Cooperative Research and Citizen Journalism

Viewer-supported Link TV, recently broadcast a program entitled 9/11 Press For Truth as part one of a two part special entitled Truth, Lies, and the Press. This program was based on the work of Internet researcher Paul Thompson, author of The Terror Timeline and the website that inspired the book The Complete 9/11 Timeline, which is now part of the Cooperative Research website. I was very impressed with the content of the Link TV special, and I hope to discuss that at some point on my Internet Esquire Blog; what I hope to cover here on the XODP Blog is the Cooperative Research website, also known as the Center for Cooperative Research.

The Center for Cooperative Research is a non-profit enterprise sponsored by The Global Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, and its content is openly licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. As open content licenses go, the Creative Commons is not one of my favorites. However, the larger mission of the Center for Cooperative Research is one that I consider worthwhile. To wit:

"The website is an experiment in open-content civic journalism. It allows people to investigate important issues by providing a space where people can collaborate on the documentation of past and current events, as well as the entities associated with those events. The website can be used to investigate topics at the local, regional, or global level. The data is displayed on the website in the form of dynamic timelines and entity profiles, and is exportable into XML so it can be shared with others for non-commercial purposes."

The site's growth potential is somewhat limited because it relies upon qualified professional volunteers to act as editors for the content submitted by member contributors. However, if the Complete 9/11 Timeline is any indication, what the site lacks in quantity of research, it more than makes up for in terms of quality. To wit, I was quite astonished to see just how many news items that should have been headlines were reported by the mainstream press but buried on page 11. Once these news items are put into a timeline format, they make a compelling case for concluding that Pakistan's ISI Intelligence Service was a sponsor of Al Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers.