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.
Soon after the attacks, 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 9/11 movement gradually split into more radical and more moderate activists and researchers. The acronyms "LIHOP" (Let it happen on purpose) and "MIHOP" (Make it happen on purpose) became popularly used to designate the two camps.
The more moderate activists and researchers in the 9/11 movement follow along the lines of Michael Moore and avoid theories that would be likely to be discredited by the mainstream media. They maintain primarily that the US government was negligent, whether intentionally or otherwise, and point to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia as havens of terrorism.
The more radical activists and researchers in the 9/11 movement maintain that the attacks were engineered by elements of the US secret services or others, and not by Muslims at all. Some in this camp find support in claims of physical evidence, like Meyssan's Pentagate, pointing to the impossibility of the official scenario. However, many have refuted Meyssan's claims at the Pentagon [1] while still supporting other aspects of the physical evidence case in DC, such as the question of why the nearly empty, strengthened and recently reconstructed section of the Pentagon was chosen to be hit. Additionally, other researchers focusing on the physical evidence emphasize the collapse of the WTC towers, such as Eric Hufschmid, author of Painful Questions, and Jim Hoffman of wtc7.net.
Some suggest the truth lies somewhere between the moderate and the radical positions: that 9/11 was allowed to happen and was given technical assistance to ensure that it did.
In 2002, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-GA, became an icon of the movement when she accused George Bush of foreknowledge of 9/11. In the Spring of 2003, the 9/11 movement gained strength from the demonstrations against the Iraq war. A further boost in March 2004 was the book The New Pearl Harbor by the academic and theologian David Ray Griffin. Also in March of 2004, the first International Inquiry into 9-11 [2] was hosted in San Francisco, California, which brought together 9/11 researchers and activists from all over the world for presentations, dialog, and interviews. Today, activists in the 9/11 movement have distributed over 6 million "Deception Dollars" (a humorous parody of the dollar bill with website links to 9/11 investigation sites).
The 9/11 movement cannot 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 limited participation by Muslims and racial minorities . However, in November of 2005, another important boost for the 9/11 movement came with the appearance of Prof. Steven E. Jones on MSNBC's Tucker Carlson show, in which Jones described his hypothesis that the WTC towers had been intentionally demolished by explosives. This was the first such event for the 9/11 movement on a major cable news station outside of C-SPAN.
The 9/11 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 all over the world. Some of the most highly regarded 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. Some of the highly regarded videos are "The Great Deception" and "The Great Conspiracy" by Barrie Zwicker.