Fwd: Raising Questions About 9/11 Gets Army Sargeant Demoted

"Donald expressed to me his disappointment in the Army after all that
has happened," said his father. "I raised my son to love America. He
still gets chills when he sees the flag flying and hears our national
anthem. He's committed his life to serving our country, only to get
tossed aside like this. It brings me great sadness."

When his son gets out, he said, he plans to become an advocate for
the 9/11 truth movement.

http://tinyurl.com/26acvm

Friendly Fire - Raising questions about 9/11 gets an Army sergeant
demoted for 'disloyalty'

By STEPHEN C. WEBSTER

These days, Donald Buswell's job is not as exciting or dangerous as
it once was. For the past few months, his working hours have been
spent taking care of some 40-plus wounded soldiers at San Antonio's
Fort Sam Houston medical center. The work is sometimes menial, even
janitorial, but he doesn't mind. After all, Buswell has been where
these men are - three years ago, he too was recovering from wounds
received in a battle zone in Iraq.

"I truly consider this an honor," Buswell told his dad not long
ago. Still, it's not exactly where Buswell expected to be after 20
years of well-respected service in the Army.

Since joining the Army in 1987, he had risen to the rank of
sergeant first class, serving in both Gulf Wars, Bosnia, Rwanda, and
Korea. He ended up with shrapnel scars and a Purple Heart and, back
in the U.S. after his last tour in Iraq, a job as intelligence
analyst at Fort Sam Houston.

He couldn't have foreseen that one e-mail could derail his career
and put him on his way out of the Army. One e-mail, speculating about
events that millions of people have questioned for the last six
years, was all it took...

Sgt. Buswell wants to know: What really happened on 9/11? And he
said so in his e-mail. In the few paragraphs of that August 2006
message - a reply not to someone outside the service, but to other
soldiers - Buswell wrote that he thought the official report of what
happened that day at the Pentagon, and in the Pennsylvania crash of
United Airlines Flight 93, was full of errors and unanswered
questions.

"Who really benefited from what happened that day?" he asked
rhetorically. Not "Arabs," but "the Military Industrial Complex,"
Buswell concluded. "We must demand a new, independent investigation."

For voicing those opinions in an e-mail to 38 people on the San
Antonio Army base, Buswell was stripped of his security clearance,
fired from his job, demoted, and ordered to undergo a mental health
exam.

(He was also ordered not to speak with the press. Information for
this story came from documents, conversations with Buswell's family
members and friends, and sources within Fifth Army who asked not to
be named.)

As if all that weren't enough, Fort Sam Houston's chief of staff
penned a letter accusing Buswell of "making statements disloyal to
the United States."

His father, Winthrop Buswell, said that his son "is one of the most
patriotic people I know."

"Donald saw something that his conscience led him to dispute," he
said. "That's just the type of man he is."

For his dissent, Donald has paid a heavy price.

Baghdad's early light danced across the surface of a man-made lake.
For Buswell, that April 2004 morning was the perfect time for a run.
Behind him, the soldiers of Baghdad's Camp Victory were, for the most
part, not yet stirring. The path he took was a historic one: In the
palace just a couple of hundred yards away, surrounded by the lake,
Saddam Hussein was in custody, locked away in a former torture cell.

Five miles into the jog, Buswell paused to catch his breath, and
something splashed in the water nearby with unusual force. He jumped
back, surprised, and surveyed the area with care. Seeing no threat,
he resumed his run, heading toward a couple of Iraqi men painting a
small building.

Seconds later, Buswell heard a growing whistle and turned just in
time to see a 122mm rocket barreling toward him. He dove out of the
way, and the round hit several dozen yards behind him. Picking
himself up off the ground, he saw another white trail forming over
the water. He started running again, but had made it only a few steps
when the force of another impact blew him to the ground. Shrapnel,
rocks, and dirt rained down on him. Ahead, a fourth round hit the
Iraqi painters, blowing off body parts and engulfing them in flames.

Horrified, Buswell ran toward the men and tried to extinguish the
flames. The men were still alive, screaming in agony. Then, he heard
the increasingly familiar whistle of another rocket and once again
hit the dirt. The one that struck the nearby road was a dud, like the
first that hit the water. Had it exploded, Buswell probably would
have died. When he turned to look again at the two Iraqi men, he saw
they were dead, their bodies charred and smoking.

"It was like the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan," his dad
recalled him saying.

By this time, troops from the camp were running toward the scene.
Only when the first of those soldiers arrived and screamed for a
medic did Buswell realize he'd been hit. Sharp flakes of metal were
embedded up and down his left leg and all over the right side of his
back.

The relatively minor wounds Buswell suffered that day were his
first in a battle zone, despite the fact that he'd served in southern
Iraq during Desert Storm a decade before. In his first few years in
the Army, Buswell had been a metalworker and had dealt with
explosives. Since 1990, he had been an intelligence analyst.

Buswell's wounds were cleaned and bandaged within an hour of the
rocket attack, and he rejoined his unit almost immediately. But 2004
had more - and more pleasant - developments in store for him.

Two months after the attack, he returned to the United States, to
Fort Hood in Central Texas, and married his girlfriend Lori,
officially becoming step-dad to her 11-year-old daughter Kaitlyn, who
calls him "DD" (Daddy Donald) for short. In one of those strange
quirks of war, Buswell had actually met Lori's ex-husband and
Kaitlyn's dad - Darren Cunningham - while both were based at Camp
Victory. The two became close friends. When Cunningham, a military
police officer, was killed in a rocket attack in October 2004, just a
month before his retirement, Buswell became even more of a father
figure for Kaitlyn - and in some ways helped Cunningham's family deal
with his death.

For the next two years, Buswell worked at his intelligence post at
Fort Hood, then was transferred to a similar job in San Antonio. But
as he worked, he studied and read about what had happened on 9/11 -
and came to the conclusions that would get him in so much trouble.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 had a profound effect on Buswell.

Before the much-disputed presidential election of 2000, Buswell
shared with his father a view that very few held at the time. He was
convinced that if George W. Bush won, he would take the country to
war with Iraq to finish his father's work. He believed the younger
Bush would be too beholden to oil interests - and feared what that
would mean for America's foreign policy.

When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, Buswell
later told his father, he figured that war with Iraq was coming, even
if the country had nothing to do with the attacks. Being a loyal
soldier, he kept his views private for a long while.

"He didn't want to rock the boat," Buswell's father said. "Like all
of us, he was somewhat in shock after what happened on 9/11." And, as
he told his father, his job was to serve. He was proud to do it, no
matter who was directing policy.

By the time he was transferred to Fort Sam Houston, Buswell had
developed strong opinions about what had happened. He had come to
believe that the World Trade Center attacks were aided by persons on
the inside and that the planes that crashed into the towers were just
one component of a larger, more complex attack. The career soldier
had effectively become a member of what's known as the "9/11 truth
movement," which has continued to grow in spite of news media
coverage that has generally refused to take the questions seriously.
The movement includes many factions, espousing theories from the
somewhat plausible to the really out-there folks who talk about space
weapons bringing down the New York towers. The doubters include
people like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who recently agreed to
distribute Loose Change Final Cut, a 9/11 conspiracy movie, and
actors Charlie Sheen and Rosie O'Donnell, whose 9/11 dissents have
been well-publicized.

In light of his new job, Buswell wanted to make sure his superiors
knew of his views. He went to Chief Warrant Officer Mario Torres, a
legal advisor to his division at Fort Sam Houston. Buswell told
Torres he would not be willing to write reports or give speeches that
required him to say things he didn't believe regarding 9/11.

He shared with Torres his belief that the facts contradicted large
parts of the official story of what had happened that day, calling
the attacks an "inside job" - one of the central beliefs of many
truth movement members. Torres didn't see a problem: Buswell would
not be working on anything related to 9/11, he said, and compared the
sergeant's views versus the official story to liking beer over wine.
His concerns dismissed, Buswell went to work.

It was only a few weeks later, on Aug. 2, when Buswell received the
e-mail that knocked his career off its tracks. The unsolicited
message was sent to him and 38 others by someone who gave his name as
Larry Anderson. No such person could be located at the San Antonio
fort, and Buswell's superiors declined to comment or to talk about
the sender of the original e-mail.

The e-mail's subject line read: "F4 vs. Concrete Wall." The message
referred to "loony liberal reasoning" that there must have been a
conspiracy involved in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon because there
allegedly wasn't enough airplane debris left behind for the building
to have been hit by an airliner. Anderson referred to a film clip
showing, he said, an Air Force engineering test in which an F4
Phantom fighter jet crashed at 500 mph into a heavily reinforced
concrete wall surrounding a nuclear reactor site. The jet "turned to
vapor," Anderson claimed, thereby explaining the lack of plane
wreckage at the Pentagon.

Later that day, Buswell committed the same infraction as Anderson:
From his Army computer, he sent a mass reply to all the folks who got
the initial message. Buswell's crime was clicking the "Reply All"
button - a mistake he still regrets.

The comparison between the F4 and a 757 hitting the Pentagon, he
wrote, "serves only to muddy the issue," because the fighter jet
hitting a concrete barrier hardened to nuclear containment standards
is very different from a plane hitting the Pentagon. The real issue,
Buswell said, was that the official story on what happened that
day "is filled with errors.

"We all know and saw 2 planes hitting the WTC buildings," he
wrote. "[W]e didn't see the 757 hit the Pentagon, nor did we see the
plane crash in Shanksville, PA. Both the PA and Pentagon 'crashes'
don't have [the] tell-tale signs of a jumbo-jet impacting those zones!

"The Pentagon would have huge wing impacts in the side of the
building; it didn't. Shanksville, PA would have had debris, and a
large debris field; it didn't."

He went on to express doubt that "some Arabs in caves with cell
phones" had been responsible for the tragedies of that day.

"I mean, how are Arabs benefiting from pulling off 9/11?" Buswell
asked. "They have more war, more death and dismal conditions, so, how
did 911 benefit them? Answer: It didn't. So, who benefited from 9-11?
The answer is sad, but simple: The Military Industrial Complex." The
idea of a 9/11 conspiracy, he added, is neither "Liberal Lunacy ...
nor is it Conservative Kookiness."

"People, fellow citizens we've been had!" he wrote. "We must demand
a new independent investigation into 911 and look at all the options
of that day ... Even the most incredulous theories must be examined."

Not an opinion one might have expected from a career soldier - but
then, expressing opinions, especially those of dissent, is the
American way. The e-mail exchange hadn't seemed particularly
important to Buswell, he later told his family. He found out
differently the next morning.

His key wouldn't open the door to his office.

That was the first clue Buswell had that something was wrong. In
short order, he was informed that a "15-6 investigation" had been
opened regarding his use of the military e-mail network. It's the
same designation given the investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture
scandal.

Over the next few days, Buswell was informed of the removal of his
security clearance, subjected to intense scrutiny and intimidation,
and alienated from other members of his intelligence division when he
was relegated to secretarial work while the investigation went on. He
was fired from his job and demoted to platoon sergeant.

In a letter appointing Major Edwin Escobar to lead the
investigation, Col. Luke S. Green, chief of staff of the Fifth Army,
wrote, "SFC Buswell failed to obey a general order or regulation when
he used his Government issued email account to send messages disloyal
to the United States [emphasis added] with the intent of engendering
disloyalty or disaffection for the United States in a manner that
brought discredit upon the United States Army."

Green added that Buswell "allegedly asserts that he has information
that proves a conspiracy on the part of the US military industrial
complex to attack targets within the United States (e.g., The
Pentagon), opinions which he asserts publicly and over Government
email systems."

However, no other documents related to the investigation mention
Buswell's opinions or question his loyalty. Officially, he was
charged only with violating an Army policy regarding use of the
military's e-mail network. Winthrop Buswell said his son has
acknowledged the infraction, but also noted it was the first time
he'd ever heard of the rule being enforced.

Green, at the behest of Lt. General, Robert T. Clark, deputy
commanding general of the Fifth Army, ordered that Buswell undergo a
mental health exam. However, the physician in charge of the medical
center's mental health division declined to administer the test,
saying that Buswell's actions did not warrant it.

Buswell fought back. He contacted U.S. Rep. Charles A. Gonzales of
San Antonio to register a complaint. Gonzales subsequently requested
information from the Army about the investigation, but according to
his aides, no other action has been taken. The request was given a
congressional inquiry case number and promptly put aside.

In another sense though, Buswell has given up - at least on the
idea of continuing his Army career. He filed retirement papers, set
to take effect April 1, 2008.

"Donald expressed to me his disappointment in the Army after all
that has happened," said his father. "I raised my son to love
America. He still gets chills when he sees the flag flying and hears
our national anthem. He's committed his life to serving our country,
only to get tossed aside like this. It brings me great sadness."

When his son gets out, he said, he plans to become an advocate for
the 9/11 truth movement.

For the last 10 months, Buswell has spent his days tending to the
needs of wounded Iraq War veterans at the San Antonio medical center.

"The service has mostly been good to Donald," said the elder
Buswell, a painter and retired locomotive engineer from Loudon,
N.H. "He wouldn't have made a career out of it if it wasn't. But
after all the controversy and the investigation, the thing that
surprises me most is how he reacted to being fired. When they
assigned him to the medical center, he told me, 'Dad, I truly
consider this to be an honor. To be given such an important task as
some kind of retaliation against me is confusing, but it is truly my
honor to help these men and women right now.'"

On the other hand, the elder Buswell said, his son's empathy toward
the soldiers now in his care isn't surprising.

"He provides great solace to the soldiers," Winthrop said. "He is a
good listener and knows what they're going through, having been in
Iraq and suffering injuries there as well. They truly appreciate him."

Family members say that's par for the course for Buswell, a guy who
delivered a Father's Day present to Darren Cunningham from his
daughter back in 2004 and even consulted Darren about raising his
friend's daughter, from whom Cunningham had years earlier become
estranged.

"I don't know what I've done in my life to deserve such a blessing,
but having Donny around has helped me and my family deal with losing
Darren," said Glenn Cunningham, Darren's older brother. "I really
admire and respect Donny for that, and because of how principled he
is. Some people don't have the sense of honor that Donny has. And,
you know, Donny ... He says things sometimes that get him into
trouble, but he says them because he feels it's the right thing to
do. And I really, deeply respect that."

To this day, Winthrop Buswell said, his son still cannot believe
the military would come down on him so hard for sharing a view widely
held across the United States.

"Donald really did nothing wrong," his father said. "He responded
to an e-mail. How many of us in civilian life respond to e-mail
forwards from co-workers or friends? Is that really a crime? ... He
is convinced, as I am also, that the 9/11 attacks are not what they
seem. We love this country. I even voted for Bush in 2000. Sadly, I
must say that I do regret it."

He shares many of his son's doubts and questions about what
happened six years ago.

"When you look back at that day - that terrible, terrible day - it
seems almost like another lifetime ago," he said. "Donald believes
bombs were planted in the towers and that the investigation exhibited
a number of very questionable characteristics. Like, how could fire
melt the steel core of the towers? Or, why did the 9/11 Commission
not talk about World Trade Center 7? That [building] fell around 5
p.m., but we don't know why. And if it is true what we've heard
recently, that a physics professor at [Brigham Young University]
found elements of steel-cutting agents in the melted steel from the
towers, why is that met with cries of insanity? There is a
possibility that what really happened was much more than what we were
told."

Not everyone close to the Buswells shares those views. Glenn
Cunningham, who has become close friends with Buswell, much like his
brother Darren, does not put much stock in conspiracy theories.

"I'm not one for conspiracies, but from what Donny is saying, it
really does sound kinda questionable," he said. "But I haven't looked
at it. I'm not in any movement ... And I just can't imagine what
people expect to come out of it. Of course I want to know the truth.
Truth is always important, and if they're lying to cover something
up, we should find out. But then what?"

Winthrop Buswell isn't strident when he talks about 9/11. He just
raises questions and encourage others to do the same - and that's all
his son has done, he said.

"I pray Donald does not get in further trouble for standing up and
speaking with his conscience," he said. "I wish we were not all swept
up in it. But here we are. So what will we do?

"Donald told me once, 'Dad, I hate feeling the way I do. I just
hate it. And if I'm wrong, gosh, I'll just apologize to no end. But I
can't deny where the facts have led, and I can't tell you how
disappointed I am. The evidence just seems so prominent, and the
question must be asked.'"

"Sadly, I agree with my son," concluded Buswell. "I want the truth.
Nothing less. We should all want that."

Stephen C. Webster is a freelance journalist in North Texas. A
version of this story appeared originally in the Lone Star
Iconoclast, published in Crawford, Texas.