Beauty Is Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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