The Immense Historical Importance of the Anthrax Attacks

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We just recently passed the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, the greatest terrorist strike in human history and an event whose political reverberations dominated world politics for most of the two decades that followed. Our Iraq War was soon triggered as a consequence, a disastrous decision that dramatically transformed the political map of the Middle East and eventually led to the death or displacement of many millions, while our failing twenty-year retaliatory occupation of Afghanistan only finally came to a humiliating end in 2021.

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American society also underwent enormous changes, with a considerable erosion of our traditional civil liberties. On the fiscal side, by 2008 Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his collaborators had conservatively estimated that the total accrued cost of our military response had exceeded $3 trillion, a figure that later studies raised to $6.4 trillion by 2019, or more than $50,000 per American household.

In the days after those dramatic events, the images of the burning World Trade Center towers and their sudden collapse were endlessly replayed on our television screens, accompanied by the near-universal verdict that American life would forever be changed by the massive terrorist assault that had taken place. But a tiny handful of skeptics argued otherwise.

The Internet was then in its childhood, with the initial dot-com bubble already deflating, while Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and social media did not yet exist. But one of the earliest pioneers of web-based journalism was Mickey Kaus, a former writer at The New Republic, who had recently begun publishing short, informal bits of punditry one or more times each day on what he called his “web log,” a term soon contracted to “blog.” Along with his fellow TNR alumnus Andrew Sullivan, Kaus became one of our first bloggers, and was inclined to take contrarian positions on major issues.

Thus, even as a stunned world gaped at the smoking ruins of the WTC towers and the talking heads on cable declared that American life would never be the same again, Kaus took a very different position. I remember that not long after the attacks, he argued that our cable-driven 24-hour news cycle had so drastically shrunk the popular attention-span that coverage of the massive terrorist attacks would soon begin to bore most Americans. As a result, he boldly predicted that by Thanksgiving, the 9/11 Attacks would have become a rapidly-fading memory, probably displaced by the latest celebrity-scandal or high-profile crime, and that the long-term impact upon American public life would be minimal.

Obviously, Kaus’ forecast was wrong, but I think it never had a fair test. Very soon after he wrote those words, our national attention was suddenly riveted by an entirely new wave of terrorism, as the offices of leading media and political figures in Manhattan, DC, and Florida began receiving envelopes filled with lethal anthrax spores together with short notes praising Allah and promising death to America.

Although nearly all Americans had seen the destruction of the WTC towers on their television screens and become outraged at the blow to our country, probably few had felt personally threatened by those September attacks. But now during October, the dreadful spectre of biological terrorism moved to the forefront of popular concerns, staying there for many months.

Those anthrax mailings had targeted particular high-profile individuals and the letters were tightly sealed, but the media soon revealed that rough handling at postal centers during the automatic sorting process had caused the tiny seeds of death to leak through the pores of the envelope paper, contaminating both the buildings and the other mail being processed. As a result, some of the subsequent fatalities were those of random individuals who had received an accidentally-contaminated letter, seeming to place all Americans at terrible risk.

Moreover, despite all the visual scenes of massive destruction inflicted on 9/11, only about 3,000 Americans had died, but then our political and media figures soon warned that terrorists could use anthrax or smallpox to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of our citizens. Indeed, we were told that just a few months earlier during June 2001, the government’s Dark Winter simulation exercise had suggested that over a million Americans could die in a smallpox attack unleashed by foreign terrorists.

According to early news reports, the anthrax in the letters had been highly weaponized using techniques far beyond the rudimentary capabilities of al-Qaeda terrorists, facts that therefore indicated a state sponsor. Numerous anonymous government sources stated that the deadly spores had been coated in bentonite, a compound long used by the Iraqis to enhance the lethality of their anthrax bombs, thereby directly fingering Saddam Hussein’s regime, and although those claims were later officially denied by the White House, large portions of the American public heard and believed them.

As the weeks went by, the FBI and most of the media declared that the anthrax had apparently come from our own domestic stockpiles, suggesting that the mailer was probably a lone domestic terrorist merely pretending to be a radical Islamicist, but much of the public never accepted this.

Indeed, a year later when Colin Powell made his famous presentation to the UN Security Council, attempting to justify America’s planned invasion of Iraq, he held up a small vial of white powder, explaining that even such a tiny quantity of anthrax spores could kill many tens of thousands of Americans. His public focus demonstrated the continuing resonance of the biological warfare attacks that our country had suffered more than a year earlier, and which many die-hard Americans still stubbornly believed had been a combined effort by al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

The handful of anthrax letters had only killed five Americans and sickened 17 more, a tiny sliver of the 9/11 casualties, and the last envelope sent had been postmarked on October 17, 2001. But I think the impact upon American public opinion during the year or two that followed was fully comparable to that of the massive physical attacks we had suffered a few weeks earlier, or perhaps even greater. For all the death and destruction inflicted on 9/11, without the subsequent anthrax mailings, the Patriot Act would never have passed Congress in anything like its final form, while President Bush might not have gained sufficient public support to launch his disastrous Iraq War.

The anthrax mailings were almost totally forgotten within just a few years and today my suggestion that their impact had matched or even exceeded that of the 9/11 Attacks themselves might seem utterly preposterous to most Americans, but when I recently reviewed the articles of that period, I discovered that I had hardly been alone in that appraisal.

Renowned investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald was just beginning his career, joining Salon in 2007. He soon began publishing a number of columns on the anthrax case, with one of the first including this paragraph near the beginning:

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Since late February 2022 Russia’s war with Ukraine has dominated the global headlines, but what may have been the most important incident in that conflict has received only a sliver of coverage in the Western mainstream media.

One year ago tomorrow a series of massive underwater explosions destroyed most of the $30 billion Russian-German Nord Stream Pipelines, probably Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure. All observers soon agreed that the blasts had been deliberate, likely constituting the greatest case of industrial terrorism in world history and an obvious act of war against Germany, NATO’s leading European member. And then in lock-step, nearly all Western media outlets declared that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines, an action further demonstrating the dangerous insanity of President Vladimir Putin, our diabolical Moscow adversary. Only a handful of voices on the dissident fringe suggested otherwise.

• American Pravda: Of Pipelines and Plagues
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2022 • 3,900 Words

But five months later the issue was suddenly resurrected. Across his half-century career, Seymour Hersh had established himself as America’s most renowned investigative journalist, and he now published one of his greatest exposes, a meticulously detailed account of how a team of American military divers had destroyed the pipelines, acting under the orders of the Biden Administration.

• Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words

Despite Hersh’s towering reputation, virtually all our mainstream journalists scrupulously avoided mentioning those revelations. But many millions around the world read his article or watched his interviews, and the UN Security Council soon held hearings on the issue, with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern strongly endorsing Hersh’s conclusions.

Given these developments, the previous claim that Putin had destroyed his own pipelines began looking a little threadbare, so Western intelligence services soon circulated a new cover story, claiming that the gigantic attacks had actually been mounted by a shadowy handful of pro-Ukrainian activists operating from a rented sailboat. Once again, nearly all our pundits eagerly nodded their heads.

We live in an age of grotesque falsehoods that might rival those portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984, and I think Putin had a point when he condemned America as “an empire of lies.”

Last winter was an unusually mild one, somewhat mitigating the full impact of Europe’s total loss of cheap Russian energy. But even so, a recent front-page story in the Wall Street Journal described the severe economic crisis facing Germany, Europe’s industrial engine. If Hersh’s account were confirmed, NATO would legally be at war with the U.S.

Although such a bizarre outcome is hardly likely, the future of the alliance does seem very doubtful. Lawrence Wilkerson has had a distinguished mainstream career, serving as the longtime chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and in a lengthy interview a couple of days ago he foresaw the loss of America’s German ally and the dissolution of NATO. If that 76 year alliance does disintegrate, future historians will surely point to the Nord Stream pipeline attacks as the crucial triggering event. Western media possesses an awesome power of illusion, but Reality usually has the final say.

Hersh had originally intended his current column to focus on the anniversary of the pipeline attacks, but important developments in the larger Ukraine war pushed that aside. As he reported, one of his trusted sources with access to current intelligence explained the disastrous state of the military situation:

“It’s all lies,� the official said, speaking of the Ukrainian claims of incremental progress in the offensive that has suffered staggering losses, while gaining ground in a few scattered areas that the Ukrainian military measures in meters per week.

The American intelligence official I spoke with spent the early years of his career working against Soviet aggression and spying has respect for Putin’s intellect but contempt for his decision to go to war with Ukraine and to initiate the death and destruction that war brings. But, as he told me, “The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going.

Hersh’s informant also described the way that Western intelligence had been manipulating our mainstream media and using it to deceive our own citizens:

“Yes,� the official said, “Putin did something stupid, no matter how provoked, by violating the UN charter and so did we�—meaning President Biden’s decision to wage a proxy war with Russia by funding Zelensky and his military. “And so now we have to paint him black, with the help of the media, in order to justify our mistake.� He was referring to a secret disinformation operation that was aimed at diminishing Putin, undertaken by the CIA in coordination with elements of British intelligence. The successful operation led major media outlets here and in London to report that the Russian president was suffering from varied illnesses that included blood disorders and a serious cancer. One oft-quoted story had Putin being treated by heavy doses of steroids. Not all were fooled. The Guardian skeptically reported in May of 2022 that the rumors “spanned the gamut: Vladimir Putin is suffering from cancer or Parkinson’s disease, say unconfirmed and unverified reports.� But many major news organizations took the bait. In June 2022, Newsweek splashed what it billed a major scoop, citing unnamed sources saying that Putin had undergone treatment two months earlier for advanced cancer: “Putin’s grip is strong but no longer absolute. The jockeying inside the Kremlin has never been more intense. . . . everyone sensing that the end is near.�

Public events seemed to quickly confirm the accuracy of the grim Ukraine war prognosis reported by Hersh. Poland has always been intensely hostile to Russia, so from the beginning of the fighting, the Warsaw government had been the strongest and most enthusiastic backer of Ukraine’s military effort, by some accounts even secretly sending many thousands of its own troops into combat. But Poland’s President Andrzej Duda has now declared that his country would provide no additional military aid, underscoring his position with remarkably undiplomatic language:

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I launched my American Pravda series just over a decade ago and during the last five years it has grown enormously, now including many dozens of individual articles and encompassing more than a half-million words of text. I’d still stand behind at least 99% of its contents, and the series probably constitutes one of the most comprehensive historical counter-narratives of the modern era found anywhere on the Internet.

Yet its roots actually go back a few years earlier than that and the entire series might never have come into existence if a link on a fringe website hadn’t caught my eye. I told that story in a short piece I published in 2010:

In the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign, I clicked an ambiguous link on an obscure website and stumbled into a parallel universe.

During the previous two years of that long election cycle, the media narrative surrounding Sen. John McCain had been one of unblemished heroism and selfless devotion to his fellow servicemen. Thousands of stories on television and in print had told of his brutal torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, his steely refusal to crack, and his later political career aimed at serving the needs of fellow Vietnam veterans. This storyline had first reached the national stage during his 2000 campaign, then returned with even greater force as he successfully sought the 2008 Republican nomination. Seemingly accepted by all, this history became a centerpiece of his campaign. McCain’s supporters touted his heroism as proof that he possessed the character to be entrusted with America’s highest office, while his detractors merely sought to change the subject.

Once I clicked that link, I encountered a very different John McCain.

I read copious, detailed evidence that hundreds of American POWs had been condemned to death at enemy hands by top American leaders, apparently because their safe return home would have constituted a major political embarrassment. I found documentation that the cover-up of this betrayal had gone on for decades, eventually drawing in a certain Arizona senator. According to this remarkable reconstruction of events, the average teenage moviegoer of the 1980s watching mindless action films such as “Rambo,� “Missing in Action,� and “Uncommon Valor� was seeing reality portrayed on screen, while the policy expert reading sober articles in the pages of The New Republic and The Atlantic was absorbing lies and propaganda. Since I had been believing those very articles, this was a stunning revelation.

But was this alternate description of reality correct? Could this one article be true and all the countless contrary pieces I had read in America’s most prestigious publications be false, merely the presentation of official propaganda endlessly repeated? I cannot say. I am not an expert on the history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

Yet consider the source. The author of that remarkable 8,000-word exposé—“McCain and the POW Cover-Up,� published on The Nation Institute’s website—was Sydney Schanberg, one of America’s foremost Vietnam War journalists. His reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize, and his subsequent book on Cambodia was made into “The Killing Fields,� an Oscar-winning movie. Schanberg later served as one of the highest-ranking editors at the New York Times, with a third of the reporters at our national newspaper of record working under him. A case can be made that no living American journalist can write with greater credibility on Vietnam War matters. And he had labored for years researching and exhaustively documenting the story of American POWs abandoned in Indochina—a story that if true might easily represent the single greatest act of national dishonor ever committed by our political leaders.

He presented a mass of evidence with names, dates, and documentary detail. Many of the individuals mentioned are still alive and could be interviewed or called to testify. Sealed government records could be ordered unsealed. If America wishes to determine the truth, it can do so.

In the years following the 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War WMDs, I’d grown increasingly suspicious of the mainstream media, beginning to suspect that it was far less reliable than I’d always assumed. The growth of the Internet had unleashed a vast torrent of additional material, much of it from alternative or fringe sources that sometimes made wild, conspiratorial claims about all sorts of things. My own views on such matters had always been quite mainstream and conventional, so I was very reluctant to abandon a lifetime of media habits and begin navigating an information jungle of implausible or often contradictory claims. Could I really take that sort of material seriously compared to the professionally-printed pages of my regular newspapers and magazines?

However, I explained that Sydney Schanberg’s astonishing John McCain revelations had finally tipped the balance and forced me to recognize that I had long been living in a world of comforting illusions based upon media lies:

Yet what I found most remarkable about Schanberg’s essay were not its explosive historical claims but the absolute silence with which they were received in the mainstream media. In 2008, John McCain’s heroic war record and personal patriotism were central to his quest for supreme power—a goal he came very close to achieving. But when one of America’s most eminent journalists published an exhaustive report that the candidate had instead served as one of the leading figures in a monumental act of national treachery, our media took no notice. McCain’s public critics and the operatives of his Democratic opponent might eagerly seize upon every rumor that the senator had had a private lunch with a disreputable corporate lobbyist, but they ignored documented claims that he had covered up the killing of hundreds of American POWs. These allegations were serious enough and sufficiently documented to warrant national attention—yet they received none.

A couple of years ago, in one of my last exchanges with my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom, who ran the National Security Agency for President Ronald Reagan, we agreed a case could be made that today’s major American media had become just as dishonest and unreliable as the old Soviet propaganda outlets of the late 1970s. At the time, we were discussing the coverage of our road to the Iraq War, but subsequent events have demonstrated that this national illness is far more advanced than either of us had suspected. Whether or not Schanberg is proven correct, the shameful cowardice of our mainstream media is already proven by the wall of silence surrounding his work.

• American Pravda: Was Rambo Right?
  Hundreds of POWs may have been left to die in Vietnam, abandoned by their government—and our media
  Ron Unz • The American Conservative • May 25, 2010 • 1,300 Words

Elon Musk controls one of the world’s most powerful media megaphones. If he chose to do so, he could easily ensure that tens of millions of Americans learned the true origins and history of the ADL, an organization that today controls much of what our citizens are allowed to read or see. Such a bold stroke might completely break the power the ADL possesses over him and the rest of our society—Ron Unz, Editor, The Unz Review

Question 1: The Nature of the ADL

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Let’s talk about the ADL. Some of your readers may not know that you have written extensively on the ADL and that your analysis prompted Paul Craig Roberts to call you “the bravest man I know.” What Roberts was referring to, I think, is your riveting 2018 account of the ADL’s shadowy history as well as its controversial activities and methods. Here’s a short excerpt from a piece you wrote in 2018 that helps to illustrate what I’m talking about:

In January 1993, the San Francisco Police Department reported that it had recently raided the Northern California headquarters of the ADL based upon information provided by the FBI. The SFPD discovered that the organization had been keeping intelligence files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals, overwhelmingly of a liberal orientation, with the SFPD inspector estimating that 75% of the material had been illegally obtained, much of it by secret payments to police officials. This was merely the tip of the iceberg in what clearly amounted to the largest domestic spying operation by any private organization in American history, and according to some sources, ADL agents across the country had targeted over 1,000 political, religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, with the New York headquarters of the ADL maintaining active dossiers on more than a million Americans.”

This is shocking information that perhaps only a handful of Americans know anything about. The recent dust-up with Elon Musk has put the ADL’s methods under a microscope particularly their alleged role in censoring people on the Internet. So, my question to you is this: What is the ADL? Is it really a civil rights organization that “combats extremism and antisemitism” or is it something else altogether?

Ron Unz—Founded in 1913, the ADL—the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith—is a very formidable Jewish activist organization that has great influence over the media and other important elements of American society, and therefore is widely feared in elite circles. As I explained in my 2018 article:

In our modern era, there are surely few organizations that so terrify powerful Americans as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a central organ of the organized Jewish community.

Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.

Because of its media influence, the ADL’s coverage has almost always been extremely favorable, portraying it as one of America’s leading watchdogs against dangerous extremism, especially anti-Semitism or racism. Given this powerful, positive image, the ADL successfully gained the role of content gatekeeper at some of America’s largest Internet companies, helping to determine what may or may not be said on such important platforms as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. Indeed, a few years ago Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News profiled the ADL Director who was responsible for policing “hate speech” across the American-dominated global Internet.

Meanwhile, that same media influence has ensured that only very few people have ever become aware of the organization’s long history of illegal spying upon enormous numbers of Americans, including such notable figures as Martin Luther King. Jr. I discussed this in my 2018 article:

The choice of the ADL as the primary ideological overseer of America’s Internet may seem natural and appropriate to politically-ignorant Americans, a category that unfortunately includes the technology executives leading the companies involved. But this reflects the remarkable cowardice and dishonesty of the American media from which all these individuals derive their knowledge of our world. The true recent history of the ADL is actually a sordid and disreputable tale.

In January 1993, the San Francisco Police Department reported that it had recently raided the Northern California headquarters of the ADL based upon information provided by the FBI. The SFPD discovered that the organization had been keeping intelligence files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals, overwhelmingly of a liberal orientation, with the SFPD inspector estimating that 75% of the material had been illegally obtained, much of it by secret payments to police officials. This was merely the tip of the iceberg in what clearly amounted to the largest domestic spying operation by any private organization in American history, and according to some sources, ADL agents across the country had targeted over 1,000 political, religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, with the New York headquarters of the ADL maintaining active dossiers on more than a million Americans.

The Decline of the 9/11 Truth Movement

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We are now at the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks that ushered in our current century and unleashed a series of wars, killing or displacing many millions. The highest-profile terrorist attacks in human history had tremendous importance both for the world and our own country, but a couple of decades later their memory has now dimmed, especially after the worldwide Covid epidemic and Russia’s Ukraine war, two much more recent events of even greater global magnitude.

These days the 9/11 Attacks are only occasionally mentioned, and even those individuals intensely focused upon conspiratorial matters have mostly shifted their attention elsewhere. Kevin Barrett was very actively involved in the 9/11 Truth movement from its inception, and last week he published one of his rare recent pieces on the topic. His short article noted the approaching anniversary and usefully summarized much of the information accumulated in two decades of research, but his overall verdict was hardly an optimistic one.

• 9/11, 22 Years Later: Will We Ever Get the Truth?
  Kevin Barrett • The Unz Review • September 2, 2022 • 1,800 Words

Two years ago the twentieth anniversary had passed with little public attention. Soon afterward, Dr. Alan Sabrosky, an important 9/11 Truth figure, published an even more despairing appraisal in which he described the total failure of the effort that had absorbed so many years of his life.

It gives me no pleasure at all to write these words. I personally came to the movement late in 2009, then met many excellent people and worked with many fine editors at a time when overt censorship was still minimal. The best of the “Truthers� shared one thing in common: they were right that the US Government explanation of the 9/11 attacks was singularly flawed, in whole and in all its major parts. But they – and I include myself here – were never able to convey that message in a politically significant way to enough of the American public to matter.

The net effect is that despite innumerable articles, speeches, seminars, videos, protests and the like by tens of thousands of activists, the 20^th anniversary of 9/11 came and went with barely a whimper. It was preceded by the collapse of the 9/11 lawyers effort in New York City on which so many had staked their hopes, and the dismissal of Richard Gage – the founder of the seminal “Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth� – from his own organization by his own board. It is tragic enough when evil triumphs, which is what the real planners and perpetrators of 9/11 did. It is even worse when the collapse of the efforts to expose them and to bring them to justice ends in farce.

• Out-Thought, Out-Bought, Out-Fought: Why the “9/11 Truth” Movement Failed
  Alan Sabrosky • The Unz Review • October 23, 2021 • 2,300 Words

As he mentioned, Richard Gage, founder and CEO of the foremost 9/11 Truth organization, had just recently been fired by his board when his controversial remarks on Covid vaccines were used by the media to torpedo a long-awaited prime-time broadcast of their 9/11 theories hosted by director Spike Lee.

I myself came very late to the 9/11 Truth issue, largely accepting the official narrative for nearly the first decade after the attacks. But when I published my own twenty year recapitulation in September 2021, the Covid epidemic was at its height and my article was one of the very few that appeared to mark that important milestone.

Although the 9/11 Truth movement has lost much of its energy and visibility, each year’s anniversary does still occasionally prompt the publication of new articles, including on our own website. These pieces sometimes attract considerable readership and heated commentary, but the authors often seem compelled to avoid merely repeating familiar arguments, so they instead promote novel and implausible theories that are far less solidly grounded in evidence. I suspect that these may do much more harm than good, obfuscating the basic facts while driving away any curious newcomers.

Some of these activists now claim that the World Trade Center was destroyed by nuclear explosions or mysterious energy weapons or that no planes were actually involved in the attacks. Although only a small minority of 9/11 Truthers take such positions, these individuals are often loud and energetic advocates, and thereby may serve to taint and discredit the more sober positions of the vast majority. Furthermore, with so many of the more mainstream 9/11 Truthers having gradually abandoned the issue, supporters of these fringe theories now probably constitute a growing fraction of the diehard Truthers. I suspect that the result has been to undermine the credibility of whatever remains of the 9/11 Truth movement.

This unfortunate situation is hardly surprising. Movements such as 9/11 Truth sharply oppose powerful official narratives so they naturally tend to attract persons with strongly contrarian and conspiratorial tendencies, individuals who are willing and eager to challenge all orthodoxies, including those of their own allies. Such activists may enthusiastically embrace wild ideas that capture their imagination, failing to comprehend that for responsible researchers, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Furthermore, establishment forces may easily take advantage of such psychological weaknesses. As I discussed in an article last year, the late Michael Collins Piper, a leading conspiracy-researcher, strongly suspected that many of the implausible conspiratorial theories he considered so damaging to his cause may have been seeded and promoted by pro-establishment operatives engaging in Cass Sunstein-type deceptions, protecting official lies by manipulating excitable activists into discrediting their entire community.

Conspiracy theorists have a notable tendency towards paranoia, but as a wit once observed “Even paranoids have enemies.â€� Once it became known that a high-ranking Obama Administration official had previously suggested that the government employ online operatives to infiltrate and disrupt the conspiracy community, the story spread like wildfire, with rival individuals and factions sometimes accusing each other of serving as such “cognitive infiltratorsâ€�…

During that period, I was paying little attention to the 9/11 issue and was barely aware of the existence of a 9/11 Truth movement. But individuals who were very actively involved at the time have told me that they believe much of their movement’s momentum was lost when certain prominent figures were diverted into various bizarre theories of what had happened.