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SPEECH TO MANCHESTER SUPPORT GROUP 1/7/04

Good afternoon and thank you for welcoming me so warmly.

I stand before you today less as a candidate and more as a messenger and the message I bear is simple and stark. We have all been lied to about 9/11, the country is in mortal danger and only you can make it right.

If you need a label, I stand here as a 9/11 Truth Candidate and some may thus dismiss me as a single-issue candidate and in a narrow sense that is true. But if you consider that 9/11 has led us into fiscal ruin, endless war and constitutional twilight, my issue is the mother issue of our age.

That said let me return to the 9/11 message the first line of which is this:

They wanted it to happen.

They being the neocon members and associates of PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, an ultra-rightwing think tank and mouthpiece for Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and most Bush's handlers these days. Cheney, Wolfowitz and their PNAC fellows had been campaigning publicly for Mideast oil wars since 2000, but also said publicly that the American people were not likely to buy these plans without a quote catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor" unquote

They wanted it to happen.

And despite over 23 warnings from 11 foreign governments in the months preceding the attacks they did NOTHING to protect or warn the country.

They did less than nothing. They quashed 5 different investigations into Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda by FBI teams, and then promoted the FBI official who did most of that quashing after 9/11.

They wanted it to happen.

And the day it finally did they let it run its course. There was a mysterious total collapse of all our air defenses. Even though planes had been routinely scrambled 67 times for far lesser threats in the preceding year, on 9/11 all standard operating procedures inexplicably broke down. With 4 hijacked planes in the air and Flight 77 taking more than an hour to reach the Pentagon, not a single plane was there to intercept its deadly course.

Think about that for a long moment. A trillion dollar defense establishment, over three months of top level warnings, an hour's lead time, fighters based ten minutes away, and they could not even protect their own goddamn headquarters.

So 9/11 happened.

3000 people were instantly killed. The economy was desperately wounded, the country paralyzed with fear.

Madness, you say. Who could possibly benefit from such a tragedy?

Well, let's just recite some facts.

-- The president's poll numbers nearly doubled overnight.

-- Our intelligence and defense services, who neither informed or defended us, got a huge new budget bounce.

-- The FBI got a big cash bonus too plus a secret police wet dream in the form of the Patriot Act.

(And when a couple senators -- Daschle and Leahy say, "Slow down, this act's not exactly patriotic or even constitutional" guess who gets anthrax in the mail?)

-- Arms merchants like Daddy Bush's Carlyle Group reaped billions, no, tens of billions, from new "War on Terrorism" orders. Washington insider firms like Cheney's Halliburton, and GOP cash cow Bechtel harvested hundreds of billions in no-bid contracts as we methodically blow up and renovate both Afghanistan and Iraq.

So 9/11 happened and the administration ordered, "thou shalt not investigate! It will distract us from the fight against terror and all the war we have to make."

White House refusal may seem natural, but where was our crusading press?

It is another simple sad fact that the journalists who should have been investigating this whole peculiar business were now owned and operated by big media corporations who were making so damn much selling these wars that they held their peace instead. They not only did not question the scores of 9/11 lies and contradictions, they never even told the public there were still unanswered questions out there at all.

So 9/11 happened, flags were waved, money flowed and the press shut up.

And there it all would have ended PNAC with its oil wars, Bush with new poll Viagra, the FBI free from the Bill of Rights, the merchants of war rolling in blank checks and the media fat with cash.

A happy ending, no?

Not for the victim families, and if it weren't for a few hundred courageous ones I wouldn't be standing in front of you today.

The government tried to buy their silence too, and offered all 3,000 families fat payments from a Victims Compensation Fund. Each would get about a million bucks if they just promised to shut, stop asking the logical questions and simply go away.

Most did, it is true. But some who were paying attention fought back and demanded a real investigation. They got the National 9/11 Commission instead.

Can you imagine a 9/11 investigative commission where most of the commissioners have ties to the oil, airline and arms industries if not to the White House itself?

Where the witnesses are not even asked to testify under oath?

Where interrogations of FBI, FAA and NORAD insiders are all supervised by White House chaperones called "minders" ?

Where the executive director worked for years with Condi Rice, head of the National Security Council who herself refuses to testify under oath?

Where the latest appointed commissioner is an Iraq war hawk who publicly said he thought the most important role of the commission was quote "not to embarrass the president" unquote?

Could you believe in an investigation like that? Can you believe the shit that is going down?

Well, neither can I and that is why I am here today to ask you to join with the desperate victim families and demand belated truth.

The country has been swindled into endless war, repression and financial collapse. Thousands of people have been murdered and we still don't know the facts.

I am just one voice saying these things up here in New Hampshire today, but if you would just do some homework you would see there are thousands like me working in shadow on the internet trying get out what the victim families want to say.

One great crusader in this struggle is your own Ellen Mariani, a Derry 9/11 widow who is suing Bush, Cheney and their neocon kin for knowingly letting her husband die for personal and political gain.

I beg you to rally around her as one of the heroes of this cause, I also beg you to read some vital texts like Nafeez Ahmed's "The War on Freedom" or the 9/11 timeline at cooperativeresearch.org And finally I ask you to vote for me to send a message of your own -- that this land is our land and it's time for gestapo-minded war profiteers to get hell out.

I thank you for sitting here and pray you will now begin to move.

Good night and god bless what's left of our democracy.