9/11 truthers must focus on destroying the official story, not splintering over dozens of theories
We must also resist those in our movement who want us to accept more and more of the official account
May 1, 2017By Craig McKee
It’s a question you would think we would have answered long ago: How can we collectively pull the truth out of 9/11 if we are pulling in different directions?As determined and sincere truth seekers, we continue to do what we can to open the eyes of people everywhere to the fact that they have been lied to about 9/11. But to be successful, we must also explain what those lies are. In other words, we have to show how the official story of this world-changing event cannot be true.
This raises another crucial question: does the 9/11 Truth Movement have a strong and coherent message—one that is understandable and potentially persuasive? Or are we allowing ourselves to be split into numerous competing camps?
We must simplify and focus our message if we are to survive as a movement with realistic hope of developing a critical mass of public support.
And we must reduce the amount of time and energy we devote to internal differences—although these are unavoidable and sometimes useful—while increasing the amount of time and energy we devote to easy-to-understand outreach. Many of us struggle—and fail—to convince our family and friends to look at this evidence. So we all know what we’re up against. Sometimes we are able to plant a seed that we hope will take root, even if not right away. We’ve had to content ourselves with small victories.
It’s about finding a balance by firmly making the case while not alienating the listener by being overly aggressive. We don’t always succeed. But not using the truth as a blunt instrument does not mean we should in any way water down the case we are making to seem more “credible.” The truth is the truth.
There are probably as many ways to approach a potential newcomer as there are Truthers. And each of us thinks we have the magic formula to reach others because we all have our own theories about exactly what happened on 9/11. But I would argue that it’s not the individual theories that can easily be brought into alignment so we can present a coherent message, it’s the focus on what’s impossible in the official story.
Some Truthers don’t particularly care if they get through to others or not; it’s about ego and arrogance for them. Others are focused on getting the approval of the mainstream media (as if the media even care about what we say), and they give dire warnings about how the sky will fall if we don’t ignore certain compelling evidence to appear more reasonable. These people have no clue what we’re really up against. Yes, we want to be credible in what we say and to base our statements on evidence, but we must also be bold enough to make the strongest case possible.
More importantly, we have to consider exactly which case we are attempting to make. Some will say we should stick to the safest evidence and chuck the rest. They would have us talk about Building 7, the Twin Towers, and nothing else. They might get into the impossibility of Hani Hanjour flying a 757 into the side of the Pentagon but not much beyond that. Truther Jon Gold takes this to an extreme when he says we should stay away from controlled demolition of the towers and accept that there were real hijackers and that a real 757 hit the Pentagon. He says we should throw all our eggs into the “we’ve been lied to” basket and stop there. This may plant a seed of doubt, but beyond that it is useless.
Look at all the evidence
For me, becoming convinced of the correctness of the Truth Movement cause was the result of an accumulation of evidence, not picking just one thing. In essence, it came from looking at the official story and then at all the information that contradicts it. That meant looking at the Twin Towers, Building 7, and the Pentagon and Shanksville. It meant looking at the military stand down and exercises, the financial irregularities, the doctoring and withholding of video evidence, the impossible accounts of the alleged hijackers, molten metal under the towers, the Larry Silverstein angle, and so much more.The more you look, the more the official story is revealed to be a web of lies.
So the idea of simplifying the message when approaching potential initiates really means sticking to the actual evidence and what we know is false in the official story. This means not proclaiming with certainty that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon or that Flight 93 was shot down. It also means not preparing to go to war with other Truthers about which type of explosive was used to bring the towers down.
This approach is essentially the one taken by David Ray Griffin in his many books on 9/11. Methodical. Well sourced. One piece of evidence at a time. How anyone could read Griffin’s work and emerge still believing the official story is beyond me. (I find it a shame that the 9/11 Consensus Panel does not achieve the dissection of the official story that Griffin’s own books so effectively do.)
I also appreciate the approach taken by Massimo Mazzucco in September 11: The New Pearl Harbor in which he looks at flaws in the official story, then the counter arguments by the debunkers, and finally at questions the debunkers must be able to answer about those arguments.
(Note: Crucial to my 9/11 education in addition to Griffin was the video National Security Alert, among
others, by Citizen Investigation Team; the numerous video presentations
by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, including live talks by
Richard Gage; the videos and articles from Pilots for 9/11 Truth; and a
host of books, including Barrie Zwicker’s Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11, Paul Zarembka’s The Hidden History of 9-11, and Graeme MacQueen’s recent advancement of the story, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. And those are just the highlights of a very long list.)If someone has had no exposure to 9/11 truth and believes the official narrative right down the line, then going into Zionism, secret societies, and the Rothschilds might not be the best way to go to introduce doubt about the truthfulness of what they’ve been told (although they are certainly valid subjects for study). Before people are prepared to believe that the U.S. government and/or certain allies were responsible for this “catalyzing event,” we have to introduce doubt about the actual “facts.” And that must be done by showing that one element of the 9/11 official story after another simply is not true.
Particularly on social media, it is common to see alleged “Truthers” (some I’m certain are trolls if not actual government agents) as they insert endless “diversity” into the debate while employing every disinformation tactic in the book. Honest Truthers either ignore them (I’m trying to move in this direction) or drive themselves crazy trying to reduce their influence (I still have one foot in this group). Or they get fooled by them.
These online Clint Eastwoods goad others to “make my day” if they dare mention something that falls outside the bounds of their theory. The result is thousands of sometimes heated and even disrespectful arguments, with the movement coming out the loser. Everyone ends up frustrated and drained. Newcomers in particular get discouraged by those fancying themselves as Truther cops who patrol the Internet, attacking what they claim is disinformation and generally terrorizing anyone who doesn’t fall into line.
A ‘divisive’ debate?
I’ll admit that my thoughts on the issue are colored by my exposure to many brainless discussions about 9/11 within the intellectual wasteland that is Facebook. If I were to come across someone willing to take the plunge into examining the evidence, the last thing I would do would be to urge them to explore 9/11 groups on this social medium. I don’t mean to say all are bad; in fact I know there are some administered by good people who do their very best to ensure a fair discussion. But others are dominated by trolls and likely agents who will mock and ridicule any newcomer who dares to even ask a question about a supposedly taboo topic.One issue that has been front and center in the debate over which evidence Truthers should present to the world is what happened, and did not happen, at the Pentagon.
This is something essential for the Truth Movement to address for two major reasons. First, the Pentagon event appeared to be an attack by an external enemy on the military of the United States (providing justification for a military response). Second, if the evidence shows that a large plane did not crash into the Pentagon and that explosives were used to simulate a crash, there is no other entity than the U.S. government itself that could have staged this deception. Simply proving the official account of a crash to be false proves an inside job took place.
What is troubling is that there is a small group of researchers, about whom I’ve written numerous times, who don’t want us to focus on what is false about the official story at the Pentagon; they want to convince us that most of it is true.
Among this group are David Chandler, Frank Legge (who recently passed away), Ken Jenkins, John Wyndham, Jonathan Cole, Jim Hoffman, and others who are pushing this position in one “scholarly paper” after another. And they never seem to have the time or inclination to show us what’s false in the official story. As I have said in numerous other articles, I believe there has been a disinformation campaign in progress for a dozen years or more that seeks to use the Pentagon event to divide the movement and to disqualify the powerful Pentagon evidence. I don’t say that all who push the large plane impact are knowingly part of this campaign, but some clearly are.
In recent years, these researchers have attempted to convince the movement not just that their interpretation of the evidence is correct, but more importantly that the movement is inevitably coming around to their way of thinking. This smacks of psychological manipulation. Cases in point include the October 2016 article in Foreign Policy Journal by John Wyndham entitled, “Bringing Closure to the 9/11 Pentagon Debate” as well as Jenkins’ and Chandler’s presentations at the 9/11 Film Festival in September 2015 (examined in these two articles: “Going full debunker: Chandler devotes most of Pentagon talk to boosting 9/11 official story” and “Jenkins misleads by linking Pentagon plane impact theory to AE911Truth”). The idea in each of these cases is clearly to manipulate people into concluding that the discussion is over, the issue decided, and anyone who doesn’t agree with the impact advocates is engaging in speculation or has “persistent beliefs.”
TAP and the Pentagon
Part of the TAP mission statement prior to removal.
In fact, Coste’s impact position was clearly illuminated on TAP’s web site (in its mission statement) until September 2016 when the text was removed in an effort by TAP to gain an endorsement from AE911Truth prior to the “Justice in Focus 9/11” symposium in New York City. (A key section that was removed read: “…the 9/11 Truth Action Project proposes to show that not only were World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7 all brought down by either classic or novel forms of controlled demolition but that the Pentagon destruction was also the result of the combination [of] a large commercial jet impact and explosives.”)
While that explicit position is no longer on the site, there is still a clear indication where TAP stands on its current Pentagon evidence page. From that page: “Meanwhile, the vast majority of impact damage was revealed in later images as a 100 foot contiguous opening in the first floor facade from column 8 to column 18. So the misperception of a “too small hole” arose from the lack of detail in early published photos.”
So those who do not believe the hole in the building is large enough to accommodate a 757 have “misperceived” the evidence. In fact, the contiguous opening is considerably less than 100 feet if you take into account that the damaged columns remain at least partially in place (some appear to have become detached at the bottom, but they are still there).
I do realize that there are those who would claim that in my frequent voicing of the importance of the Pentagon event to the overall 9/11 story—and my strong opposition to the impact position—I am guilty of the very thing I criticize: focusing on what they would call a pet theory and battling it out with any Truther who doesn’t fall into line. But I think there is a big difference.
My focus on the Pentagon is entirely consistent with my approach to 9/11 as a whole. It’s also consistent with what I think the movement as a whole should be doing—showing the official story to be false.
That government/mass media narrative says that Flight 77, under the control of hijacker Hani Hanjour, was flown into the west wall of the Pentagon at ground level, knocking over five light poles with one of those poles impaling the windshield of cab driver Lloyde England. The plane, we’re told, went through three rings of the building and emerged through a hole in the wall of the C ring. But so much about this story is obviously untrue. We can see this from the provably doctored official video; the highly credible witnesses who described a flight path irreconcilable with the “damage”; the absence of significant wreckage outside (or inside for that matter), including the wings and tail section; the hole that was not large enough to accommodate a 757, and a round “exit” hole that cannot be explained.
But I won’t go more deeply into the Pentagon details here because this article is about how we approach those outside the movement and which evidence we should focus on. Some would have us leave out the Pentagon because they claim it’s too “controversial” and “divisive” to talk about the absence of a plane at the scene of the Pentagon “plane crash.” But to do this would be to cast aside some of the very strongest evidence we have that 9/11 was an inside job. Many who don’t believe an impact took place have chosen to avoid the Pentagon altogether to keep the peace while the group that misleads us by supporting the official impact position fills the void.
I choose to stand up to those who are pushing an impact not because I must defend my own theory but because I can’t stand the idea that those who purport to be Truthers are pushing one element of the official story after another. And they are determined to drag the rest of the movement with them.
Battles we’ve already won
Applying my approach to the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers is considerably less contentious but it still has areas of fierce debate. I think it makes no sense whatsoever for some to attack a group like AE911Truth for its contention that thermite played a part in the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, instead arguing that mini nukes or directed energy weapons were responsible. We all agree that some form of explosive destruction took place and that the buildings did not come down as a result of plane impacts. Why would we want to split over the type of material used? Why re-fight a battle that AE and the movement have effectively won?And AE does not claim that thermite did the whole job. In fact, Niels Harrit, one of the authors of the research paper, “Active thermitic material discovered in dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” told me in an interview that while nanothermite was used, it was not the primary cause of the destruction of the buildings. In other words, something blew them up, and we don’t know what it was. But the controlled demolition position is a solid one, backed by overwhelming evidence, and it is essential to our efforts to educate others.
A buried plane at Shanksville?
Let’s not forget that the burden of proof is on the government to back up its claim that terrorists attacked America and that the official scenario is true. It’s their story; they have to prove it. They can’t.
In recent months and years, there have been many outside things that have threatened to splinter the Truth Movement, not the least of which are the battle lines drawn over the emergence of Donald Trump. As we focus on Russia, Syria, North Korea, inappropriate tweets, and “fake news,” it is easy to forget about 9/11, which remains to this day our best chance for exposing the global tyranny that threatens all of us.
And as one false flag, or potential false flag, after another plays itself out, it is easy to divide our focus yet further. Some point to crisis actors being used in certain events while others react to this suggestion with outrage, fearing that we’ll all be tarred as loony conspiracy theorists in the eyes of the world. It’s fine to disagree about these questions, but we must remember that it is the falsity of the official accounts that offers us the best opportunity to reveal the underlying lies that are devastating any hopes we have for a just and peaceful world.
Saying we’ve all been lied to is fine as far as it goes, but it isn’t enough. We have to show what those lies are. We must also do all we can to prevent more and more elements of the official story from taking root in the positions of Truthers where it has no business being.
And we can. Let’s do it together.
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