911 Loose Change - Are All The "Facts" Straight?

Many of you have viewed the conspiracy video 911 Loose Change. If you haven’t yet, here’s the URL:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8260059923762628848&q=loose+change

I’m not passing this information along to promote the video, but it does raise some interesting and possibly disturbing questions. Interesting and disturbing as they are, does the filmmakers’research stand up to close scrutiny? I’m not a technical expert by any means, but I do know at least one fact that they got absolutely wrong. And that one out-of-place ‘fact’ tarnishes, in my opinion, their entire hypothesis.

First of all, let me say that I do believe in conspiracies. I believe JFK’s, RFK’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations were perpetrated by a group or groups of conspirators. The single gunmen theories in all those crimes against America simply don’t make sense. So I do believe that there are people with agendas out there that run counter to the American people’s best interests.

What about 911 Loose Change?

The evidence they raise is certainly compelling, and I’d like independent experts to follow up on all of it.

Here are some of the issues they raise.

Air Force drills were conducted by NORAD just prior to September 11, 2001. Though no one in the Bush White House seemed to be taking seriously the warnings of Richard Clark, the White House counter-terrorism advisor, perhaps NORAD was. If so, hooray for NORAD!

There were an unusually high number of ‘put’ options placed on both United and American Airlines stocks just prior to September 11. ‘Put’ options make a profit when a stock goes down. Who placed these put options? That’s never revealed, but maybe some enterprising investigative journalist could find out. What if it’s discovered they were placed by a number of Saudi princes? According to the video, those options were never exercised. Whoever it was must have been scared off, but that was a lot of money to leave on the table. I guess they could afford it

Then there was the size of the hole made by the plane hitting the Pentagon. The video suggests that it couldn’t have been a Boeing 757. The hole was too small. Eyewitnesses claimed the aircraft was everything from a corporate jet to a C-130 cargo plane. And what happened to the large titanium engines? If a Boeing 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon, what did? I’d like to see this researched further.

I believe the video’s least compelling argument was about the World Trade Center. Either The History Channel or the A&E channel did a complete study and analysis in a documentary about what contributed to the WTC’s collapse. Much of it was due to the way the buildings were constructed, a hollow shell supported by a skeleton of steel beams, whose strength was compromised by explosions and their resultant fires.

Much of the video’s supporting evidence is from eyewitnesses and ‘earwitnesses.’ Defense attorneys make a living destroying the testimonies of eyewitnesses. The internal explosions that interviewees said they heard could have been the sound of steel collapsing, or perhaps other pressure-based explosions resulting from the structures’ internal collapses.

What about the hijacked planes and the cell phone calls made from them? This is one issue that really bugs me. Can cell phone calls be made from planes? I don’t know, but the video does present some compelling evidence that it’s nearly impossible to do. Were these cell phone calls between the hijack victims and their families bogus? Why would the family members lie? Could they have been bought off or intimidated into silence? That doesn’t ring true.

And what about Flight 93, the one that allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania, whose passengers tried to overtake the hijackers and ruin their mission? The video suggests that Flight 93 landed in Cleveland, its passengers evacuated. If that’s true, then where are all these people today? Are the conspirators holding them in Guantanamo? In some Eastern European CIA prison? Have the culprits set them up with new identities, given them million dollar pensions and have them living in Brazil? Or did our conspirators kill them all?

Finally, there are the identities of the hijackers. The video claims that there are reports of some of them alive and well, living in Moslem countries. I’m assuming that there can be more than one person having the same name. For instance, there are probably hundreds of thousands of guys here in the U.S.A. running around with my name, William Davis. Couldn’t that be so with some of the hijackers?

When I first watched 911 Loose Change, I thought, ‘Boy, have these guys really got something.’ But in that initial viewing, I heard one glaring error that careful researchers would have never made.

In was in a simple background segment, explaining how an aircraft had collided with the Empire State Building back in 1945. The filmmakers’ point was that the Empire State Building didn’t collapse like the WTC. Nothing was mentioned about the construction differences between the Empire State Building and the WTC.

But their glaring error was in reporting the type of aircraft that hit the Empire State Building. They reported that it was a B-52. Anyone who had done careful research would know that the B-52 wasn’t even the Air Force inventory until the early 1950’s. What did hit the Empire State Building was a B-25. Called the Mitchell, it was a medium bomber, the same type of plane that was used by Jimmy Doolittle in his raid on Tokyo in 1942.

(I’ve been familiar with this incident since I was a child. My mother was visiting New York and had just left the Empire State Building when the B-25 hit it. She was in a bus several blocks away.)

So my question is, if the filmmakers’ couldn’t get that simple fact right, what else did they get absolutely wrong? As much as I believe some of their assertions should be investigated further, I’ve got to ask myself who could have manipulated such a complex conspiracy?

From what we’ve seen of the Bush administration, their failure to have a winning strategy in Iraq, their ineptness in responding to Hurricane Katrina, their failure to be able to reign in a spending-drunk Congress, how could they have managed such a complex deception of the American people? How could they keep so many people silent, when they can’t even seal off leaks from their own intelligence bureaucracy?

Though I believe we should remain skeptical about anything the government tells us, we must also be skeptical of those fanning the fire around an American tragedy.