Geoff was on the 106th Floor of the World Trade Centre’s north tower. The attacks on America of September 11th 2001 were viewed in real-time by hundreds of millions of people around the world. The 24×7 world media coverage that continued in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was relentless. Even three to five days after 9/11, American adults were watching an average of eight hours of television related to the attacks. Those who watched the most coverage had more substantial stress reactions than those who watched less television coverage [1].
Geoff was on the 106th Floor of the North Tower. He was attending the Risk Waters Conference.
On September 11th we were on a beach. We had been on a family holiday in Lanzarote, Canary Islands for a week. At about 2.30pm local time, my wife took our six-month-old daughter for a ride in her buggy to try and get her to settle. She came back a short time after and said something had happened in New York. A lot of people were crowded around the cafes and bars watching live TV coverage. I headed up to the café/bar area sometime after 3pm, I can’t be sure if it was before the collapse of the north tower at 3.28pm, but it was definitely after the south tower’s collapse as the hazy screens were showing a very smoke-filled south Manhattan. I immediately went back to the beach to gather up my family to return to our hotel. I was not overly concerned re the safety of my brother, as he worked in mid-town Manhattan for Reuters but I wanted to make sure he was OK. I had left my mobile phone at our hotel which was some distance away, so I used a public phone box near the café/bar area to call my friend and co-director Henry to try and find out what had happened and whether he had heard from Geoff. Both towers had definitely collapsed by this time.
Geoff was going to head up the New York arm of our London based business and Henry had been corresponding with Geoff a lot that summer. Unbeknownst to me, Geoff had a ticket for the Risk Waters conference in the north tower and furthermore whilst on the phone with me, Henry was looking at an email Geoff had sent just 44 mins prior to the first plane strike saying
“Very quickly, As I’m late for the Waters conference.”
Geoff Campbell. Email sent 08:02 September 11th 2001
Henry only told me some 10 years after 9/11 that he simply couldn’t tell me when I asked if he knew if Geoff was safe, that he was actually looking at an email Geoff had sent confirming he was heading to the conference.
A few phone calls later I managed to get hold of my brother Rob who confirmed that Geoff had headed to the conference and that his fiancée hadn’t heard anything from him. I remember dropping the phone and thinking the worst.
Then began two days of frantic phone calls trying to find out more information, booking the first available flights back to the UK and speaking to Reuters HR who were trying to get us the first available flights out of the UK to New York. The hotel we were staying at had one English speaking TV news channel (CNN I think) but it was cheap cable; very hazy and poor sound. I don’t remember watching any TV, and UK newspapers were at least a day behind. My wife and mother were trying to keep the children entertained so we simply weren’t exposed to the 24×7 media coverage of the attacks. We returned to the UK late on Thursday 13th. I remember holding my youngest daughter on my lap on the flight home, tears streaming down my face and falling on her head. I was emotionally wrecked – I had been keeping it together up until that point.
Friday 14th was my first day watching any sort of TV media coverage including print media and even then, there was much to do. Reuters had managed to get us flights to New York with British Airways on the 15th. Once in New York on Sunday we were phoning & visiting hospitals in the vain hope Geoff was at one of them, perhaps unconscious. It was not to be.
I am not, and never have been, a fan of the US style of news coverage, much preferring the more familiar British format. I don’t recall watching the American TV news coverage at the hotel in New York although I’m sure I read USA Today or whatever rag was available at the time.
I do recall Andrea Catherwood from ITV/ITN news following us around Manhattan with her TV news crew filming at Geoff’s apartment and doing interviews with Geoff’s fiancée and my mother.
It wasn’t until we came back to the UK on the 21/22nd that I started to read any of the UK media coverage in any sort of detail/quantity. Neighbours and friends had kept back copies of papers for us; both broadsheets and tabloids.
What happened to my brother and to us as a family was traumatic enough without it being compounded by watching the round the clock media coverage of the attacks. Looking back, crucially for the first 2-3 days I was not exposed to the media’s relentless, propagandised, narrative forming, coverage of the attacks. In fact, for the first 10 days my exposure to mainstream media coverage of the attacks was minimal.
“Looking back, crucially for the first 2-3 days I was not exposed to the media’s relentless, propagandised, narrative forming, coverage of the attacks.”
In addition to avoiding the propagandised, narrative forming, ‘Usama bin Laden did it’ mainstream media coverage of the attacks, I also had some very knowledgeable friends who, whilst respectful of the shock and trauma I was experiencing, were determined to help me see the bigger picture.
In the mid 90s through to the early 2000s I had been working in IT at investment banks and exchanges. I had formed a software consultancy with two friends, just after the birth of my eldest daughter in 1999, the business was doing well and growing and in February 2001, my second daughter was born. I was blissfully unaware of anything outside of work and young family life. Life was good.
In April 2001 my business partner Henry attempted to burst my bubble. He sat me down and outlined how the industry we worked in was by and large a ‘rigged’ game with the covert and overt manipulation of the markets, especially strategic commodities. He was adamant that the ‘barbaric relic’ (gold, then $270/oz) would shine brightly again. Being somewhat naïve at the time, I was shocked; but I was more interested in potential money-making opportunities, rather than his exposé of corruption. Apart from buying some gold & silver and investing in some junior mining companies, I thought no more about that first awakening conversation.
Looking back, perhaps that initial sowing of a seed with some home truths of the industry I worked in was enough for me to be open enough to question the official narrative which had formed regarding the events of 9/11.
At the end of October 2001, soon after the launch of the allied attack on Afghanistan, Henry forwarded me an article by the veteran journalist John Pilger, it was titled: “This War is a Farce” [2], it began
“The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks’ bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.”
John Pilger, Daily Mirror Former Chief Foreign Correspondent
Pilger continued, “None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States.
The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.”
Until I read that article, I honestly had no interest whatsoever in geopolitics. I started to read a lot of Pilger’s books and watched his documentaries.
I started to think a lot more about the broader circumstances in which my brother had been killed and by whom.
I remember reading a small book by Noam Chomsky published in 2001 called 9-11. It was a mixture of interviews and articles which presented facts and perspectives which were either under-reported or completely ignored by mainstream media. Over the next few years, I started reading a few more of his books. Frankly I was flabbergasted, OK it’s not as if us Brits haven’t done Empire/Imperialism stuff before but the USA were doing it on what appeared to be an industrial scale.
In early 2002, another friend urged me to look into Saudi Arabia, after all 15 of the alleged hijackers were purportedly Saudi, and yet the focus of retribution of Operation Enduring Freedom was on the Taliban and Afghanistan. As a consequence of those urgings, my father is part of the Motley Rice Saudi lawsuit [3].
“Many Americans continue to seek full accountability for the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), including 9/11 survivors and victims’ family members. As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the American people deserve to have a fuller picture of what their Government knows about those attacks.”
PRESIDENT BIDEN, EXECUTIVE ORDER. 3RD SEPTEMBER 2021
During the summer of 2002 Henry also pointed me towards the work of Michael Ruppert and others. By 2004 I was reading books about, geopolitics, terrorism and the 9/11 attacks themselves by a range of authors including but not limited to, David R Griffin, Nafeez Ahmed, Justin Raimondo, John Miller, Seymour Hersh, Craig Unger and of course I read the 9/11 Commission Report.
Years later I read books by Lawrence Wright, Ian Henshall, Ray Nowosielski & John Duffy, Mark Gaffney, Kevin Ryan, Elias Davidsson, Michael Ruppert, Webster Griffin Tarpley, Peter Lance, Lynn Spencer, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swann etc.
Some of those authors listed are very, so called mainstream, and yet there is enough in their investigation(s), many backed up by public records or freedom of information requests, to know that many areas of the official narrative are simply wrong or at best, not the whole truth.
In particular, it was clear early on that a murky relationship existed between Bush and the House of Saud and that the failures of the US intelligence agencies and the FBI seemed to miraculously favour the fortunes of the hijackers. In one crucial development the CIA appeared to actively prevent the sharing of information with the FBI regarding two al-Qaeda suspects (Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi – the alleged hijackers of AA77, the flight that hit the Pentagon), living inside the United States [4]. Al-Mihdhar was already a suspect in the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombings and had attended an al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia, and crucially had a dual entry United States visa. On the 5th January 2000, the FBI’s Doug Miller (on loan from the FBI New York Office to the CIA’s bin Laden ‘Alec Station’) would read a cable which had a photograph of al-Mihdhar’s passport, which had the dual entry visa into the United States. Miller immediately drafted a memo to warn FBI headquarters but his cable was stopped from being sent by Tom Wilshire (deputy chief of Alec Station). Another FBI agent on loan, Mark Rossini, complained to the Yemen Hub head officer, Michael Anne Casey, who replied that it’s not an FBI matter.
“pls hold off on [memo] for now per [the CIA deputy chief of bin Laden unit].”
– ‘Michelle’ (Michael Anne Casey), CIA bin Laden desk officer
Philip Zelikow (former executive director of the 9/11 Commission) continues to lie about this. It’s worth reading Zelikow’s Cipher Brief article [5] and the comments made by FBI agent Mark Rossini and some of the ‘Jersey Girls’ (4 widows’ of 9/11 victims who formed the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, who successfully lobbied the US government to create an albeit not independent commission to investigate the attacks of 9/11).
“I believe it can be proven circumstantially that the reason why Doug’s CIR [memo] was suppressed, and I being ordered to not inform the FBI, was because the CIA was engaged in a recruitment operation along with the Saudi Arabian intelligence service known as the Mabahith, within the United States, of one or more of the terrorists who met in Malaysia, in direct violation of every applicable rule, regulation and law.”
FBI agent Mark Rossini [6]
With the advent of YouTube’s popularity, I also spent a lot of time looking at video footage of the attacks many years after my brother’s death. I was looking for an image or clip of Geoff, to just get one last look at my brother before he died. I rarely went past the collapse of the towers, and to be honest I hadn’t really given the manner of the collapse much thought until 2007. This was probably the first year I seriously considered the hypothesis that the twin towers were destroyed by controlled demolition.
The theory that World Trade Centre Building 7 was demolished was perhaps easier to entertain at face value as its collapse had a number of similarities to acknowledged controlled demolitions, something which wasn’t missed by some of the news anchors on the day [7]. However as late as March 2008 (in an email to Henry), I said although I had accepted WTC7 was a controlled demolition, albeit probably as an insurance scam, I was struggling to accept the twin towers had been demolished, due to not knowing how that could have been achieved (rigging etc.) but my concerns were growing.
Then in August 2008 the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released their draft report into the collapse of Building 7. At a public meeting a physics teacher, David Chandler, challenged NIST’s assertion in that report that the building had fallen at a rate 40% slower than freefall and yet it was readily measurable that the north west corner of WTC7 had fell at an acceleration within a few percent of gravity [8]. NIST published the full report in November 2008 and acknowledged that WTC7 fell at freefall acceleration for 2.25 seconds [9]. This made the controlled demolition of WTC7 through explosives the only plausible explanation to any physicist worth their salt. If that was the case for WTC7, the twin towers needed a closer examination.
Between 2009 and 2012 as evidence, especially through the work of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth started to build, it became clear to me that the twin towers had been brought down through the use of explosives and/or incendiaries.
Although the main stream media immediately took control of the narrative in the hours and days following the attacks, whilst the attacks were actually unfolding, a lot of now largely buried/forgotten truths were reported live by eyewitnesses [10].
The murder of my brother and the events of 9/11 were traumatic. I am grateful I didn’t watch it unfold in real-time. I didn’t have to suffer the 24×7 bombardment of the official narrative/propaganda whilst in a traumatised state.
I’m forever grateful that I listened to friends who were persistent in their efforts to get me to look into aspects of the narrative which didn’t sit well with them. Now that I’ve done so much of my own research, that narrative does not sit well with me either. Complementing mainstream media sources with credible alternative sources was critical in this research.
Over the last two decades, I have essentially withdrawn from the propagandising effects of mainstream media. This was fairly easy to do between 2006 and 2011 as we were living in Thailand. Whilst on one hand I wasn’t exposed to the Western media coverage of The War on Terror, it also left me rather isolated in my thoughts and I was suffering from depression. I largely avoided the many forums that discussed 9/11. It wasn’t until I returned to the UK did I connect with members of the 9/11 truth movement.
In February 2013, just a month after my brother’s original inquest, I attended a local court case where documentary film maker and 9/11 truth activist Tony Rooke was refusing to pay his BBC TV licence on the grounds that he would be funding and furthering the purposes of terrorism, given the BBC were covering up certain aspects of the attacks. At last, I had found a kind of support group where I could discuss my concerns with the official narrative. With the growing body of evidence challenging the cause of Geoff’s death [11], I started out on the path of trying to reopen my brother’s inquest due to insufficiency of inquiry and new evidence not heard at the original inquest.
Finally, as a family we submitted a petition to the UK Attorney General in August 2021 to reopen my brother’s inquest to specifically look at his cause of death. We are still awaiting his decision [12].
I am optimistic that the Attorney General will grant his authority to reopen Geoff’s inquest.
My brother had a right to life; he deserves truth and justice. As a family, we deserve truth and justice.
We all need the truth, free from propaganda, whether that emanates from the agendas of the state or mainstream media, in order to heal from the trauma of 9/11.
UK Column 2021 Webinar: Matt Campbell Details His Pursuit of 9/11 Truth and Justice
References:
- https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200111153452024
- https://cogres.org/conflict/pilger-this-war-is-a-farce/
- https://www.motleyrice.com/anti-terrorism/september-11-litigation
- https://coop.vaed.uscourts.gov/moussaoui/exhibits/defense/952A.pdf
- https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/911-commission-director-no-evidence-cia-sought-recruit-future-911-hijackers
- https://www.thecipherbrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Regarding911.pdf
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A49a9pXwDQs
- https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/free-fall-acceleration
- https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/NCSTAR/ncstar1a.pdf
- https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/technical-articles/articles-by-ae911truth/696-how-36-reporters-brought-us-the-twin-towers-explosive-demolition
- https://www.ae911truth.org/images/BeyondMisinfo/Beyond-Misinformation-2015.pdf
- https://www.ae911truth.org/news/865-the-family-of-geoff-campbell-still-awaits-justice
Selective Bibliography:
Ahmed, Nafeez. 2002. The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001. Tree of Life.
Ahmed, Nafeez. 2003. Behind The War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq. Clairview.
Ahmed, Nafeez. 2005. The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism. Arris.
Bamford, James. 2005. A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. First Anchor.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. 9-11. Seven Stories.
Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. Penguin.
Chomsky, Noam. 2007. Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Penguin.
Davidsson, Elias. 2013. Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11. Algora.
Davidsson, Elias. 2020. America’s Betrayal Confirmed: 9/11: Purpose, Cover-Up and Impunity. Toost.
Gaffney, Mark. 2012. Black 9/11: Money, Motive and Technology. TrineDay.
Gardener, David. 2021. 9/11 The Conspiracy Theories: The Truth and What’s Been Hidden from us. Bonnier.
Gert, Bill. 2003. Breakdown: The Failure of American Intelligence to Defeat Global Terror. Plume.
Graff, Garrett. 2019. The Only Plane in The Sky: The Oral History of 9/11. Monoray.
Griffin, David Ray. 2004. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11. Arris.
Griffin, David Ray. 2005. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. Arris.
Griffin, David & Scott, Peter. 2007. 9/11 and American Empire. Olive Branch.
Griffin, David Ray. 2011. 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed. Haus.
Griffin, David & Woodward, Elizabeth. 2022. 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation. Interlink.
Henshall, Ian. 2007. 9.11 The New Evidence. Robinson.
Herman, Edward & Chomsky, Noam. 2002. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon.
Hersh, Seymour. 2017. The Killing of Osama bin Laden. Verso.
Kean, Thomas & Hamilton, Lee. 2006. Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission. Knopf.
Lance, Peter. 2003. 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI The Untold Story. HarperCollins.
Lance, Peter. 2004. Cover Up: What the Government is Still Hiding about The War on Terror. Regan.
Lance, Peter. 2006. Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, The Green Berets, and the FBI – and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him. HarperCollins.
Kampfner, John. 2003. Blair’s Wars. FreePress.
Madison, Wayne. 2014. The Star and the Sword.
Miller, J., Stone, M. & Mitchel, C. 2002. The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It. Hyperion.
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. 2004. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
Nowosielski, Ray & Duffy, John. 2018. The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror. Hot.
Pilger, John. 2003. The New Rulers of the World. Verso.
Raimondo, Justin. 2003. The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection. iUniverse.
Ruppert, Michael. 2004. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. NSP.
Ryan, Kevin. 2013. Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects. Microbloom.
Shenon, Philip. 2008. The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. Hachette.
Spencer, Lynn. 2008. Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies over American on 9/11. Free Press.
Summers, Anthony & Swan, Robbyn. 2011. The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11. Ballantine.
Tarpley, Webster. 2005. 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA. Progressive Press.
Thompson, Paul. 2004. The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute. Regan.
Unger, Craig. 2004. House of Bush House of Saud: The Hidden Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties. Gibson Square.
Wright, Lawrence. 2006. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s Road to 9/11. Penguin.
Zuckoff, Mitchell. 2019. Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11. HarperCollins.
(Featured Image: “9/11” by slagheap is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)
