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January 24, 2007
Loose Change 9/11 Conspiracy movie to air on Irish RTE TV
Oddly, it seems that the Irish public TV station RTE TV has decided to show the Loose Change documentary next month. Loose Change is a movie which argues and implies that the 'official' story that Al Qaeda were behind the September 11 2001 attacks is false, and that a broader conspiracy (including the US government) was behind the attacks.
It's interesting how quickly Loose Change was able to spread on the Internet, but the film itself has been pretty thorougly shredded by a couple of compelling critiques (also distributed largely online). It's hard to see why RTE would want to focus on Loose Change when:
a) it's full of errors, and the makers appear to think that 'fact checking' is an evil CIA plot to silence dissent.
b) the film's about what's clearly a sensitive subject, which makes the dismal quality of the movie (to leave that many errors in the third version of a documentary to be released is shocking) all-the-more offensive.
c) there are many much, much better films offering critical discussions of 9/11 and US foreign policy (including the Watson Institute's own Eugene Jarecki's film Why We Fight).
d) Ireland, like the UK, has stringent libel laws and doesn't have the same right of 'fair use' that there is in the US (a problem cause Loose Change uses lots of footage lifted from news networks etc.) They run a real risk of getting sued - not for running a quality piece of investigative journalism, but for running an offensively bad 'documentary' full of clumsy, obvious errors.
This looks like an example of an Internet phenomenon crossing into the 'mainstream' media. However, I think RTE have picked the wrong phenomenon to use - if they show Loose Change then, at best, they'll look very silly. At worst, they'll get sued. This is one Internet video I'm surprised that the 'mainstream' media is reproducing.
Posted by jon_mendel at January 24, 2007 05:37 PM
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Apart from the "screw loose change.blogspot.com"and "9/11myths.com" web sites, I can think of a dozen other solid debunking web efforts that have completely demolished the "9/11 America did it, not any determined Islamic extremists" nonsense that was originally generated by ex-Stalinist academics and teenaged hustlers well before the Iraq debacle proved that Islamic extremists are more than capable of inflicting damage on the US military.
And of course there's the NIST's 10000 page report that has been peer reviewed by every structural engineer in the Western World and passed muster but that doesn't have a melodramatic soundtrack.
The only thing Irish TV proves by broadcasting that gibberish is Mark Twain's dictum that a lie flies halfway around the world before the truth has put it's boots on.
Posted by: Arnold Edwards at January 24, 2007 10:09 PM
Thanks - yeah, http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/ is a great place to start for criticisms of this type of film. NIST and 9/11 Commission reports are freely available online (the latter's a surprisingly compelling read, for those who haven't already read it).
I like the Mark Twain quote :) "a lie flies halfway around the world before the truth has put it's boots on". It'd be interesting to see what geographical variation there is in terms of how credible Loose Change etc. are thought to be - do they take tiem to travel around the world, and is Ireland 'behind' the US here? Or does the Internet mean the critiques of such films can get halfway around the world very quickly, but fall behind in the virtual 'world' of the Internet?
Posted by: Jon Mendel at January 25, 2007 12:12 AM
