Bush Blew up the Twin Towers

In a recent episode of South Park, the elementary-school-aged troublemakers spend most of the half-hour figuring out whether the U.S. government planned the attacks of September 11, 2001. As they close in on the answer, a squad of poorly drawn, machine-gun-toting Secret Service agents kidnaps Kyle and Stan, along with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. All of them are whisked away to the Oval Office, where President Bush confesses to everything.

"We've all worked very hard to keep our involvement in 9/11 a secret, but you just had to keep digging," Bush cackles. Then the president pulls out a handgun. He sticks the muzzle in the conspiracy theorist's mouth and blows his brains out. The cartoon blood splatters on a black shirt with the words "911Truth.org."

Bush then explains that he planted explosives in the base of the World Trade Center towers. The missing planes were diverted to an airport in Pennsylvania. Two military jets filled with explosives flew into the twin towers. Then he blew up the Pentagon with a cruise missile. Bush boasts: "It was only the world's most intricate and flawlessly executed plan ever ... ever."

By the end, the show has mocked everybody involved. But the following day, Web traffic to 911truth.org multiplied by five times, spiking the site's number of views to 58,000 a day. A fact omitted from the South Parkepisode — and from the Web site itself — is that 911truth.org is run by Janice Matthews, a single mother of six from Kansas City, Missouri.

Matthews has become well-known nationally within what's called the truth movement: those who believe that Bush and his buddies were behind 9/11. The idea that the World Trade Center fell in order to fuel President Bush's war machine has become the trendy conspiracy theory, replacing such old standards as aliens in Area 51 and government agents on the grassy knoll.

But those behind the 9/11 conspiracy theories aren't comics-store nerds lamenting the loss of The X-Files. In Kansas City, they include the owner of a popular theater, a dentist, and a group of conservatives that meets every week.

Mostly, truthers, as they call themselves, meet online. The Internet has become their way to spread a message they say is suppressed by the mainstream media and ignored by those who provide research funding. Of course, Matthews knows many people ignore the truth movement because it includes a whole lot of kooks posting some bizarre theories. "We have a whole society to remake," she says. "You go, 'God, people, focus.'" Matthews fights back tears in the children's section of the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library. She's surrounded by hundreds of brightly bound bedtime stories. Nearby, sunshine filters through a row of large windows.

She has short brown hair streaked with gray and piercing blue eyes that are intently focused, despite the tears. She has a silver stud in her nose and a Disney Pooh watch strapped to one wrist. She wears a baby-blue version of the shirt featured on South Park.

On this early Monday morning, she has just returned from dropping off her kids at school. Sometimes, the weight of her mission just gets to her. She's surrounded by mothers who are still oblivious to the idea that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the U.S. government.

She explains that she began crying when she thought of the 9/11 victims: the rescue workers, the orphans, the family members of those who died.

"It is just the pain," she says, "that our society isn't even looking at what these people are living through and dying through, that we could be so callous to this depth of pain on so many levels."

The mothers circling the stacks ignore Matthews. She says she's positive that she's being watched.

"I don't have some sense that they are out to persecute truth seekers," Matthews says of the phantom G-men she thinks she's seen around town. "I think they are just doing their jobs."

Matthews wasn't always this way. She earned a psychology degree from the University of Kansas in the '80s and trained as a midwife. A conservative Christian, she voted for Bush in 2000. On 9/11, Matthews was raising her children in the small central Kansas town of Lindsborg. "I had a gradual reawakening," she says.

In November 2001, she moved to Kansas City to work as a secretary. Then she read The 9/11 Commission Report. She says the congressional document found that a large number of stock shares in United Airlines had changed hands before the attack, which shows that certain segments of big business knew to expect the attacks.

Two years later, Matthews helped found the national 9/11 Visibility Project, a group that encourages people to protest government cover-ups. It's now active in 35 cities. She organized rallies on the Plaza but realized that most people wanted to avoid the stigma that came with protest marches. A year later, she founded 911Truth.org, which serves as a networking forum, a research hub and an independent news source.

In July 2005, she organized the D.C. Emergency Truth Convergence in Washington, D.C. The conference pulled together various watchdog groups, including Project Censored and the Oklahoma City Bombing Committee. She says their cell phones didn't work at the event, their remote-control car-door openers failed and their computers crashed. "Then we realized it was all electronic jamming," she says. Returning to Kansas City, Matthews found her front door unlocked. She believes her computer was hacked.