Following recent comments by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump that he will expose the truth about those behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers, members of the 9/11 truth movement have been debating whether the GOP presidential candidate can be trusted to bring about full 9/11 disclosure. While some members of the 9/11 truth movement who support Trump have been touting him as America’s only hope for full 9/11 disclosure, others have expressed skepticism, saying he is not a genuine truther and thus cannot be trusted as president to bring about full 9/11 disclosure.

A third group of 9/11 truthers, who appear to represent the majority, have expressed ambivalence, noting that although he is not a genuine truther, he is the best hope among all candidates for full 9/11 disclosure.

For instance, a truther commenting on a Facebook forum for members of the 9/11 truth movement expressed the ambivalence prevalent among members of the movement, saying, “Love him or hate him… Trump is the only Presidential candidate giving 9/11 any publicity.”

Alex Jones, an influential 9/11 conspiracy theorist, has recently stepped up a campaign through his website, Infowars, promoting Trump as the candidate for Americans who want full 9/11 disclosure.

According to Jones and other 9/11 truthers who support Trump, the GOP establishment under the influence of the Bush family is afraid of the prospects of a Trump presidency, because he has signaled recently that he will expose the truth about the 9/11 attacks.

The ongoing campaign by influential leaders of the 9/11 truth movement who support Trump and believe he will expose the truth behind the attack on the Twin Towers follows recent media reports quoting Donald Trump apparently promising full 9/11 disclosure if he is elected president. He reportedly made the promise at a campaign event at Bluffton, South Carolina, on February 17.

“We went after Iraq, they did not knock down the World Trade Center,” he said. “It wasn’t the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center, we went after Iraq, we decimated the country… you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center. Because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find it’s the Saudis, okay? But you will find out.”

Trump had made similar comments earlier on Fox And Friends on the morning of Wednesday, February 17.

“Well, they weren’t there, they didn’t find them. They found nothing,” he said. “Who blew up the World Trade Center? It wasn’t the Iraqis; it was Saudi — take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.”

Trump was here referring to 28 pages of a report, the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” that were classified and kept hidden from public for “national security” reasons.

Members of the 9/11 truth movement believe that the 28 pages contain vital information about international connections in the 9/11 attacks and that the pages were withheld because they directly implicate the Saudi ruling elite and, by extension, the Bush administration and the Bush family, who are believed to have intimate ties with the Saudi Royal family.

The conviction that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks was strengthened when Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who co-chaired a congressional inquiry into the attacks, told The Blaze in August 2014, “None of the people leading this investigation think it is credible that 19 people — most who could not speak English and did not have previous experience in the United States — could carry out such a complicated task without external assistance.”

He added at the time that a “huge breakthrough was coming with classified 9/11 information.”

Two World Trade Center after being hit by United Airlines Flight 175 [Image via Robert/Wikimedia]

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also called for release of the missing documents at a press conference in 2014, saying he had read them and that they challenged the official or mainstream account of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“As I read it — we all had our own experience — I had to stop every couple pages and just sort of absorb and try to rearrange my understanding of history for the past 13 years and years leading up to that. It challenges you to rethink everything,” he said.

However, while 9/11 truthers believe that establishing a Saudi connection in the 9/11 attacks would open the way to implicating the Bush administration, Trump has not suggested that he thinks the Bush administration was complicit in the attacks. He has only accused Bush of lying about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction to justify launching an attack on the country. He also accused the Bush administration of ignoring intelligence that could have helped to foil the September 11 attacks.

The conviction that Trump will pursue only partial disclosure by implicating only the Saudis explains why many members of the 9/11 truth movement are wary of his promises. The core belief of the 9/11 truth movement is that the U.S. government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

This not the first time that Trump’s candidacy has sparked a public debate in connection with the September 11, 2001, attacks. The GOP presidential candidate’s supporters sparked a debate last year when they proclaimed him a modern-day Nostradamus for his alleged demonstration of extraordinary prescience by predicting the 9/11 attacks and the threat Osama bin Laden posed to national security.

His supporters claimed that he predicted the 9/11 attacks in his book The America We Deserve, which was published in January 2000. He stated in the book that the U.S. was in danger of “the sort of terrorist attacks that will make 1993 bombing of the World Trade center look like kids playing with firecrackers.”

And indeed, Trump attempted to promote himself as a prescient leader at a November 2015 rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, by claiming that he predicted the 9/11 attacks.

Remains of parts of the World Trade Center after the September 11, 2001 attack [Image via Eric J. Tilford/US Navy/Wikimedia/Public Domain]

He said, “In my book, ‘The America We Deserve’ — I said Osama Bin Laden, better watch him, bad guy… In my book, before the World Trade Center. I said Osama bin Laden, I said you better take him out.”

He also said in an interview on the Alex Jones Radio Show, “I wrote a very political book in the year 2000, ‘The America We Deserve,’ and I said in that book that we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden — He was saying really nasty things about our country and what he wants to do to it. And I wrote in the book two years before the World Trade Center came down — I talked to you about Osama bin Laden, you better take him out. And now people are seeing that, they’re saying, ‘You know, Trump predicted Osama bin Laden’ — which actually is true. And two years later, a year and a half later he knocked down the World Trade Center.”

But Trump’s political opponents have tried to debunk the claim that he predicted the 9/11 attacks. They have also dismissed efforts by his supporters to invest him with exceptional powers of prescience.

Trump’s political opponents quote FactCheck.org, which accused Donald Trump of exaggeration when he claimed that he predicted the 9/11 attacks and Osama bin Laden in his book.

According to the fact-checking website, there was nothing remarkable about Trump’s comments in the sections of his book where he mentioned bin Laden because the al-Qaeda terrorist leader was already well-known at the time Trump published his book. The U.S. government was also already aware of bin Laden’s terrorist network and the threat it posed to U.S. security.

FactCheck.org argued that Trump made only a passing reference to bin Laden as an illustration of the government’s poorly coordinated foreign policy while denying that the U.S. faces a single major “looming crisis.”

And contrary to what he claimed on The Alex Jones Radio Show, he gave no specific warning or prediction about a major attack linked to bin Laden, and neither did he warn that the U.S. should watch out for bin Laden or take him out as he claimed.

However, FactCheck.org acknowledged that in a separate passage Trump expressed fears that the U.S. was under threat of terrorist attack “that will make 1993 bombing of the World Trade center look like kids playing with firecrackers.” But the website noted that Trump himself admitted that the threat was widely acknowledged at the time.

“No sensible analyst rejects this possibility, and plenty of them, like me, are not wondering if but when it will happen,” Trump wrote.

[Photo by John Locher/AP]