Heads up: I'll be on Air America Thursday morning

paulthompson

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Wed Nov-17-04 06:02 PM
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Heads up: I'll be on Air America Thursday morning

Hi,
I wanted to let people know that I'll be on Air America's Morning Sedition program tomorrow between 8 and 9 AM, East Coast time. It should be for most of the hour. I just did a preinterview, and I think we'll talk about things like 9/11 insider trading, war games, and current events like the CIA purge and the Condi Rice reassignment to Secretary of State. If anyone has anything they think I should bring up, please let me know.

Also, here's a new article about me in the upcoming issue of Esquire magazine. It's their Best and the Brightest issue, highlighting 30 or so people who did interesting things in the past year.

Paul Thompson: One man can change the world. Or at least much of its what, when, where, and how.

by Doug Cantor
Esquire
December 1, 2004

He never studied, trained, or even had any intention to become an authority on terrorism. But never underestimate the power of one man's curiosity. Holed up every night in front of the computer in his San Francisco home, poring over news on the Internet, Paul Thompson grew increasingly frustrated with how incomplete the story of September 11 was. Armed with only a broadband connection, he started to gather every credible fact he could find online. Then he condensed each point of information and put it in chronological order. His Terror Timeline quickly became a monster of about fifteen hundred items, tracing the last quarter century of terrorist activity, incorporating a detailed trail of intelligence failures, and providing a nearly minute-by-minute account of the day of the attacks.

What had started as Thompson's hobby soon became his obession. Early this year, he quit his job with an environmental protection group, moved halfway around the world to New Zealand, and began dedicating his full attention to a solitary pursuit that paid nothing and seemed unlikely to be seen by more than a handful of people. Finally, he found a small audience through the Center for Cooperative Research, a California-based historical-record-keeping Web site that shared his philosophy of nonpartisanship, information sharing, and reliance on mainstream news sources. The marriage was a fruitful one. People started e-mailing him to point out new information and to make corrections to his data. Open-source historiography had arrived.

The result is that Thompson has assembled by far the most comprehensive and detailed record of September 11 and the events surrounding it ever created.

Thompson may have furthered the cause of journalism to a greater degree than if he worked as a journalist himself. His timeline (cooperativeresearch.org) has become a trusted resource for reporters and researchers, and this fall it was published in book form (The Terror Timeline) by HarperCollins. Still, Thompson continues with his self-imposed labor. "If somebody were to say to me, 'Give me your one paragraph on who did it on 9/11,' I don't feel I could tell you," he says. "And I don't want to stop until I know that answer."