Obituary: Giulietto Chiesa, 1940-2020

The 9/11 Consensus Panel mourns the loss of the great Italian journalist, Giulietto Chiesa, whose life was devoted to upholding the foundations of democracy, not just in his native Italy, but in Russia and worldwide.

The Consensus Panel was honoured to have Giulietto as a voluntary reviewing member of its evidence-based 9/11 research – from 2011 until its findings were published in 2018.

In 1999-2000 Chiesa had founded the association Megachip – Democracy in Communications, which presents critical analysis of how the mainstream media actually works. By April 2009 its website had over 60 million hits, and by 2010 it had reached 100 million. On the website appeared the words:

A whisper was enough to create a wave.
A simple whisper,
Nothing compared to the incessant noise of the thousand media that surround us.
Yet it was enough.

From Megachip sprang the 2008 documentary Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11, which challenged many assumptions surrounding the 9/11 attacks. Featuring such luminaries as Gore Vidal and Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, it has been seen by millions of people. The Italian daily newspaper, Il Corriere de da Sera described the “sequence of contradictions, gaps, and omissions of stunning gravity” that it exposed in the official story.

In 2003, just before the American invasion of Iraq, he promoted – together with a large group of volunteering journalists – the experimental independent satellite TV project, NoWar TV.

From the late 1990s onwards Chiesa had covered issues related to globalization, in particular how they affect the world media system. This led to his involvement in the foundation of the global think tank, the World Political Forum, based in Turin and chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2010 Gorbachev founded the New Policy Forum in Luxemburg, placing Chiesa on the Advisory Board.

Chiesa also served for 19 years as a Moscow correspondent, was a former member of the European Parliament, and was a Fellow of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.
He was the Chief Editor of the web TV, Pandora TV. His blog Il Fatto Quotidiano was among the top ten political blogs in Italy. He was deeply mourned and honoured at Megachip.

Giulietto Chiesa was clearly a diverse man whose immense energy and compassion drove a lifelong quest for democracy. In the words of 9/11 Consensus Panelist Dr. Graeme MacQueen, co-founder of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, “I found him to be extremely kind and generous … it was a great honour to have known him; we have lost a brave companion. What a loss.”