The subject of what really happened on 9/11 remains taboo in the mainstream media, particularly in the United States. 9/11 is too tragic an event, too close to home. It is an agonizing wound that still, literally, lies exposed in the center of lower Manhattan.

To question the Bush administration’s explanation of 9/11 in America, regardless of any glaring anomalies in the official story, is tantamount to heresy or treason in the established media arenas. For a long time now, anyone who publicly questions the official 9/11 investigation is more than likely labeled a conspiracy theorist, a lunatic, and a nut case. Yet slowly, over time, we are beginning to hear the voices of a few journalists on the American airwaves asking questions about the events of September 11, 2001.

They join a growing movement of citizens in the US and internationally. 9/11 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth are just a few of the many organizations that have provided internet publishing platforms for the many thousands who remain sceptical.

In Canada, 9/11 Truth controversy inflamed the 2008 federal election when Winnipeg Liberal candidate Lesley Hughes and Cariboo-Prince George NDP candidate Bev Collins were exposed as sceptics of the official explanation of 9/11. The outcome could be viewed as symbolic of the growing division in the public sphere between those who accept, and those who choose to ask questions. Then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion asked Hughes to step down under accusations of anti-semitism, which Hughes hotly denied. NDP leader Jack Layton, on the other hand, refused to fire Collins, and is on record saying that he is a “good friend” of prominent Canadian 9/11 Truth activist, journalist, author, and media critic Barrie Zwicker, and is up to date on Zwicker’s publications about 9/11.

Apparently, publicly questioning 9/11 can be detrimental to one’s credibility, and livelihood, even here in Canada. Some of the very politicians we count on to protect our legal rights are instead punished for exercising their own (supposedly) protected right to free opinion.

Despite such threats, the 9/11 Truth movement continues to grow in Canada and internationally. So, who are some of these stubborn Canadians at the forefront of this controversial movement? Moreover, why won’t they just take the hint and shut up about it?

BoB decided to ask them.

Drew Noftle

A teacher based in Vancouver.

“I studied Marketing management at Kwantlen University/College in Vancouver Canada, and Mandarin at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.”

9/11 Sceptic since?

“I didn’t suspect anything until 2005. In 2005, I was living a luxurious life in Beijing, China, as the private English teacher for Yang Kaisheng, then President of the Industrial Commercial Bank of China, the largest bank in the world. I was also a corporate trainer for various multinational corporations. Like many people, I believed 9/11 was about America getting blowback from decades of failed foreign policy.”

Why?

“At that time, my roommate frequently listened to the Alex Jones Show, a nationally syndicated news/talk radio show based out of Austin, Texas. I remember often coming home to hear Jones, with his thick Texas accent, telling his listeners how he thought the world was run. To me, his ideology seemed radical and baseless until my roommate pleaded with me to sit down and watch one of his films. I said I had neither the time nor the desire to watch a full film, but that I would give him five minutes of my sincere attention. During those five minutes, he played a clip from Martial Law where I saw the collapse of (Building) 7 WTC. It was only then that I started asking questions.”

Contribution:

Co-founder of the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Society. He was also the organizer of the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference in June, 2007, and recently organized the 9/11 Truth March on Ottawa, September, 2008.

Why should we care?

“9/11 brought Canadian troops into Afghanistan and delivered Canadian material support to the war in Iraq. In fact, it is, as Stephen Harper reminded us on September 11, 2007, our sole reason for participation in the War on Terror: ‘And that is why the countries of the United Nations . . . launched their mission in Afghanistan – to deal with the source of the 9/11 terror.’”

“However, what Harper did not mention is that we only did so because then Secretary of State Colin Powell promised us a white paper linking Osama Bin Laden to the attacks. That white paper never materialized.”

Barrie Zwicker

Journalist and media analyst, Zwicker has worked for The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Vancouver Province, Sudbury Star, Detroit News, and Vision TV.

Zwicker is also the creator of the Sources directory, and is a former professor with Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto.

9/11 Sceptic since?

“I became not only suspicious, but decided – and told people around me – that this is ‘a Reichstag Fire 2001‘ by 11 a.m. on the day of the events (that’s what I call them: ‘events’ is a neutral term used in science and police ‘occurrence’ sheets.) Police cannot jump the gun; until an event is determined to be a crime it remains an ‘event.’”

Why?

“The reason I saw that the events of 9/11 were an inside job was the failure of any jet interceptor of the US air force, the most powerful and technologically advanced in the world, to turn a wheel until it was too late, during a drama in the skies that lasted almost two hours. As a former Flight Sergeant in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets and a person very interested in aviation all my life, it clearly was impossible. The air force was “stood down” which meant that whoever commanded the air force did or arranged that.”

“[The] lack of investigation or compromised investigation (as with the official 9/11 commission) is an aspect of cover-up. It happens all the time, in small and large matters, when the authorities do not want ‘the truth‘ to come out about a given event. The other side of the coin is disinformation put out instead of information. The mainstream media (and, it is important to note, the so-called alternative media) are, with a tiny number of honorable exceptions, totally complicit in the cover-up of 9/11. Without this complicity by the media, false flag operations COULD NOT SUCCEED. In spite of their vast resources, actually quite clever planning, and rather good execution of fake events, there always are telltale signs of the true perpetrators.”

Contribution:

One of the most prominent members of the 9/11 Truth movement, Zwicker is regarded as the first journalist to question the official government explanation for the events of September 11, 2001 in the mainstream media on his program The Great Deception, broadcast March 2002 on Vision TV in Canada.

Zwicker is also the producer and host of the 75-minute DVD The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw (Sept. 2004), and the author of the book Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11 ( New Society Publishers; September 1, 2006)

He is also a tireless 9/11 Truth activist and lecturer.

Why should we care?

“The official conspiracy theory about 9/11 remains the linchpin for the so-called ‘war on terror‘ which continues in turn to justify more surveillance of Canadians, more integration of Canadian so-called intelligence agencies with their US (and smarter, more devious) counterparts, growing military budgets, diminution of civil liberties, more intrusive security activities at airports and elsewhere, and much more. Very importantly, Canada’s activities in Afghanistan are predicated upon the official conspiracy theory, evidence for which was never provided to the NATO council in October 2001 to trigger Article 5 of the NATO Charter.”

Peter Dale Scott

Peter Dale Scott is a poet, writer, and researcher, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (Retired).

B.A. (McGill University, Montreal), 1949. First Class Honors in Philosophy, Second Class Honors in Political Science.
Studied six months at Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris, and two years at University College, Oxford (1950-1952).
Ph.D. in Political Science (McGill), 1955. Dissertation on The Social and Political Ideas of T.S. Eliot.

Co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

His books include:

Scott was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award in 2002 and has published many books of poetry, including the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000.

9/11 Sceptic since?

“I was suspicious within the first 24 hours of the event.”

Why?

Scott cites the discovery of “ID’s” allegedly identifying a number of the Islamic highjackers shortly after the event as the first red flag.

He also points to the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. WTC 7 collapsed on September 11, 2001 at 5:25 PM EST. No plane hit the building, yet it completely collapsed into its own footprint at freefall speed. WTC housed many government and financial offices, including The Securities and Exchange Commission, Rudy Giuliani’s New York City Office of Emergency Management, United States Secret Service, Internal Revenue Service, Central Intelligence Agency, The Department of Defense, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Salomon Smith Barney, and American Express.

Moreover, Scott is deeply suspicious of the behavior of Vice President Dick Cheney prior to and during the events surrounding September 11, 2001.

Contribution:

“[I am a] former diplomat with experience of government and its documents; years of research into deep state.”

His research and writing, particularly the books The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008).

Peter Dale Scott’s Political Page and his 9/11 Truth lectures.

Why should we care?

“Canada has a very direct stake in the sanity and rationality of the government of the United States. There’s been a downward trend in this respect for 20 or 30 years now, and very markedly since 9/11. All kinds of changes in the American political system have been introduced that are damaging to the rule of law, particularly damaging to human rights, and of particular concern to Canada. [They] have allowed the Bush administration to engage in very dangerous reckless acts of unprovoked aggression in central Asia, particularly in Iraq, and, of course, this is a matter of extreme concern to Canada. It has provoked intense American hatred in other parts of the world, and we will not be spared from that. Terrorists have come to Canada because of things America has been doing. So, it’s very urgent to get to a rational American government, and I passionately believe that the best way to do that is to get to the truth of what happened on 9/11.”

Dr. Alexander Keewatin (A.K.) Dewdney

A.K. Dewdney has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Waterloo University.

Dewdney is a professor of computer science at the University of Western Ontario, a mathematician, environmental scientist, and author of several books on a diversity of subjects.

“Primarily my background is in mathematics. I also minored in physics, so I have a good background there. Also, I have done both kinds of scientific research, inductive and deductive, and lately, in the last 15 years, I have been heavily involved in deductive research in biological processes using mathematical models or computer models, and to do that successfully I have to match the predictions of the theory with the outcome of the experiments. So, I have had a fair bit of experience matching up reality with the theoretical predictions. This has helped me a lot with what I accept as good evidence and what I don’t accept as good evidence.”

9/11 Sceptic since?

Dewdney’s suspicions were first aroused soon after the events of 9/11 when he heard reports that “Moslem fundamentalist terrorists were responsible for the attacks.”

“Suicide and the killing of civilians is forbidden in Islam,” he notes.

“I thought that was strange. Then I began to probe the net, within weeks, to find out who was saying what, and to see if there was any credible reason to doubt the official story. Then I ran into the French researcher, Thierry Meyssan, and other websites that began to spring up like mushrooms, and the rest is history, if you like. Within a year and a half, I had thought of testing the cell phone hypothesis, and we did those experiments and they came up negative. Cell phones were not designed for aboveground use, they’re purely for terrestrial communication use, and our experiment bore this out.”

Why?

“Take your pick. There are more holes in this thing than a Swiss cheese.”

“Recently a pair of physicists has been studying samples from the massive amounts of dust particles that covered Manhattan from the collapse of the buildings. They have discovered throughout this dust glassy spherals of some kind of silicate compound which had to have been heated to at least 2600 degrees centigrade for those to form. Astronomers use the same criteria for calculating the velocity of meteoric impacts. They find these little glassy spherals that are indicative of high velocity impacts and high temperatures. So, that’s the temperature, and jet fuel only burns as high as 800 degrees centigrade, well below the temperature to create these spherals. The presence of these spherals indicates something going on that has nothing to do with the incoming aircraft. Nothing that was conceivably on that plane could possibly burn at such a high temperature, especially to produce such a wealth of these spherals, because they are everywhere throughout the dust. So, that’s a pretty important finding.”

Contribution:

A.K. Dewdney conducted research experiments into the official claim that several passengers on the four-highjacked 9/11 planes had made emergency cell phone calls before the planes crashed. He concluded from his flight tests that cell phones barely worked, or not at all, at much lower altitudes than the official account suggests.

Operation Pearl: A theory, based on his investigation, focusing on the probability of switching the allegedly highjacked planes with duplicate aircraft while avoiding radar detection, and an explanation of the existent technology and procedures involved in remote control aircraft operation.

Dewdney says, “I’m trying to have a life, even as I do this sort of investigative work. I try to spend no more of a third of my time on this, because I have an ongoing research project that I’m trying to complete. I have a heavy, heavy conservation commitment. Nevertheless, I really feel that I have to do this. Lately I have been doing a little outreach in my own university, contacting some 50 colleagues that I have known over the years. I suggested that, if they would like, I could present a seminar of the evidence so far, and that this is open for discussion, and would they like to see the evidence. About 75 percent have said yeah, we would like to come and look at it. Which kind of surprised me, because these days university faculties are more conservative than the public at large.”

Why should we care?

“We live next to the elephant and whatever affects the elephant affects us almost immediately and intimately. I think the best illustration of that is the preeminence and dominance of the neo-conservative faction in Washington, which has a member in every branch of government, all pressing in the same direction to keep the war on terror alive, and this has resulted in a fundamental loss of freedoms. Anyone who has studied this knows that right away. The Patriot Act for example. And the Canadian government followed suit within months with parallel legislation. Now we’ve lost some of of our freedoms. They can now have closed trials without jury, trial judge only. Evidence given by Intel people who may or may not be telling the truth, we don’t know. There is no way to check it. There is no peer review, no review by jurors, or fellow citizens. That has gone out the window, at least in those cases that are considered sensitive or considered matters of national security. So, that is a serious effect on Canada, the passing of what I see as rather Draconian legislation that, I might add, has a strongly fascist flavor to it.”

Dr. Graeme MacQueen

“I have a Ph.D. in Comparative Religion (specialization in Buddhist Studies) from Harvard. This was actually a Ph.D. focused on the reading of huge amounts of text — learning how to analyze texts, how to ask the right questions, how to create useful categories, and so on. Then I became a professor at McMaster University, and, after some years of teaching, I became deeply involved in peace education. So, in 1989 I became founding Director of McMaster’s Centre for Peace Studies.”

9/11 Sceptic since?

“I assumed for quite a while that the official narrative was probably true in its essentials. Only in 2005 did I decide it was complete rubbish. [However], I tried quite hard right from the start to keep my mind open to the possibility of fraud. I never, for example, accepted the Bin Laden confession video, and I wondered why they would have to create such an obvious fake if their story was true. Eventually I opened a ’9/11 anomalies’ file and started putting things in it. Attending a meeting of a sub-group in the World Health Organization in Geneva, I was interested to find that many Europeans, even in the UN, were extremely skeptical about the official story. Then, after being directly challenged in 2005 to look seriously at the literature critical of the official account, I decided quite rapidly that the flaws in this official account were fatal ones. I decided to carry out my own research in primary sources. Everything I’ve discovered since then has strengthened my conviction that 9/11 was an inside job.”

Why?

“It was the ‘collapse‘ of the Towers — the physical impossibility of it — that led [me] to [the] certainty of fraud.”

Contribution:

“Occasionally ‘debunkers’ have criticized me for my work on the Towers, sneering that I’m just a religious studies prof — often they mistakenly say theologian — and don’t know anything about engineering. [However], I’ve never pretended to be an engineer or a physicist. My main contributions have been in the analysis of texts, which I’m obviously trained for. The main body of texts I’ve concentrated on is the oral histories of the New York Fire Department, which constitute about 10,000 pages of very rich material. When, on occasion, I do research that requires skill in engineering, I ask engineers to help me. I’m currently completing an article with a co-author who is an engineer.”

Member Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice
“Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice is a non-partisan organization consisting of independent researchers and activists engaged in uncovering the true nature of the September 11, 2001 attacks.”

Contributor to http://www.journalof911studies.com/

9/11 Truth lecturer.

Why should we care?

“If 9/11 was a fraud, then obviously Canadians need to know this. It has had, I believe, a big impact on Canada in terms of foreign policy, in terms of electoral politics, in terms of domestic policy and civil rights. I think it has been powerful in helping a ‘conservative’ agenda come to the forefront in Canada — and this includes the Conservative party. It has increased military spending, led to an increase in a kind of mindless nationalism, and taken Canada away from support for international law, international institutions, and the UN. I don’t mean that I was a great supporter of the Canadian government before 9/11; I’ve been a dissenter for years, but some of the worst tendencies have been strengthened by this event.”

The slow exposure of the Bush/Cheney deceit machine pushes against the fog of trauma and pain left by 9/11. Their bag of tricks has included unprovoked invasions of other nations, huge tax paybacks to large corporations, the looting of natural resources, war profiteering, illegal wiretapping, the outing of an undercover CIA operative, torture and human rights offences, the recent Wall Street bailout, the USA Patriot Act, and the violent deaths of a million innocent civilian men, women, and children in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on lies. While many still want to believe that the Bush/Cheney gang are telling the truth about 9/11, it’s increasingly hard not see that as an incredible leap of faith.

- R.D. Loyd is a journalist and broadcaster living on Gabriola Island, B.C.