911 Truth – 13 Years Later
To the best of my knowledge there has never been a real 911 Truth movement in Greece. The advocates of acknowledging reality were, and remain, isolated voices in this country. Reactions to the event and against the official “conspiracy theory” did, however, get off to an early start. Michael Ruppert’s “Truth and Lies of 911” presentation at Portland State University in Oregon became available in November 2001 and was quickly provided with Greek subtitles. An edited version of it was projected at the Ama Lahi tavern in Athens to a public meeting of the citizens’ movement ATTAC-Hellas, to mixed reactions from the audience. There were accusations that Ruppert, an ex-Los-Angeles policeman, was a “right-winger”, and thus presumably not deserving of publicity. It became evident that ATTAC-Hellas, let alone the international citizens’ movement ATTAC as a whole, could not be mobilized around the issue of 911 Truth as presented by Ruppert.
Nevertheless, on the island of Aegina, a private screening to journalist Stelios Kouloglou of Ruppert’s Portland Oregon address led to some developments. Kouloglou decided to go to the United States and film Ruppert and his milieu, including the then Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The documentary he made for the series “Reportage without Frontiers” was screened by Greek state television. It gave a relatively objective account of the activities of this first phase in the development of the 911 Truth Movement in the USA. But the programme was rather comprehensively ignored and this may have affected Kouloglou’s attitude to the subject, because in his later film “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, the version of 911 that he seems to accept as self-evident is the “official conspiracy theory”.
Kouloglou’s “Reportage without Frontiers” documentary was screened publicly in Aegina on the seventh anniversary of 911.
On 18th March 2007 there was a screening, again in Aegina, of Sofia Smallstorm’s “911 Mysteries” video on the collapse of the Twin Towers. The screening, and the associated activities of that day, were the subject of another relevant video of historical interest (perhaps) http://www.enouranois.eu/enouranois/video/monoaggliko.wmv
2013 saw a linking up, in the European Parliament, between Greek and Cypriot activists and Giulietto Chiesa, whose film on 911 “Zero” had been screened in the European Parliament when Chiesa was a Europarliamentarian. Again, the screening was almost totally ignored by journalists and by other Europarliamentarians.
Later that year Chiesa spoke in Aegina at a function entitled “European Union: disintegration or a new beginning.”
In an article asking the question “Are We Being Had Again?”, dated 24th August 2014, in the run-up to the thirteenth anniversary of 911, James Hufferd raises the new issue of ISIS and its “Islamic Caliphate Project”. Hufferd takes the line that ISIS is ”extremely likely to be (just as al-Qaeda is now widely known to be) nothing more than a tremendously hyped creation of the CIA and other western intelligence services.”
This may well be the case, but the fact is that ISIS has moved a step further than the real or mythical Osama Bin Laden and the host of other Islamic terrorist organizations of the last decades, through the proclamation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as “the caliph”, in other words the successor to the Prophet Mohammad and leader of the Islamic world. Journalistic reports of the last months have predicted that this action of ISIS’s “Islamic State” is certain to trigger an avalanche of rival claims and rival claimants, and sure enough, this has already started to happen. A jihadist video a few days ago revealed that a certain Ayman al Zawahri has launched an Indian branch of his militant group under the banner “Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent” with an aim to spread Islamic rule and “raise the flag of Jihad” across the subcontinent. Al Zawahri calls on the “umma,” or Muslim nation, to unite around “tawhid,” or monotheism, “to wage jihad against its enemies, to liberate its land, to restore its sovereignty and to revive its caliphate.”
Zawahri evidently does not recognize ISIS’s claims to have established a caliphate or al-Baghdadi’s claims to be the caliph. He is reported as saying that his organization recognizes the overarching leadership of the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, that it intends to be led by the Pakistani militant Asim Umar, and that it plans to employ a spokesman.
President Obama of the United States is on record as saying that “al Qaeda’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate is absurd, a feckless delusion that is never going to happen.” As far as I know the opinion of the President of the United States is not sought by the Holy See during the process of election of a pope, nor is it sought for the appointment of any other religious leader. (Is it?)
But citizens everywhere must have the “right” to ask any “spokesman”, including the future spokesman of Ayman al-Zawahri, the spokesman of ISIS and/or the spokesman of any other putative future candidates for the office of caliph whether they acknowledge that the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 in New York and Washington were not the work of Islamic militants.
A very few courageous mainstream politicians, such as former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, have put forward such allegations publicly, but from what I have heard from some prominent 911 Truth Movement members, many Islamic jihadists and their supporters resent the idea that the attacks of 911 were not something they did themselves.
It would therefore be very desirable for the 911 Truth Movement also to find a “spokesman” and for that spokesman to ask all present and future candidate caliphs if they are prepared publicly to support 911 Truth Movement allegations of the 2001 attacks being not the work of Islamic fanatics, but rather “an inside job”.
As a footnote it should perhaps be pointed out that Michael Ruppert committed suicide on April 13th 2014 and thus is not available to be a spokesman, as it seemed he might be qualified to be at the beginning of the career of the 911 Truth Movement thirteen years ago.
At the time he was preparing his first trip to Europe in the early years of this century, Ruppert was shattered by the total lack of interest in what he had to say that was demonstrated by ATTAC founder Bernard Cassen, a not unrepresentative example of the Parisian Leftist intelligentsia. This was the first of many disappointments that were to follow for Ruppert.
W. Hall,
Aegina Greece
4th September 2014