at this point we have nine years of hard scientific evidence that disproves the government theory about what happened on september eleventh and yet people continue to be either oblivious to the fact that this information exist or completely resistant to looking at this information so the question becomes why why is it that people have so much trouble hearing this information from my work i think we would be not to look at the impact of trauma my name is marty hopper and i'm a ph d clinical psychologist i have been working and living for the past thirty years here in boulder colorado for the past eleven years my work has focused on helping people who have the experience of personal trauma now as we know the horrors of what happened on nine eleven were televised all over the world and they were televised in fact live and we witnessed the death of almost three thousand of our fellow americans we know this had a very severe and traumatic impact on a large majority of the population i myself cried for weeks after september eleventh a friend of mine who is a psychologist in practice here in boulder said that her caseload increased tremendously after nine eleven and people that she hadn't seen in ten years were coming back into her practice so i think it's safe to say that collectively as a nation because of what happened on september eleventh we experienced trauma i'm french sure and i have a master's degree from the university of colorado i've had a private practice as a psychotherapist and as a licensed professional counselor for about twenty years why do people resist this information the information  that the official story about nine eleven cannot be true what i've learned is that as humans each of us have a worldview and that worldview is usually formed in great part by the culture we grow up in when we hear information that contradicts our world view social psychologists call the result the resulting in security cognitive dissonance for example with nine eleven we have one cognition which is what our officials what the official story of nine eleven what our government told us what our media media repeated to us over and over that nineteen muslims attacked us on the other hand we have what scientist researchers architects engineers are now beginning to tell us which is that there is evidence that shows that the official story cannot be true so now we've lost our sense of security we are starting to feel vulnerable confused nine eleven truth challenges some of our most fundamental beliefs about our government and about our country when your beliefs are challenged or when to beliefs are inconsistent of dissonance is created nine eleven truth challenges the beliefs that our country protects us and keeps us safe and in that america is the good guy my name's bob harper and i have a p clinical psychology from the university of cincinnati for the past twenty nine years i've been a licensed ph d clinical psychologist in boulder colorado when your beliefs are challenged fear and anxiety are created in response to there are psychological defenses kick in and they protect us from our from these emotions denial which is probably the most primitive psychological defense is the one most likely to kick in when our beliefs are challenged and then your deeper a ph d we're originally from football and where i studied psychology and psychoanalysis for the past fifteen years i've been empowering people who have experienced significant trauma america is a powerful nation it has never been attacked we were confident through where we felt secure and all of a sudden that security collapsed people started to be fearful with all those rumors those news people didn't know what to think about and it's a very very uncomfortable state to be on and eventually our mind shuts off just like when a computer is overloaded our minds get overloaded we can handle it anymore and we shut down it's easier to deny it and move on with our lives while some of us will tend to do is deny the evidence that's coming our way and stick to the original story the official story and to try to regain our incomplete librium in that way everything we can do is decide to look at conflicting evidence and be sincere and be open minded and look at both sides of the issue and then make up our own mind about what reality is i'm dorothy lorica i have a master's degree in counseling psychology from the university of colorado and i've been practicing reevaluation counseling for  sixteen years if we can think about our world view as being sort of our mental and emotional home i think all of us will do just about anything to defend our homes to defend our families and and so i see that with people and i saw that with myself when my brother tried to talk with me about it don't mess with me don't mess with my home don't mess with my comfort with how things how things are and about a week later i read a lengthy article by professor griffen about why he believes the official account of nine eleven cannot be true and it was a very well researched article and i was in my office at the time i sat there and i felt my stomach churning i thought maybe i was going to be sick and i leapt out of my chair and ran out the door and took a long walk around the block and around several blocks and just broke down and i understand now that what was happening was my world view about my government being in some way my protector almost like a parent had been dashed and it was like being cast out into the wilderness i think is the closest way to describe that feeling and i saw it and i sobbed felt like the ground had completely disappeared beneath my feet and and i knew at some point during the walk that i knew that i was going to have to become active in educating other people about this that there was that for me to retain any sense of integrity i was going to have to take some action i couldn't just let something like this go many people respond to these truths in a very deep way some have a visceral reaction like they've been punched in the stomach to begin to accept the possibility that the government was involved it's like opening pandora's box if you open the lid and a little bit it's it's going to challenge some of your fundamental beliefs about the world here are a few of those jobs those spontaneous initial reactions to hearing the contradictory evidence about nine eleven i don't want to know the truth or i become too negative and psychologically go downhill i'm not sure i want to know if this is true that up would be down and down would be up my life would never be the same fran i refuse to believe that that many americans could be that tre someone would have talked but these are beliefs they are not scientific facts but these beliefs do keep us from looking at the empirical evidence i'm david ray griffin i taught t  starting in two thousand and four i started publishing about nine eleven and since that time i have published ten books about nine eleven what you have in pe simply say look at the evidence and if it's convincing i will change my mind other people are parodic magic people they have a paradigm they say this is the way the world works and i'm i'm convinced this is the right way the world works nine eleven doesn't fit into that paradigm so i don't need to look at the evidence parodic matic and then there is a third type of person that we often call wishful thinkers i call it wishful and fearful thinking so they simply will not believe something that they fear to be the truth and i found maybe to be the most powerful factor of people rejecting a nine eleven truth and not even entertaining the evidence so whenever we say i refuse to believe we can be sure that the evidence that's coming our way is not bearable and that it's going it's conflicting with our world view much too much denial protects people from this kind of anxiety as i thought about all of these responses i realize that what is common to every one of them is the emotion of fear people are afraid of being ostracized they're afraid of being alienated they're afraid of being shunned they're afraid of their lives being inconvenienced they'd have to change their lives they're afraid of being confused they're afraid of psychological to to ration they're afraid of feeling helpless and vulnerable and they're afraid that they won't be able to handle the feelings that are coming out none of us want to feel helpless and vulnerable so we want to defend ourselves and the way we often do that is with anger so then we become angry and when we become angry then we become indic that we become offended we want to ridicule the messenger we want to pass knowledge it's the messenger and we want to censor the messenger so how can we overcome this resistance and denial the first thing is to meet people where they're at one thing is that we need to raise people's awareness about this through what i would call gentle dialogue and gentle questioning my name is john freedom and i'm a counsellor in private practice here in tucson arizona regimen for the past twenty years i hold a masters level certification and  two neuro linguistic programming so it doesn't work to challenge people's beliefs are merely tell them you know i know the truth about nine eleven but good ways to ask questions ask open ended questions and lead them into a dialogue and discussion about it one of the ways to deal with the trauma is to find the answers that's why i think it is such important to have a comprehensive investigation i believe that to be the kind of country that we think we are we have to face some of the things that are not as we think they are i'm robert griffin i'm a licensed psychologists practicing and pennsylvania for twenty five years i mean a member of psychologists for social responsibility and i am past president of the northeastern pennsylvania psychological association very keen that we're above such things that it could happen in other countries but it couldn't happen here that's a lack of humility and that's pride and so not being able to see your dark side your weaknesses is the most dangerous thing the observation that pride is one of the basic human flaws nations and say there and thirty bad shape but luckily we don't have those problems we don't have leaders who would do those things that were done  n the soviet union or done in germany or done in japan and on down the list so this is a type of pride that americans have a feature of american history that makes us particularly liable to this pride is this notion that it's called exceptionalism that america is the exceptional nation and that began from the beginning as they as this country was formed people would say well there was so much evil  european countries so much cheating so much lying so much using the people for the rulers purposes but not in america we have leaders that are free from those sans so i think this has made nine eleven particularly difficult for americans anyone can make mistakes but our ideals or our principles get us back on track this is one of the finding issues of our time so we need to understand that question is patriotic questioning is what we're supposed to do with citizens that's our duty when we come to the national level when something like nine eleven happens we need to be sure that we have a real investigation in to who the perpetrators are and then we need to be sure that those perpetrators are held legally accountable it's part of the healing process on the end of it to a level as on the collective level we need the truth in order to  here in the united states we're often brought up and told we don't have propaganda that we have a hard charging investigative prast we have this educated skeptical even cynical citizenry and that if there were powerful interest trying to manage manipulate public opinion they would be exposed the reality actually is just the opposite academics like alex kerry and others who've spent their lifetimes looking at how propaganda works finds that it's actually in western democracies and open societies where you need the most sophisticated sorts of propaganda and since world war one thanks to people like ivy league and any bernays you know propaganda has become a business this business of public relations or is one of the firms that has often represented dictators the person marsteller firm puts that their business is perception management to manage public perception and public policy on behalf of their clients who have been might be them amazing and they were because the entire event was staged years after the operation a us army report admitted that the toppling of the saddam's statue had been engineered by psychological operations a week earlier another psychological operation the groundwork for what followed the script was for a female lead damsel in distress to be rescued by u s armed forces in a situation that we're we're talking about outnumbering journalists propaganda has become the primary means by which the wealthy communicate with the rest of society whether selling a product a political candidate a lawyer or sells into the powerful deliver messages to the public before consulting their colleagues in the public relations industry is you tend to get more credibility to what you're told as a journalist if the advertisement comes around heckling you tend to be more skeptical about it because obviously somebody false news stories created and leaked by the bush white house propaganda apparatus prior to and during the assault on iraq war most amongst these were the lies that led to the war in the first place it was not bad intelligence that led to the invasion concludes gardiner it was an orchestrated effort that began before the war and was meant to kill leslie planned to manipulate the public in two thousand and two when the bush administration and many of them were actually registered lobbyists for military contractors there's a bit of a conflict of interest right away when your bread and butter is based on being able with savants and bombs and missiles and you're supposed to be just a patriotic acts general giving an honest opinion to what's going on and even though that's illegal there's no way to really stop and the most powerful medium through which it occurred refused to even report on the seven years later the results of the invasion are clear according to the lancet one of britain's most respected medical journals approximately six hundred thousand iraqis have been killed from the invasion as of two thousand and six b because when we think of public relations this is not an image that springs to mind yet it was here at the turn of the century in the town of ludlow colorado that p r as we know it began to take shape from the beginning it was steeped in class warfare the conditions that men women and children worked under a nineteenth century america were very much like what we think of now as the conditions in the global south in which thirteen fourteen hour days were not uncommon living conditions were often and barrack like housing children worked right alongside their parents those were the kind of conditions and certainly if you pick sure what we see in the global south today almost slave like conditions you can make the comparison pretty easily m rockefeller's were synonymous with wealth and power william avery rockefeller had made a living as a literal snake oil salesman but his son john davidson had achieved the american dream his fortune was built striking workers and their family celebrated easter the end came it became known as the burned suffocated to death in that fire that was called  reveals that the brutalization of workers in the united states was not an unusual occurrence sixty years earlier and eight hundred forty seven a nationwide general strike was met with violent oppression by federal troops over thirty workers were killed against the polling company of the great capitalists at the turn of the century can be summed up in the words of william vanderbilt in response to a suggestion that the new york central railroad should adjust its train schedules to accommodate the public  but the relationship between the public and corporations has chang the industrial workers of the world or the one following the massacre at ludlow soldiers in denver refused to participate in further attacks against the miners declaring that they would not engage in the shooting of women and children event and other events ivy league specialty was crisis management among other things he's credited with inventing the press release which you know all of us just sort of think of or something helpful you wan publicize an advantage church picnic call a news conference or put out a press release but at the time the idea was very radical because what i feel he was saying is well we're going to manage this crisis by calling attention to it we're going to actually assist and help the news media and journalists in covering it what he knew was that the degree to which journalists became used to independent on their services was the degree to which he could actually c making upon learning that the rockefeller foundation had one hundred million dollars set aside for promotional purposes he convinced rockefeller to donate large sums to colleges hospitals churches and charitable organizations in order to generate positive publicity he also suggested that rockefeller sr begin handing out money in public and that junior appear in staged photo ops at work was that the corporation needed a make over widely perceived discreet tyrannical institutions corporations needed to manufacture an image of war and carry this is the beginning of the public relations industry rock n roll didn't set up the rockefeller foundation until rockefeller became very unpopular because of his labor policies and suddenly the rockefeller needed to do create a good impression but it's an interesting phenomenon of the poor actually give a larger percentage of their income that is rich and i think the rich feel they doing more because you know giving one hundred thousand dollars seems like a specific national hundred nation and and you know it doesn't matter if they have one hundred million they still think they've done a lot so it's partly a result of this distortion of economic strictly charitable view charity and private charity and imagine a government charity that i mean any kind of action that sort of relieves people's distress a little bit without changing the system and giving enough people just enough to prevent them from breaking out in open rebellion today one of the largest p r firms in the world specializes in the art of crisis management burson marsteller holds offices in thirty five countries and assert clients as varied as cigarette maker philip morris chemical giant union carbide and the monsanto corporation a company specializing in genetic engineering and other life sciences like the rending group burson marsteller is bipartisan to the core its worldwide president and chief executive mark penn served as hillary clinton's key political advisor during the two thousand and eight election believe went to work for the i g farben company german industrial company and we know now that i g farben what is actually part of the nazi propaganda inner circle one of the most effective and of course horrifying government propaganda campaigns ever organized was the nazi campaign that continued for years and years under the direction of nazi propaganda minister as being a friendly regime but before lending his expertise to the third reich mr lee would do so for the american government along with other experts in the burgeoning field of mind science and public relations he would engineer propaganda for world war one not just against the enemy the germans but against the american people  you could be in trouble and so fervid of attention was actually given to legitimacy military troops i'm remembering here passage from the old chinese to except think it's unfair so would be a good twenty three hundred years ago where the author of the book says in general and i'm quoting now in general war is a thing that the people despise therefore when the young man is to be sent off to war his wife his parents his family should gather around him and say to him conquer or let me never see it again and this is a very powerful sense of first of all the violence done to the young man but also the sense that war is disgusting to most people and it is often not in their best interest and therefore one needs all kinds of songs and dances and in this case you know threatening the young man essentially dispossession you can't return to your family can't return home you'll be discreetly so on are security everything's being played upon her and it continues so yeah national security is one of the most powerful notions in one hundred times to swindle i think people to do things that are not in their best interest to support a massive military complexes that are not in anybody's interest but that are like cancers feeding on society frequently propaganda and persuasion have been around for centuries young's but propaganda in it modern sense can be traced to the fifteenth and sixteenth century when the catholic church was you know had a tough competition with the protestants over or how to articulate the religious vision of the world  the reason i mention this is that it shows said propaganda is about mindset it's about etiology it's about world view how people see things as distinct from an individual policy or whether you happen to like this candidate or that candidate so that's where the word came from for propagating the faith and that's the way the word was used up until the early twentieth century and then what emerged particularly with world war one was the application of this propagating the faith to refer to international affairs to refer to what a national government would  do national security policy apart the british empire seemed to be extremely strong at that time and yet nevertheless was in it downward facing it couldn't afford to support its own army for example same with the french the same with  the united kingdom came up with an office whose specific purpose was promoting the war aims of the united kingdom and wish through the boy's city through covert operations through what would they be called dirty tricks through telling the truth through a whole number of different applications of information using information as an instrument of war and from the with each he had to somehow drive the population salesmanship the world's greatest adventure in africa seventy five thousand civil leaders known as four minutes were assembled to deliver pro war messages to people in churches theatres  periodicals were sent to six hundred thousand teachers boy scouts delivered copies of president wilson's addresses to households across america it was in short the largest wartime propaganda campaign in the history of the united states central to the committee's propaganda were two basic ideas when the american homeland was in imminent danger from a savage bloodthirsty foe until it was the fate of the american nation and president wilson's words to make the world safe for democracy the first thing was a time honored tactic long used in the united states in other countries to vilify foreign enemies indigenous peoples and sla that a canadian had been crucified by german soldiers and the dead bodies were being boiled down and so called corpse factories to be used for a missions and paid for in a foreshadowing of the freedom fries incident sauerkraut was renamed liberty cabbage false atrocity stories would become a staple for nations in war time throughout the twentieth century the recent example occurred prior to the first gulf war among the children to die and as it turns out the massacre babes never occurred young girl was actually a member of the kuwaiti royal family and had been coached by the public relations firm hell and milton to may attempt to engender hatred against germans in support of the war effort was highly successful but there was another equally important aspect of the domestic propaganda campaign as every adventure story needs a villain it also needs a he united states have been justified under the pretense of maintaining order protecting american interests and bringing civilization to the savages now fish could talk and you could ask a fish what's the most obvious over to your bird the last thing the fish would say would be what that's the last thing the fish notice and it's true about any culture those things that are most powerful and most obvious to an outsider don't get seen by the people swimming in their water americans is god's chosen people this goes back this far back to sixteen thirty where john winthrop on the year of bella coming from in the united states it was a proud city building rock stronger than oceans which were god words and teeming with people living and harmony and peace were city other hill and so our mission is to democratize the rest of the the idea of a particular state cast a savior of the world would be taken to new heights in the united states but it wasn't an american invention the savior much was used as a justification for virtually every imperial intervention during the colonial devotion to a certain place in people contrary to nationalism which is inseparable from loss for power this concept of patriotism remains elusive once the war against saddam begins we expect every american to support our military and if they can't do that to shut equating super patriotism with militarism military endeavor military cheap mints military struggles and victories that's all supposedly especially manifestation of patriotism and i argue that a real patriotic wants something different for his country he wants social justice he wants peace and stability he wants fairness he wants an end to racism sexism he takes pride in his country's ability and social betterment rather than his country's ability to fade and knock around other countries