by Matt Taibbi
Edit: Just got this in from Luke…apparantly this article by Rolling Stone might be the catalyst for some blowback…
Peaceful Picket @ Rolling Stone!
Protest Magazine’s 9/11 Cover-Up!
Wednesday, October 4th, 4–6pm
1290 Avenue of the Americas (52nd St.)
Recently, Rolling Stone Magazine featured yet another of those uninformed, smarmy, know-it-all, “hit pieces” directed against our 9/11 Truth Movement. Appearing on its website and authored by Matt Taibbi, the article utilizes the usual mis-characterizations of our collective effort towards the truth of 9/11. What is intolerable though is that the writer stoops to personal attacks against those of us who doubt the official story of 9/11. Well, sorry establishment pseudo-hipsters, there are millions of us and we’re not standing for it! We demand respect, if not for our sincere efforts, than [sic] for the truth of what happened that day. We’ll see you in the street!
QUESTION AUTHORITY!
JUST GIVE US SOME 9/11 TRUTH!
“How would you rate the American media in their coverage of the events of the attack last September?”
“Well let’s see, uh, shamefully, is a word that comes to mind,” answered Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone’s best and most famous writer when speaking with Australian radio back in 2002.
Posted by Dylan Avery at 2:05 p.m.
“Jesus,” I said into the phone. “I’m an establishment pseudo-hipster.”
“The funny thing about that,” my so-called friend answered, “is that you are.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Have fun at the meeting,” he said, hanging up.
After the call I sat in my room for a minute, sorting it all out. The timeline of this whole ugly business began when I wrote a somewhat half-assed column for the Rolling Stone Web site on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, talking about what America did and did not learn from that event. In that column I made an offhand comment about the 9/11 Truthers, calling them “clinically insane.”
It wasn’t something I’d put a lot of thought into, just something that was in the back of my mind. I’d run into the “movement” over and over again in my travels for the magazine in the previous year; outside Cindy Sheehan’s tent, among protesting Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, at the site of a Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, at antiwar rallies in Washington. Each time I ran into talk about the towers being mined or felled by remote-controlled planes, I dismissed it as an anomaly. In fact, I had a mild ethical crisis over it when I covered the Cindy Sheehan story; because I was against the war and generally sympathetic to Sheehan’s cause, I didn’t want to have to mention in print that her supporters were abuzz with nut-job conspiracy theories accusing Bush of masterminding 9/11.
But the sheer numbers were so overwhelming—in one group of twenty Sheehan protesters I polled, there were fourteen who subscribed to some version of the Bush-did-it conspiracy theory—that I had no choice but to mention it in the piece.
It was the first time in my life that I felt forced to paint a negative portrait of a peace movement. It genuinely freaked me out when I eventually started to see my article linked up on a host of right-wing Web sites, used as ammunition against the antiwar crowd.
I ran into the same phenomenon several times after that. In Dearborn, where I went to interview Arab Americans who had organized to protest the Israel-Lebanon war, I was shocked to listen to well-educated, pious Lebanese Americans regurgitating 9/11 conspiracy theories like they were hard news. In particular there was a pair of college-educated sisters, Renee and Rannya Abdul-habi—both seriously religious young women who dressed in the hijab—who seemed fairly well informed about America’s Middle East policy but in outer space when it came to domestic politics. Renee, the older and more politically active sister, could not be budged from her conviction that Bush had bombed the Twin Towers and that no plane had hit the Pentagon.
What was interesting about the Dearborn trip was that when I arrived, virtually the entire community was abuzz about the arrests of a pair of young Arab American men, one of whom was unfortunately named Osama, who had been caught buying a large number of cell phones. The two boys, both of whom had been football stars at Dearborn High, had been immediately dubbed “terror suspects” in the big dailies and on television and tabbed the “Dearbornistan boy terrorists” by Detroit’s Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel. The charges were dropped a few days after the arrests, and no terror connection was ever uncovered, but the damage, as far as the community was concerned, had been done. To them, this was another example of mainstream media racism and deception, of the media carelessly seizing an opportunity to railroad an Arab without cause. It was pretty obvious to me that, because of incidents like this, the Arab American community in the Detroit area had long ago stopped paying attention to the “mainstream” news and understood most of what they saw on television to be an unbroken string of deceptions and manipulations.
But I only thought about that later on. At the time, I still thought the 9/11 conspiracy stuff was a weird aberration, your basic Clinton-era black-helicopter paranoia reconfigured to fit disaffected lefties of the terrorism age, so when I mentioned it in that 9/11 anniversary column, it was just to score a quick punchline.
But almost instantly after the column went up online, my mailbox started filling up with hate mail. And what hate mail! If there is a consistent characteristic of the 9/11 Truth Movement, it’s a kind of burning, defensive hypersensitivity, a powerful inclination to be instantly offended, which expresses itself in a tendency for its adherents to seem literally to leap out of their seats in anger even in e-mail form.
“Fuck you, you prick!” said one letter. “Left-gatekeeper cocksucker!” said another. “You’re the one who’s clinically insane,” said a third. “I can’t believe you call yourself a journalist.” Numerous complainants promised to kick my ass. Even a column I’d written celebrating the death of the pope hadn’t come close to inspiring this much invective.
About six days into this I called Jan Frel, my editor at AlterNet, and he mentioned, casually, that my 9/11 column was setting some kind of site record for comments. When I looked on the site I noticed that some of the comments touched on the actual subject I was writing about, but the vast majority were focused on that one “clinically insane” line. A sample:
Matt Taibbi, in denial or not, is misleading readers into believing the government’s fairy-tales concerning 9–11 and everything that has followed. He doesn’t ask “Cui bono?” He tries to make us believe that it was simply those other terrible people with box cutters who perpetrated 9–11 on us—that despite increasing overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that we are since 9–11 the poor victims of people who hate us for our freedoms—yeah, right! What we collectively are—are suckers for the “big lie” Taibbi is pitching.
AlterNet consistently plays the role of left-wing gatekeeper by publishing articles such as this one. I wonder if AlterNet could do some real journalism by giving a fair shake to the 9/11 Truth Movement. I think AlterNet is becoming part of the problem, not the solution.
read “the new pearl harbor” by david ray griffin and rent the film “network.” there’s no united states no middle east no germany no japan no russia no china no iran no vietnam etc etc there’s just one big global governmet a shadow government the international finanical government which executed a coup d etat on november 21, 1963 and orchestrated the attack on 9/11. its not a matter of winning any war its a matter of perpetual war.
The most insane conspiracy theory of all is to blame 9/11 on 19 Arab Muslims with box cutters led by a guy in a cave, outsmarting the the entire US Military, all of the US Spy Agencies and the US Government. As to the explosives that were most likely planted in buildings 1, 2 and 3…
After scrolling through a couple hundred of these messages and looking through another hundred more or so in my mailbox, I lost my temper and tossed off a column thrashing the 9/11 “Truth” Movement. At the time I was,
mistakenly, under the impression that the movement was an easy target. It seemed to me at the time that the only reason the 9/11 conspiracy theories were surviving on the Internet was that the movement’s leaders had carefully avoided articulating their theories in full. I really thought that all anyone had to do was put all of the movement claims together and the resulting summary would be so unbelievably ridiculous that people would actually be ashamed to defend them publicly. The 9/11 conspiracy theories seemed absurd on their face, the kind of thing that no person familiar with the mundane everyday corruption of Washington would ever take seriously, and I thought, mistakenly, that they would go away as soon as someone bothered to point out in public how retarded they are.
So I wrote something along those lines. But the response was twice, three times as vociferous as before. My in-box was deluged with hate mail of the white-hot-rage/die-cocksucker genus, and then, eventually, word of the protest hit me.
At the appointed time I walked across town and grabbed a hot dog across the street from our offices on Sixth Avenue, a block up from Rockefeller Center. It was a strange scene. Among other things, it was a bad time for a protest; the sun was just starting to recede, and it was late on a workday smack dab in the middle of a workweek. The crowd of about ten scraggly-looking protesters carrying placards and wearing black “INVESTIGATE 9/11” T-shirts could easily have been cameramen or techies lugging equipment from the giant NBC complex next door, and the suit-and-tie crowd was waltzing past them. After Falun Gong, you need a pretty good act to stop traffic in downtown New York.
I finished my hot dog, walked across the street, and picked out a pair of middle-aged men handing out fliers. One was slightly pudgy with an untucked shirt and curlyish hair, and the other had a big bulbous nose and glasses and the body of Woody Allen. Introducing myself as the guy they were protesting, I told them that I understood they needed a couple of hours to give their protest maximum exposure, but that I would be very pleased to sit down and hear their concerns in a nearby diner when they were finished.
Weirdly, the two men seemed very happy to meet me, enthusiastically shaking my hand even after I identified myself. I repeated the address of the diner and started to walk away. Curly Hair asked me my name again.
“I’m Matt Taibbi,” I said. “You know, the guy you’re picketing.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Well, thank you,” he said, shaking my hand again. He seemed very pleased to make my acquaintance.
A few hours later, I slipped into the Morning Star Café just down the block from my apartment. There were about five or six protesters there, including Curly Hair, whose real name was Les Jamieson. He was from the local chapter of 911Truth.org. They already had big plates of food in front of them and were munching happily. I sat at the end and ordered coffee.
It was awkward. I’m not sure exactly what was said at first, but I recall that after a stammering attempt on my part to start a discussion, all five or so protesters started speaking at once; I heard something about “heat levels” on my left and “video” on my right. Finally we settled down and Les started talking about some compelling 9/11 footage that some friend of his had, something about explosions, that the New York TV stations were “sitting on” and keeping from the public.
“Les,” I said, “how do you think that works? Do you think a news director for Channel 2 says to the people in the archive room, ‘Make sure this is locked away and no one sees it?’”
“Well, clearly, they’re hiding it,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Do you think the guys from the TV stations are in communication with people in government, discussing what should and should not be aired?”
“All I’m saying is, they’ve got the footage, and they’re not showing it,” he said. “So there must be something going on.”
Murmurs of assent all around the table. I changed the subject, asking them if they could just forget about the explosions and all the rest of it for now and name one piece of concrete evidence linking the government to the crimes of 9/11. From there a longish conversation started that seemed fruitful and pleasant—the tone of the discussion was respectful from both sides, and Les and his friends were making their case, even though neither side was convincing the other of much. I suppose on some level I was regretting the description of these nice people as clinically insane, but I also remembered that that’s the thing about the Internet—there’s an awful lot of white-hot insanity out there that is written by people who seem quite normal once they look up from their computer screens. Eventually Les concluded that the best evidence he could think of was the Project for the New American Century report that claimed that a “new Pearl Harbor” would be needed to get the public behind our expansionist policies in the Middle East.
“But that’s not evidence of anything,” I said. “It’s a self-evident statement. Anyone could have said that before 9/11. I could have said it.”
“But it’s right there out in the open,” said Les. “They said it. How come people in the press can’t take a lead like that and—”
“A lead?” I said. “How is that a lead? Where does it lead to?”
There was a skittish, late-thirtyish woman sitting next to me with a long dark ponytail, I’ll call her Mary, who had kept trying to bring the JFK assassination into the discussion. Mary had also said that the military was controlling the media, that “all this Brad and Jennifer stuff” was part of a plan to hide the truth. She interjected now.
“I think what he’s asking, Les,” she said, “is what the actual evidence is linking the government to the attack. What you’re talking about is circumstantial evidence.”
“And not good circumstantial evidence,” I said.
“Yes it is,” she said. “It’s good circumstantial evidence. I would say it’s very strong.”
Les frowned. “Well,” he said, “if you’re asking for concrete…”
Just then a lean, bearded figure, dressed in an army jacket, stormed through the front door of the diner and made a beeline straight for my side of the table. It was as if he’d studied my probable seating position beforehand; his entrance was executed with military precision. He pulled up a chair, spun it around to sit with the chair back facing forward, plopped down, and started barking at me in the frenzied, heavily accented English of a German film student sent to the emergency room for a meth overdose.
“Who zent you!” he screamed. “You left-gatekeeping scum! Who paid you off! Who made you do zis? You are vorking for zomebody! You…”
He kept screaming. I looked around the table in shock. The others looked down at their food.
“Hah! Who vas it! Answer me! Answer me now!”
“Jesus,” I said. “Calm the fuck down!”
“I am not CALMING DOWN!” he screamed. “You vill give me ANSWERS!”
I reared back in my chair. I didn’t know it yet, but this was my introduction to Nico Haupt, the so-called mad genius of the 9/11 Truth Movement, a feverish blogger who is credited with inventing the famed movement acronyms LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) and MIHOP (made it happen on purpose) and seems to be a ubiquitous presence at any 9/11 Truth function on the East Coast. Haupt is the movement mascot, the future propaganda minister of the Truth Republic. I would later look up his blog entries and find them to be masterpieces of conspiratorial paranoia and unintentional comedy. Among other things, they contain the usual salutations to the surveillance teams who of course are watching him at all times:
Secretly on the payroll of some other weired intelligence? Not true, because I’m also constantly hungry. I still regret any kind of recruitments:) A personal note to the NSA, who’s a regular log-in guest on my sites: I guess, you have to take the less comfortable way again and sniff my e-mails. You’re still bastards for me, who betrayed this nation and the constitution. Shame on you and go to hell!
I also enjoyed his theories that someone “got to” Ed Asner, often listed as a 9/11 Truth supporter:
I always was and always will be a big
fan of Ed Asner’s movies and TV series, especially “rich man, poor man”. Last week, I was a bit disappointed that Asner “caved in” and basically made a u-turn, by writing that 9/11 was based on negligence. I heard a different view a long while ago, even personally from him on the phone. Someone else might speculate, why this has happened now. Maybe someone threatened Asner with some infos of his past?
Haupt’s blogs are a great running account of the life of a would-be revolutionary in the Internet age—sort of like a MySpace version of Che’s Congo diary. His writings are full of little offhand personal tidbits left behind for his future biographers. “Or what about a romantic reason?” he writes one day in 2004, apropos of nothing. “My girlfriend denied to marry me…Maybe it’s frustration, depression or that i’m constantly broke.” Later on, he confesses to bravery in the face of impending capture: “Maybe i’m scared that the Homeland Security will arrest me as a ‘terrorist’? Not at all.”
In any case, Haupt had better hope he’s a speed addict, because if he isn’t, there are very few reasonable excuses for his Raskolnikovian appearance. He spits wildly when he talks, and he can’t allow anyone to respond to anything he says. In fact, my little meeting with the protesters basically broke up very shortly after his entrance, because Haupt wouldn’t let me or anyone else shut him up for even ten seconds. After I said something about needing evidence to accuse the Bush administration of planning the attacks, Haupt flipped and began demanding evidence for absolutely everything that came out of everybody’s mouth. When someone asked me how I could explain Bush’s failure to prevent the attacks, I began by saying, “Well, this batch of Republicans are the most incompetent, corrupt…”
“Where’s your evidence for zat!” Haupt screamed. “Show me evidence Bush eez corrupt!”