"The absolute standard that I have used for post-911 reporting is that I take official documented sources, whether it be the Congressional Record, [and] mainstream reports that people tend to accept: ABC, BBC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times... Documented evidence only that mainstream people don't challenge, and I assemble that and analyze it in a way that makes it very clear that the government is lying." (Mike Ruppert, from an interview with portland indymedia reporters)

The day after September 11, I was in downtown Portland for an emergency activist meeting about "what are we going to do?" and "how should we react?". I was standing out on Stark Street, in front of the office where the meeting was, and this guy came up to me saying that the government knew about the attacks, and helped plan them, and that we had to expose it. I didn't even let him start. I just held up my hand and said something like, "I can't listen to this right now. What you're saying might be true, but I can't even think about it. We've just gotta find a way to keep the bombs from falling on other countries." A typical peacenik response. He pressed on, saying that unless we stopped the people who had planned the attacks, they would keep doing it over and over again. "Maybe you're right," I said. "But no one would ever believe it. We've just gotta try to stop a war."

I'm afraid I was a bit rude to him, and if I ran into him again now I would apologize. I still don't know if I would believe his story -- I can't remember any of the details -- but I've had a change of heart about 9.11. Now I believe that our government did have prior knowledge of 9.11 and that we do need to talk about it, even though many people might not want to listen.

What happened to bring me around? Over time, people whose opinions and judgement I trust shared more and more information with me. I started looking some of it up myself. After awhile, enough anomalies emerged in the official narrative that it became unbelievable. And I wasn