The Danner Affair - A Book Excerpt
How 9/11 Truth freaked out and "grew up"
The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book on the hoax theories concerning Israeli/Jewish orchestration of the 9/11 attacks. Here we examine a dramatic controversy that erupted within the 9/11 Truth movement. It offers a window into the paranoid delusions that turned popular Truthers against each other notwithstanding their common beliefs.
“On the one hand I’m inclined to call Sam a whistleblower, but no - what he is, he’s just an American who saw something and he’s telling the truth about what he saw. . . What he saw and what he witnessed, and what he held in his own hands, suggests to us that our government lied to us about what happened at the Pentagon.”1
These words were spoken by Michael Collins Piper to open his radio show The Piper Report on July 10, 2006 on the Republic Broadcasting Network (RBN). The small financially strapped shortwave broadcasting chain finally seemed to be getting its legs in its second year of existence notwithstanding financial difficulties and being shunned by other media. While it was subsisting mainly on listener contributions and selling ads for homeopathic cures and dubious widgets like the Fuel Mule, RBN was gaining listeners by filling a place on the dial for people that had right-leaning dissident opinions against the George W. Bush Administration. Many of the station’s hosts were prominent members of the 9/11 Truth movement.
The reputations of some of these personalities were ironically enough derailed by a former Amtrak railway worker in July 2006. The story may seem trivial today, but in retrospect did much to torpedo the credibility and unity the 9/11 Truth movement was desperately seeking. RBN and its related print publication American Free Press (AFP) had audiences in the thousands or tens of thousands, whereas today there are podcasters and influencers who have millions of viewers and fans. However, it is the beliefs and delusions of this cluster of writers, broadcasters, and would-be researchers that drive the recycled hoax theories regarding 9/11 and continue to be propagated today.
Formed by a number of former staff of The Spotlight and writers from the AFP, RBN represented a step forward for their style of dissident politics that saw underhanded conspiracies behind the standard political process. The Spotlight had been affiliated with the Liberty Lobby, an organization formed in 1958 by Willis A. Carto, but in 2001 after a costly, bitter and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle with a different affiliate, the Institute for Historical Review, both were forced to dissolve. The Spotlight had once had a peak print circulation of over 300,000 in the 1970s. It had an editorial line opposing racial integration, immigration and socialism domestically while also advocating against US entanglements in the Middle East and alliance with Israel.
As the years wore on the paper became not only more strident against Israel, but also against Jewish influence in politics and media. Unlike other racial right organisations like the Ku Klux Klan and National Alliance, The Spotlight maintained a toned down style with implicit themes and innuendo employed to portray its enemies like Jewish politicians, the Rockefeller family, and the Bilderberg Group in a negative light. This style was in character with Carto’s personal behaviour which was to subtly advocate for racial populism behind the scenes unlike more outspoken leaders like American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell or White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger. These other two would often engage in much more militant rhetoric and sometimes even incited violence. Others in the racial right would often chafe under the controlling behaviour of Carto, but his organisational talents and ability to raise funds from wealthy sympathisers kept him relevant in any efforts to forge ties between different organizations and subcultures of the “movement”.
While it was not earning much in terms of advertising revenue, RBN was steadily building an audience. Americans were increasingly souring on the Bush Administration thanks to the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, while Hurricane Katrina had exposed the ineptitude of the White House response to disasters at home. The 9/11 Truth Movement was starting to gather momentum thanks to Loose Change’s viral success the previous year. On Monday July 10 Michael Collins Piper kicked off his show The Piper Report by introducing AFP colleague Christopher Bollyn and guest Sam Danner as a “whistleblower” and “an American who saw something” and declared that his witness account of the events at the Pentagon on 9/11 would completely upend the official narrative of that momentous day.
The story, just like Loose Change, purported to fill the gap left by the absence of any footage at the time showing American Airlines Flight 77’s impact with the Pentagon, which was deemed to be much more improbable of an event than the planes hitting the World Trade Center due to its much lower elevation.
The “witness” account
Sam Danner claimed to be a retired Amtrak electrician from Hagerstown, Maryland who on the morning of September 11 happened to be visiting his former workplace at the Ivy City coach yard in Washington, DC when it was announced on the train he was riding that “the nation was under attack”, meaning Flight 11 had collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. He recalled believing it had been a cruise missile. Danner then left the coach yard in his car and attempted to drive home, but ended up at the Pentagon just as an aircraft flew toward and then past him before taking a “sharp bank and dive” and colliding with the building. Piper was quick to heap praise on Danner’s story, calling it an “honest, straightforward account”, and at a different point the “honest unembellished truth”.
Callers were less convinced. Some questioned the fact that at different points he claimed to be heading due west at the time and viewing the Pentagon from his left, while elsewhere claiming he was facing south. Others were baffled about how Danner, a longtime DC metropolitan area commuter, could have ended up at the Pentagon in the first place. The sequence of roads and interchanges he said he had taken included the George Washington Memorial Parkway, the Springfield Interchange (“Mixing Bowl” in Springfield, VA) and I-395 would not have been anywhere close to the Ivy City coach yard, and were well out of the way of Danner’s journey to Hagerstown, even considering the fact that he said he got lost on the way.
According to the sequence of locations he used, Danner would have had to drive through southeast DC to get to the George Washington Parkway in Virginia, then pass the Pentagon once and continue to the Mixing Bowl interchange, before doubling back to return from the Pentagon. While it is all too common for drivers in the region to be confused by the convoluted system of roads known as “the Beltway”, such a trip would have been difficult for him to have made while still arriving at the Pentagon by 9:37 when the aircraft Danner saw crashed into the building. He even mentioned having heard from his wife about the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA along the way, but this would not have happened until 10:06.
Another problem was that Danner at times compared the aircraft to several different planes: the Gulfstream G150, the v-shaped tail of a Beachcraft S35 Bonanza, and a Boeing C-17 Globemaster due to it having a hump on its forward section. He said that the aircraft had only one engine, located on its tail. This chimeric description would later be clarified by Danner when speaking to Bollyn and fellow 9/11 Truth researcher Eric Hufschmid2 to resemble the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global hawk surveillance drone which indeed does fit much of the description that Danner provided.
The following evening Piper yielded the program to Danner and Bollyn again, while saying that he had confidence in the account and that he personally had “an ear for conmen”. Several callers then proceeded to express deep skepticism about the timeline and sequence of events. In subsequent appearances Piper continued to insist that Danner was a credible witness, albeit one troubled by the sudden inquiries while also dealing with the effects of his cancer treatments. He seemed to attribute the negative attention toward Danner to people angry at him for speaking out at all.
The issue would continue to fester until July 31 when two listeners called in to impugn Danner’s credibility: The first caller identified himself as Sam Danner’s son Matt.3 He told Piper that his father was fabricating the entire account and was possibly just seeking attention or free books and DVD’s from Hufschmid. The second person was regular caller Russell Pickering, a researcher of the Pentagon attack who had already raised several questions about Danner’s credibility. Adding to his previous remarks, Pickering now questioned Danner’s account based on his statement of having worn an EMT vest without having a valid certification, and cited his own experience as a firefighter encountering unqualified citizens seeking glory at emergency scenes. It also emerged that contrary to statements Danner had made both on the Piper Report and Alex Jones’ radio show, he was not and had never been a licensed pilot.
Over the next week and a half Piper Report was besieged on two sides by listeners taking different attitudes to Sam Danner’s account: those that wanted to hear more and know the truth, and those that felt it was a distraction. Finally on August 11 Danner admitted during an interview with two other 9/11 researchers, Victor Thorn and Lisa Guliani of WING-TV, that he had not been at the Amtrak coach yard in Ivy City on the morning of 9/11, nor had he gone to the Pentagon and witnessed the attack. Piper sheepishly admitted on his own programme that Danner had lied, yet bizarrely claimed that in some way this made him trust the man even more because of his willingness to come clean. So it would seem that the drama surrounding the aircraft hitting the Pentagon was finished.
Yet instead the fallout from Danner’s hoax story continued to wreak havoc on the small and fiercely opinionated community of involved 9/11 Truthers and their followers. Piper, in the interests of transparency, had insisted on having the whole saga play out live on the air, but at the same time had shown that he was willing to indulge Danner’s account notwithstanding the warnings of many that it was simply impossible. In responding to some of the inconsistencies in Danner’s story, Piper had urged the claimed eyewitness to limit his comments to those events he had actually seen and if possible avoid referring to information he had read from media sources. Danner himself had admitted during one call with Piper on August 2 to having watched the film Loose Change with his son Matt prior to having come forward.4 Bollyn had also speculated in a 2003 article no longer available from AFP that the aircraft that crashed into the Pentagon was an RQ-4 Global Hawk, the exact same drone aircraft that Danner would mention in his interviews with Hufschmid in June 2006.5 The Global Hawk had also figured prominently in the “Citizen’s Grand Jury” investigation of 9/11 in 2004 in which both Bollyn and Hufschmid participated.6
And then there was a new piece of controversy as within a week Christopher Bollyn was arrested at his Hoffman Estates home (see Chapter 8).7 After his release from jail, Piper hosted Bollyn so that he could share his account of his ordeal. While Piper, AFP, and RBN rallied to Bollyn’s side and organized a legal defense fund, fellow 9/11 Truthers Victor Thorn and Lisa Guliani published the Hoffman Estates Police Department’s version of events, ostensibly in order to show both sides of the story. Thorn’s articles were often published by AFP, and his WING-TV internet talk show featured much of the same themes as Piper’s. Eric Hufschmid and collaborator Daryl Bradford Smith both came to the defence of Bollyn and alleged that AFP was infiltrated by Zionists. This led to a contentious live shouting match between Thorn and Bollyn broadcast on the Piper Report on August 24. During the exchange Bollyn insisted on calling Thorn by his legal name Scott Makufka while Thorn demanded that Bollyn clarify whether he believes AFP is infiltrated by Zionists as his friend Hufschmid had alleged. Callers included yet another notable 9/11 Truther named Jack Blood who attacked Thorn over yet another internecine squabble. Thorn also said to Piper that the carrying of irresponsible stories with no corroboration like Danner’s made the alternative media look like a joke.
While Piper attempted to remain neutral, he inevitably was attacked by partisans of either side for being biased against Bollyn or Thorn. The following evening he hosted Eric Hufschmid, the very person who had accused AFP and Piper of being infiltrated by Zionists, and had a contentious argument. Rather than simmer down, the feud continued to boil over. AFP and its sister publication The Barnes Review had been heavily promoting a Labour Day weekend conference in Washington, DC that would bring together some of the most well-known names in Holocaust revisionism and anti-Zionism. But as a result of the hard feelings and warring audiences Thorn, Guliani and Bollyn all cancelled their planned attendance and participation.
Piper then went on the attack against Hufschmid, digging up some alleged connections between Hufschmid and Fox News magnate Rupert Murdoch by way of Hufschmid’s half sister marrying Murdoch’s son James.8 It is perhaps understandable that Piper and AFP would suspect infiltration, because there had been moles and investigators like the art dealer Roy Bullock in the 1990s who spied on the Liberty Lobby and other groups on behalf of the ADL.9
By October 11 Piper reported on AFP severing ties with Bollyn who had taken to echoing Hufschmid’s allegations. It was especially painful for Piper, because he had developed a personal friendship with Christopher Bollyn, his wife Helje Kaskel, and their two children and even stayed in their home during visits to Chicago. Piper had never married and lived alone in Washington, DC. His anger at Bollyn would only grow as later he would ridicule him for a 2008 story where Bollyn had alleged that two Israeli store owners he had met in Miami had been in New York right before 9/11 and that based on this must have been connected to the attacks.10 Months later on the seventh anniversary of the attacks, Piper would declare that a “former correspondent” of AFP (meaning Bollyn), whom he once characterized as “the best investigative reporter in America”, had done much to discredit the 9/11 truth movement by writing about a different alternate theory on 9/11 almost every week.11
Thorn and Piper continued to write for AFP, while Bollyn, Hufschmid, and Daryl Bradford Smith severed ties with the newsletter and eventually all went their separate ways after turning on each other. Russell Pickering who was responsible more than anyone for disproving Danner’s account, quit the 9/11 Truth Movement in December 2006 and would become a strident critic of the speculative nature of the movement’s culture.12
Unfortunately for all of the parties involved with the exception of Pickering, they failed to internalise how such chaos had even occurred. It is reasonable to assume that Sam Danner had been listening to or reading content from RBN or AFP about 9/11 and in his desire for recognition crafted the tale and shopped it to them. Hufschmid was the first to take the bait. With his anxious tone, and wild accusations against other 9/11 Truth investigators like Kevin Barrett, Hufschmid was perhaps the most paranoid and unstable of the individuals in this matter. This is no small feat considering that Piper, Bollyn, and Thorn were themselves ingrained Jew haters who perceived Mossad agents and Zionist plotters around every corner. He then fed the story up the ladder to Bollyn, who would introduce it to other RBN/AFP personalities like Piper as well as the better known Alex Jones whose show was broadcast on the internet and by Genesis Communications Network radio stations. When listeners unraveled the story as a total canard, rather than admit their own confirmation biases had rendered them vulnerable to the deception, they pointed their fingers at each other. In later years some of these individuals would take part in other notable speculative “truth” communities, in particular concerning the Sandy Hook shooting. Another element of this episode that has remained true to this day is the vicious culture of backbiting within the 9/11 Truth movement. Most of the persons involved from Thorn to Hufschmid to Alex Jones were promoting their own websites and businesses based on the desire to capitalise on the latest titillating lead becoming the next Loose Change.
Another derivative of the Sam Danner Affair and its fall-out was to change the approach of Piper to 9/11. The speculation over the technical details of the 9/11 attacks, not just as a false flag operation but one executed by Israel, no longer mattered to him. Piper and his believers like Ryan Dawson would say “I can’t show you how, but I can show you who”. And so rather than demonstrating a factual sequence with evidence of committing the act to illustrate the dynamics of such a plot, they have cataloged any association with Israel to a person involved in the events of 9/11, whether it is a hijacker like Ziad Jarrah, a group of movers who photographed themselves celebrating during the event, or NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik and decided that that they are evidence of such a conspiracy because in their minds Israel benefited from the 9/11 attacks.
Sources
Piper, Michael Collins (10 Jul. 2006). “The Piper Report Archive.” 2006. Internet Archive. 2006. https://archive.org/details/the-piper-report-2006.
Hufschmid, Eric. “Eyewitness to Flight 77,” n.d. https://web.archive.org/web/20060815232623/http://www.erichufschmid.net/EyewitnessToFlight77.html.
Piper Report, 31 Jul. 2006.
Piper Report, 2 Aug. 2006.
Bollyn Christopher (14 Sep. 2003). “The Mystery Engine Part in the Pentagon Photo”. American Free Press. Archived at http://whale.to/b/bollyn03sept14a.html.
Bollyn, Christopher. 2004. “Citizen Grand Jury Indicts Feds Over Sept. 11 Attacks.” American Free Press, October 29, 2004. https://www.americanfreepress.net/html/citizen_grand_jury.html.
Piper Report, 16 Aug. 2006.
Piper Report, 31 Aug. 2006.
Miskin, Al (July/August 1993). "ADL’s Spy Ring," Middle East Report 183.
Piper Report, 27 May 2008.
Piper Report 11 Sept. 2008.
Pickering, Russell (2011). “My Pentagon Manifesto (in Retrospect).” 9/11 Truth News. 2011. 9/11 Truth News. http://911truthnews.com/my-pentagon-manifesto-in-retrospect/
Did you ever catch Piper's spiel about the Jews secretly being the descendants of the Neanderthals? https://www.bitchute.com/video/lNz7xijB1Er2