Laratonda and the ‘Tokyo Rose’ campaign to destroy AE911Truth

He accuses AE911Truth board of ‘corruption’ after posting libelous claims about Kelly David that he admitted privately are "garbage"

Sooner or later God'll cut you down – Johnny Cash

God is gonna cut you down, Craig – Gene Laratonda

By Craig McKee

Architects & Engineers for 9/11Truth is under attack.

The source of these attacks is a collection of people who have been undermining the 9/11 Truth Movement for years. At the center of this cabal’s activities are deception and disinformation used to suppress the evidence that a plane crash was faked at the Pentagon. This is the very evidence that proves government complicity in 9/11.

Hmm… I wonder why they would want to neutralize that evidence…

This cabal – and its assorted hangers-on, trolls, and enablers – claims to have only the purest of motives. They just want to “follow the evidence” where it leads using “the scientific method.” It’s all SO darned respectable. And it’s all a sham.

The members of this cabal, who all gained their “truther cred” by jumping on the

Laratonda and Jelmi: they hate personal attacks.

controlled demolition bandwagon (and by associating with AE911Truth), include people like David Chandler, Wayne Coste, Ken Jenkins, Jim Hoffman, Fran Shure, Victoria Ashley, Jonathan Cole, John Wyndham, Frank Legge (now deceased), and numerous others.

For years, the group has done everything possible to influence, pressure, cajole, and strong arm AE911Truth, which is one pillar of the Truth movement that it has not been able to bring to heel. Its members have been trying to control it for years but have failed. However, since the departure of Richard Gage (and later Ted Walter) from AE, the strategy has shifted. Now they want to destroy it one step at a time and replace it with the “new” International Center for 9/11 Justice (IC911).

A hostile takeover by a thousand cuts.

The IC911, which was created in 2023, is a repackaging of three largely inactive entities: the 9/11 Consensus Panel, the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and the 2011 Toronto Hearings – all of which have helped the cabal to suppress the Pentagon evidence. Three of the IC911’s board members – Chandler, Kevin Ryan, and Elizabeth Woodworth – have played key roles in this.

This brings me to gatekeepers Gene Laratonda and Sandra Jelmi, who run interference for the cabal. These two constantly signal their virtue by claiming to be all about “unity” and “love.” They never pass up an opportunity to tell us how we must always avoid “personal attacks” even as they launch some of the lowest attacks you’ll see in the movement. After you read their comments below, you might want to ask yourself whether the reality of their stated ideals matches their rhetoric.

Gene and Sandra host a weekly Zoom meeting called 9/11 War Room, which is where Ted Walter announced the creation of the IC911 last year. They also run the largest 9/11 Facebook group, called “9/11 Truth Movement,” which has more than 42,000 members and which has banned me twice. The latest time was when I tried to post an article I wrote for my longtime blog Truth and Shadows that was critical of Richard Gage’s gushing praise for the IC911. The article was fair and everything in it was true. But that didn’t stop Gene from kicking me out.

Applying quite a double standard, the pair went after me in the comment section that accompanies my last article on Thought Crimes and Misdemeanors. The article revealed that Ted Walter, shortly before he became executive director of the IC911, wrote to the University of Alaska Fairbanks professor Leroy Hulsey, urging him to disassociate himself from AE911Truth. AE had funded Hulsey’s computer-modeling study on the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7. AE also made the documentary SEVEN, which focused on Hulsey and his study.

Walter obviously was more concerned with replacing his lost income and promoting his new group than he was with doing the right thing for the Truth Movement.

Grassroots truthers reading this, particularly those who see the Truth Movement through rose-colored glasses (believing everyone’s authentic, everyone’s honest), might be tempted to dismiss what I’m sharing here as “infighting.” But it’s not infighting; it’s a struggle between genuine truth seekers and pretenders whose agenda is something else altogether.

As often happens, the reaction I got to my piece revealed new truths and confirmed some things I’ve been saying since I started blogging about 9/11 in 2010. It seems that if you vigorously shake a tree, especially one that is rotten at its core, things will fall out.

Gene to the rescue

When I posted my article, Gene arrived in the comment section in no time to scold me. He wasn’t concerned about what Walter had done with Hulsey, nor did he claim it wasn’t true. He started with, “Airing this publicly does nothing for the greater 9/11 truth movement. This is an absolutely terrible piece of journalism.” He followed with, “Please refrain from personal attacks. No one is trying to erase AE911Truth. I'm criticizing that most of the time all you do is call people out instead of sharing your evidence or presenting it to someone who can utilize that evidence for getting 9/11 justice.”

If only he had stopped there. But once Gene gets rolling…

You see, Gene’s concern about personal attacks only goes in one direction. He doesn’t mind Walter’s attacks on Kelly David or Kamal Obeid or Andy Steele (see the other article for details about this) or me (below). But if anyone calls Walter out for attempting to undermine AE911Truth, THEY are the bad guys. And God forbid if you call out any members of the cabal for peddling disinformation. He’ll ignore the evidence and defend the peddlers.

Rather than bury the lead any further, I must share with you a wonderful moment when Gene got his come-uppance (Don’t you think “Gene gets his come-uppance” would be a great name for an episode of Downton Abbey?). This happened when he copied and pasted into several comments a 6,000-word text from a website created by another AE911Truth basher (and cabal supporter), Dave Slesinger, called “Is Kelly David a Police Agent.”

Kelly was the chief operating officer of AE until she resigned in November 2022 amid an attempted coup by Walter, who wanted her fired so he could take her job. Kelly had been responsible for taking the organization from the brink of financial oblivion in 2013 to being a force to be reckoned with that has done so much for the cause of truth.

So of course they had to attack her.

The Slesinger text offers no evidence to support the implied accusation in its title, but that didn’t stop Gene as he stepped into a trap of his own making. You see, it turned out that he had written an email mentioning the Slesinger text a month before (December, 27, 2023) to 12 people, including four members of AE911Truth’s board. Gene wrote that he had once fallen for Slesinger’s claims, but now he realized they are “garbage.”

So he posted them on my blog KNOWING THEY WERE FALSE. He maligned the character of one of the most dedicated truthers I know based on something he KNEW to be a lie. In my mind, there is no coming back from that. At that moment, Gene jumped the truth shark.

He got a quite a shock when I quoted from the email.

By the way, here is a line from the very beginning of Slesinger’s rant, which Gene was willing to stand behind: “…I have never met a mean lying brown noser in an altrustic [sic] movement before I met Kelly.”

Charming. You can see how much Laratonda hates “personal attacks.”

Sandra, who used to be Kelly’s friend, got very upset with this. No, not with Gene’s deception or the attack on Kelly – she was angry that I possessed the knowledge to catch her beau red-handed. She lashed out at the AE board for sharing the email with me, calling them “unprofessional” and saying they lacked integrity. She also blamed me for sharing information with everyone that she claimed I had been “entrusted with safeguarding.”

The problem is that none of that is true.

I was not given the email by one of the AE board members CC’d on the message. And, given that a dozen people had received it (including David Chandler, Xander Arena, Jonathan Cole, Fran Shure, Kevin Ryan, and Sandra herself), there was no reasonable expectation of confidentiality. Nor did Gene even ask that the email remain confidential.

Gene doubles down

Demonstrating what can happen when someone’s fingers type faster than their brain can think, Gene scrambled to explain his deception by saying he wanted to expose my garbage using garbage. This is called doubling down on the lie, and it just made him look worse.

Later, with no way to justify his actions, Gene wrote this:

“I apologize. All of this is terrible of all of us. We're all behaving poorly. I'm sorry. I won't do this anymore. I'll try my damndest [sic] not to do this.”

At first glance, this seems heartfelt and humble. But it has to be a very quick glance. When he writes that he won’t do “this” anymore, does he mean he won’t lie about whether a longtime servant of the Truth Movement is a police agent? Is this something an honest person has to promise not to do?

And notice that he tried to get away with including me in his apology, as if he was apologizing for both of us. No, Gene, this wasn’t terrible of “all of us,” it was terrible of you. You behaved poorly; I just caught you at it.

Before I share a few highlights of Gene’s or Sandra’s over-the-top attacks on me (as much fun as those are), I will quote from their comments concerning AE, an organization they both pretend to care about. Let’s start with Gene:

·         I can't wait for all this [AE911Truth] to blow up. It's gonna be something else. Maybe then AE911Truth can rebuild from the ground up after all the horrid leadership is exposed. Lol

·         My prayers for two years are being answered and the corruption at AE911Truth is being exposed in His time. I'm just watching it play out.

·         The leadership, oh dear leadership. In the world of AE911Truth, it seems that subpar performance doesn't warrant a mere slap on the wrist. No, it's time for a grand exit.

·         Perhaps it's time for the upper management of AE911Truth to pack their bags – according to critics, they've done a real disservice to the once-promising organization. But hey, if you don't see it, you must be wearing those rose-colored truther glasses.

·         Keep nodding along, yes boys and yes girls – the ivory tower is crumbling, and the fruit is withering on the vine. It's a real page-turner of organizational drama.

He accuses AE’s leadership of “corruption” without a shred of evidence or even saying what the heck he means by this. And he anticipates with delight the day when AE “crumbles.” Quite a truther, all right.

It’s worth pointing out here that Gene has been harassing AE911Truth and Steele, for years. It got so bad that AE’s board had to send him a “cease and desist” letter to stop him writing to them. Rather than take the hint, Gene giggles and drools over the prospect of AE’s demise. How insecure he must be.

Andy Steele, AE911Truth’s operations manager, reacts to Gene’s assault this way:

“It is part of a collective attack on AE that’s been going on for many years… more specifically on the individuals at AE that carry out their roles effectively and who can’t be bullied or manipulated into bending a knee to this highly toxic group of people. Kelly and I have been targets practically since we came here. It comes with the territory and means we’re doing something right.

“I’ve received emails over the years from Gene that begin with such things as 'Hi fuckface. Everything is burning around you...’ along with pictures of me attached. Either this guy is deeply disturbed or it’s a job that he’s carrying out.”

And let’s not leave Sandra out. She volunteered for AE for more than 10 years but now attacks it. Addressing me, she wrote:

·         With your right-fighting way, you've made us even leerier of all the goings-on behind the scenes at AE, exposing the shambles they are in and the hole they have dug themselves into. Nice job, truly. Someone having set out to destroy whatever is left of the organization couldn't have done any better.

·         Regarding AE, all I did was express my perception of, and sadness about, the state they are in, and I'd love for you to tell me with a straight face that you think the organization is thriving. I'd also love to tell you exactly how I know it's not, but out of respect for this once splendid organization, I won't.

Do you see the spin? She’s “sad” about the “shambles they are in,” and I’m the one “destroying” AE. Then she drops this hint that she has inside knowledge that allows her to KNOW that AE’s not thriving. She won’t say HOW she knows this because she wants to show “respect” for the organization. Imagine if she wanted it to look bad…

Andy adds:

“This is more of the same ‘Tokyo Rose’ type of spin that Sandra and her group have been putting out there for a while now, hoping it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and part of the movement’s collective attitude. People like Sandra and Gene are trying to sell the idea that their participation is indispensable, when in reality these are some very dishonest and destructive people. When you don’t fall for their spin, they attack.”

Sandra, who I once thought of as a friend, fits right into the cabal that has been leading the Truth Movement down the garden path for years, even though she agrees with me that a 757 could not have hit the Pentagon. Despite this one area of agreement, she contends that both sides are equally guilty of cherry picking facts and not considering the other side’s evidence. This is false. Just more psychological manipulation.

Sandra pretends to want unity, but that’s just a device to protect the cabal from criticism. Meanwhile, all the attempts by Ted Walter and the IC911 to damage AE are fine with her and Gene.

Coste piles on

And is it a coincidence that Wayne Coste, just about the least credible member of the cabal, had this to say about AE the same day that Gene and Sandra offered their “opinions” (in a comment on my article in the “NZ 9/11 Truth” Facebook group):

“Craig, I can't imagine this piece being published without the tacit (or explicit) endorsement of the AE911Truth Board. You make the organization sound like a lifeless, directionless, bitter organization that wants to rest on its laurels.”

No, Wayne, I make AE sound like an organization under attack by fake truthers like you. (In a future article, I’ll go over every despicable falsehood Wayne is responsible for. It might take more than one article to fit them all in.)

By the way, you can’t go to the comment stream of my piece and read most of Gene’s comments because he deleted more than 30 of them. I guess he realized how crazy they sounded. Fortunately I receive every new substack comment in my inbox. Here are some of his best moments from those comments (when he refers to more than one person, he means me and my fellow Pentagon researcher Adam Ruff):

·         Craig, your projection is showing again. Goodnight, and thanks for entertaining me while you and Adam shit all over this trash hit piece of journalism. Yellow journalism, it's what your good at.

·         Keep being the toxic best you are good at. I appreciate that you two illustrate the content of your character so well in the comments for all to see. You both shat all over Craig's shitty article.

·         I have not attacked the content of your character; you and Adam have illustrated it at length in these comments. Enjoy the bottom feeding destructive attempts to take down your "cabal" or whomever you guys want to vilify. Sounds so positive and uplifting. I've spent too much time stirring this shit post, I mean shit pot. I'm done. Make sure your get the last word. Let the hate flow through you. *chuckle* What a waste of journalistic talent, if you had any.

·         I am the cabal! bwahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahahawahahahahahahaha

·         God is gonna cut you down Craig.

·         God is gonna cut you, and the corruption leading the once great organization, down Craig. ‌ ‌

·         You did the IC and Ted dirty. You've done others dirty. I can't seem to learn the lesson of turning the other cheek. If someone goes after me or a friend of mine, especially in a one-sided hit-piece of trash journalism, I feel compelled to interject.

·         Gloves off. You wanna sling insults, expect it back. You were lookin' pretty rough there during your Adderall binge. Was it Adderall? Meth? Coke? Stay off the speeders Craig.

·         Sue me, speeder boy.

·         I'll pray for my enemies. I'll be saying your name tonight before I go to sleep.

·         Hi, my name is Gene Laratonda and I'm not very liked by the author or his friends who are ball-licking this hit piece.

·         As for this truth exposure business, I welcome the truth like I welcome a cup of coffee in the morning – with open arms. If Craig stumbled upon some mind-blowing revelation, I'd be the first in line for a front-row seat. However, let's not confuse truth with a conspiracy-laden fantasy. I'm all for facts, not wild tales spun out of thin air.

·         So, rest assured, Adam, there's no cloak-and-dagger agenda here. I'm just a fan of the good ol' truth, minus the theatrics of a piss poor article.

·         You're a trash journalist. ‌ ‌

So that’s Gene – the guy who demands that others “refrain from personal attacks.” He also sounds like the mainstream media in his dismissal of “conspiracy-laden fantasy” and “wild tales spun out of thin air.”

A gross double standard

Gene and Sandra also don’t seem to have a problem with actual personal attacks made by members of the cabal that they defend so ardently. Chandler called Citizen Investigation Team “scum” – no response. Coste said Barbara Honegger is a “horrible researcher” – no response. He also said Massimo Mazzucco is “incompetent” – no response. Coste said to David Ray Griffin that if he doesn’t watch Coste’s Pentagon PowerPoint series was he is “not a real researcher.” No response from anyone.

Cabal henchman Adam Fitzgerald posted a list on Facebook of people he considers agents. The list included Honegger, Dylan Avery (who directed SEVEN, and The Unspeakable for AE in addition to the Loose Change films), and Christopher Bollyn, who has done extensive research into Israel’s role in 9/11.

Chandler’s response to this? “Good list.” Gene and Sandra’s response to the comment? Silence.

A couple of years ago, Chandler also said that AE is infiltrated by agents and the leadership refuses to do anything about it. Who did he mean? Anyone who doesn’t think a plane hit the Pentagon (which included me).

Here’s what Sandra wrote after I posted on Facebook that the article had received more views in its first day than any piece I’d written for some time:

“That's akin to the hangman saying on the day of public hangings ‘Wow, there are more people in the town's center today than we've had in ages!’ People's blood lust is not a good measure of something's quality, and even less of its moral character.”

Blood lust. You can’t make this stuff up.

She also uses a devious but familiar spin tactic of dismissing my strong criticisms of this cabal, and now of Walter and the IC911, on the basis that I just attack anyone who disagrees with me. That’s the real clue that Sandra is not genuine since she knows that I’m not objecting to “disagreement.” Here’s how she put it:

“You've exposed yourself as someone who can't be trusted, capable of throwing anybody who acts, thinks, believes differently than you under the bus. Should anyone who currently supports you disagree with you at some point down the line or not act according to your code, they become fair game for you to destroy and throw to the wolves, in the crudest and unclassiest [sic] way, airing any and all dirty laundry publicly for anyone to see.”

I’m not sure if I throw people to the wolves and then under the bus or the other way around.

She can’t address the actual arguments I make so she attacks my character using falsehoods. Don’t disagree with McKee or he’ll destroy you! I hope that those who read the last article, and who are now finishing this one, will begin to see the harm being done and the disingenuous motives being employed to undermine AE911Truth and the Truth Movement.

Yes, folks, lies aren’t just being pushed by people outside the Truth Movement. In fact, the greatest harm is being done from the inside.

We can stop it, but first we have to see it.