The 9/11 Attacks, “Keeping The Lid On The Lie”: Media Response To The Growing Influence Of The 9/11 Truth Movement

It is impossible to keep the lid on a lie forever – especially a major deception carried out in full view of witnesses and cameras.

The last article in the Media Response series was published in February 2010, when public broadcasters in eight countries were reporting doubts about the official 9/11 story, and nine corporate media reviews had explored the issue during the previous year.[1]

Since then, the mainstream media has forged ahead on the subject.  In the past six months alone, 20 stories in major papers have covered the September-December 2013 ReThink911 campaign – including Time Magazine, the NYT, the Ottawa Citizen, and BBC News Magazine.

As time passes our memories of 9/11 becomes less painful and more open to public discussion.  There is increasing skepticism in both the social and corporate media about the credibility of 9/11 as the foundation for the continuing global war on terror.

Last year, President Obama was prevented from waging – on grounds of state terrorism –war with Syria.

As of March 2014, seven congressmen, backed by impacted  9/11 families, are calling for the release of a secret 2002 congressional study that implicates Saudi Arabia in financing the alleged hijackers.

Establishing the truth about 9/11 is a fundamental necessity for the achievement of peace between East and West.

The horrendous visual images of airliners careening into the tallest buildings in America were seared into the collective world brain on 9/11.

This collective human experience has been so powerful and haunting that no equally powerful and pervasive experience has emerged to show that the Twin Towers were not brought down by Muslim hijackers run by Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan.

Yet the weakness and falsity of the official story has been amply demonstrated by more than a decade of peer-reviewed research and scholarship, as shown by the 23-member 9/11 Consensus Panel’s evidence-based Consensus Points and reading list.[2]

And people suspect this.  A 2011 poll shows that 42% of Canadians believe US government information about 9/11 has been intentionally hidden from the public.[3]

The tale of 19 hijackers is viewed more and more as a construct – and the “reality” that it created, as a contrived perception.

If there is one force with the power to reverse this perception, it is the dynamic ReThink911 campaign, which has taken hold strongly in the US and Canada and has plans to expand into Britain and other countries.

The ReThink911 Campaign

The ReThink911 organization spearheads its campaign with the Achilles heel of the 9/11 perception – the sudden collapse, later in the day, of the 47-storey steel skyscraper World Trade Center 7, which stood adjacent to the Twin Towers.

Massive in area, Seven’s base was the size of a football field. It was not hit by a plane.

It took the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) seven years to devise a computer simulation purporting to show how an enormous steel skyscraper could collapse symmetrically with a level roofline in six seconds – from “office fires” alone.

One dismayed professor of chemistry told how he watched its collapse ten times on YouTube, his “jaw dropping lower and lower…I have not slept since that day.”[4]

But NIST concluded that on one floor, one over-heated beam expanded and detached from one pillar, thereby causing the entire building to drop like a stone –with all columns failing simultaneously.[5]

So for the month of September 2013, ReThink911 purchased large blue and orange billboards in major cities across Canada, the US, England, and Australia.

These included an enormous 5-storey high sign[6] in New York City’s Times Square, posted throughout September and October, and seen by millions of people.  A similar sign was posted in Dundas Square, Toronto.[7]

Needless to say, the media could hardly ignore an “elephant in the room” this size, towering beyond the windows of the New York Times.

How did the media deal with the situation?   

First, it is important to consider that the survival of truth in a democracy rests on the outcome of an information war that is based largely on psychological operations and propaganda.

With regard to the truth about 911, the history of corporate media reporting is reminiscent of Gandhi’s famous statement:  ”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

In 2010, at the time of my last media survey, the mainstream media was waking up to research from the 911 truth community.

By the fall of 2013, the new ReThink911 campaign had gained considerable attention in papers such as the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC Magazine, and the Ottawa Citizen.

Most of the 20 or so stories were neutral in tone, with only a few ridiculing or opposing the campaign.

I. New York City:

On October 15, 2013, New York’spopular Village Voice ran a long story about the ReThink911 billboards in Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Sydney, and London – with the enormous Times Square ad as the centerpiece – adding that

“Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth has denounced the NIST report as fraudulent and insist the truth has yet to be revealed.”[8]

The Village Voice then gave a lengthy description of the ReThink911 media blitz, printing about a dozen of the 200 emails they had received, and ending with “Thanks for your thoughts, everyone.” (The article attracted 79 comments.)

Compare this to the rambling Libertarian Republic article[9] that set out to debunk what it called persistent “conspiracy theories.” (The term “conspiracy theory” is a well known psychological thought-stopper.)

It was full of superficial obsolete evidence (compared, for example, to new evidence emerging through the 9/11 Consensus Panel’s research[10]) and full of irrelevant speculation about what motivates 9/11 researchers.

Understandably, it received only one comment.

However, the piece was published in a mainstream conservative journal, and because the author had worked long and hard to challenge the ReThink911 campaign, and because the publisher gave it so much space, it fits into Gandhi’s category #3, “then they fight  you.” (which is the last stage before truth wins)

Time Magazine, on the other hand, published an objective account (on September 11, 2013 anniversary) about the ReThink911 campaign’s leading spokesman, architect Richard Gage:

In 2006, Richard Gage, a San Francisco-based architect, founded Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which doubts Building 7 collapsed because of fire. Gage and other architects and engineers argue that 7 World Trade Center came down in a free fall, which could only have been caused by a deliberate demolition explosion. More than 2,000 architects and engineers have signed a petition calling for a new investigation into the building’s collapse.[11]

However, Time marginalized public support for the controlled demolition evidence by citing a 2011 BBC poll showing that only 15% of Americans believe the government was involved.[12]

Note that back in September 2006 Time had reported:

“A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.”[13]

The New York Times, also on the September 11, 2013 anniversary, reported in neutral terms that “a group known as Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which wants a new investigation into the events that day, is buying billboards in New York and other cities as part of what it calls its Rethink911 campaign,” and linked to the ReThink911.org website.[14]

And in January 2014, the Village Voice ran a second article featuring actor Austin Farwell (“The Long Ride Home”), who wrote:

I hope and pray daily that we as a nation recognize that forensic evidence exists proving that Building 7 was brought down in a controlled demolition. We at rethink911.org and the entire crew at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth have been tirelessly pursuing recognition for our peer-reviewed critiques and experiments into how and why Building 7 (the third tower to fall at freefall speed on 9/11) fell the way it did. Our hope in another new year is that the American people receive a true and impartial investigation into the events of 9/11.[15]

In summary:  Twelve years after the event, the New York media has become simply factual –  rather than dismissive and scornful – in reporting the work of a credible professional group calling for a reinvestigation of 9/11.

This move beyond “ignoring” and “ridiculing” signals a sea change in media receptivity to the idea that rogue elements within the US were somehow complicit in 911.

II. “Then They Fight You”

However, three news accounts were either sensational or condescending in taking issue with the ReThink911 evidence.

The Dallas Observer, referring to Dallas as the “City of Hate,” wrote at the top of its piece, “We Apologize in Advance for This Particular Item.”[16]  It then lumped together doubts about Pearl Harbor, JFK, and 9/11 as (thought-stopping) conspiracy theories.

The Observer did do its homework, though – enough to cite an academic paper arguing against a classic 9-author per-reviewed study[17] that found nanothermite, an incendiary/explosive, in the WTC dust.

This willingness to argue the evidence in a mainstream newspaper is an encouraging sign that a public debate is no longer taboo.

And indeed the piece did generate a fight, as shown in its 269 comments. The most recent commenter wrote: “I’m not going to speculate on motivations re. the slant of this article, but it amounts to a denial of an objective, careful look at the evidence.”[18]

The Huffington Post Canada’s editorial piece, “9/11 Conspiracy Ad On Ottawa Buses And Toronto Billboard Sparks Outrage,” produced 377 comments.

Although the paper referred to “the well-known 9/11 ‘Truther’ organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth,” it focused strongly on the “widespread outrage” –  the “disrespectful” and “disgusting” notion that the US government may have been complicit in the attacks.[19]

This is the sort of superficial outdated pap (insulting to an infantilized but media-savvy public) that is leading the fight (against the truth of the people) that Gandhi described.

When ReThink911 purchased 100 ads in the Bay Area Transit System, the San Francisco Weekly reported on the advertizing angle.[20]

After devising a particularly sarcastic title and describing the ads as “a valiant form of evangelism,” the paper did manage to briefly discuss the controlled demolition debate between NIST and the architects and engineers from AE911truth.org.

The four comments supported the ReThink911 campaign.

It seems that when the media disparages 9/11 skepticism these days, the fight is on.

continue reading at Global Research:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-911-attacks-keeping-the-lid-on-the-lie-media-response-to-the-growing-influence-of-the-911-truth-movement/5373217

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