A review of the documentary video, Press for Truth

Still, the fireman said, if he had to pick a letter in my poll, it would be A.

“Osama f---ing bin Laden, like Bush says. If I thought it was someone else, then I’d have to do something about it. And I don’t want to think about what I’d do.”

-- Mark Jacobson, “The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll,” New York Magazine, 20 March 2006, http://newyorkmetro.com/news/features/16464/index.html

Maybe it was traveling in the US last week, during September 11.  Maybe it was all the new reading material I discovered when I returned, not just on Internet sites, where hardly anything new had appeared over the last few years, but in mainstream outlets like New York Magazine and MSNBC. Maybe it was foreknowledge that when I walked into the video store just now, seeking escape (Omen II?) from the free documentary I’d just watched via streaming media, I was met instead with On Native Soil, “the documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report”...while somewhere overhead, eerily, audio played from the beginning of either that very video, or less likely, the one I had just watched, or perhaps another one on the same subject matter I’d seen last month, United 93.  It was hard to tell.  But did it mattter?  The facts are the same.

Ah, the facts.  Part of the problem with Internet reporting about 9/11 over the last five years has to do with coming up with alternative theories about what happened, to counter the flimsy mythology that serves as the government’s official story.  Each side, mainstream and alternative, ends up dismissing the other as a preposterous “conspiracy theory.”  The other main problem faced by the 9/11 truth movement, apart from its marginalization by the mainstream corporate media, is the power of denial (evidenced by the fireman quoted above), coupled with the effective, even coercive, psychological spin control of the government’s spokespeople and policymakers.

But this week I discovered something new.  There is a powerful revival of inquiring spirit, scholarly research, and democratic passion out there in the 9/11-truth community, that tells me this issue is not going to go away.  Current events, notably the “endless” wars now proliferating in the Middle East, are founded in official policy, if not in principle, on these very same events.

While the “facts” of the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon are apparent to all in their broadest outlines, the true narrative of what really happened and why is only now beginning to take shape. Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 were groundbreaking works in their own way, and now Press for Truth pushes into new territory with its objective piecing together of mostly-neglected facts of the public record. It follows the storyline of the “Jersey Girls,” widows of 9/11 who would not rest, either before or after the 9/11 Commission whitewash, until their substantive questions have been answered regarding accountability for the attacks.

No “theories” as such are advanced here, but we are able to discover enough missing pieces, through documentary evidence of interviews and news reports, to show how clearly lacking, and for the most part patently misleading, has been the administration’s story of what happened and what they did and didn’t know in advance.

The final piece of the puzzle--“what can I do?”--is also left unsaid.  Maybe you’ll just have to run to the neighborhood video store for escape.  But be warned: when you get there, you might not be able to escape after all.

Once you connect the dots, the picture doesn’t go away.

--Nowick Gray

Press for Truth - 1 hr. 24 min. - click for free streaming media

from Mediachannel.org - the global network for democratic media

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further reading:

Twenty Things We Now Know Five Years After 9/11 - by Bernard Weiner. Sobering recap of revelations and developments since 2001. Main body of piece is nonpartisan research; ends with plea for Democratic Party resurgence,.

Keys to 9/11 - by Michelle Mairesse. Detailed 2002 research that lays out some of the basic questions still unanswered to this day.

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Why Saddam Had to Go - by Greg Palast - "It's not about getting the oil, it's about controlling oil's price."

Apocalypse of Coercion - by Kevin Barrett - Manufacturing fear, the 3-step method

Branding Democracy - American lifestyle and the new protection racket

Film Review of United 93 - Even the mythologized version makes us remember