In fairness, I think it's getting more media coverage here than in recent years because of the recent events that have put American-Islamic relations under the microscope (the Florida pastor, the "Ground Zero mosque")... I remember last year the anniversary got barely any media coverage here.

 

That could be the case Danny, but if so, why is there wall-to-wall coverage on BBC News 24 of a commemoration, and not just a focus on these particular related stories...? And, you just know next year's 10th Anniversary is gonna be a massive pity-party.... God, they'll probably whell out "Chicken Little" Dubya himself to make a speech, and no doubt B-Liar will turn up to and get another brown envelope full of cash..... UGH....... :puke2:

 

Ok, point one: it's the 11th of September here, NOT 9/11. I cannot ABIDE it when British people call it that.

 

Point two, it's more disgraceful that the five year anniversary of 7/7 got so much less coverage than this. The only reason the nine year is in the news is because of the fuore surrounding the Muslim Community Centre near Ground Zero and the dimwit burning Qu'rans. I don't have a problem with the ten year next year being widely covered as it was a global tragedy but I agree, it should be put into context with Shock & Awe etc.

Ok, point one: it's the 11th of September here, NOT 9/11. I cannot ABIDE it when British people call it that.

 

yeah because it didnt happen in America did it.

Have you seen Loose Change?

I'm about a quarter of the way through now, but it seems to all go along with my view that they knew a terrorist attack was going to happen but didn't do anything to stop it in order to take advantage, rather than them doing it themselves...

yeah because it didnt happen in America did it.

 

That's not the point, it's just that it makes no sense when a Brit calls it that.

That's not the point, it's just that it makes no sense when a Brit calls it that.

I don't see why there's much to get hung up on - it's a quick shorthand phrase that everyone knows what you mean by. So long as people don't start calling terrorist attacks in Britain, say, 8/20, than I don't really see it as much of an issue of cultural invasion.

I don't see why there's much to get hung up on - it's a quick shorthand phrase that everyone knows what you mean by. So long as people don't start calling terrorist attacks in Britain, say, 8/20, than I don't really see it as much of an issue of cultural invasion.

 

It's partly because of some f***wits in my year who use it daily and stand for everything that annoys me about right-wing politics. One of them even dresses up as a sherriff occasionally and went around months after the US election shouting "Vote McCain". Warps my view of the phrase slightly :lol:

That's not the point, it's just that it makes no sense when a Brit calls it that.

 

So if you were watching a french film with a french title would you refuse to say the title in French?

Have you seen Loose Change?

It has a few glaring errors (steel doesn't have an absolute melting point, but instead loses strength, and the E1112 thing cited as a steel testing thing isn't a code for structural steel but just steel on its own - and it's very selective in its comparisons for towers that didn't fall) but I do think it does have a point with regards to the Pentagon, which may have been an inside job. Overall though I stand by my view that the government and related business and military figures knew it was going to happen and took full advantage of it in the aftermath.

George Monbiot, who to my knowledge has always been a fantastic pillar of sense in his writings in The Guardian, has some interesting rebuttal to Loose Change, and did a follow-up in response to the criticism of the first piece:

 

9/11 conspiracism is dragging activists away from the real issues

 

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th February 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. 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...aw/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.

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a coward’s cult.

 

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th February 2007

 

“You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the New World Order … bought and paid for.”(1) “Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and the Special Branch recruit agents?”(2) “Shill, traitor, sleeper”, “leftwing gatekeeper”, “accessory after the fact”, “political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all.”

 

These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film Loose Change, which maintains that the US government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my left-wing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I’ve blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.

 

I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by Al Qaeda, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents. I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a long-standing plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

 

But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile, while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly-timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes, and induce them all to kept their mouths shut, for ever.

 

In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.

 

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements which some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress; that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy; that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.

 

The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the “9/11 truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.

 

Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on Comment is Free, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious.. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467(2). On the same day I published an article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE. It drew 60 responses(3). The members of the 9/11 cult weren’t interested. If they were, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.

 

The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its hoard of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.

 

Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC’s film The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation of the conspiracists’ case. They urge us instead to visit websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org, and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin and the physicist Steven E. Jones. Concerned that I might have missed something, I have now done all those things, and have come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible fact; rumour and confusion transformed into evidence; selective editing; the citation of fake experts; the dismissal of real ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get to the heart of the conspiracy.

 

The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate-change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?(4)).

 

Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the New World Order, I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s all part of the plot.

 

www.monbiot.comReferences:1. Gary Allen, 911truthnc.org, 6th February 2007. Email.

2. “sirarthurchichester”, 8th February 2007. On Comment is Free.

 

3. George Monbiot, 13th February 2007. The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...2011751,00.html

 

4. Quoted by Will Sullivan, 3rd September 2006. Viewing 9/11 From a Grassy Knoll., US News and World Report. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles...1conspiracy.htm

Oh lord, please don't tell me you're one of them :( I could believe that they knew about it beforehand. That they pulled it off themselves? I severely doubt it.

 

 

Agreed. After reading several books from the library and many websites I don't think they planned it at all or planted any explosives in the basement of the towers. I do believe though that they had sufficient Intelligence for the top people including Rice, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to know it was planned and they then didn't do anything to stop it. Guess we'll never know for certain.

Edited September 11, 201014 yr by Common Sense

Sigh, I hate agreeing with Chris. It automatically puts into question any point that I've made.

Sorry if this offends anyone, but I am really, really sick of hearing about "9/11" now, more important things have happened, simple as, and the title of this Forum is "Perspectives", so I think it's time to put Sept 11th into some kind of perspective, and look at the US's actions before and after this date.....

 

I'm not offended at all, and I generally agree with your overall point, but I don't think it's wrong to commemorate the people who died on Sept. 11 just because we're not commemorating Iraqi war casualties, or because so many more Iraqis died, or because Guatemalans died in the 60s when the CIA started a civil war, or whatever. It's not a contest, how many more died when, or who killed more people. The media is certainly too focused on the West, but it's also where most of us and our friends and family live, so it's human nature that we care more when tragedy or violence happens here.

 

I live in Washington, DC and no one seems to be making mention of the anniversary, or they are at least reflecting quietly/personally. I suspect New Yorkers are doing the same. It's the redneck, right wing, brainless f***wits who freak out at the very mention of "9/11" and continue to vote for war mongers and civil liberty-destroyers -- even though they are perfectly f***ing safe in their homes in suburban Texas! And yet its us who live in cities who will suffer when a terrorist strikes -- and we're the ones who get it! If there is another terrorist attack, and I hope there isn't, but please, can't it be some godawful Arizona suburb or something??

Ok, point one: it's the 11th of September here, NOT 9/11. I cannot ABIDE it when British people call it that.

 

Point two, it's more disgraceful that the five year anniversary of 7/7 got so much less coverage than this. The only reason the nine year is in the news is because of the fuore surrounding the Muslim Community Centre near Ground Zero and the dimwit burning Qu'rans. I don't have a problem with the ten year next year being widely covered as it was a global tragedy but I agree, it should be put into context with Shock & Awe etc.

 

Which is basically all I'm asking for... I think that America has to stand up and answer for the crimes it's committed in the past decade - Iraq, Abu Ghraib (and, frankly we've only seen less than half of that, there is plenty of stories of rape and torture of female detainees, evidence of which is being sat on. A few low-level Grunts got convicted, bit fukkin' deal.....), GITMO, Rendition, etc, and often in contradiction of its own Constitution and Bill of Rights...

 

I'd have a HUGE problem with the 10 year commemoration if it became hijacked by the Neo-Cons and used as an excuse to wheel out the likes of Dubya, Rumsfeld and Co to "make speeches" or get involved in documentaries....