September 11 attacks advance-knowledge conspiracy theories

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 9/11 advance-knowledge conspiracy theories center on arguments that certain institutions or individuals had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001.

Some of the primary concerns include whether the Bush administration or the United States Armed Forces had awareness of the planned attack methods, the precise volume of intelligence that American agencies had regarding al-Qaeda activities inside the United States, whether the put options placed on United Airlines and American Airlines and other trades indicate foreknowledge, and why the identities of the traders have never been made public.

Additional facets of the conspiracy theories include debate as to whether warnings received from foreign agencies were specific enough to have warranted preventative action, whether domestic intelligence about planned al-Qaeda attacks was thorough enough to have mandated intervention, the extent to which the alleged hijackers were under surveillance prior to the attacks, and whether Mossad or the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence were aware of an imminent attack.

Using planes as missiles

Immediately following the attacks, President George W. Bush stated that: "Nobody in our government at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envisage flying air planes into buildings" and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice claimed: "no-one could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile". An Air Force general called the attack: "something we had never seen before, something we had never even thought of." A few days after the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced: "There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country." However, Mueller noted that an FBI agent in Minneapolis said Moussaoui might be "that type of person that could fly something into the World Trade Center." Mueller said this warning should have been followed more vigorously.

Some mainstream media reports have conflicted with these statements, claiming that the FBI, CIA and Executive Branch knew of the threat of planes being used as missiles as early as 1995, following the foiling of the Bojinka Plot. In September 2002, one year after the 9/11 attacks, The Chicago Sun-Times reported that:

The FBI had advance indications of plans to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as weapons, but neither acted on them nor distributed the intelligence to local police agencies. From the moment of the September 11 attacks, all high-ranking federal officials insisted that the terrorists' method of operation surprised them. Many continue to stick to that story. Actually, elements of the suicide hijacking plan were known to the FBI as early as 1995 and, if coupled with current information, might have uncovered the plot.

The Pentagon Mass Casualty project (codenamed Pentagon Mascal) was a contingency exercise that was held in the Office of the Secretary of Defense conference room between October 24 and October 26, 2000. The exercise required emergency response teams, members of the defense protective services, and U.S. government officials to conduct emergency simulations in preparation for a possible plane crash into the Pentagon. 

The book The Terror Timeline includes numerous articles that are often cited to suggest that the method of flying planes into buildings was known by U.S. officials:

• In 1994, there were three examples of failed attempts to deliberately crash planes into buildings, including one where a lone pilot crashed a small plane into the lawn of the White House.
• The Bojinka Plot was a foiled large-scale al-Qaeda terrorist attack to blow up eleven airliners and their passengers as they flew from Asia to America, due to take place in January 1995.
• The 2000 edition of the FAA's annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation said that although Osama bin Laden 'is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so,' adding, 'Bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation.'"
• In April 2001, NORAD ran a war game in which the Pentagon was to become incapacitated; a NORAD planner proposed the simulated crash of a hijacked foreign commercial airliner into the Pentagon, but the Joints Chiefs of Staff rejected that scenario as "too unrealistic"
• In July 2001 at the G8 summit in Genoa, anti-aircraft missile batteries were installed following a report that terrorists would try to crash a plane to kill George Bush and other world leaders
• On the morning of September 11, 2001, the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for operating U.S. reconnaissance satellites, had scheduled an exercise simulating the crashing of an aircraft into their building, 4 miles (6 km) from Washington Dulles International Airport.

A 2004 USA Today article, "NORAD had drills of jets as weapons," describes pre-9/11 NORAD drills that suggest they were prepared for such an attack as happened on 9/11:

In the two years before the September 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties. One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. In another exercise, jets performed a mock shootdown over the Atlantic Ocean of a jet supposedly laden with chemical poisons headed toward a target in the United States. In a third scenario, the target was the Pentagon — but that drill was not run after Defense officials said it was unrealistic.

That NORAD was aware of the threat of terrorists hijacking commercial airliners within the United States, and using them as guided missiles, was flatly denied by the 9/11 Commission, which asserted several times in their report that "The threat of terrorists hijacking commercial airliners within the United States – and using them as guided missiles – was not recognized by NORAD before 9/11." 

The September 11 attacks in 2001 occurred during that year's Global Guardian and Vigilant Guardian joint exercises. That year, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, Vigilant Guardian 'postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union' on North America. In contrast to the 9/11 Commission Report - Michael Ruppert has characterized Vigilant Guardian as "a hijacking drill, not a cold war exercise". He cites direct quotes from participants which indicate "that the drill involved hijacked airliners rather than Russian Bombers". General Arnold, Tech. Sgt. W. Powel and Lt. Col. Dwane Deskins have stated that when they first were informed about hijacked airliners they thought it was "part of the exercise".

The Joint Inquiry of 2002 confirmed that the Intelligence Community had received at least twelve reports over a seven-year period suggesting that terrorists might use planes as weapons. After briefly discussing each of them, it says that "The CIA disseminated several of these reports to the FBI and to agencies responsible for preventive actions. They included the FAA... Despite these reports, the Intelligence Community did not produce any assessments of the likelihood that terrorists would use planes as weapons, and U.S. policymakers apparently remained unaware of this kind of potential threat." Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger testified to the Joint Inquiry:

We heard of the idea of planes as weapons, but I don't recall being presented with any specific threat information about an attack of this nature, or highlighting this threat, or indicating it was more likely than any other.

September 2001 a part of the Pentagon Renovation Program was completed: blast windows and wall reinforcing system, to significantly diminish the Defense Department headquarters' vulnerability to blast damage from a terrorist attack.

Insider trading

The Times reported on September 18 that investigations were under way into the unusually large numbers of shares in insurance companies and airlines sold off before the attack, in the UK, Italy, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France and the US. News accounts in the weeks that followed reported a notable pattern of trading in the options of United and American Airlines as well as Morgan Stanley and other market activity. An article published in The Journal of Business in 2006 provides statistical evidence of unusual put option market activity days before 9/11:

Examination of the option trading leading up to September 11 reveals that there was an unusually high level of put buying. This finding is consistent with informed investors having traded options before the attacks.

In a statement to the 9/11 Commission in 2003, Mindy Kleinberg, of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, said:

Never before on the Chicago Exchange were such large amounts of United and American Airlines options traded. These investors netted a profit of at least $5 million after the September 11 attacks. Interestingly, the names of the investors remain undisclosed and the $5 million remains unclaimed in the Chicago Exchange account.

The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that "Exhaustive investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, FBI, and other agencies have uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions." The report further stated:

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options — investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price — surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 — highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous.

WTC hard drive restoration operation

In December 2001 and early 2002, there was extensive media coverage of the efforts by the German data retrieval company Convar to reconstruct, using laser scanning technology, data from damaged hard drives recovered from the WTC as part of the investigation into a surge in financial transactions just before the two hijacked planes crashed into New York's World Trade Center. The company's CEO, Peter Henschel, noting that the investigation was being conducted for a number of U.S. based clients cooperating with the FBI, said that there was suspicion that criminals had used inside knowledge about the attacks to make and authorize financial transactions during the chaos. According to Convar's data retrieval expert Richard Wagner, criminal transactions in excess of 100 million dollars could have been made in the hope that their trail would have disappeared as a result of the destruction of the WTC mainframe computers. As reported by the Heute Journal, a news programme by the German ZDF TV channel, by March 2002 Convar had been able to restore several hundred hard drives from the WTC.

However, the 9/11 Commission, in a memorandum entitled "FBI Briefing on Trading" dated October 18, 2003, said that when asked about the media coverage of the hard drive restoration operation, the "assembled [FBI] agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort", further noting that one New York agent argued that it was "extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived to the extent that they data [sic] be recovered."

Later research

The papers of several finance researchers also suggest that some profited from foreknowledge of 9/11. In 2006, Allen Poteshman, a professor of Finance from the University of Illinois, published an analysis of the airline stock option trades preceding the attacks. This peer-reviewed study, published by the University of Chicago Press, came to the conclusion that an indicator of long put volume was "unusually high which is consistent with informed investors having traded in the option market in advance of the attacks". In January 2010, a team of Swiss financial experts published evidence for at least thirteen informed trades in which the investors had apparent foreknowledge of the attacks. Finally, in April 2010, an international team of experts showed that there was a significant abnormal increase in trading volume in the option market just before the 9/11 attacks in contrast to the absence of abnormal trading volume over periods long before the attacks, concluding that their findings were "consistent with insiders anticipating the 9-11 attacks".

Intelligence warnings

The 9/11 Commission Report states that "the 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamic extremists had given plenty of warnings that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers." The report continued:

During the spring and summer of 2001, U.S. intelligence agencies received a stream of warnings about an attack al-Qaeda planned, as one report puts it "something very, very, very big." Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told us "the system was blinking red."

The US administration, CIA and FBI received multiple prior warnings from foreign governments and intelligence services, including France, Germany, the UK, Israel, Jordan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco and Russia. The warnings varied in their level of detail, but all stated that they believed an al-Qaeda attack inside the United States was imminent. British Member of Parliament Michael Meacher cites these warnings, suggesting that some of them must have been deliberately ignored. Some of these warnings include the following:

• March 2001 – Italian intelligence warns of an al-Qaeda plot in the United States involving a massive strike involving aircraft, based on their wiretap of al-Qaeda cell in Milan.
• July 2001 – Jordanian intelligence told US officials that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on American soil, and Egyptian intelligence warned the CIA that 20 al-Qaeda Jihadists were in the United States, and that four of them were receiving flight training.
• August 2001 – The Israeli Mossad gives the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and says that they appear to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future.
• August 2001 – The United Kingdom is warned three times of an imminent al-Qaeda attack in the United States, the third specifying multiple airplane hijackings. According to the Sunday Herald, the report is passed on to President Bush a short time later.
• September 2001 – Egyptian intelligence warns American officials that al-Qaeda is in the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, probably within the US.

Able Danger

A classified military intelligence program known as "Able Danger" was created in October 1999 specifically targeting al-Qaeda. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) charged before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Able Danger had identified Mohamed Atta, and three of the other hijackers, prior to 9/11. 

The existence of Able Danger, and its purported early identification of the 9/11 terrorists, was first disclosed publicly on June 19, 2005. On June 27, 2005, Weldon stated to the House:

Mr. Speaker, I rise because information has come to my attention over the past several months that is very disturbing. I have learned that, in fact, one of our Federal agencies had, in fact, identified the major New York cell of Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11; and I have learned, Mr. Speaker, that in September 2000, that Federal agency actually was prepared to bring the FBI in and prepared to work with the FBI to take down the cell that Mohamed Atta was involved in in New York City, along with two of the other terrorists. I have also learned, Mr. Speaker, that when that recommendation was discussed within that Federal agency, the lawyers in the administration at that time said, you cannot pursue contact with the FBI against that cell. Mohamed Atta is in the U.S. on a green card, and we are fearful of the fallout from the Waco incident. So we did not allow that Federal agency to proceed.

There is no mention of Able Danger in the 9/11 Commission Report. Two 9/11 Commission members, Timothy J. Roemer and John F. Lehman, both claimed not to have received any information on Able Danger. Weldon alleged that intelligence concerning Able Danger was provided to the 9/11 Commission but was ignored.

Following coverage in the national media of Weldon's claims in August 2005, Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, former Chair and Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission, issued a statement in which they stated the Commission had been aware of the Able Danger program, and requested and obtained information about it from the Department of Defense (DoD), but none of the information provided had indicated the program had identified Atta or other 9/11 hijackers.

Curt Weldon issued a response to this statement clarifying the mission of Able Danger, expressing concern over the statements made by various members of the 9/11 Commission, and promising to push forward until it is understood why the DoD was unable to pass the information uncovered by Able Danger to the FBI, and why the 9/11 Commission failed to follow up on the information they were given on Able Danger.

al-Qaeda investigations

Numerous whistleblowers and officials have surfaced, claiming that there was a deliberate effort, from high-ranking officials, to prevent investigations into al-Qaeda.

In 2002, FBI agent Coleen Rowley wrote to FBI director Robert Mueller describing her experience working with Minneapolis FBI agents tracking suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui prior to the attacks. She describes how FBI HQ personnel in Washington, D.C. had mishandled and failed to take action on information provided by the Minneapolis Field Office, and had failed to issue a warrant to search Moussaui's computer despite having probable cause. Senator Chuck Grassley later wrote that "If the application for the FISA warrant had gone forward, agents would have found information in Moussaoui's belongings that linked him ... to a major financier of the hijacking plot". Rowley was credited as a whistleblower and jointly awarded the TIME Magazine "Person of the Year" for 2002. Her testimony to the 9/11 Commission was omitted from their final report.

FBI agent and al-Qaeda expert John P. O'Neill warned of an al-Qaeda threat to the United States in 2000. He retired from his position in mid-2001, citing repeated blocking of his investigations of al-Qaeda by FBI officials. After his retirement from the FBI, the World Trade Center hired him as its chief of security. He started work on August 23, 2001; 9/11 rescue workers found his body in a staircase inside the south tower rubble.

Shortly after the attacks, David Schippers, the chief prosecutor for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, stated that the government had been warned in 1995 about a future attack on a government building and that later he was contacted by three FBI agents who mentioned uncovering a possible terrorist attack planned for lower Manhattan. According to Schippers, as the agents informed their superiors, they were briefed not to pursue the issue and were threatened with prosecution. Schippers declared, "Five weeks before the September 11 tragedy, I did my best to get a hold of Attorney General John Ashcroft with my concerns." According to Schippers, Ashcroft responded that the Justice Department does not start investigations at the top. Author William Norman Grigg agrees with Schippers in his article "Did We Know What Was Coming?" According to the article, three unnamed veteran federal law enforcement agents confirmed "the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the Bureau before September 11."

According to Senator Bob Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from June 2001 through the buildup to the Iraq war, "Two of the September 11, 2001, hijackers had a support network in the United States that included agents of the Saudi government, and the Bush administration and FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship," as reported by the Miami Herald. And in Graham's book, Intelligence Matters, he makes clear that some details of that financial support from Saudi Arabia were in the 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's final report that were blocked from release by the administration, despite the pleas of leaders of both parties on the House and Senate intelligence committees." In March 2012 as part of a lawsuit by 9/11 victims families Graham and another former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey said in affidavits that they were certain there were direct links between the Saudi government and the attacks.

There have also been allegations that the hijackers' preparations may have been given assistance by U.S. intelligence. According to CBS News, "two of the Sept. 11 hijackers who lived in San Diego in 2000 rented a room from a man who reportedly worked as an undercover FBI informant... the FBI informant prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account." Doubts have been raised about the speed with which the hijackers were identified, leading to suggestions that the FBI already had the names of the hijackers in advance. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke said that at 9:59 am on September 11, which is the time when WTC2 collapsed and 8 minutes before NORAD even knew Flight 93 had been hijacked, the FBI already had a list of the 19 alleged hijackers. A former high-level intelligence official said that "Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase."

Foreign government foreknowledge

It has been suggested that some foreign governments and intelligence agencies may have had some foreknowledge of the attacks.

Iran

Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator, was told by another translator that the FBI received information in April 2001, from a reliable Iranian intelligence asset, that Osama Bin Laden was planning attacks on 4–5 cities with planes, and that some of the plotters were already in the country and the attacks would happen in a few months. The translator described the interviewing agents' reaction that the warnings were not specific enough to act upon.

In 2004 the 9/11 Commission "found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack." Just before their report was published the committee received evidence which caused to add to the report that the topic required further investigation.

On December 22, 2010, a United States Federal Judge signed a default judgment holding Iran, the Taliban and al-Qaeda liable following an open court hearing in which the evidence was produced by the plaintiffs' attorneys which they said showed that Iran assisted the hijackers. 9/11 commission members and witnesses who claimed they were Iranian defectors and members of Ministry of Intelligence and National Security and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards also testified during the hearing. The suit Havlish, et al. v. bin Laden, et al was brought in 2001 by Fiona Havlish whose husband died in the North Tower. Abolghasem Mesbahi, who claimed he was a former Ministry of Intelligence operative in charge of Iran's espionage operations in Western Europe testified that he was part of a task force that designed contingency plans for unconventional warfare against the United States code-named Shaitan dar Atash/Satan in Flames which included crashing hijacked passenger airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House, and that in the summer of 2001 he received three coded messages telling him to activate the plan. An Iranian government memorandum was presented as evidence that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had pre knowledge of the attacks. Several days after the ruling a spokesperson for Iran's Foreign ministry said charges that Iran "had a hand in planning the attacks and that one of al-Qaeda's members was present inside the country is baseless" and said "With the repetition of such claims to back its political aims the U.S. is putting the peace and security of the world in jeopardy."

In February 2012 President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that "Iran has harbored al-Qaida leaders, facilitators," and that they have been "under house arrest conditions. (Iran's rulers) have had this sort of standoff arrangement with al-Qaida, allowing (al-Qaida) to exist (inside Iran), but not to foment any operations directly from Iran, because they're very sensitive about, 'Hey, we might come after them there as well.'... So there has been this longstanding, as I say, kind of, shotgun marriage, or marriage of convenience."

Israel

It was reported that the Mossad informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in August 2001 that as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into the United States and planning "a major assault on the United States." The Israeli intelligence agency allegedly cautioned the FBI that it had picked up indications of a "large-scale target" in the United States and that Americans would be "very vulnerable."

In September 2001, The New York Times and Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that four hours after the attack, the FBI arrested five Israelis who had been filming the smoking skyline from the roof of a white van in the parking lot of an apartment building, for "puzzling behavior". They were charged with illegally residing in the United States and working there without permits. The Israelis were said to have been videotaping the disaster with what was interpreted as cries of "joy and mockery". Police found the van and a search revealed $4,700 in cash hidden, along with foreign passports and a boxcutter which aroused suspicions and led to the detention of the occupants. The men were held in detention for more than 2 months, during which time they were subjected to interrogation and lie detector tests, before being deported back to Israel; one of the men (Paul Kurzberg) refused to take the test for 10 weeks, and then failed it.

The five men worked at the company Urban Moving Systems, owned and operated by Dominik Suter. After the men were arrested the FBI searched their offices and questioned Suter, however Suter fled to Israel before he could be questioned further. Eventually, Suter's name appeared on the May 2002 FBI Suspect List, along with the Sep 11 hijackers and other suspected extremists.

According to a former CIA chief of operations for counterterrorism Vince Cannistraro, there was speculation that Urban Moving Systems may have been a front for an intelligence operation investigating fund-raising networks channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On March 15, 2002, The Jewish Daily Forward claimed that the FBI had concluded that the van's driver, Paul Kurzberg, and his brother Sivan, were indeed Mossad operatives, who were in America "spying on local Arabs". ABC news cited this report on June 21, 2002, adding that the FBI had concluded that the five Israelis had no foreknowledge of the attacks.

In March 2001, the US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive had issued a warning about people identifying themselves as "Israeli art students" attempting to bypass security and gain entry to federal buildings, and even to the private residences of senior federal officials. A French intelligence agency later noted "according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells". The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. In 2002 several officials dismissed reports of a spy ring and said the allegations were made by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was angry that his theories had been dismissed.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an August 2010 speech that no "Zionists" were killed in the attacks since, according to him, "one day earlier they were told not go to their workplace." He also remarked, "What was the story of September 11? During five to six days, and with the aid of the media, they created and prepared public opinion so that everyone considered an attack on Afghanistan and Iraq". However, contrary to such conspiracy theories about Jews being warned not to go to work that day, the number of Jews who died in the attacks is variously estimated at between 270 and 400, while a few Israelis died in the attack as well.

France

On December 5, 2007, French authorities filed preliminary charges against Guillaume Dasquié, a reporter for the daily Le Monde, for publishing state secrets related to the 9/11 hijackings. Dasquié's April 16 article in Le Monde, titled "September 11: the French had long known" reported that the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), had warned the U.S. of a possible terrorist plot that involved al-Qaeda hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings some eight months before 9/11. The article contained excerpts from a 328-page classified DGSE report on al-Qaeda activities which included maps, analyses, graphics, and satellite photos.

Afghanistan

Moderate elements of the Taliban are reported to have given the USA advance warning of the attacks.^[76] The BBC reports that Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban's Foreign Minister, sent the USA an advance warning of the attack following a tip-off he received from Tohir Yo'ldosh, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Like al-Qaeda, the Taliban allowed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to place training camps in Afghanistan. Tohir Yo'ldosh was reported to have been concerned that if al-Qaeda was not stopped prior to launching the attacks, the USA would retaliate against all of Afghanistan, which would have a negative effect on his movement's efforts.

Possible warnings given to individuals

There have been claims that some individuals received warnings in advance of the attacks.

• It is often alleged that San Francisco Mayor, Willie Lewis Brown, Jr. canceled his flight plans for September 11 after receiving a warning late on September 10 from what he described as his airport security. In fact it was Brown who first called his security staff at the airport, to check on his flight for the following morning, and they then warned him that he should be cautious about flying. Brown says, "they always alert me when I ought to be careful," and he decided to fly anyway. In September 2006, Willie Brown responded to these escalating conspiracy rumors by calling them an "ongoing myth."
• Odigo Messenger reported that two of their employees who were working in an Odigo office in Herzliya Pituah in Israel, received a derogatory English electronic instant message, on the day of the attack, non-specifically threatening them that a terrorist attack would happen. They did not mention this to their employer until after they heard reports of a terrorist attack in America on the news, after which they informed the company's management, who traced the IP and contacted the FBI. However, the threatening message did not mention the location of an attack. The notes ended with an anti-Semitic slur. Odigo Vice President of Sales and Marketing Alex Diamandis later said that the message did not identify the United States or the World Trade Center as to be involved in the event, and that "it could easily be coincidence."
• Silverstein Properties who, according to the New York Times, had planned to meet on September 11 on the 88th floor of one of the towers to "discuss what to do in the event of a terrorist attack," but canceled the meeting late on September 10 "because one participant could not attend."
• Susan Lindauer asserts that she and other intelligence colleagues were aware of the attacks in April 2001, and that Richard Carl Fuisz had advised in August 2001 against traveling to New York.
• Parke Godfrey, a professor of computer science at York University in Toronto, Ontario testified in United States v. Susan Lindauer that he had been warned by Lindauer on several occasions of a "massive" attack on southern Manhattan that would involve planes and the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon.

Other related events

On September 6, 2001, a freshman from a class of Pakistani immigrants at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn was overheard by his English teacher, Antoinette DiLorenzo, to say that the two World Trade Center towers "won't be standing there next week." After DiLorenzo reported the incident on September 13, the youth and his older brother were questioned by the FBI and local police. According to police, the youth admitted to making the comment but he and his brother said he had been kidding.

Kurt Sonnenfeld, a former videographer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) who documented the aftermath of the attacks at the World Trade Center complex, claims that he has videotapes proving that U.S. government officials had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Sonnenfeld is currently living in Argentina, where Denver police are seeking his extradition on charges of murdering his wife.

On August 30, 2001, an online posting was made with the subject "911". It warned, "Something is going to happen tomorrow . . . REPENT!" On September 4, 2001, the author of the first message, "Xinoehpoel" wrote, "Wait 7 days". This was dismissed by people reading the discussion at the time, but seven days after the message, on September 11, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked.

Students for a Democratic Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Students for a Democratic Society

Predecessor	Student League for Industrial Democracy
Successor	New Students for a Democratic Society
Formation	1960
Founded at	Ann Arbor, Michigan
Extinction	1974
Purpose	Left-wing student activism
Location	United States
Secessions	Revolutionary Youth Movement

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States that was one of the main representations of the New Left. Founded in 1960, the organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s, with over 300 chapters recorded nationwide by its last convention in 1969.

SDS has been an important influence on student organizing in the decades since its collapse. Participatory democracy, direct action, radicalism, student power, shoestring budgets, and its organizational structure are all present in varying degrees in current American student activist groups. Though various organizations have been formed in subsequent years as proposed national networks for left-wing student organizing, none has approached the scale of SDS, and most have lasted a few years at best.

A new incarnation of SDS was founded in 2006.

Origins

SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905. Early in 1960, the SLID changed its name into SDS at the behest of its then acting Director, Aryeh Neier. The phrase "industrial democracy" sounded too narrow and too labor oriented, making it more difficult to recruit students. Moreover, because the LID's leadership did not correspond to the expectations and the mood on the campuses, the SLID felt the need to dissociate itself from its parent organization. SDS held its first meeting in 1960 on the University of Michigan campus at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Alan Haber was elected president. Its political manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement, was adopted at the organization's first convention in 1962, based on an earlier draft by staff member Tom Hayden. 

The Port Huron Statement criticized the political system of the United States for failing to achieve international peace and critiqued Cold War foreign policy, the threat of nuclear war, and the arms race. In domestic matters, it criticized racial discrimination, economic inequality, big businesses, trade unions and political parties. In addition to its critique and analysis of the American system, the manifesto also suggested a series of reforms: it proclaimed a need to reshape into two genuine political parties to attain greater democracy, for stronger power for individuals through citizen's lobbies, for more substantial involvement by workers in business management, and for an enlarged public sector with increased government welfare, including a "program against poverty." The manifesto provided ideas of what and how to work for and to improve, and also advocated nonviolent civil disobedience as the means by which student youth could bring forth a "participatory democracy." Kirkpatrick Sale described the manifesto as "nothing less than an ideology, however raw and imperfect and however much would have resisted this word."

The manifesto also presented SDS's break with the left-wing policies of the postwar years. Firstly, it was written with the same overall vision all along the document and reflected their view that all problems in every area were linked to each other and their willingness not to lead single-issue struggles but a broad struggle on all fronts at the same time. Then, it expressed SDS's willingness to work with groups whatever may be their political inclination and announced their rejection of anti-communism, a definitely new radical view contrasting with much of the American Left which had developed a policy of anti-communism. Without being Marxist or pro-communism, they denounced anti-communism as being a social problem and an obstruction to democracy. They also criticized the United States for its exaggerated paranoia and exclusive condemnation of the Soviet Union, and blamed this for being the reason for failing to achieve disarmament and to assure peace. 

The Port Huron Convention opened with a symbol of this break with the policy of the past years: the delegate of the Communist Progressive Youth Organizing Committee asked to attend the conference as an observer. The people from the Young People's Socialist League objected while most of the SDSers insisted on letting him sit. He eventually sat. Later in the meeting, Michael Harrington, an LID member, became agitated over the manifesto because he found the stand they took toward the Soviet Union and authoritarian regimes in general was insufficiently critical, and because, according to him, they deliberately wrote sections to pique the liberals. Surprisingly, Roger Hagan, a liberal, defended the SDS and its policy. After lively debates between the two, the draft finally remained more or less unchanged. Some two weeks later, a meeting between the LID and SDS was held where the LID expressed its discontent about the manifesto. As a result, Haber and Hayden, at this time respectively the National secretary and the new President of the organization, were summoned to a hearing on the 6 July 1962. There, Hayden clashed with Michael Harrington (as he later would with Irving Howe) over the perceived potential for totalitarianism among other things. Harrington denounced the seating of the PYOC member, SDS's tolerance for communism and their lack of clarity in their condemnation of communist totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and he reproached SDS for providing only a mild critique of the Soviet Union and for blaming the cold war mostly on the United States. Hayden then asked him to read the manifesto more carefully, especially the section on values. Hayden later wrote:

While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn't enough for LID leaders like Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race.... In truth, they seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism...

The tension between SDS and the LID was greatly increased when SDS called for a national demonstration to take place during the spring of 1965. The LID was very concerned about "Communist" participation but SDS refused to restrict who could attend and what signs they could use. The rift opened even further when, at the 1965 SDS National Convention, the clause excluding communists from membership was deleted from the SDS constitution. During the summer of 1965 delegates from SDS and the LID met in Chicago and New York. The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's sponsoring organization, objected to the removal of the exclusion clause in the SDS constitution, as SDS benefited from LID's non-profit status, which excluded political activity. By mutual agreement the relationship was severed October 4, 1965.

Early years: 1962–1965

In the academic year 1962–1963, the President was Tom Hayden, the Vice President was Paul Booth and the National Secretary was Jim Monsonis. There were nine chapters with, at most, about 1000 members. The national office (NO) in New York City consisted of a few desks, some broken chairs, a couple of file cabinets and a few typewriters. As a student group with a strong belief in decentralization and a distrust for most organizations, the SDS did not have a strong central bureaucracy. The three stalwarts at the office, Don McKelvey, Steve Max, and the National Secretary, Jim Monsonis, worked long hours for little pay to service the local chapters, and to help establish new ones. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, little could be accomplished. Most activity was oriented toward civil rights issues and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a key role in inspiring SDS. 

By the end of the academic year, there were over 200 delegates at the annual convention at Pine Hill, New York, from 32 different colleges and universities. It was then decided to give more power to the chapters, who would then send delegates to the National Council (NC), which would meet quarterly to handle the ongoing activities. Also, in the spirit of participatory democracy, a consensus was reached to elect new officers each year. Lee Webb of Boston University was chosen as National Secretary, and Todd Gitlin of Harvard University was made president. Some continuity was preserved by retaining Paul Booth as Vice President. The search began for something to challenge the idealistic, budding activists. 

SDS New School in the building of the Presidio Hills School, 3839 Washington St., in San Francisco was founded in January 1964 by Saul Landau, Alvin Duskin (former president of Emerson College), Paul Jacobs, Carl Werthman (sociologist), Ronnie Davis (a playwright and director), Mike Miller (SNCC), and Bob Scheer.

It was at this time that the Black Power Movement was first gaining some momentum (although Stokely Carmichael would make the movement more mainstream in 1966). The movement made it impolitic for white activists, such as those in SDS, to presume to lead protests for black civil rights. Instead, SDS would try to organize white unemployed youths through a newly established program they called the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). This "into the ghetto" move was a practical failure, but the fact that it existed at all drew many young idealists to SDS. 

At the summer convention in 1964 there was a split between those who were campus-oriented, and the ERAP supporters. Most of the old guard were ERAP supporters, but the campus activists were growing. Paul Potter was elected president, and by the end of summer there were ten ERAP programs in place, with about 125 student volunteers. C. Clark Kissinger of Shimer College in Illinois was elected as National Secretary, and he put the NO on a much more business-like basis. He and his assistant, Helen Garvey, mailed out the literature list, the newsletters and the news of chapter's activities to a growing membership list. Kissinger also worked to smooth the relationship with the LID.

A small faction of SDS that was interested in change through conventional electoral politics established a program called the Political Education Project (PEP). Its Director was Jim Williams of the University of Louisville, and Steve Max served as its Associate Director. This was never very large, and it was opposed by the mainstream SDSers, who were mostly opposed to such traditional, old-fashioned activity, and were looking for something new that "worked". The landslide victory of Lyndon B. Johnson in the November presidential election played its part, as well, and PEP soon withered away. A Peace Research and Education Project (PREP) headed by Paul Booth, Swarthmore, met a similar fate. Meanwhile, the local chapters got into all sorts of projects, from University reform, community-university relations, and now, in a small way, the issue of the draft and Vietnam War. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the SDS broke with the pro-labor ideas in the Port Huron Statement and decided that it was best to shift the focus of civil rights away from the southern states and more towards urban cities in the north.

Then, on October 1, the University of California, Berkeley exploded into the dramatic and prolonged agony that was the free speech movement. Led by a charismatic Friends of SNCC student activist named Mario Savio, upwards of three thousand students surrounded a police car in which a student was being taken away, arrested for setting up an informational card table for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in defiance of the University's ban on politics. The sit-down prevented the police car from moving for 32 hours. The demonstrations, meetings and strikes that resulted all but shut the university down. Hundreds of students were arrested.

From protest to resistance: 1965–1968

In February 1965, United States President Johnson dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam by bombing North Vietnam in Operation Flaming Dart and introducing ground troops directly involved in fighting the Viet Cong in the South. Campus chapters of SDS all over the country started to lead small, localized demonstrations against the war and the NO became the focal group that organized the march against the war in Washington on April 17. Endorsements came from nearly all of the other peace groups and leading personalities, there was significant increase in income and by the end of March there were 52 chapters. The media began to cover the organization and the New Left. However, the call for the march and the openness of the organization in allowing other groups, even communist front groups, or communists themselves, to join in caused great strains with the LID and some other old left organizations. 

The first teach-in against the war was held in the University of Michigan. Soon hundreds more, all over the country, were held. The demonstration in Washington, D.C. attracted about 25,000 anti-war protesters and SDS became the leading student group against the war on most U.S. campuses. 

Representing its move into the heartland, the 1965 summer convention was held at Kewadin, a small camp in Northern Michigan. Moreover, its National Office, which had been located in Manhattan, was moved to Chicago at about the same time. The rapid growth of the membership rate during the preceding year brought with it a new breed with a new style:

For the first time at an SDS meeting people smoked marijuana; Pancho Villa mustaches, those droopy Western-movie addenda that eventually became a New Left cliché, made their first appearance in quantity; blue workshirts, denim jackets, and boots were worn by both men and women. These were people generally raised outside of the East, many from the Midwest and Southwest, and their ruralistic dress reflected a different tradition, one more aligned to the frontier, more violent, more individualistic, more bare-knuckled and callus-handed, than that of the early SDSers. They were non-Jewish, nonintellectual, nonurban, from a nonprofessional class, and often without any family tradition of political involvement, much less radicalism. They tended to be not only ignorant of the history of the left and its current half-life in New York City, but downright uninterested: ...

The convention elected an Akron, Ohio student, Carl Oglesby, President and Jeff Shero, from the increasingly influential University of Texas chapter in Austin, as Vice President—in preference to "old guard" candidates. The convention voted to remove the anti-communist exclusion clauses from the SDS constitution, failed to provide for any national program, and increased the reliance on local initiatives at the chapters. As a result, the National Office's leadership fell into ineffectual chaos. The League for Industrial Democracy, SDS's nominal sponsoring organization, was disappointed with removal of the exclusion clause from the SDS constitution, as SDS was covered under LID's non-profit status which excluded political activity. By mutual agreement the relationship was severed October 4, 1965.

On November 27, 1965 there was a major anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. at which Carl Oglesby, the new SDS president, made a very successful speech, addressed to the liberal crowd, and in circuitous terms alleged that the United States government was imperialist in nature. The speech received a standing ovation, substantial press coverage, and resulted in greatly increased national prominence for SDS.

The unexpected influx of substantial numbers of new members and chapters combined with the ousting of the previous leadership, the "old guard", resulted in a crisis which dogged SDS until its final breakup; despite repeated attempts to do so, consensus was never reached on what form the organization should take or what role it should play. A final attempt by the old guard at a "rethinking conference" to establish a coherent new direction for the organization failed. The conference, held on the University of Illinois campus at Champaign-Urbana over Christmas vacation, 1965, was attended by about 360 people from 66 chapters, many of whom were new to SDS. Despite a great deal of discussion, no substantial decisions were made.

Nationally, the SDS continued to use the draft as an important issue for students, and over the rest of the academic year began to attack university complicity in it, as the universities had begun to supply students' class rankings, used to determine who was to be drafted. The University of Chicago's administration building was taken over in a three-day sit-in in May. Rank protests and sit-ins spread to many other universities. 

The summer convention of 1966 was moved even farther west, this time to Clear Lake, Iowa. The "prairie people" continued to increase their influence. Nick Egleson was chosen as President, and Carl Davidson was elected Vice President. Greg Calvert, recently a History Instructor at Iowa State University, was chosen as National Secretary. It was at this convention that members of Progressive Labor Party (PL) first participated. PL was a Maoist group that had turned to SDS as fertile ground for recruiting new members sympathetic to its long-term strategy of organizing the industrial working class. SDSers of that time were nearly all anti-communist, but they also refused to be drawn into actions that smacked of red-baiting, which they viewed as mostly irrelevant and old hat. PL soon began to organize a Worker Student Alliance. By 1968 and 1969 they would profoundly affect SDS, particularly at national gatherings of the membership, forming a well-groomed, disciplined faction which followed the Progressive Labor Party line.

The 1966 convention also marked an even greater turn towards organization around campus issues by local chapters, with the NO cast in a strictly supporting role. Campus issues ranged from bad food, powerless student "governments," various in loco parentis manifestations, on-campus recruiting for the military and, again, ranking for the draft. Campuses around the country were in a state of unprecedented ferment and activism. Despite the absence of a politically effective campus SDS chapter, Berkeley again became a center of particularly dramatic radical upheaval over the university's repressive anti-free-speech actions, and an effective student strike with very wide support occurred. Even Harvard endured an upheaval engendered by a visit there of United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

At this time many in SDS turned to a more anarchist-influenced politics and organized activities aimed at the country's burgeoning countercultural community. These efforts were especially successful at the large and active University of Texas chapter in Austin where The Rag, an underground newspaper founded by SDS leaders Thorne Dreyer and Carol Neiman was, according to historian Abe Peck, the first underground paper in the country to incorporate the "participatory democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture that the New Left of the midsixties was trying to develop." And SDS' now legendary "Gentle Thursday" events on the UT campus helped to galvanize the Austin cultural community and turn it into a potent political force. Austin's Gentle Thursday inspired similar activities at a number of other universities including Penn State and Iowa State. Austin, also a center of civil-rights and anti-war activities, was in 1967 the scene of an SDS-generated free speech movement (the University Freedom Movement) that mobilized thousands of students in massive demonstrations and other activities.

The Winter and Spring of 1967 saw an escalation of the militancy of the protests at many campuses. SDSers and self-styled radicals were even elected into the student government at a few places. Demonstrations against Dow Chemical Company and other campus recruiters were widespread, and ranking and the draft issues grew in scale. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (mainly through its secret COINTELPRO) and other law enforcement agencies were often exposed as having spies and informers in the chapters. Harassment by the authorities was also on the rise. The National Office became distinctly more effective in this period, and the three officers actually visited most of the chapters. New Left Notes, as well, became a potent vehicle for promoting some coherence and solidarity among the chapters. The Anti-War movement began to take hold among university students. 

The 1967 convention took an egalitarian turn by eliminating the Presidential and Vice-Presidential offices and replacing them with a National Secretary (20-year-old Mike Spiegel), an Education Secretary (Texan Bob Pardun of the Austin chapter), and an Inter‑organizational Secretary (former VP Carl Davidson). A clear direction for a national program was not set but they did manage to pass strong resolutions on the draft, resistance within the Army itself, and they made a call for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. 

It was also acknowledged that male chauvinism was rampant in the organization, and that women who attended the 1966 convention were pelted with tomatoes after requesting a plank for women's liberation. The 1962 Port Huron Statement even glorified housewives, stating they should work with doctors, professors and laborers in order to expand the organization. At the 1967 convention women's liberation resolution on the issue of male chauvinism was passed by conference attendees, for the first time. 

This resolution on women's liberation, drafted in the Women's Liberation Workshop, had two goals. They were to "free women to participate in other meaningful activities" and to "relieve our brothers of the burden of male chauvinism." For the first goal, they had three specific subgoals. The first was the creation of communal childcare centers, so mothers at home could have free time to pursue their interests. The second was the acknowledgment of the right of women to choose when to have children. They said that free distribution of birth control information and competent medical abortion should be provided for all women. The third called for the even distribution of household chores between all adult members, male and female. For the second goal, to rid SDS of male chauvinism, they had four specific subgoals. The first was that the male SDS members should first work on their personal chauvinism first, and try and remove that from their work and social relationships. The second is for women to participate in all levels of SDS work, "from licking stamps to assuming leadership positions." The third is for leaders to be aware of the power they hold in creating the dynamic of the leader/subordinate relationship, and to be responsible for not abusing that power. The fourth mentions that all programs created by the SDS must include a section on women's right. The New Left Notes reprinted the statement, however, it was accompanied by a caricature of a woman dressed in a baby-doll dress, holding a sign with the slogan "We want our rights and we want them now!

That fall saw a great escalation of the anti-war actions of the New Left. The school year started with a large demonstration against university complicity in the war in allowing Dow recruiters on campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on October 17. Peaceful at first, the demonstrations turned to a sit-in that was violently dispersed by the Madison police and riot squad, resulting in many injuries and arrests. A mass rally and a student strike then closed the university for several days. A coordinated series of demonstrations against the draft led by members of the Resistance, the War Resisters League, and SDS added fuel to the fire of resistance. After conventional civil rights tactics of peaceful pickets seemed to have failed, the Oakland, California Stop the Draft Week ended in mass hit and run skirmishes with the police. The huge (100,000 people) October 21 March on the Pentagon saw hundreds arrested and injured. Night-time raids on draft offices began to spread.

Climax and split: 1968–1970

In the spring of 1968, National SDS activists led an effort on the campuses called "Ten Days of Resistance" and local chapters cooperated with the Student Mobilization Committee in rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins, which culminated in a one-day strike on April 26. About a million students stayed away from classes that day, the largest student strike in the history of the United States until 1970. It was largely ignored by the New York City-based national media, which focused on the student shutdown of Columbia University in New York, led by an inter-racial alliance of Columbia SDS chapter activists and Student Afro Society activists. As a result of the mass media publicity given to Columbia SDS activists such as Columbia SDS chairperson Mark Rudd during the Columbia Student Revolt, the organization was put on the map politically and "SDS" became a household name in the United States for a few years. Membership in SDS chapters around the United States increased dramatically during the 1968-69 academic year. 

Led by the Worker-Student Alliance and rival Joe Hill caucuses, SDS in San Francisco played a major role in the Third World Student Strike at San Francisco State College. This strike, the longest student strike in U.S. history, led to the creation of Black and other ethnic studies programs on campuses across the country.

SDS members from Austin, Texas participated in a mass demonstration in San Antonio, Texas in April 1969 at the "Kings River Parade". San Antonio SNCC members called the demonstration to protest the killing of Bobby Joe Phillips by San Antonio Police Officers. 

In the summer of 1969, the ninth SDS national convention was held at the Chicago Coliseum with some 2000 people attending. Many factions of the movement were present, and set up their literature tables all around the edges of the cavernous hall. The Young Socialist Alliance, Wobblies, Spartacists, Marxists and Maoists of various sorts, all together with various law-enforcement spies and informers contributed to the air of impending expectations. 

Each delegate was given the convention issue of the newspaper New Left Notes, which contained a manifesto, "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows", a line taken from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues". This manifesto had been first presented at the Spring, 1969, SDS National Council Meeting in Austin, Texas. The document had been written by an 11-member committee that included Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn and John Jacobs, and represented the position of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) wing of SDS, most of which later turned into the Weather Underground Organization. It has been noted that the Weather Underground was an off-branch of SDS for a number of reasons. The New Left Notes issue was full of the language of the Old Left of the 1930s; and was thus impenetrable and irrelevant to the majority of SDSers. 

According to Kirkpatrick Sale's account of the convention, the RYM and allied groups battled Progressive Labor (PL) members and the WSA faction of SDS for control of the organization throughout the convention. The Black Panther representatives attacked PL and at the same time proved itself inclined towards sexism by advocating "pussy power." The entire convention fell into something approaching chaos, or worse, farce. 

The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn, led 500 to 1000 people out of the Colosseum and, later that evening, holding a 1000-person meeting in another site near the National Office. There, the Weatherman faction carried the day, electing their slate of officers. The 500-600 people remaining in the meeting hall, dominated by PL, declared itself the "Real SDS", electing PL and WSA members as officers. By the next day, there were two SDS organizations, which RYM termed "SDS-RYM" and "SDS-WSA."

In the fall of 1969, many of the SDS-RYM chapters also split up or disintegrated. The Weatherman faction evolved into a small underground organization that first took to street confrontations and then to a bombing campaign. The Weathermen held one final national convention in Flint, Michigan, from December 27–31, 1969. It was at this convention, more popularly known as the "Flint War Council," that the decision was made to disband what remained of SDS-RYM. SDS-RYM was fully defunct by 1970, while SDS-WSA continued its activity. 

Also in 1969, the New Left was present at a Counter-Inaugural to Richard Nixon's first inauguration, at which the antiwar leader Dave Dellinger, serving as master of ceremonies, incorrectly announced, "The women have asked all the men to leave the stage." After that, SDS activist Marilyn Salzman Webb attempted to speak about women's oppression, and SDS men heckled her, shouting, "Take her off the stage and fuck her!" and so forth until she was drowned out. Later Webb received a threatening phone call which she thought was from Cathy Wilkerson, but that was not confirmed, and it may have been from a government agent. In any case, the call contributed to driving apart outspoken feminists in the national SDS and people who put anti-racist and anti-war work before feminism and went toward the Weathermen.

SDS-WSA: 1969 to 1974

SDS-Worker-Student Alliance (SDS-WSA) continued to function nationwide, with a focus on (a) fighting racism; and (b) supporting workers' struggles and strikes, including the 1969 General Electric strike and 1970 Postal Workers' strikes. The WSA organized a support demonstration for the post office strikers, which greatly worried Richard Nixon's administration. This is the entry from H.R. Haldeman's diary:

Saturday, March 21, 1970.
P in early, to EOB, to work on briefing books. Had to spend quite a little time on postal problem. The settlement didn't work, because rank and file won't go back, have rejected leaders, and now SDS types involved, at least in New York.

Now calling itself simply SDS, SDS-WSA continued to publish the newspaper New Left Notes. It held a convention in Boston in 1971, at which a striking General Motors worker was a featured speaker. 

In 1972, SDS-WSA demonstrated at the Democratic National Convention in Miami against Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's retreating from his original stronger campaign positions against the Vietnam War. Several hundred SDS members staged a sit-in at the Doral Hotel as McGovern and his staff met upstairs with protesting members of Grassroots McGovern Volunteers and sympathizers angry over the same issues.

In Newark, New Jersey, SDS-WSA demonstrated against Anthony Imperiale and his North Ward Citizens' Council which was opposing the construction of Kawaida Towers, a building complex sponsored by a community organization led by Black nationalist and poet Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroy Jones) (New York Times January 3, 1973, p. 84) 

SDS joined with PLP and others to protest the writings of Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and Richard Herrnstein, all of whom promoted the notion that there might be a genetic component to the observed below-average performance of black people on IQ tests. In October 1973, SDS-WSA, PLP, and others organized a convention at the Loeb Student Center of New York University dedicated to opposing academic racism. SDS circulated a petition entitled "A Resolution Against Racism" that was published in the New York Times on October 28, 1973 (p. 211). Out of this convention the Committee Against Racism (CAR) was formed to continue the fight against racism. CAR later changed its name to International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), when some chapters were formed in Canada. 

In 1974, National SDS(-WSA) voted to dissolve as a separate organization and reform as chapters of InCAR. However, individual chapters of SDS continued to exist for some time. A chapter at Purdue University was active as late as 1976. 

All references to contemporary activities of SDS in sources such as the New York Times after early 1970 are to SDS-WSA. For example, SDS confronted Indiana Senator Vance Hartke at an antiwar rally in New York City in 1971 (New York Times July 3, 1971, p. 3 and July 4, 1971, p. 3). SDS denounced liberal Democrats as having been the authors of the Vietnam War in the first place. SDS demonstrated against the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida in August 1972 (New York Times August 21, 1972, p. 20; August 22, 1972, pp. 1,36; August 23, 1972, pp. 1, 28). 

Unlike SDS-RYM and the Weathermen, SDS-WSA strongly opposed bombing and terrorism. In 1971, SDS-WSA published a pamphlet titled Who Are The Bombers?. It warned readers against police agents sent into the anti-Vietnam War movement to foment violence to justify police attacks. It also sharply criticized the Weathermen, which had begun its campaign of bombings.

On June 26, 1972, the US Supreme Court gave a unanimous opinion, in the case Healy v. James, stating that members of the SDS had been unconstitutionally deprived of their First Amendment right to freedom of assembly when a group was denied permission to form on the campus of Central Connecticut State College in New Britain, Connecticut.

A few early SDS leaders went on to careers as Democratic Party politicians, including Tom Hayden, a former member of the legislature of the state of California and well known as the former husband of actress Jane Fonda, a prolific author, and a former candidate for offices such as Governor of California, Mayor of Los Angeles, and US Senator.

New SDS: 2006 and later

A new incarnation of SDS was founded on January 16, 2006, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and by 2010 had grown to over 150 chapters around the United States. It has held five national conventions to date, including the fifth in 2010 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Cultural references

In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, when Mrs. Jeremy Stone (Susan Brown) informs her husband (Arthur Hill) that unexpected visitors have arrived, he responds, "The SDS, no doubt" before learning that the visitors are Air Force personnel. In the 1994 film Forrest Gump, Jenny (Robin Wright) introduces her boyfriend to Forrest (Tom Hanks) as Wesley (Geoffrey Blake), the president of the Berkeley chapter of SDS.