9/11 skeptics to speak at UQAM

By JAN RAVENSBERGEN, THE GAZETTE

May 2, 2010

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/skeptics+speak+UQAM/2976659/story.html

MONTREAL – A double-bill presentation scheduled in this city Monday evening by two leading voices of what’s known as the 9/11 truth movement has triggered lively debate over freedom of expression – after one researcher at the university where the event is being held labeled skeptics unconvinced by official U.S. government reports as “liars” and “intellectually dishonest.”

Organizers said the evening will be “Canada’s largest 9/11 conference.”

One speaker, David Ray Griffin, is a retired theologian currently writing his 10th book analyzing 9/11 and related topics. Its immediate predecessor examined the late-afternoon collapse Sept. 11, 2001, of World Trade Center 7. Griffin called the final U.S. government report on WTC 7 “unscientific and false.”

An earlier Griffin work devoted 339 pages to “omissions and distortions” of the official 9/11 Commission Report.

“There has been little if any public discussion,” Griffin stated in that book, over “whether the report of the 9/11 Commission should be accepted as the definitive account.”

His book makes it crystal clear he considers it should not:

“As in any crime investigation,” Griffin added, “the Commission should have looked equally at evidence supportive of the alternative theory – with one piece of evidence being the very fact that the White House tried to prevent any serious investigation of the matter.”

Last September, Griffin was ranked by the New Statesman, a British magazine, as No. 41 among The 50 People Who Matter Today.

The other speaker is Richard Gage, an American architect who founded Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

The website of the non-profit group lists 1,188 architectural and engineering professionals asking for an independent investigation into the events of 9/11, “with subpoena power.”

Julien Tourreille is a doctoral candidate at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, where the presentations are taking place at 6:30 p.m. Monday, in the 730-seat Salle Marie-Gérin-Lajoie downtown. Both speakers are “fraudsters,” he told a large-circulation French-language Montreal newspaper.

“It’s a shame that UQAM’s name is being linked to such a movement, because it does not add to the credibility of a research institution,” added Tourreille, who specializes in U.S. studies.

Louis Balthazar, a professor emeritus at Laval University in Quebec City, is a specialist in U.S. foreign policy and president of UQAM’s Centre for U.S. Studies, Raoul-Dandurand Chair. “UQAM should not lend its name to this organization,” he was quoted as saying.

Others at the university, however, took a different view.

Donald Cuccioletta, a colleague of the two, told the French-language arm of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that “personally, I don’t agree” with 9/11 truthers. But, he added, “these people have a right to hold their conferences” on university premises.

The evening, said Jean-François Ranger, one of the organizers, will be a “historic event for Montrealers wishing to better understand the science and motives behind this contentious geopolitical attack.”

It will demonstrate “the real reasons why the 9/11 truth movement continues to grow worldwide,” Ranger stated.

Griffin’s talk is titled: Is the war in Afghanistan justified by 9/11?

Gage will give a multimedia talk – similar to one he’s presented in 14 nations – as 9/11 Blueprint for Truth – The Architecture of Destruction.”

More information at w9t.org/montreal

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