PETER'S NEW YORK, Sunday, November 30, 2008--Frustrated with the lack of accountability for what happened on September 11, 2001, three concerned upstate New Yorkers recently joined forces to see if they could mobilize the public to critically examine the government's version of the events of that day. One of the three managed to convince the proprietor of a local theater that a showing of the controversial documentary Loose Change Final Cut, a film critical of the government's version of 9-11, would draw a sizable crowd. The others teamed up in a supportive role to publicize the event. The result was a screening of the film last Tuesday at the Charles R. Wood Theater in Glens Falls, New York, with a personal appearance by the film's producer, Korey Rowe. Attendance far exceeded that of any other film shown in the theater's history. "That was a record," said the theater's executive director, Bill Woodward, of the 143 paid attendees who passed through the theater's doors. The previous high grosser was a film that brought out about 100 people, Woodward told Peter's New York.
The event was the brainchild of Dave Nicholson, a committed activist on behalf of a variety of causes, both local and national in scope. A Vietnam War veteran, he had concluded. along with many other Americans, that individuals high in government circles staged the 9-11 events to justify in the eyes of the public the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed. The government-promoted scenario of 19 Middle Eastern men who were said to have hijacked airliners that day and to have flown them into each of the the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, and into a field in rural Pennsylvania, was merely a smokescreen full of contradictions, Nicholson contends. Nicholson said his aim is to save as many lives as possible by unmasking the government's perfidy and bringing to a halt the nation's aggressive military actions abroad, which have led, by some estimates, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of U.S. servicemen, not to mention the injuries, both physical and psychological, wrought on survivors.
Nicholson points to recent government reports showing that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a justification to escalate the Vietnam War, never really happened as it was represented to the U.S. Congress. If the truth had come out at the time, the Vietnam war could have ended earlier, Nicholson argues. "Now you have 9-11 with this information coming out right now as we're fighting," he said. "If enough people were able to be aware of how we're being manipulated again, we can stop more deaths," he said.
