Category Archives: 911

ABC Nightline reveals its agenda, equates 9/11 truth with gun-wielding crazies

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Reprinted from AE911Truth.org
Friday, 26 March 2010 11:11Shawn Hamilton

ABC Nightline’s piece on the 9-11 Truth Movement qualifies as nothing short of journalistic fraud. Instead of presenting an objective look at the surprisingly large numbers of people who are questioning the government’s official conspiracy theory involving 19 Arabs, Bury’s piece was clearly intended to equate in viewers’ minds those in the 9-11 Truth Movement” with gun-wielding crazies like the recent “Pentagon shooter” John Patrick Bedell. 

 

While this movement includes a wide variety people including thousands of architects, engineers, firefighters, academicians and scientists, Nightline seemed intent on creating an oversimplified caricature of what it disparagingly called a “viral community of true believers,” that is, people who are crazy enough to suspect the government might be hiding something when there’s no evidence to support that idea. There’s actually a lot of evidence, but TV shows like Nightline are not interested in looking at it, much less refuting it. The Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth were featured as keynote speakers at the same conference that you attended and now host over 1,000 A/E petition signers—all demanding a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9-11. Why did you not ask us what evidence we might have to support our call for a re-investigation? We understand that you were even re-directed by no less than three of your interviewees to speak with us.

Korey Rowe and Dylan Avery, whose documentary, “Loose Change” provided many with their first look at problems with the official account, knew what Nightline was up to. Rowe told Bury, “They’re trying already to equate us with this man (Bedell) and trying to say that the 9-11 Truth Movement is a militia, gun-toting, anti-government conspiracy [group].”

Avery told Bury, “We already know what you guys are going to do—just by the questions you asked us. It’s very clear what your agenda is.” Bury got a similar response from former FBI agent and whisteblower Coleen Rowley when he asked her the loaded question, “Do you think the American government helped kill innocent Americans?” Rowley told Bury the technique he was using reminded her of interrogation strategies she’d used while in the FBI. Rowley stated that the full truth is simply not known and that the 9-11 Commission has said so itself. Nightline then interviewed Lee Hamilton, vice-chairman of the 9-11 Commission, who stated, “We got the story basically right” in order to give the impression he was contradicting Rowley’s claim, but that was intentionally misleading. Consider what he wrote in his book Without Precedent—that the 9-11 Commission was “set up to fail” by the Bush Administration. And what John Farmer, Senior Counsel to the 9-11 Commission wrote on page four of his book, The Ground Truth: “At some level of government, at some point in time, there was an agreement not to tell the people the truth about what happened.”

Lee Hamilton told Nightline, “When they bring these theories of what happened forward, the appropriate question is, ‘What evidence do you have of that?’ And if they have evidence, then let’s examine it in the court of public opinion.” We may be on the same page with Lee Hamilton after all. This is exactly what groups like ours want to see happen. For instance, why did World Trade Center Building 7, which was never hit by an airplane, collapse suddenly, smoothly, straight down into its own footprints at free-fall acceleration?

This is a question for an enterprising, seasoned journalist like Chris Bury of Nightline to pursue—especially since there is an abundant evidence of the incendiary “thermite” in the molten iron found in the rubble of all three WTC skyscrapers. And since the explosive composite “nano-thermite” was found in all of the pulverized concrete that was laid like a blanket throughout lower Manhattan.

The massive amount of concrete powder contained evidence of the explosive “thermite”

Richard Gage, AIA, founder of AE911Truth stated, “These technical professionals are staking their licenses, degrees, and reputation not on conspiracy theories but on the scientific, forensic evidence that speaks for itself. We have no other agenda than for the public to be aware of this evidence that was eliminated from the official reports.”

Here is a partial list of the evidence demanding further investigation:
• Rapid onset of collapse of all three WTC skyscrapers.
• Sounds of explosions at the onset of collapse
• Symmetrical collapse — through the path of what should have been the greatest resistance–at nearly free-fall acceleration (i.e. the columns offered no resistance; therefore, they must have been instantly “removed”)
• WTC 7 collapsed nearly into its own footprint with the steel skeleton almost completely broken up. The Twin Towers on the other hand were extremely explosive—hurling 9-ton steel sections laterally several hundred feet. 

 
Steel beams blown laterally several hundred feet

• Massive volume of expanding pyroclastic-like dust clouds
• Several tons of molten metal found at the base of the buildings by credible witnesses.
• Evidence of thermite (an incendiary used to cut through steel) found in beams, slag and iron spheres in all the dust samples
• Inter-granular melting and evaporation of steel structure found and documented by FEMA in App. “C”)
• Expert corroboration from controlled demolition professionals
•Foreknowledge of WTC collapse by media

The details can be found at www.AE911Truth.org and are available to anyone who wants to look at them, yet Nightline representatives chose to devote their attention to mischaracterizing members of the 9-11 Truth Movement instead of actually confronting the evidence. What is their agenda?

David Ray Griffin on Media Resistance to 9-11 issues

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I recorded this interview in San Francisco at the Marine’s Memorial Club and Hotel on February 19, 2010. The occasion was the Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth press conference announcing the group had surpassed 1000 signatures from licensed building professionals calling for a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings. Griffin was a keynote speaker.

Richard Gage and David Ray Griffin

Shawn Hamilton (SH): “How do you account for the apparent psychological resistance even among members of the alternative media—who should know better—to even looking at the evidence?”

David Ray Griffin (DRG): “In one sense it’s obviously a big mystery because these are people who’ve been on the forefront of exposing American complicity—you know, if we talk about Howard Zinn, [Noam] Chomsky; we’re talking a long, long time here, so I never criticize these gentlemen because they’re heroes; they’ve done what they’ve done; we wouldn’t be here without them and so on. Some of the younger guys? I don’t know. Some of it is, I think, fear. I’m not talking about fear for their lives although I’ve heard of people who’ve said, ‘yeah, I’m afraid for my life,’ but I don’t think that’s the main thing. It’s more a fear of, well, job loss. That’s a big one for reporters. I talked to a reporter who had done one nine eleven story and so I said, ‘Well, are we going to get another one out of this lecture,” and he said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think my job would survive one more story.'”

“Then, more generally, loss of reputation. The effectiveness of this term ‘conspiracy theory,’ ‘conspiracy theorist’ and that no member of the press can be a conspiracy theorist because they’re supposed to be objective, even if objective means parroting everything the government says. In our day that’s what counts for objective. 

But if you parrot what somebody says who’s espousing what is defined as a conspiracy theory, which in the definition that I gave earlier means a theory that contradicts a theory the government has already spoken on, then that a conspiracy theory in the negative sense and very few reporters could survive in their jobs if they explicitly said that.”

SH: “I understand that for the mainstream media, but what about the alternative media? There’s a split even at KPFA. They don’t want to touch this. They don’t even want to look at it. I’m not saying believe it, just look at the evidence.”

DRG: “That’s the next step down. They’ve been so effective with this scare tactic that even to give an open microphone to a conspiracy theorist means give them credibility and that means there’s something wrong with you. So, Shawn, I’m not sure that you’re going to fit in here in our future plans. So, you know how it works; everybody in the media knows how it works: nobody has to be explicitly threatened; they just know the rules. Maybe they tried one story once and they said, ‘Whew,’ that story wouldn’t go, certainly no story about nine eleven is going to go, so they learn not to do it.”

“A third factor is, and some have explicitly said this, ‘we in the left-leaning press spent years building up our credibility, and now you crazy nine eleven conspiracy theorists are destroying our credibility. Well, first of all, a big majority of the 9-11 movement is not on the left; they’re on the right. They’re libertarians and Republicans. Both Steven Jones and Richard Gage were lifelong Republicans, but this is the answer they give. I don’t think that’s just an excuse; I think they really do believe that [we threaten] things they’ve worked for.”

“So from their point of view, it doesn’t matter whether what we’re saying is true or false; it’s not expedient. It’s not helpful to what they consider the larger cause of exposing other high crimes and misdemeanors. So they say, well, we lose our credibility here, then we can’t do all this other good work, overlooking the fact—I would say as a rabid member of the nine eleven truth movement, ‘Look, this is the big story. This outstrips anything you could possibly be exposing from the last ten years or in the next ten—probably unless we have another one, and if we do have another one it will be partly your fault because you didn’t help expose this one.”

“So I just think that’s a very poor answer, and for some people to say—and I regret that Howard Zinn, who showed great courage opposing [Noam] Chomsky on this who would not read my book even though they’re both good friends of Richard Falk. Richard Falk wrote to Chomsky and he said, ‘I think you should read this manuscript. My friend David Griffin has been a great admirer of yours; he’s built on your work. He would love to have a blurb from you. Chomsky wrote back and said Dick, ‘No, I will not read your friend Griffin’s book.’ Howard Zinn read it. He wrote a blurb, and many people said, ‘I never would have read your book except for the blurb by Howard Zinn despite the fact that he got flack from many friends on the left for writing that very innocuous blurb—he was not endorsing my ideas, he was just saying this is a serious book. Even though he got a lot of flack for that, he came back and endorsed a second book, so I praise Howard Zinn for the courage he showed even though—and I regret the fact that towards the end of his life he said,   ‘Well, nine eleven isn’t too important. It doesn’t matter too much what the truth is. I just think he made a terrible misjudgment in that.”

David Ray Griffin Interview (audio) Part 1 

David Ray Griffin Interview (audio) Part 2

“Over 1000 architects and engineers have signed petition to reinvestigate 9-11 destruction”   (Associated with story #14 in Project Censored’s currrent list/book, Censored 2011)