A look at the 9/11 Truth Statement signers

A look at the 9/11 Truth Statement signers

Brian Salter, questionsquestions.net
31 January 2005 (updated 1 February)

On October 26 2004, "100 prominent Americans" signed their name to a petition calling for "immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur." This was aimed, among other things, at the now-moribund effort to bring about an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041026093059633

Without getting into an analysis of the petition itself, I think some attention is due to some of those who signed it. Obviously, there is a wide variety of viewpoints among the 100 signers, and they can't be lumped together. In fact many of them are opposed on various other issues. However, there are some individuals and groupings which raise questions about what kind of issues and agendas are being piggybacked opportunistically onto the 9/11 Truth Movement, and even a few who one would not expect to find on such a petition in the first place. So what is going on? What is also notable is the absence of many of the serious heavy-hitters of 9/11 research.

The follwing research notes are divided by category:

Depopulators

Richard Heinberg, author, The Party's Over, core faculty, New College of California. A "peak oil" promoter and population reduction advocate, whose book sports endorsements from Virginia Deane Abernethy and David Pimentel.

Abernethy, also on the Truth Statement, is the author of Population Politics and up to her ears in connections to pro-eugenics and population reduction organization, especially those with a racist or anti-immigrant bent, including Carrying Capacity Network, Population-Environment Balance, pro-eugenics journal Occidental Quarterly. She is also a Member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an white supremacist anti-immigration group funded by the notorious Pioneer Fund.
http://www.newcomm.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=4

Heinberg's other endorser, David Pimentel, is a Cornell University Professor and influential population reduction advocate, associated with the organization Negative Population Growth (www.npg.org) which receives funding from billionaire Warren Buffett, and a member of the U.S. Sustainable Population Policy Project whose agenda is "The Development and Implementation of a Domestic Population Policy in the United States, to Achieve Long-term Environmental and Economic Sustainability." In the past, Pimentel has argued for the drastic reduction of the world's population to two billion (and reportedly has lately been lowering that even further).
http://www.mnforsustain.org/uss3p_cosponsors_and_participants.htm

Mike "peak oil" Ruppert's support for the "two billion or less" population crash scenario is already well known and hardly needs detailing. In a speech last year, he quoted the eugenicist Charles Galton Darwin, lauding him as "distinguished". Darwin was a founding member of the viciously racist journal Mankind Quarterly, which was financially supported by the Pioneer Fund; serving alongside Darwin on the MQ board was Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was Josef Mengele's mentor.

Mike Ruppert and Charles Galton Darwin
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/ruppert_darwin.html

Neocons

Rachel Ehrenfeld, Ph.D., Director, American Center for Democracy, author, Funding Evil. By far the most bizarre name to find petitioning for "9/11 Truth". Ehrenfeld is a member of the ultra-hawkish neocon think tank, Committee on the Present Danger, whose honorary chair is George Shultz. Also on the CPD is 9/11 suspect extraordinaire and "peak oil" promoter, James Woolsey, who wrote the foreward to Ehrenfeld's book which focuses blame for 9/11 especially on Saudi Arabia. Notably, Ehrenfeld has been a participant in a new series of conferences in Israel which began in 2003, the "Jerusalem Summits", alongside Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Yossef Bodansky, Frank Gaffney, et. al. Another attendee and speaker at the Jerusalem Summits is John Loftus, whose line on 9/11 is that it was entirely the work of "Nazi Islamofascists" in a secret alliance with anti-Israel traitors in the US government. A somewhat similar thesis is taken up in Mike Ruppert's FTW in its recent series on Ptech, which has given mention to Ehrenfeld in a rather positive context.

Ehrenfeld's site: http://public-integrity.org/Book%20Promo.htm

Ehrenfeld's work with the Committe on the Present Danger: http://www.fightingterror.org/views/index.cfm#ehrenfeld_pubs

John Loftus on the "Arab Nazi-Al Qaeda connection": http://www.spitfirelist.com/f473.html

World government advocates

Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law, Princeton University. CFR member and former research director for the World Order Models Project sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rockefeller Foundation. Falk, who sits on the board of The Nation magazine, is the originator of the idea of accepting the demise of the Westphalia nation-state system by steering political opposition towards "globalization from below". Falk chairs the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), which follows in the footsteps of the Pugwash Conferences started by Rockefeller family associate Cyrus Eaton and world government fanatic Bertrand Russell [1]. He has also collaborated with the Club of Rome's top systems philosopher and Club of Budapest founder, Ervin Laszlo.

John Rensenbrink, professor emeritus, Bowdoin College, co-founder, US Green Party. Author of "A Planetary Government for the Planet's Ills: United Representative Government, Direct Democracy, and the Federal Principle."

Postmodern theologians

The well-known name here is of course David Ray Griffin, Ph.D., of the Claremont Institute of Theology. A relevant critique can be found here: http://mysite.verizon.net/vze25x9n/id25.html

Also on the Truth Statement is ecofeminist and professor of feminist theology at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, Rosemary Radford Ruether, who did her post-graduate studies at Claremont. Promoting her views on population reduction, she told attendees of a May 1998 ecological conference that "We need to seek the most compassionate way of weeding out people.... In place of the pro-life movement we need to develop the 'spirituality of recycling'...a spirituality that includes ourselves in the renewal of earth and self. We need to compost ourselves." Like David Pimentel, she sets the depopulation goal at two billion: "We must return to the population level of 1930." One of her philosophical themes is that traditional Christianity is inherently anti-semitic, and can only be cured by being fundamentally re-engineered in a gnostic mold.

John Cobb, Ph.D., theologian, co-author, For the Common Good. Frequent collaborator with David Ray Griffin, and also with Club of Rome member and former World Bank economist, Herman Daly (Daly has also worked with the U.S. Sustainable Population Policy Project).

Marjorie Hewit Suchocki, Ph.D., theologian, author. Professor emerita of Claremont School of Theology.

George Shultz's New Age posse

Jim Garrison, Ph.D., president, State of the World Forum, author, America as Empire. Garrison is an old colleague of George Shultz. The two founded the International Foreign Policy Association with Eduard Shevardnadze in 1991. Previously, Garrison was an executive at the Esalen Institute. In 1995 he founded the State of the World Forum with Mikhail Gorbachev; the main themes of these conferences have been world government and population reduction, bringing together elitists like George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Zbigniew Brzezinski, etc.

Even more disturbingly for someone on a petition for 9/11 investigation, Garrison was a co-founder with Jesuit Daniel Sheehan of the Christic Institute, which was widely suspected of deliberately bungling and wrecking Iran-Contra investigations in the 1980s.

"We are going to end up with world government. It's inevitable ... There's going to be conflict, coercion and consensus. That's all part of what will be required as we give birth to the first global civilization." James Garrison, president, Gorbachev Foundation USA; quoted in The Daily Record, Dunn, NC, p.4 10/17/95

Rather than oppose US imperialism, he argues that it must be postively transformed into US "leadership" to build a world order:

"To achieve greatness, an empire needs a transcendental vision that can unite all the disparate elements within it into an overarching purpose. It must aspire to a mission that the entire empire can join in building. It must be fundamentally constructive, not destructive.

"Americans at their point of empire are called to articulate a vision for the world worthy of the power they now hold over the world. This vision must transcend self-interest and embrace the whole."

Garrison is a religious scholar who shares a belief with David Ray Griffin, John Cobb, Richard Falk, and others on the 9/11 Truth Statement, that the crises facing the world must be solved by an immediate and artifical re-engineering of religion. http://worldforum98.percepticon.com/spirit/article_spirit_.html

Garrison might be able to do more spiritual good for the world by explaining his relationship with George Shultz, who helped install the Bush administration's 'neocon' team who are associated with the kind of dangerous beliefs and attitudes that Garrison deigns to critique. A skeptical observer would note that this is a case of the same people creating the "problem" and then proposing a "solution". One could see this kind of vampyric manipulation as a socio-political version of Munchausen-by-Proxy Syndrome. [2]

Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., sociologist, author, The Cultural Creatives. Proponent of Systems Philosophy. His book is a somewhat modernized and toned-down version of the elitist New Age "change agent" social vanguardism found in earlier works like Marilyn Ferguson's Aquarian Conspiracy, which in turn was based on ideas like the "Open Conspiracy" of Fabian Society globalist H.G. Wells, and more especially, the semi-secret 1974 report from Stanford Research Institute co-authored by Willis Harman, Duane Elgin (Club of Rome), Joseph Campbell, et. al., the notorious 'Changing Images of Man'. One of SRI's main funding sources is Bechtel (as in, George Shultz's Bechtel).

Stephen Dinan, author, Radical Spirit. Organized last year's "911 Convergence" with Jim Garrison.

Brad Blanton, Ph.D., psychotherapist, author, Radical Honesty. Founder of the Gestalt Institute of Washington, D.C., and protÈgÈ of gestalt psychology founder Fritz Perls, who was a major early figure at Esalen and its encounter group movement.

More "New Age" change agents...

Saniel Bonder, spiritual teacher and author, Great Relief

John Gray, Ph.D., #1 bestselling author, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Associated with Adnan Khashoggi. John Gray dossier: http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/johngraydossier.html

Craig Neal, author, co-founder, The Heartland Institute, former publisher, Utne Reader. New Age business management consultant.

Sean Kelly, Ph.D., author, professor of philosophy and religion, CA Institute of Integral Studies. A principal financial benefactor and guiding hand of CIIS was the late Laurance Rockfeller, and avid proponent of the "Human Potential Movement". Other Truth Statement signers associated with CIIS include eco-philosopher Joanna Macy and 911truth.org's Byron Belitsos, who studied there. Belitsos is a leading figure in a UFO-themed cult, URANTIA, for which there is much evidence of infiltration and influence by elite mind-control operations:
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/belitsos-urantia.html

Other sources of funding for CIIS have been managed by Esalen's Michael Murphy. Laurance Rockefeller was also a financial angel to Truth Statement signer Ralph Metzner, co-founder of the Green Earth Foundation.

John Renesch, business futurist, author, Getting to the Better Future. Connected to Willis Harman, Riane Eisler (systems philosopher and student of the Club of Rome's Ervin Laszlo), and Gorbachev.

Global Business Network

GBN is a consulting think-tank formed by veterans of Stanford Research Institute and Royal Dutch Shell. Exemplary of the "California Ideology", they offer corporate management consulting based on the usual cybernetics / systems theory background.

Paul Hawken, bestselling author, environmentalist, entrepreneur, founder of Smith & Hawken. Hawken's "Natural Capitalism" is based partially on the the work of corporate management "transformation" guru and systems theorist Peter Drucker, who was an early leader in establishing group dynamics methodologies like Total Quality Management (derived from Tavistock 'T-groups').

Catherine Austin Fitts, Asst. Secretary of Housing in the first Bush administration. Former GBN member. Fitts promotes cyber-utopian notions like digital internet currencies and communitarian idea of localized, neighborhood joint-stock companies. The latter has long-running precedents in feudal-utopian ideology. For example, community corporations were an idea of Charles Fourier promoted by early communitarian leader, anti-industrial mystic, and proto-counterculturalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was close to British East India Company circles and was sponsored financially by John Murray Forbes, a leader of the anglophile Boston opium syndicate which was to form into the Skull and Bones clique. Emerson also promoted the feudalist communitarianism of Robert Owen, whose work was financed by the likes of East India Company's Jeremy Bentham and London aristocrat banker Isaac Lyon Goldsmid (incidentally, an ancestral relation of Edward Goldsmith).

More on GBN: http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/pentagon_gw.html
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/GBN_kunzru.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.11/gbn_pr.html

The Goldsmith Gang

"Green Billionaire" Edward Goldsmith comes from a family with a background in banking catering to the British oligarchy, and who are closely intermarried with the legendary Rothchild dynasty. He is a trustee of part of the fortune of his late brother Sir James, a notorious corporate tycoon whose business partners included George Soros and Jacob Rothschild, and who was associated with the Pinay Circle, a super-elitist offshoot of the Bilderberg group. In 1994, Goldsmith formed the International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org), to promote putatively "anti-globalization" policies that are typical of the controlled opposition tendencies influenced by the anglo-american ruling class, such as: radical localism / decentralization, anti-statism, communitarianism, "civil society" governance, anti-development / anti-technology, hardcore malthusian / scarcity ideology, fetishization of "indigenous autonomy" as a wedge issue against the nation-state system, etc. The following Goldsmith / IFG associates are Truth Statement signers:

Randy Hayes, founder, Rainforest Action Network, US National Director, Direction Conservation. RAN receives major funding from Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Hayes presented an IFG study, "Restructuring the Global Economy" at the 2002 Johns Hopkins Symposium on Foreign Affairs.

David Korten, author, When Corporations Rule the World. Korten was trained by SRI's Willis Harman and recently joined the Club of Rome. He is a reahbilitor of Adam Smith, and argues that governments should be viewed as negatively as big corporations. Supports Paul Ray's "Cultural Creatives" ideology. Promoted by Ruppert's FTW.

Ralph Nader, Independent candidate for President.

Kevin Danaher, Ph.D., author, speaker, co-founder, Global Exchange.

Also supporting Goldsmith / IFG is Richard Heinberg, who describes their efforts as "populist".

Govt. Insiders

Daniel Ellsberg, author, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Whether ex-RAND Corporation employee Ellsberg really deserves his public reputation as a whistleblower and outsider is questioned here: http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/ellsberg.html

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, co-founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Melvin Goodman, senior fellow, Center for International Policy, author, former Senior Analyst, CIA, professor, National War College. The Center for International Policy, founded in 1975, receives funding from elite-connected foundations such as Ford Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, and Samuel Rubin Foundation. All of these have CFR ties.

Edward L. Peck, former US Ambassador and Chief of Mission to Iraq, former Deputy Director to the White House Task Force on Terrorism. Peck also serves on the Iraq Policy Information Project: http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Iraq_Policy_Information_Project

Morton Goulder, Deputy Secretary for Intelligence and Warning under Nixon, Ford, and Carter. New Hampshire venture finance tycoon Goulder was the founder of defence electronics giant Sanders Associates which was acquired by Lockheed/Martin in the 1980s and is now known as BAE Systems, whose US operations are headquartered in New Hampshire. BAE is currently a major information technology contractor for the Pentagon and is connected with a variety of companies which have been linked to 9/11, such as Mitre Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton. This might make Goulder's past connection a matter of interest.

Fred Burks, presidential interpreter for Bush, Clinton, Cheney, and Gore. Burks achieved some notoriety last year when he "verified" the rumors about President Bush using a radio reciever to help him in debates, rumors prompted by the "bulge" photos. Burks' account was based on his firsthand experience, but provided no proof. The problem was that the "bulge" is almost certainly better explained as a portable defibrillator, specifically the LifeVest brand which is a perfect match for the photos; the radio claim is severely dubious given that one of this conspicuous bulky size would represent outdated 1930s technology. So, Burks' "confession" may have helped divert attention towards a red herring and away from the much more politically substantive question of the President's apparently seriously ill health. http://www.wanttoknow.info/indymediashutdown
The "bulge" and LiveVest defibrillator:
http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2004/12/35839.php

Latecomers, former 9/11 "gatekeepers"

Dennis Bernstein, investigative reporter, radio host of KPFA's Flashpoints. Was previously a notorious and relentless enemy of 9/11 Truth Movement on KPFA. His belated conversion to join a petition full of establishment insiders certainly begs some questions.

Howard Zinn, professor, historian, author, A People's History of the United States. New Left revisionist historian who, despite signing the Truth Statement and endorsing David Ray Griffin's New Pearl Harbor, has reportedly continued to toe the "incompetence" line in his speaking appearances.

Others:

Kelly Patricia O'Meara, investigative journalist, public relations. Reporter for Insight Magazine, owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

James W. Walter Jr., venture investor, philanthropist, founder of Walden Three. Has spent enormous amounts of his own money embarassing the 9/11 Truth Movement with promotions of widely exposed disinfo like the video, In Plane Site. His "Walden Three" concept is a reference to Walden Two, a crypto-totalitarian novel about a "utopian" society by behavioralist psychologist B.F. Skinner, author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Some comments on Walter's feudal-utopian ideas for a future behavior-modification based society can be found here: http://mysite.verizon.net/vze25x9n/id24.html

Footnotes:

[1] More on Bertrand Russell and world government:
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/russell.html

[2] While I would certainly not deny that there is always a place for critique of traditional religion, one must also keep in mind that the idea of profoundly re-engineering traditional religions is deeply rooted in elite social engineering agendas aimed at creating "global governance" or a "world order." It is thus a grave error blindly to assume, as many on the political left might do, that the present elites are inherently "conservative" in their attitudes to religion, surface appearances notwithstanding. Furthermore, assuming that those who advocate for some new religion or new cultural paradyme are automatically fighting the powers-that-be only compounds that error, especially because the "fundamentalist" or "extremist" versions of western monotheism that are currently clashing violently on the world stage are not fully culturally organic but in fact have come about partially synthetically, under the influence of elite social engineering, and thus may be actually designed to provoke a backlash as part of their function. This is the motivation for my concern with "alternative" religious agendas being piggybacked on the 9/11 Truth Movement, on top of the fact that they are an intrusion in any case.

David Ray Griffin is devoted to a "postmodern" remodeling of Christianity based on the claim that traditional theology is to blame for supposed environmental catastrophes. This may appear to be a form of dissent to some, but in fact this is a kind of idea that one can trace, in general terms, directly to the inner circles of the anglo-american imperial establishment. For example, it can be found in the late works of Arnold J. Toynbee, who was a leading historian and propagandist with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, whose counterpart in the US is the Council on Foreign Relations. Blaming traditional forms of monotheism for creating a destructive rift between humans and their natural environment, Toynbee argued "...The question of mankind's future religion arises because all the current religions have proved unsatisfactory... A future religion that is to bring into being, and to keep in being, a new civilisation will have to be one that will enable mankind to contend with, and to overcome, the evils that are serious present threats to human survival." In order to solve the alleged "world ecological crisis", Toynbee argued for a return to pantheism (Griffin's version of Christianity, pan-en-theism, strikes something of a nuanced middle ground). He summarized such views in his late works, such as Mankind and Mother Earth (1974), and also published a notable series of discussions with Daisaku Ikeda, leader of Japan's Soka Gakkai cult and a Club of Rome member. In these, Toynbee expressed a preference for Buddhism, an interesting position for an anglo-american elitist, and even more interesting in light of the efforts of Griffin and Cobb to promote a "mutual transformation of Buddhism and Christianity". Around this time, Toynbee was associated with the Esalen Institute in California. Fittingly for such "New Age" connections, and consistent with elite psychological warfare operations which were impacting the formation of the radical environmental movement, he invoked predictably extreme false dichotomies, blaming technology, material progress, and industrial civilization for humanity's problems and advocating a turn to ascetic mysticism (as did SRI's 'Changing Images of Man' study): "...Jesus, Buddha, and Lao Tse... agreed in their ethical precepts. They all agreed that the pursuit of material wealth is a wrong aim. We should aim only at the minimum wealth needed to maintain life; and our main aim should be spiritual. They all said with one voice that if we made material wealth our paramount aim, this would lead to disaster. They all spoke in favor of unselfishness and of love for other people as the key to happiness and to success in human affairs." Such lofty advocacy of the simple life came conveniently at a time when the attempts of the "third world" to modernize and develop their economies were just beginning to be utterly devastated by anglo-american malthusian warfare, in the form of predatory IMF loansharking and artificially created "oil shocks".

In 1931 Toynbee had this to say about his work with the RIIA: "I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands...."

Ideas of a turning-point crisis, like "peak oil", are evocative of Toynbee's theories about the rise and fall of civilizations. He proposed that a challenge to survival due to latent, self destructive tendencies would cause a civilization's demise after reaching a peak, if it was not met with a creative, adaptive evolution to a new form (from the point of view of the elites Toynbee worked with, this might take the practical, proactive form of fabricating crises and challenges that impel civilization to "evolve" into a desired form of global order). "Peak oil" promoter Mike Ruppert picks up on Toynbee's theme directly: "I'm firmly convinced that what we are now faced with is a choice offered to us by our creator. Either evolve or perish."

Toynbee also spoke out on "overpopulation": "We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves." Some of his specific ideas on changing society might surprise some kinds of communitarians and localists who believe that their ideas are going against the system: "What has been needed for the last 5,000 years ... is a global body politic composed of cells on the scale of the Neolithic-Age village-community--a scale on which the participants could be personally acquainted with each other, while each of them would also be a citizen of the world-state...." but he also added, "At this time in our history, we human beings might be tempted to envy the social insects. These have been conditioned by Nature to cooperate with each other on the grand scale. The individual bee or ant or termite subordinates and sacrifices itself in the service of the community." This might be a pleasing idea to a depopulation advocate like David Pimentel, who -- as luck would have it -- happens also to be an insect ecologist.