Ted Walter, AE911Truth's director of strategy and development, joins host Andy Steele on this week's episode of 9/11 Free Fall to discuss the organization’s renewed focus on Congress in 2021 and explain why it just might be worth your time to send that letter or even request a meeting with your representatives as the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches.
We invite you to listen or to read the interview below.
Andy Steele:
Welcome to 9/11 Free Fall. I'm the host Andy Steele. Today we're joined by Ted Walter. Ted is the director of strategy and development here at AE911Truth. He is the lead author of AE911Truth's 2015 publication- it's called Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7 - as well as our 2016 publication World Trade Center Physics, a very handy guide there for someone trying to reach people in the academic community. And, most recently, AE911Truth's "Request for Correction" to the NIST report on World Trade Center Building 7, which was submitted last April and is still pending. We've got a new congressional outreach going on that we're going to be talking about, so, Ted, welcome back to the show.
Ted Walter:
Thank you, Andy. It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Andy Steele:
So you're here to talk about our latest effort with Congress. Why don't you lead the way and lay it out for our audience?
Ted Walter:
Sure. I would say pretty much since the beginning of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the organization, along with its volunteers, supporters, and small staff, and particularly the architects and engineers, have been involved in reaching out to Congress, sending Congress materials, pushing for a new investigation. As many people will know the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition actually is, literally, a petition to Congress calling for a new investigation into the destruction of the three towers on 9/11.
Really what we're talking about here is just the latest phase in a long process that has been going on for many years. As many people will know, but not everybody, a few years ago we launched something called the Bobby McIlvaine World Trade Center Investigation Act campaign, which was draft legislation that we drafted that would establish a select committee in either chamber of Congress to reinvestigate the destruction of three World Trade Center towers.
Bobby McIlvaine is a 9/11 victim who was killed when he was entering the lobby of the North tower - evidence points to this - even right before the first plane hit. There were explosions in the basement and in the lobby of the North tower that his father and his family believe are what killed him. And his father, Bob, has been one of the most outspoken advocates for a new investigation in this work for many years and a lot of the activism that he's done has been with Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. So that legislation we named after his son, and we are still continuing to push it. You can go to our website and find a section of our website that says the Bobby McIlvaine Act.
Given that we're in a new, obviously there's a new administration and there's a new Congress every two years a new Congress convenes. And we're just now month and a half into the new Congress. And so typically around this time, which we did two years ago, again, is where we revitalize or focus on getting the message to the new Congress. Like there's many new members now. Right now at the beginning of the session is the time to be reaching out to them and looking at this as, okay, we've got two years to try to get something done with this particular Congress. And I think we're seeing really on both sides of the aisle, more anti-establishment sentiment than we've ever seen before.
Whether you're conservative leaning or liberal or progressive or libertarian or what have you, there's more frustration with the establishment, with the status quo than ever before. And I think that, combined with the fact that we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, that's just six or seven months away, I think we really do have a fairly unique window right now in which the outreach that we do to Congress, as unlikely as it may seem, given what we've seen over the last 15 years, where a real concerted effort where we're involving lots of people in the grassroots could make a difference, could find that one or two members of Congress are really willing to champion the issue this year as the 20th anniversary rolls around.
And beyond that, even if those one or two don't surface, or maybe it's more than one or two, but it's really important that this message is properly delivered to all these members of Congress, because change can seem to be happening slowly and then all of a sudden it just sneaks up on you and explodes.
If you've got hundreds of members of Congress who've been properly informed with the materials that we're producing and getting to them and involving our supporters and getting to them, a) they're less likely to make negative statements about 9/11 Truth, which that alone helps us, but things just start to break, just start to turn in the right direction, and you've got members of Congress who've been seeing this stuff sent to them.Their staffs have been receiving materials, receiving emails, phone calls, requests for meetings, etc. The slippery slope to suddenly many members of Congress taking the issue seriously and speaking out on something happening can go a lot faster as soon as things start to turn in our favor.
And I would say just a general, we're really optimistic about what this year has in store in large part because of the 20th anniversary. And so we think that it is really worth for all of our supporters out there, for everybody that cares about 9/11, like this is a year that it's really worth doing everything that you can. Whatever comes to mind, whether it's the stuff that we send out, this is the year to really give it all because good things could happen this year in particular.
So as far as the particular strategies that we're doing, the way that we're reaching out to Congress, just this week now we are launching an effort where we're asking supporters to donate $20, and we will send you three copies of the DVD of the new documentary SEVEN, which was released in December, by Dylan Avery. And it's about the four-year computer modeling study at the university of Alaska Fairbanks led by professor Leroy Hulsey, which has basically completely, definitively shown that fires could not have destroyed Building 7. And it has really helped highlight the ways in which this report is false and fraudulent, frankly, although that language is obviously not used in the UAF report. So we want to get this DVD into the hands of every member of Congress, all 535 or 541, if you include the non-voting delegates. If we can get several hundred of our supporters sending these DVDs to Congress, we will reach the large majority of them.
If we can get a few thousand supporters, we will reach pretty much every member of Congress. So really urging people to spend what is, for most people, a pretty manageable amount of money, $20, receive three DVDs, and we give you all the materials that you need, the three envelopes and a pre written letter. So all you need to do is sign it, put the letter in the envelope, put the DVD envelope, bring it to the post office, another 10 bucks spent and bam, you've contacted your three members of Congress and given them this DVD. And I think a DVD in the mail to Congress is going to stand out a lot more than that a letter, and it's a very nicely designed DVD, I must say. So we're going to really get people's attention with the DVD, some of them will watch it, some of them won't, but it's also about due diligence.
And this is something that we're really emphasizing is we want to at least make it so that things start to turn in our favor and people in Congress start getting a little uncomfortable about the fact that they haven't done anything about 9/11. We have the paper trail to show that they were informed about it and they chose to do nothing, if indeed that's what happens, which is likely to happen with most members of Congress, if they probably won't do anything right away.
But it's really important that we do the due diligence, that we create the paper trail that shows these people were informed about it and they chose to do nothing. So that's what's happening right now this week, $20, receive three DVDs, put them in the mail to each of your members of Congress, and we'll hit most in Congress with this DVD. Imagine being able to say for all of us who've dedicated themselves to this cause to helping Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth that almost all of Congress has received the DVD SEVEN. That in itself is a good step forward.
Andy Steele:
Right on, I love doing outreach to Congress, even the ones that don't want to hear this message, and in some ways it's a little bit more fun to try to get this information to them. As Ted said, it puts them on record that at this critical moment in the history of our nation, these people did not stand with the truth. They did not stand up for scientific integrity, and they decided to go on business as usual. And we can see now the results of that, as Ted mentioned before, on both sides of the political aisle, there's a very anti-establishment sentiment. This is all good for the 9/11 Truth Movement because as the people get mad about other things we can point back to World Trade Center 7, to the fall of the Twin Towers and say, hey, look, this information that you disregarded earlier, look at it again.And people are more open to this now.
Just as I predicted years ago, I knew that things are going to happen. I just had a feeling that things were going to happen to make people more open to this, and they're going to look back and they're going to remember their friends who were talking about 9/11 Truth all those years. And I can see it even in my own life. Everybody's turning to me now to tell them what's going to happen next, because I was talking about 9/11 all this time and certain other things have made them wake up to the realities of my world, and they're realizing that I'm not as easy to dismiss as I once was.
And I imagine that's happening for people out in the audience as well, and this is important to do because we've got to keep the pressure on. I say this on the webinars every single week is that, members of Congress don't do anything they would rather not do unless they hear from a lot of constituents, unless they're put on the spot. And activism is not just going there and having one meeting and sending one letter, it's the continuous work. It's the due diligence that Ted is talking about.
And this is so important to us that we are going to give you the three DVDs for just 20 bucks. I mean, it's listed for $15 on the online store, just your own personal viewing, but we're going to give you three of them with the expectation that you're going to go and do this work, send it to your member of Congress, and every little bit helps.
Look, you don't have to be particularly talented in this world, you don't have to be particularly some kind of high-level genius level intelligence to get things done. All you got to do is show up and do the work. And maybe you make a mistake the first time; you learn from it, and then you get more talented and you get more intelligent about the thing that you're doing, the action that you're doing as you go. But the key is just showing up and doing it. Those are the people that always succeed, and collectively we can succeed because we've already got our foot in the door.
Everybody knows about this issue, to some extent, everybody knows that there's questions surrounding September 11th. I mean, you can't even mention Building 7 without people automatically thinking about the question of how it came down. That's what this building is notorious for. So you got to go ahead and participate in things like this when they come up, and we've made it so easy for you. We're going to send you to the three DVDs. We've already written a letter for you. So you just got to stick it in the mail and send it in.
And it's with all of us doing this collective work that we're going to achieve justice. It's no one action, it's the culmination of many actions. And we've seen the results of that before, when we did that with C-SPAN, that's just one after. That was a lot of people all over this country calling into that show, and it resulted in Richard being on there and being the number one interview, and I was just a tiny thing.
I think about what we can accomplish if we move it on into Congress. And the great thing about what's going on right now is they still have phone meetings that we're going to be talking about that in just a minute. Ted, you mentioned about sending them the physical copy, how that will stand out. Why is it important that they actually get a physical copy of the DVD as opposed to us just sending a link to an MP4 version that we're streaming?
Ted Walter:
Yeah, well, I actually think that they're more likely to watch it when they get the DVD. I think that the people in Congress, they get a lot of emails, they're not going to be keen to just click on a link and go spend time on a computer watching this 45-minute film. But if you put a DVD in their hands, even though people don't watch DVDs as much these days, I think I myself, having been in the offices, having meetings with people in Congress, there tend to be TVs in the offices and there tend to be DVD players there. And so I think it's probable that many of these people will actually watch the DVD, much more probable than if we were sending a link to where they can pay to watch it on, on Amazon or on Google Play or whatever.
And yeah, as I said before, as you said, it's an attention grabber. It's a very nicely designed DVD. It just presents the issue very, very professionally, very slickly and in a way that it looks like it's going to be entertaining to watch. So, I think that's really important.
And we've spoken to the cost of this. We're basically doing it at cost, we're offering the DVDs so that there's zero net revenue being made here. We want it to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. It's overall, it's about 30 bucks to $20 to donate, to get the three DVDS and the packages, and then $10 that you're going to have to pay when you walk down to the post office and put these in the mail, roughly $3, 3.50 per package to each member of Congress.
So yeah, there's a letter in there as well. That's optional. We provide a letter. If you want to write your own letter, totally understandable. We have a letter that's very carefully worded that we think a lot of our supporters are going to feel good putting their name on, and it also does something really important which is inform the member of Congress about the request for correction that we have pending with NIST right now that we and ten 9/11 family members submitted to NIST last April, which Andy mentioned at the beginning of the show.
That along with the DVD and the study; it's such an effective way to gain credibility in the eyes of these members of Congress. It shows that we have this request for correction that's pending, this administrative process that we're using to try to force NIST to reverse its conclusion, abandon its original report, and come clean that the building was brought down by controlled demolition.
So really that's the other really important thing that you would be participating in. It's not only giving them the DVD and educating them about the study, but about the request for correction, which, when they see that, that will be an eye-opener for them as well.
Andy Steele:
Right. And the thing is that members of Congress are no different than any other human being; they're susceptible to marketing just like you and I are. And if you actually get something in the mail that you can hold, you can see the cover, it's going to catch your attention more than just an email. I mean, good God, my inbox is like Penn Station. I get so many emails a day, it's easy to miss things. I can't imagine what it's like for a U.S. congressman's office and of course, a lot of staffers intercept those emails and he gets very generic responses, sometimes if they're just a overall well-wishing emails from constituents. So if something actually comes through the door and has got nice pictures on it and a nice description on the background, it's more interesting, it's more eye catching, it's going to get their attention. That's why we got to do these kinds of things.
And we got to mail it in because it's very hard to get access physically to Congress right now. However, we can call them on the phone, we can have phone meetings, and we've done this before, and this is part of the due diligence follow-up that Ted was talking about. And it never ends, it's never something that we stop doing. We're always willing to do these phone meetings with members of Congress. But we're going to have a big push on Congress this year focusing on outreach to them, because that is the route that it has to go through in order to get justice in the end, that's the whole petition that AE911Truth is about. So we're going to have to remind our audience on how to do these phone meetings, which are going to be a large part of helping to coordinate as they have been in the past. Ted, can you talk about that part?
Ted Walter:
Yeah. Well, you are the expert on the phone meetings more than I am, all the ones you did last year and in previous years. But I think that keep an eye out for, in the next couple of months, email action alerts asking you to request a meeting with your member of Congress, typically U.S. representative in the House of Representatives. And since COVID started, it's become a lot more common to just have these meetings with constituents over the phone, which is what we did last spring, how we had a lot of meetings with the staff of these members of Congress. And the constituent would come on the call with us, and Andy would be there with a couple other of our experts. Richard Gage would usually be on the call, maybe Roland Angle, a civil engineer who's on our board of directors, and make the case to the staff.
And, they're very polite, usually very receptive, and we try to show them the collapse of Building 7, or, I should say, the destruction of Building 7 on the video, on their own computer. They could be watching it while we were talking about it with them. And it's always an eye-opener for the people that see it. They often just agree, yeah, that looks like a controlled demolition, and they move the issue forward to their higher ups and to the member of Congress.
So again like the DVD, it's another way of really getting the message there much louder than just sending an email, making a phone call, and you get to participate with us. It's also easy, it doesn't involve much time. Usually these meetings are like 15 minutes to 30 minutes at most. But it can make a big difference. And this is how we find those few members of Congress who would be willing to champion the issue, especially as the 20th anniversary rolls around.
Andy Steele:
Right. And it's a great first step for being a local leader as well, because we're going to need you to be out there. And there's a lot of people who settled for just getting the meeting and then the person heard my case and that's it, but what it really takes is being a constant presence, getting them to learn your name, know who you are and know exactly what you are about, doing the follow-up and letting them know that you are out there and informing others in your community, first about this issue and about your congressmen or congresswoman's stance on it, or how they have responded or no response.
And that's an important thing too, because there's some people, not many, not many, most of them got meetings in the last time that we did this so that we made a big push for this. But there's some people who didn't it, but I'll tell you what, making that effort and doing everything you can to get that meeting and then being either ignored or turned down is still important because then you can make a note of it.
And then there's other things that you can do. Maybe that member of Congress comes up for re-election and you reach out to the person's opponent and say, hey, this congressman didn't respond or this person ignored me or said this when I talked about this issue, but I know of 9/11 family members who are supportive of it and I find that very disturbing, and I will support you if you're willing to, at least, listen to the evidence and have a meeting when you come into office.
They say, yes, you can hold them to account on that, wait a few months and make another request. You have to be a constant lobby for this issue in your area and not just give up just because you had a meeting with them one time, or because your congressman ignored you. Again, it's the constant action that results in success in the end, and then actually doing the meeting. I mean, for us it's fun. And we're so coordinated and calculated with this now, and a whole meeting set up that we do, and we do show them the video of World Trade Center 7. And a lot of times, as Ted said, they said that it looks just like a controlled demolition.
So we are informing staffers, and here's the thing too, they may be under the thumb of their member of Congress and that person's agenda, but at some point, those staffers become the new members of Congress. A lot of them run later on, and if they're awake to this, then who knows what kind of influence you may have in the future. Even if it isn't about 9/11, maybe there's some legislation that gets brought up that you would disagree with knowing what you know about 9/11. And maybe they will too, even if they don't state it.
I mean, our work has a three-dimensional effect, and it affects so many other things. So the only way that you lose in participating in something like this is if you don't participate. It's all winning. It's all good returns, no matter what you do, you can hold them to account, and we need you to be that local leader out there taking advantage of this opportunity. We're here doing what we do and we can advise you and tell you what we think ought to be done next, but we need you out there doing the groundwork and being that voice in your district who is willing to bring this issue to your congressman or bring it to their opponent next time they come up for re-election, but letting them know it's not going away.
Now, something I want to quickly address, and I got my own opinion, but I'd like to let Ted talk first here, because I might be inclined to ramble. But a segment of our listening audience doesn't think much of our government institutions anymore for obvious reasons, and they'll say, Oh, what's the purpose of reaching out to Congress? We know what they're like, why is this so important to you, Ted?
Ted Walter:
Well, I think it's important to try every conceivable avenue that could lead to getting new investigation, getting a breakthrough, or that could even just a small step in the right direction. And we were trying all of those avenues here at AE911Truth, whether it's the inquest that we're helping the family of Jeff Campbell, the 9/11 victim from the UK, helping them get a new inquest into the death of their son or the request for correction I mentioned before, the films that we put out. But Congress is another avenue. You find a member of Congress who is willing to champion this issue, and I think that the political climate all the time is getting better and better for it; that would be a big step forward that could start a tidal wave. Eventually, if more members of Congress, they have a platform, and I'm convinced that many of them already know the truth and they're not just corrupt people who are okay with it. They're maybe looking for the right opportunity. So it's about letting them know that we exist.
The change is not going to happen if don't try and at AE911Truth, we're not nihilists, we believe that it's possible to change the world. You see the world changing all the time because people work hard and people believe in things. And so, we have chosen against the alternative of doing nothing, that's why we're here. And you have to recognize that it's an uphill battle; you're not going to see results tomorrow necessarily, but nothing happens if you don't try. And this is a totally legitimate realistic avenue, and when things start falling, when things start turning, the dominoes start falling, people in Congress will want to get on the right side of history. I mean so it's about pushing them, nudging them so that they see that, yeah, that is the truth. Oh, here's an opportunity for me to actually do something, so that's how I see it. What do you think, Andy?
Andy Steele:
Yeah. Ditto on all of that. Something we have to remember is that a lot of the people in Congress weren't necessarily there on September 11, so it's not their cover-up until you bring the information to them. So you either make them involved in the cover-up or you open their eyes and start getting them involved in bringing the truth to light. So there's always hope. Congress is always changing and, as we said already, that there's an anti-establishment fervor going on on both sides of the political aisle right now.
I think society is becoming more susceptible to recognizing certain truths, like what really happened on September 11th. Something that you got to remember too, I mean, nothing has ever been solved overnight; that's how the system works. Abolition of slavery - it wasn't that we just elected some president and he ended slavery overnight. I mean that took many decades of people making great sacrifices and really sticking their neck out and doing important work to change attitudes in this country to the point where it could result in legislation and big change from what people were used to.
So, if those people can do it, we can do it. We're not even asking you to do some of the things that those people did for that issue. All you got to do is, in this particular case is buy some DVDs and stick them in the mail. Set up a phone meeting, show up, and tell the Congressman why you think this is an important issue and let Richard make the case for why the towers were brought down with explosives. Just participate in the process; it's really easy. Ted, we are out of time. Thank you so much for all the work you do right here.
We work together and I see what Ted does, and I see what everybody does here at AE911Truth. A lot of great people working here, either up front or behind the scenes to keep this issue alive and bring us to justice in the end. And of course, Ted is a big part of that. So thank you, and thank you for coming on 9/11 Free Fall today.
Ted Walter:
Thank you, Andy. Thank you for everything that you do.
