Short Changed
9/11 conspiracism is dragging activists away from the real
issues
By George Monbiot.
02/06/07 "Guardian" --- 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. First
cultivated in a laboratory in the United States, the strain
reached these shores a few months ago. In the past fortnight it
has become an epidemic. Scarcely a day now passes without
someone possessed by this sickness, eyes rolling, lips flecked
with foam, trying to infect me. 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 liquidised, 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(1).
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”(2). 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(3).
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(4).
Counterpunch, the radical leftwing magazine, commissioned its
own expert – an aerospace and mechanical engineer – to test the
official findings(5). 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(6). Popular Mechanics
magazine polled 300 experts and came to the same conclusions(7).
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.
www.monbiot.com
References: 1. Thomas Frank, 23rd September 2001. Tracing Trail
Of Hijackers. Newsday. Viewed at:
http://www.pentagonresearch.com/Newsday_com.htm
2. Ed Pilkington, 26th January 2007. ‘They’re all forced to
listen to us’. The Guardian.
3. Benjamin Chertoff et al, March 2005. Debunking The 9/11
Myths. Popular Mechanics.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html
4. National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2006. Federal
Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center
Disaster: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions.
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
5. Manuel Garcia, 28th November 2006. We See Conspiracies That
Don’t Exist: The Physics of 9/11.http://www.counterpunch.org/physic11282006.html
6. Manuel Garcia, 28th November 2006. Dark Fire: The Fall of WTC
7.
http://www.counterpunch.org/darkfire11282006.html
7. Benjamin Chertoff et al, ibid.
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