catch the ear of a man we’ll call Mr. X, who may or may not be running the group. He’s sort of a truther guru. He points out how the FBI never actually charged Bin Laden with 9/11-related crimes. He talks about MI5 and MI6 and peer-reviewed papers by architects regarding the rate at which buildings fall during demolition. “Everything I’ve told you is the truth, but that doesn’t make it the truth,” he says. Also: “Authority isn’t truth. Truth is authority. See? Turned it around.”

Mr. X advises me not to believe anything I hear unless I do research, even if he’s the one saying it. “I could be lying to you,” he says, enough times to make me suspicious. “Everywhere around you is lies, Patrick. All around you.”

Jon Gold would probably call these people “the fringe.” They would probably say he’s blind to the big picture, or pretending to be, so as not to seem fringey. There would be no winner in an argument between the two sides. Is there room in any one political movement for such disparate factions?

My notebook full of sites to visit and books to look up, my head buzzing with self-perpetuating theories and unconfirmable factoids, I say goodbye and head out to the train station.

It’s suddenly nice out. No rain. Not a chemtrail in the sky. And that rumble underfoot isn’t a man-made earthquake, it’s my train.

The post The Truth About Truthers appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

A decade after the attacks, at least two of them are still trying to make change in public policy. In doing so, they’ve broadened their focus from post-attack truth-finding, the cause that brought them together nearly 10 years ago.
Lorie Van Auken is now a beekeeper who is pressing the federal Environmental Protection Agency to ban a pesticide that some blame for Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been killing honeybees.

Kristen Breitweiser blogs on politics and national security. Though those are issues tied to 9/11, she doesn’t write just about the attacks.

“I think a lot of times when people suffer tragedy or go through something in their own life, they feel compelled to turn it into something better,” Breitweiser said.

Many of the spouses, parents and children of those killed in the terrorist attacks did that.

They set up foundations to honor the best traits of their lost loved ones. They lobbied for tax breaks for the victims, fair deals from the Victims’ Compensation Fund and a burial site at ground zero.

The four stay-at-home moms who lived relatively carefree lives in suburban Monmouth County became some of the most visible faces of the families of the dead and their main cause at the time: pushing the federal government to study the attacks — whether there was intelligence that could have prevented them, and whether the response once they began was adequate. They were subjects of scores of articles, multiple books — including a memoir Breitweiser published in 2006 — and a documentary film, “9/11: Press for Truth.”

The fame and the civic engagement, born of tragedy, came fast.

“I had a very complacent life: we voted, we paid taxes, we volunteered. That was it,” Breitweiser said. “That was the extent of our contribution.”

Two of the Jersey Girls, Patty Casazza and Mindy Kleinberg, did not respond to requests for interviews for this article and have not granted any interviews for the last few years.

All four had husbands working in the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

After 9/11, they united over their mounting frustration that the whole story wasn’t being told.

For more than a year, they parked their children with family and drove to Washington in Breitweiser’s SUV — dubbed the “widowmobile.”

Armed with thick binders of documents, they met with members of Congress and held rallies asking for a full government inquiry. They gave interviews by the score. They recognized that journalists were hungry for stories about the real people affected by the attacks. They could offer that, but they also talked about their policy agenda.

Finally, in November 2002 — 14 months after their husbands and nearly 3,000 other people were killed — President George W. Bush signed the law to create the commission.

One of their champions in Congress was U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey. He said they did their research and came prepared in small ways. They knew he had a sweet tooth and were sure to bring him candy when they stopped by.
“The Jersey Girls were, in my opinion, the reason the commission came into being,” Smith said.

For Breitweiser and Van Auken, the result of the main government inquiry and another on intelligence before the attacks were disappointing, leaving them with many unanswered questions.

For one, a section of a report that appeared to deal with al-Qaeda funding was redacted from one government report.
They’re also not satisfied that the planes involved in the attack could not have been intercepted after the first one crashed into the World Trade Center.

“You want to say the first attack was a surprise? OK, the first attack was a surprise,” Van Auken said. “If we have a group of people that are in charge of our defense and they can’t manage to intercept an airplane for two hours?”
Breitweiser, a former Republican who campaigned for John Kerry during his 2004 run for president, said she’s not satisfied that the country is safe enough now. “I wish the billions of dollars we spent on wars overseas could have been used at home,” she said.

The women triggered a backlash from those who thought they were too partisan as they bashed Bush and supported Kerry. The apex came in 2006 when conservative commenter Ann Coulter, in a book, dubbed them the “Witches of East Brunswick.” ”I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much,” Coulter wrote.

Hillary Clinton, then a U.S. senator, was among those who came to their defense.

Smith said the criticism was hard for him to accept. They were grassroots activists, he said, doing what they thought was right.

Both Breitweiser and Van Auken say their activism was the right thing to do, though they’re not happy with the results.
“I only have regrets about the outcome,” Van Auken said. “I have regrets that nobody was held accountable.”
Van Auken, now 56, is in the same home where she lived with her children — now in their 20s — and husband, Kenneth, before he was killed.

Since 9/11 Van Auken has taken up beekeeping. As colonies have died off mysteriously, she’s tried to rally other beekeepers to fight for a federal ban of the pesticide clothianidin.

Unlike a decade ago, she’s now savvy about how government works.

So far, the EPA has not been willing to ban the pesticide. Van Auken says she’s not surprised, “We know from 9/11 that the EPA is not above bending to political will when they said the air was safe to breathe and all those people got sick,” she said.

Breitweiser, now 40 and living in New York, is the Jersey Girl with the highest profile.

A lawyer by training, though she never practiced, she was often the spokeswoman, and she was the one who campaigned extensively for Kerry, wrote a memoir focusing on her political education and now blogs occasionally for the Huffington Post.

She still writes about 9/11 but also about other national security issues. She is particularly concerned that chemical plants are not safe enough.

Her main job, she said, is raising her daughter, Caroline.

Caroline is 12 now and was a toddler when her father, Ron, died. Caroline, she says, doesn’t have a memory of a dad. Breitweiser said that makes raising her alone easier but also sadder. Breitweiser says she knows that her husband would have continued to be a great father.

Breitweiser has been trying to expose Caroline to Muslim people and their beliefs. They’ve traveled to Morocco and are planning to go to Turkey and Egypt in the next year.

It’s all part of a lesson she didn’t imagine needing to teach her daughter 10 years ago. “It’s OK if women have a veil over their face. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad people,” she said. “I don’t want her growing up with any sort of hatred or rage inside of her.”

On Sept. 11, she intends to do what she always does on the anniversary: take a walk with her daughter and their dogs — currently three undisciplined Golden Retrievers — on a beach or in the woods.

She wants to stay far away from the solemn commemorations in New York City and elsewhere.

Van Auken will be in New York, but not at the ground zero ceremony. She’ll be there to see her daughter Sarah, now 22, act in a play.

The post Jersey Girls Who Emerged After 9/11 Stay Activists appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.