A tremendous amount of research went into the creation of AE911Truth's brand new 50-page booklet, Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of the World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7. But getting 20,000 copies of the booklet into the right hands turned out to be almost as challenging.
AE911Truth operations manager Andy Steele and volunteers Josh Ewing and Chris Kendall, who were responsible for building the distribution list for the mailing, had to be really creative as they went about finding contact information for the most influential people in government, media, academia, and professional associations and firms.
"These are the opinion makers and the news makers in their fields," Steele points out. "Now they can no longer claim ignorance of the evidence or turn a blind eye to the crime of the century, which is a cover-up of the fact that three buildings were brought down in controlled demolitions that day."
A particular challenge for Steele et al. was getting the booklet to the individuals who worked on the 9/11 official reports published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Ewing used LinkedIn profiles and anything else he could find to track them down to the places where they work now. After many hours of searching, he located more than 250 current or former NIST and FEMA employees or contractors.
Officers of the American Institute of Architects received booklets that were sent to each of the 300 local AIA chapters in the US.
Researching the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) proved especially daunting, since each member had to be reached individually, as no chapter addresses were available. An 80-page PDF booklet did contain all the necessary addresses — but lumped into one big paragraph and organized alphabetically by state. So the contact information had to be meticulously copied, then pasted into Notebook, then turned into spread sheets. Steele pulled an all-nighter in order to complete this arduous task.
"It was well worth it, given that we added 2,000 names and addresses that night."
Like Ewing, he also used LinkedIn to find many of the ASCE national board and committee members.
Steele says he found a list of the top 25 engineering colleges in the U.S. and through their websites was able to make a list of faculty members from the structural, chemical, mechanical, and civil engineering disciplines to whom the booklet could be sent. Among these schools were such prestigious institutions as MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, and UCLA.
One donor to the Beyond Misinformation project asked that an outreach effort be made to every member of Congress and every state governor. This was relatively easy to do with addresses gleaned from government websites. It was also simple to find contact information for the presidents of hundreds of architectural and engineering firms as well as for each of the 51 members of the New York City Council.
The editorial staff at The New York Times (minus sports and arts writers) received copies. Any Times reporters or editors who read the booklet in September or in the first week of October did so under the shadow of the huge AE911Truth billboard that sat for an entire month right across the street from their building.
Other media members receiving Beyond Misinformation included Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez at Democracy Now!, the staff of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC and of the Anderson Cooper 360 show on CNN, plus the entire staff of, respectively, Al-Jazeera America, The Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, and PBS in New York City. Of course, not to be forgotten were the producer and hosts of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, which had AE911Truth's Richard Gage as a guest last year.
Steele says it's vital for AE911Truth supporters around the US to pick up where he, Ewing, and Kendall left off — by putting the booklet into the hands of as many professionals and other decision makers as they can.
It's important to make friction wherever you can by talking about this evidence and spreading it far and wide."
He says he believes the compilation of this massive mailing list highlights how much AE911Truth needs volunteers to get the essential work done. To Steele, the people working behind the scenes are just as important to the success of an effort of this magnitude as are those who make speeches on behalf of 9/11 Truth and present the controlled demolition evidence.
"Activism is not just handing out flyers and talking on street corners, it's the nitty-gritty work that needs to get done to keep this machine moving," Steele emphasizes. "We need as much help as we can get."
Craig McKee is a journalist and the creator of the blog Truth and Shadows.
