Editor's note: The only bad press is no press - as they say. Well here's some press - you decide. It's from our stop in St Paul where AE911Truth delivered lots of evidence for the destruction of the three World Trade Center Skyscrapers. But this writer quotes none of it, and spends an awful lot of attention on Canada's National Post editor, Jonathan Kay, as well as making it look like a conspiracy fest.

Those unconvinced by 'official' 9/11 story meet at St. Paul U campus

So-called 'truthers' seek to uncover government conspiracy

by Richard Chin of TwinCities.com Pioneer Press

When Richard Gage came to Minnesota recently to talk about Sept. 11, he started with three questions.

How many people believed "the official story" of the World Trade Center attack, asked Gage, the founder of an organization called Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

About a dozen hands went up in the audience that congregated on a recent Thursday night in a meeting room on the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus.

Next, Gage asked how many people were unsure. About 70 hands went up.

Finally, how many believed the World Trade Center collapsed not from being hit by jetliners piloted by terrorists, but by "controlled demolition."

The rest of the 300 people in the room raised their hands.

"Did you guys bring your friends?" Gage joked. "Or you don't have any more friends?"

It's been nearly 10 years since 9/11, and those who think the truth hasn't been told about the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks are still trying to convert the rest of us.

To them, the death of Osama bin Laden doesn't mean that the real culprit behind 9/11 has been brought to justice.

"I don't think justice has been discovered and found," said Bruce Stahlberg, a St. Paul resident and organizer of the Minnesota 9/11 Truth. "We haven't looked into it. We haven't turned the stones over."

"Whoever did it had to be a lot more powerful than Osama bin Laden," said Michael Andregg of St. Paul.

"I don't think the book can be closed yet," said Russell Felt of St. Paul. "The Pentagon was not hit by an airplane."

'False Flag' Operation / Gage, Stahlberg, Andregg and Felt are all part of what is known as the 9/11 truth movement, people who believe the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually an inside job, a "false flag" operation engineered by the government or the intelligence community or the military-industrial complex to justify going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The ranks of 9/11 "truthers," according to conspiracy theory expert Jonathan Kay, have included Jesse Ventura, Charlie Sheen, Hugo Chavez and Jared Loughner, the man accused of shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Here in Minnesota, truthers include engineers and businessmen, nurses and college instructors and relatives of people killed on Sept. 11.

According to Kay, the truthers are part of a decadelong conspiracy-theory crisis that has gripped the country for the past 10 years.

"When a critical mass of educated people in a society lose their grip on the real world — when they claim that George W. Bush is a follower of Nazi ideology, that Barack Obama is a Muslim secretly plotting to impose Sharia law on America, that the United States government is controlled by Israel, or that FEMA is preparing to imprison political dissidents in preparation for a totalitarian New World Order — it is a signal that the ordinary rules of rational intellectual inquiry are now treated as optional," according to Kay's book, "Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground."

Mark Fenster, another conspiracy theory expert, expected the 9/11 truth movement would lose its steam by now.

After all, the alleged warmongering bad guys suspected by many 9/11 truthers — the Bush-Cheney administration — are out of power, said Fenster, a University of Florida law school professor and author of "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture."

Kay, managing editor of the National Post newspaper in Canada, believes the 9/11 truth movement probably peaked between 2004 and 2006.

In 2006, a national Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that 16 percent of Americans believed it was very likely or somewhat likely that the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings.

The poll also found that 36 percent of Americans thought it was very likely or somewhat likely that federal officials either participated in the Sept. 11 attacks or took no action to stop them because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.

Sounds like a lot, but the survey also found that even more people think it's at least somewhat likely that officials in the federal government were involved in the Kennedy assassination and that "the federal government is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets."

Kay said, "I think that most conspiracy theories are kind of like religion. It never gets completely extinguished."

Magicians Join Architects / That's what it looked like at Gage's speech in Minnesota: A case of a practiced preacher giving a sermon to a receptive flock.

Kay calls Gage the best speaker he's seen in the 9/11 truth movement. Gage is a San Francisco-area architect who now appears to spend most of his time speaking about Sept. 11. He revolutionized the truth movement, according to Kay.

"He provided all this technical mumbo jumbo," Kay said. "This guy has actually built buildings, so he has some credibility."

Organizers of the St. Paul meeting said they paid Gage a $500 speaking fee. In return, they got more than two hours of Gage narrating a PowerPoint presentation of nearly 700 slides, which focused on the Twin Towers, as well as a third building nearby, the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, which collapsed that day after catching fire.

According to Gage, eyewitness accounts, slow-motion video, technical analysis of the dust from the disaster site, suspicious reports from the media and the unlikely collapse of Building 7 all amount to "massive, overwhelming evidence" of a vast, sophisticated conspiracy involving controlled explosions set off inside the buildings.

"This is not America as we used to know it," Gage said. "We're not being told the truth about these events."

He invited audience members to sign his online petition, to give a tax-deductible donation to his organization and to buy his $20 DVD.

He polled the audience again at the end of his speech. This time, only eight people said they were unsure about the cause of the World Trade Center. The rest believed the cause was explosives in the buildings.

Gage got a standing ovation, and audience members lined up at three microphones to ask questions.

"Hi, I'm David with Magicians for 9/11 Truth," said one questioner.

That actually is a group, at least according to a website that says, "We believe that, just like in performing magic, there may have been the use of misdirection & deception involved with the events of September 11th."

The Internet also reveals there's a Firefighters for 9-11 Truth and Pilots for 9/11 Truth, along with anti-truther websites such as "The Journal of Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories" and "Conspiracies R Not Us."

Another group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, was founded by James Fetzer, a former University of Minnesota-Duluth philosophy professor who has also written books alleging a cover-up in the Kennedy assassination and asserting that the airplane crash that killed U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone was also an assassination.

'No One Held Accountable' / Gage didn't say who was responsible for the explosions he believes caused the World Trade Center collapse.

But others are ready with an explanation.

"I think it's our intelligence community. I think it's our military-industrial complex," said Felt, a Minnesota 9/11 Truth supporter. "War is good business. It goes back to the Kennedy assassination. We wouldn't have had the Vietnam War if he lived."

Fetzer said 9/11 was engineered by "elements within the U.S. government" aided by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

"It appears to be a project motivated by the neo-conservative agenda," Fetzer said.

Organizers at the Gage speech distributed phone numbers and websites of local media outlets, urging calls to demand coverage of the truth movement. Many truthers believe the media is also part of the conspiracy.

Other truthers talked about their lone efforts to spread the word despite being compared to Holocaust deniers and people who believe the moon landing was faked, and enduring ridicule, harassment and conflict with friends and families.

"It'd be a lot easier for me to believe the official story," said Stahlberg, a businessman from St. Paul. "There's very little tolerance for having a difference of opinion."

"Ever since I found out about it, I can't stop telling people," said Litchfield resident Robyn Richardson, who said she hands out 9/11 truth DVDs to repairmen who come to her house.

Felt, a St. Paul lawyer and chemical engineer, said that when solicitors call him on the phone, "I turn it right around.

"I ask them if I can ask them about 9/11. I ask them if they're aware of Building 7," he said. Kay said conspiracy theories are "psychologically addictive."

"It's about redemption. It's about something that has been stolen from our nation," Fenster said.

But Kay said the 9/11 truth movement can ultimately be harmful because "it bespeaks a very toxic distrust for government and all public institutions."

"How do you run a society when a significant portion of ordinary people believe their own government is trying to murder them?" Kay wrote in an email.

Catherine Statz, a St. Paul public health nurse, said she won't stop expressing her belief that someone besides terrorists was behind the explosion that killed her sister in the Pentagon attack on 9/11.

"People ask me all the time why I keep at this," she said. "No one was held accountable for what happened that day."

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