Clearing the Record on "Confronting the Evidence"
By Nicholas Levis
(co-writer of the script)A near-capacity crowd of 1100 people converged for "Confronting the Evidence," an exposé of U.S. government complicity in the crimes of 9/11 held at the Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom on the evening of Saturday, September 11, 2004.
In four hours time, some 20 panelists and filmmakers from New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada made often brilliant presentations, covering every aspect of 9/11 research and the 9/11 truth movement. Content for the program was developed by a fractious coalition of people associated with 911Truth.org, NY 9/11 Truth, cooperativeresearch.org, INN World Report, SGTV and the "9/11 Science and Justice Alliance."
For most people, the only story that should matter is the one told during the program: the case for opening a new criminal investigation of 9/11, based on evidence that elements of the U.S. government were complicit in the attacks.
The entire production including promotion came together in just three weeks, starting from scratch, thanks to a gargantuan effort by a dozen dedicated, often sleepless but razor-sharp minds - and to a donor who was extremely generous.
Within hours after the program was over, however, attack mails began to circulate on the Internet. The complaints did not issue from supporters of the official story, but from supposed 9/11 truth activists. Some of them puffed up the inevitable technical snafus as evidence of sinister intent, or else decried the lively stage debate, as though allowing a diversity of opinion is a crime. A few of them contained errors on every imaginable detail. Be aware that several of the mails originate with people involved on the periphery of organizing the event, which had an extremely convoluted background. Some of these people appear to have been among the hecklers who tried to disrupt the proceedings.
People invested in such an endeavor will tend to complain about whatever they feel went wrong. I for one was extremely frustrated that the big scoop several of us had worked hard to prepare - the discovery that three out of four of the black boxes at Ground Zero were found after Sept. 11, and that the government is covering it up - did not end up in the final program. This story will be breaking soon anyway.
I very much wanted to stay out of the post-program wrangling over the backstage story. Who cares? Anyone who was not involved directly in organizing would far better spend their time researching 9/11 and related crimes, and getting involved in the 9/11 truth movement. Unfortunately, so many false and malicious rumors have been disseminated, albeit by a small number of people, that I am compelled to clear the record and my own name.
I do so in the form of an open letter to Christopher Bollyn, who packed a number of falsehoods about my involvement in the program into a single, outrageous sentence. I use this as a jumping-off point for a complete account of how the program was made, to which I would gladly sign my name to in the form of a sworn deposition.
Your final warning:The following may be amusing, but it should be of interest only to those who read the attack mails, have a special love of backstage sagas, or are among the several hundred people who have asked me why I got kicked out of the program that I co-wrote. If you do not belong to one of these groups, you are probably better off skipping it and doing something constructive instead. (You might begin by visiting 911Truth.org or ny911truth.org, neither of which is responsible for the content of this page.)
Nicholas Levis
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To: Christopher Bollyn (Internet writer)Dear Mr. Bollyn,
My attention was recently drawn to the web page
http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=784
the publisher of which I believe is Nico Haupt.QUOTE:
"When 9-11 'activist' and conference 'advisor' Nicolas Levis hysterically tried to steer the second conference away from discussion of the evidence, security guards removed him from the theater."Unless it has in the meantime been corrected, this sentence occurs on the above web page as a non-sequitir, in a review under the by-line of Christopher Bollyn. I wish to inform you that the account therein is not merely incomplete. It is demonstrably false and almost certainly libelous. It also misspells my name (Nicholas).
Be it known that you, Christopher Bollyn, have both my e-mail and means of reaching me by phone, and that we have had amicable telephone conversations in the past, so that you could have easily contacted me for fact-checking in advance of publishing these false claims, as would have been in keeping with commonly recognized journalistic practice.
The facts of the incident you refer to, to the best of my knowledge, are as follows:
"Confronting the Evidence," the program presented at the Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom in New York City on 9/11/04, was executed according to an original script written by myself and Bryan Sacks. There was one major exception to the written script (Exhibit A) during the first part of the live program. A number of other exceptions were caused by technical snafus beyond my purview. To the best of my knowledge, the second half of the program, the "Physical Evidence Forum," at which I was no longer present, also went according to the plan scripted in advance by Sacks and myself.
Three weeks before the program date, on 8/22/04, Sacks and I were hired as independent contractors by Jimmy Walter, the financer of "Confronting the Evidence." Under an oral agreement, he charged us with writing an original script for use in the 9/11/04 program. We were also charged with writing press and promotional materials for the event, and with a number of other tasks.
Contrary to some accounts now circulating, Nico Haupt was not involved in writing the script for this program, although he helped organize the event and made a variety of suggestions, some of which were incorporated by Sacks and myself at the behest of Jimmy Walter. Walter laid out the considerable expenses for the production and (to my best knowledge) has been conscientious in paying whatever sums he promised to everyone involved.
When Sacks and I first got involved, the intended program had almost no content whatsoever, a venue (the Grand Ballroom), a date and starting time (8PM at 9/11/04), a production director for the event itself (Lenny Charles of INN World Report), and one confirmed guest among all those who ultimately appeared on stage (David von Kleist).
During the next three weeks, Sacks and I were the primary organizers of preproduction logistics, ground campaign and cross-promotional activities. We also commissioned and/or co-wrote and/or co-produced several of the original film clips presented at the 9/11/04 program, including "A Tribute to the Fallen," "Obstruction and Corruption in the FBI" (both produced by Mike Berger) and "The Collapse of WTC 7" (commissioned from SGTV and based on my original script). Sacks and I also commissioned the post-production work on the video of David Ray Griffin's presentation (which was done by Mike Berger).
Further, I wrote the original questions and advised the negotiations with Zogby International leading up to the representative poll of New Yorkers on their beliefs about September 11, 2001. Walter provided the costs of the poll (the results of which were a major story that went almost entirely ignored by the major media). Sacks wrote the newspaper advertisement for the 9/11/04 event, which appeared in The Village Voice and The Daily News, and which used the Zogby poll results as its main promotional hook. ("Half of New Yorkers believe that some U.S. leaders knew about 9/11 in advance and 'consciously failed to act' to stop them. On September 11, 2004, we invite you to come and see why.") Once again, these advertisements were financed by Walter. Together with an associate, I managed the web domain www.summeroftruth.org, which promoted the 9/11/04 event among others, and which was listed as the contact site in the newspaper ads. I am the owner of the domain name. Sacks and I coordinated the cross-promotion of "Confronting the Evidence" at a long series of events held on Aug. 27-Sept. 9 under the banner of "The Summer of Truth," including the well-attended "9/11 Citizens' Commission" held on Sept. 9, 2004. (The 9/11 Citizens' Commission was developed long in advance by 911Truth.org and 9/11 Citizens' Watch, and was unrelated to "Confronting the Evidence" except for the cross-promotional activities).
The script that Sacks and I prepared for the evening of 9/11/04 received explicit approval from Walter in person at a pre-production meeting on Friday, 9/10/04. At the same meeting, Walter requested a number of cosmetic and aesthetic changes to the video clips produced by Mike Berger and SGTV. The clips were thereupon provided by Sacks and myself to an independent team under Lenny Charles of INN World Report. On Friday night, this team carried out Walter's desired changes to the video clips.
In the script for 9/11/04, Sacks and I included all of the invited guests about whom we were informed. Some of the guests were invited by Sacks and myself, or by our appointed agents. The guests who came at our invitation were Jenna Orkin, Dr. Robert Bowman, Paul Thompson, Karl Schwarz and Barrie Zwicker. Other guests were suggested to us by agents hired by Walter. To the best of my knowledge, John Prados and David von Kleist were invited by Jimmy Walter personally. Kristina Borjesson and Christopher Scheer were invited by an independent agent, whom Walter had hired. To the best of my knowledge, Jeff King, Tom Gordon, Craig Hill and Webster Tarpley were invited by Nico Haupt, whom Walter also asked to search out guests.
All of these guests were included in the script by Sacks and myself. We welcomed all the talent.
We worked closely with Jeff King in developing a script for his power-point presentation on the collapse of the Twin Towers, which unfortunately did not come off due to a technical problem, the nature of which is unknown to me. I heard that King covered for that by making a great stand-up speech. Sacks and I also incorporated into the script a guest about whom we were first informed on the evening before the show. (This was Tom Gordon, who seems like a very nice guy.)
The printed conference program, which I wrote together with an associate and arranged to have copied in the hours just before showtime, documents that Sacks and I included all of the above-named invited speakers in our script, including the presenters in Part 2 of the program, the "Physical Evidence Forum."
Exhibit B: Program for "Confronting the Evidence"
(Click on images for full-size versions)
No one told either Sacks or myself that you, Christopher Bollyn, were coming, or that you intended to speak. Had anyone involved in the convoluted and decentralized organization of this event done so, the program would have also listed you as a panelist.
The printed program also lists two phone-in guests, Scott Forbes and Eric Hufschmid, who did not end up speaking due to technical failures, the nature of which is unknown to me. (Before anyone seeks to blame anyone else for technical problems, they should stop to consider the conditions under which this show came together. Also, for those who were present, consider the spectacular success of the program with the vast majority of the audience, and recall the electricity in the hall.)
Less than an hour before showtime, Walter suddenly demanded and received the exclusion of a "surprise" evidentiary presentation, a breaking story that Sacks and I wrote into Part 1 of the script as approved by Walter on Friday, Sept. 10. Sacks and I reluctantly acquiesced in the deletion of this extremely interesting segment, which we had worked very hard to put together. The story unfortunately remains undisclosed to a larger public. This was the only "discussion of the evidence" that was planned in advance and consciously avoided on that evening, and the person responsible for its removal was Jimmy Walter. I had the disheartening task of going to the control room and directing the teleprompter person to delete the section, which she duly did, in advance of showtime.
During the three weeks of our collaboration Jimmy Walter was mercurial, to say the least. He often changed his mind about things, and Sacks and I did our best to keep up with him. His unpredictability and spontaneous sea changes seemed to confuse a great many people.
This is not the place for a causal analysis of Walter's character or motivations, and I am not qualified to provide one. But I will relate my firm impression that he is a good-hearted and generous man who wishes to help people and do the right thing, and this is why he set the project in motion with his funds. That is the big picture, and it is a good one. He is a remarkable man, and it was often a pleasure working with him. I believe activists of the 9/11 truth movement owe a debt of gratitude to him for his financing of "Confronting the Evidence," cross-promotional activities for "The Summer of Truth," the Zogby poll, the newspaper advertisements and a number of other worthy projects. The good he has done far outweighs the chaos he occasionally stirs up. Honestly, I pray for him, that he should find peace with himself and with the world.
The devil was in his constant changing of details on the micro level. He seemed to believe that those whom he pays can convert every whim, no matter what, into instant reality. He wanted to assign blame whenever his whims were not fulfilled immediately, and became suspicious of people even when they faithfully followed his orders. These suspicions were by no means limited to Sacks and myself, as Walter's performance on 9/11/04 demonstrated. He may have been encouraged in these tendencies by certain handlers and hangers-on, who in my opinion showed more appreciation for his money than for the causes to which he devotes it.
Once the 9/11/04 program was underway, towards the end of Part 1, for reasons best known to Walter, he began asking the hall security to evict a number of persons from the building. The first attempt was made on Jamey Hecht, the co-host, who says he simply turned away from the security personnel who approached him on stage and returned to the main podium, where he continued with his role in the show and remained until the end of the program. The second attempt was on Bryan Sacks, who was backstage wearing a headset and escorting guests to their cues. Like Hecht, Sacks avoided this first eviction attempt by correctly informing the security personnel that he was among those running the show, and proceeded with his appointed duties.
During the first questions period, Nico Haupt took an audience microphone and began to heckle the hosts with a number of claims, among them that he had written a script for the program that was not being used. A handful of people, apparently his associates, catcalled in support. In fact, Haupt to my knowledge was never asked to write a script and never submitted one, and I have seen no evidence he ever wrote one. On the other hand, with Jimmy Walter, one never knows what commitments may have been given to whom, so it's not out of the question that Haupt at some point was led to believe that he was supposed to run the program.
(Haupt currently says that he never claimed he had written a script, but was in fact complaining because INN World Report had desired a different sequence of script segments. In fact, Sacks and myself had engaged in negotiations over the order of the script with production director Lenny Charles of INN World Report (Haupt's employer), and these were resolved to the satisfaction of both parties, well in advance of showtime, again with Walter's explicit approval, on 9/10/04.)
After Haupt's brief disruption of the program, Walter had him successfully removed from the building.
The security personnel, apparently acting on Walter's orders, also evicted Mike Berger, who among his many other contributions to the program made the video clips "A Tribute to the Fallen" and "Obstruction and Corruption in the FBI."
I have also read of the early eviction from the audience of one Jolly Roger, for reasons unknown me or, apparently, to him. (Also at http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=784)
To the best of my knowledge - and in this case it's based on second-hand accounts - at some point, when the program was already underway and going well, Walter developed the idea that Sacks and I intended to sneak back into the program the "surprise" presentation that had earlier been excluded at Walter's request. Neither Sacks nor I had any such intent, and we were not asked about this matter by either Walter or his producer, Stan Tipton.
At the break between Part 1 and Part 2, security personnel, acting on Walter's orders, came to escort me out of the building. They and Tipton met me at stage left, in the wings. They invited me to follow them to a staircase backstage, with the apparent intent of preventing a public scene. Since I knew about a few of the earlier ejections and attempted ejections, I chose to make my removal public by ensuring I would be escorted out via stage front. I did an end-run around the security guys and ran out on to the stage. (Remember, this is during the break, so there was no disruption to the program.) The security men were very amiable as they hoisted me off through the crowd and to the elevator. I did not resist and had no intent to resist. A squad of additional security people joined the elevator at the next floor, apparently to ensure I would not Houdini my way back in. They were friendly and we cracked jokes. The elevator stopped at several floors on the way down, apparently because someone was running down the stairs and pressing buttons to stop it.
Downstairs on the sidewalk, where a hearty scene developed as a few people began to leave the program, I heard that Part 2 came off more or less as planned. I later heard reports that Walter prevented Tom Gordon from joining the final panel, and also that he went on stage to force Von Kleist to stop speaking, but obviously I didn't witness any of that and can't vouch for it. In addition, you, Christopher Bollyn, got to join one of the panels, as the last guest speaker to be worked into a crowded evening.
Sacks was later also evicted.* We went to get a beer.
Thus, the one-sentence account of my eviction by you, Christopher Bollyn, as quoted above and published at http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=784
is demonstrably false on several points. An old saying holds that the lie marches halfway around the world before the truth can put on its boots. And a single false sentence often demands a novel's worth of corrections, to wit:Contrary to your statement, my eviction was unrelated to any attempt on my part to "steer" the program in a fashion not agreed upon in advance by the principals. The program was in fact "steered" throughout by the script that Sacks and I wrote, which had received Walter's advance approval. (Except for the part censored by Walter at the last minute, and granted the technical glitches outside my purview.) I was not merely a conference "advisor," in quotes as you have it, but one of the two scriptwriters and among the band of dedicated people who were called in to create an entire program in three weeks from near-scratch, and without whom the production might have never come off, let alone as successfully as it did. (I certainly don't need to prove my cred as a 9/11 truth "activist," a word you also put in quotes, to you or to anyone else.) The decision to remove me was apparently motivated (again: to the best of my knowledge) by Walter's mistaken belief that I intended to reintroduce the portion of the program he had summarily censored. I had no such intent. My removal was only one in a series ordered by Walter.
Your account creates the false impression that I engaged in a "hysterical" episode in advance of my removal, which is a complete fiction. Your account falsely states that this outbreak, apparently a figment of your imagination, involved an effort to stop presentations from going ahead, a claim that is especially damaging as it is likely to cause unfounded anger at me by third parties. Your account insinuates that this fictional outbreak was the direct cause of my removal, as though the security personnel witnessed me being disruptive and were themselves motivated to remove me, with no special orders given to them. In fact, at no point before my removal began did I appear on stage, make a public pronouncement, cause any disruption, or attempt to "steer the second conference [i.e., Part 2] away from discussion of the evidence," as you write. Nothing that I did drew the attention of the security, as you insinuate. They only took note of me after they were ordered to get me out, by Walter. When the security arrived to grab me, I was doing nothing other than playing my appointed backstage role in the program.
It falls to the audience to judge whether my subsequent performance - once my removal was initiated at Walter's request - was hysterical, in either common sense of the term.
You, Christopher Bollyn, could have easily obtained all of the above information, had you simply followed the standard journalistic practice of contacting the subject of your writing for confirmation in advance of publication. But I guess you were too busy producing a puff piece in praise of Jimmy Walter, which in my humble judgement is not really in his interest. You see, Jimmy is already surrounded by an ample surplus of yes-people.
Getting kicked out of the program was not a big deal. Many of those who read this will not be surprised to hear that at that moment, it felt like a liberation. The real burden of it has come after the fact, thanks to the predictable swirl of rumors about me, and especially as a result of uninformed and possibly malicious misrepresentations of the event, like your own account. These entail hours in corrections for me, and there is no guarantee that my reputation will not be tarnished, or that my contacts among associates and potential associates will not be damaged, regardless of the truth.
There is also the sad fact that many activists in the 9/11 truth movement are spilling electrons in shooting rumors about the event and everyone involved in it around the Internet, instead of getting on with the historic task of exposing the great deception of 9/11. At least that should prove temporary and irrelevant: The 9/11/04 event was a great breakthrough for the 1100 audience members who had no idea about the backstory, and little reason to care about it. The quality of the presentations was, for the most part, stellar. "Confronting the Evidence" joins the series of many other events in the weeks before and on the day of 9/11/04 in toppling the Big Lie and redefining reality for the American people. The world is shifting under our feet. Kudos to all who made it possible.
For you, Christopher Bollyn, there is an easy route, one that your conscience may compel you to follow: You are respectfully requested to immediately retract and/or correct your mistaken account in a published form, and to cease and desist in spreading the untruths contained therein.
Sincerely,
Nicholas Levis
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* The security who escorted him out kindly allowed him to inform his personal guests, family and friends that he was being thrown out.
