Among the Truthers (13 page)

Covering Their Tracks

In the introduction to this book, I explained that my initial interest in the 9/11 Truth movement had an inward-looking aspect: Many of the conspiracy theorists I communicated with reminded me, in some way, of my own obsessional self. But there was another factor, too: Just about every conspiracy theorist I spoke with believed that my own industry—the corporate media—is deeply complicit with the government agents who destroy buildings and spread disease; that we know (or at least suspect) the awful truth, but refuse to report on it. Like all journalists, I regard myself as one of the good guys, as a force acting
against
unchecked government power. So why does my profession arouse such intense suspicion and hostility—not only among hard-core paranoiacs, but also among legitimate political activists spanning the political spectrum from left-wing student groups to right-wing Tea Partiers?

The fact is that there is a grain of truth to the claim that the media creates its own “invented reality” (to cite the words of influential Canadian Truther Barrie Zwicker)—just not in the way that conspiracy theorists believe. No, we aren't privy to shocking, other-worldly state secrets: If we were, there would be a mad rush among my colleagues to publish them, become sainted stars on par with Bernstein and Woodward, and then sign seven-figure book deals. Rather, the reality we journalists “invent” is very much based on the mundane happenings in the world around us, but it is selected, packaged, and sold according to our own editorial and ideological biases, as well as our commercial understanding of what interests our readers, listeners, and viewers. As a result, the news that appears in the media often is dumbed down, sensationalized, slanted left or right in a way that can make people think we are making it all up out of whole cloth.

In the three-channel universe of the postwar years, the variance between corporate media sources was so small that most people could imagine that the reported world and the world they knew were one and the same. Now that media choice has expanded by several orders of magnitude; people can switch realities merely by changing the channel—including an option now known as “reality television.” In describing the day's news, for instance, FOX and NPR provide such different points of view that they might as well be broadcasting from different planets. In the current political environment, the usual practice among ordinary media consumers is that they “trust” one side and accuse the other of dishonesty. On this score, conspiracy theorists distinguish themselves only by their even-handedness: They accuse all sides of lying.

G
regg Roberts describes himself as a freelance writer, business analyst, and lifelong peace activist. From the moment the Twin Towers collapsed, Roberts tells his readers, he was “surprised” by “the apparent completeness of the collapses, and the huge amount of dust that was produced.” In time, he came to conclude that the tragedy actually was the result of controlled demolition. “I spent the next couple of weeks appropriately depressed,” he reports. “I had known even before I knew all the facts that
if
the facts showed US officials were behind the attack, my life would never be the same. I would not be able to live my life in the same leisurely, typical American way. I would be compelled by my sense of integrity to try to do something about this attack, to try to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

But when Roberts tried to spread the message to his friends, he got a frustrating response. “In many personal discussions I have had about the issue, I am often interrupted long before I can describe much of the evidence, with the objection that such a large conspiracy could not have been covered up,” he writes. “[A] whisteblowing exposé would be published by a ‘reputable' news outlet, the story would be picked up by other mainstream news organizations [and] widely known among Americans.” Why wasn't any of this happening?

Finally, Roberts stumbled on the “chilling explanation”—that the media organizations we trust to give us the news are actually in cahoots with the military-industrial complex. “[Even] the Left media are largely controlled by elites tied to the very national security state that the Left media pretend to oppose,” Roberts writes, referring readers to a bewildering flowchart that includes entries for “George Soros,” “Skull & Bones,” and “Mother Jones.” “Even the venerable Left magazine
The Nation
seems to have significant ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.” In his lengthy 2006 essay, “Where are the 9/11 Whistleblowers?” Roberts concludes that the insiders who conspired to blow up the World Trade Center also were able to ensure that none of the conspirators would share their story with the outside world.

The idea that the 9/11 masterminds are sufficiently powerful to control the reporting of thousands of different American news outlets, as well as stifle after-the-fact disclosures from hundreds of active conspirators, is far-fetched. But it isn't much more far-fetched than the notion that they could execute the 9/11 plot in the first place, which always is explained by reference to the evildoers' allegedly superhuman powers of organization, discipline, and self-control.

A variation of Roberts' argument is made within all conspiracy movements. Just as America's early nineteenth-century anti-Masonic conspiracists claimed the Masons' diabolical plots were being covered up by Masonic editors and newspaper owners, so do modern-day anti-Bilderberg conspiracists like Daniel Estulin claim that “Bilderberg meetings are never mentioned in the media, since the mainstream press is fully owned by the Bilderbergers.”

Likewise, in protocol twelve, the fake Herzl is made to go into minute detail about Jewish control of the media. “Our government,” he says, “will become proprietor of the majority of the journals. This will neutralize the injurious influence of the privately-owned press and will put us in possession of a tremendous influence upon the public mind . . . . If we give permits for ten journals, we shall ourselves found thirty, and so on in the same proportion.” At the same, Herzl provides elaborate instructions on how to concoct bogus rifts among newspapers and other publications, so as to convince the broad public that the marketplace of ideas is genuinely free. And if, by chance, some renegade journalist might try to spill the beans about the Jewish menace, he would be silenced with extortion: “Not one [journalist] is ever admitted to practice literature unless his whole past has some disgraceful sore or other . . . These sores would be immediately revealed.”

Since 9/11, the idea that the mainstream media is too corrupt and timid to report the real facts about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has become a cliché in Truther culture. “ ‘The news' consumed by most people in North America and Europe is a cocoon of manufactured facts, distractions and personalities forming an almost seamless web of invented reality—including invented history—obscuring the power of money and other resources in the hands of the few, even while cleverly masking its own unreality,” wrote Barrie Zwicker in the influential 2006 Truther book
Towers of Deception
:
The Media Cover-Up of 9/11
. “Fake events are a key component of the illusion, a
Truman Show
writ large. The mainstream media remain mute in the face of mounting evidence that Western covert operators were behind Bali, Madrid, London 7/7, mosque bombings in Iraq and elsewhere and, of course, 9/11. Because the mainstream media are integral to the Industrial Military Academic Intelligence Media complex (IMAIM), the cold-blooded technicians of death face no journalistic scrutiny. Without moral, legal, technical or financial constraints, the black operators range freely, executing the orders of the global oligarchies—what I call the Invisible Government.”

O
ne of the reasons that this book likely will do little to change the mind of anyone who is already a Truther is that I am a mainstream newspaper editor and columnist—which makes me a presumptive accomplice to government lies. Like the
Protocols
and so many other conspiracist and faith-based phenomena, the 9/11 Truth movement has embedded within its dogmas an airtight means for defending itself from outside critics.

And just like everything else, they borrowed the trick—without knowing it—from a cabal of plagiarist anti-Semites working for the Russian czar.

Fortune, especially when she desires to make a new prince great, who has a greater necessity to earn renown than an hereditary one, causes enemies to arise and form designs against him, in order that he may have the opportunity of overcoming them, and by them to mount higher, as by a ladder which his enemies have raised. For this reason many consider that a wise prince, when he has the opportunity, ought with craft to foster some animosity against himself, so that, having crushed it, his renown may rise higher.

—Machiavelli,
The Prince

I can surely understand your reluctance to believe that the leaders of the United States could perpetrate such a crime against humanity. History, however, would seem to disagree with you. When you look at the history of false flag attacks performed by the American intelligence agencies, military and government you get a very different view of history . . . Create a problem, gauge the reaction of the public then provide the solution to soothe the people that fits the goals that the folks in charge had to begin with.

—Oregon-based blogger and conspiracy theorist Greg Hoggatt, in an Oct. 28, 2008, email sent to the author

Ken Jenkins: Videographer, Flower Child, Truther

If you want to meet the gentle giant who embodies the sixties soul of the 9/11 Truth movement's older members, you will find him, living and working alone, in a split-level wood-frame walk-up apartment on the fringes of a medium-sized town twenty minutes north of San Francisco.

He's easy to find: Ken Jenkins makes no secret of his radical politics. A poster declaring “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB” fills one of his windows. A similar bumper sticker festoons the car parked outside. The freelance video editor will talk to anybody about his cause—even a nosey nonbeliever like myself, traveling through the Bay Area and seeking an interview on short notice.

The Truther who had introduced me to Jenkins via email—a conservative, buttoned-down architect named Richard Gage (profiled in Chapter 5)—warned me not to judge the man based on first impressions. “He might come off as a bit of a flower child,” Gage told me. “But never mind that. He has an extremely sharp mind.”

And Gage was right. As soon as I walked into his apartment—a mishmash of sixties-era psychedelic posters, Ankhs, and lava lamps alongside banks of state-of-the-art computers and video gear—I knew I'd hit on a lively interview. New-age spiritualist, electrical engineer, video producer, psychologist, computer expert: Of all the Truthers I've met, the pony-tailed, six-feet-three Jenkins is easily the most intellectually multifaceted.

He also happens to be a charming fellow. During the hours we spent together in his apartment, our conversation was wide-ranging and open. He exhibited none of the brittleness that conspiracy theorists sometimes display if you challenge them on their dogmas.

Slightly bewildered by the riot of spiritual symbols decorating the four walls, I asked Jenkins about his religious faith. He paused thoughtfully, then said: “It's a little hard to define unless you've seen a movie called
What the #$*! Do We Know!?
(which, upon subsequent googling, turned out to be a 2004 documentary about the spiritual links between quantum theory and living consciousness). Part of his belief system, he told me, involves categorizing personalities according to a nine-pointed psychospiritual “Enneagram” that he's pinned up in his kitchen. (Ken describes himself as a “Peacemaker,” which aligns to node number nine. But he is quick to point out that the Truth movement contains all manner of personalities, including more aggressive types, such as radio host Alex Jones, whom Jenkins describes as a “Challenger,” placing him squarely on node number eight.) The man has not eaten meat since the 1960s—though he confesses to “a little fish now and then”—and pursues a lifestyle program he calls “intentional longevity.” It is clearly working: A baby boomer born in 1947, Jenkins could pass for midforties.

A Silicon Valley native, Jenkins ventured east in the 1960s to study electrical engineering at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Following graduation, he returned to California, where he pursued a career in video production. For a while, he worked as a technical director at Hewlett-Packard's in-house film studio, then left in 1989 to pursue freelance projects—including a phantasmagoric, avant-garde title called
Illumination
:
Visual Music
.

Then came 9/11. “On the day itself, I'll admit I was somewhat blasé,” he tells me. “It was horrible, of course. But I assumed it was blowback from U.S. foreign policy—well, finally someone did something about everything the United States had inflicted on the world. So many thousands of people die awful deaths every day from starvation, et cetera—so I didn't find those particular three thousand deaths themselves particularly upsetting.”

But in the weeks that followed, Jenkins began asking questions—especially about NORAD's slow response to the hijackings. To this day, he remembers the period as one of intense struggle and self-examination.

“My initial resistance to the truth had to do with what is commonly called ‘the Big Lie'—an idea that Hitler and J. Edgar Hoover talked about quite specifically,” Jenkins told me. “Normal people are not accustomed to thinking of great, audacious lies. They think about small white lies. The idea that something as vast as 9/11 could be explained by anything other than the official story is outside a lot of people's reality. That's why I was skeptical myself during almost two months of daily research.”

As the weeks went by in the fall of 2001, a handful of conspiracist pioneers began to post their theories on the Internet. One of the most influential was author Michael Ruppert, a charismatic former L.A. narcotics investigator who'd originally gained fame in the 1970s for his allegations that the CIA was involved in the drug trade. In his previous writings, Ruppert already had developed an unusually well-textured conspiracist mythology linking the government to a variety of smuggling plots. After 9/11, he extended his theories to the world of Islamic terrorism on his
From the Wilderness
blog. And in late 2001, he took his act on the road, delivering speeches at various West Coast venues, including universities. While Ruppert identifies himself as a conservative, his radical message appealed to left-wing campus activists—the type who had constructed their image of America from books written by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. This “Truth and Lies of 9/11” speaking tour helped define the first stirrings of what we now call the Truth movement.

According to Ruppert's view, the seeds of 9/11 were planted in the Caspian Basin “sometime during the period between late 1998 and early 2000.” Global elites had been expecting that the oil deposits from that region would forestall “the pending calamity of Peak Oil,” he argued. When they saw the first exploration and drilling results, they grew desperate. It was then that “Dick Cheney and the neo-cons stepped up with a plan”—the first stage of which was the election of George W. Bush with the connivance of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“An irrevocable decision had been made to cross the Rubicon, that bloody line between an ailing republic and the empire that irreversibly supervened,” Ruppert later wrote. “In May 2001 President Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of all planning for a terror attack, effectively giving him complete control over FEMA, the military, everything. In June 2001 the NORAD scramble protocols that had worked efficiently since 1976 were rewritten to take most decision-making power out of the hands of Air Force field commanders. Although minor exceptions in those protocols still allowed commanders to act on their own in certain cases . . . the change itself provided deniability for elements of the confusion that Dick Cheney was going to deliberately engineer and control . . . These men, led by Dick Cheney, chose what they thought was their only logical option. I believe it seemed to them the ‘right' thing to do; after all, it was only a few thousand lives. Other rulers have made similar choices in the past.”

Ruppert also helped develop Truther mythology, vague as it is, in regard to the actual mechanics of the 9/11 operation. Osama bin Laden, he theorized, was a “CIA/U.S. government/Wall Street asset” who had been groomed under the Clinton administration for exactly this sort of assignment. The “so-called hijackers” were probably “part of an ultra-secret U.S. military and intelligence joint operation ‘Opposition Force,' or OPFOR, which routinely played bad guys in hijack exercises around the world.” The World Trade Center was an attractive target because “it housed not only the vast archives of criminal investigative records of agencies like the SEC but also an unknown-sized paper trail of financial crimes, cooked books, inflated profits, and sundry other offenses. There were large amounts of gold and negotiables in a number of vaults, many belonging to foreign central banks, that could be secretly removed and later claimed destroyed.”

After Jenkins saw Ruppert speak at a Sacramento event during his “Truth and Lies of 9/11” speaking tour, he came away impressed. “It took a lot of courage to do that in those days,” Jenkins told me. “The Patriot Act had been passed. Once you accepted that 9/11 was an inside job—that these people were so ruthless that they would mass-murder three thousand people—it seemed pretty dangerous. But I thought to myself, ‘If someone doesn't stand up and say something, they're going to get away with it. I don't want to live in that sort of world.' ”

Using his skills with computers and video editing, Jenkins became the Truth movement's unofficial multimedia coordinator—helping fellow conspiracists adapt their theories into slick video montages and PowerPoint presentations. He also partnered in the creation of 911tv.org, a website that archived footage of Truther conferences, and packaged it for distribution to local-access television stations. As with every full-time Truther I've met, his funding is meager—a few hundred dollars here and there from donors and video sales. But it's clear from my visit to his home office that the man's material needs are modest.

In the years following 9/11, the Truth movement gained traction through blogs such as
From the Wilderness
and left-wing campus activist networks. In 2003 and 2004, major Truther conferences were held in Lucerne, San Francisco, Toronto, and New York. Michael Ruppert's massive book on the subject,
Crossing the Rubicon
, appeared in 2004, and became the Truth movement's bible. In the same year, Claremont School of Theology professor David Ray Griffin published
The New Pearl Harbor
:
Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11
. Another major Truther milestone came in 2005, when twenty-one-year-old director Dylan Avery released
Loose Change
, which helped spread the Truther message through the then-emerging medium of web-streaming video. In 2006, the ranks of elite Truthers were joined by professional architect Richard Gage, who used his expertise in structural engineering to create detailed technical presentations alleging that the Twin Towers could have been brought down only through internal demolition. Increasingly, members of the Truth movement began presenting themselves as scientists as much as activists.

During these years, Jenkins began gearing his own 9/11 presentations to a recruitment strategy. He eventually published an article summarizing his approach, entitled “The Truth is Not Enough: How to Overcome Emotional Barriers to 9/11 Truth.” Among those barriers, Jenkins argues, are “blind nationalist faith”; our desire to look up to governmental authorities as parent figures; shame at our longstanding gullibility; enduring “post-traumatic stress disorder” in the wake of the Twin Towers' destruction; and “apathy and complacency.” Regarding the latter, Jenkins quoted radio talk-show host Mike Rivero to the effect that “most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker, but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.”

As a 1960s-vintage student of human spirituality and consciousness, Jenkins takes the long view when it comes to changing American minds. “The implications of 9/11 Truth are so big that for society as a whole to accept it is not something that can happen overnight. In fact, you would not even
want
it to happen overnight—it would cause chaos. Even if somehow we could magically get on all the networks and instantly prove that 9/11 was an inside job, on one level it would be nice, but it would do damage . . . Richard [Gage] is always saying ‘We're going to
break
the story.' And my attitude is: ‘I don't think it's going to happen that way.' It's going to continue to be a gradual process. And as I said, I think that's for the best.”

Looking back at his own conversion process, Jenkins told me, the decisive factor was the realization that 9/11 was hardly a one-off crime: History was repeating itself.

“What got me from 97 percent sure to 100 percent sure was the revisionist account of Pearl Harbor,” he explained. “In that case, too, I bought into the official history. But the more I studied it, the more I realized it wasn't true. The U.S. government had broken the codes. We knew just what the Japanese were doing. And that's when it clicked—because of the similarity in scale.

“Pearl Harbor wasn't the same as 9/11,” he adds. “It was
allowed
to happen [by the American government], not
made
to happen. But it was similar in that our normal military defenses should certainly have detected those planes and ships. There was information kept from the military in Hawaii to allow that to happen. And then there's the fact that all of our best ships were taken out of the harbor before the attack, and a bunch of old clunkers were put in . . .”

With that, Jenkins was off and running about an event that took place sixty years before 9/11. Over the next two hours, more diversions were to follow—about the assassination of JFK, the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq, and a slew of other alleged precedents. As anyone who's talked to conspiracy theorists can testify, such exercises in historical hopscotch are common: A conversation about the present inevitably turns into a conversation about the past.