Running in Circles: 2006 9/11 Truth/Impeachment Congressional Campaign Report From Beginning to End, and Where Next?

http://communitycurrency.org/circles.html



(Gold9472: There are several links in the original.)

by Carol Brouillet
November 28, 2006
www.carolforcongress.org

There are few public positions these days that arouse more animosity and disgust than that of politicians, who are generally assumed to be greedy, power-hungry, corrupt criminals. Who in their right mind would aspire to act like one or become one? Going to Washington, DC, to challenge the policies and legitimacy of the Bush Administration certainly was never one of my childhood dreams. I probably never would have thought of running for public office had it not been for the unique set of circumstances that came together in 2004 and 2005.

I had marched on my Congresswoman’s office many times, met with her staff, lobbied her on a range of issues, and encouraged her to do the right thing. Publicly she supported Bush, signed the Patriot Act, got on the House Intelligence Committee, co-sponsored the Intelligence Transformation Act (which would expand the Intelligence Agencies), said the 9/11 Commission Report was “bipartisan and thorough,” wouldn’t touch impeachment, and ignored the fact that elections were being stolen. At a candidates forum in 2004 the League of Women Voters refused to voice my written question about the 9/11 Commission, dismissing it as a “partisan issue.” All three candidates were supporting the “War on Terrorism” and the “9/11 Commission Cover-Up Report.” I stood up and challenged them all verbally, until the League of Women Voters forced me to leave the room. A year later when an active Green Party Council member asked me if I would consider running for Congress, the thought of being legally able to raise taboo issues at the next candidates forum made me consider whether it might be worth the effort.

First I wrote to my Congresswoman asking for a meeting and for her to rethink her position on 9/11 and impeachment. She made it clear that she would not touch impeachment and would champion the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations (and in her subsequent campaign she has been pushing for creating a new Counter-Terrorism Cyber Czar position).

The Northern California 9-11 Truth Alliance, as well as a larger group of 9/11 Truth activists who gathered at a strategy meeting in December 2005, encouraged me to run on a 9/11 Truth/Impeachment platform.

After attending my first Santa Clara Green Party Council meeting in San Jose and a California Green Party plenary at Davis, I felt that I would get some support from the Green Party. I also wrote a strategy paper on “Why the Green Party Should Champion 9/11 Truth,” which I passed out at the plenary and sent to Greens nationwide. I have been a registered Green ever since it became an option. I have also been a champion of local currencies, opposed to the expansion of corporate power, the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and militarism since I became politically aware. The Greens took a better public position on 9/11 than the Democrats and the Republicans, and they had the advantage of not being complicit in the crime and the cover-up.

My utter lack of political campaign experience didn’t daunt me; I figured that it would be a learning experience and my chance of winning the election was very slim, dependent on whether the country woke up to 9/11 Truth and favored impeachment. I wanted to challenge Eshoo on “Real Security versus Fake Security,” challenging the military paradigm with the “green paradigm” that respects life and recognizes that real security comes from healthy relationships in a healthy world.

On January 15th, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday (the anniversaries of our earlier marches demanding an investigation of 9-11, pre-emptive impeachment, and repeal of the Patriot Act), I organized a rally where people spoke out for truth, peace and justice, and I announced my intention of running for Congress. We produced a DVD of the rally for television before I realized that you can’t actually air political rallies on community access stations; we did post it later on the internet @ http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...27598466&hl=en .

By sheer luck, a wealthy relative gave me a couple of generous financial gifts which helped me to hire a young, enthusiastic Stanford grad to be my campaign manager and set up a website during the first months of the campaign, when I easily gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot with the help of some volunteers.

For 14 years I have struggled to balance mothering with activism, and it was a challenge to add running for office to my daily routine. The kids and my husband were less than enthusiastic; they have developed an aversion to politics. As far as the kids were concerned, the worst thing that could happen to us, as a family, would be if I were elected to office and away from home more than I already had been (due to my activism, meetings, conferences, and rallies). In the wake of 9/11, I began a weekly Listening Project in Downtown Palo Alto, until we break the myth about "the war on terror" and expose it as a "war of terror," I will continue to "Listen" each Wednesday.

I was more comfortable with my “mom” and “activist” hats than playing the “candidate” role. When the bank account began to run dry, I told my campaign manager that we had to get out a letter announcing my candidacy and asking for financial support from my friends, family, and the huge number of contacts that I had developed over the years. Without donations I couldn’t continue to hire him. His response was that I should phone all my friends and hit them for donations, and then he suddenly quit working for me. Unfortunately, as I really hate asking for money, the letter never went out. Instead I just slipped back into my usual activist mode, organizing and publicizing the upcoming “International 9/11- Revealing the Truth, Reclaiming the Future” conference in Chicago.

In May and June the 9/11 Truth Movement was suddenly in the news, on television, and in the pages of the New York Times. NBC even called me up, spent 45 minutes interviewing me at my home, and aired a short segment, which actually won people over to the side of the 9/11 Truth Movement (according to my son, who witnessed discussion of the TV coverage in his Criminal Law class). A Zogby Poll showed that a growing number of Americans, nearly half, doubted the official 9/11 story and believed there should be a new investigation. Just over half didn’t know about a key fact--the collapse of a 47-story steel framed building in New York in the late afternoon on September 11th, which hadn’t been struck by a plane. We clearly were entering “stage four--the take-off stage of social movements” (as outlined by Bill Moyer in his excellent book Doing Democracy). The Chicago conference and subsequent 9/11 Truth symposium in Los Angeles were successes. Uncontested in the primary election, I garnered 100% of the Green Party vote.

Over the summer I traveled to Canada for our regular family visit. For our family, it felt like the last summer together, before my eldest son left for college. I planned to do civil disobedience, flyering, when Stone's film- World Trade Center premiered, but supportive theaters eliminated that possibility, and instead I tabled in the lobby of the Grand Lake Theater. Theater owner, Allen Michaan, placed "WAS 9/11 AN INSIDE JOB?" on his marquee, and drew coverage from local television stations.

The kids, an antiwar-rally, as well as publicizing and organizing a string of 9/11 Truth events in September, took up all my free time, energy, and attention, and the campaign was put off indefinitely. One of my big hopes had been to have a “Green Party party” to network and activate local Greens, but a bug in my computer devoured 30,000 of my emails in early August, including all my campaign volunteer information. My other hope was to publish a “Conception Dollar” for my campaign with websites and art promoting solutions. I had successfully published and distributed 6,000,000 Deception Dollars, exposing the problems with the official 9/11 story, the stolen elections, and the media. Unfortunately, the artist working on the Conception Dollar lost the use of his computer for two months, and I finally had to give up on it because we were so backlogged with orders for our regular Deception Dollar.

In September our 9/11 Truth events were successful in terms of attendance, but the challenge was to receive coverage in the independent media, as well as in the mainstream media. We helped premiere “9/11 Press for Truth” in Oakland, as well as Ken Jenkins’s new film featuring David Ray Griffin, “9-11 The Myth and the Reality.” Griffin and 9/11 Truth were also featured in an excellent cover story in the Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz Metro newspapers. Pacifica and KPFA held a great event entitled 9/11 and American Empire--which drew a full house and was filmed by C-Span--which included David Ray Griffin, Kevin Ryan, Peter Dale Scott, Peter Phillips, and Ray McGovern. A book by the same title also came out and provided a perfect rebuttal to the outrageous attacks upon the 9/11 Truth movement by the “Left.”

By October, having about $1,000 in my campaign coffers, it seemed like the most strategic thing to do, with so little money and time, was to hold a 9/11 Truth event in my district and try to break the issue into the local press, and hopefully into the national press as well. The Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance voted $2,000 for me to premiere “9/11 Press for Truth” locally. I was also able to do a couple of candidate statements for television. A Green Party forum in Mountain View received surprisingly good coverage from Channel 2 TV, including a sound bite from me. The only mention of my candidacy in the local weekly paper was a brief statement that I was running against Eshoo, which included my campaign website, her government website, and omitted the Libertarian and Republican candidates entirely.

Despite all of our efforts, most of the press ignored the “9/11 Press for Truth” showing, which included the hero of the film--Paul Thompson (who created the Complete 9/11 Timeline and authored The Terror Timeline (HarperCollins 2004)--and Peter Dale Scott, who wrote Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (2003), edited 9/11 and American Empire (2006), and wrote The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (to be published in 2007).

Both Paul Thompson and Daniel Pearl had graduated from Stanford University. Pearl worked at the Palo Alto Weekly before he went to work for the Wall Steet Journal and went to Pakistan, where he was killed while investigating the I.S.I./Al Qaeda links. Peter Dale Scott had spoken brilliantly in Berkeley on How the FBI protected Al Qaeda’s 9/11 Hijacking Trainer- New Revelations about Ali Mohamed. Ali Mohamed, a top Al Qaeda operative involved in the '93 WTC bombings, the African Embassy bombings, and 9/11 was also working for the FBI, CIA and the military and is currently under a "witness protection program." Both Paul and Peter raised some critical questions on the relationship between the US government and the terrorists. Ali Mohamed also lived for years in Santa Clara, so it seemed like our event, "the story" was local, national, and of great international importance, but the mainstream press wasn't touching it.

We received a cover story in the Stanford Daily, a write-up in the local high school online newspaper, and someone posted the Question and Answer session that followed the film online, but that was it.

The same weekend as our event, I went to Colorado to emcee two events organized by Colorado 911 Visibility entitled “Research on 9/11: Why the Official Story Cannot Be True -- Scientists Find Overwhelming Evidence of Controlled Demolition” featuring Dr. Steven E. Jones, Kevin Ryan, and Kevin Barrett, three heroes of the 9/11 Truth movement. It was a great experience; they gave outstanding talks and received fairly decent local news coverage.

When I returned, a scant week before the election, I still couldn’t resist going to San Francisco for an impeachment rally at the office of Nancy Pelosi on Halloween, which the press also ignored.

The most attention that I received from the print media involved their solicitations for advertising money; otherwise they ignored me and the key issues completely. KPFA ignored me as well; I got more radio coverage from non-local stations, which did not really help to raise awareness about the race in my district.

The press also ignored the one and only candidates forum, organized by the League of Women Voters. I was shocked by the positions that the incumbent, the Republican, and the Libertarian took and glad that I was able to voice a challenge to all of them. I had hoped that I could at least get a video copy of the forum and have it shown on local community access television and the Internet, but the audio quality was terrible. It was painful to listen to, and I didn’t even try to post it online because I didn’t think most people could endure more than a few minutes of it.

End Part I