Barrie Zwicker Endorses Citizen Investigation Team, Censored at 911blogger

Open Letter from:
Craig Ranke
Citizen Investigation Team
August 1, 2010

Re: Censorship of a major 9/11 Truth figure at 911blogger.com

To everyone concerned with the truth:

Renowned journalist, author, and media critic Barrie Zwicker has joined the growing list of intellectuals, experts, scholars, activists, journalists, pilots, and concerned citizens who have spoken out in favor of Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) and our presentation National Security Alert, some of whom are quoted here.

Barrie has also taken it upon himself to speak out very strongly against those attempting to cast doubt on us and/or our findings.

A video and accompanying text of his endorsement is available on this web page.

It now has been 10 days since Barrie's confirmed effort to submit this to 911blogger.com, and his post has not been approved for publication (more on this later). He has told us he still maintains hope that "this de facto censorship, at the premiere 9/11 Truth site, against support for a major team of 9/11 researchers and their original and highly-significant research will eventually be lifted, for the sake of those who visit the site in search of facts and opinions falling squarely within the mandate of 911blogger.com".

He added that if 911blogger does not revert to serving the cause of 9/11 Truth, which he believes it started out doing, it will have to join an all-too-long list of disinformation sources to be included in the book he is writing on false flag operators, false flag organizations and false flag operations. He said this troubles him deeply.

For those who aren't aware, CIT has been under assault from the owners of 911blogger for more than two years. For the record:

The history of 911blogger and CIT

The owner of the 911blogger website when I was first made aware of it in 2007 was known only by the name "Reprehensor". He originally banned CIT in 2008, following a poll he had conducted on the site. I am certain that I was not alone in feeling the poll was unfairly worded. It asked, "Do you believe the Pentagon Fly-Over Theory as proposed by the Pentacon team (CIT)?" (likely leading to "no" votes from people who were unfamiliar with the evidence supporting that conclusion) - rather than the more appropriate "Do you believe the Pentagon attack plane flew north of the Citgo gas station as stated by the independently corroborated eyewitnesses presented by CIT?" that would refer to the evidence, rather than the conclusion out of context. As far as I know, this is the only poll that has ever been posted on that site, and despite the unfair choice of wording, the poll showed a majority did indeed support the flyover conclusion.

"Reprehensor" said in the thread that, since we won the poll, as opposed to forbidding discussion of our work altogether, he would allow our entries to continue to appear in the blog section (as opposed to the more visible news section) which he had already been limiting them to for quite some time. However, he immediately made another post propagating the websites of three detractors of ours, including John Farmer, who was not a 9/11 truth researcher at all, but a "JREFer" who openly called us "counter-intelligence". Naturally that upset us, as it amounted to a direct attack from the site owner - as did the poll itself, regardless of our winning it. Reprehensor used our upset response to his attack as an excuse to ban us, while proclaiming that people interested in our work would have to visit our website directly, and that it would not be "promoted" on 911blogger any longer. You can read our full comments in the thread in context and decide for yourself if our banning was justified.

As a side note, all three of the detractors he linked to in that post have effectively disappeared from the CIT-bashing business, as well as the entire 9/11 truth discussion, while John Farmer was discredited so badly that he went so far as to remove from the internet his entire website and every bit of "research" or information that he had ever published, including all of his numerous critiques of CIT. The fact that all three of these formerly aggressive detractors have disappeared - while we're still here - speaks volumes.

After we were banned from 911blogger, we continued our investigation, uncovered a massive catalog of additional new evidence, while attention to the information we uncovered continued to grow by leaps and bounds. Eventually when others would post stuff about our findings on 911blogger, the posts did start to show up again in the "blog" section - despite Reprehensor's resolve not to "promote" our work at all after he banned us. Of course these posts would be heavily attacked by the regular members there who man the site, and we were unable to respond to defend ourselves because we were banned.

Eventually the site changed hands from "Reprehensor" to Justin Keogh, who is a member of the board of directors of AE911Truth. By this point CIT was a rather hot-topic of discussion that would come up quite often, usually from a small group of posters who would regularly insert sideways attacks against us, sometimes in threads regarding unrelated topics. However, things really heated up after the release of National Security Alert, when we put out our press release announcing our initial list of respected supporters who had provided statements praising us and our work. A blog submission regarding our 2009 conference in Arlington, which also quoted supportive statements from Richard Gage, Ed Asner, Peter Dale Scott, David Ray Griffin, and Aidan Monaghan (a well-known contributor to 911Blogger), caused a firestorm from the usual suspects.

It was then 100% clear that we had the public support of an unprecedented number of respected movement leaders, while our detractors were falling by the wayside, and National Security Alert was quickly becoming the definitive "go to" presentation regarding the Pentagon attack. We had become the hot-topic at 911blogger, and it was obvious that attention to the information wasn't going away any time soon.

Because of all this, in October of 2009 I decided to reach out to Justin Keogh directly to see if he would be willing to lift our ban from his site (implemented by the previous owner), or to give me a good reason why we weren't allowed to defend ourselves against the regular attacks on us and our work that he clearly was allowing on the site. We had a disappointing exchange that in essence exposed the fact that this arbitrary ban is based on nothing but pure censorship and control of the information. I highly recommend you read that discussion here for yourself. Most who have done so have agreed the nature of the exchange is very revealing.

The discussion about us on their site raged on without us, as they were unable to contain the growing popularity and attention that the definitive evidence we had uncovered was receiving as National Security Alert continued to explode.

In early 2010 there was an aggressive attempt by one of the moderators who goes by "loose nuke" (alleged real name Erik Larson) to rebut our findings and cast doubt on us personally by claiming we had questionable "methods". He went so far as to meet in person with two witnesses whom we had also previously met with. Ironically he simply ended up confirming what we reported (see here and here), yet his articles were deceptively written to imply the opposite and cast doubt on our "methods" anyway. In addition to being published by a 911Blogger moderator on that site, these dishonest hit-pieces were also promoted by Larson and others via full search-engine-optimized (SEO) "stalker blog" style dissemination efforts at other online locations.

The controllers of 911blogger responded to this clear inability to control our rise by not only upholding our completely unjustified ban but eventually going so far as to silence our most vocal supporters, such as Adam Syed, Adam Ruff, Stefan, and a poster who goes by "onesliceshort".

Then on July 6th, 2010, we announced our upcoming European tour this September for the 9th anniversary of the attacks. A random poster submitted this to 911blogger and on July 8th, which was a Thursday, it was surprisingly published on the front page as a "news" item.

Although many of our most vocal supporters were recently silenced, the comments came fast and furious - mostly from the usual suspect detractors - but there was still vigorous defense of us from several other members. By Monday morning, the thread had reached 438 comments - as can be seen in this screen shot from July 12th, 2010.

As far as I know, that is the most commented thread in 911blogger's history.

It then had to have been 100% apparent to the site controllers that there was no possible way they could contain the discussion without an all-out purge of anyone who supports us. So they proceeded to silence anyone and everyone who spoke out in our favor in that thread. Perhaps even worse, they outright deleted literally dozens of already posted comments. By later in the day the post count had actually gone DOWN by scores of posts, and as you can see from thie following screen shot taken just the other day, the current count is still at 359, which means at least 79 comments were removed.: screenshot here. As of this writing you can still see this same post count on the blog of the user who originally made the post.

Now of course with our supporters safely removed, and many of their posts blatantly deleted, 911blogger had effectively gamed their vote system, so now whatever posts in our favor that were left were simply voted down into oblivion, with zero opposition to worry about.

Barrie Zwicker speaks out

We were very pleased to hear from Barrie Zwicker that he was willing to publicly support us, and speak out against those who have chosen to spend so much energy to attack us or implement blatant thought control efforts to marginalize our work. Barrie video recorded his endorsement and submitted it to 911blogger under his own account (bwz) on Thursday morning, July 22nd, 2010, at 11:06 AM. Here is a screen shot of that submission:




As you can see at the top of the screen shot, Barrie received the typical message saying that his post "has been submitted for moderation and won't be listed publicly until it has been approved." It has now been ten days since Barrie's submission and it has still not been approved (and numerous subsequent submissions from other users have). A week after making his submission, Barrie told us he wrote to Justin Keogh directly to inquire about the status of it, asking whether there was anything about his post that contravened publication protocols. The fact that he has not received even the dignity of a response - despite plenty of other moderator activity evident during this period - can only force us to come to the conclusion that 911Blogger has taken it upon themselves to censor this respected, prolific, well-spoken, well-liked, tireless, and outspoken voice for 9/11 truth.

Oddly, this morning a post appeared in the blog section under moderator "loose nuke's" account announcing and lamenting the endorsement. The post disappeared within minutes. You can still find it on google web cache here and we have saved screen shots of the entry here as well as the comment left by "loose nuke" here. The fact that they failed to approve Barrie's post, but posted the endorsement themselves ten days later, only to instantly remove it, can only be described as a schizophrenic reaction, so exactly what they will do after this letter is published is anyone's guess. However at this point it can not be denied that Barrie has been censored.

Also, let's not forget that even if they would have let Barrie post his endorsement instead of censoring him, or if they do end up finally allowing it to be published after the time of this writing (8/1/10), it almost certainly would have/will be accompanied by dishonest "criticism" of and outright attacks against CIT, the evidence we have uncovered, and possibly even Barrie, links to dishonest hit pieces against CIT, etc., all from the same cast of characters who have spearheaded the campaign against us for so long now. The post by "loose nuke" only further confirms this fact, which anyone who has paid close attention would anticipate anyway.

And, more importantly, these posts likely would/will go completely unchallenged and unrebutted, not because they are salient, but because, again, in addition to having banned us long ago, 911Blogger has recently purged most if not all of the users who have previously spoken strongly in our favor and who have the knowledge to defend us and our work appropriately.

A natural question we should all ask ourselves is: How could it come to be that the most popular website supposedly dedicated to 9/11 truth happens to be controlled by people who have an interest in marginalizing, attacking, and silencing widely-respected citizen investigators who have uncovered critical information exposing the 9/11 deception, and anyone who supports them, from long-time contributors to their site to people like Barrie Zwicker?

Obviously we have personally given lots of thought and study to that question since our unwarranted banning over two years ago, and we encourage others to wrestle with this critical question as well, because it has some pretty serious implications regarding where we're at as a "movement" and where we're heading moving forward.

Regardless, we feel that the censorship of a person who is arguably Canada's most prominent voice for 9/11 Truth proves more than ever that the site is beyond repair. We therefore feel that it is incumbent upon everyone who cares about 9/11 truth to condemn and abandon the site for these established practices, thereby removing it it from its position of influence. To not do so will be to acquiesce to this extreme censorship and gatekeeping, and to assure that it will continue and even worsen.

Again, all of our most knowledgeable and articulate supporters -- people who are able to successfully rebut and set the record straight about the dishonest attacks and hit pieces against us -- have now been completely banned from 911Blogger at a time when we have more support than ever within the "9/11 truth movement" and we are preparing to tour Europe with the support of 9/11 truth groups there. Think about that. Then, please add your voice to ours and our many supporters, including Barrie Zwicker. Please act now to stop this assault on the truth about what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11.

Peace,

Craig Ranke
Citizen Investigation Team