On Election Eve, Sept. 11 Doubters Surface

Nov. 1, 2004 — -- More than three years after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the skeptics are still out there, and despite a massive government investigation into the causes, threats and government response, in the final days before the presidential election, the doubters have been making more noise.

One organization, reopen911.org, has launched an ad campaign calling for a new investigation into what happened on Sept. 11, and another group, 911truth.org, is filing a formal complaint with the New York state attorney general, seeking a criminal investigation.

Conspiracy theories about the attacks began brewing while the ashes of the World Trade Center were still smoldering, and have grown into a booming cottage industry, with countless books, Web sites and videos devoted to the subject.

For some people, the questions about what happened have not been resolved, and the report released by the 9/11 Independent Commission did nothing to put them to rest. For some, it only caused more frustration.

Jimmy Walters, the man behind the campaign that has placed commercials showing the collapsing buildings at the World Trade Center and a computer-generated image of the plane that hit the Pentagon on television in New York, and full-page print ads in newspapers across the country, said he has a definite political aim.

"If George W. Bush is re-elected, I don't think we'll get anything done," he said.

And Walters, who is also the founder and president of the Walden Three Project, which promotes the development of sustainable cities and grew out of his attempt to write a science fiction novel in Hong Kong, said his feelings about what happened have gone from believing that the government bore responsibility for "an error of omission" to a belief that there had to be government involvement in the attacks on some level.

"We were terrorized and it wasn't 19 screw-ups with box cutters from Saudi Arabia," he said. "It had to be somebody bigger, better organized."