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It’s been a year since AE911Truth held its San Francisco Press Conference announcing it had secured the signatures of 1,000 licensed/degreed architects and engineers who supported the group’s effort to obtain a new, independent investigation of 9/11.
 Shawn Hamilton, Richard Gage, and Fritz Eriksen reflect on the WTC concerns of 1,000 Architects and Engineers at the Marines’ Memorial Club and Hotel, San Francisco, February 19, 2010 |
I didn’t know what a “truther” was when I went to San Francisco to cover this story, but I would find out very quickly. Soon after a print version of the radio story I had produced for KPFA appeared on Examiner.com, I was accused of being one. The accusers weren’t light-hearted about it either. Some of the meanest comments came from people who identified themselves with the James Randi Educational Forum—an organization of professed rational thinkers. Somehow my having reported this story—a report that simply relayed what had happened at an interesting press conference—made me a “truther,” a term that 9/11 truth activists originally applied to themselves, but which has been adopted by their opponents as an insult.
This hadn’t happened before. I had covered press events relating to same-sex marriage and no one said I, therefore, was gay. I had covered medical marijuana-related press conferences and wasn’t labeled a “head.” But as I would learn throughout 2010, the principles that apply to typical news coverage don’t apply to 9/11.
9/11 Truth Makes People Crazy
It’s this aspect of the story that really intrigues me. Why are otherwise rational people so willing to suspend their reason and refuse to even discuss 9/11-related issues? When I was younger, I thought people would always want to know important truths if they could. With age came the gradual understanding that many people not only don’t want to know the truth about certain subjects, they very much resent your bringing it to their attention.
After months of my being assaulted with all manner of insult and abuse, two events transpired that took things to a new level. First was the good news that Project Censored had picked up this story for its yearly list and book, and later, Examiner began doing strange things to my story, “Over 1000 architects and engineers have signed petition to reinvestigate 9/11 destruction,” if it wasn’t being censored outright, was certainly being “messed with.”
Examiner writers use a computerized publishing tool that lists all their stories and provides a means of editing them. This particular story simply vanished from my publishing tool—without apology and without explanation when I inquired. It was the only time a story had just disappeared from the system like that, and it just happened to be the very one picked up by Project Censored. I would also learn that Project Censored was itself censored for mentioning, among other 9/11 topics, this particular story.
In a recent interview, Mickey Huff, Project Censored’s current director, describes how he and former director Peter Phillips had been censored by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
“We originally did an op-ed piece on State Crimes Against Democracy and had included some recent research from Niels Harrit (co-author with Steven Jones) and the Open Chemical Physics Journal. We’d mentioned the work that Richard Gage had been doing with AE911Truth, having over a thousand architects and engineers, and that story was done and basically no one paid any attention to it,” Huff said. “We included that in a story involving State Crimes Against Democracy in a long narrative of ways that we’ve had these kinds of conspiratorial undertakings [in] our history.”
Huff stressed that these events are not only possible – they have happened. He said there are things right under our noses that might qualify under the definition of State Crimes Against Democracy as defined by an entire volume of the American Behavioral Scientist journal. “We were contracted to write op-ed pieces, so we wrote this op-ed, figuring this was a big story: academic journals were writing about this. These stories are being ignored; why isn’t this being picked up? So we thought this was a pretty good topic for an op-ed piece because if we live in a society that purports to have free press principles, there can’t be any topic that we won’t discuss a priori, just out of the gate,” Huff said. “So Peter and I wrote this piece for the IPS that said they weren’t going to run it, essentially, because of the subject; they wouldn’t publish anything on 9/11.”
Huff and Phillips talked about this in several radio interviews and published it in Project Censored’s book. IPS contradicted their account, but Huff and Phillips stand by their story.
“They didn’t even tell their own staff members that they did it. Once they found out we were talking about it, they sort of did a little PR cover, and then they kind of let it go,” Huff told me. “We were very disappointed and we sent them a few things since that suggested they should revisit the topic, and I hope, if they have integrity, they at least consider it with an open mind.”
Like me, Huff wants to enjoy our Constitutional freedom to discuss 9/11-related issues as part of what Jefferson called the “marketplace of ideas.” If an idea is ridiculous, it will shrivel and die on its own lack of merit. There should be no off-limits topics in a free society, and journalists especially should be free to explore subjects without fear of being branded with silly labels and losing their jobs.
“We think there is a lot of factual reporting on the issues of 9/11, from the Commission to what happened in New York, that simply hasn’t been fully explored and opened and looked at in our media. That’s the mission of Project Censored— to highlight those stories. To say we’re “9/11-centric” is to ignore everything else that we do,” Huff said. “We are not ‘truthers’ or ‘birthers’ or ‘Birchers’ or ‘chemtrailers’ or ‘flat earthers’; we’re just Project Censored. I suppose we are [9/11]-truth-oriented, but our main issue is media censorship, across the board, period.”
Editor’s Note: Please visit Hamilton’s blog http://theswillbucket.com.
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Dr. Steven Jones, co-author of the peer-reviewed paper, “
