The rise and fall of the 9/11 conspiracy theory

7/30/2019 The rise and fall of the 9/11 conspiracy theory

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Where Were You When You First Heard?

The other question I asked myself for the

10th anniversary of 9/11.ByJeremy Stahl|Updated Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011, at 6:59 AM ET
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Soon after 9/11, conspiracy theorists began to question the origins of the tragedy

I remember precisely where I was and what I was doing when I heard: I was about three weeksinto my first year at Emory University in Atlanta, and I was sharing a meal with my new dorm-mates in theDUC dining hall. In the manner of college freshmen everywhere, we were

discussing current events. It was Sept. 12, 2001, less than 28 hours after the attacks, when I heardmy first 9/11 conspiracy theory.

A friend was arguing that the plane that had crashed in Pennsylvania the previous day had beenshot down by the U.S. military. His theory was not that the jet had been destroyed as part ofsome larger nefarious government plot,as some would later claim, but that it had been shot downto prevent another target from being hit. Furthermore, he argued, the Bush administration wouldnever be able to admit this, because the public would never accept that the American governmentwould order an American plane, over American airspace, with American passengers, to be shotfrom the sky.

To me, the government not only would have been justified, the American people would havevery easily understood that it had been justified, not to mention the fact that such a secret wouldbe impossible to keep. We had a friendly debate for about half an hour. The next day actualdetails of what happened on Flight 93began to emerge, and my friend and I didn't broach thesubject again.

Now that 10 years have passed, I found myself wondering: Whatever became of my friend's oddconspiracy theory? (For that matter, whatever became of him?) More generally, what hashappened to the 9/11 conspiracy theory, in all its various and outrageous permutations, in the lastdecade? By tracing its history, and its responses to news events such as the Iraqi surge or the2008 election or the death of Osama Bin Laden, would it be possible to show how and why

conspiracy theories in generalor at least this one in particularwax and wane?

Conspiracy theories thrive by appealing to existing hatred, paranoia, and uncertainty. The hatredcan wither. The paranoia can crack. And the uncertainty can disappear. But the conspiracy theorylives or dies, prospers or fades, for reasons almost entirely unrelated to its actual content.

Consider: Within hours of the planes hitting the towers, the conspiracy theories had alreadybegun to swirl. Many used them to pin blame on their favorite pre-existing bogeyman. Days after9/11, for example, a rumor spread that 4,000 Jews had been warned about the attacks and failedto show up for their jobs at the Twin Towers. As outlined in Part 1 of this series, this story wasdebunked immediately and never gained traction in the West. Career paranoiacs in America,meanwhile, were pointing the finger squarely at the U.S. government. People like libertarianradio host Alex Jones and alternative media reporter Michael Ruppert came from different endsof the political spectrum, but they both "knew" instantly that powers more diabolical than al-Qaida were behind the attacks, specifically the all-pervasive New World Order and the oil-hungry, fascistic Bush administration.

Soon after the attacks, Ruppert and Jones both had begun to cultivate mythologies about whatreally happened that day. But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, only a tiny segment of the
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American population, 8 percent according toone pollin early 2002, was inclined to believe thattheir government was lying to them about what happened that day.

In 2003 and 2004 the Iraq war and revelations about the misleading claims that led us into itopened more minds to the possibility that the government wasn't telling the "truth"a word the

conspiracists conscripted to their cause, calling themselves the "9/11 Truth Movement"behind9/11. In the meantime, inconsistencies in the official version of events and questions aboutBush's dealings with the 9/11 Commission gave full-time conspiracists plenty of ammunitionwith which to work. Although most Americans still believed that the Bush administration was"mostly telling the truth," by early 2004 16 percent of the population believed it was "mostlylying" about how much it knew prior to the attacksdouble the number from thesame CBS polltwo years prior. Mainstream Democratic politicians likeHoward Deanstarted to tip-toe aroundthe subject of Bush foreknowledge, while at least one member of Congress,Cynthia McKinney,embraced conspiracy theories outright.Fahrenheit 9/11, which obsessively reported Bush'sconnections to the Saudis and the Bin Laden family, was a smash hit, pulling in more money atthe box office than any previous documentary.

And in 2004, "truthers" found their intellectual apostle in an elderly professor of theology, DavidRay Griffin. One year later, a film calledLoose Changewas released on the Internet, and by theend of 2006 it had been viewedtens of millionsof times. Part 2 shows how over the course ofthe four years, from the start of the Iraq war to when it reached its lowest point in terms of bothpublic support and as a military campaign, a new pool of potential adherents was created fromwhich these conspiracists could pull their ranks. By mid-2006,one in three respondentswouldtell pollsters that they believed the government either orchestrated the attacks or allowed them tohappen in order to go to war in the Middle East.

Around this time books, conventions, and movies about the 9/11 conspiracy finally started to

garner attention from more mainstream outlets. With attention came scrutiny. Yet even thoughmost of the principal contentions behind the movement were proved to be falsemost famously,by 100-year-old engineering journalPopular Mechanicsas Part 3 illustrates, the full-timeconspiracy buffs doubled down. Instead of admitting mistakes and exploring more realisticpremises, the loudest conspiracists started accusing anyone who would question their findings ofcomplicity in the cover-up.

And then there was the role of anti-Bush sentiment. As Bush became a lamer and lamer duck,Bush hatred subsided, and its pool of potential adherents dwindled, the movement became proneto infighting and purges. Soon there was a circular finger-pointing squad, as detailed in Part 4.Some younger leaders, likeLoose Change director Dylan Avery, were driven away by thecynicism and intense paranoia of the conspiracists around 2007, while others, like British peaceactivist Charlie Veitch, were accused of being government spies after renouncing their beliefs.

At that point, however, the movement had already begun its decline. By 2009, with the first-everAfrican-American president having taken office, the number of Americans who said that Bushlet 9/11 happen in order to go to war in the Middle East was at14 percent. (Because the wordingof questions about responsibility for 9/11 has changed over the years, getting a consistentmeasure of the public's view is difficult. But in September 2007, a Zogby poll found that 26.5
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percent of Americans believed "certain elements in the US government knew the attacks werecoming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military and economic motives,"and 4.6 percent more said that members of the government actively aided in the attacks.) Inanother poll in 2010, only 12 percent of Americans said theydid not believeOsama Bin Ladenhad carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Ten years after 9/11, the 9/11 conspiracy theories are receding to where they started: on thefringe. Yet one of the primary drivers of their popularitymistrust in public institutionsremains high. After a decade of war and economic catastrophe, Americans are more distrustful oftheir government and the mediathan at any time in modern history. In the final installment ofthis series, I ask what this rising uncertainty means for the 9/11 conspiracy theory, or for othersuch theories. And I check back with my old college friend.

Part 1: Where did 9/11 conspiracies come from?

Do you remember where you were when you heard a 9/11 conspiracy theory for the first time?

Email us [email protected] or share your story in the comments below and we'llcompile the most interesting notes in an epilogue to this series.

The rise and fall of the 9/11 conspiracy theory

Where Did 9/11 Conspiracies Come From?

The fringe.

ByJeremy Stahl|Updated Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011, at 7:00 AM ET
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Alex Jones, one of the earliest and most influential 9/11 conspiracy theorists

The 9/11 conspiracy theories predate 9/11. On July 25, 2001, in a two-and-a-half-hour broadcastof hisInfowars TV program on a local public-access channel, Alex Jones laid out what he saw asthe history of government-manufacturedfalse-flagattacks, from theGulf of Tonkinincident that

Lyndon Johnson used to draw the United States deeper into the Vietnam War to the first attackon the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, whichJonesclaimedwas government-manufactured terrorism orchestrated to help Bill Clinton boost his pollnumbers and suppress civil liberties. As he compared Oklahoma City to theReichstag fire, Jonesflashed the numbers for the congressional and White House switchboards onscreen. "Call theWhite House and tell them we know the government is planning terrorism," he said. " 'BinLaden' "he used air quotes"is the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian phony system."

Six weeks later, on the day the Twin Towers fell, Jones began his broadcast by declaring that, ashe had predicted, the Bush administration had taken part in a staged terror attack. "I'll tell you thebottom line," Jones said. "98 percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled

bombing."

The controlled demolition theory remains the one great unifying dogma of 9/11 "truthers," asthey call themselves. But immediately following the attacks, it was a difficult position to take. Inthe month after 9/11, Jones' steadfast preaching that 9/11 was an inside job cost him more than70 of his 100-plus radio affiliates. Then again, his early stand would also lend him credibilitywhen disenchantment from both the left and right steadily grew over the following decade. Now,Jones is back on more than 60 radio stations, with anall-time-high audienceof 3 million listenersper day, and he boasts of his role in spreading the 9/11 conspiracy theory: "I am the progenitor ofthe entire enchilada."
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But it was more than just enthusiastic "early adopters" that drove the popularity of the 9/11conspiracy theory. Early factsseemingly inconsequential nuggets passed around the Web soonafter the attacks occurredalso played a major role. By the time these facts were debunked, thetheory they were adduced to support had already gained widespread acceptance.

The first noticeable road sign as you enter Sebastapol, Calif., a small town two hours north ofSan Francisco, is for the city's fortune teller. Driving along themain dragone is similarly struckby rows of crunchy, hippie organic shops and advertisements for an interactive dinner murdermystery. It's almost clich that down a winding back road in such a place lives another founderof the 9/11 conspiracy theory, Michael Ruppert. But much about Ruppert fits the stereotype ofthe full-time conspiracy theorist.

When I arrive at his two-acre country property, Ruppert gives me the tour of his personal gardenand chicken coop, plucking an organic raspberry, a piece of lettuce, and a leaf of basil as awelcome offering. His upstairs hallway and office are adorned with photos of fellow conspiracytheorists such asCynthia McKinney, the former Democratic member of Congress and 2008

Green Party presidential candidate. Ruppert gained a minor degree of celebrity himself two yearsago after writing and starring in the critically acclaimed documentaryCollapse, about his currenttwin obsessions of economic crisis and peak oil. He boasts that the movie made him friends withMel Gibson and Leonardo DiCaprio, and is also a proud marijuana user. ("I used to have acolumn inHigh Times!") He is prone tobizarre rantsabout having predicted the currenteconomic crisis. "I am America's Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," he tells me in a typical non sequitur."I'm in a gulag. Not like he was, not physically. I'm in a gulag of invisibility. The United Statesgovernment and the mainstream media do not dare mention my name. I predicted all of theseevents, not all, but most of them, with alarming clarity."

Before 9/11, Ruppert had been working on other conspiracy theoriesabout a government

supercomputer program, about accusations that AIG was laundering drug money, about allegeddrug-running by the CIA. He had been obsessed with the CIA and drugs ever since he says theagency tried to recruit him through his ex-fiancee, "Teddy," while he was an LAPD narcoticsofficer in 1976. The dramatic tale of his descent from up-and-coming cop into career paranoiac istold in Jonathan Kay's chapter on the psychology of conspiracists in his bookAmong theTruthers: "Within two years of meeting 'Teddy,' Ruppert checked himself into a psychiatrichospital, complaining about death threats. Soon thereafter, he left the LAPD, and began peddlingdifferent versions of his storyincluding the contention that the CIA tried to recruit him toprotect its L.A.-area drug operationsto whatever credulous journalists would listen." It wasRuppert's website From the Wilderness that was one of the first to start questioning the officialaccount of 9/11.

On the morning of 9/11, Ruppert was exchanging emails with his ex-wife, who witnessed theattacks from her 35th floor Battery Park apartment. As Ruppert attempted to hold her handvirtually while she watched the North Tower burn, he watched live on TV as the second planestruck the South Tower.

"As soon as the second plane hit, I knew that this was totally wrong," he told me. "I may nothave reported it right away, but I was in full investigative mode from the second I saw the
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second airplane hit the tower." And when the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77, it was all theconfirmation Ruppert needed that the government had been complicit.

Ruppert then interrupts his story to show me a closet that houses his knife collection and"personal emergency survival supplies." He pulls out a framed photo of an Air Force pilot

alongside assorted combat medals and ribbons. "This is my father," he says. "He was a radarintercept officer in F-89 and F-90 interceptors stationed in Alaska waiting for the Russianbombers to come over the pole. I was raised into this culture. It's impossible under NORAD

and Air Force scramble procedures for that plane to have ever hit the Pentagon. We wereprepared for that from the 1950s."

For Ruppert, it was inconceivable that the most expensive air defense system in the world couldpossibly have failed that day. Never mind that it was a system whose primary mission was toguard against Soviet encroachment for 40 years and which continued to focus exclusively onexternal threats in the decade following the end of the Cold War. It should have been ready, andif it wasn't, then it had to be because of internal sabotage.

Lending credence to this conspiracy, the official timeline issued by military commanders in thewake of the attacks was incorrect. At first NORAD claimed that fighters were notified that Flight77 was hijacked, and that the fighters were scrambled toward Washington in whatshould havebeen enough timetointerceptthe third plane before it struck the Pentagon. Eventually, usingsubpoena power, the 9/11 Commission was able to piece together the actual timeline of eventsthat day, whichdemonstratedthat contrary to previous claims, the military had not been aware ofany of the hijackings before it was much too late. Though military officials were exonerated ofintentionally misleading the 9/11 Commission, some staff members of the commission wouldlater go on to describe the testimony asdeliberately untrue.

So the seed of one key 9/11 conspiracy theory was based on a government-propagated falsehood.The tapes of the day's events from NORAD's Northeast headquarters, eventually released to thepublic in 2007, would prove that there was little the fighters could have done. But by then itdidn't matter. As early as November 2001, Ruppert waslecturing in front of 1,000 people atPortland State Universityon the "Truth and Lies of 9/11," which he recorded and soon startedmarketing. He went on to catalog his From the Wilderness reports into a book, Crossing theRubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, which has sold morethan 100,000 copies.

***

In the weeks and months after 9/11, Jones and Ruppert were already formulating a vastconspiracy theory that would take several years to reach peak popularity. There was anothertheory, however, that spread more widely and died more quickly, at least in the West. As such, itserves as a lesson in how and whereif not whyconspiracy theories work: by taking a smallnugget of truth and constructing entire mythologies around it.

It tookless than 24 hoursfor vague theories attributing the attacks to Israel to begin to circulate.Four days after 9/11, the first piece of evidence linking Israel to the attacks was reported in
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Syrian newspaperAl Thawra. The government paper stated that "4,000 Jews were absent fromtheir work on the day of the explosions," the implication being that 4,000 Jews were forewarnedabout the attacks by the actual plotters, fellow Jews. The storyspread throughthe Middle East.The original source of that precise 4,000 number was the Jerusalem Post, whichreportedon theday of the attacks that "[t]he Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of

4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon atthe time of the attacks."

Slate and popular myth-busting site Snopes.com were two of the first outlets todebunk therumor. Yet 10 years later, morphed versions of the discredited "Jewish foreknowledge" storiesare still being repeated by fringe anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracy theorists, includingIranianPresident Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The theory does not have much traction in America, evenamong 9/11 conspiracy theorists, but it has maintained consistent popularity on the Arab street,where according to theNew York Times it isconventional wisdomthat Jews were warned to stayhome that day.

A 2008World Public Opinion pollshowed that 43 percent of Egyptian respondents blamedIsrael for 9/11, while 31 percent in Jordan blamed Israel, and 36 percent in Turkey pinned theattacks on the United States government. In the Palestinian territories, 27 percent thought theUnited States was responsible, while 19 percent said Israel had carried out the attacks. Arabiceditions of the original anti-Semitic conspiracy theory,The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, havebeen best-sellers inSyria and Lebanon, while the famous forgery wasadaptedfor Egyptiantelevision in a 41-part "historical drama" in 2002.

In the Middle East, saysCharles Hill, a 32-year veteran of the foreign service, there is a deepundercurrent of belief that just about everything that happens in the worldgood and badisdue to an American-led international Jewish conspiracy. "America is kind of Jewry writ-large

because 'the Jews control the media, they control committees of Congress, and they control theuniversities,' and such," he says. In the case of the 4,000-Jews rumor, Hill says, the veryspecificity of the charge lent it credibilityeven as it also allowed it to be quickly debunked.Conspiracists like a fact "that is concocted to be plausible because it is highly specific," Hillsays. "And because it is highly specific, and because it has been, they claim, discovered, becauseit had been covered up, designed not to be known, and it was revealed by an error or by someonewho stumbled across it, and therefore that proves or adds credibility to the overall charge."

***

The prominence of the 4,000-Jews rumor in the Middle East to this day and its failure to catch onin the United States is illustrative of a crucial fact of the popularity of conspiracy theories: Theyneed fertile ground in order to flourish. In the early days after 9/11 in the United States, the fieldswere relatively fallow. But within 18 months of 9/11, that would begin to change. Part 2: The rise of 9/11 conspiracism.
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The Rise of "Truth"

How did 9/11 conspiracism enter the

mainstream?ByJeremy Stahl|Updated Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011, at 7:01 AM ET

George W. Bush gets word of the 9/11 attacks while reading a book to schoolchildren

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, conspiracists started to create and spread what wouldultimately become the foundational mythology of the 9/11 conspiracy movement: In order tosuppress civil liberties and benefit their allies in the oil and gas industry, hawkishneoconservatives in the Bush administrationalong with their partners in the CIA and FBI, ofcourseorchestrated a massive terror attack that killed 2,977 innocent civilians and mobilizedthe American populace behind otherwise unsupportable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is no consistent polling about the popularity of this theory. But in the early years of thedecade, at least, it was relegated to the far reaches of the American political spectrum, a placememorably described in Richard Hofstadter'sParanoid Style in American Politics. In May 2002,with Bush's approval rating still well over 70 percent, fewer than one in 10 Americans in aCBSNews pollsaid that the Bush administration was lying about what it knew regarding possibleterror attacks prior to 9/11. By April 2004,16 percent of respondents in a CBS Newspollsaidthat the Bush administration was "mostly lying" about what it knew about possible terroristattacks against the United States prior to 9/11, while 56 percent said it was telling the truth buthiding something and 24 percent said it was telling the entire truth. By the five-year anniversaryof the attacks,one in three Americanswould tell pollsters that it was likely that the governmenteither had a hand in the attacks of 9/11 or allowed them to happen in order to go to war in theMiddle East.

What caused these ideas, by the middle of the decade, to enter thepolitical mainstream? It's hardto say whether widespread discontent and mistrust makes people more willing to listen to ideas
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they previously considered absurd. But it seems plausible. And there can be little doubt that bythe middle of 2006, 9/11 conspiracy theorists had a new base to draw from. That base wasgeneral unhappiness with the war in Iraq and a small but deep strain ofBush hatred.

***

The 9/11 conspiracy theories got a hearing in Europe and among liberal intellectuals like GoreVidal before they rose in popularity in America. French author Thierry Meyssan's9/11: The BigLie, which postulated that the Pentagon was not struck by a jetliner but by a smaller militaryaircraft or a missile, was theNo. 1 best-selling bookin France for six weeks in the spring of2002. By October, Vidal wasseriously exploringa wide range of conspiracy theories that theBush administration had been complicit in 9/11 for geostrategic reasons in an essay in Britain'sObserver.

At home, such talk remained on thefringesof political life even as the war got under way. Butfueled in part by anger over thedeceptions of the war, the lack ofaccountabilityordisclosureon

the part of the Bush administration with respect to the 9/11 Commission, andcivil libertiesabusesin the aftermath of the attacks, the popularity of conspiracy theories was steadily growingin 2003 and 2004.

Then, in the summer of 2004, Michael Moore'sFahrenheit 9/11was released, earning more than$100 million to becomethe top-grossing documentary of all time. WhileFahrenheit 9/11 doesnot allege any sort of Bush-led conspiracy concerning 9/11, the film does depict a governmenthell-bent on covering up how much it knew prior to 9/11 and using the attacks as a false pretextfor a war with Iraq. In 2004, more and more Americans were willing to raise these kinds ofquestions.Bush derangement syndrome, as Charles Krauthammer would famously call theemerging trend of Bush hatred, had not yet reached a boiling point. But it would. Within three

years of his film's release, Moore himself wouldstart giving credenceto some of the more out-there conspiracy theories.
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When I asked several leading 9/11 conspiracists who or what inspired them to join, they did notnameself-proclaimed founding father Alex Jones.As popular as Jones is, and as much influenceas he has had in spreading the 9/11 conspiracy theory, the 37-year-old Texan new-mediaprovocateur is not the movement's intellectual leader. That title belongs to the grandfatherly 72-year-old academic David Ray Griffin.

On 9/11, Griffin was a well-respected professor of philosophy at the Claremont School ofTheology in Southern California. Believing that the attacks had been prompted by overlyinterventionist American foreign policy, Griffin shortly thereafter began working on a book

about American imperialism. He was two-thirds of the way through with the project when, inMarch 2003, a colleague sent him a link to Paul Thompson's terror timeline, a go-to sourceamong 9/11 researchers of all stripes. The timeline includes more than 5,000 reports that catalogevery mainstream media account that could be cited as demonstrating inconsistencies in theofficial story or the possibility of government foreknowledge. It describes dozens of warningsabout an upcoming terror attack prior to 9/11, all reported in mainstream media, and points toallegations that members of the Pakistani-ISI had aided the 9/11 attackers, strongly implying thatthe CIA also knew. At the time that Griffin picked up the timeline, it also pointed toinconsistencies in NORAD's story and wondered aloud why the planes had not been intercepted.

All of this was simmering in Griffin's mind in March 2003. "We realized how important 9/11

was when we saw it wasn't just attacking Afghanistan, but then using that to go into Iraq,"Griffin told me. When one of his students asked him to put together a presentation about 9/11 asthe pretext for the war in Iraq, Griffin obliged. Soon after he began working on a magazinearticle based on the presentation, which would eventually become too sprawling for a periodical.It became The New Pearl Harbor, published in 2004, the first of more than 10 books Griffin haswritten about 9/11. Although it relies upon factual inaccuracies, leaps of logic, and selectivequotations to create a complex web of conspiracy leading to the top of the Bush administration,Griffin's work is still held up by 9/11 conspiracy theorists as a masterpiece of the genre.
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***

Former University of Wisconsin lecturer Kevin Barrett, who is the leading advocate of theoriesthat Israel's Mossad orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, is one of the conspiracists who cites Griffin ashis inspiration for joining the movement. Barrett came to renown in 9/11 conspiracy circles in

2006 after being castigated on Fox News by Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly during a nationaldebate about the 9/11 conspiracy theory and academic freedom on the Madison campus.

Though he had his doubts about the mainstream account, Barrett had dismissed 9/11 conspiracytheories as ridiculous speculations prior to 2003. But after hearing that Griffin was "marshallingthe evidence" for the case that the Word Trade Center had been brought down by a controlleddemolition and the Pentagon had been attacked by a military aircraft, Barrett decided to do moreresearch. After two weeks of reading the work of Ruppert, Meyssan, and others, he wasconvinced. "I kind of went from saying, 'Well, this is really interesting that somebody as sensibleand careful and empirical as David Ray Griffin would give credence to these pretty bizarrespeculations,' to two weeks later, 'My God, this is absolutely right.' "

Over the next several months he held teach-ins on the Madison campus. But he never took hisactivism beyond that until just days after President Bush's re-election. It was the second battle ofFallujah, which took place during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, that caused Barrett, whohad converted to Islam years before, to become a full-time activist. "The images and the storiescoming out of Fallujah were so atrocious," he said. "That actually was the moment when I said,'Well, I need to take this to the next level. What can be done to stop this growing war?' " AfterFallujah, Barrett decided to start a group called the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11Truth. After losing his teaching job, in 2007, he turned his attention to conspiracism full time,and he continues that work to this day.

***

In mid-2002, an 18-year-old from upstate New York named Dylan Avery discovered PaulThompson's timeline of terror. Like David Ray Griffin, Avery was impressed, and he soonbecame convinced that the government was not revealing the whole story of 9/11. Avery startedworking on the screenplay for a feature film about a group of three friends who discovered agovernment cover-up. The Bush administration's lack of complete cooperation with the 9/11Commission, along with the powerlessness of anti-war protesters to slow the march to war inIraq, drew him to the community of 9/11 conspiracists in 2003 and 2004. "It was just so easy tobelieve anything terrible about your government because you were seeing all of these terriblethings," Avery told me. "They were doing all of these terrible things right in front of our faces,so why wouldn't they do terrible things behind closed doors?"

After realizing that a full-budget action feature was too ambitious for an 18-year-old director,Avery decided to turn his film into a documentary. Working with his childhood friend KoreyRowe, who had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, Avery cut together an 82-minutedocumentary that compiled many of the more out-there conspiracy theories about 9/11, includingthe charge that the South Tower was not struck by a United Airlines commercial flight but rathera military drone.


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The film, produced for $2,000, was released in April 2005. At the time, Avery was working as awaiter at Red Lobster. It didn't do spectacularly well. Avery struggled to get Alex Jones to coverit on his website, and the movie was attacked by others in the movement for its factual problems.

In response to the criticism, Avery cut a new edition and released it at the end of 2005, which

turned out to be "the perfect time." Discontent with the Iraq war, and the Bush administrationgenerally, spiked in 2006 as sectarian violence tipped into civil war. A majority of Americansconsistently said that the Bush administration had deliberately misled the public about whetherIraq had weapons of mass destruction, while 58 percent said the government was misleading thepublic about how the war was going. Bush's approval rating sunk to new lows.

"The distrust built up over time," Avery said. "It led, I think, to the culmination of the movementin 2005, 2006, which is when a lot of people had these doubts that were building up over years,but didn't really have an outlet for it." In July 2006, a Scripps-Howard poll found that 36 percentof Americans said it was "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that federal officials assisted in the9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them because they wanted the United States to go to war in

the Middle East. A Zogby poll one year later found 31 percent saying that elements of thegovernment either orchestrated the attacks or let them happen for geopolitical reasons.

The re-cut version of Avery's film became the most influential piece of 9/11 conspiracy agitprop,attracting tens of millions of views or downloads on YouTube and other sites. Mainstream mediaoutlets started hounding Avery and Rowe for interviews. In the summer of 2006, Avery says,"Vanity Fair came to our house. CNN came to our house. MSNBC. CNN. Calls would not stop."

But Avery's faith in the theory, like the intensity of Bush hatred in the population generally, hasfaded with time. "Nobody really seems to care anymore," he says. "I don't know what it was, butI guess that climate of fear during the Bush administration, while it certainly was oppressive and

made us feel like Big Brother was literally lurking around the corner, it got people off their ass. Itmade people active, it made people want to join the anti-war movement."

Since 2006 Avery has re-cut the film twice more, removing some of the more outrageousaccusations, like the claim that Flight 93 had been diverted to Cleveland Hopkins Airport ratherthan crashing in Pennsylvania and that calls made from the plane had been faked using "voice-morphing" technology. After interviewing some of the Pentagon witnesses in person, Avery haseven backed away from the stance that it was a missile and not a plane that hit the Pentagon. "It'seasy to come to conclusions when a) you don't have a lot of information at your disposal and b)you haven't had a chance to actually talk to people who were there," Avery says.

***

What does Avery think of 9/11 conspiracy theories now? He thinks that while orchestrating theattacks was beyond the scope of the Bush administration, there was "considerableforeknowledge" within the government so that it should have been able to prevent them. Why itdid not is his new focus. "Where I am now is, I've whittled it down to a very basic statement thatI think a lot of people can agree on: There was a cover-up of some kind," Avery says. "The only


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question is what they were covering up, how far [up] it goes, how deep it runs, and how manyasses would be on the line if the truth actually came out."

He says he still "support[s] the movement," but he also acknowledges getting "sucked in" deeperthan he should have been, into a "hardcore mentality that it was almost too easy to get into back

then, because the war had just started and everybody was just so pissed off."

"It was easy to distrust everything," he says, "because there was nothing you could trust."

The Theory vs. the Facts

9/11 conspiracy theorists responded to

refutations by alleging more cover-ups.ByJeremy Stahl|Updated Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011, at 7:31 AM ET

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission

It's difficult to pinpoint a precise moment when the popularity of the 9/11 conspiracy theorypeaked, though it was probably sometime in 2006. In tracking its decline, however, three datesstand out: July 22, 2004, when the 9/11 Commission released itsfinal report; Feb. 3, 2005, when

Popular Mechanics publishedits 5,500-word articledismantling the movement's claims; andAug. 21, 2008, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued the final portionof a$16 million studyinvestigating the cause of the collapse of the Twin Towers and a thirdWorld Trade Center skyscraper that was not hit by a plane.

Facts alone are insufficient to destroy a conspiracy theory, of course, and in many ways atheory's appeal has more to do with the receptiveness of its audience than the accuracy of itsdetails. The popularity of the 9/11 conspiracy theory would continue to ebb and flow after each
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of these reports. But their responses to these challenges show how followers of the 9/11conspiracy theory changed their emphases and argumentsor, more often, did notwhenpresented with new information.

***

ThePopular Mechanics article may never have been published were it not for a $3 millionnational ad campaign by an eccentric millionaire to promote a self-published book calledPainfulQuestions. The campaign posited that the World Trade Center was brought down in a controlleddemolition and that the Pentagon was never hit by a jetliner, and asked questions about whetherthe fires in the Twin Towers were sufficiently hot to bring about their collapse or whether thehole in the Pentagon was big enough to fit a commercial airplane. WhenPopular MechanicsEditor James Meigs saw the ad, he says, "I thought, well, we'rePopular Mechanics and we'vebeen reporting about what happens when planes crash, how skyscrapers are built, for 100 years.Let's actually answer the questions."

So the magazine went about reporting out some of the most interesting and serious conspiracytheories, and responding to them based on interviews with more than 70 experts in aviation,engineering and the military. Its article found that all of the supposedly scientific evidence forgovernment involvement in 9/11 was based on shoddy research and, to a large extent,manipulated and misleading argumentation. The piece remains the most widely read story themagazine has ever published, with more than 7.5 million page views.

"We were the first people to actually take the conspiracy theory claims seriously and addressthem very directly," Meigs says. "And the reaction was so overwhelmingly hostile, and kind ofscary, that it was a real education in how these groups work and think." Among the responseswas a report by anti-Zionist conspiracist Christopher Bollyn, who claimed to have discovered

why the 100-year-old engineering magazine would take part in a government cover-up of thecrime of the century: A young researcher on the magazine's staff named Benjamin Chertoff wasa cousin of then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and the magazine was seekingto whitewash the criminal conspiracy with its coverage.


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Never mind that Chertoff had not been in his position when the story was being written, andBenjamin Chertoff had never met the man who he said might be a distant cousin. The meremention of the connection was sufficient for conspiracists to dismiss the report.

"That was interesting. A little bit scary I think for Ben, but also kind of comical," Meigs said."Imagine the scenario. Let's say somebody atSlate is related to Dick Cheney and all of a suddenhe said, 'Hey guys, I need everybody to work with me on this: We're going to all get together tocover up the biggest mass murder in American history. Are you with me?' "

ThePopular Mechanics article was turned into a book calledDebunking 9/11 Myths, whichcame to include interviews with more than 300 sources and eyewitnesses. David Ray Griffinresponded with his own book,Debunking 9/11 Debunkingin 2007, in which he reiteratedtheories that he said had not been adequately debunked, claimed that the only successfuldebunkingPopular Mechanics had done was of straw men, and repeated the Chertoff cover-upaccusation.

It's worth lingering over Griffin's response to illustrate a typical reaction among conspiracytheorists to refutation. One of the bedrocks of the conspiracy theory is that U.S. military planesshould have been easily able to intercept any of the four hijacked airplanes on 9/11 to prevent theattack. ThePopular Mechanics article notes that only one NORAD interception of a civilian

airplane over North America had occurred in the decade before 9/11, of golfer Payne Stewart'sLearjet, and that it took one hour and 19 minutes to intercept before it ultimately crashed. Basedon initial reports that misread the official crash report, conspiracists had previously cited theStewart case as evidence that it normally only took NORAD 19 minutes to intercept civilianaircraft.

"That's a very debated thing," Griffin told me. "It looks like somebody has kind of changed thestory there. I don't know what happened, but I've read enough about it to look like that's not true
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that it took that long." And what about other physical evidence that debunks the interceptiontheory, specifically the NORAD tapes, which document the chaos and confusion of American airdefenses that morning in painstaking detail? Griffin's response is that the tapes have likely beendoctored using morphing technology to fake the voices of the government officials and depictphony chaos according to a government-written script. It's not surprising, he says, that after 9/11,

mainstream historical accounts would be revised to fit the official narrative.

"This is a self-confirming hypothesis for the people who hold it," Meigs says. "In that sense it isimmune from any kind of refutation and it is very similar to, if you've ever known a reallyhardcore, doctrinaire Marxist or a hardcore fundamentalist creationist. They have sort of a divineanswer to every argument you might make."

***

Another article of faith among conspiracy theorists is that the conspiracy would not have to havebeen very large. In Crossing the Rubicon, Michael Ruppert writes that there didn't have to be any

more than two dozen people with complete foreknowledge of the attacks to orchestrate 9/11, andthat they would all be "bound to silence by Draconian secrecy oaths." But those numbers beginto balloon out of control if all of the people and institutions accused of playing a part in thecover-up are counted. They would have to have included the CIA; the Justice Department; theFAA; NORAD; American and United Airlines; FEMA;Popular Mechanics and other mediaoutlets; state and local law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York; theNational Institute of Standards and Technology; and, finally and perhaps most prominently, the9/11 Commission.

Of the alleged conspirators in the cover-up, few play a greater role than Philip Zelikow, the 9/11Commission's executive director. A career academic and diplomat, he was asked to resign from

his post in 2004 by representatives of 9/11 families because of an alleged conflict of intereststemming from his role on George W. Bush's transition team. Zelikow recused himself from anypart of the investigation dealing with the time period that he worked with the transition team, buthis presence on the commission is all the conspiracists needed to discredit the entire report.

"I play a very prominent part in their demonology of the world, but the people themselves don'tcome across like raving lunatics," Zelikow says. "They're often people who in many respectsseem quite sincere, very concerned, very patient. They just are fixated." The obsessive nature ofconspiracism makes it very difficult to discuss or debate issues with some of the more hardcorebelievers. "They're not really able to listen to you," Zelikow says. "It's almost like you'll saysomething and then the tape will just replay its loop again."

In 2007 a conspiracist confronted Zelikow in public with the "fact" that many of the hijackers arestill alive. Zelikow responded that the 9/11 Commission had looked into the claims and foundnothing to them but could not fit every single debunked conspiracy theory into the final versionof the report. The questioner's reply was to repeat his accusation. I had a similar experience onthe same topic when questioning Griffin, who begins his bookThe 9/11 Commission Report:Omissions and Distortionswith the "hijackers are still alive" theory. I sent him an email pointingout that this theory relied on discredited media reportsthe "hijackers" they had found were just


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people with the same names as the hijackers. In response, he emailed me a chapter on the topicfrom one of his books and said he was too busy to discuss the issue further.

Another common conspiracist tactic is to obsess over minor points of contention and exaggeratethe importance of often easily explained inconsistencies in very hard evidence, such as phone

calls victims made to family members on the ground describing the hijackings. For example,Griffin says that the phone calls, records of which were made public as part of the 9/11Commission, were faked by "voice-morphing" technology that fooled family members on theground.

***

All the same, some conspiracy theorists have actually retreated from their more difficult-to-proveclaims, such as the argument that no commercial plane hit the Pentagon. "They are focusing mostof their attention on the World Trade Center stuff, where they're clinging to a few of these nowpretty well-rebutted engineering hypotheses," Zelikow says. The most successful purveyor of

these hypotheses is Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth founder Richard Gage. In March2006 Gage heard Griffin argue on the radio that quotes from firemen provided evidence ofcontrolled explosions in the World Trade Center. Gage was floored. "I couldn't even get back tothe office, I had to pull the car over," he says. Gage tried to attend a Griffin lecture in Oaklandthe very next day, but the 600-person hall was full and he had to settle for listening to a livewebstream. Within a couple of weeks he had created a PowerPoint presentation about this theoryand started proselytizing to co-workers.

Two months later he started Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and soon after that hebecame a full-time activist, spreading his message that the World Trade Center investigation bythe National Institute of Standards and Technology was a fraud and that there needed to be an

"independent" investigation. The petition he started at the time now has signatures from morethan 1,500 licensed or degreed architects and engineers, and he is considered one of themovement's most persuasive leaders. Like Griffin, Gage argues that the three-year-long, $16million NIST investigation, the work of nearly 100 NIST investigators, staff, and independentexperts and consultants, was part of the criminal cover-up. "We're calling for a federal grand juryinvestigation of the lead investigator and his co-project leader," Gage says. "Whoever's namesare on those reports need to be investigated."

Dozens of peer-reviewed papers have been written that support the official hypotheses, but thoseare dismissed as well. Both Gage and Griffin do, however, point to the movement's own peer-reviewed paper, published by former BYU professor Steven Jones and Danish scientist NielsHarrit. Because traditional controlled demolitions would have been audible throughout lowerManhattan had they actually occurred on 9/11, conspiracists have been forced to posit a veryobscure scientific explanation for their central thesis: that the demolitions used an incendiarychemical called nano-thermite. Jones and Harrit argued in their paper that they found traces of athermitic reaction in particles of dust found at the World Trade Center.

Griffin and Gage hold this up as mainstream validation of the movement's work, but the peer-


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review process of the paper is suspect. (The editor of the journal resigned over the paper after itwas published without her approval, for example, and one of the paper's peer reviewers is a 9/11conspiracist who has speculated that the passengers on the four flights are actually still alive andliving off of Swiss bank accounts.) "Since they can't attack the science, they attack the peer-review process," Gage responds. "Let's have them attack the science." The science has been

addressed byPopular Mechanics and others.

At a certain point, though, debating science and theory and ideas is an exercise in futility,because the hypotheses of conspiracy theorists are not grounded in any kind of a largerunderstanding of the real world. "This sounds really mean," says Erik Sofge, a reporter on theoriginalPopular Mechanics piece and an occasional contributor toSlate. "But really, it's likearguing over the marching speed of hobbits."

Part 4: Paranoia and apostasy.

You're Not Paranoid if It's True

What happens when believers in 9/11

conspiracy theories change their minds.

ByJeremy Stahl|Updated Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011, at 7:14 AM ET

Nano-thermite figures heavily in some 9/11 conspiracy theories
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The man who created the single most influential piece of propaganda about the 9/11 conspiracyis now ambivalent about the movement he helped make popular. "There's a certain thing calledtact that you need when you're dealing with the public," says Dylan Avery, director of the filmLoose Change, released in 2005 and since viewed tens of millions of times online. "And I thinkthat is a certain approach that a lot of people lack."

Avery should know. He has been accused of being a traitor,a spy, orslightly morecharitablyjust plain "sloppy." According to 9/11 conspiracy proponent Michael Ruppert, themovement has been hurt by its acceptance of some of the (relatively speaking) more absurdnotions that were featured prominently in the early versions ofLoose Change, notions that hesays were planted asdisinformationby those looking to discredit conspiracists. "That's one ofmany reasons why I completely cut myself off from the 9/11 Truth movement in 2004," Ruppertsays. "They just swallowed too many poison pills."

That's the thing about conspiracy theories and the people who believe in them: One man's poisonpill is another's smoking gun. For much of the decade, 9/11 conspiracy theorists were united by

(and benefited from) opposition to the war and hatred of George Bush. Not even direct assaultson the facts underlying their theories had much impact. As it turns outas it usually turns outwith conspiracy theoriesthe people most adept at weakening the "9/11 Truth" movement werethe truthers themselves. Because conspiracy theorists can't just have disagreements. If youdisagree with a conspiracy theorist, then you probably belong to the conspiracy.

***

In 2008, Alex Jones' website alleged that young New York-based conspiracist Nico Haupt wasactually an undercover agent. Haupt was one of the very first conspiracy theorist leaders, startingto research and organize on the morning of 9/11. He was the first to report some of the military

training exercises that were going on during the attacks, which Ruppert called "the holy grail" of9/11 research and which the movement would use to argue that the military had been sabotagedfrom within.

But in 2005, Haupt started preaching a theory, referred to disparagingly by other conspiracists asthe "no-planer" hypothesis, that the footage of jetliners hitting the WTC seen live on TV thatmorning was actually of holograms. Around that time, he started accusing other leaders in themovement, including Jones and David Ray Griffin, of being government plants themselves. Atthe end of 2006 he nearly got in a fist fight withRolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, and byMay 2008 he was accused of assaulting fellow conspiracists protesting at Ground Zero. He hasnot really been heard from since, says Ruppert, who calls him "a fringe guy who had a goodheart who went crazy."

Jones would disagree. He and Luke Rudkowski, a young activist who has been described as aJones protg, took Haupt's increasingly outlandish behavior and violence as evidence that hewas co-opted by the government. "This is a classic COINTELPRO operation, straight out the1960s," Jones' website reported.
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Conspiracists are not being entirely irrational when they express their fears of governmentinfiltration. The FBI's counterintelligence operation, known as COINTELPRO, spied on andsometimes infiltrated suspected Communist groups, civil rights groups, anti-war activists, andhate groups, among others, until the program was exposed and shut down in 1971. The FBI wasusing some of these tactics, including surveillance of journalists, as late as 1987. COINTELPRO

has become shorthand in the 9/11 conspiracy world for almost any source of information that aconspiracist disagrees with. Because there are so many disparate elements in the 9/11 conspiracytheory world, the charges will often be lodged against fellow conspiracy adherents.

The key piece of evidence cited to allege that government still spies on conspiracy groups is a30-page 2008 paper titled "Conspiracy Theories" co-written by Cass Sunstein, the currentadministrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In it, Sunstein says thatdomestic and foreign conspiracy theories pose "real risks to the government's anti-terroristpolicies" and argues that the government should be "cognitively infiltrating" groups that purveythese theories. Sunstein proposes having the government send undercover operatives and paid"independent" contractors onto online message boards and websitesand into some real-life

groupsin order to undermine the theories.

There's no evidence that such a program is currently being undertaken by the Obamaadministration, but the paper set the conspiracy world aflame. "Cognitive infiltration" hasbecome the latest buzz phrase in conspiracy circles. (Griffin devoted his last book to the topic.)In late June, one of the first alleged "cognitive infiltrators" was uncovered.

***

Charlie Veitch is a 31-year-old British anarchist living in London. On 9/11, he happened to be onvacation in Thailand and remembers watching a TV in a beachside bar as the towers burned. He

cut his trip short and soon took a job in the City, London's Wall Street. He did not encounter hisfirst 9/11 conspiracy theory, he says, until 2006, when he watched Alex Jones' TerrorStorm,which describes a history of alleged false-flag terror attacks and then makes the case that 9/11was such an event. Veitch was instantly hooked. He started to watch all of the 9/11 conspiracyvideos he could find on the Internet, which turns out to be quite a few.

In 2009, Veitch lost his job. By then he had started occasionally posting videos to YouTube ofhimself and friends heckling Scientologists or breaking out into song during the "People'sQuestion Time" with London Mayor Boris Johnson. After losing his job, Veitch started makingthe guerilla videos on a full-time basis and launched an activist group called the Love Policedevoted to "confronting the authority state" in the United Kingdom.


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Nineteen days after starting the Love Police, Veitch caught the attention of Alex Jones with avideo of himself being confronted by police officers after trying to film the U.S. Embassy inLondon. Jones invited Veitch onto the show to discuss what they described as the U.K. policestate, and Veitch became an occasional guest. Veitch's site gained a following, which in turnallowed him to solicit enough donations to afford to pay the rent. He also started appearingoccasionally on Russia Today, the Russian-sponsored propaganda TV network that trafficsheavily in conspiracy theories. In June 2010, Veitch was arrested while doing his provocateurthing at the G-20 summit in Toronto, and he was arrested again the day before the royal weddingin April on suspicion of "conspiracy to cause a public nuisance." He remained a relatively minor

figure in the 9/11 conspiracy world.

Then he was selected as a subject in a documentary called 911 Conspiracy Road Trip, to bebroadcast on the BBC this week. The documentary shows five British 9/11 conspiracy theoristsas they travel to Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pa., where they meet peopledirectly affected by the attacks. Veitch was given the chance to grill controlled-demolitionexperts, professors of metallurgy, some of the people who helped build the World Trade Centerin the 1970s, retired CIA analysts, eyewitnesses, and aviation experts. In Pennsylvania they alsospoke with Alice Hoagland, the mother of Mark Bingham, one of the passengers on Flight 93who helped fight the hijackers.

By the third day of actually speaking with people he had believed responsible for covering upmass murder, Veitch was starting to believe he was wrong about 9/11. "After meeting all of thesealleged conspirators that were supposed to be in on it, I realized they were normal family men,"Veitch said. "There wasn't anything conspiratorial about them." It was when he questioned ademolitions expert atop the rebuilt World Trade Center 7 that he finally changed his mind about9/11.
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"It's not so much a matter of technical evidence, it's more of a change in mindset that I've had,"Veitch said. "Going from a paranoid mindset to a less paranoid mindset."

***

Veitch announced his "conversion" on June 29, 2011, on his blog and YouTube channel, sayingthat he hadn't been wrong to believe that the government was capable of orchestrating 9/11, buthe had been wrong about the facts:

I think because the government has lied about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq andhundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed, we do suspect foul play when otherterrible events [happen] and if governments can lie and kill half a million people, whywouldn't they lie about killing 3,000? It doesn't take an incredible leap of fantasy or faith orgullibility. We're not gullible, we're just truth seekers. And the 9/11 Truth movement is trying tofind out the truth about what happened. [But you should] not hold onto religious dogma. Ifyou're presented with new evidence, take it on, even if it contradicts what you or your group

might be believing or wanting to believe. You have to give the truth the greatest respect, and Ido.

This relatively mild renunciation by a relatively minor advocate of 9/11 conspiracy theories wastreated as major news in the conspiracy community. Veitch received threatening phone calls andemails. Donations to his site dried up. He was accused of having taken a payoff from the BBC,of having been subject to mind control by "neuro-linguistic programming experts," of beingunder hypnosis by British illusionist Derren Brown, and of being a Sunstein-sent cognitiveinfiltrator. "The best theory I heard has been that I have been deep undercover MI6 or CIAagent," Veitch said. "[They say] I was basically a one-man sleeper cell waiting to discredit the9/11 Truth movement and destroy what they call 'the resistance' from within." Last month,

Veitch's site was hacked and a message was sent to his 15,000 subscribers calling him a childabuser. "When your mom phones you saying, 'Why have you sent me something admitting tobeing a child molester?' it's not very good," Veitch said.

"People went ape-shit over this Charlie Veitch, I couldn't believe it," says Avery, director ofLoose Change. "I was like, 'Really?' I mean, I had never even heard of this guy until now." Butin the 9/11 Truth movement, apostasy at any level just provides another excuse to unleashparanoia.

It's this mentality that has pushed Avery away from the movement over the last four years."Maybe he just changed his mind," Avery said, referring to the Veitch hysteria. "I mean, peoplechange their minds." Avery has had his own issues with Jones and his audience over the years,and speculated that some of the death threats that Veitch received came from Jones' listeners."That kind of mob mentality [is] the very thing that we were claiming to fight, the 'You're withus or with the terrorists' mentality," he said.

"That's one of the reasons I had to back away from the movement in general," he said. "I wasafraid I was becoming one of themsomeone who sees conspiracy around every corner."


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Tomorrow: Why the 9/11 conspiracies live on.

Why Trutherism Lives On

The 9/11 conspiracy movement has faded, but

the conspiracy theory will never die.

ByJeremy Stahl|Updated Friday, Sept. 9, 2011, at 7:17 AM ET

President Barack Obama announces that the U.S. has killed public enemy No. 1, Osama BinLaden

When Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden in a nighttime raid on May 2,manyinthemediawondered whether a new conspiracy group of "deathers" would rise up to replace the recentlydeflatedbubble of "birthers."The number of potential "deathers"those who doubt Bin Laden isdeadranged between 12 percent and 15 percent, according to a pair of May polls fromFox

NewsandZogby. Among 9/11 conspiracy theorists, though, it is practically a given that the Mayraid was a hoax. Many believe that Bin Laden died long ago, probably in 2001, and that thevideo and audio recordings of him broadcast over the years were government-manufacturedfakes.

The May 2 raid "was Barack Obama saying we're getting our ass kicked in Afghanistan, theempire is collapsing, let's do a phony show to kill Osama, declare victory, and go home," saidearly 9/11 conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert. Ruppert believes that Obama needed Bin Laden
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Documents

The rise and fall of the 9/11 conspiracy theory