WAITING to meet members of the West Yorkshire Truth Campaign, I half expect someone to wander in wearing a raincoat and start casting furtive glances around the room.

They might even insist on first talking in code to establish who I am before agreeing to divulge any further information.
But when I spy Andrew Sunderland and Richard Worthington sitting at a table in a large Leeds bookstore I'm relieved to find they both seem reassuringly normal.

True, my offer to buy them a coffee from the in-house Starbucks is greeted with a couple of dark whispers about multi-national corporations, but they accept it all the same.

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And as far as stereotypes go they don't look much like your classic conspiracy theorists, either.

Andrew is wearing an anorak but it's quite a trendy one, while Richard looks positively cool in a sleek leather jacket.

But then neither of them likes the conspiracy theorist tag all that much. In fact, they get positively prickly when people label them as such.

"It's not about paranoid conspiracy theories, it's about looking at the evidence," says Richard, who has positioned a dictaphone on the coffee table in order to record our conversation.

"I think a lot of people are very reticent to do that because they find the whole concept that perhaps the authorities were in some way involved in this to be just too much."

The group, which notches its two-year anniversary this month, is keen to attract publicity but at the same time its members are wary of being held up to ridicule.

It turned down a recent invitation to appear in a Channel 4 documentary, fearing it would paint it in a less than favourable light.
Andrew, 30, a former hospital maintenance worker from Whinmoor, joined about a year ago and Richard, a 49-year-old from Oakwood, who composes electronic music, a little later. They got to know each other via internet forums.

The boiled-down version of their theory, or 'narrative' as they prefer to call it, is that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were nothing more than state-sponsored terrorism.

By that they mean they were either orchestrated by US intelligence agencies or they knew about them and chose not to act.
They say it was a 'false flag operation', where you carry out the attack and then blame it on someone else to justify a widescale security crackdown.

"This notion that people in Government would never do this, unfortunately evidence states otherwise," says Richard, perhaps spotting that my eyebrows are somewhere in the vicinity of my hairline.

"The Nazis, for instance, organised the burning down of the Reichstag, blamed it on the left and then installed a security crackdown."
He goes on to mention how George W Bush's grandfather belonged to the American Liberty League, which was accused of plotting to overthrow President Franklin D Roosevelt and install a fascist-style government.

But it's a bit of a red herring as the claims were subsequently discounted and no prosecutions followed.

Andrew says that while we can guess at the motives behind the attacks it's secondary to the evidence that points towards government involvement in them.

He mentions a right-wing think tank called the Project for the New American Century and says 13 of its members were in the first Bush administration.

"In their document, Rebuilding America's Defences, which was written in 2000, they talk about transforming the American military into a force for global dominance," he says.

"It says one of the things that will hasten this process will be a new Pearl Harbour and that's what Bush referred to 9/11 as in his diary the day after it happened."


Sounds like a bit of a coincidence to me, but the pair have other misgivings about the attacks of seven years ago.

They cannot understand why jets weren't scrambled in time to head off the hijacked plane bound for the Pentagon or how a terrorist with limited flying experience was able to crash into the building with such pin-point accuracy.

The virtual absence of plane wreckage in the aftermath of the attack also puzzles them.

Then there is the spectacular, vertical collapse of both World Trade Center towers and a third building nearby.

Andrew and Richard contend that the manner of their collapse and the astonishing speed at which it took place indicate the presence of explosives, packed into one or both of the towers.

"We have no desire to be ghoulish about this," says Richard. "A lot of people lost their lives in these events and in the wars fought on the back of them.

"But we have to be sure of what went on and who was behind it when our liberties are being taken away."

The group is also frustrated by the British government's refusal to allow an independent public inquiry into the July 7 attacks on London, led by Dewsbury bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan.

As with 9/11, they scent the whiff of a cover-up.
I ask them what their wives or girlfriends think of their theories.
Both men say they're single, but add that some of their family members agree with their theory and others don't.

"I've found that people can be very rude but they project their own doubts on to you because they can't handle it emotionally," says Richard.

"You can literally see people's guts knotting up. But if we could get these questions answered we would go away.

"What we would say is look outside the mainstream media to what has not been presented to you and then make up your own mind," says Richard.

For more information on the West Yorkshire Truth Campaign visit www.wytruth.org.uk.