How could those towers have collapsed into a pile of rubble only a few stories high, when the core of each tower consisted of 47 massive steel columns? You've got these 47 columns that go from the sub basements to the top. How could those all have just collapsed into a pile of rubble?

The 9/11 Commission settled that easily. They said the core of each building consisted of a hollow steel shaft that just had elevators and stairwells in it. You can't get a bigger lie. The unique thing about the towers when they were built was their unique structure of just having the core thing and then the perimeter columns and then trusses that connected the core to the outside, so you've got this tremendous amount of space with no pillars whatsoever. So any book you would read about the WTC would talk about those things and they just denied their existence. I mean, it's just audacious that the press won't report on those huge lies.

But wouldn't the administration have realized that people are going to investigate this? We're not a nation of dummies.

We are a nation that is very poorly informed by its mainstream media, a nation that has had drilled into it that we are America the Good, we make mistakes but we're never deliberately evil. We've had drilled into us that people who believe in conspiracy theories are idiots, so we wouldn't want to be one of those. But most importantly we're a nation with a controlled press, a corporately controlled press. We do not have free press. And in fact, if you want to say that the definition of a free press is one that is not controlled by religion, one can say ours is, because we really have a religion of capitalism-we like to call it free enterprise-and that's what controls our press, so we do not have a free press any more than the Soviet Union had a free press.

They'll just say, "He holds the ridiculous theory that explosions planted by our own government brought the building down" but they never say, "Now what's the evidence?" And they would certainly never bring me or Jim Hoffman or Jim Fetzer on to NBC or ABC or CBS or to say what is the evidence for that.

Building 7 was 47 stories high and not hit by an airplane. Do we know why it collapsed?

It's still not covered, even by the 9/11 Commission Report. Building 7 was the least covered of the buildings that collapsed and the least understood, but the most glaring example of potential complicity by the administration.

It is the most obvious because with the Towers, one can think that somehow the planes hitting them caused them to weaken and fall down but with Building 7, it would be the first building in history that was ever brought down entirely by fire alone. And so it's obviously the biggest embarrassment for the government, so the 9/11 Commission handled Building 7 by simply not mentioning that it collapsed. This should have been a world-shaking event that would have led all insurance companies around the world to say, now we know, steel framed high rise buildings can totally collapse because of fire alone, so we've got to up our premiums greatly. But they didn't even mention this historic event. Now we come to the NIST Commission, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, have put out a report claiming that they have given an explanation of why the World Trade Center towers collapsed. It's completely bogus but I won't go into that, I'll just say, they have not yet released their report about Building 7 because obviously they know they don't have a plausible story to tell.

FEMA could not explain it either?

FEMA did the first investigation, and they came up with a scenario in which maybe timbers from one of the towers came over and set the diesel fuel on fire and turned Building 7 into Towering Inferno. Of course the photographs show that there were fires on only two or three floors of the 47-story building at most. But nevertheless, they say maybe this is what happened, but then at the end of all that they said, the best possible explanation we could give has a very low probability of occurrence. So in other words, they admit they couldn't explain it.

Wasn't the collapse captured on video and didn't it in fact look like a controlled demolition?

It was even more obviously a case of controlled implosion than the Towers, because the Towers, the collapse had to begin near the top where the planes had hit because that was going to be the story. But Building 7 was just a traditional controlled implosion, where it starts from the bottom and the walls fold in on themselves and it collapses into a very tiny pile of rubble. And so to show you what lack of confidence NIST has in its report, a fellow named Ed Haas, who has a muckraker report that you can find on Google, called up the spokesman for NIST, named Michael Newman, and said, you know you've got all these physicists who reject the official story and they believe that it was an inside job, why don't we settle all this by having a debate on national television, between some of these scientists and your NIST scientists? And Newman said no NIST scientist is going to debate. And he's reiterated that. So he has said nobody from NIST will ever debate their report. In other words, they will not defend it in public, even though it's a taxpayer supported project and they should be demanded to report it. So that shows you how flimsy the official story is. And they still have not issued a report on it. They will not debate their report on the Towers. Obviously, they're not going to defend their debate on Building 7-they won't even issue it, just hope the public forgets about it. Because the press does not keep reminding people that Building 7 did collapse and it's a total mystery.

What was your first major tip-off that something might be inaccurate in the reporting of the events of that day?

Mainly I was focusing on the question of, "Why no interceptions?" Why, with the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, nobody scrambled to stop these planes from flying into the various targets. We have standard operating procedures that evidently work flawlessly about 100 times a year, where planes are scrambled and there are interceptions made within 10 to 15 minutes of the first sign there's anything wrong (the three standard signs are they lose radio contact, the transponder goes off or the plane deviates from its course). If they can't get it corrected within about a minute they contact the military, and the military calls NORAD and has them scramble a couple of fighters from the closest airbase that has fighters on alert-these are all over the country and these planes can go very fast and so normally it only takes about 10 or 15 minutes. And here, 20 minutes, 40 minutes with the Pentagon-nothing happened. So that was the first evidence I focused on that suggested it wasn't just a matter of foreknowledge but was actual complicity in the attacks, ordering a stand down (not taking action). Because the other evidence that I looked at early on was all the evidence of foreknowledge and of actual interference with investigations.

You suggested that the FBI had repeated warnings from multiple sources that there was going to be an attack on the World Trade Center, which they systematically ignored.

That was part of it. Some of them were that explicit. Others were simply where they were investigating Osama Bin Laden, or members of Al Qaeda, people who were taking flying lessons and so on, various kinds of investigations where FBI members trying to do their jobs got stopped by FBI headquarters. And then after 9/11 the stories about not really going after Bin Laden.

Was it the British press that suggested we deliberately allowed Bin Laden to escape?

One of their mainstream newspapers concluded that the so-called Battle of Tora Bora was just a farce.

Why didn't the Pentagon collapse when it, too, was hit by an airplane?

A question you might ask about the Pentagon is, it was allegedly hit by an airplane about the same size as the one that hit each of the towers-why did the seismic measurements not register? You get a definite impact registration when each of the towers is hit. But when the Pentagon is hit, nothing. Whatever hit the Pentagon did not really shake the earth. Those seismic reports are available for anybody who wants them, so if you Google "9/11 seismic reports," you would find it.

Pictures we've seen show a hole in the Pentagon just a couple of feet off the ground going through several layers of the building. It seems hardly large enough to have been made by a Boeing 757.

It's between the first and the second floor, so it means that the aircraft itself had to be extremely low to the ground, If that hole was, as some people say, simply the hole punched by the nose of a Boeing 757, the engines would have been digging into the grass, but there is no damage to the grass whatsoever.

Also, with the force of a Boeing 757, the enormous weight of that going several hundred miles an hour, even a reinforced Pentagon façade would have been much more destroyed than all the photos and eyewitnesses say.

And if it was a 757, the tail, which would go up about 40 feet off the ground, surely would have made some sort of dent, visible mark, above that hole we saw in the façade before the building collapsed.

There are no marks on the side where the wings would have hit, and those would have been very powerful. So it seems like a combination of the amount of damage done to the Pentagon and very little debris-no large, plane-sized things outside, no wings, no engines, no tail, no fuselage, so they had to be inside, and yet when the people inside were interviewed, the fire chief and then the head of the building renovation, both of them said they hadn't seen any big pieces of airplane.

What about luggage or body parts?

I've seen descriptions of people who were on the scene and saw body parts, but I don't know if anybody walking through would have been able to distinguish passengers from people working in the Pentagon. I've never heard any testimony about luggage.

The Pentagon is one of the best-defended buildings in America. Wouldn't there have been security cameras trained on it that would have captured the plane or whatever it was that hit?

I'm sure many cameras did capture the aircraft that hit the Pentagon. But if by hypothesis it was not a 757, the Pentagon is not going to release those videos, and that's one of the questions we've asked. We know there was a video camera on the Citgo gas station across the highway, and we know that the FBI swooped in within five minutes. You would almost think they had known in advance! You would think the FBI would think, "Oh my God, for the first time in history, the Pentagon has been hit, what's happened here!" but they had the presence of mind to go over there and get the video.

There have been efforts under the Freedom of Information Act to get that. And also there's another story that one of the hotels had workers who were actually watching the video and the FBI came in and took it away. So we know at least there were at least two and likely a lot more. That's one of the many, many, many pieces of evidence that suggest that the Pentagon was not hit by a Boeing 757.

If it wasn't hit by a 757, what did hit it? And if Flight 77 didn't hit it, where did it go and what happened to those passengers?

That's what we need an investigation for. We need somebody with subpoena power and the power to get people to identify those above them who are responsible, and talk about what really happened. They have to be more afraid of prison than of losing their job or getting shot or getting "accidented." As to what really hit it, there's contradictory evidence-some evidence suggests a missile, some suggests a rather small airplane that might have been a guided aircraft, like a Global Hawk, something fairly light that when it hit the Pentagon it would have shattered into fairly small pieces, because we do have witnesses.

Prior to whatever hit the Pentagon hitting it, was there an internal explosion?

That's what it's starting to look like, that there was an explosion and subsequently something did strike it from the outside. So it's starting to look like all three things may be true: there was an explosion, there was a small plane, and the small plane shot a missile into the Pentagon. That would account for this hole that went through to the C Ring.

If they'd just release the tapes, they could end this speculation. It's astonishing that mainstream news media isn't looking at this.

More Americans get the news from NBC than from any other outlet. You've got NBC, CNBC, MSNBC. And who owns NBC? General Electric. Who is making billions of dollars off the War on Terror?

What about Flight 93, reported to have crashed in Shanksville, Penn.?

This is the thing I know the least about. Some people speculate that, to watch the glorified movie of it, you know, "Let's roll" where all the passengers roll up to the front, they take control of the plane, and somehow in the process of wresting it away from whoever was flying it, it then proceeds to crash into the Pennsylvania countryside. Now there's another school of thought that says that the American military deliberately shot it down for reasons that we don't fully understand. So I'm confused about this.

There are actually three schools of thought-another one says that when the people showed up at the so-called crash site, there was no evidence of a plane. So it's a big mystery what happened. In my books, I have provided an enormous amount of material that the plane was indeed shot down by the US military. And there is even an envoy from Washington who was speaking to the Canadians trying to get them to join more thoroughly into what we call the Missile Defense Program, in other words the weaponization of space. And he said you should be very proud of your Canadian participation in NORAD because when Flight 93 was shot down by the military it was a Canadian who was in charge of NORAD at that stage. So we have testimony that a Washington insider has said that it was shot down.

What do you think about the film United 93?

The movie follows the official version. But there are different versions of the official version. One was that the passengers brought it down, one was that when the terrorists saw that the passengers were going to get control of it, they deliberately grounded it, so you do have those two official versions. But one thing that people need to be alerted to who have seen the movie, in the movie these people are having these rather long cell phone conversations with people back home, right? Where they're interacting with them. If you read the actual transcripts that have been provided, they're not interactive like that, they're all one-way things that anybody could have said, it's more like "Hi Mom, we're at the back of the plane, we're getting ready to do something, gotta go now, bye." They do not have conversations where the people would really know I was talking to my son or my husband or my wife. And we have very good evidence that that's not the case in the famous case of Mark Bingham, who says, "Hi Mom, this is Mark Bingham." What person has ever talked to his mother and used his last name? That's so absurd!

A story came out a few years ago that showed that they have now perfected voice morphing. So they can take a recording of somebody and then make that person utter certain sentences. So I forget the, I think it was one that they had Colin Powell and it had him uttering a statement such as, some absurd thing, "We just shot down a Russian satellite" or something like that. And it sounded to all the world like Colin Powell, nobody could have detected that it was a made up thing. So all of those things were quite likely results of voice-morphing.

So if the military did shoot it down, why?

One possibility is that there was some truth to the story that the passengers were trying to get control and that they were afraid they were going to have live hijackers who might talk. That's one possible story. In the meantime we've become more skeptical that there were actually any Arab Muslim hijackers on these planes. Their names are not on the flight manifests. There are no Arab names on any of the flight manifests that have been released. We have no evidence that any of these guys were on the plane. So if that was the case with Flight 93, why would the military have shot it down? And there I just have to throw up my hands and say, this is why we need a real investigation to find out what really happened. So there are just lots of mysteries about Flight 93 and 77 and the Pentagon strikes. Just reading what we can learn from available information, we will never know the full truth, not even close to it. So our primary claim is not that we know the truth. The primary claim is that there are so many questions that demand a real, official investigation.

I have focused my attention on what we're certain of, that the official story is false. We're not certain of what happened to 93 or 77 or at the Pentagon and to some extent at the Towers.

What could be the motive of our leaders to orchestrate such events?

As soon as the Soviet Union imploded, these guys started thinking we could have a unipolar world instead of a bipolar world, and we could make it permanent. We could have the first borderless empire in history. We'll be greater than Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or the Roman Empire or the British Empire. Pretty heady trip. And they were writing about this all through the '90s, and they formed this organization called Project for the New American Century, which is a unipolar, neocon organization, and laid out five conditions for doing this: You've got to have a tremendous increase in military spending; Second, the transformation of the military technologically, which really means the weaponization of space. Third, we need to get control of the world's oil, so Central Asia and the Middle East, and of course Iraq was in their sights from the time that Bush Sr. refused to go to Baghdad-they were writing letters to Clinton urging him to attack Baghdad. And clearly they had plans to attack Afghanistan prior to 9/11-that had developed at least in the summer of 2001.

Fourth, they wanted to revise the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes. According to international law up until then, you could not launch legally a pre-emptive strike on a country unless you had very good evidence that it was just about to launch a pre-emptive strike on you, and this strike had to be so imminent that there was no time to take it to the UN Security Council. So they said this was archaic, paying attention to international law, we should be able to attack any country we want to, basically.

The fifth requirement would be a kind of new Pearl Harbor that would get the American people ready to support these policies: the spending and be willing to accept pre-emptive strikes on other countries and so on. So 9/11 did all that. Gave them everything they wanted. We're talking about billions even trillions of dollars, when you put it in terms of decades of spending. That very day they increased military spending $40 billion, which is spending money. And by now we've upped it to over $200 billion. They don't even count what they spend on Iraq in the budget; that's just discretionary funds.

So you can't imagine stronger motivation. The two major motivations for war have always been the political motivation of imperial lust, just the desire to win in battle and rule over other people; and the dominant motivation of at least the kind of people who've gone into politics and the military. And then the other big motivation is economic, which in our day, partly is just lining their own pockets, partly it's keeping the military spending going which means funding all these corporations that build things for the military, such as General Electric, Halliburton obviously and then all the ones that produce military equipment, tanks and all that stuff. But also getting control of the world's resources as they're winding down. That's where the oil in particular, oil and natural gas, come in.

And Iraq has such huge reserves.

So did the Caspian Sea. So we've got two of the biggest reserves back to back like that. So for people to say no motivation, we had what would count as the strongest possible motivations for going to war, in terms of what has always motivated people to go to war in the past.

There has been talk that FDR had advance knowledge of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

There's a book called NATO's Secret Armies and it shows that during the Cold War, the CUIIA and NATO (which of course means the Pentagon) were funding and backing various attacks in Italy, France and Belgium to terrorize the population and then the left-wing would be blamed-the Communists or anarchists-because right after the war the Communists were very popular because they'd been the Resistance, and we were trying to put the right-wingers back in control. So we would arrange these attacks. There was a big expose of it in the '90s but you heard almost nothing about it in the US, whereas in Europe it's quite well-known that we did all that.

So you're saying that this is not the first time we've been involved in actions like this?

We have done it time and time again. We wouldn't be sitting on this property other than for a false flag operation we did to start the war with Mexico and stole half of Mexico from them, by claiming they had shed American blood on American soil. A Congressman named Abraham Lincoln said that was the sheerest deception on the part of President Polk, but he got away with it.

Is the "false flag" phenomenon a common practice?

I began my latest book, The Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, with a whole chapter on "false flag" operations, and show that imperialists have regularly done this. The Chinese did it when they were ready to start taking over Manchuria. The Germans did it when they wanted to attack Poland... The burning of the Reichstadt was earlier, when they wanted to get rid of civil rights. But several years later when they were ready to attack Poland, they dressed some of their own troops in Polish uniforms and had them go over the border and then come back and attack. Then they got some German convicts, killed them and dressed them as Poles and left their bodies as proof that Poland attacked. So then the next day, Hitler could cite 21 border incidents.

And then we've got Operation Northwoods documented. This was what the Pentagon proposed to Kennedy, so we would have a pretext to attack Cuba. And they used that language. They said, "Operations to provide a pretext to attack Cuba." If it had been any president other than Kennedy, we probably would have done it.

A lot of people say the 9/11 Commission, which has endorsed the official account, was an impartial commission and can be believed. It was independent, there were Republicans and Democrats, and they did a deep and thorough investigation. Who are we, without their resources, to question their conclusions?

Who actually ran the Commission? People think it was kindly old chairman Thomas Kean, Gov. of New Jersey. These commissioners we saw on TV didn't do the work. The work was done by a staff of 75 people run by Philip Zelikow, Executive Director. He was essentially a member of the Bush/Cheney administration. He had been part of the National Security Council during the administration of the first president Bush. He and Condoleezza Rice were on that together. Then when the Republicans were out of power during the Clinton years, they wrote a book together. And you have to be very close to somebody both personally and ideologically to write a book together. Then when Rice was named national security adviser for the second president Bush, she brought Zelikow on to help with the transition to the new National Security Council. Then he was appointed by Pres. Bush to the president's foreign intelligence advisory board. After that then, he became chairman of the 9/11 Commission. So it was no different than if Condoleezza Rice or Dick Cheney had been running the Commission. But the press didn't tell us this about Zelikow. They would have a few mentions of it in the New York Times, about the families of the victims being unhappy with Philip Zelikow. But I never saw a story spell out how closely allied he was to the Bush Administration.

Now here's something I learned from the book Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann. I mentioned this, the new doctrine of pre-emption, which is really a doctrine of preventive warfare. But people don't understand, prevention sounds like a good thing, sounds better than pre-emption. So I call it the doctrine of preventive pre-emption warfare, which means that we see that some country may cause us trouble somewhere down the line-maybe five or 10 years from now-but we decide it would be easier to get rid of their weapons now than later, so we'll just go ahead and attack them now. That was the new doctrine that was signed into existence in a document called "National Security Strategy of United States of America 2002." And in the cover letter to that document the president himself says, "We can no longer wait until our enemies have gotten ready to attack us, we've got to act offensively." And who wrote that document? Philip Zelikow. Condoleezza Rice was in charge of writing that-that's her job as national security adviser. So she had evidently asked Philip Hoss, a subordinate to Colin Powell in the State Department, to write it. He wrote a first draft and she thought it wasn't bold enough, so she ordered it completely rewritten and had Zelikow come in and do the writing. She and Zelikow and Stephen Hadley were the three who primarily wrote it. So here you have a guy who [helps] write the document that on the basis of 9/11 says we can get this new doctrine of pre-emptive preventive warfare that neo-cons have been wanting-the guy who most turned 9/11 into the pretext for making this US official policy. And he is the one who is a year later brought on to be the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which is supposed to see if the White House was complicit somehow-maybe just through incompetence or for deliberately allowing it to happen or ordering a stand down operation or whatever it is, was the White House somehow involved.

It's outrageous, and the press has never talked about it. That's what we're talking about, an unfree press that will not reveal even the most basic facts. You wouldn't have to argue any kind of complicity, you could say, "Isn't this an interesting fact: The fellow who was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission was the one who wrote this document which contains this new doctrine which is so central to the Bush administration that it's called the Bush Doctrine, this new doctrine of preventive warfare." There's always been a Nixon Doctrine, a Johnson Doctrine, a Carter Doctrine-this was the Bush Doctrine.

Zelikow decided which topics would be investigated, and which ones not. So they did not investigate any of the evidence about Bush administration complicity and show why they had motives for this. Our motives were much more powerful than Al Qaeda's-what were the Al Qaeda motives? They hated Americans, they hated our freedoms. Our way of life. So they would do this. It's comic book stuff. What the American people don't know is that basically Zelikow controlled the Commission, controlled what the reports were. And then when some things would leak through that he didn't want in the final report, he controlled the final report, so he just deleted it. So here's an example of a big thing that leaked through. Has to do with the Pentagon's claim and the 9/11 Commission Report's claim that nobody in the Pentagon knew that some aircraft was coming after them. And of course the official story is that here was Flight 77 coming back after them, and it went along for about 40 minutes, and gosh none of their radars picked that up. And so it's an incredible story on its face. But we have actual evidence that they did know something was coming to the Pentagon.

Norman Mineta, secretary of transportation, reports that he was told by Richard Clark to come to the White House. He got to the White House, went in, reported to Clark. Clark tells him he should just go on down to the underground bunker, the presidential emergency operation center, and the vice president's already down there. And so Mineta said he got down there about 9:20am. Well he hadn't been there very long before this young man comes in and says to the vice president that this aircraft is now 50 miles out. And pretty soon he comes back in and he says that now it's 30 miles out. And then he comes back in and says that now it's 10 miles out, do the orders still stand? And the vice president whips his head around and says that of course the orders still stand, has he heard anything differently? Then Tim Romer, commissioner, asked what time was this, how long it was after he got down there. He said it was about five or six minutes. So Romer asked if that would have been about 9:25 or 9:26? Yeah. Well then the official story is that of course the Pentagon was hit, about 9:37 or 9:38, there's a big gap in there so there's a problem, but nevertheless you have the testimony that something was coming towards Washington and that the vice president said yes, the orders still stand.

Now Mineta says he assumed the order was to shoot the aircraft down. But whatever it was, it was not shot down, and why would the young man have asked do the orders still stand if the order was to shoot it down? Of course we would shoot something down that's coming towards us. So the order must have been not to shoot it down. So it looked like we had testimony there given to the 9/11 Commission about a stand down ordered by the vice president. Don't shoot down the aircraft. Well what happened to that testimony? Disappears. Does not make it into the 9/11 Commission Report.

Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission says that Cheney didn't get down to the underground bunker until almost 10 o'clock, probably about 9:58, so of course they had to delete this whole exchange with Mineta and Romer, because when Mineta got down there at 9:20, Cheney was already there and obviously had been there for at least a few minutes because some conversation had already gone on. So that fits with what everybody else says, which is that Cheney went down there about 9:15. That's what Clark says, that's what the White House reporter says, that's what lots of people had said. Even Cheney said, shortly after the South Tower was hit-9:03-the Secret Service came, picked me up, carried me down bodily downstairs. Shortly thereafter couldn't have been 45 minutes later. So even Cheney had said on Tim Russert's show, that that had happened. The 9/11 Commission tells this obvious lie that he didn't get down there until 10. They do say he went downstairs earlier and then stayed at the end of the tunnel, watched TV for a while, talked to the president for a while, and so by the time he and his wife went down to the end of the hall it was 9:58, but they have him getting down to the downstairs at about, sometime after 9:30,and clearly we had all this testimony that he was already in the operations center by 9:15. So here's a blatant, obvious lie that somebody on the New York Times staff, somebody on the Washington Post staff has to know is a lie, and either they won't write a story about it or if they do write a story about it their editor won't let it run.

I've done quite a bit of reading about the press and people say that if you're going to be successful in the press you learn very early on what kind of stories will fly, what ones won't, and if you take a story of a certain type to your editor once or twice and it's turned down you know not to take that kind of story again. The editor doesn't have to say, "If you do this again I'll fire you." You get the message, this is futile, you're not going to get promoted, you're not going to get the plush jobs if you don't understand how things are done.

I have heard of people in the Pentagon. I know a guy who knows a guy who's still working in the Pentagon, who says, this guy tells me, it was no Boeing 757. So I ask the guy, can you get this guy to say this in public, and he says, absolutely not. He fears he will be killed if he said that. So there are people who fear for their lives, but I doubt it's newspaper reporters, it's more that they fear for their jobs or their reputation or whatever.

We always hear about people being "disappeared" in other countries. Do you believe it happens here as well? Are journalists at risk?

We had over 100 people who died mysteriously and just sometimes just before they were going to testify [regarding the Pres. Kennedy assassination]. Whether to the New Orleans jury or to the House select committee. But these were always people who had some particular inside information. Nobody who wrote a book about it was ever killed. They were speculating and they can be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. And they don't really have a firsthand knowledge. The only kind of news people who might be threatened are people who actually went out and interviewed somebody and got some of that direct inside information and were about to report. One or two people have died who were thought by some to have been related to 9/11.

What about the people in the press who got the military grade anthrax right after 9/11?

Yes, it did look like a warning shot. The president and the vice president asked Tom Daschle to have this innocuous investigation carried out only by the Joint Intelligence Commission. Daschle went along with it. Daschle was one of the ones who got anthraxed. Brokaw was another one. So it was a message to news reporters: don't do anything.

If you were to speak to the Christian community, what is a person's responsibility as a Christian or as a conscious spiritual being?

I really need to address the Christian community in particular because America is primarily a Christian nation and I'm a Christian theologian. I would say two things here. Christians should have motivation more than anyone else to look into 9/11, and if they agree it was an inside job, expose the truth. First of all because 9/11 from the beginning and still remains the pretext for all the things that we are doing and not doing in the world. It's the pretext for focusing on the so-called War on Terror rather than dealing with global warming, or the war on poverty or the health crisis, and all these other things, education... And it's the pretext for the attacks on Lebanon, anybody you can label a terrorist the United States gives you a free pass to attack them because they're kind of like the terrorists who attacked us and we've got to get rid of all the terrorists in the world. So it's the pretext for everything that has happened that has made the world a far more dangerous place than it was before 9/11. So just on a purely moral basis recognizing that 9/11 is the pretext for this, all Christians should say, well if there's one chance in a thousand that 9/11 was an inside job we need to know it, so I will read the evidence.

Secondly Christianity began as an anti-imperial religion. Jesus was crucified on a cross. The cross at that time was the Roman means of execution of people who were considered politically dangerous to the empire. So it was only the Romans that had the power to execute. We've had recently a movie that says it was the Jews who did it. No, the Jews did not, the Jewish authorities did not have the authority to crucify anybody, only the Romans could do it. So Jesus was crucified as a political threat to the empire. I have a whole chapter in the new book, which builds primarily on Richard Horsley's book called Jesus and Empire, so if nothing else I hope you will publicize this fact.

Christianity was anti-imperialistic during its first three centuries. Only in the fourth century did it start supporting empire, with Constantine.

Where do you pull an example from the Bible? What about, "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's"?

Right, a most misinterpreted passage. It was a trick question. The most volatile issue at the time and the reason people were crucified and groups were killed or slaughtered, is they refused to pay the tribute to Rome, that was the political issue. And so if Jesus had said, don't pay the tribute, that would have been grounds right there for execution, for rabble rousing. But on the other hand if he said, do pay it, then he's a collaborator. And so what does he say? He says, "Render unto God the things that are God's, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." Well for a Jew in the first century, everything belongs to God, nothing belongs to Caesar. So it was a way of saying to his fellow Jews, of course don't pay it. It's got Caesar's picture on it, but that doesn't mean it belongs to Caesar. So that's been used and constantly quoted. If you read the chapter you'll see there are many illustrations and passages that once you understand the Roman occupation you see that Jesus was preaching what Horsley called an anti-imperial gospel.

And then the Book of Revelations, is a full-out anti-imperial book. The beast-that's Rome, all the imagery is Rome. And that's one of the earliest books of the New Testament, written before most of the gospels, so it shows you that early, before they had started to make their peace with empire as you get in the book of Luke. Luke acts much more friendly towards empire.

This is revolutionary stuff.

It is, and what we call the Peace Churches-the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Amish-they've always made this point that the fall of the church happened with Constantine, when he adopted Christianity and created the Holy Roman Empire, that was the ruin of the church. So they've always been anti-empire, and the mainstream churches, unfortunately, have not really taken a stand on this even after we've known better.

One good thing that may come out of all this is that churches may recover the original gospel and start to take it seriously.

Are there parts of the gospel that aren't in the Bible that support this position?

Sure. Elaine Pagels wrote a book several years ago in which she talked about the Gnostic Gospels, and she was focusing on the feminist issue and the rise of patriarchy and showed that some of the ones that didn't make it made women too equal. Now whether those gospels also had more of an anti-imperialist ring, to my knowledge she didn't focus on it because that wasn't the issue at the time, and I don't know anybody who's gone back and looked at that.

But in your mind you believe that Christ was preaching against the empire, because a lot of the evils of the world had sprung out of the expansion of empire.

Right, and he was preaching against the collaboration with the empire and the corruption of the temples. He was against, if one wants to say the Jews, the chief priests and rabbis of the temple. But these were not, they were outsiders who were brought in, they were Hellenistic Jews, so they were not people of the people, they lived in grand houses and were really stooges of the empire, and so he was preaching against them and against the money changers and that whole system of collaboration.

You have really synthesized a lot of information.

I've been working on this full time for three years. So sure, I've got an enormous amount of information. And I would issue a challenge to anybody who just wants to dismiss it a priori : Read my three books, write enough back to me to show me that you've read them and understood them, and then tell me you don't have any doubts about the official theory." I've thus far not run into anybody who's done that. I've run into people who've dismissed it without reading the books. I've run into a lot of people who've said, "I began your book convinced I was going to reject it." But if anybody will listen to an hour-long lecture, that's all it takes.

Do you ever have concerns for your safety?

I don't worry about that because there are two choices-they can either leave me alone or they can take me out. If they leave me alone I get to enjoy my old age and write my systematic theology. If they take me out, my 9/11 books rise to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So it's a win/win situation.

David Ray Griffin has been dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, but as he points out, conspiracy is when two or three people conspire in secret to do something illegal or immoral, and our newspapers are full of conspiracies-local bank robberies, Enron defrauding its customers-so we're all conspiracy theorists. The question in this case is, which conspiracy has the best evidence to support it?

"Elizabeth de la Vega, appearing on behalf of the United States." That is a phrase I've uttered hundreds of times in twenty years as a federal prosecutor. I retired two years ago. So, obviously, I do not now speak for any U.S. Attorney's Office, nor do I represent the federal government. This should be apparent from the fact that I am proposing a hypothetical indictment of the President and his senior advisers -- not a smart move for any federal employee who wishes to remain employed. Lest anyone miss the import of this paragraph, let me emphasize that it is a disclaimer: I am writing as a private citizen.

Obviously, as a private citizen, I cannot simply draft and file an indictment. Nor can I convene a grand jury. Instead, in the following pages I intend to present a hypothetical indictment to a hypothetical grand jury. The defendants are President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war -- in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States. And all of you are invited to join the grand jury.

We will meet for seven days. On day one, I'll present the indictment in the morning and in the afternoon I will explain the applicable law. On days two through seven, we'll have witness testimony, presented in transcript form, with exhibits.

As is the practice in most grand jury presentations, the evidence will be presented in summary form, by federal agents -- except that these agents are hypothetical. (Any relationship to actual federal agents, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.)

On day seven, when the testimony is complete, I'll leave the room to allow the grand jury to vote.

If the indictment and grand jury are hypothetical, the evidence is not. I've prepared for this case, just as I would have done for any other case in my years as a prosecutor, by reviewing all of the available relevant information. In this case, such information consists of witness accounts, the defendants' speeches, public remarks, White House press briefings, interviews, congressional testimony, official documents, all public intelligence reports, and various summaries of intelligence, such as in the reports of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the 9/11 Commission. I've discarded any evidence, however compelling, that is uncorroborated.

Then, using a sophisticated system of documents piled on every surface in my dining room, I've organized and analyzed the reliable information chronologically, by topic, and by defendant. I've compared what the President and his advisers have said publicly to what they knew and said behind the scenes. Finally, I've presented the case through testimony that will, I hope, make sense and keep everybody awake.

After analyzing this evidence in light of the applicable law, I've determined that we already have more than enough information to allow a reasonable person to conclude that the President conducted a wide-ranging effort to deceive the American people and Congress into supporting a war against Iraq. In other words, in legal terms, there is probable cause to believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell violated Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States. Probable cause is the standard of proof required for a grand jury to return an indictment. Consequently, we have more than sufficient evidence to warrant indictment of the President and his advisers.

Do I expect someone to promptly indict the President and his aides? No. I am aware of the political impediments and constitutional issues relating to the indictment of a sitting president. Do those impediments make this merely an empty exercise? Absolutely not.

I believe this presentation adds a singular perspective to the debate about the President's use of prewar intelligence: that of an experienced federal prosecutor. Certainly, scholars and experts such as Barbara Olshansky, David Lindorff, Michael Ratner, John Dean, and Elizabeth Holtzman have written brilliantly about the legal grounds for impeachment that arise from the President's misrepresentations about the grounds for an unprovoked invasion of Iraq. But for most Americans, the debate about White House officials' responsibility for false preinvasion statements remains fixed on, and polarized around, the wrong question: Did the President and his team lie about the grounds for war? For many, the suggestion that the President lied is heresy, more shocking than a Baptist minister announcing during vespers that he's a cross-dresser. For many others -- indeed, now the majority of Americans -- that the President lied to get his war is a given, although no less shocking.

So my goals are threefold. First, I want to explain that under the law that governs charges of conspiracy to defraud, the legal question is not whether the President lied. The question is not whether the President subjectively believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The legal question that must be answered is far more comprehensive: Did the President and his team defraud the country? After swearing to uphold the law of the land, did our highest government officials employ the universal techniques of fraudsters -- deliberate concealment, misrepresentations, false pretenses, half-truths -- to deceive Congress and the American people?

My second goal is to supplement the scholarly analyses already written, by moving beyond exposition, beyond theory, to the inside of the courtroom, or more precisely, the grand jury room. By presenting the President's conspiracy to defraud just as a prosecutor would present any fraud conspiracy, I hope to enable readers to consider the case in an uncharged atmosphere, applying criminal law to the evidence that they believe has been proved to the standard of probable cause, just as grand jurors would in any other case.

Why is it important to do this? Because whether the President and his senior officials conspired to defraud the United States about the grounds for war is, at least on one level, a legal question, but, without a shift in political will, there will never be any reasoned consideration of it as such. The President will not be held accountable for misrepresenting the prewar intelligence unless and until Congress conducts hearings similar to the Watergate hearings. As yet, however, we seem painfully incapable of reaching that point. We are like inept tennis partners, collectively letting the ball slip by in the no-man's-land between the service line and the baseline, or in this case, between the legal and the political.

Perhaps more important, however, is that, although the evidence of wrongdoing is overwhelming, the facts are so complicated -- far more so than those that prompted the Watergate hearings--that it's impossible to have a productive debate about them in the political sphere. Indeed, modern-day spin has vanquished substance so thoroughly that even the most well-grounded charge of deliberate deception is often considered more despicable than the deception itself.

One forum where that's not true is the courtroom. The court system is far from perfect, but there we at least expect that people will not substitute personal attacks for argument. We expect a reasoned exploration of fact versus fiction, honest mistake versus deliberate fraud. We also expect, and the law requires, that people hear all the evidence before deciding, thereby avoiding the rapid volley of sound bites that so regularly masquerades for debate on television. Hence, this hypothetical grand jury presentation: it is a vehicle to deliver a message.

My third goal is to send the message home -- to whomever will listen. And this is it:

The President has committed fraud.

It is a crime in the legal, not merely the colloquial, sense.

It is far worse than Enron.

It is not a victimless crime.

We cannot shrug our shoulders and walk away.

Why? Because We Are All Kitty Genovese's Neighbors

As an Assistant U. S. Attorney in Minneapolis, a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force in San Jose, and Chief of the San Jose Branch U.S. Attorney's Office, I prosecuted all manner of criminal cases. There were bank embezzlements, government frauds, violent takeover robberies, piloting a commercial passenger flight while under the influence -- the pilot had had twenty rum and (diet) Cokes and four hours' sleep before takeoff--and investment frauds, to name a few. Most were interesting; some downright loopy. One hapless fellow, for example, stole a truck filled with frozen turkeys and drove it across state lines to Wisconsin, thereby landing himself in federal prison rather than in county jail. For good measure, the following week -- before he'd been apprehended for the frozen-turkey heist -- he stole a truck filled with packaged frozen broccoli and drove it to Iowa.

Unquestionably, though, the most compelling cases were those that involved victims -- of violent crimes, robberies, or fraud. So I was not surprised to hear the lead Enron prosecutor's comment after the jury convicted former Enron CEOs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling: "What inspired me," John Hueston said, "was just that, that I had spoken to so many employees, so many victims who lost their savings, people who pleaded with me and the other prosecutors to see justice done."

Thanks to Hueston and his team, the victims of the Enron fraud -- a $68 billion dollar crime that left 20,000 people without jobs, pensions, and life's savings -- have obtained some measure of justice. They will never be made whole, but at least the CEOs who orchestrated the fraud have been held accountable. In the case of the largest corporate fraud ever prosecuted in the United States, the system has worked, albeit imperfectly.

Thus far, however, in the case of the vastly broader and more devastating Iraq war fraud orchestrated by the CEO of the United States and his management team, the system has failed. And we are all victims of this fraud. George W. Bush exploited the vulnerability of an entire populace reeling from the September 11, 2001, attacks to manipulate them into supporting a war based on false pretenses. If the financial cost of the President's fraud is astronomical -- $340 billion in direct war costs alone as of August 2006 -- the human cost is incalculable, and far more profound: over 2,500 American soldiers killed and 19,000 wounded; possibly many more than 50,000 Iraqis killed; untold numbers of grieving Iraqi and American family members; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis homeless; and a million soldiers who have been sent to this war and will never be the same.

While we are all victims of the President's crime, we are also all bystanders. The crime is ongoing, happening right before our eyes, and we are all onlookers; we are all, in a sense, Kitty Genovese's neighbors.

As Malcolm Gladwell recounts in his book The Tipping Point, Kitty Genovese was viciously assaulted, stabbed three times, and finally killed, on the way to her Queens, New York, home one night in 1964. Thirty-eight neighbors heard or watched her ordeal, but no one called the police until the attack was essentially over. The murder was universally seen as a horrifying example of modern-day indifference to the plight of others. But, Gladwell explains, psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley conducted experiments that led to a far different explanation: "When people are in a group ... responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem ... is not really a problem." Ironically, then, it was not that no one called to help Kitty Genovese "despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream; it's that no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream."

For over a year now, polls have shown that the majority of Americans believe President Bush deliberately misrepresented prewar intelligence. Executive branch officials who deliberately mislead Congress and the public intending to influence congressional action have committed a federal crime. That means that roughly 100 million Americans believe Bush has committed a crime, yet most, like Kitty Genovese's neighbors, are just passive bystanders--although not, I believe, due to indifference.

Indeed, many of us are just watching it happen because we feel powerless to stop it. Hundreds of thousands of people have, in effect, called 911, but not even Democrats in Congress have been willing to answer the phone. It is not that they don't have enough information; it is, our Democratic representatives say, because it is not good political strategy.

The proposition that it is not good political strategy to insist that government officials obey the law is highly debatable. More important, strategizing in the face of an ongoing crime is wrong. Ask any legislator whether he would strategize about possible political fallout before intervening to stop a crime that was occurring in front of his eyes and the response would be, "Of course not." But that is exactly what's happening right now.

So, consider this my 911 call. I'm calling on Democrats and Republicans to do the right thing. And I'm calling on everyone else to do whatever you can to convince Congress to do the right thing. I am not talking about bringing people to justice in the vengeful sense that President Bush employs. I am talking about effecting justice. I am talking, finally, about holding our highest government officials accountable for a complex and calculated program of false pretense, misleading statements, and material omissions -- a criminal betrayal of trust that is strikingly similar to, yet far worse than, the fraud committed by Enron's top officials.

Enron: Misleading Statements and Material Omissions

In July of 2002, President Bush stood before a snappy blue-and-white banner marked "Corporate Responsibility" and announced that he was opposed to fraud. With the enactment of the new Corporate Corruption Act, the President declared, there would "not be a different ethical standard for corporate America than the standard that applies to everyone else. The honesty you expect in your small businesses, or in your workplace ... will be expected and enforced in every corporate suite in this country." CEOs would now have to personally vouch for the truth of their public statements.

Bush's speech announcing a higher standard for CEOs was itself misleading. Hearing it, one might easily conclude that if the President hadn't pushed for this new law, corporate officers would be legally entitled to lie, cheat, and steal. Not true, of course. The new law, also called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, did not suddenly, for the first time in United States history, require corporate officials to be truthful, forthright, and fair with the public. Such obligations have been inherent in criminal fraud and other statutes for years.

Indeed, the Enron prosecution did not involve the Sarbanes-Oxley Act at all. The main charge was conspiracy to defraud: that is, conspiring to deceive investors by manipulating financial data, making false and misleading statements, and deliberately omitting important facts, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371.

Manipulation of data, false and misleading statements, and material omissions -- sound familiar?

At trial, former Enron CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling claimed they were not responsible for the deception because they had no idea what their underlings were doing. As the jury was instructed, however, anyone who makes representations intending that the public will rely on them, has an affirmative obligation to make sure that they are true and accurate. Representations made with reckless indifference to their truth are as false as outright lies.

After four months of complex testimony, the jury reached a simple conclusion: Lay and Skilling were responsible for what went on their company. As school principal Freddie Delgado put it: "I can't say that I don't know what my teachers were doing in the classroom. I am still responsible if a child gets lost."

In other words, the Enron jurors concluded that, legally, the desks of CEOs Lay and Skilling were the final repositories of the proverbial buck. Those jurors were average Americans -- office workers, educators, engineers, a nurse -- and they knew, even without the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, that CEOs should be held to the same standards of honesty and accountability that they would apply to themselves in their own lives. Faced with evidence that Lay and Skilling had repeatedly made public statements that were seriously undermined, if not flatly contradicted, by information and warnings they had received behind the scenes, the jury refused to allow them to avoid responsibility by blaming their subordinates.

Iraq: Misleading Statements and Material Omissions

The techniques of deception used by George W. Bush and his aides are identical to those used by Lay and Skilling. In his July 2002 speech announcing the signing of the Corporate Corruption Bill, the President said, "The only fair risks are [those] based on honest information." The President and his top advisers were acutely aware of the solemn risks posed by an invasion of Iraq, but instead of debating those risks honestly, they developed slogans, including the familiar "risks of inaction are greater than the risks of action" that simultaneously usurped and deflected counterarguments while providing no information whatsoever, honest or otherwise.

Such propaganda, cynical and craven as it is, might not qualify as criminal fraud, but the propaganda alone was insufficient to convince Congress and the American people to invest in the plan for war. To remedy this deficiency and close the deal, the President and his top aides made hundreds of representations, both general and specific, that were carefully crafted to manipulate public opinion. As we now know, many of those assertions were false and misleading. More important, we also now know that President Bush and his advisers had notice and direct knowledge that their representations were seriously undermined and in some key instances, disproved by information that was available to them. Consistently, the President and his aides knowingly conveyed false impressions, concealed important information, made deliberate misrepresentations, and professed certainty about facts that were speculative at best. Such is the definition of criminal fraud -- whether committed by the President of the United States or the CEO of a major corporation.

The only difference between the fraud committed by the Enron officers and the fraud committed by the President is that the latter was far more comprehensive and far more calculated. Even as President Bush stood center stage endorsing honesty that July four years ago, he and his company were setting the stage for another show. If the "only fair risks" speech was a perky Frank Capra clip, the White House's next production would be twenty-first-century H.G. Wells.

As of July 30, 2002, Bush had directed the creation of the White House Iraq Group, a public-relations operation whose sole purpose was to market the war. This team, collectively called WHIG, was co-chaired by the President's closest aides and long-term political consultants, Senior Adviser Karl Rove -- whom Bush has described as "the architect" of his 2004 reelection campaign -- and former Counselor to the President Karen Hughes.

By July 30, 2002, the White House Iraq Group had already begun fabricating an ominous scenario that blurred together the September 11 tragedy, mushroom clouds rising over American cities, and terrorists releasing strains of smallpox, interspersed with the shadowy face of a mad Iraqi dictator spring-loaded to attack the United States. They were collecting props -- anthrax vials and undated photos showing centrifuge components and unidentifiable buildings where something ominous might be happening, but we can't afford to wait to find out. They were writing the script: power phrases like "Grave and gathering danger" and "We can't afford to let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud," designed less to inform than to inflame. And, finally, Rove, Hughes, and company were scheduling appearances for the President's War Council members that would begin just a month later, in early September 2002.

It was to be a bravura performance by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, and many supporting cast members. The production was so well done, in fact, that, like the radio audience terrified into hysteria by the infamous "War of the Worlds" broadcast of 1938, most of us were fooled. Admittedly, we resisted buying the duct tape and plastic sheeting; we may not have wrapped our heads in wet towels to ward off Martian gas like the 1938 radio audience. What happened, however, was much worse: because of Bush's fiction, we agreed to bomb people 8,000 miles away whose only "crime" was that they were oppressed by a violent and cruel dictator.

Undoubtedly, Americans were panicked by H. G. Wells's radio play in part because they were exhausted and nervous in those tough Depression years. But Orson Welles' breathless report of a Martian invasion was never intended to cause panic, nor was it ultimately harmful.

The President's elaborate production was, and still remains, an entirely different story. It was a deliberate effort to create a permanent state of fear in America. And to say it was harmful is like saying that it hurts to get hit by a Mack truck.

Federal sentencing guidelines recognize that one who defrauds a vulnerable victim, such as a salesman who falsely represents the curative benefits of an elixir to a cancer patient, has committed an even more serious crime than one who defrauds a person who is not so "particularly susceptible." The President knew that Americans were "particularly susceptible" in 2002. We were exhausted, and justifiably terrified, not only because of September 11 but also because of the anthrax murders and the random Washington, DC, sniper killings that coincided with the Bush-Cheney administration's push for war.

President Bush and his White House Iraq Group did not merely exploit this fear; they magnified it. Worse yet, the President was the very person upon whom the public relied to protect it from danger and, one would hope, from omnipresent fear itself. Having used the authority of the Oval Office to make people more afraid, having created an even darker backdrop of fear, our highest officials exploited that reliance and the trust they enjoyed by virtue of their positions to sell something they knew the American public would not otherwise have bought. It was as if the cancer victim's trusted personal physician had convinced him that his disease was more advanced than it really was, and then used the same fraudulently heightened fear to manipulate him into buying a bogus cure-all.

In the language of criminal law, the President and his senior advisers have abused a position of trust to defraud the most vulnerable of victims. How would such a case be presented for prosecution? I invite you into the grand jury room to observe:

Ladies and Gentlemen, tomorrow begins our presentation in the case of United States v. George W. Bush et al. Please remember that you must decide the case based solely on the evidence that's presented and the applicable law, without regard to prejudice or sympathy. In other words, your politics, and any personal feelings you have toward the defendants -- positive or negative -- should have no bearing on your deliberations.

Excerpted from United States v. George W. Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega, published December 1, 2006 by Seven Stories Press and Tomdispatch.com. Copyright 2006 Elizabeth de la Vega.


Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.

In recent years, a combination of factors -- including but not limited to the consolidation of mainstream media by huge multinational entertainment conglomerates, the concomitant spread of cable television's highly partisan and factually challenged opinions-as-news formats, the digital information revolution and its explosion of online media outlets, and the Defense Department's Rumsfeldian reliance on "Information Dominance" -- have combined to create a serious long-term problem for our democracy. To put it bluntly, many of us no longer feel we can trust the news media to deliver the information we need to function as fully informed democrats.

Enter NewsTrust, an online social news network aimed at helping people identify quality journalism -- or "news you can trust." This free, not-for-profit service offers the most trusted news of the day, as selected by community members using state-of-the-art media literacy tools. By filtering content available from online sources, establishing common metrics for evaluation, and accessing the "wisdom of the crowds" through social networking, the free, not-for-profit NewsTrust service offers one possible solution to the "News You Can Trust" conundrum. The website, where members rate the news online based on commonly accepted standards of journalistic quality, features news and analysis from hundreds of mainstream and independent news sources. This non-partisan community effort tracks news media worldwide and helps citizens make informed decisions about democracy across party lines.

At NewsTrust, anyone can submit stories and news sources for community consideration. Each is then researched and rated by panels of reviewers for balance, fairness and other basic journalistic principles. Some reviewers are paid practicing journalists, others students -- but most are simply "ordinary citizens" seeking trustworthy information. NewsTrust's voluminous research shows that "amateur'" citizen reviewers using the site's unique review tools are able to evaluate news as reliably as experienced professionals.

NewsTrust is the brainchild of former journalist and brilliant digital media pioneer Fabrice Florin. After cashing out of a company that delivered content to mobile devices, Florin had time and money on his hands. While seeking something "socially useful" to occupy his time, he soon determined that media and its discontents would be a good place to put his energy. In early 2005, Florin began his effort to jumpstart NewsTrust. One of his first calls was to this reporter.

A mutual friend had referred Florin, whom I did not know. He told me of his plan to create an online space devoted "simply to helping each other find good journalism online." He said that he has some early interest and a modicum of backing from MoveOn, the self-identified "progressive family of organizations" that claims 3.3 million members across America working together "to realize the progressive vision of our country's founders."

I told Florin that I liked his concept, but thought it would never work if it accepted funding and support solely from the likes of MoveOn. The key to NewsTrust's success, to my mind, was to ensure that the service was completely non-ideological and non-partisan -- both in fact and in perception. Aligning closely with any partisan group -- especially the controversial Moveon -- would doom the effort at its inception. Finally, I told Florin he would also have to reach out to conservatives and independents and make strenuous efforts to include them in the NewsTrust community.

In light of the fact that I had told him he would have to turn down tens of thousands of dollars in greatly needed funding to work with me, I assumed that would be the last time I ever heard from Florin. Instead, to my great surprise, he called back several weeks later and said he thought I was right, and agreed to accept my suggestion of soliciting support and involvement from beyond the "progressive" community. More surprisingly, he also said he had decided not to accept MoveOn's money -- despite the project's dire funding prospects -- because to do so would damage (if not kill) the entire project. (Full Disclosure: I decided on the spot to accept Florin's offer of becoming NewsTrust's first -- and unpaid -- Editorial Director, and immediately began volunteering my services to help make the project a reality.)

Of course, the lack of funding could also kill the project -- and almost did several times. Efforts to garner grants from foundations proved largely futile, as the recent collapse in support for the not-for-profit independent media sector continues unabated. The response from leading schools of journalism, where we believe NewsTrust could play a vital role, was tepid, as administrators grappled with a changing industry, changing curricula and their own constant funding crises. Discussions with industry giants such as Google and Yahoo yielded initial interest but ultimately a let's-wait-and-see-what-happens response. Meanwhile work on developing the project and the site continued -- and the related expenses continued to mount.

When the money first ran out, Florin and NewsTrust Director of Product Development David Fox, who manages all web and technical development aspects of the project, rolled up their sleeves and went to work, spending months literally hand-coding and personally programming the site. When the money ran out the second time, Florin reached into his personal account and donated the funds necessary to keep the project going. Although he's far from wealthy, he says it's all been worth it.

"I'm just an ordinary person who was concerned about what was happening in our society and starting looking for quality, trustworthy information," Florin says. "But it was extremely tough to do so."

So who you gonna trust? Now there's NewsTrust. "Our social news network features some of the best and worst news of the day, all based on ratings from people just like you and me," says Florin. "We review everything our members submit and rate it based on journalistic quality, rather than mere popularity (which many other sites rely on) or partisan ideology, which we frankly identify as part of the problem with the media today -- and certainly not part of any solution."

NewsTrust has been operating as a closed, private pilot site for months, but is opening its portal this week to the public-at-large. It is user-friendly, offering a range of tools and review possibilities - including a 'quick review' option for newbies and those pressed for time, and a longer, more detailed 'full review' for dedicated news fanatics who are poised to make significant contributions of time and energy. It already tracks ratings for hundreds of text-based news sources, from blogs to newspapers to wire services to magazines, and continually adds new sources based on member submissions. After going public, its utility and reach should grow exponentially, and if all goes well, NewsTrust is poised to scale and to expand its ratings eventually to include rich audio and video sources as well.

In its first year as a pilot project, NewsTrust has accomplished a lot, including:

* developing a host of new online review tools;
* recruiting an experienced management team;
* adding an accomplished board of advisers;
* conducting extensive research and assessing market demand through national online surveys;
* testing educational applications of the service; and
* exploring collaborations and partnerships with a range of stakeholders, including both established news providers and startups, as well as civic groups and academic institutions.

What happens next is up to you.

Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

My father lost many of his relatives in Byelorussia during the Nazi rampage in that country. Naturally he followed the war news very closely and that day he told me about Roosevelt passing the "Trading with the enemy act in 1942 and how the U.S. confiscated the Prescot Bush holdings in a Nazi banking group. Until then I had never heard about that and I could hardly believe it. How could voters, less than ten years after that horrible war send such a man to the U.S. Senate?

On November 8th 2006, following the U.S. elections I thought about my father. I remembered when he took me to Union City New Jersey, not far from where we lived to see the German American Bund march through the streets swastikas and all. "You should go to Hell," My father would shout at them along with some choice words in Russian.

Yes, I thought about that day because I could easily equate the Jewish community that sent Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate with the German American Bund. They are the same kind of blind faith followers.

Almost the entire country voted against the war in Iraq, but Connecticut sent the leading warmonger and blind faith Israel supporter back to the senate. They knew who and what he was. They voted for him anyway just as they did in 1952 for Prescot Bush,the grandfather of our President. Most people the world over are only what the media makes them and the media in Connecticut supported Prescot Bush and recently. Lieberman.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia tells us that Prescot Bush came under fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Controversially, Bush wrote home about receiving medals for heroic exploits. His letters were later published in Columbus newspapers, but were retracted a few weeks later when it was revealed that he, in fact, had not received such medals. The retraction was made in a cable in which Bush stated that his earlier letter had been written "in a spirit of fun" and was not intended for publication. Is lying passed down genetically?

Investigator John Loftus has said, "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averell Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."

Ben Aris in Berlin, and Duncan Campbell in Washington wrote for the Saturday September 25, 2004 issue of the The Guardian "New documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

As a young man I wondered how in hell the German people ever let insane Nazism happen to their country. When I had German prisoners aboard our ship during the war, I asked them that question, They shook their heads and looked down. Later one rated man said, "It's a sickness. Someone tells you you are better than others and you like to hear it so you follow."

Simple enough. It is the fuel of all religion and politics. It is also the wind that keeps the wild fires of greed spreading.