"9/11 truth" or the 9/11 skeptics did not begin as an "inside job," but devolved into it over time as the fanatics and presumably agents first pumped the poison and then showed staying power. This would not have been possible without the mutual reinforcement they got throughout from the corporate media. Once it turned into Loose Change Boys vs. Popular Mechanics, or Taibbi vs. Crazy Nico, instead of FSC and other critics using Thompson, Ahmed et al. vs. 9/11 Commission, it was bad.
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"We Demand Transparency" Conference - FAILURE!!!! (93 posts)
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Posted 14 years ago #
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Or Jones vs Fetzer, which had a huge effect in turning it into the controlled demolition movement.
Posted 14 years ago # -
The media was very smart and cynical to highlight those worst case perspectives. Lots of gullible "truth" supporters thought that Fox News mentioning "loose change" and similar antics was somehow a victory. It was a case of reverse psychology. 911truth.org and a lot of other efforts share some of the responsibility for this outcome, too.
Posted 14 years ago # -
I don't want to be part of the "9/11 was an inside job and global warming is a hoax movement" or the "9/11 was an inside job because they blew up the towers movement" or the "9/11 was an inside job because I'm really angry and alienated movement" or the "9/11 was an inside job and we should work with anyone who agrees movement" or any movement that starts off with "9/11 was an inside job." Yes, I used to stand on the street with a banner saying exactly that, but I have continually refined my thinking on the issue since the very beginning, and I'm willing to admit it. I definitely don't want to be part of the "9/11 was an inside job and I'm never going to question myself or my understanding of the evidence because I must uphold a facade of security and confidence movement."
BTW, http://www.ny911truth.org/ is now totally dead. We should send our congratulations to Les Jamieson, Tom Foti, Luke Rudkowski, Nico Haupt, Frank Morales, and the entire team that made this important failure possible.
Posted 14 years ago # -
Ha ha ha -- remember this conference?
http://www.911truth.org/911rtt/speakers.html
Quite a lineup. Nick, I'm sorry you're on this list. 2006 was a key year and the fix was in.
My favorite part of the conference was sitting in the hotel bar and talking to an earnest man who had just been talking to a weasely, CIA-looking guy. He told me how the CIA guy had just been telling him about a split that was going on in NYC movement. He was a Les Jamieson supporter and he was expounding on how this gentleman should really look into the writings of EUSTACE MULLINS.
Posted 14 years ago # -
i remember in late 2003 - early 2004 fighting with the radical wing of NY911Truth about our banner at ground zero that said "The Bush Regime Engineered 9/11." i was stupid enough to actually let myself be photographed holding it up. one of my biggest regrets - among an ocean of regrets.
you can just imagine how put-off people were. 2 years after the fact. Bush was practically being declared our 'dear leader.' The Dixie Chicks were being publicly burned at the stake as witches for daring to question Bush policy. and we were letting Nico - in his skinhead-like army boots and army fatigues - do outreach for us at ground zero - and stand with us and hold up a sign like that.
what were we thinking Levis? Jesus Christ i must have been crazy,
but to your point - honestly - the 'inside job' meme was there from as early as i can remember. there was always this almost adolescent peer pressure to adopt the more absolutist declarative narratives. There was a whole period where activists would SNEER at you and accuse you of being a LIHOP-er. Limited Hangouter Albanese, lol that was me.
Hicks put a major nail in our coffin at Riverside Church - but the real END of the movement in NYC was after Bush's re-election. Most of our regulars simply drifted off and Jamieson filled the void. Next thing you know Luke shows up out of nowhere with his giant pictures of the buildings exploding - and his rolling eyes and smirks and know-it-all attitude - and it was over.
wow - i really do need to write a book.
Posted 14 years ago # -
Reinventing da Twoof, Recalamatizing the Future! http://www.911truth.org/911rtt/speakers.html
We seemed on the verge of so much. That is certainly a catalog of disappointments.
Even those who haven't disappointed by commission kind of (with only a couple of exceptions) wandered off and disappointed by omission. I'm sure y'all had your reasons.
My excuse is a case of co-dependency that keeps finding new and ingenious ways to express itself.The Santa Cruz "Deep Politics" conference in May, by the way, will feature some of those folks: Organizers and/or advisors include Belitsos, Day, Kubiak, and Machon; speakers will include Crane, Machon, Marrs, Phillips, and Zwicker (among others).
Posted 14 years ago # -
Speaking of the FSC and Thompson and Ahmed, how come they missed the Chicago conference? How come Shayler and Machon were billed but not Ahmed? Where's that at? Was Shayler into his no-planes thing by then or did that come later? Kyle Hence was there -- why not the whole Press for Truth crew?
Posted 14 years ago # -
Has there EVER been a 9/11 conference with the courage to state that the "no plane" claim is bullshit disinformation from the perpetrators to muddy the waters?
Posted 14 years ago # -
Hi Brian, good to see someone new on the forum.
It seemed like around the time of the Chicago conference, most people (including myself) were just starting to get their bearings as to who and what were damaging and suspicious in the movement. And some of these people hadn't yet come out of the closet as disrupters. But that does not excuse the horrific lineup.
Morgan Reynolds, Kevin Barrett, Ian Crane, Fred Smart, Jim Fetzer, Sander Hicks, Les Jamieson, Annie Machon, David Shayler, Webster Tarpley, Rick Siegel....
Jesus, Rick Siegel, whatever happened to that clown?
Posted 14 years ago # -
"Quite a lineup. Nick, I'm sorry you're on this list. 2006 was a key year and the fix was in."
Doesn't bother me none. Perhaps you remember certain people encouraging me to go and offering me a lift? And don't you remember what my scheduled talk was?
http://www.911truth.org/911rtt/events.html
Has 9/11 Skepticism Succumbed to Faith-based Science? Nicholas Levis
Two years ago, a debate on differing paradigms of the September 11th events might have focused mainly on questions of authorship, foreknowledge, financing, motive, geostrategy, history and precedents. Much of the research sought to identify salient and actionable contradictions in official accounts, in an effort to gain grounds for discovery, the holy grail of a legal venue.
For many, this richness and appeal has now been reduced to a near- exclusive focus on the demolitions hypothesis - for which there are powerful arguments, but which is often treated as an article of faith, with invective directed at those who hesitate in pledging allegiance to it. In this and in many other matters, the preference seems to be for magic shortcuts that supposedly provide instant proof of one's preferred hypothesis, that require no further argument or persuasion, just a comfortable announcement of "Case Closed." Much of the real evidence for official complicity in the attacks is obscured by phantom evidence. Many claims that were falsified years ago are repeated ritualistically, and have become seemingly immortal.
This workshop is designed to ask why we should care. The movement is growing, of that there can be no doubt. So do we really need logic and rigorous empirical method? Do we really need to establish peer review and think tanks? Or should we be content with accepting every claim and advancing whatever argument seems to convince people directly at the moment?
Once I got to Chicago I decided the answer was, "yes," and saw no point in fighting it any more. I'd known the end of my involvement had been coming for some time. I dropped the speech and showed John's film, instead.
And I don't care who I was photographed with. You don't always get to choose that, in public. And those who attack by false association hardly need evidence for it; that would be so beneath them, you know?
Here was the rough draft of my undelivered speech - knocked it off in an e-mail a few weeks before:
HAS 9/11 SKEPTICISM SUCCUMBED TO FAITH-BASED SCIENCE?
Two years ago, and I hope I am not looking back with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, a debate on differing paradigms of the September 11th events might have focused mainly on questions of motive, geostrategy, foreknowledge, authorship, financing, history and precedents. Much of the research sought to identify salient and actionable contradictions in official accounts, in an effort to gain grounds for discovery, the holy grail of a legal venue. The questions of September 11th were the story, and researchers relied on the confirmable record in an effort to generate new leads. There was a painful awareness of the psychology of speaking to the mainstream, and an even more painful sensitivity to the feelings of the grieving families, which surely led to an over-cautious approach. The media wanted to reduce the movement to "those people who think a cruise missile hit the Pentagon," but we knew it was about a lot more than that. The larger society, its history and the possible futures of our species were all approached with a vision and consciousness both broad and deep.
Now a large number of 9/11 movement activists have reduced this richness and appeal to a near-exclusive focus on the demolitions hypothesis, for which there are powerful arguments, but which many treat as an article of faith that demands our allegiance, lest we be denounced as fools and traitors. The preference seems to be for magic shortcuts that supposedly provide instant proof: "squibs," "pull it," "rivers" of molten steel that may or may not have been there. Real science is supposed to consider exhaustively the best version of each hypothesis, and not just beat the strawman (as our "debunkers" often do). But many among us consider it allowable to pretend that the government claims jet fuel fires melted structural steel, and some seem to take a perverse pride in not even having skimmed the official reports before sneering at them.
Further afield, we are flooded with phantoms and ephemera impervious to repeated falsification. Some of the same people who brought us the fantasy pods, "flashes" and windowless planes of 2004 have now morphed these into no planes in New York at all. Others think they can see through the foam obscuring the Pentagon façade, and know beyond any doubt that the hole is not big enough. These items belong to a bestiary of revealed religious persuasion. Just as the official story has become a new secular religion, designed to justify the new definitions of reality that followed September 11th, complete with miracles like the United 93 uprising and saints like Todd Beamer, so too are many of the 9/11 skeptics simply content to soil the faith of the official doctrine with some outrageous blasphemy, setting up their own underground church with its own relics and saints.
Single sentences from conflicting news reports are cherry-picked as a start-point for enormously complex scenarios that may be possible, but lack evidence. The constant desire to come up with new facts and proofs ends up dismissing the long-accumulated body of solid evidence for government complicity as old-fashioned, or irrelevant, or insufficiently turbo-powered. Why should I break my brain over the contradictory stories about 38 different points in multiple timelines of what happened on 9/11, coming from almost as many different sources? Why indeed, when it seems like enough to announce that the hole in the Pentagon is too small? Even though it's actually just large enough.
Every jaunt into Google is expected to produce important new findings, and if it doesn't, the researcher can still insist on conclusions manufactured out of tertiary associations, misinterpreted data and out-of-context quotes. It takes about a day for the latest hypotheses to harden into an article of faith. A stubborn series of assertions end up repeated, ritualistically, ad infinitum. These have usurped the place of empirical investigation based on sourcing, verification, experimentation, peer review and the presumption of doubt against all claims from all sources, from which true science is born.
Does it matter that Marvin Bush was not "chief of WTC security"? There has never been any follow-up on the mostly flimsy BBC reports of "living hijackers," does that matter? One of the people who at least shared a name with one of the identified hijackers reportedly went to the US embassy in Saudi Arabia to complain, has anyone ever bothered to inquire about that case since then? Does it matter that the only source for the rumor that Condoleezza Rice was the one who warned Willie Brown came via an anonymous call-in to a radio show? There was only one "magic passport" reported at the WTC, not two, does that matter? Does it matter that the coroner statements used to imply there were no bodies in Shanksville are taken entirely out of context? Or that many other supposed eyewitness statements are also based on interpretations that clearly twist what the speaker actually meant? Does it matter that the Mayor of Shanksville clearly did not mean that there was no plane at all in the crater? Does it matter that the pictures of a given scene available on the Internet may in fact be a tiny fraction of the sum total of existing pictures of that scene?
(Best case to take on, fortress of the propaganda edifice on both religious extremes: United 93. Planeswapping. Beamer and Bingham.)
Obviously it matters. But many eye the efforts to apply standards and practice peer review suspiciously, at best as a distasteful disruption of the "big tent" philosophy. Many seem to feel that anything that spreads the message -- or as it sometimes seems, anything that sells books and videos -– can only be good. They are happy with any alliance, even if it comes at the cost of precluding the appeal to the majority.
They seem incapable of the insight that if we can believe anything, but actually know nothing, we are powerless. If we abandon the distinction and our tools for determining truth and untruth, validity and invalidity, reality and unreality at all levels, large and small, we are blind. We become nothing other than a congregation, offering each other stimulants or soporifics, even the occasional controlled heresy, but always within the same choir. New members will still arrive to join the choir, but we are no longer a struggle for transparency, truth and justice, we are no longer a movement for social change, we are no longer actors in a history but consumers of a faith. Outsiders are treated with derision, as the misguided, as objects of pity: the damned, the irrelevant.
One indicator of this trend is that to a large extent, we have become "the story." As I said, two years ago, wherever the media black-out was broken, the unanswered questions of 9/11 were the story, but now, although we have many more evasions of the black-out, the story focuses on the existence of people who doubt 9/11, of the colorful believers in an alternate reality. This is not without precedent. We are now allowed to believe what we like, to join the great American ecumenism of diverse faiths, to be quoted in our beliefs, but not to be taken seriously, and never to be given a chance at real knowledge, let alone power over our own lives.
At one extreme of our movement we have those who react in the sense of the reactionary, who for the most part have always reacted against any attempt to set up standards, with cries of censorship and infiltration, with downright calls for jihad against the internal heretics who refuse to see "the pod," or the cruise missile entry hole, or "the squibs," or who dare to demand methodological rigor and to dismiss falsified claims. Here discussion quickly degenerates into name-calling and accusations. We turn to ripping each others' quotes from their context and generating tertiary associations about each other (or, just as often, passing on baseless rumors about the tertiary associations). We take up the weapons of defamation. Here again, fact-checking is dismissed. As in the treatment of the larger issues of what really happened on 9/11, the burden of gathering evidence is often shifted to the object of the claim, as opposed to the claimant himself.
The excuses are legion: "Oh, I'm not the corporate media, I have no resources, I have no time to make phone calls, it's not up to me to prove anything I say, it's up to the government to prove the opposite." (Or in the case of accusations amongst us: "It's up to you to tell us when you stop beating your spouse.") There is no doubt these excuses are often valid. Obviously we lack access to the documentary record and have no ability to pose the real questions of the relevant officials under oath in an empowered investigative setting. Obviously there is much we cannot know, and much we cannot afford. Ultimately, without a doubt, the greatest cause for us to speculate, idly or otherwise, grows out of the government's endless record of lies and its total refusal of transparency. Conspiracy theory is what you get when there is no transparency, and I understand where the primary fault lies.
But how often are these same excuses just a cover for laziness, another shortcut to the originally desired conclusion? You are not a researcher or a scientist if you simply repeat the claims of others without putting doing your best to verify them, or at least, making sure to trace these claims to the original published source and avoid the "telephone" effect of corruption that hits information as it goes through generations of re-publication. And you are not a journalist if you make no effort, when it is possible, to call the person who is the subject of your claims and attempt verification.
Again, I'm probably wearing the rose-colored glasses. Things were hardly as good two years ago as I am pretending, though the spirit of the pioneer movement was surely more boisterous and creative; and things are not as bad now as my words may make it sound to some of you. I could have as easily made this speech in 2003 or 2004, with most of the same complaints, but if I make it now, it's partly because I think the negative trends I am describing may have reached an obvious peak, an end point, a non-plus ultra. (The latest, sudden wave of claims that there were no flying objects in the New York skies of any kind hitting the Trade Towers on 9/11, that the people looking up did not even see high tech holograms but nothing at all, and were later hypnotized into thinking they had seen something by bluescreen projections on video after the fact, is surely a sign - how much further can this trend go?) This may signify our opportunity to reverse these trends, at the least to clear the air of smoke and mirrors. But we need for at least a group of us to make a clear stand, to be fearless about confronting the junk data and faith-based science that threaten to overwhelm our research, to err for a change on the side of doubt and caution - I think there is certainly enough to lay out the case for 9/11 as an inside job, to persuade people and to gain a genuine investigation with discovery powers, without needing to make use of anything questionable or weak! - to establish standards that others will be free to use or deride, but that will stand without compromise, as a beacon, as a guide to a place where we do not merely believe, but actually know of what we speak.
We cannot afford laziness. These are not trivia. This is not a parlor game, the sport of sophism, or a professional wrestling match held in a government-approved free speech box. I wish us to reclaim our power and live up to our responsibility, and that begins with the reclamation of our ability to make distinctions. What we think matters. This is why I have called this workshop. I am inviting you to create a true institute, a think tank. Not just something that calls itself scholarly as a PR gimmick, something that uses the labels and professor titles and vocabulary of academia, but ignores or violates the actual principles of scholarship. We don't need another open club of friends who call themselves a research institution, and who react with dismay at the first hint that their ideas may be susceptible to verification or falsification by reasoning and scientific method. We need the real thing.
Posted 14 years ago # -
"HAS 9/11 SKEPTICISM SUCCUMBED TO FAITH-BASED SCIENCE?"
Nicholas, please publish that as its own entry at truthmove or somewhere else, i think it deserves more attention than just as a comment.
Posted 14 years ago # -
Article on Sander Hicks that glosses over the rough spots:
http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/lonely-...
The Catskills Truth Gathering
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Richard Gage, AIA Founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth http://www.ae911truth.org ;
Luke Rudkowski, Founder, We Are Change
Sander Hicks (Activist religion writer @ Huffington Post, founder, Truth Party, earlier, founder of Soft Skull Press and Vox Pop)
Barry Kissin Attorney, Columnist, Populist investigator of the anthrax attacks.
Nick Bryant, Author, The Franklin Scandal
Rev. Ian Alterman (Minister, member of Religious Leaders for 9/11 Truth) Author of the 9/11 Primer.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Hicks is a "religion writer"?
how did i miss this?
or is he just whatever he decides he wants to be on any given day?
Posted 13 years ago # -
or is he just whatever he decides he wants to be on any given day?
Bingo.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Vox Pop Closed By the IRS For Good
For the past year or more the cafe has been closed numerous times by the IRS for non-payment of back taxes. There were many “Save Vox Pop†town hall meetings and benefit shows and the cafe, under the leadership of its new manager, Debi Ryan, was able to revive again and again after these setbacks. The IRS leans were a result of the previous ownership (and financial mismanagement) of Vox Pop by Sander Hicks, who is no longer an owner of the cafe (note: you can also read about Hicks in a New York Observer article by Alexander Zaitchik. In 2009, the cafe was transformed into a “for-profit collective†with shares owned by various community members.
http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.com/2010/08/25/vox...
Posted 13 years ago # -
like the government didn't own it all along...
:|
Posted 13 years ago # -
Sander endorsed this "PRIMER ON 9/11 TRUTH" by Ian Alterman who was at his truth gathering in the Catskills:
http://guerrillaunderground.ning.com/profiles/blog...
Read that section on the Pentagon and read the section on the Pentagon in "The Big Wedding" and ask yourself what happened. The links in the piece are particularly ridiculous.
Posted 13 years ago #
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