9/11 Truth Movement
The 9/11 Truth Movement refers to a movement by people who disagree to varying degrees with the official account of what occurred during the September 11, 2001 attacks and who wish to determine the "real truth" behind them.
Even before the attacks were over, conspiracy theories began to spread on the internet implying government complicity.
The first such exposé in book form was published in France in March 2002 by Thierry Meyssan, President of Réseau_Voltaire. He emphasized anomalies in the photos of the Pentagon, although other truth activists have suggested that Meyssan's work is a form of misdirection (promoting a fake claim to distract from real evidence). Meyssan's first book was published around the time that "Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth" was published in France by Brisard and Dasquie, which documented that the US government had told numerous allies it was going to invade Afghanistan several months before 9/11. The first work in English was The War on Freedom by N. Ahmed in July 2002, emphasizing geopolitical motives. These books inspired activists of the budding "9/11 Truth Movement" who depended on websites, e-mail and demonstrations. Canadian journalist Barrie Zwicker aired a series on Vision TV titled "The Great Deception" in January and February 2002, the first televised questioning of the official story that charged a deliberate effort to allow the attacks to happen via suppression of the normal air defense systems over New York and Washington.
The movement split gradually into radical and moderate tendencies. The moderates follow along the lines of Michael Moore and avoid theories that would be discredited by the mainstream media. They maintain only that the US government was negligent, whether intentionally or otherwise, and point to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia as havens of terrorism.
The radicals maintain that the attacks were engineered by elements of the US secret services, and not by Muslims at all. The acronyms "LIHOP" (Let it happen on purpose) and "MIHOP" (Make it happen on purpose) designate the two camps. The radicals find support in claims of physical evidence, like Meyssan's Pentagate, pointing to the impossibility of the official scenario. Other writers emphasize the collapse of the WTC, such as
, author of Painful Questions, and Jim Hoffman of wtc7.net. Others suggest the truth lies somewhere in-between (9/11 was allowed to happen and was given technical assistance to ensure that it did).
The miniscule 9/11 movement gained strength from the demonstrations against the Iraq war in Spring 2003. Between 2002 and the present, the movement distributed over 6 million "Deception Dollars" (a humorous parody of the dollar bill with website links to 9/11 investigation sites). A further boost in March 2004 was the book The New Pearl Harbor by the academic and theologian David Ray Griffin.
In 2002, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-GA, became an icon of the movement when she accused George Bush of foreknowledge of 9/11.
The movement can not really be labeled as left or right. It includes pacifists and patriots, Greens and Libertarians. With a few exceptions, like the historian Howard_Zinn or writer Gore_Vidal, leftist intellectuals do not support the initiative; likewise the mass media, except for the Internet, some talk-radio hosts like Alex Jones (U.S. journalist) or Jeff Rense, and Larry Flynt of Hustler magazine. There is not much participation by Muslims or racial minorities.
The movement is informal, decentralized and fractious; its members convene mainly by list-serves and occasional public conferences. Nonetheless, the corpus of evidence employed by authors of 9/11 exposés is created largely by the little-known activists, bloggers, researchers and sympathizers of this movement, working on the Internet. The best books on the topic include "Crossing the Rubicon" by Michael C. Ruppert, "The Terror Timeline" by Paul Thompson and "The War on Truth" by Nafeez Ahmed, the best videos are "The Great Deception" and "The Great Conspiracy" by Barrie Zwicker.