This column is by two septuagenarian "truthers" who would rather be doing something else and are behind in our preparations. We speak this coming Sunday for the second time in Pittsfield about our walk across the state to demand a new, independent, honest investigation of the "9/ll" attacks of September 2001. Several days later, after speaking at the Provincetown Library, we start walking westward.

We both walk and hike. Bruce was an engineering analyst at GE Ordnance, then taught college math. Before that he worked in farming, had his own home construction business, was a union carpenter in Montana. A difficult family matter had taken him out there. Mark's path to retirement was smoother, all of it in journalism, most of it in the family business, Eagle Publishing, with three years off to work for two international news services.

Neither of us is a fool or a dupe or a "conspiracy theorist," as that handy term of disparagement has had it since the 1960s (look it up). We don't embrace the government's conspiracy theory that 19 Al Qaeda terrorists guided by Osama bin Laden and company, armed only with box cutters, hijacked and commandeered four jetliners and crashed them into the Twin Towers skyscrapers in New York, the Pentagon headquarters in Virginia, and (encountering in-plane resistance) a field in Pennsylvania, somehow evading the government's national security apparatus. The government's conspiracy theory has simplicity going for it, as all good yarns do, but it's too simple.

Our national news media, though, bought it along with all of the attendant excuses and phony science from officialdom, and is hanging onto it. And because of that, millions of Americans still buy it, when they think about 9/11 at all.

How did the two of us go astray?

A sophisticated crime

Bruce: "In 2006 a female friend in Worcester beat on me every time she saw me about the 9/11 and the importance of enlightening people to the truth. I took the hint and started contemplating 9/11. ... From that beginning, elements of the 9/11 mystery fell into place abetted by books, videos, conversations, meetings, presentations by experts. Nine/eleven was a sophisticated crime which does require scrutiny and reflection to comprehend. Yet many aspects of the government's explanation are either clearly false, or with vanishingly small probability of being true. Not to mention the physical impossibilities and improbabilities."

Mark: "I got a copy of David Ray Griffin's first book on 9/11, 'The New Pearl Harbor,' published in 2004 (none of his books are reviewed in newspapers or displayed prominently in bookstores) and was hooked. I lent it to a friend who had been a flight engineer for two airlines for most of his career, but he wouldn't countenance this alternative view. Rather than refute Griffin's thesis, he wouldn't talk about it. I've given perhaps 25 copies of the 50-page 'Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7,' put out by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (and available for free on its website) to people with scientific or engineering backgrounds. Most of them won't discuss it. A few say it makes sense, but those who criticize it won't sit down and go through it with line by line saying where it's invalid."

Triggered string of wars

We undertake this walk across Massachusetts in order to promote open discussion of all angles of the crime of the century. It killed nearly 3,000 people on one day and led to a string of wars costing trillions of dollars and visiting incalculable bloodshed and destruction abroad. We aim to help penetrate a seeming conspiracy of silence on the part of the news media, which behave as if being disciplined gatekeepers of what Americans and the world should be exposed to is more important than digging into the meat of an uncomfortable but pivotal chapter in history.

We want to talk with as many people as people as possible to get their views about it and how they have come to hold them. The 9/11 Truth Action Project (TAP) has already lent us a hand. We hope to speak at more churches and libraries, at senior centers and colleges, on sidewalks and luncheonettes. We'll distribute leaflets packed with information and links to more. We'll be respectful of others' feelings and perspectives. And we invite fellow and sister walkers, for whatever distances.

Hope to see some of you at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church on Park Square this Sunday morning at 9, between the 8 and 10 o'clock services (to which you are also invited). The conversation is in the dining room in the basement, directly accessible through the Allen Street entrance.















