To be sure, public relations outfits and staged press events routinely influence the content of the daily news, and media watchdog groups often spotlight the fiction or egregious bias that finds its way onto the airwaves. Yet in a culture where truth is so often mangled and information so scattered — and the state of politics and the economy so frightening — both sides of the political spectrum have moved toward the fringes. And thumbing through Censored 2011, one wonders if Project Censored itself has wandered into uncharted territory.

Huff and former Project Censored director Peter Phillips recently coauthored an op-ed exploring the concept of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs), hoping to publish it through the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C. To their dismay, IPS rejected it. Huff found the decision cruelly ironic — he felt he’d been censored.

Chapters 6 and 7 of Censored 2011 also delve into SCADs — a construct that seeks to buck the “conspiracy theory” label in favor of a more sophisticated framework. They are defined as “concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes.” The introduction to the book alludes to those chapters as “beyond urgent,” and Kristina Borjesson equates a lack of mainstream media coverage of questions surrounding 9/11 — perhaps the mother of all SCADs, from the 9/11 Truth Movement’s perspective — as censorship.

Huff and Phillips noted that they are not part of the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, arguing that urging mainstream coverage of that particular set of questions is just a small piece of their wider body of work. There are signs, however, that returning to that particular topic over the past several years has harmed some people’s perceptions of the project.

One person familiar with Project Censored noted that at least two former judges had parted ways over “the 9/11 fixation … a really weak link in the entire operation. It rearranges atomized factoids into theories.” Yet the project should still be viewed as valuable and relevant, this person added.

“There is absolutely no question that they’ve done extremely important work over the years,” noted Reese Erlich, a prominent journalist who has covered the Iraq war and won awards from Project Censored for his work in the past. “The mainstream media in this country are failing to report all kinds of issues.” Yet Erlich turns a critical eye onto the so-called 9/11 Truth narrative. “My biggest gripe is that by complaining there is a conspiracy … you take away from the ability of people to make positive change,” he noted. “It gives them all the power, and the people have none of the power.”

It’s clear that Project Censored is sensitive to the “conspiracy theorist” label, and as champions of free speech, the directors aren’t shy about addressing it head-on. The first item on the Investigative Research section of its website, for example, is a nearly 10,000-word article titled “Analysis of Project Censored: Are We A Left-Leaning, Conspiracy-Oriented Organization?”

Its self-analysis concludes that the organization is neither, but admits to a certain bias. “The bias of Project Censored seems to be quite simple,” it notes. “We promote protection of First Amendment rights in support of a truly free press, one that holds those in power, elected by the people or appointed, accountable.”

Project Censored’s website

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Speakers included Graeme MacQueen, founding director for McMaster University’s Centre for Peace Studies in Ontario, and behavioral neuroscientist Laurie Manwell.

“The folks who are engaged in the movement are serious scholars who come to conclusions based on evidence that should be available to everyone in the room,” said Byron Bangert, member of the 9/11 Working Group of Bloomington.

After a brief moment of silence “for those who lost their lives on 9/11 and in the events that were set in motion on that day” initiated by Bangert, the speakers began their presentations.

MacQueen’s speech, titled “The Fictional Basis for the War on Terror,” explained two hypotheses — the structural failure hypothesis, or “governmental hypothesis,” and the explosion hypothesis, or “non-governmental hypothesis.”

By aid of video footage, images, eye-witness accounts and details of his findings of chemical and physical inaccuracies, MacQueen explained his evidence behind the theory that the World Trade Center was detonated.

“The towers came down because they were wired for detonation,” he said. “I’m not suggesting that planes didn’t fly into them and damage them. I am suggesting that they didn’t bring the towers down.”

Manwell’s speech, titled “The Psychological Implications of 9/11,” covered such topics as group mentality and social crimes against democracy and challenged people to not just accept the facts they have been given about 9/11.

“Just talking about 9/11 can arouse fear and anxiety in people, which affects cognitive judgement,” she said. “The death of democracy will come if we don’t do something, and it will come while we’re covering our ears to things we don’t want to hear.”

At the conclusion of his speech, MacQueen urged citizens to “never tolerate outrageous lies and war-mongering.”

“The theories we had might have made sense on 9/11 when we didn’t have access to this information,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense nine years later.”

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