This week the Weekender began coming out on Friday afternoon. Items were added later, and more may be added on Saturday.

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20th Anniversary Conference: One source of information about the September 2001 terror attacks and what happened — or didn’t — before, during and after them is an eight-hour online conference titled “From 9/11-Anthrax to the Pandemic: Life and Liberty in the Balance.” Click HERE for the schedule, a lineup of speakers, and how to register.

Sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, the live-streamed event begins at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, Sept. 11, 2021. It will be archived for seven days for attendees who arrive late or want to watch all or parts of it later or again.

Price of admission is a suggested donation of $20, but “any size is ok.”

I recommend sending the Lawyers’ Committee some amount of money, even $5, to see how what the speakers say stacks up against mainstream news outlets’ 9/11-related stories. The latter have tended to refer to people who don’t accept the mainstream stories as “conspiracy theorists” — when they acknowledge the existence of these people at all.

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He Won’t Be On-screen Saturday: One person not participating in the Saturday conference described above is Wayne Madsen. He said why in a column reprinted yesterday in this blog titled “2021 Hijacking.” Read it HERE. Andrew Kreig of the Justice Integrity Project had called on Thursday to ask what I thought about some things going on in the 9/11 truth “movement” including vocal disagreement with prevailing views of Covid 19 and ways to combat it. Kreig recommended the newest entry on the Wayne Madsen Report. Madsen let me reprint it yesterday because the Saturday conference was just two days away; normally he requires more time after publishing something on his blog. Madsen doesn’t name the conference he is boycotting, probably out of respect for most of the speakers. (Maybe he wasn’t invited.) He’ll probably have a look at it, though.

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Mainstream News Sources 1: With weekend approaching, the big story throughout the country is THIS ONE bannered across the top of page 1 in Friday’s New York Times, headed “BIDEN ISSUES SWEEPING MANDATES FOR SHOTS: Push to Cover Two-Thirds of Workers — ‘Our Patience Is Wearing Thin.” Read it HERE as picked up on msn.com.

The president’s announcement was a blessing for government and mainstream media managers who doubtless welcomed a diversion from discordant coverage of deteriorating official narratives.

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Mainstream News Sources 2: Most of page 1 of the weekend newsprint edition of USA Today is devoted to promoting “9/11: 20 Years Later,” a special section. “America Doesn’t Forget: We grieve those we lost on a terrible morning 20 years ago. And we remember.”

There are three stories in that section. The one headlined “A Monday that ended an era: The day before 9/11, life seemed abundant and terrorism existed in remote places,” written by staff members, does not appear online.

“Several aspects of life altered after 9/11 terror,” by Hadley Barndollar

”How Muslims are telling their stories,” by Hannah Adele and Danielle Parhizkaran, gets the views of “eight influential Muslim Americans” about how the terror attacks and Islamophobia have changed life in the United States.

–   –   –

Abrupt Changing of the Guard at AE911Truth: A week or so ago the founding director of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Richard Gage, was replaced by board member Roland Angle, a civil engineer. Gage was apparently fired by the board of directors after Spike Lee’s interview with him and inclusion of his views on matters unrelated to the building collapses at the World Trade Center caused a well-publicized revision of a documentary series directed by Lee. (For more about the matter, click HERE and scroll down.)

Less-said-about-that-the-better is how AE911Truth is handling Gage’s firing — similar to how mainstream media have uniformly handled the organization for its entire 15-year existence, so far. Gage was slated to speak this Saturday at the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry but is no longer.

–   –   –

Mainstream News Sources 3: E.J. Dionne begins his latest column with this: “The primary lesson we should take from the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is to be wary of lessons we think we have learned from traumatic events. Trauma can undermine the clear thinking and calm deliberation big decisions require.”

One translation: “The primary lesson we should take from the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is to be wary of anything networks and newspapers feed viewers and listeners and readers about any traumatic event because it can undermine the clear thinking and calm deliberation that are required.”

Find Dionne’s column HERE on a North Carolina newspaper’s website. As always, note the uses of “we,” “us” and “our” throughout. (It also appeared in the Springfield Republican and dozens of other newspapers in the United States.)

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Mainstream News Sources 4: On page 1 of Friday’s Springfield Republican under the headline“Too young to remember, Gen Z reflects on 9/11: Knowledge of attacks comes from school, family, internet” is the fruit of Elizabeth Román’s conversations with young people from Holyoke, Springfield, Chicopee, Agawam and Maynard. What do they think? Where do they get their information?

One of them, Melissa Nieves-Torres, 22, says, “I feel it is something that is not talked about in high school or college. It’s glossed over, but I think it should be talked about more and we should understand the historical significance of that because it impacts us to this day.”

Find the story online HERE.

— Mark Channing Miller

“All serious attempts to expose the truth about major criminal conspiracies are eventually infiltrated by provocateurs. 9/11 Truth is no exception,” says Wayne Madsen, a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist, author and columnist. Below please find a guest column by him, reprinted from the Wayne Madsen Report with the author’s special permission.— MCM

–   –   –

Anti-vaxxers, Covid Hoaxers, and 9/11 Truth

By Wayne Madsen

As someone who believes it is my duty as a journalist to follow every substantial lead and write about verified evidence on the major crime of this century, namely, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and an aborted aerial attack on the U.S. Capitol by hijacked United Flight 93, it is with sadness and disgust that I must report that one of the 20th anniversary “9/11 Truth” conferences this year has been hijacked by a crew of anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 pandemic hoaxers. One of the slated speakers has even bizarrely suggested that Covid is the “new 9/11.”

I was honored to have been invited to speak at several 9/11 anniversary truth seminars over the years. They included the second anniversary, where I spoke at the famed Riverside Church in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as the 15th anniversary event at Manhattan’s Cooper Union, where I stood on the same stage graced by Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. Other 9/11 anniversary speaking venues included St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan, where Peter Stuyvesant is entombed; the celebrated off-Broadway Walker Stage in Soho; and the historic West-Park Presbyterian Church in uptown Manhattan. Other speaking venues over the past 20 years include George Mason University in Arlington, the University of Montreal, National City Christian Church in Washington, and the Sheraton Pentagon City hotel overlooking the west side of the Pentagon, which was impacted and destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Not every tragedy is the result of a criminal conspiracy, but every criminal conspiracy seeks to debase the conspiracy investigators and researchers by infiltrating their numbers with ne’er-do-wells, wackos, and disinformation provocateurs.

The 9/11 Truth seekers did themselves no favors by inviting anti-vaxxers and Covid hoaxers to help them mark the 20th anniversary of the crime of this century. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, with over 2,500 members representing every scientific and engineering discipline involving construction, mechanics, and chemistry, had the most credibility when it came to questioning the official government explanation of the collapse of the World Trade Center. Spike Lee was planning to include interviews with some of the AE911Truth members and its founder, Richard Gage, in his HBO documentary series on the attack.

Lee was forced to send the AE911Truth segment to the cutting room floor after Gage’s comments that Covid-19 is a “deep state hoax” became widely known. For AE911Truth, the bad publicity forced their board to dismiss Gage as the group’s director.

The net result of embracing the nitwittery that Covid is the product of some maniacal plan by cowled sorcerers meeting in secret at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that the vaccines being administered to stem the effects of the virus are some follow-on plot to cull the human race has turned serious investigations of 9/11 into a joke.

I continue to take seriously the 9/11 attack strategy and mechanics, the anthrax attacks on Congress and the media that shortly followed, and the quick adoption of the USA Patriot Act as an overall modern-day version of Adolf Hitler’s 1933 Reichstag Fire and the subsequent German Enabling Act. So I chose not to participate in any 20th anniversary event at which Covid hoax snakes and anti-vaxx snake oil vendors are present.

It does no justice to the 3,000 people who lost their lives on 9/11 and those first responders and others who later died from exposure to lethal toxins in the air in Lower Manhattan to suggest that their deaths are linked to those of the more than 630,000 Americans who have died and continue to die because of the total incompetence and inanity of Donald Trump and his circle of grifters, neo-Nazis, fools, fakes, and frauds. The two events are apples and oranges (and the “orange” pun is intended).

After I spoke at one of the 9/11 anniversary events in Manhattan, I was approached by a rather burly gentleman wearing a grey suit and bearing a crew cut. He told me that he was a New York Police Department detective. While I braced myself for what I expected would be a haranguing over my speech on 9/11, the detective shook my hand and said that if his brother was still alive, he would have also been in the audience and thanked me for my investigation of 9/11. The detective’s brother worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, which occupied the 101st to 105th floors of World Trade Center One. He perished, along with 657 of his co-workers on September 11. The detective urged me to continue with my work despite the “conspiracy” label pejoratively used by critics. I promised him I would continue to investigate the events of that day and its precursors and aftermath.

To cobble 9/11 in with anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers at this point in time is the worst possible way to keep the quest for 9/11 truth alive. President Biden recently signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to review and release still-classified documents concerning 9/11. They largely include documents on the FBI’s Operation ENCORE, the investigation of the role that the Saudi government played in orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. This is something the families of the 9/11 victims expected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump to do, but to no avail.

And, speaking of Trump, he, along with his coked-up progeny, Donald Trump, Jr., will be marking the 20th anniversary of September 11 by hosting a heavyweight boxing match between the aging Evander Holyfield and Mixed Martial Arts champion Vitor Belfort at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida. WMR [the Wayne Madsen Report] previously reported that that city was a nexus of activity for the 9/11 Saudi hijackers, including team leader Mohammed Atta, and Israeli so-called “art students” — Mossad agents —during the months leading up to September 11.

In contrast to Trump, President Biden will commemorate the 9/11 20th in visits to the World Trade Center Memorial in Manhattan, the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon, and the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Biden attended a ceremony on Sept. 11, 2020, at the Shanksville memorial site.

Since the Trumps appear to be crapping all over the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with their goofball “heavyweight” match at a Florida casino, it may have been a better idea for the anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers to join the circus there on September 11, 2021. They should  not have besmirched the memories of the victims of September 11 and the hard work of all of those who have seriously sought the truth about that day of infamy.

Report from Islamabad: In an 11-minute segment today on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” HERE, co-host Steve Inskeep relates that many Pakistanis regard Osama bin Laden favorably — possibly a majority since his 2011 death. He visits the site of Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad raided by U.S. Navy SEALS who killed him there and later dumped his body in the sea.* The compound has been razed, in part for fear it would become a shrine.

One Pakistani interviewed sees the Sept. 11 attacks as “a drama orchestrated to justify an attack on a Muslim country” (as an interpreter worded it). Inskeep: “This man endorses a conspiracy theory, for which there is no evidence, that America attacked itself.” About half the Pakistanis surveyed in a recent poll reportedly said the U.S. government was responsible for 9/11. Another interviewee said many Pakistanis have high estimation for Bin Laden because he is “portrayed as a good man by the state.”

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‘The Imagination of the Terrorist’: On Day 3 of its series “9/11 20 Years Later,” the Springfield Republican yesterday ran Jim Kinney’s report headlined “How safe are we because of 9/11? Security evolved to meet challenges posed by terrorists.” (Subscribers can read an online version HERE.)

In it, Jane F. Garvey, an Amherst resident who headed the Federal Aviation Administration 20 years ago, recalls the skies: “The pilots call a day like that ‘a severe day.’ It’s perfect for flying.”

Garvey said a positive change resulting from the attacks is intelligence information sharing by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies that used to work less cooperatively than they do today.

”You can put all the technology you want in the world,  but when you are dealing with the human mind, which is what we are dealing with, it’s the imagination of the terrorist,” she said. “You need to know who they are.”

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Accidental Witness: Albany Times-Union reporter Paul Grondahl took the train to Manhattan on another assignment on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, expecting to stay just for the day. He stayed for five. Read his look back on the experience, headlined “Days that churned with grief and dust” in today’s newsprint editions, HERE.

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George Will and Secrecy: In today’s Times-Union, syndicated columnist George Will focuses on President Biden’s “tentative step in the right direction” in ordering review and declassification of some federal documents related to the September 2001 terror attacks. The T-U headline: “End secrecy over Saudis and 9/11.”

Two things about the column. Will conveniently ignores the role of the mainstream media, of which he is a shining example, in keeping the public in the dark for three years about Senate Resolution 610 that “documents related to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, should be declassified to the greatest extent possible.” And, why declassify just material related to possible Saudi involvement in the attacks?

To read the column online courtesy of  a Michigan newspaper, click HERE.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* The operation is examined by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in a 10,000-word piece published by the London Review of Books in 2015. Click HERE to read it.

 

 

President’s Statement on Beginning Review and Declassification of 9/11 Documents, made Friday, is HERE.

The Executive Order is HERE.

For news stories Saturday on the order, click HERE.

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Cancer Rates of 9/11 First Responders: National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program today began what cohost Steve Inskeep said would be a week of reports on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. In the first, titled “A Study Says First Responders Survive Cancers at Higher Rates,” A. Martínez interviews NPR correspondent Allison Aubrey. Listen HERE.

In part of it, Elizabeth Cascio of the New York City Fire Department recalls the experience on Sept. 11 of “walking through six to 10 inches of concrete sand and literally the entire dust cloud that was in every direction. We were literally engulfed  by it.” Some, including Cascio, were on the scene for weeks.

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A Special Times Look at TV 9/11 Specials: Today’s New York Times carries a piece by its chief television critic, James Poniewozik, titled “What Needs to Be Said About 9/11: TV should treat it as serious history, not just pay it homage.”

The wrap-up might well have been subtitled “. . . And What Doesn’t Need to Be Said,” which would match what the Times has left out of its coverage for the last 20 years, thus enabling other news organizations to do the same.

“Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day,” Poniewozik notes, “avoids getting snared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on.”

The specials are or will be on the History Channel, Discovery, CNN, Netflix, PBS, and HBO. Most are, indeed, studies in avoidance.

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He Helped Guide Payments to 9/11 Families: Today’s Springfield Republican salutes Attorney Kenneth R. Feinberg, who oversaw more than 900 hearings for the distribution of compensation payments to families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. In all, about 1,600 hearings were held and a total of $7.1 billion in federal funds was distributed from 2001 to 2003.

Reporter Ron Chimelis’s story is headlined “‘A patriotic undertaking’: UMass alum took charge of 9/11 compensation fund.” Subscribers to the newspaper and mass live.com can read the account HERE. It explains why the payments were unequal: They were based on rough percentages of the unequal financial losses families suffered.

Feinberg’s experience is described in much greater detail in his 2005 book What Is a Life Worth? A movie, “Worth,” starring Michael Keaton as the Compensation Fund special master, opened Friday in a limited number of theaters and on Netflix.

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9/11 and Covid-19 Were Killers for Lower Manhattan Businesses: Yestrday’s New York Times carried a report headlined “Where Towers Stood, Rebirth Grinds to a Halt,” by Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan. The page 1 story describes the financial toll suffered by restaurants, stores, hotels and other businesses in the district, beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, years of slow recovery for some of them, and a second crisis delivered by Covid-19 in early 2020.

— Mark Channing Miller

 

 

President Biden yesterday signed an executive order ordering federal agencies to review and declassify an unspecified amount of documents related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

HERE is the Washington Post story by Amy B. Wang as it appeared in the Anchorage Daily News. HERE is the New York Times story by Annie Karni as it appeared on bdnews24.com.

The order was a breakthrough of sorts, but not all documents are necessarily to be released. One of the agencies, the Justice Department, is to review and release selected documents over the next six months.

As recounted HERE, nearly a month ago families of 9/11 victims and others told the president to stay away from 20th anniversary events unless he ordered documents declassified. In 2018 the U.S. Senate approved a resolution without objection calling for declassification of all documents related to the September 2001 attacks; for details click HERE and scroll down.

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Two of this country’s oldest magazines have been handling “9/11” differently. The Atlantic’s September issue has a long cover piece by Jennifer Senior, “Twenty Years Gone: One Family’s struggle to make sense of 9/11.” family is that of Bobby McIlvaine, 26, who died in the first of the Twin Towers to collapse.

Larger truths of 9/11 are avoided in the 15-page up-close-and-personal examination of the anguish and other emotions of this one victim’s family, friends, fiancée, neighbors, schoolmates, teammates /and a former coach as they remember him and have grappled with his loss over 20 years.

One of many paragraphs focusing on the young man’s father:

“Crucial to Bob Sr.’s understanding of September 11—that it was the cynical skulduggery of the U.S. government, not a grisly act of terrorism by jihadists using commercial planes filled with helpless civilians—is the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which popularized the idea that jet fuel couldn’t burn at a high enough temperature to melt beams into molten steel. This is, it should go without saying, contrary to all observable fact.”

Some will see disinformation in that by Senior, who doesn’t elaborate on “all observable fact.”

Disinformation is the topic of Harper’s September issue cover piece, “Disinformed: How We Get Fake News Wrong,” by Joseph Bernstein, which does not mention 9/11 or get into what news consumers are to do with news managers’ decisions to leave out inconvenient information. HERE it is for Harper’s subscribers.

Click HERE for Aldous Huxley’s 1936 look at propaganda, “In the Dark,” in the September Harper’s. In less than a page it says a lot about how Americans and the world have been misled about 9/11, although the author of Brave New World could only guess what might be in store that long ago.

A couple of passages:

“Advertisers claim to know accurately enough the potentialities and limitations of different kinds of propaganda—what you can do, for example, by mere statement and repetition; by appeals to such well-organized sentiments as snobbery and the urge toward social conformity; by playing on the animal instincts such as greed, lust, and especially fear in all its forms, from the fear of sickness and death to the fear of being ugly or absurd to one’s fellows.”

and

”[P]ropaganda is most influential when it is a rationalization of the desires, sentiments, prejudices, or interests of those to whom it is addressed.”

— Mark Channing Miller

The Maine 9/11 Truth website, https://www.maine911truth.org, is unrecognizable compared to what it was for years, I learned today. The current website, HERE, is a replacement.

For some of its former content, click HERE and HERE. The two links are past entries in this blog titled “A Breath of Maine Air” and “Consider . . . ”

Note: The link in the first entry’s third paragraph, which originally was to a number of recommended websites, now is to a replacement page rather than those websites.

Also note: The change is likely a result of the original authors’ deciding not to continue paying a service for online display of the content, which had not varied for years although it remains valuable to people curious for alternatives to mainstream media accounts backing those of the U.S. government’s Executive Branch.

— Mark Channing Miller

Ed Asner, a stalwart participant in and supporter of the maligned  9/11 Truth effort, and certainly the best known, died yesterday at age 91.

Here is a short tribute to Asner emailed out this morning by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 inquiry:

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Ed Asner 1929-2021

UPDATE: Ed Asner, our dear friend and fellow Lawyers’ Committee board member, died this past Sunday, August 29, 2021. He was 91 years of age.

We are all deeply saddened by his passing. His courage and leadership in life was an inspiration to us.

God Bless Ed and his Family.

There will be a tribute to him at the Lawyers’ Committee 9/11 20th anniversary event.* As was previously planned, he would have given the welcome address.

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HERE is a tribute to Ed Asner by Craig McKee, emailed this afternoon from Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. McKee notes the actor’s key involvement in two AE911Truth documentary films, “Solving the Mystery of WTC 7” in 2011 and “SEVEN” in 2020.

HERE is Asner’s Associated Press obituary by Marcela Isaza as it appeared in today’s Buffalo News under the headline “Actor Ed Asner, TV’s blustery Lou Grant, dies at 91.”

One version or another of that AP obituary appears today in hundreds of daily newspapers in the United States and abroad. Neither of the two I read mentions his interest in challenging aspects of the official 9/11 narratives.

A Washington Post obituary of Asner by Emily Langer, HERE, goes into detail on his career in TV and film, and in one of a dozen paragraphs on his political activities briefly notes his skepticism concerning official accounts of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The New York Times obituary (HERE, for subscribers), under the byline of Anita Gates, even more extensively chronicles Asner’s professional acting career but, in the single paragraph about his political activism, does not mention his support for a new look at the attacks.

Ironically, Asner’s voice may be stronger now on behalf of the search for truth and justice related to those attacks than it would be if he were still alive because of the widespread and heartfelt attention being paid to the man and his life as a professional actor and a citizen.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* For more about the forum on Saturday, Sept. 11, 2021, click HERE. Expect further details on this blog between now and then.

 

The truth is hard
The truth is hidden.
The truth must be pursued.
The truth is hard to bear.
The truth is rarely simple.
The truth isn’t so obvious.
The truth is necessary.
The truth can’t be glossed over.
The truth has no agenda.
The truth can’t be manufactured.
The truth doesn’t take sides.
The truth isn’t red or blue.
The truth is hard to accept.
The truth pulls no punches.
The truth is powerful.
The truth is under attack.
The truth is worth defending.
The truth requires taking a stand.
The truth is more important now than ever.*

[signed] The New York Times

Every purchase supports New York Times journalism.

–   –   –

The above is, verbatim, from a full-page ad two or three days ago in the Times’s A section, for hoodies bearing the sentences about truth in light lettering on a dark background.

–   –   –

Then, yesterday, came an example of New York Times journalism inside the same section in a story headline under the headline “Lee Re-edits Series That Features 9/11 Conspiracists.” Staffers Julia Jacobs and Reggie Ugwu get the byline, and Kevin Roose is acknowledged as having “contributed reporting.”

The Lee in question is filmmaker Spike Lee. His HBO series is titled “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½.” The “conspiracists,” apparently, are Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Here’s the top paragraph: “Facing mounting criticism for spotlighting conspiracists in his new HBO documentary series about the Sept. 11 attacks on New York, the filmmaker Spike Lee said Wednesday that he was re-editing the final episode.”

This treatment of the Lee’s series is echoed in a report in the Los Angeles Times headlined “Spike Lee yanks 9/11 conspiracy theorists from HBO documentary series amid scrutiny,”under the byline of Christi Carras.

Here’s the top paragraph: “Prolific director Spike Lee has removed interviews with Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists from his HBO documentary series after raising eyebrows with recent remarks about the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

In the New York Times report, variations of the phrases “conspiracy theorists,” “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy group” appear at least seven times. In the shorter L.A. Times account, which relies in part on the earlier story from New York, three times.

In both stories Lee is quoted expressing hope that, as a result of his series, “Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11.”

In the L.A. Times account Lee refers to what reporter Carras terms “a widely debunked conspiracy theory” about the amount of heat required to melt steel beams. The link is to a short article Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, wrote that appeared in 2005  on the website of Scientific American titled “Fahrenheit 2777.”

(Shermer refers in his article to coverage in the magazine Popular Mechanics, which was dealt with in the 2007 book Debunking 9/11 Debunkers by David Ray Griffin. (To debunk, according to Merriam-Webster, is “to expose the sham or falseness of.”)

Julia Jacobs is a culture reporter for the New York Times. Reggie Ugwu covers film, television, music, and internet culture for the New York Times. Kevin Roose is a technology and business columnist for the New York Times. Christi Carras is an entertainment reporter at the Los Angeles Times who has worked at Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and CNN.

Other coverage of the matter includes THIS by columnist Andrea Peyser in the New York Post, THIS by columnist and film critic Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times, and THIS by pop culture reporter Sonia Rao in the Washington Post.

Of them all, Rao’s seems least alarmist about AE911Truth and its founder Richard Gage.

Roeper is most disparaging of them. This is from his column: “Last Monday, the New York Times reported Lee had devoted about a half-hour of that final chapter to wholly unsubstantiated and categorically false conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks, and in particular to a group known as Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, including the organization’s founder, one Richard Gage, who has been peddling fictional garbage about 9/11 for years.” (The columnist then refers to Slate’s reporting on Gage’s opinions about  Covid-19 and vaccine “hoaxes.”)

The rash of stories on the re-editing was kicked off by a story leading the Arts section of the Times on Tuesday by Ugwu. Headed “Capturing the Spirit of the City,” it is mostly excerpts of an interview in which the reporter talks with the filmmaker.

Here is an exchange near the end of the article:

“You interview several members of the the conspiracy group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Why did you want to include their perspective?

“Because I still don’t . . . I mean, I got questions. And I hope that maybe the legacy of this documentary is that Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11.

”You don’t buy the official explanations?

”The amount of heat that it takes to make steel melt, that temperature’s not reached. And then the juxtaposition of the way Building 7 fell to the ground — when you put it next to other building collapses that were demolitions, it’s like you’re looking at the same thing. But people going to make up their own mind. My approach is to put the information in the movie and let people decide for themselves. I respect the intelligence of the audience.”

Lee is far from alone in his hope for some action by Congress. The entire U.S. Senate seems to be on his side. As this blog reported, HERE, in 2018 the Senate approved a resolution without objection calling for declassification of all 9/11 documents. The resolution was reported HERE in the Congressonal Record on Aug. 21, 2018, but no news organization, including all those mentioned above, covered the matter. Since then those “thousands of pages of documents” remain classified by the Executive Branch of the federal government.

— Mark Channing Miller

A live-stream conference aiming to connect other jarring phenomena of this century with the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be held on the attacks’ 20th anniversary.

The eight-hour forum, titled “From 9/11-Anthrax to the Pandemic: Life & Liberty in the Balance,” begins at 1 p.m. EDT on Sept. 11, a Saturday. It is sponsored by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry.

The suggested minimum donation for a ticket is $20. But “any size is ok,” according to a Lawyers’ Committee news release sent out Sunday. (See the news release HERE.) Donations are tax-deductible.

The entire event will be archived for 7 days afterward so people who attend online can arrive late, watch it later, or watch any part of it again.

The following is a letter LC president David Meiswinkle emailed to supporters Sunday:

“Saturday, September 11th 2021 will mark the 20th Anniversary of the dreadful criminal attacks against the United States of America.

“On that day, almost 3,000 innocent people were slaughtered, and many thousands more have died from exposure to the contaminants at Ground Zero. These horrible crimes have never been properly investigated by the United States government, and the guilty parties have never been brought to justice.

“Join us this September 11th for [the] tremendous commemorative life-stream event, entitled “9/11-anthtrax to the Pandemic; Life and Liberty in the Balance,” featuring many outstanding speakers who will address the crimes of 9/11 as well as the continuing assault on civil liberties resulting from the  present pandemic, and show the connections between 9/11 and Covid-19.

“The Lawyers’ Committee is dedicated to Government transparency and accountability regarding the crimes of 9/11, investigating and litigating where necessary.

“Help us carry on.  Support our efforts and join us this September 11th for a very educational, eye opening experience.

“Thank you.”