While many of us suspected his accusations were some form of projection, little did we think we'd ever find proof that, Killtown is a fraud. Or at least he's stolen the work of someone else to build his reputation.
Our story begins with one of the most respectable early 9/11 websites,
The Complete 9/11 Timeline
"The
Complete 9-11 Timeline" section was
developed and is maintained
by Paul Thompson.
developed and is maintained
by Paul Thompson.
at the defunct URL: complete911timeline.org
As readers can see perusing the Wayback machine, the sole responsibility of the website is claimed by Paul Thompson, a person who was literally sucked into 9/11 Truth via the Internet:
Paul Thompson One man can change the world. Or at least much of its what, when, where, and how. By Doug Cantor | Dec 1, 2004 | 358 words He never studied, trained, or even had any intention to become an authority on terrorism. But never underestimate the power of one man's curiosity. Holed up every night in front of the computer in his San Francisco home, poring over news on the Internet, Paul Thompson grew increasingly frustrated with how incomplete the story of September 11 was. Armed with only a broadband connection, he started to gather every credible fact he could find online. Then he condensed each point of information and put it in chronological order. His Terror Timeline quickly became a monster of about fifteen hundred items, tracing the last quarter century of terrorist activity, incorporating a detailed trail of intelligence failures, and providing a nearly minute-by-minute account of the day of the attacks.
What had started as Thompson's hobby soon became his obsession. Early this year, he quit his job with an environmental protection group, moved halfway around the world to New Zealand, and began dedicating his full attention to a solitary pursuit that paid nothing and seemed unlikely to be seen by more than a handful of people. Finally, he found a small audience through the Center for Cooperative Research, a California-based historical-record-keeping Web site that shared his philosophy of nonpartisanship, information sharing, and reliance on mainstream news sources. The marriage was a fruitful one. People started e-mailing him to point out new information and to make corrections to his data. Open-source historiography had arrived. The result is that Thompson has assembled by far the most comprehensive and detailed record of September 11 and the events surrounding it ever created.
Thompson may have furthered the cause of journalism to a greater degree than if he worked as a journalist himself. His timeline (cooperativeresearch.org) has become a trusted resource for reporters and researchers, and this fall it was published in book form (The Terror Timeline) by HarperCollins. Still, Thompson continues with his self-imposed labor. "If somebody were to say to me, 'Give me your one paragraph on who did it on 9/11,' I don't feel I could tell you," he says. "And I don't want to stop until I know that answer."
I want to feel sorry for him, I really do. I know someone else with a similar story, and it speaks to the power and volume of fringe right propaganda flooding the Internet then that anyone could be sucked into it's event horizon.
But....
At no point would I have ever given up a stable, well paying job no matter how compelling the evidence appeared. In fact the only reason the evidence appeared so compelling was the devastating the economic climate in the wake of 9/11. For a person relatively financially secure to throw it all away and move to a different country...that's some dedication.
And it raises questions. Was Thompson's frustration with the incomplete 9/11 story before or after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in June of 2004, six months before the interview dated Dec 1, 2004?
[Dates vary: Wiki has it at Jan of 2004, while the current page says Nov 2005. I'm going with the wayback date of Dec 1, 2004]
Another problematic issue is, Thompson's book was promoted to me as valuable because all his sources were supposedly from mainstream media, but under reported. In fact, this appears not to be the case. Whether this was Thompson or one of his boosters misrepresenting his work, more research is needed.
While that article may be hard to pin down, others aren't. Take the Village Voice article about Thompson, that definitely predates the Release of the 9/11 Commission Report:
Timeline of Tragedy
Picking up the pieces of 9-11, putting them in order, trying to make sense
WASHINGTON, D.C.—From his outpost on New Zealand's South Island, overlooking the stormy Tasman Sea, Paul Thompson, a young American, might seem like the most unlikely of detectives trying to sort through the historical debris of another hemisphere.
But this former California environmental activist is one of a handful of freelance, unpaid, amateur sleuths who have become a 9-11 Information Central—what amounts to an intelligence apparatus aimed at pinning down what the Bush administration knew and didn't know about 9-11, before and after the attacks. The results of this sleuthing often find their way to the 9-11 families, and in particular, to the by now mythic Jersey Girls, as the leaders of the survivors' families have come to be called.
The researchers are in many ways similar to the team Scott Armstrong, the former Washington Post reporter, recruited in the mid 1980s to uncover the roots of Reagan's secret Iran-Contra deals. The National Security Archive, making extensive use of the the Freedom of Information Act, soon established itself as the lead independent investigatory body, and today stands as a major independent research operation in the nation's capital.
At the hub of the 9-11 research is Thompson's intricate timeline on the website of the Center for Cooperative Research (cooperativeresearch.org). As of April 19, the crisply written timeline consists of 1,382 items, beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and running up to the present. In addition to the basic, annotated chronology, there are offshoot timelines for each of the four flights that day, along with a minute-by-minute recounting of President Bush's activities on 9-11. Still other timelines delve into official "lies" from 1979 forward.
Thompson, now in his thirties, grew up in Northern California, attended Stanford, and then moved to New Zealand. A self-described "typical mainstream California Democrat" and former environmental activist who worked on trying to save the rain forests in Borneo, Thompson has pieced together his chronology from myriad sources across the globe. He has pored over 5,000 articles and reports so far and spends most of each day on the project, reading hundreds of incoming e-mails and trolling the Web himself.Several things are notable about this article. One, Thompson is not mocked as a kook. The fact is thanks to the Bush administration's combination of epic incompetence and arrogant lack of transparency, many persons on the left of the political spectrum were willing to look at any explanation besides "oops". No one could be that dumb, was the feeling. (Turns out they can, but that's another story. ) Hence the Village Voice's indulgence.
Second Thompson identifies as a Democrat, so it's reasonable to assume his politics are leftist. Thompson, unlike many "truther" leaders to follow , had no ties to the fringe or Libertarian right. But by the same token he would know nothing of them and be likely to take anything the said at face value.
Third, the comparrison of Thompson's research to Scott Armstrong of the Washington Post is another indicator that, given the political climate of 2004, Thompson's research was considered reasonable. If a journalist from the Villiage Voice thought it was reasonable, many other people on the left thought Thompson's concerns were reasonable. This was before the more extreme "theories" were invented, which is probably a factor.
Fourth, Thompson had "hundreds of incoming emails". This is where things get murky. Because, with the exception of people like Thompson, leftists looking for a clue about what happened to their country, the majority of emails from people running 9/11 websites were frauds only to tickled to have found a volunteer front man, from the left of their politics no less.
Take a look at the links on Thompson's website in February 2003. Among them all the usual fringe right, antisemite pro militia websites are in evidence. Thompson himself notes certain sites positively:
Acknowledgements
|
Jeff Rense, The Power Hour and Daniel Hopsicker, I ask you. "Hopsicker is doing amazing research in Florida about 9/11 that virtually no one else has uncovered." Yes, Mr. Thompson, that's because he's making it up as he goes.
Sigh.
But who among this list should I find than my best buddy Craig Lazo's website, "Killtown". It was much sparser back then. Hosted on koolpages, Lazo was less about slandering random people then, and more about "just asking questions". It was still headed by his Big L Constitution twaddle:
"To preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic."
Plus an awkward Star Wars quote:
LUKE: "It looks like Sandpeople did this, all right. Look, here are Gaffi sticks, Bantha tracks. It's just...I never heard of them hitting anything this big before."
Ben is crouching in the sand studying the tracks.
BEN: "They didn't. But we are meant to think they did. These tracks are side by side. Sandpeople always ride single file to hide there numbers."
BEN: "And these blast points, too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise."
The main "research" is the so called Pentalawn, Flight 77 and an forgotten website of Lazo's called Bush at Booker.
What's conspicuously absent is Killtown's 9/11 Oddities.
But they can be found....on Paul Thompson's website in 2003 under
Oddities of 9/11, that links to Fall Out Shelter News. If that doesn't scream paranoid militia separatist, I don't know what does.
At the full link: http://www.falloutshelternews.com/9_11_ODDITIES.html
they explain:
Oddities of 9/11
Little-known facts of the world's best-known event
[We don't endorse any particular theories suggested by the links
below. Our objective is not to "explain" 9/11, but to show that 9/11
has not yet been satisfactorily explained. The following oddities and
inconsistencies show that a thorough and independent investigation of
all aspects of 9/11 is not only warranted, but demanded by the facts.]
Little-known facts of the world's best-known event
There's a petition that's defunt, but some parts can be found in Wayback:
http://www.petitiononline.com/11601TFS/petition.html
This petition is credited to Lori Price, a woman rumoured to have an association with the veteran conartist James Fetzer. Price's website was also one of the first places 911 oddities was published in 2002, with the same link to Fall Out Shelter News. No where on the page is a mention or link to Lazo's Killtown website.
But by 2005, Killtown's 911 oddities were not only listed on her website, but he had a timeline as well:
Complicit - Associated with or participating in a questionable act or a crime. --Killtown's 9-11 timelineKilltown's 9-11 Oddities
The full title is the 9/11 coincidences and oddities page!
And redirects to hosting at 911review.org. By the time Lazo's "Killtown Oddities" was published, Falloutshelternews appears to be gone.
Much of the material on FSN was probably reworked into Lazo's website, but even I have to grudgingly acknowledge the ambition behind Lazo's project. It's not research so much as a Libertarian obsessed copy/pasta project. Eventually it grew to over 200 and something so called "smoking guns". But it wasn't Lazo's idea.
Unless Lazo had also been part of FSN, but that seems unlikely. FSN was run by Carol Schiffler with the help of Lori Price. But it's interesting Lazo ran with Schiffler's idea without ever acknowledging credit. Someone should start a 911 oddities Fraud blog....
Of course this could have been deliberate. Maybe Schiffler wanted to move on and Lazo was happy to take over propaganda duties. It's just that years later, what it looks like is Lazo, Schiffler and Price are all working together pushing a conspiracy con. Why? Oh, that's right, because they were.
Back to Thompson. Let's read what he says about these websites:
The first is fair enough; there was little obvious woo then. But calling Lazo's website an excelent presentation is a stretch. Amaturish hack would be more accurate:Oddities of 9/11 I found lots of leads here as well.
Killtown Excellent presentation of the Pentagon mystery and Bush's actions on 9/11.
Another "oddity" of Lazo's page is the contact information:
We need your help!And
If you know of any links to news articles, eyewitness reports, or photo's you think would be useful for this investigation, please e-mail us with these links.
Please e-mail us with any questions, comments, or suggestions!
Not I or he, but we and us. This documents Lazo had a partner, or worked with a group.
There are rumors Lazo had help running his blog, probably his very blonde ex. But this was before Lazo met the Libertard Blonde Bot. Lazo did not work alone and he probably still doesn't.
Unlike Lazo, Thompson moved on without being driven offline due to terminally embarrassing behaviour. But one has to wonder what Thompson thinks about his work since most of it was based on so called research that is now known to be lies, if not outright Jew Hating propaganda. At least 8 of the websites Thompson acknowledged are run by anti Semites or people with direct connection to racist friendly pro militia organizations. From the Wilderness was set up by a man almost certain the victim of a cult confidence game. It's true there was so much bullshite swimming across the interwebs it was virtually impossible to distinguish a fellow sincere seeker and a deliberate con.
But now it's obvious. There was no conspiracy, besides trying to hide how incompetent Bush was at protecting national security. There are no "agents" distrupting the "movement" because there is nothing to disrupt. In light of this stark reality, it would help greatly if Thompson came forward to put the "911 truth" matter to rest.
There maybe questions remaining about the Bush administration's response to the attacks, but there was no "Inside Job". It's a pity Thompson left a career and wasted over a decade of his life on a fraud. I suppose in comparison I should feel lucky.
But the frauds don't get to get away with it....
