US Court Activism for 9/11 Skepticism: The Case Studies

Inspired this evening by a notice from the 9/11 Skeptics Movement in the UK, I am publishing another free chapter from my book, Slingshot to the Juggernaut: Total Resistance to the Death Machine Means Complete Love of the Truth.
Our friends in the UK are trying to get their Courts and BBC to pay attention to important legal evidence. It may be noteworthy to look at three different attempts that we activists on this side of the pond undertook to get the case heard in our courts.
Did we win? Not yet. But remember, every "no" is one step closer to a "yes."

Chapter 2 from Slingshot to the Juggernaut

Truther as Court Reporter: How America’s Number One Taboo Topic Is Mistreated in the “Halls of Justice”

           

Let’s look at and compare two numbers.

            The first one is fourteen million. That’s how many dollars were spent in the 9/11 Commission’s “official investigation” of the 9/11 attacks. Fourteen million dollars is less than one third of the amount spent on Ken Starr’s investigation of President Clinton.

            Our next number is five hundred times larger. It’s seven billion. That’s the sum total spent by the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The serious money was put into a hush-fund vehicle that paid the victims’ families not to sue.

            With 9/11, the powers that be did a quick investigation that blamed no one and said nothing. The government then spent five hundred times more on shutting people up. The real cover-up was not the Washington, D.C., insiders who wrote a ridiculous and spotty 9/11 report; it was preventing justice in the courts by muzzling the victims who in their limitless grief would of course attempt to find relief by suing the U.S. government, the airlines, and the intelligence agencies that either “failed us” through “incompetence” or did something much more nefarious.

            If you compare the two numbers as a ratio, you see that the 9/11 Commission was funded with 0.2% of what we spent on the victims’ hush fund. Seven billion dollars can pack a wallop. But not everyone has been hushed up, and there’s the real story. This chapter will look at three heroic Davids who dared take on Goliath. These activists and attorneys sought to overturn one juggernaut of a well-capitalized cover-up.

            In the United States, people are raised to believe that “everyone can get their day in court.” But with 9/11, each time evidence was presented that something was terribly wrong, the dispensers of American justice reacted by moving to crush the plaintiffs.

           

NYC CAN

           

     In 2009, I served as the canvass director of the New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN). NYC CAN was an effort to rejuvenate the stalled NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative. The founders of New York 9/11 Truth had made some progress collecting signatures to put the 9/11 investigation question on the NYC ballot. But at the outset of 2009, the new NYC CAN director, Ted Walter, and friends decided that “NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative” needed to be rebranded as something a bit more palatable, a bit more acceptable to the average New York voter. The new name, NYC CAN, was upbeat and positive. It was trendy, and felt in rhythm with Obama’s pert slogan “Yes, we can.” In fact, that year, some activists even dared to dream that Obama himself might open a new 9/11 investigation.

       Part of the new mission at NYC CAN was to simplify the message. Our new style would be to coolly and calmly present the request for a voter’s signature, to allow voters in New York City a chance to vote on a 9/11 independent investigation. No long debates.

Ted and I ran a tight operation. We had T-shirts and a training manual. We gathered the required signatures, over eighty thousand. We were optimistic that we could overcome the systemic biases in the legal system against 9/11 skepticism. We were wrong.

       The ballot access laws in New York State required fifty thousand valid signatures for a popular referendum to be placed on New York City’s ballot. But the New York Supreme Court judge decided not to allow us to ask the voters the question about a new 9/11 investigation. The legal decision, when you read it, is twisted and tense, both sad and funny.[1] At one point the court says that this would have been too much “direct democracy,” and that this just isn’t done in New York State.

The judge accused us of “tortured reasoning,” but he himself seems to have been suffering from prejudiced assumptions. The court shows its hand in this regard by referring to the “international terrorists” that it assumes were responsible for 9/11. If the court already had a culprit, why would it have let us open a new investigation into just who those “terrorists” were?

      There were some legal gray areas from the first draft of the NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative that did come back to haunt us. For example, we projected quite a large budget, and claimed we could raise the $14 million all from private donations. The judge didn’t think this was realistic. But who knows—this judge was clearly uninformed about the size of the potential base of supporters.

At one point, our attorney asked the judge about Building 7. The judge answered, “Building what?” That comment inspired NYC CAN to start a new TV ad campaign to raise awareness about one of 9/11’s smoking guns, WTC Building 7, which imploded at free-fall speed around 5:21 pm on 9/11, without having been hit by a plane. WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein even admitted on PBS that he had decided to “pull it,” but the media and the courts and even the giant insurance agency all decided to let that odd comment slide.

      NYC CAN’s leadership made a tragic decision not to appeal the New York State Supreme Court’s decision. It’s not the decision I would have made, but my job was already over and Ted had a commitment to attend grad school out of state.

       We lost that battle, but we haven’t lost the war. The NYC CAN experience made me a student of how the courts can possibly be used to simply investigate the biggest trauma of our lifetimes.

       In the next ten years of 9/11 Truth, I predict we will see less activism in the streets and more court cases. That’s because more admissible evidence comes out every year. This change is already underway. With lawyers like William Veale and the Center for 9/11 Justice, we will have our day.

      Before we dive in and learn more about California attorney William Veale, let’s head out from New York City, across the Hudson River, into New Jersey, where citizen litigator Dom Meserlian is representing himself in a series of tussles with his local municipal court.

           

Don Quixote Is a Forensics Engineer

           

On February 4, 2010, forensics engineer Don Meserlian was brought to court in Fairfield, New Jersey, on charges of “harassment” of police chief Mark Deuer. Meserlian had tried to compel Deuer to review an accusation of “treason” in regard to the 9/11 attacks. He presented New York–area seismic records from September 11, 2001, and a scientific study published by physicists at Bentham.org. This peer-reviewed study of the dust from the World Trade Center compelled Meserlian to claim that 9/11 was a crime, and to suspect that it was an inside job. The reason he had “harassed” Chief Deuer was that he understood certain laws compelled everyone, including him, to notify local authorities in any situation where “treason” occurs. I put “treason” in quotes because it’s an exact term, a precise word, that denotes a crime carefully defined in the U.S. Constitution.

            Meserlian has dug up an old federal law still on the books: U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382). This law prohibits “misprision of treason” and applies to all U.S. citizens and judges: No one can fail to act when presented with strong evidence of treason. Meserlian tested his interpretation of the law by phoning U.S. attorney David Foster, who agreed that the law gives any citizen the duty to alert any judge regarding treason.

            In Fairfield Municipal Court that day, however, prosecution, police, and Judge Pomaco countered that the eighty-two-year-old Meserlian had been so “annoying” to the police that he was guilty of “harassment.” Even though Meserlian would lose his case, at the end of the trial, Judge Pomaco called Meserlian a “patriot.” He allowed Meserlian ample time to make his case, over the objections of the prosecution.

            Maybe the judge realized that the case law was on Meserlian’s side. The same misprision statute has been used in two cases from the Civil War era. In those cases, the judges pointed out that “treason” stands alone as the sole felony our founding fathers saw important enough to define in the Constitution, which states that the primary definition of treason is to “levy war” against the United States. “Levy war” is defined in the case law as that which “wages” or “causes or compels” the United States to go to war.

            Following that logic, then, since 9/11 compelled two long wars, and since credible parties have asserted that the attacks may have been an inside job, the 9/11 issue is really a legal question of treason. A close reading of our Constitution, therefore, would compel us to investigate that which caused and compelled us to war. Even if the notion that the attacks may have been an inside job is absurd or atrocious to some, the U.S. Constitution advises to carefully examine any accusations of treason.

            But in court, Judge Pomaco wasn’t buying it. He kept directing the trial back to the accusation of “harrasment” against Mr. Meserlian. Meserlian, for his part, kept trying to talk U.S. Constitution. The court’s refusal to consider his evidence of treason seemed to show that the court was prejudiced against his controversial line of thinking. The judge found Meserlian guilty, but levied no fine.

            At the end of the trial, Judge Pomaco gave an interesting speech: Don Meserlian was a dedicated family man, an upstanding citizen, and a “patriot.” Pomaco went so far as to describe the 9/11 attacks as “serious” and “a terrible tragedy.”

            However, Meserlian never asserted that 9/11 was merely “tragic.” Beyond Pomaco’s maudlin speech, the 9/11 event, and the subsequent lack of scientific, unbiased investigation are serious crimes. In both the NYC CAN case and the more local Meserlian trial, the courts seemed to be wearing a form of mental blinder; the Bush-Cheney story about 9/11 was somehow sacrosanct. The same men who, it is widely acknowledged, lied and manipulated us into the Iraq War are somehow presumed innocent of any malfeasance about bin Laden, anthrax, and the collapse of three towers from two planes.

            Rational analysis of 9/11 shows a masterful crime that demands masterful investigation. As the Bible says, when injustice is perpetuated for so long, even the stones will begin to cry out for justice. In court that day, it was sad to see Judge Pomoco smiling at Meserlian and trying to show some kind of integrity, some kind of humanity and virtue. The man was simply unable to sidestep his prior assumptions about 9/11. His substitution of sentimentality for a dispassionate review of evidence itself shows prejudice. The stones cry out. The cool blue fluorescent lights of the New Jersey courthouse seemed to mask the sound of the U.S. Constitution being ripped apart in the  back room.

            As 9/11 justice activism heads increasingly to the courts, future judges will have this problem: The 9/11 Truth movement’s evidence is compelling, scientific, and verifiable. Meserlian, national director of a new group called the Citizens’ Committee for a 9/11 Grand Jury, is a lifelong forensics engineer. In his thirty-five years of giving testimonies, he has never lost a case.

            September 11 is remarkable for its emotive power, but also for the crime’s complexity and for its curious lack of judicial review. Rational, clear-headed analysis of 9/11 has led an entire movement of intelligent citizens to conclude that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks remain unindicted inside U.S. military and intelligence. They have evaded scrutiny by most media. Yet domestic and international public opinion shows a sharp break with the Bush-Cheney-Obama official story[AT1] .

            The Meserlian trial is historic. It brought about a new era for U.S. citizens who are skeptical about 9/11. Meserlian is one tough cookie, and a bit of an eccentric. He’s also a charming guy who plays a mean violin and can jam with you at the drop of a hat. Meserlian has done the world a favor. He has more guts than we did at NYC CAN. He raises the stakes and points us to laws to remedy our need to investigate that which we can no longer ignore: treason. Say it out loud, now: “Treason!”

            This case must now be picked up and made to judges of similar but even greater sympathy than Judge Pomaco. We want the sympathy without the sentimentality. We want rigor; we want the crucible of cross-examination. In the court of the mass media, our evidence is not considered. Instead, the sneering Washington consensus pats itself on the back for making dismissive generalizations. They call us “cranks” and “kooks.” Meanwhile, we prepare for our next day in court.

            The authors of the U.S. Constitution wanted accusations of treason to be treated with exquisite care. Even among our broken judiciary, surely there is a judge who understands this. Maybe it’s up to you and me, my dear reader, to go out and find that judge. Because if the fate of NYC CAN and Don Meserlian don’t inspire you to action, look at what the system did to attorney William Veale: It sought to crucify him for his love of justice.

           

Meeting Bill Veale

           

In the spring of 2010, I met attorney William Veale in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, at the aptly named Treason in America conference. We had been in touch via email, but at the conference, we gave a speech together about how an ad hoc “citizens[l2]  grand jury investigation” could be formed and given actual subpoena power, and legitimacy by the system.

            Veal’s logic is based on the Fifth Amendment:

            No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,   unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a         witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due            process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just            compensation.

            Veale explained what he meant by use of “presentment” in a memo I asked him to write:

            The first provision of the Amendment has to do with Grand Juries, requiring an Indictment, which is a legal accusation requested by a prosecutor or a Presentment, which is a charge made by a Grand Jury without the request of a prosecutor. Presentments have had a rich history in this country, but fell into disrepute under varying circumstances. There is no mention of presentments in the Federal Criminal Code, and there hasn’t been since the late forties. There can, however, be no sounder basis of legal action in this country than the words of the Fifth Amendment. The presence of the word “presentment” in the Amendment means there must of necessity be a mechanism for its use, no matter how desperately the writers of the Criminal Code may have wanted it to vanish.

           

            Aha! So, that means at the bedrock of the Constitution is the power of the people to indict criminals, without using a prosecutor. We already have a tool to create a grand jury of citizens. That should make every skeptic, every Truther, excited about getting real justice. Veale adds:

           

            The grand jury is in its essence a democratic institution. It was designed to  be a rein on the government, putting between it and an accused citizen   another group of citizens who would decide whether or not the government prosecutor was acting with cause. Since the representatives of  the citizens are not discharging their obligations as some of us have envisioned, we are not in a position to look to our elected representatives  for justice in the instance of 9/11. We may look to history for a procedure to follow. In colonial days and after the revolution, communities were small enough that town hall meetings played an important role in governance. In the case of local corruption, where the prosecutor was engaged in criminal activity, the people themselves would convene a grand jury for the purpose of investigating and prosecuting an offending official.”

            As a part of our presentation at the Treason in America conference, Veale and I handed out a “Truth over Treason” form, on two-part NCR paper. It was a kind of legal document that forty-four individuals that day agreed to sign. By signing, they agreed to contact their local judges and attempt to find a judge willing to look at the evidence of treason.

            In the meantime, Veale was preparing for the trial of April Gallop, a soldier and 9/11 victim who suffered injuries in the Pentagon that day.

           

Gallop v. Cheney

           

The Navajo say, “You can’t wake a person pretending to be asleep.” Some refuse to even look at evidence of wrongdoing on 9/11. Veale calls that thing the “fortress of denial.” On the website of the Center for 9/11 Justice, he and his team of attorneys explain:

The attacks of September 11th were part of a complex and elaborate psychological operation that created in each citizen to a greater or lesser degree a fortress of denial, which has prevented many from any forthright attempt to investigate the truth about 9/11. Before justice will be allowed to breathe, that fortress must be destroyed.

            Veale’s client is former Pentagon soldier April Gallop. Alongside her two-month-old infant son, Elisha, Gallop was injured in the Pentagon that day.

            If the official story were correct, Gallop would be dead. On the first floor, in the fifth corridor, of the Pentagon’s E ring, her desk and her baby boy were in the direct pathway of one of Flight 77’s 2.3-ton jet engines. Instead, Gallop was knocked unconscious and came to in a disaster. Office debris was everywhere, but plane parts were not.

            “I didn’t see any seats, any metal, any baggage; I wasn’t covered in jet fuel.”

            In a 2007 speech in Irvine, California, Gallop told the audience, “Most of the debris we were encompassed with was pertaining to office things: concrete, books, computers, tables, things to that effect . . . With that in mind, I would have never believed that it was a plane, simply because I didn’t see particular things. According to the Pentagon renovation team [who mapped out where everyone was], we were thirty-five to forty-five feet away from the place of impact.”

            Representatives from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines visited Gallop in the hospital to discuss what her public statements would and would not say. “They wanted to train us, or specifically communicate to us how they wanted us to express the story, what happened, but I couldn’t do that . . . They wanted to ensure that we communicated things as they made the official story. I just couldn’t do that based on what I saw on the inside.”

            In a military hospital, a captain from the U.S. Army suggested things to add to her story. Gallop objected. According to Gallop, the captain’s parting words were “I’m going to leave you with this. This is what it was, this is what you saw, and this is what you’re going to say you saw. And we’ll be back to transport you to Walter Reade.”

            “Life afterwards has been just as traumatizing as having the experience,” reports Gallop. A female Fox News reporter let slip that the Pentagon was telling the media not to speak with Gallop. Fox News, fearing exclusion from future Pentagon news feeds, complied with the request.

            The lawsuit that William Veale and company eventually filed on behalf of Gallop is a great opportunity for historians to pause and reflect just how many strange anomalies there are around 9/11 and the Pentagon. The primary smoking gun cited in Gallop v. Cheney is that transportation secretary Norman Mineta testified to the 9/11 Commission that Dick Cheney was in an underground bunker at the White House that morning by nine thirty. Cheney was monitoring radar, and beside him was a young male aide. As the wayward “Flight 77” (if that is what it was) wandered out to the West Virginia area and back, the aide built the tension by telling the VP, “The plane is fifty miles out; it’s now forty miles out . . . do the orders still stand?” Cheney whipped his head around and said, “Of course the orders still stand—have you heard anything to the contrary?”

            This testimony was deleted from the 9/11 Commission website, and, when later asked about the oversight by a camera crew from the movie Loose Change, former secretary Mineta was surprised to hear it had been left out.

            There’s also the problem that the National Transportation Safety Board and the 9/11 Commission Report could not agree on the final flight path of Flight 77. In a similar way, 9/11 researchers Citizens’ Investigation Team went to Arlington Cemetery, around the Pentagon, and found eyewitnesses who said the plane came from a more westerly direction, over the Navy Annex building and north of the Citgo station. The official flight path has the plane coming up in a more northeast direction, smacking into a light pole that then somehow inserted itself perfectly into the windshield of local cab driver Lloyd English.

            Flight 77’s flight data recorder showed the massive jetliner descending at a sharp angle; then, before impact, the recorder mysteriously stopped recording data. This information is inconsistent with the “five frames” of blurry video released by the Pentagon, which show a flat blur parallel to the ground slamming into the Pentagon wall.

            Or, let’s recall that Clinton holdover Richard Clarke testified that Rumsfeld and Myers were in the Pentagon, running the show, recorded via video conference, as the Pentagon plane was approaching.

            As Veale puts it, “Whatever efforts they made to prevent the attack on the Pentagon were unsuccessful, even though sufficient time and armaments existed to mount a defense. If they were in the National Military Command Center, in full view by Richard Clarke, and presumably taped on a video-teleconference screen, they cannot avoid the scrutiny that ordinarily follows failure in the line of duty.”

           

“Cynical Delusion and Fantasy”

           

On March 14, 2010, Second Circuit judge Denny Chin dismissed Gallop’s suit with prejudice and heated denunciation. He ignored the sixty-five pages of evidence that court procedures required him to treat as presumed true. Instead, he ignored the anomalies about what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Myers were doing on 9/11, and what they said and did about it afterward. In fact, Chin avoided mentioning any of those three by name altogether. Veale later said, “It was like discussing the indictment of someone for robbing a liquor store without ever naming the suspect.” But Chin was content to ignore much and dismiss the entire suit as “cynical delusion and fantasy.”

            Perhaps it’s fortunate that Chin levied such incendiary language. On Veale’s side were two other fine attorneys, one of whom, Dennis Cunningham, is a strong writer. In discussing Chin’s logic, Cunningham used a deft mix of empathy and passionate appeal for reason beyond prejudice. He often conceded to the court that the underlying presumptions of its case were “indeed shocking” and “outrageous” but also “substantial, and serious” and based on “an elemental knowledge of human history”—i.e., “evil is attracted to power.”

            Power, by this radical logic, is therefore naturally a primary suspect when it comes to the highest crimes and cover-ups. Of course, this kind of radical, populist logic is not Chin’s federal court’s cup of tea. Chin was rather lazy, according to the plaintiffs, and content to make a “blanket determination, not based on the factual allegations it was faced with but on the Court’s [read: Chin’s] subjective, personal reaction to the horror of the very thought of the wrongdoing alleged,” and therefore, “the plaintiffs’ claims were absolutely implausible—as a matter of law, as it were, emanating from the depth of the Court’s gut—and therefore frivolous, and to be quashed without recourse.”

            Veale and company appealed. One year later, they were promised “five minutes” at a three-judge appeals court hearing in New Haven, Connecticut. One of the judges scheduled to preside was none other than president George H. Walker Bush’s first cousin judge Scott Walker. Walker refused to recuse himself, despite a motion from the plaintiffs. It went downhill from there.

           

Showdown in New Haven

           

On April 4, 2011, I traveled with one of the junior attorneys on the case, Mr. Mustapha Ndusa, from New York City to New Haven to attend the appellate hearing of April Gallop.

            Having attended the appeals hearing of FBI agent Richard Taus years earlier, I was reminded that a three-judge courtroom looks like a triumvirate, a gang. Three judges instead of one means three huddled together in collusion, whispering loudly and talking over each other, talking over attorneys. In New Haven, they interrupted each other as much as they interrupted Veale. The spirit of an appellate court is already one of an intensely adversarial nature, so it’s especially chaotic and bitter when your cause is asking questions about 9/11.

            Attorney Bill Veale was heroic, leaning over and vociferously defending the cause. When he was hot, he was white hot. “Evil does exist. Power is attracted to it.” He was a poetic prophet against a new devil.

            In his twenty years of hard labor as a public defender, Veale served the battered proletariat. As court-appointed defense counsel, he tried to get poor crooks and accused crooks good deals and reduced time. Today was his first appearance in federal court.

            Veale got about twenty minutes to make his case. Some of the judges did show some humanity, like the time they let Veale have a final two minutes to catch his breath and make his final points. But then when Veale began to speak, Judge Walker would interrupt with an idle, long-winded request that they go through a list, vocally, of who the defendants were in this case: vice president Dick Cheney, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, JTOS Meyers, and John Does #1-X.

            At one point, Bush cousin Judge Walker also made an “out of the blue” comment of his own. He did acknowledge that “there is a lot of controversy about this topic.” He looked out directly at the galley, where we fifteen Truthers sat among the day’s usual gaggle of fidgety lawyers and heiresses appealing estate matters of decaying Connecticut wealth. In the jury box sat twelve or fifteen bored-looking kids in blue suits and dresses, a distracted field trip from Yale Law School. But when the case was over, all fifteen Truthers stood up at once. The judges noticed it: There is a public with a bunch of questions, and sharp suspicions about the Bush-Cheney 9/11 story. We were hoping the judges would keep that in mind when considering at the evidence and arguments levied by Veale, April Gallop, and the Center. After all, it looked like even Judge Walker knew some of the questions people had, by acknowledging the widespread skepticism.

           

Two $15,000 Hammers Slam Down on Veale: “Justice Denied”

           

Judge Walker, of course, was not picked to write the inevitable denial that came from the Second Court of Appeals. Judge Calabrese did, and stuck to the script Judge Chin had used: Huff and puff about how outrageous the claim is, but don’t actually respond to the evidence presented.

            So, sixty-five pages of evidence, from sources such as the Bush White House’s own officials Clarke and Mineta, can be tossed away as nothing but “pure speculation and conjecture.” The three-judge appellate court stepped on the gas and added an aggressive layer of bile and mockery to its denial, which opens with:

            As the sentient world well recalls, on the morning of September 11, 2001, agents of the al Qaeda terrorist organization hijacked commercial airplanes and attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the national headquarters of the Department of Defense in Arlington, Virginia.

           

            Calabrese pointed out that Gallop’s case could be thrown out on the basis of “estoppel”; i.e., she had sued someone else before on similar grounds. However, she lost before, and according to the legal definition of “estoppel” cases, “estoppel” stops you only if you won something, using a different argument, in an earlier case. “Absent success in a prior proceedings,” argued the Supreme Court in New Hampshire v. Maine, the courts are not supposed to deny appeals by citing estoppel.

            In court that day in New Haven, Veale pointed out that new evidence about 9/11 factual data “is coming out all the time.” Therefore, Gallop’s prior suits were irrelevant. The nature of her claims changed based on new evidence.

            In the denial, Calabrese then made the harsh claim that Veale “failed to provide” any of this new evidence. That’s rather unfair, given that Veale was already over his five-minute time limit and was constantly being interrupted with asinine points of clarification from the bench. All of the evidence was outlined and prepared for court. It was described in summary form in sixty-five-page documents.

            If Veale had been asked about what new evidence has come out recently, we know from the Center’s various briefs on behalf of Gallop that Veale and company are not shy about talking about the evidence of the sophisticated demolition explosive nano-thermite at the WTC.  The peer-reviewed Bentham.org study found evidence of nano-thermite in four out of four samples of WTC dust.

            But in their denial (a good word for it), Judge Calabrese called this case an unnecessary imposition “on the government, which is forced to defend against the appeal, and on the taxpayers, who must pay for that defense. Accordingly, Gallop and her counsel are hereby ordered to show cause in writing within thirty days from the date of entry of this order why they should not pay double costs and damages in the amount of $15,000, for which they would be jointly and severally liable.”

            That’s right. The judges just threatened to fine Veale $15,000. Imagine mobsters killing someone who won’t pay protection money, to send a message to the world. The threat of serious fines here shows that the judges didn’t actually believe this case from Veale was lightweight “pure speculation,” but thought it a very serious threat to a way of doing business.

            Veale protested this sanction and made a motion to have the three judges removed from further involvement in this case. They were victims of 9/11’s shock and awe, he argued, “unable to conceive that their own government did that to them. And that means that when they hear these allegations, they disregard them. They think they are the product of lunacy, or delusion . . . [They imagine], ‘oh that couldn’t possibly be true’ . . . And that is the existence of a prejudgment or a bias.”[2]

            The judges responded to these motions with further denials and another set of sanctions, this time personally targeted at William Veale.

            The American Bar Association did a terse article for the ABA Journal. The best part of the article was an online comment from one John Flynn:

“Not content with being simply moderately corrupt and dismissing the complaint before the Plaintiff can hale these Defendants into Court and, I presume, even engage in discovery [the period when both sides in a court case examine evidence], the 2nd Circuit sees fit to try and chill other attorneys who may be considering similar lawsuits by issuing an OSC (Order to Show Cause) on the plaintiffs attorney which I can only assume will result in over the top, severe sanctions, even though anyone who has looked at 9/11 in any detail knows there is at least sufficient evidence of the plaintiff’s theory to defeat a MSJ (Motion for Summary Judgment) and get to trial.”[3]

 [End of Chapter.]

Thanks for reading.
Get the whole book, here.

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[1] On http://sanderhicks.com/nyccan.html, I have published the twenty-five-page report by the “referee” of this dispute.

[2] As Veale told Kevin Barrett of No Lies Radio, http://noliesradio.org/archives/35231.

[3] Debra Cassens Weiss, “‘Fantastical’ 9/11 Lawsuit Could Lead to Sanctions for Lawyer, 2nd Circuit Says,” ABA Journal, April 28, 2011, http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/fantastical_9-11_lawsuit_could_lead_to_sanctions_for_lawyer_2nd_circuit_say/.

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