Kevin Barrett is still scratching his head and wondering: Why is "liberal" Wisconsin bent out of shape about an $8k-a-year lecturer whose course barely touches on 9/11...when ultra-conservative Brigham Young University is rallying behind physicist-hero Steven Jones, who has proved that the WTC was demolished with explosives....and ultra-conservative Texas A&M has no problem with their professor emeritus and former Bush Administration member Morgan Reyolds, who says the Twin Towers were "blown to kingdom come" by his own former bosses? They're just two of the 70-plus Ph.D.s with full university affiliations at Scholars for 9/11 Truth: http://st911.org

DARIEN TOWNSHIP-The Silver Moon Center will be the site for a "rational discussion" Sunday (July 30th) about theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon...

Capital Times Article “What Makes Kevin Barrett Tick?”

http://www.911blogger.com/2006/07/capital-times-issues-lengthy-article.html

Concise Little Missive from Smear-Specialist Nathan Comp

From Nathan Comp, author of the smear article in Isthmus, the Madison, WI weekly. Among dozens of inaccuracies in that article, Comp wrote that Kevin Barrett reportedly believes in a "Jewish conspiracy" and thinks that all of history since Roman times is controlled by the illuminati! As if it wasn’t already going to be hard enough for Kevin to get re-hired next semester... ; ) Comp writes to Kevin Barrett:

it was a real dick move to share my e-mail address with strangers. unlike you, i don't bask in the harassment, which is exactly what this is considering i have no power to coordinate the nookie-cookie face-off you've challenged nass to.

perhaps you could send a concise little missive to your chromosomally-deficient army of dumbasses, asking that they remove me from their contact list. that, my friend, would be great. good luck with nass. he thinks you suck, too.

nathan

"nathan comp" <ncomp47@hotmail.com> (608) 663-8444

Kevin Barrett responds: Okay, Nathan, I'll just forward YOUR concise little missive ; )

And speaking of smear-jobs, a new documentary is peddling the “anti-Semite” line. Here at MUJCA,  our mission is to put a lid on people blaming “the Muslims” or “the Jews” or “the Arabs” and instead have a respectful dialogue about what really happened on 9/11/01. So please take action!

URGENT 9/11 ACTION REQUIRED:  

New documentary SMEARS 9/11 TRUTH CAMPAIGN

PLEASE CALL AND COMPLAIN ABOUT FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF “ANTI_SEMITISM”...

Signs that read "Stop the 9/11 Cover Up" appear in a new documentary, with voice-over about the 9/11 truth movement being part of a neo-nazi anti-Semitic mindset.

CONTACT THE DISTRIBUTION COMPANY OF THIS FILM: 212-444-7900  and 416-488-0037

Before you call with your complaint about the film, email major media with the below message, so that when you call the film distribution company you can inform them that you have already contacted the media.  

Let them know you've informed the media regarding this defamation of the 9/11 truth movement thru use of the iconoclastic signs from 911truth.org and the overlaid audio making it appear that 9/11 truth activists were connected with the anti-Semitic groups this documentary covered.  

Also, let them know you are urging 911truth.org to file a lawsuit for defamation.   

LET THEM KNOW OUR MOVEMENT IS ABOUT "PHYSICAL EVIDENCE"

AND NOT ABOUT THEORIES INVOLVING THE TYPE OF PEOPLE IN THAT DOCUMENTARY, AND NEVER HAS BEEN!

SEND EMAIL (below) TO MEDIA:

letters@nytimes.com, pnn@pacifica.org, mail@democracynow.org,

Imus@msnbc.com, AbramsReport@msnbc.com, Hardball@msnbc.com,

TheNews@msnbc.com, MSNBCInvestigates@msnbc.com, Headliners@msnbc.com,

Today@NBC.com, weekendtoday@nbc.com, Nightly@NBC.com, Dateline@NBC.com,

MTP@NBC.com, letters@MSNBC.com, World@MSNBC.com, bEditors@newsweek.com, Letters@newsweek.com, Editors@newsweek.com, dtalbot@salon.com, modonnell@salon.com, rocallahan@salon.com, kamiya@salon.com,

scottr@salon.com, lauram@salon.com, ruth@salon.com, bwyman@salon.com,

jstark@salon.com, szacharek@salon.com, lauram@salon.com, shansen@salon.com,

jsweeney@salon.com, janelle@salon.com, jwalsh@salon.com, ayork@salon.com,

kaufman@salon.com, klauerman@salon.com, jtapper@salon.com,

dcruickshank@salon.com, ccolin@salon.com, areiter@salon.com,

kcroft@salon.com, aleonard@salon.com, km@salon.com, boehlert@salon.com,

dcave@salon.com, tennis@salon.com, max@salon.com, ec@salon.com,

leanne.pilkington@bbc.co.uk, steve.becker@bbc.co.uk,

d.blackledge.sj@stonyhurst.ac.uk, alison.butterworth@bbc.co.uk,

phil.cunliffe@bbc.co.uk, brett.davison@bbc.co.uk, joe@joefishcountry.com,

gary.hickson@bbc.co.uk, gerald.jackson@bbc.co.uk, graham.liver@bbc.co.uk,

sally.naden@bbc.co.uk, dave.swanton@salesharks.co.uk, mike.west@bbc.co.uk,

joe.wilson.01@bbc.co.uk, radio.leeds@bbc.co.uk, john.ryan@bbc.co.uk,

radioleicester@bbc.co.uk, radio.lincolnshire@bbc.co.uk,

yourlondon@bbc.co.uk, admin@bigl.co.uk, studio@bigl.co.uk,

info@londonturkishradio.org, lyric@rte.ie, livewire@uea.ac.uk,

plesniak@salon.com, jjones@salon.com, anash@salon.com,

abramowitz@washpost.com, achenbachj@washpost.com, ahrensf@washpost.com,

aizenmann@washpost.com, allenh@washpost.com, allenm@washpost.com,

aranam@washpost.com, argetsinger@washpost.com, asherm@washpost.com,

chuck.babbington@washingtonpost.com, bakerp@washpost.com,

balzd@washpost.com, barbashf@washpost.com, barkerk@washpost.com,

barkinr@washpost.com, barrj@washpost.com, barrs@washpost.com,

beckerj@washpost.com, behrp@washpost.com, belmanf@washpost.com,

bennettp@washpost.com, benningv@washpost.com, bersellie@washpost.com,

afriedman@motherjones.com, huber@motherjones.com, mccallum@motherjones.com,

amos@motherjones.com, fuzy@uclink4.berkeley.edu, wise@motherjones.com,

backtalk@motherjones.com, vince@motherjones.com, cal@motherjones.com,

bauerlein@motherjones.com, laura@motherjones.com, brooke@motherjones.com

THE MESSAGE:

A brand new documentary on anti-Semitism just released on Cinemax cable movie channel called "Protocols of Zion" THROUGH DECEPTIVE ASSOCIATION IMAGES fragment America away from the physical evidence proving 9/11 was an inside job.   The physical evidence of 9/11 has resulted in nearly 50% of Americans now suspecting US govt. complicity.  This film distorts the 9/11 truth movement and deceptively weaves it in with neo-nazi and anti-semitic movements.

This documentary showed the iconic image of the 9/11 truth movement, the protest signs "Stop the 9/11 Cover Up" which appear in media and across the world on websites, and while the camera focused on this iconoclastic image of the 9/11 truth movement's "Stop the 9/11 Cover Up" signs being held at ground zero, the narrator and people being interviewed talked about how the 9/11 truth movement was an anti-Semitic paranoid effort.

This of course is nonsense.  911Truth.org who produced those signs has never made any claims that even hinted at anti-Semitism, and has never tolerated such lunatic ideas.  911Truth.org has always been a physical evidence based organization and would never endorse, or tolerate the kind of wingnut concepts as the hate groups this documentary was about.  911Truth.org is dedicated to an examination of the physical facts of 9/11 for the good of the American people, the families and victims of 9/11, and for the world.

I RECOMMEND THAT 911TRUTH.ORG, THE PRODUCERS OF THOSE ICONOCLASTIC SIGNS DECEPTIVELY USED BY THE MAKERS OF THIS FILM TO SMEAR THE 9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT, CONSIDER A MAJOR LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS VIDEO DISTRIBUTOR OF "Protocols of Zion" FOR DEFAMATION.

I know that all mainstream 9/11 truth groups have never espoused or tolerated any lunatic anti-Semitic concepts.  But now we must also speak out and make it clear to the media that anti-Semites are NOT part of this "physics, fact based movement for truth," and tell the media that those who speak in anti-Semitic terms are very possibly cointelpro meant to discredit this 9/11 truth movement, and to stop average Americans from looking at the real facts of 9/11 that point to US govt. involvement. 

See also: 

"Why the Jewish Community Should Demand 9/11 Truth"
by William E. Douglas, Jr

#########################################################

NEW BOOK...  

Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action
David Ray Griffin

Westminster John Knox Press, 2006  

"Professor David Ray Griffin has a well-deserved reputation for the thoroughness of his research. All Americans who love their country enough to dig into the facts of these critical times will be well rewarded by examining his books. 9/11 truth is a very important issue---one with the power to bring lasting change to our country.”-—The Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr, author of Credo: Letters to a Young Doubter and A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches 

“If you are open to recognizing that the United States behaves much as other great powers have behaved, but you get your information through standard American channels, I dare you to expose yourself to the facts Griffin summarizes, facts that have been suppressed by our newspapers and magazines. If you are one who wants to be a disciple of Jesus, you will have some hard thinking to do about what American Christians are called to be and to do at this historical moment.”

-—John B. Cobb Jr, co-author of The American Empire and the Commonwealth of God 

“Are we brave enough to read this nerve-wracking book, one of the most important theological texts of our time? Rooted in the longstanding belief that Christians share responsibility for shaping a more justice-loving world, Griffin makes a strong case that the real "conspiracy theory" about 9/11 is the Bush Administration's silly notion that nineteen young Arab men could have pulled it off. Griffin helps us wrestle with questions that are almost too much to bear, yet which may empower us, if we dare, to build a more truthful and, over time, more deeply moral nation and world.”---The Reverend Carter Heyward, Robbins Professor of Theology Emerita, Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and author of Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right and God in the Balance: Christian Spirituality in Times of Terror  

“A gripping account of precedents for the current global empire, from the Rome of Jesus to twentieth-century ‘false-flag’ operations. . . . His wake-up call to U.S. Christians will be evaded at our peril.”—-Catherine Keller, Professor of Theology, Drew University, and author of God and Power.  

“In two earlier books, David Ray Griffin established himself as one of the foremost researchers into 9/11. This book is of immensely greater scope and importance. . . . It sees the contemporary world clearly and synoptically in an informed Christian perspective, so that it makes questions of theodicy and the roots of evil as contemporary as the events of 9/11. Even though it makes some claims and arguments I disagree with, I consider this one of the most significant and original books I have ever read.”-—Peter Dale Scott, author of Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina 

 "WARNING: If, like most Americans calling themselves Christian, you prefer the comfort of acquiescing in the official version of 9/11 and the imperial wars it facilitated, DROP THIS BOOK NOW. But if you are open to the grace of honest inquiry and the risk of following the historical Jesus in confronting the evils of empire, this rigorously argued book is a MUST READ.”---Ray McGovern, CIA veteran analyst now with Tell the Word, a project of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour, Washington, D.C. 

 "David Griffin has previously made the case for the Bush administration’s complicity in 9/11 and the cover-up of this evidence by the 9/11 Commission.  Here, in this important book, he puts these shocking realities in the context of Christian theology and the challenge to the churches. In a profound exploration of the nature and history of the demonic, Griffin suggests that American empire is a culmination of human demonic alienation from God."-—Rosemary Radford Ruether, emeritus scholar, Claremont Graduate University and Claremont School of Theology 

 “Do American Christians want the United States to act like the New Rome, invading other countries to impose its imperial rule and its control of other peoples’ resources? That, however, is just what the US is doing, increasingly so since 9/11, explains David Griffin. In this gripping summary of evidence for the truth behind 9/11 and the 9/11 Commission report, Griffin makes a compelling case that the imperial practices of the American government have become a destructive force in the world. And he clarifies the biblical and theological basis for Christians to challenge the resurgent American imperialism that often claims divine blessing on its destructive actions.”-—Richard A. Horsley, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion, University of Massachusetts, and author of Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder  

“Compelling reading. Here is a remarkably thorough presentation of facts regarding 9/11 events. Professor Griffin sets the events of 9/11 in a historical, religious, and philosophical context that is most enlightening. Although this context is also somewhat chilling, he holds out hope in his discussion of where we can go from here. I most highly recommend this book!”---Steven E. Jones, Professor of Physics, Brigham Young University 

TABLE OF CONTENTS  

Preface  

Part 1: Evidence That 9/11 Was a False-Flag Operation 

1. 9/11 and Prior False-Flag Operations 

2. Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories  

3. The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True  

4. Flights of Fancy: The 9/11 Commission’s Incredible Tales of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93  

5. Bush Administration Responsibility for 9/11: From a Prima Facie to a Conclusive Case 

Part 2: A Christian Critique of 9/11 and American Imperialism 

6. Imperial Motives for a “New Pearl Harbor”  

7. Jesus and the Roman Empire 

8. The Divine and the Demonic 

9. The American Empire, Demonic Evil, and 9/11 

10. A Call to Reflection and Action 

------------

#########################################################

Aaron Nathans did an amazing job researching and writing this article. He must have called me several dozen times to make sure he had his facts right. And he tracked down my old friends, acquaintances and colleagues and called them repeatedly, taking care to make sure that he was quoting them accurately and reporting exactly what he saw and heard. This kind of diligent journalism is much harder work than just making stuff up and tossing off stale insults—right, Mr. Comp?  -KB 

What Makes Kevin Barrett Tick?

UW lecturer just doesn't believe the government 

http://www.madison.com/toolbox/index.php?action=printme2&ref=tct&storyURL=%2Ftct%2Fmad%2Ftopstories%2Findex.php%3

Fntid%3D92026%26ntpid%3D0 

By Aaron Nathans

July 22, 2006

LONE ROCK - Kevin Barrett's father could have won an Olympic gold medal  in 1964, if not for a mistake that nobody noticed but he. 

Peter Barrett was competing in a series of seven sailing races in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. He accidentally hit a mark, grounds for disqualification, but wasn't caught. He nearly finished the race, but at the finish line, in first place, he dropped out, admitting the foul. 

He ended up winning the silver on the strength of his performance in the other races. 

Sitting in front of his grandparents' television in Madison, a 5-year-old Kevin Barrett was watching. He recalled being proud of his father after learning what happened. He said he also learned an  important lesson. 

"It's important to do what's right, and to follow the truth, no matter what," Kevin Barrett said in a recent interview, noting that his late father won the gold four years later. "Cheating for strategic advantage is unacceptable." 

Kevin Barrett, now 47, says he has long searched for truth and deeper meaning. More often than not, he finds that truth in the pages of a book. Many of his books line a log cabin he often visits here in Lone Rock, a sparsely populated town an hour west of Madison. 

He takes care of the cabin for Khidria, the Madison Islamic organization that owns it. It is surrounded by towering pines. His 1964 Dodge camper, with a faded San Francisco State University bumper sticker, is parked out front. Visitors are greeted by his tan shepherd dog, Rushdie. 

He calls the cabin his zawiya, or Islamic spiritual retreat. There's a lot of peace to be found here, an escape from the academic and political rigors of Madison, where Barrett, his wife and their two boys, 12 and 9, live in University of Wisconsin staff housing. Here, Barrett tends the peppers, tomatoes and squash in the organic gardens, complete with rain barrels. On a bright day, the sun reveals bass swimming in the lake out back. But there is little peace for Barrett these days.

"I've been too busy to fish. I've been too busy to do anything," said Barrett, whose red beard is graying, as he climbed the hill from the lake toward the cabin. On the way up, he passed an old satellite dish and a faded orange Everlast punching bag. "This 9/11 thing is turning into a monster." 

Barrett has recently emerged from obscurity to gain worldwide attention for his belief that some top U.S. government officials orchestrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He works to punch holes in the  government's official version of the attacks from the second floor of  the Lone Rock cabin.

Here he runs the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth.  Members of his alliance have various opinions about this nation's level  of complicity in the attacks, but all say they want a review more thorough than the one the 9/11 Commission provided in 2004, Barrett said. 

Barrett, a UW lecturer on Islam, personally believes the World Trade Center towers were brought down by a controlled demolition. 

He also believes that the story of the hijacked plane that hit the Pentagon is "preposterous." 

"Their agenda goes way beyond Iraq. They want 50 years of war at least," Barrett said of the U.S. government, sitting barefoot in a soft chair in the cabin. The government wants to gain power over the Middle East and Central Asia, he said. "They'll be able to use the psychological impact of 9/11 for another 50 years." 

Kevin Barrett grew up in a home where both parents were highly educated and well-read, and both would eventually become UW-Whitewater  professors in business and accounting. Kevin was such an avid and  advanced reader that he skipped first grade. 

He recalled challenging a seventh-grade teacher who supported the war in Vietnam. Two years later, he watched in awe as Mark Lane, attorney for Lee Harvey Oswald, spoke at a local college. Lane showed the Abraham Zapruder home movie of the assassination frame by frame to raise the question of whether his late client was guilty of killing President Kennedy. 

But Barrett recalls being most deeply moved by a smart, eccentric woman who questioned orthodoxy. Barrett credits Charlotte Smith, the librarian at Pewaukee High School, for guiding him to a political satirist named Kurt Vonnegut and a psychoanalyst named Sigmund Freud. 

She even showed him where the library kept a hidden copy of Philip Roth's sexual coming-of-age novel "Portnoy's Complaint." 

"She would have gotten in trouble if any student had got ahold of it and found the pornographic passages. Of course, I did, and entertained the lunchroom with it," Barrett said. 

Smith suggested he read books by cult novelist Philip K. Dick. Barrett said three of Dick's books stand out on his all-time favorite reading list: "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," which he calls "a hallucination parody of our mind-controlled society"; "The Man in the High Castle," an alternate history of what would have happened had the Nazis won World War II; and "Ubik," a commentary on consumer culture. 

Once at UW-Madison, Barrett combined his love of intellectual inquiry with a hard partying lifestyle, hanging out with "eccentrics and hippies," and receiving his bachelor's degree in journalism in 1981.

After graduation, he took off for San Francisco in a 1955 school bus. 

In the Bay Area, he sang in a punk band, wrote poetry and did odd jobs like moving furniture and proofreading academic papers. He spent a year in Seattle working for a group that advocated a nuclear arms freeze, and volunteering for former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart's 1984 presidential campaign. But upon returning to San Francisco, he fell back into his life of partying and creative intellectualism, enjoying gatherings at the San Francisco Art Institute. 

Barrett, from a family of "lapsed Unitarians," was at the time dabbling in existentialism, absurdism and Zen. 

"He was a young man," said longtime friend Jackie Leder, now a criminal defense attorney outside Chicago, "living on a bus." 

Seeking some direction in his life, he enrolled at San Francisco State, where he received two master's degrees, in English literature and French, in the early 1990s. 

Peter Weltner, his English literature thesis adviser, said Barrett was one his most memorable students. Barrett wrote his thesis on Dick, the author. Weltner said it was one of the few theses he ever read for pleasure. 

"It was laugh-out-loud funny. It subverted the stodgy notion of what a thesis is supposed to do, without eliminating the fundamental part of it," Weltner said. "It was an extraordinary, unusually intelligent piece of work."

Nevertheless, Barrett had the ability to separate Dick's diabolical vision of American society from his own political beliefs, Weltner said. Barrett hardly seemed a conspiracy theorist, he said. The best scholars of literature read with a "somewhat more detached way of looking at the world, and certainly Kevin, to me, had that." 

But Leder, who attended UW-Madison with Barrett when they were undergraduates, said her friend has always been good at separating his work in the classroom from his personal pursuits. Barrett has always been fascinated by the Kennedy assassination, she said.

"He does have a great distrust of government in general," said Leder, noting he grew up during Watergate and Vietnam. "The distrust of authority has been long-standing." 

During his time in San Francisco, Barrett was exploring mysticism. He recalled accidentally wandering into a lecture on Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, by Jacob Needleman, a professor of philosophy. That got him thinking more critically about the nature of God. 

In 1993, he took a train from San Francisco to New York with a friend.  He was reading Gore Vidal's "Live From Golgotha," a book portraying biblical events as if they were on television, which inspired him to entertain passengers in the lounge car with a stand-up comedy routine about religion. 

The night they arrived, in a cafe in Brooklyn, he met his future wife, a Moroccan-born woman who practiced Islam. The next day, a friend in New York gave him a copy of "TAZ," by Hakim Bey, which Barrett describes as an "anarchist manifesto" inspired by Islamic ideas. The book "was so poetic, it had this poetry that strips away veils. There was just a whiff of that, it was pointing toward Islamic mysticism." He had to learn more. 

Later that day, he and his future wife met up to chat again, this time at a train station below the World Trade Center. Just a month later, the complex would be bombed for the first time, piquing his attention.

A few months later, Barrett and his beloved were married, first in a formal Islamic wedding, and later at City Hall. Several days before they tied the knot, he said the Shahada, or Muslim declaration of the oneness of God, in front of some Moroccan Muslims there, making his conversion official. 

"I was walking on Cloud Nine," he said in a recent interview. "I'd found something I'd been looking for. It's indescribable, it's a step back to God." What resonated so much, he said, was the Islamic approach to God.

"The Christians seemed to imagine God as an old guy with a beard, a patriarch," he said, noting that he does not identify with a particular sect of the faith. "In Islam, God is much more transcendental, much less anthropomorphic. The first tangible quality of God is mercy and compassion." 

(Barrett's wife requested that her name not appear in this article. She said she wanted to keep herself and her children out of the fierce controversy surrounding her husband. American media go too far in invading the private lives of public figures and their families, she added. "What happened with Clinton would never happen in Morocco," she said.) 

After he converted, Barrett gradually gave up alcohol. He was determined to learn Arabic, and the only sure way to do that, he said, was to go for a doctorate. He returned to UW-Madison with his wife in 1995. They spent a year in Morocco when he was a Fulbright scholar, culminating in a dissertation on Moroccan legend. Barrett received his doctorate in African languages and literature, with a folklore minor, from UW-Madison in 2004.

Harold Scheub, the Evjue Bascom professor of humanities, said Barrett was a fine doctoral student and handled himself well. 

"He defended it very effectively," said Scheub, who was his dissertation adviser. 

Barrett was teaching a folklore class as a teaching assistant on Sept. 11, 2001, when word began to roll in about the attacks. He says he was immediately skeptical when he saw the 19 names of the hijackers and that they were members of al-Qaida, which he considered a disorganized and ineffectual group. The United States and Saudi Arabia gave funding to Osama bin Laden and his fighters during the Soviet invasion of  Afghanistan in the 1980s; Barrett believed, as many do, that the CIA created al-Qaida. 

Barrett said he thought: "Someone's going to make a lot of money off of this. The defense budget's going to double overnight." 

He puzzled over the official story for two years, believing there were "lots of holes." At Mark Wolfert's auto body shop in Lone Rock, a hot spot for political chat among locals, the conversation often turned to the attacks. Barrett was just one of the regulars who believed something was fishy with the government's official line.

In late 2003, Barrett heard that one of the theologians he was citing in his dissertation, David Ray Griffin, was writing a book about problems with the government's story of the attacks. Barrett admired Griffin's work, and decided to do some of his own research. 

When Griffin's book, "The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11," came out the next March, it made points that resonated with Barrett. 

Griffin's arguments contended that the air defenses around Washington were lax on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, allowing a plane to plow into the Pentagon nearly an hour after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Griffin wondered why the pilot of that flight was reported to have had trouble flying a Cessna, yet was able to perform a complicated flight maneuver of dropping the plane 8,000 feet in two and a half minutes to attack the Pentagon. 

And he raises the question of why one of the smaller buildings, World Trade Center 7, collapsed in the early evening of Sept. 11, when no plane hit that building. He later mused that the fall of the towers had to have been the result of a controlled demolition. 

Barrett eventually concluded that the attacks were intended as a spark to rally the support of the American people behind war in the Middle East. 

As Barrett sunk deeper into the "9/11 truth movement," founding the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, he was also finishing his UW dissertation. Schueb, his dissertation adviser, said he had no idea that Barrett was involved in the movement until he saw Barrett speaking on Library Mall. 

The galvanizing moment, Barrett said, came when he invited Griffin, the author, to speak at UW. About 450 people attended the speech at Bascom Hall in April 2005, and it was rebroadcast on C-SPAN. The broadcast and publicity around the event attracted people from around the world to Barrett's cause, helping make the alliance a leader in the movement, with about 1,000 supporters.

During the speech, Griffin made the case that it was implausible the Pentagon could be hit by an airplane, since it is "surely the best defended building on the planet." The U.S. military has the best radar systems in the world and "does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace," he added. 

In recent weeks, politicians have sought Barrett's ouster as a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer on Islam in an elective, four-credit course. Provost Patrick Farrell last week reaffirmed the university's offer for him to teach a class this fall, citing the university's tradition of academic freedom. 

Barrett, who has taught folklore at UW-Madison and Islam at Edgewood College, says he may apply for a tenure-track position at UW-Madison, if the right job becomes available. 

Now that he's famous, Barrett's views have many people calling him crazy, but Leder, his old friend, insists that he is not.

"Kevin has always explored," Leder said. "He's never taken anything at face value."