The Village Voice Gives A Massive Expose On 9/11 Truth

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The Village Voice Gives A Massive Expose On 9/11 Truth

The Seekers
The birth and life of the '9-11 Truth movement'

http://villagevoice.com/news/0608,murphy,72254,6.html

by Jarrett Murphy
February 21st, 2006 11:48 AM

Essentially, it's all about physics and common sense. Cut steel, and buildings fall. Crash a plane, and the Earth gets scarred. Fire a missile; see a hole. What's up must come down, cause makes effect, and for the truth to set you free, it must be freed itself.

It's dark in the basement of St. Mark's Church and dark outside on a mid-December Sunday night, but inside they have seen the light. Among the 100 or so people in the room, many wear buttons that read "9/11 Was An Inside Job." Others grip the vital texts in their hands—Crossing the Rubicon, The New Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 Synthetic Terror. Most in the largely (but not exclusively) white and male crowd can quote you the important passages from "Rebuilding America's Defenses" or The 9/11 Commission Report. A few can guide you through the details of concepts like "peak oil" and pyroclastic flow. All of them suspect—and a few simply know—that their government was somehow complicit in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans four Septembers ago.

They are watching the new edition of Loose Change, a slick, witty documentary featuring a hip soundtrack and a rapid-fire assault on nearly every aspect of the "official" story of 9-11. The work of 22-year-old filmmaker Dylan Avery, Loose Change came out last year to take its place in a growing library of DVDs that 9-11 skeptics can own: Painful Deceptions, Confronting the Evidence, 911 in Plane Site, 9-11 Eyewitness. Shown in similar gatherings around the country and passed among likeminded friends, the films are what tie together the disparate ends of what many of its members call the "9-11 Truth movement." They unite Luke Rudkowski, an earnest Brooklyn College freshman, with David Ray Griffin, a California theologian who wrote The New Pearl Harbor. They link Les Jamieson, a web designer and coordinator for New York 9-11 Truth, with multimillionaire Jimmy Walter, dreamer of car-free, self-sustaining cities. And they bind a FDNY lieutenant attending his first Truth movement meeting with Michael Ruppert, the Crossing the Rubicon author who blames a fiancée's CIA-and-Mafia-linked drug running and arms dealing for helping to drive him out of the LAPD two decades ago.

It's easy to dismiss the odd characters. It's harder to ignore the regular guys in the room, or the polls showing that 49 percent of New York City residents believe the government knew about 9-11 before it happened, or the rock-solid certainty of these supposed doubters. "I'd love to be proven wrong. I would love for someone to come to me and say I'm full of shit. It hasn't happened," says Avery. "I have scientists on my side. There's so much evidence supporting my side, and the government's side has nothing."

Its name notwithstanding, the 9-11 Truth movement tells a story—and is a story—about what happens when the government lies. Again, it's simple physics: For every action, there's a reaction equal and opposite.

Everyone has a September 11 tale about how we watched the events in "disbelief." But some people really didn't believe, and in the immediate aftermath of the attacks their doubts took form on the Internet on sites like serendipity.li, plaguepuppy.net, and Killtown. "They were a group of conditioned conspiracy theorists who have been around since JFK and before," says Steve Ferdman, now a 22-year-old marketing major at the New York Institute of Technology, who joined the Truth movement well after the attacks. "They knew how to get the ball rolling immediately. The moment it happened, the conspiracy theories were flying."

It wasn't long before the theories made it to Internet radio—and to shows like The Power Hour. Host Dave vonKleist was no stranger to telling alternate stories: His wife was an early Gulf War illness activist, they fled Houston ahead of Y2K, and his three-hour show deals with subjects like depleted uranium and vaccine fears. On 9-11, he recalls, "I got on and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is Dave and before we even say good morning, run to your VCR and start taping. America is under attack.' " As he sat glued to the TV that day, he grew suspicious when the networks went to the file footage of the tall Arab with the gun. "They were still talking about what kind of plane hit," he says, "but they sure as hell knew that Osama did it, and I said, 'Wait a minute.' " These doubts lay dormant for months until vonKleist happened upon Hunt the Boeing, a French website. France was an incubator for many 9-11 doubts. Thierry Meyssan's 2002 book L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud) spawned deeper inquiries, including vonKleist's film 911 in Plane Site.

While the Pentagon story attracted people because so little was seen or known about that attack, the demise of the World Trade Center was burned in collective memory. Eric Hufschmid, a software designer from Santa Barbara, took the attacks at face value on 9-11 and even mocked the nascent conspiracy theories. "Then I started looking at it," he tells the Voice. "It was obvious something was wrong at the towers. They looked like they'd been blown up." He began contacting engineering professors, asking them to look into it, but none did. So he took up the cause himself, penned the book Painful Questions in early 2002, and produced the companion movie, Painful Deceptions, a few months later.

Around the same time, Dylan Avery was completing a job as a helper on the construction of a new restaurant for James Gandolfini. He tended bar at the opening party, and when he got a few minutes alone with the Sopranos actor, he said he'd thought he might like to direct films. "James said, 'If you want to be a successful director, you've got to have something you want to say to the whole world,' " Avery remembers. He set out to write a fictional story about discovering that 9-11 was an inside job. "Upon researching the movie, I began to think maybe it was true," he says.

The movement's momentum picked up in 2004 as George W. Bush sought re-election, the 9-11 Commission finished its work, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued preliminary findings on the building collapses. Members petitioned New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer to convene a grand jury on the attacks. New figures emerged, like Kevin Ryan, a scientist at the testing firm that certified the steel used in the twin towers, who was fired after he wrote a letter to NIST faulting its findings, and William Rodriguez, a janitor at the twin towers credited with saving lives on 9-11.

Rodriguez has filed a federal RICO suit against Bush, the president's father and three brothers, the Republican National Committee, Alan Greenspan, Halliburton, several voting-machine companies, and others. He claims that the president and his administration participated in "approval and sponsorship of the 9-11 attacks, kidnapping, arson, murder, treason" in order to "obtain a 'blank check' to conduct wars of aggression, to consolidate economic and political power."

"The guilt of the defendants," the suit alleges, "is compellingly suggested by their myriad lies, their thwarting of any proper investigation, and their stonewalling and failure to truly cooperate even with the . . . Commission 'investigation.' "

End Part I

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It is a matter of public record that the government did not always voluntarily tell the whole truth about 9-11. In the first days after the tragedy, the EPA said the air was safe (see "Truth Out," page 32). The Bush administration claimed there had been no warnings of the attacks. A congressional inquiry was prevented from discussing information the intelligence community provided to the White House. The White House resisted forming an independent commission, stalled on releasing documents, delayed in allowing Condoleezza Rice to testify in public, and agreed to let the president meet with the commission only on the conditions that there be no oath administered, no formal transcript made, and that Vice President Dick Cheney be at his side. Several members of the commission had to recuse themselves from parts of the probe because their government or private-sector careers posed conflicts. And in its final report, the commission punted on such questions as where the money for the attacks originated, dubbing that issue "of little practical significance."

The long list of obfuscations and obstructions has helped the Truth movement attract sympathizers who don't buy the idea that the attacks were planned by the government. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia has taken up some of the movement's themes. Actor Ed Begley Jr. co-hosted a September 11, 2004, Truth event in New York because of his environmental concerns. "As to the other more fantastic theories about the events of 9-11, I don't care to comment, other than to say that they have raised some very interesting questions that I would love to see answered," Begley tells the Voice in an e-mail.

Another environmental activist, Jenna Orkin, also admires aspects of the movement but distances herself from others. "I think it's terribly important," she says, "to distinguish between the legitimate questions and the wackiness—and the wackiness has contaminated the legitimate questions in a very destructive way."

Drawing that line has split the movement. Many Truth activists now dismiss the "pod theory" and its cousin "the flash," which contend that the planes that struck the towers had unusual shapes on their undersides that may have fired missiles. More maligned is the idea that no planes hit the towers—that what we saw were drones or holograms. Even the no-planes-at-the- Pentagon theory divides Truth-ers.

Some alternative theorists avoid events involving the American Free Press, which has reported several of the vital pieces of the Truth story but has links to the neo-Nazi Barnes Review. And almost no one wants to talk about Jimmy Walter, whose money (he offered $1 million for proof that the towers fell because of the fires) helps but whose advocacy of a "no-punishment" society doesn't. The disputes aren't always friendly. VonKleist, a chief proponent of the pod theory, says the movement "has been heavily infiltrated." And Hufschmid labels most of the movement "part of the criminal movement that did the attack in the first place."

Internecine feuds are not uncommon among people who believe in conspiracies. Yet dubbing Truth movement members "conspiracy theorists" is inaccurate for two reasons. First, there's no doubt that 9-11 was a conspiracy—the question is whether it was among Muslim terrorists or others. Second, many Truth-ers deny having any theory at all. They resist efforts to construct an alternative story of the crime.

"I cannot explain it. That is not my duty," says former German cabinet minister Andreas von B a leader of the 9-11 skeptics in Europe, in a recent Dutch documentary. VonKleist takes the same line. He doesn't theorize anything, he says. "I'm simply asking questions."

That sounds fair at first, only it isn't. The movement's questions imply a different version of the story, and the true test is whether that alternative is more or less plausible that the official one. By saying they're only checking facts, the Truth activists avoid having to address the weaknesses in their own yarn. Why do the "booms" at the trade center come several minutes before the "demolition"? Why would the government destroy WTC7 when no one knew or cared about it? What happened to the people on the planes?

Some skeptics, however, aren't shy. Fringe pol Lyndon LaRouche thinks the attacks were "an attempted military coup d'état." Hufschmid says the Arab terrorists were patsies of several governments, including the U.S. and possibly Britain, France, Canada, and Israel. Ruppert, an adherent of the theory that oil reserves have peaked and that the petroleum-based economy is in great peril, postulates that 9-11 was a desperate effort by a couple dozen elites from the Clinton and Bush administrations to cling to dwindling energy supplies. His version stresses the links between the CIA and Wall Street and drug money, suspicion of the Secret Service, and a plot to rid the world of 4 billion people in order to reduce demand for petroleum.

For passengers detraining at the PATH station and climbing the stairs to ground zero on a typical Saturday, the 9-11 Truth movement is hard to miss. There at the exit stand Jamieson, Rudkowski, and a few compatriots holding a large banner declaring "9/11 Was an Inside Job." Pamphlets are handed out, and some of the vital books of the Truth movement are at the ready if a passerby wishes to debate, which happens a couple times each week. A woman is labeling as "bullshit" the idea that the entire government was behind the plot. Jamieson shakes his head. "Not the entire government," he says. "Just a small faction."

It's cold, and some passersby laugh. It has not been easy, Rudkowski says, but he sees progress. "At first my family thought I was an idiot," he recalls. "Now they're just scared." Avery and vonKleist say they've each distributed some 50,000 copies of their respective movies, but the total number of people who've seen the films must be far larger, given how often they have been shown to groups small and large. At ground zero, in the church basement, and in interviews, Truth movement members are optimistic their crusade will go far. What is clear is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, for many of them to turn back. Once you believe that official sources cannot be trusted because they are part of the conspiracy, it becomes very difficult to accept any evidence to the contrary.

Take the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief: By forcing its release, the 9-11 Commission showed the world that the president knew something about heightened threats. But to Alex Jones, the anti-government radio host who thinks the FBI plotted the 1993 Trade Center bombing, the PDB episode was just a ploy to make the commission appear independent. When the Voice mentioned to Avery that a key firefighter witness denied ever saying there were "bombs" in the towers, and that San Francisco mayor Willie Brown's "foreknowledge" of the attack seemed to have been limited to something the State Department posted on its website, the director was unfazed. "It's just one piece of evidence," he said about the Brown warning.

He's not alone. Although the Truth movement is quick to seize upon shifts in the government's story, its own version has changed multiple times. Meyssan first said a truck bomb hit the Pentagon, then suggested a drone aircraft or cruise missile did. At first, skeptics said there was too little damage to the interior rings of the Pentagon for the building to have been struck by a 757; now, some say there was too much. The number of hijackers who are supposedly alive has risen and fallen over the years.

The key to understanding the Truth movement is to realize that its members do not lack faith in all institutions of the U.S. government. On the contrary, their theories rely on a healthy respect for the power and competence of air defense units, FBI agents, high-rise building designers, and others.

Why would Bush mistakenly say he'd seen the first plane strike on TV? How could the FBI miss so many leads? Is it plausible that the CIA ignored all those warnings? And after the purported multiple failures of the FAA and NORAD on 9-11, how come no one was fired?

It's odd. For a group of people who harbor so many doubts about the intentions of their own and other governments, the media, and fellow citizens, much of the Truth movement does not suspect for a moment that our defense spending has been a rip-off, that the FBI is a clumsy bureaucracy, that our spy agencies are deaf and dumb, and that our skyscrapers are not 100 percent safe. They do not seem worried that they could be unwitting partners in a more mundane conspiracy to obscure the limits of security and science. To the lies of the Bush administration, many in the Truth movement reply with stunning and familiar certainty. "I can't jump back to the other side," says Avery. "I know that what I'm doing is right."

End

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Conspiracy 101
The basics of alternative 9-11 theories

http://villagevoice.com/news/0608,murphy,72255,6.html

by Jarrett Murphy
February 21st, 2006 11:51 AM

The JFK assassination had its "magic bullet," Watergate the "18-minute gap," and Oklahoma City that mysterious "John Doe No. 2." All conspiracy theories—whether accurate or fantasy— revolve around key clues, real or otherwise. Here are the essential elements of some alternative theories of 9-11:

Operation Northwoods This 1962 white paper from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested possible justifications for a war against Cuba, including a never executed idea in which the CIA would detonate a drone aircraft to make it look like Fidel Castro had shot down an American passenger plane. Theorists see the proposal as evidence that the U.S. government had contemplated faking air disasters as a pretext for military action.

Project for the New American Century As evidence of the motives behind a government-planned 9-11, theorists point to one 28-word passage in a September 2000 PANC report written with help from the likes of Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfo-witz: "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." Bush and his cronies, the argument goes, were looking for that event, and they got it on 9-11.

Forewarning Theorists point to Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision to stop flying commercial in the summer of 2001, as well as a San Francisco Chronicle report that Mayor Willie Brown received a warning of 9-11, as evidence that some people had foreknowledge of the attack. (It seems the alert Brown was passed was a public warning from the State Department, and he planned to fly anyway.)

War games Truth movement members who believe the military was "neutralized" or told to "stand down" on 9-11 find it very suspicious that U.S. air defense units that day were supposed to play the war game Vigilant Guardian, a simulation of a Russian bomber attack, while simultaneously monitoring Russian exercises in the Arctic.

The Pentagon Some—not all—alternative theorists say the hole in the Pentagon was too small to have been made by a 757, and too deep to have been made by anything but a cruise missile. They also cite the lack of significant wreckage or skid marks near the building. The dearth of surveillance footage of the attack arouses further suspicion. Among the alternate explanations: a truck bomb, a missile, or a drone.

The twin towers Early on, skeptics raised questions about how two 110-story steel-framed skyscrapers built to withstand airplane impacts not only collapsed, but did so suddenly, totally, and apparently straight down, possibly for the first time in history. The skeptics suggested that the buildings collapsed in a controlled demolition, a theory that has only gained strength in the past four years. The official explanation shifted—first blaming pancaking floor trusses, then warped steel columns transferring weight where it couldn't be held—and never detailed the exact sequence of the entire collapse. Alternative theorists point to sounds and witnesses' reports of explosions, little puffs of smoke, steel beams ejected outward, the rapid crumbling of the superstructure, and even the pyroclastic flow of dust as evidence that the buildings had to have been destroyed by explosives. Some theorists also believe the aircraft that hit the buildings were carrying pods on their underbellies and may have fired missiles that account for a bright flash that occurs before the collisions. Others claim the planes were remote controlled, were military aircraft, or did not exist at all.

World Trade Center 7 This building—the last to fall on 9-11—is key to all controlled-demolition theories. Its sudden fall onto its own footprint, and developer Larry Silverstein's reference on TV to telling the FDNY to "pull it," are seen as evidence that WTC7 was rigged to fall. Meanwhile, a convincing official explanation hasn't exactly been forthcoming: FEMA punted on figuring out why building seven, which was not struck by an airplane, collapsed; NIST has postponed its verdict several times. While it might seem odd that the government would destroy a building most people had never heard of, theorists cite the tenants of WTC7 (the SEC, Secret Service, CIA, and Mayor Giuliani's emergency bunker) as hints of a motive for its demolition. The speculation is that the building was taken out to cover up financial crimes or to destroy the mechanisms of the twin towers' demise: control boards for the supposed demolition charges or remote-control consoles to guide the airliners to their targets.

Flight 93 The mystery over exactly what happened during the passenger revolt on United Airlines Flight 93 has puzzled even mainstream researchers. Alternative theorists ask different questions. Pointing to press reports filed on 9-11, many suspect that the plane actually landed in Cleveland. Others believe the aircraft was shot down by U.S. military aircraft.

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The Usual Suspects
What it takes to make a conspiracy theory

http://villagevoice.com/news/0608,murphy,72256,6.html

by Jarrett Murphy
February 21st, 2006 11:52 AM

Imagine that a government illegally and secretly sells weapons to an enemy nation and diverts the proceeds to a guerrilla group. Or agents in one country, hoping to keep control of a second country, use spies in a third country to try to assassinate a religious leader. Let's say, in order to hurt a rival, operatives for a candidate cut a back-channel deal with hostage takers to delay the release of the captives. Better yet, what if three countries make a pact in which one starts a war so the others can play peacemakers and get what they want?

Bad things happen all the time; only some events turn out to be conspiracies and/or fodder for conspiracy theories. The above references (to Iran-Contra, the supposed KGB effort to kill Pope John Paul II, the purported October Surprise plot involving the 1980 Reagan campaign and the Iran hostages, and the 1956 Suez Canal crisis) are examples of the breadth of events that—accurately in only some cases—get stuck with the C label.

Conspiracy theories usually attach to events that have shocked or hurt many people, such as the JFK assassination (the daddy of modern conspiracy theories). It also helps if the first official stories turn out to be false or incomplete; every official lie weakens the credibility of the mainstream tales and augments the plausibility of other versions.

Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida who has written about conspiracy theories, sees other common structural elements. "You'd also need specifics that go to really gritty details," Fenster says, "a level of detail that suggests that . . . the person who's telling me this knows what they are talking about." And the details generally revolve around the idea, says Fenster, that "there are bad guys out there that have some sort of motivation to do what they are doing, that you can find traces or evidence of what they are doing, and that some effort of newly enlightened people to band up against them to correct history is necessary."

That sense of taking action is one aspect of what makes conspiracy theories satisfying to believe. Another is that they bring order to an unwieldy universe: Even a theory that posits an overweening evil force in the world is comforting compared to the images of random tragedy we see on the evening news. This is especially true of what Michael Barkun, a poli-sci professor at Syracuse's Maxwell School, calls super–conspiracy theories, like the one about a worldwide Jewish cabal.

Conspiracy theories also reflect their developers' values. "I think there is something deeply populist about the U.S.," says Fenster. "We claim to have a fear of the concentration of private and public power, and a lot of our conspiracy theories relate to the idea that there are some private entities that are capturing our political system."

The problem is that if people erroneously believe in a shadowy conspiracy, it is difficult to change their minds because counter-evidence can be seen as a ploy by the conspirators to conceal the dirty deeds. And the danger, Barkun says, "is that we may end up in a place where there are a lot of different pictures of the world. The question is: Can you have a workable society if that happens?"

That's not an idle worry. Conspiracy theories are typically depicted as the ruminations of a lunatic fringe, but in fact, almost everybody is into them. Former Justice Department official Webster Hubbell recalls President Clinton asking him to find out the truth about UFOs and the JFK assassination. And despite President Bush's plea not to "tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty," several members of his administration have—to varying degrees—tried to tie the attacks to Saddam Hussein. These claims owe much to scholar Laurie Mylroie's efforts over the past decade to link Iraq to everything from the Oklahoma City bombing to TWA Flight 800.

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Truth Out
Sick of being lied to by the EPA, 9-11 plaintiffs use the courts to force the answers they seek

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0608,lombardi,72258,6.html

(Gold9472: Doh! I missed one.)

by Kristen Lombardi
February 21st, 2006 12:26 PM

Jenna Orkin doesn't expect to hear her truth about 9-11 unless someone forces the officials involved to tell it. For her, as for so many people downtown and in Brooklyn, 9-11 meant clouds of ash and smoke engulfing her apartment building, filtering down the halls of her son's Tribeca high school.

Within days of the World Trade Center collapse, someone ordered Environmental Protection Agency administrators to tell New Yorkers the air was safe. Reopen Wall Street, and bring back its thousands of workers. Reopen Stuyvesant High School, which Orkin's son attended. Ignore Brooklyn, where residents like her vacuumed inches-deep white ash from their windowsills. No matter that private tests showed the air remained full of lead, asbestos, mercury, benzene. No matter that, according to documents forced out of the EPA by a Freedom of Information request, the agency's own tests agreed that the air in Lower Manhattan—who wanted to bother with Brooklyn?—wasn't fit to breathe.

Even without testing, anyone could see the billowing cloud of debris released when the 110-story twin towers came crashing down. Dust from the Trade Center hung in the air for weeks. Putrid fires burned for three months.

"Any half-wit knew it was hell after 9-11," Orkin says. She has been pressing the EPA to test for and clean up toxic dust in her Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, across the East River from ground zero and smack in the plume's path. After tests revealed high levels of asbestos in her home, she paid thousands of dollars for a full abatement, which included ripping up the carpets. Her World Trade Center Environmental Organization website, wtceo.org, is devoted to the 9-11 fallout and replete with aerial photos and satellite images of the plume.

Not content with activism, she is today one of 12 plaintiffs suing the EPA in a class action lawsuit on behalf of residents, office workers, and students from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Unlike so many others who've gotten sick from WTC-related pollution— including many of the plaintiffs—she hasn't experienced any symptoms. And neither has her son. What she's sick of is not being told the truth.

"We were being duped," Orkin says, leaning forward, "and I'd like to find out why."

Now she and her fellow plaintiffs just might. On February 2, U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts handed down a surprising pre-trial ruling, blasting the EPA for its response to 9-11 and allowing the case to go forward. That put Orkin and her colleagues one step closer to proving their claims in court.

In their 111-page complaint, they allege that thousands of people living, working, and attending school downtown and in Brooklyn were exposed to contamination after the EPA misled them about air quality. They claim that Christine Todd Whitman, then the EPA administrator, and her staff made false statements and failed to carry out its cleanup duties. As a result, they charge, the EPA violated their constitutional rights to be protected from being harmed by government officials.

In her 83-page ruling, Judge Batts found enough evidence for the case to proceed. She not only denied the EPA's motion to dismiss it, but refused to grant Whitman immunity. On the contrary, she scolded the former EPA head, declaring her statements so "deliberate and misleading" they "shock the conscience."

"No argument can be made that Whitman could not have understood from existing law that her conduct was unlawful," Batts wrote.

The EPA's spokesperson declined to comment on the ruling, referring questions to the Justice Department, which is handling the case. Its spokesperson, Charles Miller, refused to discuss pending litigation.

Whitman, now a New Jersey consultant, released a brief statement, expressing "outrage" and calling the plaintiffs' claims off-base. "Every action taken by the EPA during this horrific event," she said, "was designed to provide the most comprehensive protection and most accurate information to the residents of Manhattan."

Now that the suit can proceed, the truth of that statement will be put to the test. Bates's decision paves the way for the plaintiffs to sit government officials down and make them testify under oath. And this process of legal discovery, explains New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chris Dunn, who has sued federal departments, will prove enlightening for New Yorkers. All we know now is what EPA officials say in the press—in short, their spin. That's about to change.

"No one on the street can get an official to talk about government business," Dunn notes. "One of the biggest virtues of any lawsuit is that it can force the government to disclose information it won't otherwise."

By now, some truths about the 9-11 fallout are known. The lawsuit outlines EPA press releases issued in the first days after the attacks, beginning on September 13. All are reassuring in nature. But it didn't take long for private tests to contradict the rhetoric. By December 2001, the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project was collecting dust samples in elevator shafts and ventilation units downtown, and finding asbestos and other toxins at double the threshold of safety. A freedom of information request from the project yielded 800 pages of previously hidden EPA samples that had revealed the same.

Then in August 2003, the EPA inspector general issued a scathing 165-page report verifying such contradictions and disclosing some disconcerting news—that the White House had pressured the EPA to sanitize its warnings, for instance.

Says Joel Kupferman, of the law project, which serves as co-counsel in the suit, "No one can really argue there wasn't malfeasance."

No one can argue that people aren't getting sick, either. Take Bob Gulack, a plaintiff who works for the Securities and Exchange Commission. One month after the attacks, the SEC leased offices in a building on Broadway, two blocks from ground zero. Almost from the moment Gulack arrived, he began experiencing ailments he never had before. His lungs filled with fluid. He struggled to breathe. Doctors diagnosed him with reactive airway disorder and permanent lung damage, and attributed the ailments to 9-11.

He wasn't alone. As a union steward for 150 SEC employees, he's documented symptoms among dozens of co-workers, from burning eyes to heart palpitations.

"This is brand-new and it started with the World Trade Center collapse," he says, sitting in a workaday Asian restaurant on 72nd Street. Gulack, who now collects workers' compensation for his 9-11–related illnesses, avoids going downtown. He does not visit his office or old haunts for fear of triggering his asthma. The only time he ventures into Lower Manhattan is to attend hearings on the 9-11 fallout.

Still, he says, "I'm one of the lucky ones."

Some of the plaintiffs forked out thousands of dollars—from $5,500 on up to $18,000—to rid homes and businesses of the toxic dust. Those who couldn't afford the professionals mopped it up themselves.

For the plaintiffs, the sense of injustice is profound. "We have been forgotten," says Gail Benzman, whose continual strained coughing is excruciating to hear. Benzman developed sinusitis and asthma while working in a municipal building on Center Street, seven blocks from ground zero. "There is nothing for people who have gotten ill outside the pit."

Jeanne Markey, one of three Philadelphia lawyers representing the plaintiffs, says the lawsuit has made these frustrated activ ists—who've spent years asking for credible testing, medical monitoring, and a real cleanup—suddenly much more powerful. "It's one thing to say someone lied," she observes. "It's another thing to take that person to court because of the lie."

Ask any lawyer who's sued the federal government and they'll tell you the same thing: Discovery changes everything. Mitchell Bernard, of the National Resources Defense Council, in Manhattan, has taken on the EPA and other government agencies in court. He says there's a difference between what an official says in public and under oath.

When a political appointee makes a pronouncement, Bernard explains, "he is not under any obligation to tell the truth." In a deposition, he is.

Officials tend to have a script, says the NYCLU's Dunn. Reporters may ask questions, but officials can refuse to answer. In a deposi tion, they can't. "Depositions are the surefire way to get government officials to answer questions they don't want to answer," he adds.

And then there are the documents. Confidential records the public cannot access even through freedom of information requests—internal e-mails, meeting minutes—become treasures unearthed in the discovery process. If plaintiffs can get their hands on such records, Bernard says, "What comes out of it could be illuminating in terms of what actually went on at the EPA."

Markey says she and her colleagues have yet to develop a strategy for discovery. But she ticks off a number of questions: What was the justification for the EPA's assuring statements? Did it rely on test results? What were they? "We're interested in discovering the basis of the statements," she says.

For now, the plaintiffs have to keep waiting. While Batts's decision allows the case to move forward, it's not the final say. Markey expects the Justice Department to appeal, stalling the proceedings.

Miller, the department's spokesperson, says the case is still under review, and points out that a second class action lawsuit against the EPA—one involving first responders on the debris pile—was dismissed earlier this month. "One judge went one way and the other judge went the other way," he says, suggesting a reason for appeal.

Appeal or no, the plaintiffs aren't about to give up. As they see it, the lawsuit represents the last chance to force the EPA to live up to its mission to protect New Yorkers. Somebody, they say, has to fight for accountability.

"Somebody has to blow the whistle on these guys," exclaims Diane Lapson, a plaintiff who heads the tenant association at Independence Plaza North, an affordable-housing complex three blocks from ground zero. Lapson, 54, a product of 1960s social activism, sits at her kitchen table, sipping coffee, looking out at the scarred Lower Manhattan skyline, and combing through snapshots taken from her building—aerial views of the 9-11 cloud, of the Hudson River pier where twisted metal was loaded on barges bound for Staten Island.

She's furious with the government officials who told her not to worry. "They're the naked emperors," she seethes. "Somebody has to stand up and say, 'You guys have no clothes.'"