Loose Change

Finally alternate theories regarding what really happened on 9/11 have reached the mainstream media. William Welch of USA Today has written a piece on the film Loose Change: Conspiracy Film Rewrites Sept. 11. As expected, the report is quite dismissive of Loose Change and other alternative theories out there.

The official story is so unbelievable we must believe it:

Craig Smith, director of the Center for First Amendment Studies at California State University, Long Beach, cites the unusual nature of 9/11: four airliners simultaneously hijacked and no defenses stop them.
"You would say, come on, I can't even buy that as a movie script," Smith says. "All of this feeds this readiness for paranoia."

It's kinda like Santa Claus, right? As a child you're sold this incredibly hard to swallow lie and convinced to believe despite your misgivings. The fact that the official 9/11 story is so convuluted doesn't undermine its truthfulness but rather fuels our baseless paranoia.

But Mr. Welch wants to make sure we are getting the right message:

'They Aren't Truth-Tellers'

Most of what the film alleges is refuted by the evidence at hand. Anything not answered definitively by the government is interpreted by the film as proof of a coverup.

The strategy up til now has been to ignore these theories. Put your faith in a government that lies to you again and again to go to war. Put your faith in a commission headed by people loyal to George W. Bush and his cronies. Ignore what your gut tells you. Ignore the real evidence. You're on the good team, the winning team and it's not your job to question what our leaders do.

But most of what the film alleges is not easily refuted. It is a fact that 9/11 marked the first time in our history that a steel framed building collapsed due to fire. On that historic day, not one but three buildings collapsed due to fire, collapsing in approximately 10 seconds: the time it would take a ball to drop from the top of one of the towers to the ground.

To accept the official version you have to believe that those 343 firefighters and paramedics were simply too stupid to know that the building might collapse. They weren't stupid. And they weren't ignoring any forseeable threat when they entered the buildings on that fateful day. In the normal world steel framed buildings don't collapse due to fire.

This raging inferno that supposedly brought down the towers was so fierce that Fire Chief Palmer was able to reach the 78th floor of the South Tower and decided he could knock the fire down with two hoses.

The piece in USA Today ends with a few nice quotes from the nut David Horowitz and a sociologist who attempt to explain away the popularity of such alternative views. Interestingly they could have gotten a quote from Noam Chomsky--someone Horowitz despises--that also would have dismissed these theories. But a quote from Chomsky would have probably carried a lot more weight with those, like myself, who find these theories to be credible. Chomsky, like Horowitz, dismisses them as an "internet thing."

One thing to keep in mind is that there are different factions within this movement. It's not a monolithic entity. Watch the films. Read the many wonderful books out there, like Crossing the Rubicon by Michael C. Rupert. Join the internet discussions. Do your own research. I think you'll be surprised by what you find.

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