NY911Truth.org

NY911TRUTH.ORG Last Saturday, a man invited the waiting crowd outside the Riverside Church in Morningside Heights to step right up and let into a bottom-weighted punching doll of George W. Bush. At the church steps, two shaggy activists held a banner calling for mutiny within the U.S. armed forces in Iraq. Oddly, the Mister Softee truck parked nearby looked at home.

The mini street carnival gave way to a somber reverence under the stained-glass heights of the Riverside, where pews were more than half-filled for a program titled "Stop the 9/11 Cover-Up." The event was sponsored by the church, WBAI and NY 9/11 Truth, a group that sets up tables at Ground Zero every Saturday to ask what the Bush administration knew and when they knew it. They tend to be very intense. They scare some people.

Just over 37 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came out against the Vietnam War from this same pulpit, and organizers hinted that tonight would be a similarly historic meeting of the antiwar movement and the 9/11 conspiracy crowd.

Human beat box Kid Lucky and MC Conscious opened with a rap that benefited from Riverside's stone acoustics. They were accompanied by a quick-cut montage of administration officials, burning towers, mushroom clouds and Abu Ghraib. Then, Scott Ritter spoke. After establishing his credentials-"I was a Marine officer for 12 years, voted for Bush in 2000 and am a self-confessed conservative that loves my country"-the former chief U.N. weapons inspector delivered an impassioned speech that critiqued U.S. foreign policy and swiped at the American "way of life." He recalled the sanctions on Iraq that killed 1.5 million people and took apart the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi WMD.

"But don't just blame Bush," he said. "Blame Congress and the media, too. And look in the mirror? I can train a monkey to wave a flag, but I can't train a monkey to read the Constitution and act on it."

He was given a standing ovation.

Next was Sander Hicks, the endearingly spastic founder of Soft Skull Press and so-called "punk of publishing" who recently emerged from a year in the desert to prove 9/11 was a joint effort of rogue elements in the U.S., Pakistani and Saudi intelligence services.

Bounding up to the pulpit with spiky hair and wearing a black suit, Hicks launched into his rambling lecture with a Baptist preacher's fire. Much to the crowd's bemusement, this skinny, goateed white kid quoted MLK at length. "Tonight we're gonna look at the truth!" he roared, and proceeded to ask more good questions than he answered. But nobody seemed to mind. People knew it would have been a miracle had he done otherwise, even in a church.