Korey Rowe, 23, was an Oneonta teenager who had just started basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. Four months later, he stepped off a plane in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
"Sept. 11 was something that directly affected every person in the U.S.," Rowe said in a 2002 interview with The Daily Star after returning from Operation Enduring Freedom. "We had to go over there and get the terrorists."
But Rowe dramatically changed his views after serving in the Iraq war where he said he saw reporters staging battle scenes.
Rowe said he believes the United States government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and will soon orchestrate another terrorist attack in this country.
"It’s inevitable," Rowe said.
Rowe is a co-owner of the Oneonta production company, Louder Than Words. The 9/11 conspiracy film "Loose Change," written and directed by his colleague Dylan Avery, also of Oneonta, has garnered national attention.
But Tully, also an Iraq war veteran, harbors no such theories about 9/11 and said the United States has some very real enemies.
"I think about how it was a wake-up call to the American people that there are people out there who want to kill us," Tully said.
The only credit Rowe gives to the Bush administration is for benefiting from the 9/11 attacks.
A self-proclaimed "9/11 truth activist," Rowe said a series of events are planned for this weekend, culminating with a rally on the site of the World Trade Center.
He said, "9/11 today is a pretext for everything that’s gone on in the last five years. It’s dictated the foreign and domestic policies."
