Jimmy Walter events - Florida

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Reopen the September 11th Investigation: Come Judge for Yourself!

Dear Concerned Citizen;

From 1997 to 2000 Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb
Bush, and numerous other Bush Administration officials and friends
issued and signed numerous documents which called for the invasion
of Iraq, one of which called for "A New Pearl Harbor," a “catastrophic
and catalyzing event”, to convince the American People to invade Iraq
and project American military power in the Middle East. These
documents are blatantly available on their website, Project for A New
American Century; www.newamericancentury.com.

It is standard operating procedure for any crime scene investigator to
develop
theories about what happened based on 1) motive, 2) ability, and 3)
opportunity.
These Bush administration officials had all three and advocated the
attack and
deception in writing.

It is the duty of the President and the Attorney General to investigate
all possible
terrorists, friend or foe.


Consider the following evidence about the September 11th attacks:

--“NORAD sent fighter jets in the wrong direction…this is unbelievable
negligence.” Senator Mark Dayton, D—MN

--“It is likely that there were pre-positioned explosives in all three
buildings at ground zero.” Steven Jones, Brigham University Physics
Professor

-- No steel framed building before or since September 11 has ever
collapsed from fire or collision, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima. A
testing agency tried to destroy a steel framed building with jet fuel
and
failed! Yet on September 11, three skyscrapers, including one that was
not hit, collapsed at free fall speed.

-- Scientific American in 2000 said, "The WTC was probably one of the
more resistant tall buildings..they just don't build them as tough as
the
World Trade Center"


-- “The specifics of the fires … and how they caused the building to
collapse remain unknown at this time.” Federal Emergency
Management Administration. The NIST has yet to report.

-- Of the 19 alleged hijackers identified by the FBI, at least six have
turned up alive after the attack. (CNN, New York Times, CBS, BBC)

-- The hijackers’ instructors have stated that they “could not fly at
all.”
Yet the air traffic controllers were amazed at the precision turns and
coordination of the attacks at high speed and low altitude. Some
Professional pilots can’t any human could have flown the planes.

**For these, and many other reasons, we believe that the 9/11
investigation should be reopened. Please join us for these LIVE
EVENTS and judge for yourself! **
Forum: A New Pearl Harbor—Confronting the Evidence: A Real
Investigation into What Happened on September 11th

Tampa Theater, Tampa Florida, Dec. 7th-8th For Reservations, call:
813 274 8286 or for advanced tickets over the phone at 813.287.8844
or online at www.ticketmaster.com or at any Ticketmaster outlet.

Lincoln Theater, 541 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, FL, December 9th
For Reservations, call: 305 673 3331

Hosted by 9/11 experts, Jimmy Walter, Morgan Reynolds, David
Von Kleist, William Rodriguez, Joyce Riley, and Eric Hufschmid; this
forum is an investigation into September 11, and how our own
radioactive Uranium Ammunition has maimed 265,000 servicemen.
Even worse, it has been passed in their sperm to their wives and
lovers, and deformed their children and millions of other children in
the Middle East and Yugoslavia.

Special Screenings of "Confronting the Evidence: A Call to
Reopen the September 11th Investigation":

Friday Morning Musicale – Friday, December 9th, 6:30pm-10:30pm
809 Horatio Street
Tampa, FL 33606
(Tickets available on at the Box Office only)

Beach Theatre - December 11th, 6:00 pm - 10:00pm
315 Corey Avenue
St. Pete Beach, Fl 33706
Box Office: 727-360-6697
www.beachtheatre.com

Sarasota (To be announced)
Free DVD: If you can’t join us in person, we will give a free DVD of
Confronting the Evidence: A Call to Reopen the September 11th
Investigation, to anyone who requests a copy. To date, Jimmy Walter
has given away more than 360,000 DVD’s, and is making 100,000 this
week, now in ten languages. For Free DVD, to read more and catch up
on the latest 9/11 news at: Reopen911.org or call 1 800 630 9012

Million Dollar Challenge! Jimmy Walter is putting his money where
his mouth is. Walter is offering one million dollars to anyone who
can prove explosives were NOT used at the World Trade Center on
9/11. For full details and contest rules, see:
www.reopen911.org/Contest.htm

Write a Letter to the Editor: If you are already familiar with the
reopen 9/11 truth campaign, and you would like to stay involved,
please take the time to write a letter to the editor of your local
newspaper calling for the 9/11 investigation to be reopened. Right
now, we especially need letters to go to major news outlets in Florida.
Links for letters to the editor:

Tampa Bay Tribune: http://feedback.tbo.com/
Miami Herald: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/contact_us/
Florida Sentinel: http://www.flsentinel.com/
St Petersburg Times: http://www.sptimes.com/letters/


One thing is for certain; the facts surrounding the September 11th
attacks prove our government is not telling us the whole truth. We
would like these points publicly addressed. Please assist us in
examining and getting the word out about these critical historical
events.

Sincerely,

The Reopen 9/11 Staff


Contact us: Reopen911.org, or call (800)630-9012;
Press Contact: Ilene Proctor or Angus Hsu
Direct Line: (310) 271.5857
E-mail: proctor@artnet.net

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Suspicious Mind
Why the heir to a Tampa home-building fortune has spent millions trying to prove that the 9/11 attacks were a U.S. government plot.
By Eric Snider
Published December 14, 2005

REBEL WITH A CAUSE: Jimmy Walter at Tampa's Don Vicente Inn.
(max linsky)





With his rented Ford Taurus idling in a parking lot, Jimmy Walter springs from the driver's seat, hustles back to pop the trunk and pulls out a duffle bag. He wrestles free an army-green jumpsuit and then quickly pulls it over his suit pants, white shirt, tie and dress shoes. He grabs a flight helmet, fixes it on his head, looks up and smiles.


MAN IN UNIFORM: Walter in his Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief get-up.
(max linsky)


With no phone booth in sight, Walter has transformed himself into Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief, his Bush-whacking alter ego. The get-up is festooned with patches and stitchings: Chicken-Hawk Guard, First Chicken-Hawk Wing. Across the back, six-inch letters spell AWOL.

Walter, the 58-year-old son of Tampa's late home-building tycoon Jim Walter, had the suit made during the run-up to the Iraq war. He's worn it at protest rallies (and one year at Gasparilla). Occasionally, he dons it when leading a seminar alleging that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by a cabal of higher-ups in the U.S. government. Or, sometimes he just morphs into Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief for kicks.

There are those who would suggest that this is no way for Jim Walter's son to act. Further, there are some who might look askance at Jimmy spending millions on his three-year campaign to show that the official story of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is a sham.

To the notion that he's squandering his inheritance on fringe craziness, Jimmy Walter replies, "All patriots are looked upon as fools by many of those around them because they give up their lives and property. I may be a fool, but I'm proud to be a patriot."


[See the attached file] HE WAS THERE: North Tower janitor William Rodriguez, who spoke at Walter's symposium.
(max linsky)


Walter has poured an estimated $5.5 million into his crusade. Initially, the money paid for a series of full-page ads in major publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek and Reader's Digest, as well as full pages in the Weekly Planet in 2003 and 2004. He followed this campaign with an array of TV spots that have run mostly on cable.


[See the attached file]


Walter has produced a documentary, Confronting the Evidence: A Call to Reopen the September 11th Investigation, and distributed more than 300,000 DVD copies for free.

His website, www.reopen911.org, is one of the more prominent in what is often called the 9/11 Truth movement. On the home page, Walter offers $1 million to anyone who can prove explosives were not used in the attacks. (He says that thus far he's had no takers.)

Additionally, Walter has conducted a series of symposiums, featuring prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorists, in cities such as New York, Amsterdam, Vienna and London. Last week, on Pearl Harbor day, he brought his conspiracy road show to his hometown. "The New Pearl Harbor: Confronting the Evidence" was held on Wednesday and Thursday nights at the Tampa Theatre.

Over a well-paced two-and-a-half hours in front of around 300 True Believers, Walter played ringmaster on Wednesday for a seminar that featured plenty of video on the theater's big screen and six panelists whose presentations ranged from fiery rhetoric to nerd-speak. They laid out compelling claims that 9/11 was an inside job (for a primer on the various conspiracy theories, see the sidebar), and repeatedly bashed the mainstream media for ignoring the issue.

The event's highlight came courtesy of a hero, William Rodriguez, a janitor in the North Tower who saved hundreds of people by freeing them with his master key, and who barely escaped the building's collapse by jumping under a fire truck. He held the crowd spellbound with a detailed first-person narrative of his experiences that morning. Rodriguez also said he heard explosions in the basement and in other parts of the building before it fell, bolstering the most prominent conspiracy theory: It was preset explosions, not jets or fire, that brought down the WTC buildings.

Much to his credit, this was not the Jimmy Walter Ego Hour. While entertaining and at times boisterous, he largely played the deferential master of ceremonies.

Although 9/11 revisionists say that Walter is the only guy out there backing the cause with major dollars, he's more than just a bankroller. The millionaire can be found most days stationed in front of his laptop, working e-mail, researching 9/11, developing new initiatives and generally staying the course.

The month before coming to Tampa, Walter stayed with Rodriguez in his Jersey City apartment, sleeping on an inflatable bed propped on milk crates. "Every morning, he would go with a placard and picket the New York Times building," Rodriguez says, referring to Walter's protesting what he sees as the newspaper's suppression of information about 9/11. "He has put himself out there to try to get to the truth."

Former Tampa mayor Dick Greco, a close friend of Jim Walter Sr., says of Jimmy, "I've always known him to march to his own drummer. His dad believed in that. Jimmy couldn't care less [if people disapprove]."

Jimmy has his own take on what Dad would say: "He might not agree, but I think he would be proud that I was defending his country with his money."


[See the attached file]


Walter lived in California until January, and now keeps two small apartments in Amsterdam and Vienna. But when he's on the road, he prefers to stay with friends (as he did in Tampa) rather than in penthouse suites. He rents modest cars and, mostly because of past drug addiction, doesn't carouse.

The fact is, Jimmy Walter is not a ridiculously wealthy man. After his father died at age 77 in January of 2000, he says he inherited $11 million. He does not earn a paycheck, but makes income from investments. The scion says he's just about reached the point where he must scale back his lifestyle, which he describes as comfortable but not lavish. He adds that his days of carrying the financial burden of the 9/11 truth cause are coming to a close. It's time for others to step up, he says.

Walter gladly admits to being eccentric, and allows that he gets considerable juice and a certain ego-gratification from his incendiary role.

"Of course I do," he says pointedly. "I'm not Buddha. But that's not what drives me. I get riled when I see the criminals of the century going uninvestigated, at least the ones who I think are the perpetrators."

During several extended interviews, Walter is an open book, exhibiting a likeable lack of guile. He's an odd mixture: driven and passionate about his cause, but with a whiff of whimsy. He's a nutty guy, but he's not nuts. He's also regarded as categorically brilliant.

Walter has Tourette's Syndrome, not the curse-out-loud type, but a case that puts him in near constant motion that's at times a bit twitchy. He's a combustible sort, capable of lashing out in anger. "I'll yell and scream," he says, "but it's gotten to the point where I realize what's happening and just try to get up and leave."

The oldest of Jim Walter's two sons came relatively late to the conspiracy party. At first, like everyone else he blamed 9/11 on the terrorists. He started researching, and became convinced that the government proliferated a series of lies about Iraq's WMDs in order to drag the country into conflict. After so-called "mission accomplished" in Iraq, he started attending anti-war rallies, where he met Eric Hufschmid, who gave Walter his detailed 9/11 conspiracy book, Painful Questions, and accompanying video. It sat around for six months, but when Walter finally checked out Hufschmid's work, "it was an awakening."

Walter bought his first ad in the New York Times on Feb. 27, 2003. He wanted the headline to say "Powell Lied" (to the U.N. about Iraq's WMD capacity). But the newspaper made him add a question mark: "Powell Lied?" "I wanted an exclamation point," he says ruefully.

For his involvement in the 9/11 Truth movement, Walter has paid a price beyond money. He's received veiled death threats via e-mail, and had his car smashed by a rock in Santa Barbara, Calif., the incident that was the final catalyst for his move to Europe.

He feels safer there, and plans to make it his base for the time being. But that doesn't mean he rests easy. "I thoroughly expect them to kill me - a black op by some government," he says. "They never forget. The only reason I'm probably alive now is, in the words of [author] Robert Heinlein, 'When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.'"

If the government is shook up about Jimmy Walter and his crew alleging that 9/11 was an inside job, it's not letting on. No official refutations have been issued; the conspiracy crowd maintains that the silence is calculated so as not to legitimize their efforts.

While the movement has been largely relegated to the Internet, it's starting to show signs of gaining traction. Walter points to a recent Zogby poll of 605 New York metropolitan area residents that he spent more than $10,000 to commission. Some of its findings:

• 45 percent agreed that U.S. government officials knew in advance of the planned 9/11 attacks and consciously failed to act. 39 percent disagreed.

• 30 percent agreed that "some U.S. government officials and citizens had to be actively



involved" in the attacks. 56 percent disagreed. Among people 18-29, 53.5 percent agreed.

9/11 conspiracy advocates complain that they've been all but ignored by the mainstream media, and even allege that high-level editors are in cahoots with the government to keep their evidence out of coverage.

Thus far, Walter has appeared on At Large With Geraldo Rivera, where he says the host blindsided him. He was given somewhat fairer treatment on Anderson Cooper 360. There, he squared off with author Gerald Posner, whose book, Why America Slept, is deeply critical of the government's lack of preparation for a major terrorist attack, but does not buy into conspiracy notions.

"We all have a lot of opinions, but a trust fund baby gets to make sure a lot of people get to hear what his opinion is," Posner said by phone from his home in Miami. On Cooper 360, Posner alerted viewers that Walter paid a PR agency to advance his views. In turn, Walter proudly points out that when Cooper aired an informal Internet poll asking if folks believe the government was involved in 9/11, 90 percent said yes.

Despite making gains in awareness, 9/11 conspiracy theories have not infiltrated the American rank and file. Part of that has to do with the paucity of mainstream news coverage, but the conspiracy theorists also must contend with being dismissed as kooks. The New York Post ran a story on Walter with the headline, "Loon Tycoon."

"I have to tell people that I don't believe in lizard people and crop circles; I don't believe Elvis is alive," he says. "I get lumped in with them. It's like the wild, wild West."

Walter thinks he knows the roots of America's resistance to the 9/11 conspiracy theory. "It's very difficult to accept this," he says. "To do so can really shake your faith."

Still, some experts feel that the notion of government involvement in 9/11 will yet capture the popular imagination. Posner, no conspiracy buff, says, "Look at JFK. The way we love conspiracy theories, I wouldn't be surprised if it became widespread."

James Willis Walter, Jimmy's father, has been lauded as Tampa's first self-made tycoon. In 1946, after fighting aboard a Navy destroyer in WWII, he returned to Tampa. His father Ebe offered him a new car or $1,000 to start a business. Jim Walter opted for the latter, bought a shell home in Tampa and quickly turned a $300 profit.

By the 1950s, buoyed by postwar demand, he had built a thriving business selling unfinished bungalows for no money down, using the buyer's lot as collateral. More than 300,000 Walter homes sprang up in Florida and around the South.

Jim Walter's astute business mind helped him expand his development company into Walter Industries, which over the years branched into an array of ventures, from coal mining to mortgages to manufacturing.

Jimmy, born in 1947, first "knew we'd made it when I was 10, when we moved from a two-bedroom house on McKay to a mansion on Gulfview [in Palma Ceia]."

The Walter boys, Jimmy and Bob, 17 months younger, enjoyed all the privileges. The family belonged to such linchpins of Tampa society as Ye Mystic Krewe and Palma Ceia Country Club. Their dad wasn't around much, but, Jimmy says, "He was a very loving guy, always bringing home presents. He wanted everyone to be happy."

Not everything about the Walter household was idyllic. The parents fought constantly, Jimmy says, much of the time fueled by alcohol. "It was part of capitalist culture," he explains. "There'd be drinks at lunch, drinks before dinner, drinks with dinner, after-dinner drinks."

Jimmy's darker side emerged as well. "When I was 10 years old, I had this vision of oblivion, nothingness, and it terrified me," he says. "It gave me anxiety attacks. I was afraid of dying. I wasn't diagnosed with Tourette's until 35, so I couldn't sit still. I would grind my teeth."

Nevertheless, Jimmy, a math and science wiz who willingly studied hard, excelled in school. It was the Walter way. For eighth grade, he was shipped off to the prestigious Asheville School For Boys in North Carolina, where he completed high school.

His grades were so high that he was offered a Moorehead scholarship at University of North Carolina. He wanted to be a scientist. "At this point, my father stepped in and convinced me to go to business school," Jimmy recalls. "He was a charmer. He told me I could tell the scientists what to do. I pretty much regretted it, all that business-school malarkey."

Even so, Jimmy Walter took a position in Dad's firm after graduating. He bristled at the chain of command. "I started out running an adding machine," he says. "Palace politics abounded. What they did for other people's sons, they wouldn't do for me."

He quit after two years. But his departure did not drive a wedge between father and son. Although they disagreed on politics, especially Jimmy's opposition to the Vietnam War, the two maintained a loving relationship. "He might've been disgusted with me at times, but we were never estranged, I was never persona non grata," Jimmy says.

Jim Walter even helped keep his son out of Vietnam. After Jimmy's college deferment dried up in 1969, the elder Walter pulled some strings and pushed him to the "front of the line" for the Air Force Reserves. Jimmy aced the test, earned his officer's commission and did four years of reserve duty.

After leaving Walter Industries, Jimmy embarked on an odyssey that took him to New York - where he held his last paying job, in financial public relations in '74 - to Hong Kong and back to Tampa several times. For a spell, he lived the life of a profligate rich boy, drinking, snorting coke and soaking up the nightlife on Daddy's dime. Walter never had much success with women - he didn't have a girlfriend until after college - but now he found them flocking around. "They wanted money and not me," he says, more matter-of-fact than bitter. "They looked at me as a mark, someone to marry, but they wouldn't go to bed with me." Walter has never married.

In the early '80s, Walter embraced Rational Emotive Therapy Training. Founded by psychologist Albert Ellis in 1955, it advocates shedding irrational beliefs and replacing them with healthy ones. With REBT, he started to get a handle on some of his demons. He quit cocaine and cigarettes. Alcohol hung around longer, but he says he's been sober for a year. "I don't think I'm a problem drinker," he says, "but I have an addictive personality, so it's better for me to be not drinking than walking that fine line."

In the early '90s, Walter came down with a heavy case of altruism. Interested in prison reform, he formed a nonprofit called Life Skills that taught inmates and parolees how to set goals and cope with life on the outside. He sank $3 million into the project along with outside funding, and says the program yielded a recidivism rate far lower than the state average. But Walter shut Life Skills down when, he says, the state pulled its financial backing.

Later in the '90s, he formed a small think tank called Walden Three (www.walden3.org), which has built a plan for an environmentally friendly, sustainable city. He still refers to Walden Three as his "day job," but in truth it takes a back seat while he's in the throes of the 9/11 fight.

Last Tuesday, a few hours before he playfully donned his Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief suit, Jimmy Walter hosted a news conference to promote his seminar. Panelists, PR people, print and radio reporters (but no TV cameras) and a handful of conspiracy enthusiasts milled around the lobby of the Don Vicente hotel in Ybor City.

Panelist Morgan Reynolds, former chief economist for the labor department in the Bush administration, said of Walter, "He's paid a heavy toll in the battle for the mind of the American people. He'll eventually no longer be a wealthy man, he's spending so much of his fortune on this. My hat's off to him."

Finally, the panelists seated themselves at a folding table to make short statements and answer questions. The banter was lively, the passion palpable, and then Jimmy Walter broke in and said he was about to raise the stakes. Leveling a look at the audience with his piercing brown eyes, he said, "They are going to do it again. They have to get the momentum behind them to advance the neocon agenda. They have to do another big one."

Jimmy Walter's crusade, it appears, is far from over.