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By Root 349 0

long I was calling people all over the world trying to see if any of the stuff in the film was true. For instance, Loose Change makes a point of “reporting” that many of the hijackers were reportedly seen alive after the attacks. If you looked closely, however, the sources they cited—in one case the Los Angeles Times, in another the BBC—they were all very old stories, dating to less than a week after the attacks. As I subsequently learned, all of these supposed sightings were simple misunderstandings, based upon similarities with Arab names and cases of mistaken identity, in which the authorities, for instance, mistook one Waleed al-Shehri for another. The same sources that Loose Change quoted had all long since corrected the misunderstandings. The Saudi embassy, which had been the source for the LA Times story cited in Loose Change, laughed about the whole thing. “For God’s sake, they’re all dead. We settled this question ages ago. We even have DNA tests to confirm it,” said Nail as-Jubeier of the embassy in Washington. The guys at Arab News were flabbergasted by the call. “They’re just as dead as they were four years ago,” one of the editors said. There was simply no way any of this stuff had made it into the movie unless they hadn’t checked their facts.

So I asked Bermas if he’d made even one phone call on that score. His response:

“Yes phone calls were made to organizations such as CNN, the BBC, and other media outlets,” he wrote. “However many of us do not have the privilege of being employed by The Rolling Stone [sic], so when asked about the legitimacy of an article or the possibility of licensing footage we would either be completely ignored or someone would ‘get back to us.’”

These guys thought the “9/11 Commission Report” was shoddy, yet the sum total of their journalistic research was “No one returned our calls”!

We went back and forth for a while; meanwhile, I was still being deluged with angry mail and I was beginning to develop a strange sort of permanent migraine headache from staring at sites like PrisonPlanet.com and 911Truth.org. I started talking at great length about 9/11 to friends and relatives who clearly weren’t in the least bit interested in the topic, and the slightest provocation would get me dialing anyone and everyone in search of immediate answers to my 9/11 questions. Bermas, for instance, at one point sent me a letter berating me about the notorious (notorious in Truther circles, that is) “missing twenty-eight pages” that had been redacted from the original congressional report about 9/11, pages that Truthers believe contain “missing evidence” of the involvement of a foreign power in funding the terrorists. The Truthers, you see, believed that the “foreign power” was probably Pakistan, and that was significant because Mahmoud Ahmad, the chief of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, was actually in Washington, meeting with Senator Bob Graham and onetime CIA director Porter Goss, on the morning of 9/11.

The whole thing struck me as absurd; if there was something suspicious about Bob Graham meeting with Mahmoud Ahmad, then what smoking-gun evidence could anyone possibly hope to glean from a redacted congressional report that had been written by…Bob Graham! In a frenzy by this point, I called the now-retired Graham (whom I’d last run into in a highly uncomfortable meeting while working for the Bush campaign undercover in Florida) and asked if I could ask him a few 9/11 questions. He was very polite and seemed to think this was a normal press inquiry, but his tone quickly became nervous when I started rambling about the Truth Movement and Loose Change and Jim Fetzer and a bunch of other names he’d never heard of. “What’s, uh, the 9/11 Truth Movement?” he asked. “And who did you say you worked for?”

“It’s, uh…Well, listen, what foreign country were you talking about in that report, anyway?” I asked, ignoring his second question.

Graham said he was talking about Saudi Arabia, that the commission had found evidence that Saudi Arabia had supported at least two of the hijackers financially.