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As you may know, the Citizens’ 9/11 Commission Campaign has gone through some significant changes in the last few months.  We are back online now, and reorganizing to continue our prime mission – creating a real investigation into the events of 9/11 through state ballot initiatives. 

Our major changes began late last November when Senator Mike Gravel first announced his departure from our group’s mission so as to return to his long time mission of creating a national initiative.  While we wish him well with his mission, we chose not to join Mike in that effort, but rather decided to continue pursuing the state ballot goals as outlined by our revised strategic plan.

Gravel’s departure in December was not without difficulties, as you may have heard.  While our primary focus is on moving forward and rebuilding on our existing foundation so as to advance our mission, we do address the ongoing dispute with Gravel in a separate post below.

As we have learned, it typically takes at least two years to mount successful state ballot initiatives.  Since we only formally launched our current website less than five months before Mike’s departure, our efforts are no more than well started.  The 2014 election cycle is more in line with the two-year period typical for implementing state ballot initiatives.

Our recent rushed attempt in Massachusetts to organize and raise sufficient funds for signature gathering in that state not surprisingly fell short for the 2012 election cycle, yet yielded a number of successes and established that state as a strong prospect for 2014.  We are also still considering ballot initiatives in a handful of other prime initiative friendly states, including Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Maine and DC, and will be further evaluating those and other states, such as California in the coming months.  California remains the best option in most ways except one, it is by far the most expensive.  So it will remain an elusive dream, unless a few funding angels decide to change that. 

One of the main qualifying criteria in evaluating the optimum state(s) for our purpose is the presence of enough local resident 9/11 truth activists in the state who are willing to help lead their state campaign.  It will be up to you, our fellow 9/11 truth activists, to make possible a ballot initiative your own state, by contacting us so we can work together to make it happen.

Part of our new direction includes wanting to engage more effectively with the 9/11 truth movement than we did in the frantic months last summer and fall.  We want to better gather advice, support, and more fully address your concerns, so that you will feel more a part of this effort.  We look forward to many of you working more actively with us in our mission.

We are looking to partner with fellow 9/11 truth activists who, like us, also believe that state ballot initiatives are our best approach to our long sought after goal of a real, independent investigation into the events of 9/11.  We currently need a few web savvy individuals to help us with our revised website, and to coordinate our outreach via social networks.  Until then, hang in with us as we continue to rebuild our website to be more interactive and up to date.

In the mean time we are setting up a G-mail list serve to allow us to reopen lines of communication.  Send email to [email protected] to sign up for that.

The success of this project depends on you, our fellow 9/11 truth activists.  If you share our belief that the state ballot initiative is the best approach to a real and independent investigation, please contact us to let us know how you would like to help this effort succeed.

We've all been taught, and rightly so, that Congress is the constitutional forum in which solve national problems through democratic deliberation. And so, it is not surprising that some in our movement would advocate the idea of petitioning Congress and sending our activists to lobby the halls of Congress in person. Unfortunately, we believe this tactic to be intrinsically self-defeating. We understand, of course, that this approach is well-meaning. But we oppose, on grounds of common sense, the idea of dispatching people into the bowels of a political institution that we believe is literally built around denial of 9/11 truth. In sending our activists to Congress, we are putting them in the hands of two corrupt and corporatized political parties that are known countenance state repression, torture, crimes against democracy, illegal warfare—well, you know the list.

Further, we object on pragmatic grounds. In making pressure on Congress our political strategy, we are in effect endorsing this organization as an appropriate and just forum for redress of grievances about 9/11, which in our humble opinion is a political impossibility—in almost any imaginable scenario. And remember, 911cc.org is led and endorsed by a former distinguished U.S. Senator, the founder of our organization, and is endorsed by two other prominent Congresspeople, Representatives Dan Hamburg and Cynthia McKinney.

One more important point: If, somehow, enough citizens do swarm the halls of Congress with petitions or copies of peer-reviewed articles, that institution may—in theory—be moved to act by overwhelming pressure from below. But we can be near-certain that such a process will result in yet another grand deception. In such a scenario, Congress stages a “new, 9/11 investigation” that quells the grassroots, but is rigged yet again, perhaps this time less blatantly. They limit the scope of their new commission just as before, and stack it with insiders as before (maybe adding one or two token “truthers”or those capable of a "limited hang-out" with 9/11 truth). And, perhaps this time, they go a little further by sacrificing a few lower-level “conspirators” (for example, those behind the “Able Danger” scandal) in an effort to let off steam and thus deflate and ultimately delegitimize the truth movement.

You probably can infer by now where this argument is going. We at the Citizen 9/11 Commission Campaign believe that we have found a solution to the gridlock and corruption that pervade our federal system:  That solution is direct democracy and the state initiative process. That solution gives our activists a chance to mature politically by given them an effective vehicle in which to exercise their rights as citizens. It provides an outlet for passionate activism that is structured and reliable, one that leads to a legal process that has teeth and gets concrete results in the real, political world. And this solution has the potential to both heal and unify the 9/11 truth movement, redeeming our ten years of effort by providing a fulfilling and functional platform of political self-expression.