The Biggest Conspiracy
William Rodriguez was a janitor in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11.
A light snows fell in Ann Arbor two hours after an April 7th Hash Bash. The day’s hash-related events had come to a close, and though some attendees still drifted around the Diag, the cold had driven the majority home. In front of the wooden double doors of the Michigan League, three men stood around smoking cigarettes. Beneath their open jackets, they wore shirts bearing the words “Tyranny Response Team.” One man sported a baseball cap bearing the Marine Corps logo; another wore a National Rifle Association hat. They had taken a long commute on that day, driving up from Manchester, Michigan, to hear a hero speak.
William Rodriguez, a former janitor at the World Trade Center, single-handedly saved the lives of fifteen people during the September 11 attacks in 2001 and enabled the rescue of countless others. He is believed to have been the last person to exit the North Tower and was honored at the White House five times for his actions. The three men, however, believe him to be a hero for a different reason. Rodriguez does not accept the government’s story that several operatives of an organization known as Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center. He believes that the United States government is the main culprit and travels to speak his mind all over the country and all over the world.
??!http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1173/1402061227_cbcbaff58b_m.jpg! %William Rodriguez directly saved 15 people on 9/11, when he was working as a janitor in the Twin Towers. Illustration by Quinn Burrell%??
On that day, Rodriguez was not to be the only speaker. The event, organized by Ann Arbor 9/11 Truth, included several speakers from Scholars for 9/11 Truth; the 9/11 documentary, Open Complicity: Anatomy of the 9/11 Cover-Up, was to premier. Three hundred people showed up to the Michigan League Ballroom – by eerie coincidence at 911 N. University Ave. – to hear Rodriguez and the Scholars.
It was a remarkably diverse crowd. As Jimmy Schiel, the most talkative of the three men from Manchester, said of the event and the broader movement of which it is a part, “You can see hippies, right-wing conservatives, rich people, poor people, Jews, Christians, and even ex-marines.”
The size of the base of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as it has been termed by the mainstream press, is far from certain and can be said to claim varying amounts of popular sympathy, depending on how the question is phrased. A May 2006 poll by Zogby International indicated that 42% of Americans more likely agree with people who believe that the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks, saying there has been a cover-up, than with people who believe that “the 9/11 Commission was a bi-partisan group of honest and well-respected people and that there is no reason they would want to cover-up anything.” In a July 2006 Scripps Howard and Ohio University poll, 36% of respondents said it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them. In the same poll, 16% of respondents said that it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings. In a New York Times/CBS News poll that is often cited within the 9/11 Truth Movement, only 16% of respondents said the government headed by President George W. Bush is telling the truth on what it knew prior to the terrorist attacks, a number which has decreased considerably since May 2002.
Schiel and his friends, however, have been believers in a 9/11 conspiracy since the attacks took place. “Right after the planes hit, we loaded up our guns and bought generators,” Schiel said. “We thought martial law was going to be declared.”
The three professed a general mistrust of the government, tracing this back to the 1993 siege by the FBI of a Branch Davidian compound at Waco, in which 79 people were killed. They claimed that events since the 9/11 attacks have proved their fears to be correct, citing the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the Patriot Act.
Ben, Schiel’s cousin, is an ex-Marine who served in the First Gulf War. He talked about how the government used the 9/11 attacks to invade Iraq, which they had been planning to do in advance. Ben served in the Marine Corps from 1988 to 1992, when, he says, he was just a nineteen-year-old kid who didn’t know anything. After he got back, a girl he met at a party gave him a book to read called The Unseen Hand, a conspiratorial view of history written by A. Ralph Epperson. In the book, Epperson documents a history of secret societies, economic totalitarianism, and communist plots that he claims have shaped and continue to shape the world we live in today. The book got Ben thinking about the reasons behind the events of the past and present. He eventually concluded that the American government, among other organizations, is dominated by a small group trying to establish a “New World Order,” a belief which Jimmy Schiel and Mike, Jimmy’s friend of thirty years, hold as well.
Ben was not happy when his younger cousin recently made the decision to join the Army. “How can you give them [the Iraqi people] freedom when we don’t have freedom here?” he told him.
He said of Bush, “They should bury him next to Saddam Hussein. He always wanted to go to Iraq. Leave him there.”
Eventually, the three men headed into the League to hear Rodriguez speak.
The Janitor
Rodriguez, a former magician’s assistant and an immigrant from Puerto Rico, has a commanding presence. Striding from his podium to the audience and back, he sweepingly gestures with his hands to punctuate key points and raises his voice suddenly to articulate shocking or meaningful events, leaving a window of time blank to allow for reflection. Dressed in a suit and tie, Rodriguez uses no notes. Since the attacks, Rodriguez has traveled the world, speaking of his experiences on that critical day to many people, among them the President of the Assembly in Venezuela, members of Japanese parliament, the former prime minister of Malaysia, and numerous foreign dignitaries. He will soon meet with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in anticipation of an official Venezuelan government investigation into 9/11.
When the three men from Manchester entered the ballroom, Rodriguez was doing an exaggerated impression of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was the original appointee to head the government commission established “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks,” but withdrew because he would have had to disclose the clients of his private consulting business. Rodriguez expressed amusement at this appointment of a man whom he said was considered worldwide to be a war criminal to head such an investigation. The audience laughed uproariously.
Rodriguez discussed how, after the attacks, he became a public figure. He didn’t yet believe that the government’s story was false and spent much of his time working to get legislators to set up scholarship programs for the children of 9/11 victims and to get a Tax Relief Act passed that would cover all American victims of terrorism. Rodriguez founded the Hispanic Victims Group, which helped secure amnesty for undocumented Hispanic workers killed in the attacks and played a large part in helping to establish the 9/11 Commission.
_“Did you hear from the actual victims? Of course not!”_
When he drew attention to the fact that a mere janitor played such a key role in establishing the 9/11 Commission, Rodriguez sounded like a motivational speaker. “Motivation and enthusiasm provide you with all you need to succeed,” he said. Next, however, he talked about the development of his doubts.
“The 9/11 Commission was created with one caveat,” Rodriguez said. “The government claimed that the families would be upset if certain questions were looked into.” Yet these same families, Rodriguez said, supported a full investigation of all events surrounding 9/11.
Rodriguez nevertheless looked forward to speaking before the Commission. He was to testify behind closed doors, unlike other witnesses, and his testimony was supposed to have been used in the 9/11 Commission Report. But Rodriguez began to change his mind after seeing how the commission worked. His testimony was omitted from the Report, and what he considers to be a key part of his testimony was edited out by the American media. He said that the commissioners didn’t answer his questions and avoided the issues he was raising.
“Did you hear from the actual victims? Of course not!” he shouted before the audience. “It has been the families who have fought to get information out. … The excuse they give is that they don’t want the families to experience grief.”
In 2004, Rodriguez filed a lawsuit against numerous federal government officials under the RICO Act, which was passed to enable the government to prosecute organized crime as a conspiracy. “We have never sued for money. We have sued from the very beginning to get information out,” he said to wild applause.
Rodriguez began his account of his experiences of September 11, a story that, given the frequency of his speaking engagements, he must have told at least fifty times.
Total Horror
Rodriguez, a high-ranking janitor, was in charge of cleaning 110 flights of stairs in the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
“If somebody did my routine, if they ever finished, it would take three days of sick leave for them to recuperate,” he said.
After arriving for work at 8:30 on the morning of 9/11, Rodriguez went to the North Tower’s maintenance office, located on the first sublevel.
“You heard BOOM!!!” Rodriguez shouted. “An explosion so loud forces you upwards!
“I worked 20 years in the building,” he said. “I would know the difference between something coming from the bottom and something coming from the top.”
More explosions came, he said, this time from above. A black man ran into the office, skin hanging from his face and off his arms and dangling from the tips of his hands.
“Horror,” Rodriguez said. “Total horror. Everybody screaming.”
Another explosion came from the top, and everything in the building shook as if it were in an earthquake. Rodriguez added that he thought that it was actually a bomb, not an earthquake, comparing the explosion to his experience during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when he was stuck in one of the elevators of the North Tower.
This time, he ran outside, leading the burnt man, among others, to safety.
“For the first time, I hear, ‘A plane hit the building, a plane hit the building,’” Rodriguez said. “I could not understand why they were saying it was a plane.” He knew that the building was in a no-fly zone.
At that point, he remembered the danger posed to people in the Windows on the World Restaurant, an elegant establishment at the top of the North Tower. Every morning, Rodriguez would ascend to the restaurant, where the Hispanic wait staff would serve him a free breakfast, before he began cleaning from the top down. If he had been there when the first explosion happened, he would almost certainly have died.
“I came in late that day,” said Rodriguez. “God saved me for a reason.”
After deciding to enter the South Tower and leaving it, Rodriguez went back into the North Tower. He headed for the basement, where he heard people screaming for help. Two people were trapped in an elevator, and Rodriguez could talk to them through the mesh on top. He ran to fetch a ladder long enough to reach them and found only one that was not chained up. Hurrying back to the elevator shaft, he opened the top, lowered the ladder into the elevator, and took the trapped people outside.
At this point Rodriguez emphasized another point that he claims contradicts the government’s story. If, when a plane hit the top of the building, a fireball went down the elevator shaft the way the government claims, the elevator operator should have been burned to a crisp. The man is still alive and only broke both ankles, Rodriguez said, which casts doubt on the official story.
Evidence!
Rodriguez possessed one of five master-keys to the World Trade Center, and it enabled him to rescue yet more people. Announcing that he was still in possession of the master key, Rodriguez held it up before the audience to the greatest applause thus far. As his website shows, this same key has been photographed countless times, in the hands of powerful officials both domestic and foreign, famous actors and celebrities, and fans and supporters posing for pictures. Rodriguez keeps it on a chain and wears it in his breast pocket, an icon of his almost religious devotion to the cause of 9/11 Truth.
After he reentered the North Tower, Rodriguez, using his key and his knowledge of the building, led a team of firemen up the building’s narrow stairs. “Because the stairs were not wide enough, people going up had trouble because they were colliding with people coming down.” Due to his not wearing heavy equipment and having cleaned the stairwells every day, Rodriguez was able to quickly maneuver his way upwards.
While Rodriguez and the firemen were making their way up the stairs, a third violent explosion shook the building. Rodriguez, who thought he heard it coming from below, frantically asked the firemen what it was. “That must be the gas tanks from the kitchen blowing up,” one of them replied. Though he knew the kitchens were powered by electricity, Rodriguez was too distracted to pursue the matter.
Eventually, the firemen could continue no longer. They collapsed to the floor and dropped all of their heavy equipment, sitting on the floor and trying to breathe. After breaking into a vending machine to get them bottled water, Rodriguez called his mother in Puerto Rico from within the building, to reassure her in case she saw something about 9/11 on the news. “Get out now! There’s fire!” she told him. “These people don’t know the building,” he responded and hung up to try to get more people out.
There had been no mandatory training to instruct people where the building’s exits were, and Rodriguez had to direct several people out of the building. He decided to descend to the 33rd floor to get dust masks. “That’s where I had my office,” he said. “OK, OK, it was a closet.” The audience laughed.
While he was getting the masks, Rodriguez thought he heard something being moved on the floor above, the 34th floor. The floor had been emptied some time before 9/11, everything in it had been demolished, and the lease owner had been planning to rebuild the floor to suit his own purposes. “I used to have lunch on that floor because I wanted to hide from my supervisor,” Rodriguez said. The floor should have been empty, he said, and he never entered it on 9/11. The implication was that the explosives supposed to have been used by the government to demolish the North Tower could have been set up on that floor.
Rodriguez climbed up the stairs yet again. When he reached the 39th floor, one of the rescue workers turned to him, saying, “You’ve done enough. Give me a hand on the 27th floor with a man in a wheelchair.” Rodriguez obliged and descended the stairs with the man. When they arrived at the 27th floor, the wheelchair-bound man had already been laid out across a stretcher and was being taken out of the building. At this point, Rodriguez said, he heard the collapse of the South Tower and a loud, repeated popping sound inside the elevator.
Rodriguez claimed that, based on his chronology and other reported observations, experts have concluded that this last explosion came from the bottom. “Evidence! Evidence!” he cried to the audience.
When he got outside of the North Tower, Rodriguez saw gray dust everywhere. Revolving doors were shattered to pieces, and the debris of the world’s financial center was scattered everywhere. He heard a voice shouting from behind him, “Don’t look back! Don’t look back!”
He looked back.
Rodriguez saw the bodies of those who had jumped out of the building. They blanketed the pavement, and when Rodriguez looked at them more closely, he could recognize some of them by their clothes. One woman he had saved was lying there, cut in half by a huge sheet of glass. Rodriguez speculates that she made it out, but was then struck by the glass as it fell from one of the collapsing towers.
At that moment, he heard another voice say, “Run!” He shouted that he had nowhere to go and as the North Tower collapsed was forced to dive under a fire truck. The debris fell to the ground in a massive torrent, nearly flattening the truck. “I wanted my mother to have something to bury,” he said.
The skills Rodriguez had picked up performing escapes as a magician’s assistant came in handy. He remembered to lower his breathing and relax, maneuvering this way and that under the collapsing debris to avoid being killed. “I expected death, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced to the audience in typical magician’s style, showing a slide of the truck after it had gotten pulverized.
After being treated for his injuries in an ambulance for fifty minutes, Rodriguez came out again to help search through the rubble of the towers.
As his story came to a close, Rodriguez showed a slide of Felipe David, the man he had first saved, the one whose skin had been burnt from his hands and face. David had recovered from a coma after the attacks and his story corroborated Rodriguez’s. The government never heard his testimony, and Rodriguez went on to list a number of other men with similar stories. He described the efforts of victims’ families to fight for a decent memorial, calling for “a respectable and honorable place for us to pray for our loved ones,” but talked about the politicization of the disaster.
“Giuliani is running for president as a hero, but people forget his record from before the attacks.” One week after 9/11, Rodriguez said, the steel from the Twin Towers was sold to Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia to make paperclips. “This is a criminal act,” he said, adding that Giuliani got $3 million as an advance for his book. “Who’s making money from 9/11?” he asked. “Follow the money.”
Advancing from his podium, Rodriguez looked over everyone and shouted: “We want to reopen investigation! We want answers! We want our rights!”
“They keep us in constant fear!” he added. “I’m struggling to do all this on a shoestring. … Do you know how my family lives in constant fear?
“9/11 changed history all over the world,” he said. “I’m already in the history books, but we owe it to the truth.”
The audience erupted into voluminous and lengthy applause and stood almost as one body.
“There’s a lot about conspiracy theories,” Rodriguez said over the noise. “But guess what? The biggest conspiracy was placed by the government. A conspiracy theory will talk about speculation. I talk about experience.” In conclusion, he said, “If I as a janitor was able to make those changes, you with all your credentials can make a difference.”
To Be an American
After he finished speaking, Rodriguez was surrounded by fans. One group of college students from out of state posed for a picture with him. “It’s funny: I lost my religion the same day you found yours,” one woman said.
Schiel and his friends were pleased with the speech. “He’s a regular guy like you and me,” he said, bringing up the story of Rodriguez’s hiding from his supervisor to eat lunch.
When asked about the requirements for membership in the 9/11 Truth Movement, Schiel responded, “You only need to be an American.” He didn’t agree with all of the theories advanced by other members, though. “There are a lot of nutty theories out there. Some people believe that there were no planes and that the government used holograms. There is also some anti-Semitism. Some people even think it was aliens who carried out the attacks.”
Jimmy, Ben, and Mike agreed that all they would like to see would be “the system working.” They wanted those who truly carried out or arranged for the 9/11 attacks to be indicted and tried in court. Only if the law fails would they advocate armed insurrection. In a world where “democracy is two wolves and one sheep planning what to eat for lunch,” Shiel said, “the constitution only works if you fight for it.”
In the meantime, what they do is spread the word to others, whether through talking to people they bump into in a social setting, passing out any of the plethora of DVD documentaries made about 9/11, blogging or posting news bulletins on MySpace, or showing 9/11 DVDs at a backyard barbeque. “If someone just laughs, it means they have been basically been brainwashed,” Schiel explained. “But if someone argues, it means they have questions they are trying to work out.”
Proving the Pythagorean Theorem
The driving force behind Truth Strikes Back was a local activist named Adam DeAngeli, who made the film that premiered at the event. DeAngeli used to operate a small “alternative” store on South University Ave called The Planet, which sold political buttons, DVDs, t-shirts, literature, music, and spray-painting supplies. He intended to establish a place for activists and politically oriented people to congregate but due to limited business was forced to move to 613 North Main St and then forced to open his store on an appointment-only basis.
DeAngeli and a group of about ten others organized and publicized the event at which Rodriguez and the Scholars for 9/11 Truth appeared. “We really did try to find someone to debate us,” DeAngeli said. “We gave over 1000 U-M faculty invitations, to no avail.”
The Scholars for 9/11 Truth were forced to hold a mock debate, in which Kevin Ryan argued from what he saw to be the government’s point of view against Kevin Barrett, who argued that the government’s story was false. Ryan is a former executive at the company that certified the steel used in the Twin Towers, and he has questioned the validity of the claim that fuel fires caused the towers to collapse. Barrett is a lecturer on Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
After Rodriguez spoke, DeAngeli screened Open Complicity: Anatomy of the 9/11 Cover-Up, a documentary he made about 9/11. “The video clips were all downloaded from the web, and the ‘slides’ were made with Paint Shop Pro. For the narration, I had a friend with a better voice than mine just record it into a microphone plugged into my computer, then edited out the bad takes. The whole thing was done at home.”
Such films about 9/11 are scattered across the Internet, using spliced news-footage and interviews set to ominous-sounding voiceovers. It would seem that making another one would add little. DeAngeli says his motivation for making his film was to “break new ground—I was tired of other films discrediting the official story and leaving it at that; they get repetitive after a while, like proving the Pythagorean Theorem two dozen ways. That’s why my film advances particular ideas about not only what did not happen, but what did happen.”
The film discourses at length about perceived insider-trading on the day of the attacks, as well as a perceived connection to the Israeli Mossad. It moves along rather slowly, spending much of its length probing miniscule unexplained details. The large amounts of United and American Airlines stock options that were traded just prior to 9/11 are viewed as clear evidence of a 9/11 conspiracy, and the five Israelis who were detained by the FBI directly after 9/11 because they were reported to be celebrating and taking pictures of the events are seen as certain proof of Israeli involvement.
The 9/11 Commission has said that much of the suspicious trading can be traced to an options-trading newsletter sent to its subscribers on September 9th that recommended these trades, and the FBI has concluded, based on field work, polygraph tests, cross-checking, and intelligence work, that the five Israeli men had no foreknowledge of the attacks, though there is still disagreement about whether they were in some way connected to Israeli intelligence. The film, however, tries to convince viewers that these incidents so obviously implicate key officials and figures that the government arranged them to prevent the traders and Mossad agents, who were peripherally involved in the conspiracy, from blowing the whistle on the scheme because the whistleblowers themselves would then be implicated in the conspiracy.
The Truth Movement
According to DeAngeli, the 9/11 Truth Movement is “burgeoning more rapidly than even the anti-war movement.” Most recently, he said, “Rosie O’Donnell has begun speaking out, and the mainstream media is bending over backwards trying to smear her. But these attacks seem to be having the opposite effect: the mainstream media is only further discrediting itself. People have paid for scientific polls from time to time, and they are all showing that our numbers continue to climb. Just Google ‘9/11 poll.’”
DeAngeli emphasized some of the broader perspectives of the movement. “I don’t know where the term ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ came from, but I feel that dropping the first word and just calling it ‘The Truth Movement’ is more appropriate. 9/11 isn’t the only issue we are concerned about. 9/11 is an extremely important issue, but there are others.”
Many people associated with the 9/11 Truth Movement view 9/11 as the latest in a long and incremental push by a tiny elite to gain greater control over governmental power and public life. DeAngeli sees the United Nations as having a “hidden agenda” and the Federal Reserve System as being part of a large-scale money scam carried out by the government. The three men from Manchester see the unseen hand of the New World Order as being intimately involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Kevin Barrett believes that most terrorist attacks are government sponsored and that “governments have been doing this since Roman times,” but said that he tries to stick with clear evidence and that there is not enough of it to implicate groups such as the New World Order or the Illuminati.
Whether or not the 9/11 Truth Movement is actually a “movement” is up for debate. “It really isn’t a singular organization at all; it is just a collection of local organizations and websites all over the place,” DeAngeli said. The movement might at this point be more accurately compared to a large Internet fan community, such as those that exist for Star Trek or Harry Potter, but one that is more dedicated and controversial. The more vocal and publicly known advocates of 9/11 Truth constitute the only kind of leadership or hierarchy in it.
“This actually makes it very resistant to COINTELPRO-type disruption, because there are no leaders to disrupt,” DeAngeli said. “When somebody popular in the Truth Movement turns out to be a government shill or just starts acting ridiculous, we all just sort of shrug it off and move on.
“For example,” he said, “one previously well-respected figure, Professor James Fetzer, recently flipped out and began spouting nonsense about how advanced weapons in outer space had to bring down the Twin Towers because even controlled demolition couldn’t have pulverized the concrete or some such thing. It wasn’t a week later that a new organization replaced his, and his audience was gone.”
The 9/11 Truth Movement is subject to factional disputes and partisan bickering. The diverse range of theories purporting to explain the 9/11 attacks can fall into the categories of LIHOP (in which the government Let It Happen on Purpose), MIHOP (in which the government Made It Happen on Purpose), or something much farther from the government’s official story, and one theory’s supporters may come into conflict with another theory’s believers. Much of the 9/11 Truth Movement is spread over the Internet, and many chat rooms are filled with furious disagreement over how and by whom those buildings were destroyed on that crucial day. That Truth Movement members cover the whole range of the political spectrum does little to diminish the fury.
The question of just what those in the movement can do to counteract what they see as increased government dominance over its populace remains unanswered. “Well, ultimately, of course,” DeAngeli said, “the perpetrators must be brought to justice and their system overthrown. Unfortunately we do not have quite enough people at that point yet.”
Filed on 05/17/2007