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9/11 Truth movement is the collective name of organizations and individuals that question whether the United States government was either negligent toward or complicit in the September 11 attacks. When negligence is alleged, motives given are nefarious such as allowing the launch of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or curtailing civil liberties. Members of the movement are frequently referred to as “Truthers”.

History
In January 2002, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the investigations to "intelligence failures."

Both before and after the 9/11 Commission Report, there were questions about the official account published. Among others, Michael Ruppert and Canadian journalist Barrie Zwicker, published criticisms or pointed out purported anomalies of the mainstream account of the attacks. French author Jean-Charles Brisard and German authors Mathias Bröckers and Andreas von Bülow published books critical of media reporting and advancing the controlled demolition thesis of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.

In September 2002, the first "Bush Did It!" rallies and marches were held in San Francisco and Oakland, California organized by The All People's Coalition. In October 2002, an anti-Bush parody of the dollar bill that includes addresses of websites which say they prove that 9/11 was an inside job, began being produced and handed out at protests and rallies.

The 911 Visibility Project was formed in 2003 and in January 2004 they organized a demonstration at Ground Zero; activists stood behind a large banner that read "The Bush Regime Engineered 9/11," and held signs reading "Support the Families: Stop 9/11 Cover-Up" and "Bush Knew". Leaflets were handed out pointing out supposed inconsistencies in the official account. On March 20, 2004, more than 100,000 people turned out for an anti-war demonstration in New York. 9/11 truth activists distributed thousands of "Stop the 9-11 Cover-Up" signs and the movement received national press exposure.

Several academics challenging official reports of the 9/11 attacks lost their jobs. Steven E. Jones, who became a leading academic voice of the demolition theory In 2006, he published the paper "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Completely Collapse?". was placed on paid leave by Brigham Young University following what they described as Jones's "increasingly speculative and accusatory" statements in September, 2006, pending a review of his statements and research. Six weeks later, Jones retired from the university. Also in 2006, in the U.S. Midwest, 61 legislators signed a petition calling for the dismissal of a University of Wisconsin assistant professor, Kevin Barrett, after he joined the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Citing academic freedom, the university provost declined to take action against Barrett.

9/11 Commission Report reaction
To the consternation of the families and the "9/11 skeptics" in general, many of the questions that the 9/11 Family Steering Committee put to the 9/11 Commission were not asked in either the hearings or in the Commission Report. Lorie Van Auken, one of the "Jersey Widows", estimates that only 30% of their questions were answered in the final 9/11 Commission Report, published July 22, 2004. The story of the Families Movement and their monitoring of the commission is documented in the film 9/11: Press for Truth (2006).

The 9/11 Family Steering Committee produced a website summarizing the questions they had raised to the Commission, indicating which they believe had been answered satisfactorily, which they believe had been addressed but not answered satisfactorily, and which they believe had been generally ignored in or omitted from the Report.

In addition, the 339-page book The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions by David Ray Griffin, claimed that the report had either omitted information or distorted the truth, providing 115 examples. He summarizes his book in the article The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-page lie, claiming that "the entire Report is constructed in support of one big lie: that the official story about 9/11 is true."

On May 26, 2008 college professor Blair Gadsby began a protest and a hunger strike outside the offices of Senator and Republican Party Nominee for President John McCain's office demanding to see McCain. Arizona Republican State Senator Karen Johnson joined the protest in support. On June 10 Johnson with Gadsby as her guest and other 9/11 Truth movement members in the audience spoke before the Arizona State Senate espousing the controlled demolition theory and supporting a reopening of the 9/11 investigation. In response to a questioner McCain, who wrote the forward to a Popular Mechanics book aimed at debunking the theories, said he did not meet Gadsby "Because I don't take well to threats".

NIST Report reaction
Immediately after the collapses of the Towers and Building 7, eyewitness testimony referring to explosions, along with features of the collapses caught on film that resembled footage of controlled demolitions, led many people, including some news anchors and engineers, to suspect that explosives had been pre-planted within the buildings. Within hours, the explanation that the impact damage and fires had led to a "progressive collapse" was presented in the mainstream media. And in weeks and months that followed, articles in scientific journals explained that the global collapses of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers were inevitable, with most asserting that the impact damage and intense heat of the fires caused the floor trusses and the vertical columns to weaken and fail, and the "pancake" effect of floors crashing down on top of one another brought down the entire structure. The initial government investigation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Report (May 2002), reached similar conclusions, but recommended a more thorough investigation. The full Report into the collapses of the Twin Towers by the official investigators, NIST, was published in June 2005.

Following the NIST Report, numerous responses were written by members of the 9/11 Truth movement. Many of these responses claimed that it ignored key evidence suggesting an explosive demolition, "distorted reality" by using deceptive language and diagrams, and attacked straw man arguments, such as the 2005 article by Jim Hoffman entitled, Building a better mirage: NIST's 3-year $20,000,000 Cover Up of the Crime of the Century.

In the Fall of 2005, then-Brigham Young University Physics professor Steven Jones announced a paper criticizing the NIST Report and describing his hypothesis that the WTC towers had been intentionally demolished by explosives. This paper garnered a small amount of mainstream media attention, including an appearance by Jones on MSNBC. This was the first such programming on a major cable news station. As of November 2006, Jones had not published his research in peer-reviewed mainstream journals. Although Jones has been criticized by his university for publicizing his claims before vetting them through the approved peer review process and has since been placed on paid leave, he continues to remain a focus of public interest for his 9/11 research.

Accordingly, in April 2007, some 9/11 victims' family members and some members of the new Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice submitted an additional request for correction to NIST, containing their own views on the defects in the report. NIST responded to this request in September 2007 supporting their original conclusions; the originators of the request wrote back to them in October 2007, asking them to reconsider their response.

Criticism
The movement has attracted the attention of some major mainstream media publications.

While noting that the movement is "a mainstream political reality", Time magazine declared that "the [conspiracy] theories prompt small, reasonable questions that demand answers that are just too large and unreasonable to swallow." The movement receives criticism from a variety of sources. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote that he has "two basic gripes with the 9/11 Truth Movement":
 * "The first is that it gives supporters of Bush an excuse to dismiss critics of this administration. I have no doubt that every time one of those Loose Change dickwads opens his mouth, a Republican somewhere picks up five votes.... Secondly, it's bad enough that people in this country think Tim LaHaye is a prophet and Sean Hannity is an objective newsman. But if large numbers of people in this country can swallow 9/11 conspiracy theory without puking, all hope is lost."

MIT engineering professor Thomas W. Eagar was at first unwilling to acknowledge the concerns of the movement, saying "if (the argument) gets too mainstream, I'll engage in the debate." In response to physicist Steven Jones publishing a hypothesis that the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition, Eager stated:
 * "These people (in the 9/11 truth movement) use the "reverse scientific method"… they determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn't fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion."

Organizations
Since the publication of the official reports, a number of interconnected 9/11 Truth movement organizations have been formed to research the events of the day, to promote the 9/11 Truth movement and 9/11 conspiracy theories to the general public, and to try and force a new investigation.

911 Truth
This organization was launched in June 2004 and has become the central portal for all the 9/11 Truth movement organizations. It is run by Janice Matthews (Executive Director), David Kubiak (International Campaign Advisor) and Mike Berger (Media Coordinator), among others, and its advisory board includes Steven Jones, Barrie Zwicker and Faiz Khan.

The organization co-sponsored the Zogby Polls that have shown an increasing number of people believing the government has covered-up the real story of 9/11. A few of its sister and spin-off organizations include the 9/11 Visibility Project and Justice For 9/11. It also organizes gatherings and events, promotes "scholarly" research, warns about the discrediting effect of extreme alternative theories, and attempts to affect mainstream media coverage.

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is an organization of architectural and engineering professionals who advocate September 11 conspiracy theories and are calling a new investigation into the cause of the destruction of the Twin Towers and 7 WTC. The group is collecting signatures for a petition to the United States Congress that demands "a truly independent investigation with subpoena power" of the September 11 attacks, and in particular "a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives that might have been the actual cause of the destruction" of the World Trade Center buildings. Richard Gage, a San Francisco Bay area based architect, founded Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in 2006.

Investigations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) have concluded that the buildings collapsed as a result of the impacts of the planes and of the fires that resulted from them. Gage critizised the government agency NIST for not having investigated the complete sequence of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and claims that "the official explanation of the total destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers has explicitly failed to address the massive evidence for explosive demolition." To support its position, the group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth points to the "free fall" pace of the collapse of the buildings, the "lateral ejection of steel", and to the "mid-air pulverization of concrete".

Scholars for 9/11 Truth
The original 'Scholars for 9/11 Truth', founded by Dr. James H. Fetzer and Dr. Steven Jones on December 15, 2005, was a group of individuals of varying backgrounds and expertise who rejected the mainstream media and government account of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Initially the group invited many ideas and hypotheses to be considered, however, leading members soon came to feel that the inclusion of some theories advocated by Fetzer—such as the use of directed energy weapons or small nuclear bombs to destroy the Twin Towers—were insufficiently supported by evidence and were exposing the group to ridicule. By December 2006, Dr. Steven Jones and several others set up a new scholars group titled Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, whose focus was in the use of the scientific method in analysis. The original members took a vote on which group to join and the majority voted to move to the new group. By 2007, James Fetzer had been openly rejected by the 9/11 Truth Movement, banned from and criticized on popular forums and no longer invited to public 9/11 events.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice
Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice formed in January 2007 and is "a group of scholars and supporters endeavoring to address the unanswered questions of the September 11, 2001 attack" with a focus on scientific research. The group is composed of more than 700 members, including Richard Gage, Steven E. Jones, Jim Hoffman, David Ray Griffin, Peter Phillips, former Congressman Daniel Hamburg, and Kevin Ryan. Most members support the theory that the the World Trade Center Towers were destroyed through explosive demolition.

In 2008 and 2009, several Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice members published essays in science and engineering journals. In April 2008, a letter by members Steven E. Jones, Frank Legge, Kevin Ryan, Anthony Szamboti and James Gourley, was published in The Open Civil Engineering Journal. In July 2008, an article by Ryan, Gourley and Jones was published in the Environmentalist. In October 2008, an essay describing what the author considers fundamental errors in a Bažant and Verdure paper was published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics by member James R. Gourley. And in April 2009, as reported by major Danish newspapers, Danish chemist and STJ member Niels H. Harrit, of the University of Copenhagen, and eight other authors, some also STJ members, published a paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, titled, 'Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe'. The paper concludes that chips consisting of unreacted and partially reacted super-thermite are present in the samples of the dust.

9/11 CitizensWatch
The group was formed in 2002 by John Judge and Kyle Hence and, along with the Family Steering Committee, played an active role in calling for the establishment of the 9/11 Commission, and monitoring the commission closely.

Hispanic Victims Group
The Hispanic Victims Group is a group created after the 9/11 attacks and headed by William Rodriguez, who is now an outspoken member of the 9/11 Truth movement. The group was a key force behind the 9/11 Commission, and was among the Families Advisory Council for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The group helped secure an amnesty for Hispanic illegal immigrants who died in the attacks.

We Are Change
The organization staged a protest march at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The group filmed protests in an effort to catch illegal action by protesters or police.

Conferences
Members of the 9/11 truth organizations, such as the Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, regularly hold meetings and conferences to discuss alternative theories about 9/11 and to strategize about how best to achieve their goals. Many of these conferences are organized by 911truth.org and some have been covered by the international media.

Internal critique
While there is general agreement within the movement that individuals within the United States government (but not necessarily the government as a whole) are responsible for the attacks, alternative theories differ about what may have happened. There have been a number of articles and responses written by members critiquing the methods and theories of other members, often in a scholarly format, as in the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

While Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice states that they advocate the use of the scientific method and civil research activities over public debate, Jim Fetzer's group, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, has said that the scientific method is unnecessary and that any imaginable theory is worthy of advocating to the public. For example, reporting on a conference involving Fetzer's group, a Madison Times article stated: "By Sunday the conference had covered weather control, weapons from space, and the idea that the planes that struck the towers never existed at all."

Books
One of the best known authors of 9/11 Truth movement literature is theologian David Ray Griffin. His two books, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (March 2004), which outlined a methodical, deductive framework for researching 9/11, and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (October 2004), became best-sellers. His Debunking 9/11 Debunking (May 2007) looks at the way magazines such as Popular Mechanics have sought to debunk the alternative 9/11 theories. His most recent work, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the cover-up, and the exposé (2008), was written to update his original book, The New Pearl Harbor, reflecting information and insights from five major developments that have occurred since his original publication.

In September 2004, the interactive "Complete 9/11 Timeline" website by Paul Thompson, which is a collection of mainstream media reports presented chronologically, was made into the book The Terror Timeline.

Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (October 2004) identified potential key insider suspects in the 9/11 attacks and provide an examination of their context: petroleum, geopolitics, narco-traffic, intelligence and militarism. Webster Tarpley's Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (2005) described a link between 9/11 and previous accusations of false flag state-sponsored terrorism such as Gladio or the Red Brigades.

Films
Popular films made by the 9/11 Truth movement include: Loose Change:Final Cut (2007) by Korey Rowe, Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State (2005) by Alex Jones, 911 Mysteries: Demolitions (2006), The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw (2004) by Barrie Zwicker, and 9/11: Blueprint for Truth (2007) and updated 2008 Edition (2008) by Richard Gage.

These documentaries present a range of alternate theories about how the attacks might have been carried out. In some cases, these theories have been rejected by other movement members In this case most objections raised against the movie were taken into consideration while creating the "Final Cut" version.

9/11 Press for Truth (2006) documents the struggle by the Jersey Widows to open a full investigation of the events, and their frustration while monitoring the 9/11 Commission as part of the Family Steering Committee. The film, partly based on The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson, also looks at warnings received by the US government prior to September 11 and instances during the US invasion of Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda managed to escape from US forces and flee into Pakistan.

Alex Jones has made a number of films about perceived historical instances of false flag terrorism and points out similarities between them and the 9/11 attack. He also promotes the view that the US government has used 9/11 to increase domestic control via the Patriot Act, Homeland Security Bill and militarization of police forces.

Alex Jones, 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorists are  the subject of a documentary New World Order directed by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel  that  debuted on the Independent Film Channel on May 26, 2009. The documentary while not endorsing the movement is described as the giving the movement "more sympathetic, or less critical, airing than they've yet had (except among the converted)".

Mainstream media coverage

 * 2002 September 15 – New York Magazine
 * 2004 March 25 – The Christian Science Monitor
 * 2006 July 28 – National Post (Toronto, Canada)
 * 2006 August – Vanity Fair
 * 2006 September 3 – San Francisco Chronicle,
 * 2006 September 5 – The Guardian (United Kingdom)
 * 2006 September 6 – Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
 * 2008 June 7 – Financial Times Magazine