The Spook & the Stand-up Comedian: Louis Nevaer & Bronston Jones, on the 9/11 Missing Persons Fliers

No greater insight into the synthetic nature of the phenomena of the missing persons filers---those pieces of paper with photocopied images of the putative dead, which blanketed lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks---can be gained than a study of how, within four months of the attacks, those fliers were assembled into a nationwide museum tour by two unlikely gentlemen---the one, Louis Nevaer, a liminal spy, and the other, Bronston Jones, an aspiring stand-up comedian.

Louis Nevaer

Whether we believe the fliers emerged as a spontaneous and unplanned expression of mass grief by those most deeply affected by a surprise terrorist attack, or were in fact, unleashed as a heavily scripted component part of a psychological operation perpetrated from within the U.S. government by the same people who undertook the false-flag attacks themselves---in what was designed ultimately as justification for subsequently entering into the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq---in either case, the historic import of the fliers was recognized early on by officials.

That the job ultimately fell to two men with zero credibility to undertake such a task, is further evidence of the inherently fraudulent nature of the material itself---what we can now recognize as being only a program meant to falsely imprint into mass consciousness the legitimacy and authenticity of the human losses from that day. Other evidence points to the fact that the names, faces and identities depicted on the fliers are, in fact, merely "vicsims," computer generated fictions, part of the tally of woundedness which necessitated an American revenge.

Bronston Jones

The "official" story of the exhibition of these fliers, is maintained on a web page of Bronston Jones, a Los Angeles-based producer of commercials and music videos, who is an aspiring comedian, and whose sole credit as a photographer consists of one trip to New York City a week after the September 11th attacks, where for four weeks, he took images of the fliers as they decayed in poor weather on city streets.

It was on these same streets where Jones is said to have met and teamed up with the highly improbable figure of Louis Nevaer, an economist, Pacific News Service contributor, and author of "more nonfiction books and articles about Hispanic and Latino culture and business than any other living author."

That the two concurrent tours organized by Nevaer and Jones were abandoned within the first year, and after only 15 marginal venues, would point to a growing awareness that the tour was doing more harm than good in authenticating the victimhood of those depicted. Jones records simply that the tour's only "mission [wa]s to share these fliers with Americans and others throughout the world," but the sub-standard method they employed in doing so did more to [dis]"honor their memory by acknowledging their lives."

An essay by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Kodak Moments, Flashbulb Memories: Reflections on 9/11, records some scathing criticism of the exhibition:

Reporting on the exhibition at the Artists’ Museum in Washington, DC, which coincided with the six-month anniversary of 9/11, Garance Franke-Rutawas disturbed by what she characterized as a “jarring, tasteless presentation of some of September 11’s most powerful fragments” (Franke-Ruta 2002). While she admired Nevaer's intentions—to provide an opportunity for the people outside New York to know, mourn, and honor those who died—she questioned the way the exhibition was installed. First, she objected to the aestheticization of the fliers: only the colored ones were shown (the black-and-white ones were considered less compelling) and the fliers were framed. Second, such material deserved a more prestigious venue than the “middlebrow” Artists' Museum. Third, “the show’s March 8 opening struck an offensively irreverent tone: Gallery-goers wandered amidst the posters drinking glasses of chardonnay while live jazz music thrummed in the background from a band playing in another gallery down the hall” (Franke-Ruta 2002).8

(For more virulence, see: The American Prospect, "Missing" Sensitivity: Washington, D.C., offers a very crude commemoration of 9/11. by Garance Franke-Ruta | March 20, 2002)

The "middlebrow" Artists’ Museum (whose web site is up for sale, by the way.) would rank at the very top of the venues that the Jones/Nevaer exhibition landed. Other sites, like the Hiddenbrooke Country Club in Vallejo, CA, or the Now Art Cafe Gallery in Hollywood, FL, are more representative of their efforts to honor victim's memories.

The American Prospect article linked to above, needless to say, didn't make it onto the index of news articles on Bronston Jones' web page compendium of the tour. But one article that is listed there, dated February 7, 2002---from the beginning of the tour---"Last Seen on Sept. 11" by Renee Koury of the Bay Area, CA, Mercury News, isn't any more complimentary. This is how the physical experience of the exhibition is described:

"The exhibit's first day in San Francisco was no exception. About 125 of the posters, each tucked in a simple black frame, were hung in the basement of City Hall, bathed in the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights, in a busy corridor between a mailroom and the elections department. Workers with mail carts wheeled through the corridor while visitors peered solemnly at the display."

The exhibition petered out, but only after being officially recognized by the U.S. State Department, when it was included as part of a show of 9/11 imagery organized on behalf of the American Embassy in Costa Rica. Perhaps it was the danger posed by such official acknowledgment of criminally liable material that led to the plug being pulled on a the further planned international tour of the images.

This was wise. The "World Memorial Museum," yet another in the endless supply of subsidized web sites which sprang into existence after 9/11 in order to pimp the orthodox history of that day, makes clear that the images which toured under the auspices of Jones and Nevaer were their own, personal private property. "The Collection generously on loan from Bronston Jones and Louis Nevaer," is how it's put it.

It is in many of the specific narrative details that make up the Bronston and Navaer story that we can see the fictive elements of a pre-written history. We are repeatedly told that an estimated

"500-700 families could get to New York to create fliers, approximately 90,000 were hung."

The first figure should represent a nearly precise number, while the second figure is an impossible number to arrive at. Who could guesstimate the total number of individual fliers posted throughout the city? What we are being informed of here, are the contents of the advanced briefing papers laying out the rules of the op.

Believable, would have been a statement along the lines of "we collected fliers of approximately 500 individual identities (One flier, which we are told was a favorite of Nevaer's, is described as

"one that shows a laughing middle-aged woman who appears to be trying to dodge the camera at a party. Handwriting identifies her only as Isabel. The message: "Missing, needs medicine."1

which could never be established as belonging to any known victim. Should it be counted in the narrative then? Does she represent someone who should be on the missing roster, but isn't? What about fliers bemoaning the loss of "my adorable twins," which spoke of the towers themselves, and other such marginalia?)

What of the Mesoamerica Foundation which "organized and funded the Missing exhibit?" Variously described as a "Mexican human rights group," and Nevaer's employer, the tour's "sponsor" is in truth just the charitable arm of Bain & Company, a global business consulting firm. Was it somebody's bright idea there to bypass traditional standards of museum scholarship and force an exhibition on the American public?

"In the meantime, the Smithsonian and the City Museum of New York collected the torn-down posters with an idea of archiving or displaying them later. Nevaer contacted both to help facilitate a traveling show, but the willingness of the institutions to cooperate was overcome by the due deliberations of their systemic natures. After considerable searching, Nevaer made contact with the Mexican human rights group Mesoamerica, which was eager to fund and easy to reach by phone. He made his own collection from private properties and the tour swiftly took shape." 2*

I call Nevaer's a "spook" and a "liminal spy," because that's the results a simple Google returns. We are told that Castro engaged Nevaer to tell his story, Nevaer's being "connected to Castro through a family pharmaceutical business in Mexico, which does business with Cuba." Elsewhere, we learn Nevaer's "was invited by the Islamic Republic to assist in strengthening ties between Iran and the Spanish-speaking world."

Ask yourself, is it congruous for "an authority on NAFTA and the Hispanic consumer market [who] has written nine other books including New Business Opportunities in Mexico (Quorum Books, 1995), and New Business Opportunities in Latin America (Quorum Books, 1996) [and who is] a consultant for top management in international finance," to have undertaken his own private street collection of these fliers, "curating" them, (read: mounting them in frames,) and then to have traveled along with the collection in order to be on hand at openings across America (as newspaper interviews indicate he did?)

But Nevaer's spy world credentials are vouchsafed by his role in authoring two articles disseminated by the little-known Pacific News Service---the May 4, 2004, Hired Guns with War Crimes Past, and the June 16, 2004, Here Come the Death Squad Veterans, which were picked up by some in the liberal media, but the facts of which remain almost completely unknown to the general public.

Louis Nevaer

The articles reveal the role that international covert forces have in keeping tabs on one another throughout times of peace and times of war. In what must have outraged the international secret services at the time, was the fact that as events spiraled out of control after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority running the country began the "outsourcing" of privatized security services to companies contracted by the Pentagon. These companies---mainly corporate offshoots of Blackwater---then hired thousands of known terrorists, mercenaries and war criminals---such as South African ex-hit men, Serbian mercenaries, and Chilean and Pinochet-era death-squad members to do the dirty work of subduing the resistance.

That the Christian fundamentalism underlying the corporate structure of Blackwater allowed for the harvesting of the most evil killers alive on the planet, speaks to the unmitigated horror that was the United States invasion of Iraq. It is to Nevaer's great honor that his name is attached to this unheard of breach of the rules of covert decorum. It is further proof that the U.S. entered into religious wars---"Crusades" President Bush first declared---at the urging of Israeli special interests aligned with the organized forces of a subversive apocalyptic Christian identity.


1* "New York Fliers Capture Terror," by Morgan Green, Santa Barbara News-Press, January 2, 2002

2* "In Mad Hope: An Exhibition of “Missing” Posters
from NYC at the Karpeles," by D.J. Palladino, Santa Barbara Independent, January 10, 2002