[wordup] The "Loose Change" documentary

Sun Mar 11 04:02:17 EDT 2007

After that last post David Nicol pointed me at a 911 documentary called
"Loose Change".  I'd never heard of it before so I found it on Google
Video and watched a chunk of it.

Brett Shand then pointed me at an interesting article about it on
Alternet, and a comment there led me to a movie called "Screw Loose
Change" which is an annotated point by point refutation of the "Loose
Change" video.

All interesting stuff.

Adam.

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The "Loose Change" video.

Via: David Nicol <davidnicol at gmail...>
Source: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7866929448192753501

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The "Screw Loose Change" video.

Source: http://lolloosechange.co.nr/

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Article by George Monbiot about the "Loose Change" video and why it's a
distraction from what really matters.

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight...>
Source: http://www.alternet.org/story/47986/

Short Changing 9/11: Popular Documentary Takes Us Nowhere
By George Monbiot, AlterNet
Posted on February 17, 2007

There is a virus sweeping the world. It infects opponents of the Bush
government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them
into gibbering idiots. The disease is called Loose Change. It is a film
made by three young men which airs most of the standard conspiracy
theories about the attacks of September 11 2001. Unlike the other 9/11
conspiracy films, Loose Change is sharp and swift, with a thumping
soundtrack, slick graphics and a calm and authoritative voiceover. Its
makers claim that it has now been watched by 100 million people.

The Pentagon, the film maintains, was not hit by a commercial airliner.
There was "no discernable trace" of a plane found in the wreckage, and
the entrance and exit holes in the building were far too small. It was
hit by a Cruise missile. The twin towers were brought down by means of
"a carefully planned controlled demolition." You can see the small puffs
of smoke caused by explosives just below the cascading sections. All
other hypotheses are implausible: the fire was not hot enough to melt
steel and the towers fell too quickly. Building 7 was destroyed by the
same means a few hours later.

Flight 93 did not crash, but was redirected to Cleveland Airport, where
the passengers were taken into a NASA building and never seen again.
Their voices had been cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and used to
make fake calls to their relatives. The footage of Osama Bin Laden,
claiming responsibility for the attacks, was faked. The US government
carried out this great crime for four reasons: to help Larry
Silverstein, who leased the towers, to collect his insurance money; to
assist insider traders betting on falling airline stocks; to steal the
gold in the basement; and to grant George Bush new executive powers, so
that he could carry out his plans for world domination.

Even if you have seen or read no other accounts of 9/11, and your brain
has not yet been liquidized, a few problems must occur to you. The first
is the complete absence of scientific advice. At one point the presenter
asks "So what brought down the Twin Towers? Let's ask the experts." But
they don't ask the experts. The film makers take some old quotes, edit
them to remove any contradictions, then denounce all subsequent
retractions as further evidence of conspiracy.

The only people they interview are a janitor, a group of firemen and a
flight instructor. They let the janitor speak at length, but cut the
firemen off in mid-sentence. The flight instructor speaks in short
clips, which give the impression that his pupil, the hijacker Hani
Hanjour, was incapable of hitting the Pentagon. Elsewhere he has said
the opposite: he had "no doubt" that Hanjour could have done it. Where
are the structural engineers, the materials scientists, the specialists
in ballistics, explosives or fire? The film makers now say that the
third edition of the film will be fact-checked by an expert, but he
turns out to be "a theology professor." They don't name him, but I would
bet that it's David Ray Griffin, who also happens to be the high priest
of the 9/11 conspiracists.

The next evident flaw is that the plot they propose must have involved
tens of thousands of people. It could not have been executed without the
help of demolition experts, the security firms guarding the World Trade
Centre, Mayor Giuliani (who hastily disposed of the remains), much of
the US Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration and the North
American Aerospace Defense Command, the relatives of the people "killed"
in the plane crashes, the rest of the Pentagon's staff, the Los Alamos
laboratories, the FBI, the CIA and the investigators who picked through
the rubble. If there is one universal American characteristic it is a
confessional culture which permits no one with a good story to keep his
mouth shut. People appear on the Jerry Springer Show to admit to carnal
relations with their tractors. Yet none of the participants in this
monumental crime has sought to blow the whistle -- before, during or
after the attacks. No one has volunteered to tell the greatest story
ever told.

Read some conflicting accounts, and Loose Change's case crumbles faster
than the Twin Towers. Hundreds of people saw a plane hit the Pentagon.
Because it collided with one of the world's best- defended buildings at
full speed, the plane was pulverised: even so, both plane parts and body
parts were in fact recovered. The wings and tail disintegrated when they
hit the wall, which is why the holes weren't bigger.

The failure of the Twin Towers has been exhaustively documented by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology. Far from being
impossible, the collapse turns out to have been inevitable. The planes
cut some of the support columns and ignited fires sufficient to weaken
(but not melt) the remaining steel structures. As the perimeter columns
buckled, the weight of the collapsing top stories generated a momentum
the rest of the building could not arrest. Puffs of smoke were blown out
of the structure by compression as the building fell.

Counterpunch, the radical leftwing magazine, commissioned its own expert
-- an aerospace and mechanical engineer -- to test the official
findings. He shows that the institute must have been right. He also
demonstrates how Building 7 collapsed. Burning debris falling from the
twin towers ruptured the oil pipes feeding its emergency generators. The
reduction in pressure triggered the automatic pumping system, which
poured thousands of gallons of diesel onto the fire. The support trusses
weakened and buckled and the building imploded. Popular Mechanics
magazine polled 300 experts and came to the same conclusions. So the
critics -- even Counterpunch -- are labelled co-conspirators, and the
plot expands until it comes to involve a substantial part of the world's
population. There is no reasoning with this madness.

People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world:
comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs
it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our
lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws
campaigners away from real issues -- global warming, the Iraq war,
nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality -- while permanently wrecking
their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow
a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project
for a New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of
nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken
seriously.

The film's greatest flaw is this: the men who made it are still alive.
If the US government is running an all-knowing, all-encompassing
conspiracy, why did it not snuff them out long ago? There is only one
possible explanation. They are in fact agents of the Bush regime,
employed to distract people from its real abuses of power. This, if you
are inclined to believe such stories, is surely a more plausible theory
than the one proposed in Loose Change.

George Monbiot is the author of 'Poisoned Arrows' and 'No Man's Land'
(Green Books). Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article
originally appeared in the Guardian.