Northern California 9-11 Truth Alliance premiered the excellent documentary- 9/11 Press for Truth followed by a discussion with the film’s hero, Paul Thompson, author of The Terror Timeline (Harper Collins 2004) and author Peter Dale Scott, who wrote Drugs, Oil, and War- The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (2003), edited (with David Ray Griffin) 9/11 and American Empire, and wrote The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (which will be published in 2007).

About the Film...

Following the attacks of September 11th, grieving families waged a tenacious battle against those who sought to bury the truth about the attack, including the Bush administration. In “9/11 Press For Truth,” those most affected by the tragedy, including three of the Jersey Girls, tell the story of how they took on the powers in Washington and won. They forced an investigation, only to subsequently watch the 9/11 Commission fail to even ask their most urgent questions.

      
Paul Thompson and The Terror Timeline (Published by Harper Collins 2004)

Adapting Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline www.complete911timeline.org), the film stitches together news clips, buried stories and government press conferences, revealing a pattern of official lies, deception and spin. Thompson’s narrative presents a different picture of 9/11, one that raises new, more pressing questions.

What actions were taken by top government officials who received dozens of specific warnings before the attack? Was Bin Laden and his top al Qaeda leadership allowed to escape in Afghanistan? What has been the reason for obscuring the evidence regarding the Pakistani connection? Why, five years later, are so many of the families’ questions still unanswered?

Review of the film by Michael Collins, “Scoop” Independent News

Review of Oakland Premiere and film by Carol Brouillet

The event was sponsored by the Northern California 9-11 Truth Alliance whose mission is:

“to seek and disseminate truths about the terrible crimes committed on September 11, 2001, exposing gaps and deceptions in the official story, and to thus inspire more eyewitness revelations, truthful media coverage, and a movement that will bring the responsible criminals to justice and eliminate governmental and corporate policies that enable criminal elements to commit such acts."

More about the authors-

Paul Thompson graduated from Stanford University. His mother used to teach at Gunn High School. He has become a hero of the 9/11 Truth Movement for his outstanding research, book and articles.

This is an article that appeared in Esquire Magazine in December, 2004, by Doug Cantor:

Paul Thompson: One Man Can Change the World. Or at Least Much of Its What, When, Where, and How.

He never studied, trained, or even had any intention to become an authority on terrorism. But never underestimate the power of one man's curiosity. Holed up every night in front of the computer in his San Francisco home, poring over news on the Internet, Paul Thompson grew increasingly frustrated with how incomplete the story of September 11 was. Armed with only a broadband connection, he started to gather every credible fact he could find online. Then he condensed each point of information and put it in chronological order. His Terror Timeline quickly became a monster of about fifteen hundred items, tracing the last quarter century of terrorist activity, incorporating a detailed trail of intelligence failures, and providing a nearly minute-by-minute account of the day of the attacks.

What had started as Thompson's hobby soon became his obession. Early this year, he quit his job with an environmental protection group, moved halfway around the world to New Zealand, and began dedicating his full attention to a solitary pursuit that paid nothing and seemed unlikely to be seen by more than a handful of people. Finally, he found a small audience through the Center for Cooperative Research, a California-based historical-record-keeping Web site that shared his philosophy of nonpartisanship, information sharing, and reliance on mainstream news sources. The marriage was a fruitful one. People started e-mailing him to point out new information and to make corrections to his data. Open-source historiography had arrived.

The result is that Thompson has assembled by far the most comprehensive and detailed record of September 11 and the events surrounding it ever created.

Thompson may have furthered the cause of journalism to a greater degree than if he worked as a journalist himself. His timeline (cooperativeresearch.org) has become a trusted resource for reporters and researchers, and this fall it was published in book form (The Terror Timeline) by HarperCollins. Still, Thompson continues with his self-imposed labor. "If somebody were to say to me, 'Give me your one paragraph on who did it on 9/11,' I don't feel I could tell you," he says. "And I don't want to stop until I know that answer."

The 9/11 Timeline:

www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott.

            

Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (2003),
9/11 and American Empire (2006)

His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (from JFKLancer, 1995), and Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003)

His chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994). In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.

An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

His poetry has dealt with both his experience and his research, the latter of which has centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic. The poet-critic Robert Hass has written (Agni, 31/32, p. 335) that "Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time."

He was featured in Guerrilla News Networks short documentary The War Conspiracy and their more ambitious documentary Aftermath- Unanswered Questions from 9/11.

He recently edited 9/11 And American Empire with David Ray Griffin. They both spoke at the "9/11 and American Empire- Intellectuals Speak Out" event with Peter phillips, Kevin Ryan, and Ray McGovern, a benefit for KPFA and Pacifica Radio on September 24th in Berkeley that was filmed and should be aired this month on C-Span. An expanded version of the excellent talk that he gave in Berkeley How the FBI protected Al Qaeda’s 9/11 Hijacking Trainer New Revelations about Ali Mohamed has been posted on Chossudovsky's excellent website. Peter Dale Scott's website is www.peterdalescott.net.

His latest work, the book- The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, has been accepted for publication by the University of California Press. It will not appear before 2007.

We placed ads in the Palo Alto Weekly, the Silicon Valley Metro, the Stanford Daily, and on the Paly Voice website. We passed out over 3000 postcards, and put up posters all over town. With less than three weeks, we didn't have time to do a mailing, but we got very creative and had a lot of fun making a big banner which we wheeled around major intersections during rush hour- here is what it looked like:

Update- Between two and three hundred people came to the event. A 31 minute piece on the Q & A was uploaded at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2508500012998770082&q=%22peter+dale+scott%22&hl=en- one member of the audience shared her personal experience of being in the White House on the morning of September 11th, and how they had no clue as to whether anything was amiss.

Before the event the Paly Voice posted this article:

New film raises questions about 9/11

After the event, The Stanfod Daily ran a headline, cover story with graphic:

An honest search for the truth or yet another conspiracy theory?
911 call on 9/11 response
Leftist "Press for Truth" documentary highlights governmental failures to secure safety, suggests cover-ups

Here's the color graphic that accompanied the story

The text is posted online at- http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2006/10/31/911CallOn911Response

The article generated a number of responses, including one from me; they made a number of mistakes and mispelled Peter Dale Scott's name, but I was glad that they did a cover story and drew attention to the issue!

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