UQ Wire: Brief On Press Conference & 9/11 Hearings

I'd like to provide a few of the highlights from the past week (more forthcoming or posted at www.911citizenswatch.org).

1st National Press Club Press Conference for 9/11 CitizensWatch

Our first National Press Club press conference on Monday, March 22, brought together a diverse group of seven survivors and family members of victims from the Septemeber 11th attacks on New York and D.C.

Our intention was multifold in holding the conference the day before the first 9/11 hearing of testimony from top level Bush and Clinton Administration officials.

1) Allow family members to tell their stories and raise their own questions.

2) Highlight the body of questions raised by the 9/11 Family Steering Committee as a ëroad map' for the Commission.

3) Introduce CitizensWatch to a larger national audience and the D.C. Press corp.

4) Highlight key resources CitizensWatch has found useful in its independent research and analysis and which it has formally introduced into the archive of the 9/11 Commission.

5) Launch our D.C. Metro ad campaign and Washington Post ad calling for testimony under oath from Condi Rice, Bush, Cheney, Clinton and Gore.

6) Publicly call for the resignation of the 9/11 Commission's Executive Director

Mike Springmann, formerly of the State Department, also joined us posing a question that suggested perhaps the same VISA granting system that allowed unqualified applicants to come to the U.S. in the 80s to train with the CIA as Mujahdeen fighters to fight the Soviets was still in place in the form of the Saudi VISA EXPRESS program that enabled several of the alleged 19 hijackers to enter the U.S.

Catherine Austin Fitts raised the specter that the integrity of the U.S. financial system was at stake due to the ongoing refusal by the Pentagon to provide for annual audited financial statements for the Dept. of Defense budget. She noted that in fact they had used the attacks as a excuse for not having done so. I should note here we are two and half years later and still they have not accounted for the reported $3.3 trillion dollars of ëundocumented adjustments' in their privately-managed accounting system. She echoed our principal tenet that there must be transparency at the DoD and with the 9/11 Commission. [see www.solari.com]

Most of the major networks were there with cameras running and C-SPAN covered every minute of the conference live running over one hour and a half. So our thanks again to C-SPAN. The print media was also well represented but one story we are aware of was printed the following day in the Christian Science Monitor. The video of the event is now available for streaming off their web site and as of Saturday, March 27th, it is currently one of the most viewed videos on their site alongside Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission--this despite the fact in the haste to pull together the event we failed to alert our 'membership' via email.

Family members were grateful for the opportunity to participate one saying she slept much better that night having been able to give voice to her questions and tell her story. And naturally we are grateful to them for the heightened visibility they give the questions and skepticism many of us have about the attacks of 9/11.

This is far from comprehensive report on the conference. To view it yourself please visit the C-SPAN site and a link to the streaming video should be on their home page.

We intend to do this again at the National Press Club.

Radio and TV Appearances

With providence smiling on us, the timing of our conference couldn't have been better. As a result CitizensWatch received a lot of calls from press asking for details about what occurred at the hearings and our insight into this Commission. All told this week we've done 7 or 8 radio interview and a televised interview for the Regional News News (RNN) which has a reach of 4.1 million homes in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.

The Christian Science Monitor also did a story that made mention of our work and the network of those working on independently to learn the whole story behind 9/11.

Updates on web site

Please see our web site for continued updates and selected news we repost. Further analysis and highlights forthcoming including more details about potentially earthshaking whistleblower revelations that are being buried by the Government through the claiming of State Secrets Privilege, something that has occurred only ten times since its first use.

I also did a brief piece posted on the site about the questions about NORAD (off focus of the two days of hearings) that were posed to Rumsfeld and Myers and their apparent refusal to answer clearly for the record. This I called the sleeper story of the hearing that as yet has not been addressed in the partisan credibility battle going on between Richard Clarke and the Administration.

Stay tuned. And my sincere apologies for not informing you all in advance of our press conference; we were buried pulling together all the details.

Kyle F. Hence
For 9/11 CitizensWatch
http://www.911citizenswatch.org

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