April 29,
2008
Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
100 Lafayette St.
Suite 604
New York, NY
10013-4400
Dear Amy,
Hi there, from your old friend and fan, Sander Hicks. I still listen
to you almost morning. And I’m so glad we appeared together in the indie
film Horns and Halos.
You’re continuing to do good journalism at Democracy Now. But
there’s one area that has been over-looked. DN! can’t seem to figure out how to
do serious journalism about the growing movement for peace and truth around
9/11. I know this is a loaded issue. There is a lot of crap conspiracy theory
out there. But a good journalist like you can parse out the wheat and the chaff.
Right now in the American Left, there’s a generation gap between powerful,
establishment, Baby Boomer voices who dominate the discourse, and determine what
is an acceptable journalistic territory. On the other side of the gap is a
multi-generation/multi-politics/heterogeneous movement that asks for truth about
9/11. In the case of 9/11, Cockburn, Chomsky, Rothschild, Solomon, et. al. and
yourself unfortunately overlap with the Bush State Department’s own demonstrated
objectives to attack and discredit a growing international movement of those who
reject the 9/11 official story.
However, I have great hope in you. I don’t think the
journalist who broke the East Timor story and so many others is going to be
constrained by some contrived notion like a “generation gap.” I understand that
you are considering the public request made to you this weekend by LA attorney
Peter Thottam and fellow peace activists in the LA movement. That request was to
do a week-long appraisal of the 9/11 truth movement’s more credible claims. As a
fellow independent journalist, author, and active leading member of the 9/11
Truth Movement, allow me to make a few suggestions, from personal
experience.
First of all, it’s time to invite author Peter Lance back on
your show. I know you’ve had him on twice, in 1993 and 1996, to discuss his
important works on FBI corruption, and their “mis-handling” of terrorists and
informants. I know too that Lance is derided throughout most of the 9/11 truth
community for being too conservative in his conclusions (I empathize, having
also been too careful at first). However, when Lance came and attended a speech
I gave in his hometown of Santa Barbara this past February, we shared insights
into the FBI protection of accused 9/11 hijackers Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al
Hazmi.
Lance has always been skeptical of the theory that the 9/11
attacks happened on purpose. This winter, Lance stated that that is beginning to
change.
The aegis of Federal protection clearly given to the 9/11
“hijackers” is the best way to prove cover-up and complicity in the events of
9/11. Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi lived with an FBI informant in San Diego in Sept.
2000. But even Senator Bob Graham was stymied from subpoenaing that informant,
according to his book. Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi were linked to the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing circle in Jersey City, and Al Mihdhar even enjoyed using a
fake ID created for him at Sphinx Trading, their Jersey City front company. Al
Mihdhar and Al Hazmi were monitored by CIA in Malaysia in winter of 2000, but
were protected from being put on the “Terrorism Watch List.” At that same time,
they were protected by Pentagon top brass from the working-class DIA reservist
operation Able Danger.
My friend Joe Trento’s book “Unsafe at Any Altitude” has one whopper
of a revelation, buried between the lines about aviation safety. Al Mihdhar and
Al Hazmi weren’t just protected by officials from the Saudi consulate in LA (as
per Senator Graham) they were agents of the Saudi G.I.D. I asked Joe about that
one. He said his sources were solid, “inside Western and Saudi
intelligence.”
For me, this is personal. I lost my friend Jim Hatfield on July 18,
2001. He was the biographer of Fortunate Son, the man trying in vain to warn the
world about Bush’s lifelong pattern of corruption, business dealings with the
Bin Laden family, and the constant compromises to the interests of oil and war.
But Jim died after years of mass media abuse, by his own
hand.
In the same way, a patriotic progressive dentist, Dr. David M.
Graham (no relation to the exSenator) died a year ago last September, silently,
without recognition, without even a serious story in his local daily paper. This
despite the chance meeting Graham had with 9/11 “attackers” Nawaf Al Hazmi and
Fayed Banihammad, in November of 2000. When Graham’s strange acquaintance, a
rich and powerful Saudi handler of Al Hazmi, et. al. was bragging about family
connections to Bin Laden, Graham warned the FBI. FBI and Secret Service actually
met with Graham, before 9/11. Then, the FBI started threatening Graham. They
tried and failed to get him to stop being so curious. After 9/11, Graham wrote a
book about the harassment and “incompetence” of the FBI. On the verge of
publishing it, he was poisoned, in Texas, en route to a friend’s wedding,
Memorial Day weekend, 2004. The funny thing is, the FBI arrived at the Emergency
Room, right after he did. They told doctors Graham was suicidal, and crazy. Some
of the doctors listened. Graham died a slow death, 20 months
later.
Last Fall, I brought an old reporter friend of mine with me,
and we drove to Shreveport, LA. We spent a week talking to everyone we possibly
could. All friends and family agree: Graham was not suicidal. The FBI is
involved in his death, in some way. I confronted the FBI, and the transcript
that resulted shows that Special Agent Steve Hayes has something to
hide.
So, yes, there is cultural pressure from some segments of the
comfortable, established “Left.” And I really do hope your important
grant-writers support your journalistic choices. Because a cynical dismissal of
the entire 9/11 truth movement is cheap, irresponsible, and contrary to the
desire of the international movement for peace and real social justice.
Contrast that noble desire with the context of today’s New York
politics. At the New York Megaphone newspaper, we found an amicus brief up in
the archives of NY State Supreme Court. We were able to prove that then-Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer helped WTC lease-holder Larry Silverstein receive an
outrageous $4.5 billion insurance payout. His brief helped reverse a lower
court decision, and got the 9/11 buildings collapse insured, curiously, as “two
separate attacks.”
As a part of that story, it’s also worth noting that we
published online an audio recording of my interview with Spitzer’s fellow NYC
Democrat, Jerome Hauer. Recently indicted by a San Diego “Citizens Grand Jury”
Hauer is a “bio-terror expert” with ties to FBI top anthrax suspect Stephen
Hatfill. He was Giuliani’s director of the Office of Emergency Management,
running a bio-terror drill on 9/11, down at Ground Zero. When Dan Rather had
questions about the attacks, it was Hauer who corrected him, live, on TV, later
that day. Despite no investigation, Hauer told Rather on 9/11 that the towers
had to have come down due to jet fuel fires, and that there was absolutely “no
state sponsorship” of the 9/11 attacks.
The voices of establishment “Left” journalism are behind the
times. But that’s OK. With this growing, nationwide truth/justice/peace
movement, isn’t it great to see the people leading? Will the leaders
follow?
OK, whew! Finally: I really enjoyed the interview this morning with
former Arabic School principal Debbie Almontaser, and the audio file of neo-con
intellectual con Daniel Pipes getting caught taking quotations out of context in
his racist, xenophobic attack. But if a deeper historical inquiry about the
USA’s history of manipulating radical Islam was more in vogue on your show, then
a certain fact would have not gone missing from today’s broadcast: anti-Arab
neocon Daniel Pipes is the son of Richard Pipes, who, in 1977 under Carter, was
in charge of employing Islamic rage in central Asia to stir up a "genocidal
fury" against the Soviet Union. It’s ironic to hear a certain Pipes talk about
Bin Laden “the terrorist” on your show, without a voice there asking about a
certain Pipes using Bin Laden in 1977 when it was in the interests of US Foreign
Policy.
In Solidarity,
Sander Hicks
Vox Pop Inc.
New York Megaphone
308 Bowery
NYC, NY 10012
http://Nymegaphone.com
http://Voxpopbowery.com
PS for more
information, sources and links, please go to http://www.sanderhicks.com/
