Beauty is Truth [Featured article in the Stranger, (Seattle's Only Newspaper)]

To read original article: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=309650

Six years after 9/11, more than a third of Americans believe the attacks were an inside job. Are 9/11 Truth groups a convenient harbor for conspiracy theorists, crackpots, and lizard-man chasing coincidence-hunters, or are they actually onto something?

By Paul Constant

The eight of them huddled around a table at a coffee shop could easily be confused for a comic-book fan society, or a Dungeons & Dragons kaffeeklatsch. They’re mostly white men in their 20s and 30s, many with creative facial hair. They’re dressed casually. The majority of them are computer programmers. Nearly half of them work at Microsoft, although they coyly refer to it as a “major computer-software firm based out of Redmond,” presumably for fear of workplace repercussions.

“I’d like to call this meeting to a quorum,” a guy named Robin says, presumably hamming it up because a member of the media is present, “and I’d also like to point out that we’re all mostly white guys and that that’s how this whole thing started.”

This is a meeting of We Are Change Seattle, one of the many local branches of a loosely affiliated network of 9/11 Truth organizations. They get together in coffee shops and bars every week or two.

Robin spent much of his life in Boston working as an air-traffic controller and manager of standup comedians and only recently moved to Seattle to take care of his grandchildren. He’s the oldest of the group, but in many ways the most passionate, followed closely by a charismatic man named Giancarlo. Giancarlo’s father brought him to the U.S. 20 years ago from “a Communist country”—he evades questions about which country specifically. He’s forceful, handsome, and young, the kind of person who says “with all due respect” with a smile and then proceeds to tell you exactly what’s wrong with you. He’s got the kind of magnetic personality that could probably earn him an elected office, if he smoothed out a few of his angry edges.

“What’s really a slap in the face,” Giancarlo says, “is that they dumbed down the explanation to such third-grader principles, that the terrorists did this because they hate our freedoms. I hate the fact that I believed that for five years.” Giancarlo’s rant about freedom gives way to a conversation about the failure of the anti-Iraq-war movement, which has consisted of hippies singing folk songs, ridiculous puppets, and self-righteous preaching to the choir.

“This is why the 9/11 Truth movement is brilliant,” Robin says, “because we’re on the web and we have DVDs and we’re out handing things out”—specifically, he says, in places they aren’t wanted. “We’re doing what I’d like to call civil informationing.”

It’s true that educating people hostile to your cause, rather than smugly marching in lockstep with like-minded pacifists, is the way to operate a movement. Giancarlo is said to be the best at debating naysayers and sweet-talking reluctant people into taking copies of We Are Change Seattle’s information. Kristian Konrad, probably the closest thing that We Are Change Seattle has to a leader, says that they get a lot of aggression from people outside Mariners games: “They say things like ‘Get fucked, traitor’ and ‘Oh, look, it’s the freaks’ and stuff like that.”

I got invited to this meeting after exchanging a few e-mails with Konrad, and in that exchange I compared the level of hatred for Truthers to the way most people treat Lyndon LaRouche followers and Jehovah’s Witnesses. This touched a nerve with Konrad, who replied to that e-mail by saying, “Unlike LaRouchers, we have regular jobs, and don’t adhere to one man’s ideas.” He added, “I’m just a regular guy, trying to get the word out that buildings don’t fall apart at free-fall speed due to fire.”

Weeks after the meeting in the coffee shop, Konrad is at Hempfest handing out DVDs to strangers. He has 400 of them, which he paid for himself at an estimated cost of “27 cents apiece, not including time.” He was literally up all night burning them. A sign that reads “Google 9/11 Truth” is sticking out of his backpack, but otherwise he could easily fit into the Hempfest demographic. A preteen boy who must’ve been five, at most, in 2001, says, “Dude it was six years ago. Get over it!” One man shouts, “Fuck you!” A soft-spoken man in his 50s takes a DVD before handing it back and walking on.

I catch up to him. He tells me, “I’m not interested. I feel like conspiracies in this day and age would be extremely difficult to perpetuate. Now, with the internet, governments are running scared. The writing is on the wall and they can’t control the people. They’re in trouble and they know it.”

I go back to Konrad and report this to him. Konrad laughs. “Good for him, man,” he says. “I want some of what he’s smoking.”

* * *

Three months ago, I was at a birthday party I was covering for my column, Party Crasher, and I noticed a dour young man wearing a “9/11 was an inside job” T-shirt. I’d already been noticing a lot of “inside job” stickers and graffiti around town, and now, faced with a real-life Truther, I found that I couldn’t stop staring at him: He was at a celebration of a friend’s life and he was wearing a shirt announcing that 3,000 American citizens were killed by our own government. It’s easy to dismiss a guy like this as a lone wolf, but he’s actually not alone: A year-old Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that 36 percent of all Americans believe that the government is responsible for 9/11—either by direct action or by willfully ignoring clear evidence it was going to happen.

There is no end to the variety of what Truthers believe, but almost all of them believe that the United States government perpetrated 9/11 in an elaborate conspiracy to bring about the decomposition of civil liberties and the fortifying of the American empire in the Middle East. The reason that they think this is because, since 9/11, we’ve witnessed the decomposition of civil liberties and the fortifying of the American empire in the Middle East.

Most Truthers claim that their starting point in the movement was watching the third World Trade Center tower fall. At 5:20 p.m. on September 11th, 2001, WTC 7, a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper located 300 feet north of Tower 1, collapsed. This collapse, as seen in news footage, looks a lot like an implosion, as if through controlled demolition. This is the drum that most Truthers bang on when trying to get people to pay attention, and it’s a pretty sexy bullet point: No planes struck WTC 7, so why would it collapse? The fact that the mammoth 9/11 Commission Report barely mentions WTC 7 falling pushes doubters to turn to Truth sites in hopes of elucidation.

But, for that matter, why would the Twin Towers collapse? The 9/11 Commission Report claims that the towers fell at nearly free-fall speed because of something called “pancake theory,” which means that each floor fell on top of the floor below it. Truthers claim that the towers fell straight down into their own footprint in mere seconds, and that the noticeable puffs of smoke jetting from the side of the buildings during the collapse are signs of controlled explosions within the buildings. And, further, that the jet-fuel-stoked fire inside the towers, which probably burned at a maximum of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, could not have weakened the metal structure of the building, since the metal used in the WTC had a melting point of 2750 degrees Fahrenheit.

It’s false to refer to Truthers as conspiracy theorists because, as they’re quick to point out, they don’t have a theory. All they have are questions. Some of them believe that the government is guilty of knowing about the attacks and simply allowing them to happen, others believe that the planes were remote controlled and that no passengers died in the attacks, and still others believe that the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile and that no plane was involved at all. Many Truthers believe that Flight 93 couldn’t have crashed in Pennsylvania since the crash site is only 6 feet wide by 20 feet long. A radical few even claim that no planes struck the Twin Towers, despite what billions of eyes saw that day. The debate within the movement is intense and not always polite—for instance, not all Truthers believe that doubting the planes’ involvement is a good idea, and that to deny the deaths of hundreds of air passengers on September 11th is disrespectful and stupid.

There are almost as many notions about what happened on September 11th as there are members of 9/11 Truth organizations. To add to the confusion, the movement is home to not a few eccentrics. After the coffee shop meeting with We Are Truth Seattle, I got the first in a series of e-mails from a woman named Rebecca. Rebecca was angry that she wasn’t allowed to take part in the group interview, a decision that Konrad justified as a way to present a “more united front” to the media. Konrad told me that Rebecca claimed this was a sign of organizational sexism. He said, “I wish that more women would get involved, but for whatever reason, we’re primarily white males.”

Rebecca and three other founders of 9/11 Truth Seattle—the umbrella entity that makes communication between various Truth groups in Seattle possible—had recently decided to abandon We Are Change Seattle anyway, after trying unsuccessfully to have “two 9/11 Scholars for Truth speak out about their controversial theories that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were a large-scale weapons test of top-secret electromagnetic scalar weapons, and that no planes were used to topple the buildings.” Most recently, Rebecca has decided to stop being part of any 9/11 Truth organization. In her words: “I have instead decided to give priority to my creative work with political satire and performance poetry.”

This tiny schism is emblematic of larger rifts within the Truth Movement. Its first few years have seen a number of organizations come and go in a flurry of arguments and personality clashes. For instance, earlier this year, after a prolonged argument about whether the towers were felled by miniature nuclear weapons, a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth voted to disband and reform as the new, improved Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Many Truthers rejected the residency of a man named Webster Tarpley as a major public face of the Movement because he was a frequent host of The LaRouche Connection, a news service funded by the LaRouche organization. “Many of us felt like he took some credibility from the movement,” a Truther who wanted to be anonymous told me. The rumors are that Tarpley could run for President on a 9/11 Truth ticket, which could draw some of the Truth votes from both Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, who seem to be running neck-and-neck in popularity with the primarily Libertarian-leaning members of 9/11 Truth groups.

In the midst of all this it’s easy to forget that, by virtually any measurement of intellect, Truthers are highly intelligent people. The very fact that they’ve branded themselves the “Truth Movement” shows a canny grasp of public relations on a level with the Bush Administration’s lusty embrace of the word Freedom. Who could possibly be against Truth? Earlier prototypes of the movement, including some that are still in existence today, went by “9/11 Visibility,” but that dog won’t hunt: Visibility is a shaky word, one that feels wishy-washy, even a little… French. But Truth! Truth is part of the credo of superheroes, along with Justice and the American Way. It’s the same kind of organic organizational genius that people who are against abortion drew on when they came up with “pro-life.” The adoption of a powerful, emblematic word like Truth or Life or Freedom gives you an important edge at the start of an argument. It’s more than a statement of purpose; it’s genius marketing, and it reveals an organization wise enough to use the same tools as the institutions they’ve sworn to fight. Truthers get dismissed on liberal and conservative message boards around the country as idiots, but it’s hard to think of another movement that’s covered as much ground so quickly, and defined itself as, well, as 9/11 Truth.

* * *

Central among the movement’s ideas is the distribution of information, and I left that first coffee-shop meeting with a stack of books and DVDs almost as long as my arm. The bible for most of the movement is David Ray Griffin’s confusingly titled Debunking 9/11 Debunking, written in response to a March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics that refuted commonly floated 9/11 Truth theories. Some Truthers’ copies of Debunking 9/11 Debunking are as underlined as an evangelist’s NKJV. It’s a necessarily dry book—there are great swaths of pages devoted to whether jet fuel fire would burn black or white—and Griffin, a professor of theology and philosophy of religion, is not by any stretch of the imagination an inspirational writer, but his methodical approach gives the book gravity.

The first internet-distributed movie that turned people on to the Truth movement was Loose Change, a film that’s been updated into a version 2.0 and, most recently, Loose Change Final Cut. For an amateur production, Change is pretty amazing: a documentary that’s paced and edited like a mainstream documentary. It’s a shame that it’s so bad. Director/narrator Dylan Avery’s voice is nasally, reminiscent of Ira Glass’s, which partly explains why Change seems like an ordinary episode of This American Life on acid—crazy suggestions are accompanied with Avery stopping and saying, in a folksy stage-exclamation, “Wait a minute! What did I just say?” The last third of the film goes into the belief that Flight 93 never crashed in Pennsylvania. By this point it’s clear that Change is the work of someone who’s spent too long examining the evidence and needs to step out for fresh air.

The Truth Movement’s newest, most popular film is a documentary called Zeitgeist. Not nearly as professional as Change—the first five minutes consist of a black screen with bad audio of a professor discussing conspiracy theories dubbed over it—Zeitgeist still has weird power: Based solely on anecdotal evidence, it’s probably drawing more people into the Truth movement than anything else.

The first 45 minutes of it explain in detail why Christianity is a sham and Jesus Christ is not the messiah. Besides some not-well-documented dabbling into astrology, it’s fairly well argued and revolves around commonly known facts: Many early religions had messianic stories involving virgin births, crucifixions, celebrations on December 25th, etc. The second part of Zeitgeist is devoted to 9/11 Truth, and it’s probably the most clearly stated case I’ve seen, in part because of its brevity; it covers the “facts” as concisely as possible. The third part of Zeitgeist lost me entirely—it’s a screed about how everything has always been a part of a master plan to create a New World Order, and the film’s emotional climax involves a documentary filmmaker befriending a loose-lipped Rockefeller family member who blurts out the events of 9/11… nearly one year before they happened!

It’s fascinating, this structure. First the film destroys the idea of God, and then, through the lens of 9/11, it introduces a sort of new Bizarro God. Instead of an omnipotent, omniscient being who loves you and has inspired a variety of organized religions, there is an omnipotent, omniscient organization of ruthless beings who hate you and want to take your rights away, if not throw you in a work camp forever. Zeitgeist is the film most Truthers mention online when they’re new to the movement, and it believes in a magical fairyland dominated by evil villains. It’s fiction, couched in a few facts—true, too few Americans know that the United States is entering into some disturbing trade agreements with Canada and Mexico, but then too few Americans know anything at all—and it adds up to the worst kind of fear-mongering. A borderless North American mega-nation with a single currency, the Amero? Do they really expect Bush to sneak that past the minutemen in the Southwest?

There are even nuttier resources, like Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies by Jim Marrs, who’s made a career of writing about the JFK assassination and, in 1997’s The Alien Agenda, extraterrestrial encounters. David Icke, who famously believes the world is being controlled by lizard-men (in a plot startlingly similar to the cult NBC miniseries V), has contributed his very particular genius to the genre with Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster. Just type a couple words into Google and the whole thing spins into crazy within seconds.

* * *

You can get sidetracked tearing apart every bit of evidence with a Truther. Was the whole thing done with remote-controlled planes bearing bomb-pods on their underbellies? If so, where are the real people who were ostensibly the passengers of those flights? How did they—whoever they are—pull it off—whatever it is? When I ask Konrad how the tens of thousands of people it must’ve taken to commit a conspiracy of this size managed to still be keeping their mouths shut after all this time, he argues about the size of the conspiracy.

I ask how many people it must’ve taken to wire the towers to explode.

“If they had long enough, probably you could have gotten it done with crews of 20 or 40 people.”

So how did the government convince a crew of that size to wire two iconic buildings in their own country, and why have none of them come forward?

“It’s just my theory,” he says. “But the people who wired the towers to explode are already dead. They probably got three in the back of the head, just like Pat Tillman.”

But what about the people who did the people who did the towers? And the people who told the people to do the people who did the towers? You can imagine a line of men in suits shooting each other in the back of the head extending all the way from New York to Washington, D.C. and ending in the Oval Office, but somewhere along the way, someone’s going to squeal. Truthers tend to implicate the media in the attack but, as anyone who’s ever gotten drunk with a journalist could tell you, a conspiracy that involves the media would be the world’s shortest-lived conspiracy.

The secrecy of our government is a major reason why the Truth movement has gained such successful footing in such a relatively short time, and Bush and Cheney’s refusal to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission can easily be interpreted as an admission of guilt. Plus Bush and Cheney do happen to be guilty of a lot of horrible things, some of which we’ll probably never know about. But wouldn’t a government conspiracy to go after Iraq just have tied the towers directly to Iraq? If the Truth Movement’s only job is to uncover discrepancies, they’re dooming themselves to forever be pulling facts apart. It’s a kind of a Zeno’s Arrow of illogic: They’ll never come to a reasonable conclusion because there’s never going to be an absence of doubt. It’s time for Truthers to put up or shut up, in other words—it’s been six years since 9/11 and they’ve yet to produce anything coherent.

Almost any Truther will tell you that what they’re looking for is a new, independent—possibly international—commission to investigate the events of September 11th. When I ask Konrad in an e-mail if he thinks that such a commission could accurately identify what happened and who did what to whom, his answer is less than fulfilling: “I do think there is still enough evidence to indict some of the perpetrators…. There is a lot of evidence, and it needs to be objectively sorted out…. We may never know who exactly ordered the attacks, or who did the footwork, but it is necessary to investigate. This whole war on terror, and the wars in the Middle East, is based on it.”

* * *

Do I think that the government gave us the whole truth about 9/11? Of course I don’t; I’m not an idiot. The CIA trained Osama Bin Laden to fight the Soviets, the Bush and Bin Laden families have been tied together in business dealings forever, and the administration has barely released any usable information about the attacks. But I also think that the Truth Movement is looking backward, which certainly won’t help them succeed in their mission and, incidentally, is the same sin that We Are Change Seattle’s members rightfully hold the peace movement accountable for.

But many people are quick to dismiss the Truth movement the second a Truther starts talking. This is a mistake. In many ways, Truthers represent a step forward, in part because of the high value they place on reason—nothing to sneeze at in a religious age. Outside of the always-to-be-expected lunatic fringe, the majority of the Truthers I’ve met have used clear-headed and civil discussion as their primary method of coercion, and it’s worked remarkably well. The problem is that many of the believers—like the ones who love Zeitgeist—have started to fall for spiritual hooey and tangentially Masonic bunkum. There’s a cult of coincidence just waiting to be born in the Truth Movement that could prove to be just as awful and wrongheaded as any religion, but if the intelligent rationalists that I’ve met can keep their wits about them, be reasonable, and stick to facts, they could become a very important force.

The awful truth, of course, is that we’re all living in a huge conspiracy, and things are so ridiculous that we barely even think about it anymore. Even without a poll in front of me, it’s fairly safe to say that the majority of Seattleites know that we entered into the Iraq war under false pretenses. Our government routinely spies on its citizens both inside and outside its borders, and secret courts with special rules try and convict people of all sorts of crimes. We torture and kill civilians in other countries because we can, and the very name of the Department of Homeland Security is enough to make someone familiar with Orwell and German history nearly shit their pants in terror.

I was surprised when I met some of Seattle’s Truth groups because I was confronted by smart, sincere people with lots of information about the sad state of civil liberties and corporate control in the United States, people eager to inform other people about what’s happening to our rights and using money out of their own pockets to do it. People fighting, in other words, the single biggest sin in America: laziness. The kind of pervasive laziness that can be found everywhere today—in our leaders, in our media, in ourselves.

They could do a lot better by dropping the arguments about the melting point of steel and whether or not planes actually did hit buildings. What they already have in their hands is priceless: In just a couple years, they’ve created, from nothing, a truly democratic, highly visible grassroots framework for a new kind of peace and civil rights organization that could use that concept of “civil informationing” to bring about change. It would require the movement to endorse some candidates, and make some compromises, but there comes a time in every adult’s life when you’ve got to get to work because it’s time to stop pointing at the heavens and shouting, “Why?”

hay

i already posted this

I saw that...

Hey R Rod, I think you and I must've posted at the same time, or close to the same time. I appreciate you posting it up.

BTW... what do you think?

Kris
wearechangeseattle.org
911truthseattle.org

"and that no passengers died

"and that no passengers died in the attacks"

This statement should have been immediately followed by "but are, in fact, simply unaccounted for". Because to leave that out is to beg the question (from the lesser minded, at least) "So what happened to all the people who died? Are you saying they never existed?" I know it's dumb, but you have to remember that many, MANY Americans would ask this type of question, unfortunately.
The sad truth is that we HAVE to nitpick, at least until critical mass is reached.

Read the book Paul

"If the Truth Movement’s only job is to uncover discrepancies, they’re dooming themselves to forever be pulling facts apart. It’s a kind of a Zeno’s Arrow of illogic: They’ll never come to a reasonable conclusion because there’s never going to be an absence of doubt. It’s time for Truthers to put up or shut up, in other words—it’s been six years since 9/11 and they’ve yet to produce anything coherent."

I found this paragraph particularly revolting, especially considering it's apparently the crux of his dismissal of 9/11 Truth. First, we're not just uncovering discreptancies, we're pointing out physical impossibilitiies and blatant lies, about which there can be no doubt. Second, it is not our job to speculate about portions of the story for which we have insufficient data, it is only necessary for us to factually disprove other parts, and thus logically we have disproved the whole. Third, wouldn't it help if the author actually read Griffin's book, and familiarized himself with that which he is judging to be incoherrent? Further, is it fair for him to cite views that have been thoroughly discredited as evidence for a lack of coherence within our argument? No, it's not fair, in fact it's a logical fallacy, and an especially egregious one considering that if we are right (which we are), then that sort of disinfo would be expected from the culprits.

9/11 is an issue that demands rigorous and objective analysis, so while the author may admittedly have a talent for eloquent description, his lack of research has betrayed him. To those familiar with the facts, there is no doubt that the buildings were brought down via controlled demolition. None. Speaking of which, could someone in Seattle please educate the author about the molten metal in the rubble under all 3 buildings? And maybe even the work of Steven Jones?

This article is a nice psychological portrait of someone who's just peeking into the truth movement, and I'd be curious to see where Mr. Constant stands a few months from now, having by then withstood a full frontal assault on the many faulty aspects of his analysis.

:P

Who are all these people pushing Zeitgeist?

Mr. Constant writes an excellent piece that mis-characterizes and marginalizes the truth movement while not examining the facts. Why am I not surprised?

I have met and worked with many folks in the Seattle truth community and all but a very few are rational, reasonable people who reject the no-planes and DEW theories and yet Mr. Constant feels the need to highlight these views and play up the very limited "loony fringe" element that exists within any large grassroots movement.

Mr. Constant ends by telling us to stop acting like children, compromise ourselves, endorse some political candidates and submit to the clearly corrupt existing paradigm which created 9/11 (and all the previous false flag events) and is destroying the planet and humanity almost as fast as possible.

Mr. Constant, I would suggest that you do some research. Start by watching 9/11:Press For Truth and 9/11 Mysteries:Demolitions and reading The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin (Debunking 9/11 Debunking is clearly way too advanced for him). Then do something really unusual for you, allow your curiosity to get the better of you and seek out everything you can find on the events of 9/11. Take a Physics 101 course at the local community college if you need a refresher on basic physics. I guarantee that with 20 hours of unbiased and focussed research you will realize that your denial has gotten the better of your intellect and you, too, will demand a full and complete investigation into the events of 9/11.

BTW, Mr. Constant, most of us know "why", what we want to know as completely as possible is "who" and "how" so we can stop them from ever doing it again. Remember that we are talking about a cold and calculated MURDER of nearly 3,000 people in one day on American soil which also allowed the illegal invasions and ongoing genocidal occupations of two sovereign nations.

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.