Permanent Top Post--Scroll Down for Newer Posts

(Note: The date on this post is intentional; it keeps this post pinned to the top. Thanks for asking!).

11/11/07 Update: Loose Change Final Cut has just been released and so we have not prepared a full debunking. Both James and I have many comments about the movie below and I started a thread over at JREF with some examples of mistakes in the film. Much of the rest of the information in this particular post concerns the earlier versions of Loose Change.

Because this blog is getting so much traffic from Google searches and referrals from various forums and Wikipedia, we decided to put one post up top to link to information our newest visitors are apparently looking for.

First, if you have not seen the film and want to watch it, be sure to watch the annotated version, which was named after this blog, Screw Loose Change. The creator did a terrific job on this, and we strongly recommend watching this version rather than Dylan Avery's cut.

James has put together a list of major lies in Loose Change. Here's Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.

I compiled three very easily refuted lies in the movie. I also showed three tricks and distortions that are used throughout the film.

A friend of the blog named Mark Roberts (aka Gravy at the JREF forums) compiled this amazing Viewer's Guide to Loose Change, (now HTML) which includes a complete transcript of the movie, pictures and links that refute many of the claims, and which highlights the changes between Version 1 and Version 2.

The hot new film in 9-11 Denial is called 9-11 Mysteries. One of our JREF buddies, The Doc, has put together a rebuttal video called (you guessed it!) Screw 9-11 Mysteries, and assembled a viewers' guide to 9-11 Mysteries.

Many 9-11 Deniers focus on the collapse of World Trade Center 7, which fell at 5:20 PM on September 11, almost seven hours after the North Tower. If you want a really detailed analysis of WTC 7, I recommend Mark Robert's WTC 7 and the Lies of the 9/11 Truth Movement. I also recommend the BBC's terrific video on The Third Tower.

If you'd like to discuss the ideas about 9-11 you've encountered here or elsewhere, another friend of the blog started a Screw Loose Change Forum. It's a very lively place with lots of opinion back and forth between both sides. There's also a Screw Loose Change MySpace page, with some animated commentary. Of course, we also welcome comments on our posts.

If you're looking for detailed rebuttals of other aspects of 9-11 Denial, I heartily recommend 9-11 Myths, Debunking 9-11 and Internet Detectives.

Markyx has also put together a video (note: graphic images and strong language) called 9-11 Deniers Speak. If you think Dylan Avery and Jim Fetzer have any respect for the victims of 9-11, just watch this film. There are five parts. Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.
There's also a Google Video which is all in one part.

This should be enough to get you started debunking Loose Change to your friends. We have a lot more content below this post.

Notes on unusual terms/abbreviations: Looser (not a misspelling of Loser)=Believer in Loose Change. CT=Conspiracy Theory, Conspiracy Theorist. Truther=9-11 Conspiracy Theorist (all Loosers are Truthers, not all Truthers are Loosers). OS=Official Story. CD= Controlled Demoliton. LIHOP: Let It Happen On Purpose; theory that the government knew the 9-11 attacks were coming but allowed them to happen to further other goals of theirs. MIHOP: Made It Happen On Purpose; theory that the government planned and orchestrated the attacks. Most Truthers are MIHOP.

Update: Comments closed on this post, which is intended solely as a pointer. Because Haloscan will not let us close comments on a particular post, be forewarned: Don't leave a comment in this post or it will be deleted.

Update II: Note on comments: Because some of our commenters have chosen to act like children, we are no longer allowing comments.

Read More

Ben Swann Drinks the Kook-Aid

Never heard of this guy before, but surfing over to his website, I see he's kind of a kinder, gentler Alex Jones.  Lots of fear-mongering about Agenda 21, the Federal Reserve, Obama's gonna take your guns, etc.  He announced last week that he was going to "take on" the Rethink 9-11 Campaign, Richard Gage's latest effort to reanimate the corpse of 9-11 Troof.

I had little hope for this to begin with; about the best that could be anticipated was that he would yammer something about how the Truthers were distracting people from the very real dangers we face because (insert alternate paranoid fantasy here).

Instead, he took on the task of sucking up big-time to the Truthers, repeating every talking point from Gage and the others like a trained parrot.

Rethink 911 is the first ever global 9/11 anniversary campaign. Sponsored by a coalition of more than 40 organizations, ReThink911 is placing ads in 11 major cities around the world this September 2013.
But what is there to rethink? According to a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, you need to start by rethinking the third building that fell that day.

And it goes downhill from there.  Tony Zamboni gives the usual bs about how no building in history every came down that way that wasn't a controlled demolition, and works in his usual spiel about the missing jolt.  Bob McIlvaine repeats his bizarre claim that his son died before the planes hit:

I can say with confidence that Bobbie died, and I can say with confidence before the planes hit.   So the point is, the planes had nothing to do with his death and I could prove that in a court of law pretty easily.

And they've got a new poll!

According to that poll, 38% of Americans have doubts about the official account of 9/11 and 10% do not believe it at all.  That is compared to only a minority of those polled, 40% who are completely satisfied.

Well, that's giving a very generous reading to the actual poll results (PDF file)

40% I am completely satisfied with the government’s account

38% I have some doubts as to whether the government’s account fully explains

everything

10% I do not believe the government’s account at all

12% I don’t know/ Not sure

Some doubts as to whether the government's account fully explains everything? That's not tinfoil hat territory by any means; I might even go along with that statement.  They want you to lump the 38% who are reasonably skeptical that everything has been disclosed, with the 10% who are nutters.  I'd say that the 38% should go with the 40%; call them people who are generally satisfied with the government's explanation, but may have minor doubts about some of the details.

Read More

Richard Gage: Hard at Work, or Hardly Working?

You may recall that Box Boy Gage claims on the IRS forms for his group that he works 80 hours a week.  Sunup to Sundown, all 7 days in other words.  But I guess Gage's work is like an iceberg, where 90% of it is hidden.  Check out his upcoming events calendar.

Three of the "upcoming" events have already passed; the only real future event is in DC in September, and even that one is marked "tentative".  I assume that's the Pentagon kookery event we talked about a couple weeks ago.  BTW, that event is now a sell-out.  And even there, Gage is only scheduled for 30 minutes.

Read More

Is DC the Place to Be?

For the twelfth anniversary of 9-11?

Kevin Barrett plans to be part of the Million Muslim March.

AMPAC will be forcefully announcing its presence with a “Million Muslim March” on the White House on September 11, 2013. The goal, announced at AMPAC’s press conference in New York:

“We at AMPAC (American Muslim Political Action Committee) are planning a historic event for 9/11/13. One million Muslims will march to Washington D.C. and demand that our civil rights be protected by our government. We are demanding that laws be enacted protecting our First Amendment rights. We are asking President Obama to fulfill his promise from his first campaign for the Presidency of a transparent government. Lastly we are asking for the establishment of a real 9/11 Commission to reveal the truth to the American people.”

AMPAC founder M.D. Rabbi Alam, a well-known Missouri Democratic Party organizer, points out that American Muslims, like other Americans, were targeted on 9/11. More than 60 Muslims were murdered in the explosive demolitions of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11, and a mosque in the South Tower was annihilated. Alam points out that “Muslim and non-Muslim alike were traumatized by 9/11, but we as Muslims continue twelve years later to be victimized by being made the villains.”

Note the explosive demolitions crap.

As an adjunct to this no doubt enormous march, there will be a confab in Pentagon City, Virginia, the following weekend with Box Boy Gage as the featured speaker.  I do like this detail from the agenda:

Morning Theme – Understanding the Pentagon Attack

9:30

Moderator

Kevin Barrett,

Long-time Public 911truth Advocate

What Happened? Three Perspectives

Dwain Deets, Retired Aerospace Research Engineer -- Plane Hit the Pentagon

Matt Sullivan, Former Editor, Rock Creek Free Press--Citizens Investigation Team (CIT) position, Plane Did Not Hit the Pentagon

Barbara Honegger, Retired Military Affairs Journalist -- Preplaced Explosives and Heliport Plane

They are going to spend three stupifying hours on this topic. Note that Deets, who gets to endorse the official story of the Pentagon, was a CIT flyover kook in Jesse Ventura's  moronic episode on the Pentagon.




Deets' segment starts about 11:45 into that video. Right about 14:00 Deets specifically proposes the flyover theory.

Read More

You Can't Handle the Truther

The guys over at Skeptic Magazine try their hand at humor. Pretty funny.

Read More

Dylan is Back

Loose Change's Dylan Avery is back giving an interview on 9/11 conspiracy films together with Jonathan Elinoff of Core of Corruption to Jesse Ventura's son Tyrel and some guy I have never heard of. I thought Dylan had moved out west to go legit like Michael Corleone, but I guess they always pull you back in.

Nothing too exciting about the interview, but I do find it amusing how someone always has a friend in the FBI or the Mossad who secretly told them the truth about 9/11, but apparently doesn't have any actual evidence or has never told anyone who mattered. Yeah, OK, I have a friend in the FBI and he thinks you are a moron.

Read More

Abby Martin Gets Bent Out of Shape

I enjoyed this one:



Not a big fan of Maddow myself, but she's on the right side in this fight.

Read More

Boston Bomber a Truther?

Apparently the dead Boston Bomber might have been a bit of a conspiracy theorist.

The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies. Another in his possession was about "the rape of our gun rights". Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that "Hitler had a point"

And this is a surprise to whom exactly?

And on another note. More evidence for the Willy Nelson Hypothesis.

The brothers had been reading militant Islamic websites before the bombings. Friends say the younger brother smoked copious amounts of pot and rarely prayed. 'Tito' told us Dzhokhar's older brother dominated him and didn't approve of his "party lifestyle".

Update: The Wall Street Journal adds more details to this story, even giving it front page treatment.  Apparently out old friends the American Free Press were involved.

Mr. Tsarnaev got his own subscription to American Free Press, a paper that the Southern Law Poverty Center said promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. A spokeswoman for the paper denied it had such an agenda, saying the paper publishes "news that the established media won't." She confirmed that someone bought Mr. Tsarnaev a "get acquainted" 16-week subscription in December. It expired in April, at about the time of the Boston Marathon attack.

 And to respond to M. Gregory Ferris in the comments. No, I am not Batman, although with access to enough startup capital and adequate research facilities, I could be...

Read More

Coach Kook?

Well, looks like James' football team is run by a nutbar:

Seattle head coach Pete Carroll hosted a retired four-star general at the Seahawks facility last spring and blitzed him with questions about whether the 9/11 attacks “had been planned or faked” by the government, according to Deadspin.com.

Decorated general Peter Chiarelli, who had just called it a career, was discussing football and brain injuries with Carroll before the conversation took a turn, Deadspin reported.

I had to chuckle at this part:

“Pete grew up in California during Vietnam, and during Watergate,” Ellison said. “That’s just the perspective he brings to the table.”

I grew up during Vietnam and Watergate, and I don't get the point.

Read More

Psychological Study of Truthers and Debunkers Online

Worth a read.

The raw data consisted of the comment sections of various online news articles. Samples were taken from news articles posted between July 1st and December 31st, 2011, on four mainstream news websites: ABC (American Broadcasting Company) News, CNN, the Independent, and the Daily Mail. This date range was chosen because of the large number of 9/11-related articles around the time of the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and these four news sites were selected on the reasoning that an ideal sample would not be restricted to a single country, journalistic style, or ideological position, as well as for more practical reasons such as search capabilities, comment archiving, and unpaid access.

I do have an alternate explanation for this observation:

We also found that hostility was higher in persuasive arguments made by conventionalists than in those by conspiracists. As 9/11 conspiracism is by and large a minority viewpoint in the West (WorldPublicOpinion.org, 2008), this makes sense: conventionalists, rather than focusing on presenting novel information, instead attempt to enforce conformity to the majority viewpoint (Latané, 1981).

There's an element of truth in that; keeping people in line lends itself more to denigrating the opposition, whereas converting people requires gentler persuasion.  But there's another dynamic as well.  In general, Truthers know a great deal more of the minutiae of 9-11 than those debating them.  I have been at this for over 7 years now, and I'll freely admit that many if not most Truthers know more about that day than I do (although on the important issues I have them cold).  This is probably true for most conspiracy theories for an obvious reason; if you are into a conspiracy theory you are going to spend a lot more time studying up on the event than if you believe in the conventional explanation.

But of course, what happens when a conventionalist without a lot of background knowledge runs up against a conspiracy theorist who can provide a lot of detail?  He gets frustrated and angry; he knows he's right, but he cannot provide the evidence to support his opinions and hence tends to lash out.  There's an old joke about how lawyers work: When you have the facts on your side, pound the facts.  When you have the law on your side, pound the law.  When you have neither, pound the table.

Read More

Pakistani Report on bin Laden Leaked

Once more I think of Hanlon's Razor. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. News you won't find on 911 Blogger. In fact you won't find much over there nowadays. Hello, anyone awake? Will the last person to leave the "truth" movement please turn out the lights....

Via the BBC.

Incompetence and negligence allowed Osama Bin Laden to live in Pakistan undetected for almost a decade, a leaked government report suggests.

A version of the report leaked to al-Jazeera says the killing of Bin Laden by US forces was a "criminal act of murder" ordered by the US president.

It also reveals details of the al-Qaeda leader's whereabouts and day-to-day life after fleeing Afghanistan in 2001.

Read More

The Org Chart From Hell

Sometimes the Truthers make our points better than we can make them ourselves. In this case, we have always pointed out how ridiculously complex and unmanageable their 9/11 conspiracies are, as compared to real examples of conspiracies which tend to involve just a few people in a single organization, and even then they tend to blow up. Anyway, a Truther posts this graphic demonstration of the conspirators, in the comments on 911 Flogger  in reference to Kevin Ryan's new book Another Nineteen.

Oh yeah, all these guys are just supposed to somehow meet, agree to carry out murder and treason, and then cover it up afterwards. And this is just the middle management! What could possibly go wrong?

Read More

Where Did the Money Go Dick?

Earlier Richard Gage and the AE911 bunch had claimed that they had nearly $100,000 in matching funds donated to their Operation Tilting at Windmills campaign.

With your support, we’ve already raised close to $100,000 in matching funds, almost half of the $200,000 we need for our billboard, subway, and grassroots-to-global multi-city campaign!

Now, uhh, not so much?

As you will see on ReThink911.org, the campaign has decided to narrow the number of cities to eleven strategically selected markets due to the fact that a large source of pledged matching funds has not arrived as expected, and due to a revised strategy of concentrating our funds in fewer cities.

 So what happened to the money? Charlie Sheen blew it all on blow? Ed Asner lost it all the craps table at Caesars? Alex Jones finally get his prescription for lithium filled? We want to know. Maybe the IRS should stop worrying about the Tea Party and investigate these guys?

Read More

Alex Jones Loses it on the BBC

For an all Alex Jones nuttiness weekend, Alex is on the BBC with David Aaronovitch, author of Voodoo Histories. For the entertaining part you can just skip to the last couple of minutes.

Read More

You Work for Cobra!

We haven't had a good Alex Jones rant in a while. Enjoy him in all his bipolar genius.

Read More

The 9/11 conspiracy theorist who changed his mind

Bit of an old story, but the Telegraph has an interesting interview with Charlie Veitch, the Truther who rejoined the world of the rational.

On a June afternoon in the middle of New York’s Times Square, Charlie Veitch took out his phone, turned on the camera and began recording a statement about the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center.

“I was a real firm believer in the conspiracy that it was a controlled demolition,” he started. “That it was not in any way as the official story explained. But, this universe is truly one of smoke screens, illusions and wrong paths. If you are presented with new evidence, take it on, even if it contradicts what you or your group want to believe. You have to give the truth the greatest respect, and I do.”

Read More

Scratch Uncle Fetzer....

Find a Holocaust Denier underneath.  Qu'elle surprise!

And this just in: Dr. Fetzer is so hopping mad at the Zionists that he's decided to come out of the closet and announce his support for holocaust revisionism! After studying the issue, Jim says that the "responsible revisionists," who admit that there was a Nazi holocaust but insist that there were few if any gas chambers and that the "six million" figure is wildly inflated, are correct.

 Of course, this is not the first time he's been caught minimizing the Holocaust:

 I believe Elvis is dead, I am not a Holocaust denier (even though I'm inclined to believe the numbers killed have been exaggerated)...

(bolding added for emphasis).

Read More

Evidunce from the 9-11 Consensus Nutbars

Came across this at 9-11 Troof dot org.

The 9/11 Consensus Panel now offers four evidence-based Points about the alleged phone calls from the 9/11 flights.

The famous "let's roll" drama of the passenger revolt on UA 93 was relayed by passenger Todd Beamer's 13-minute unrecorded seat-back call to GTE telephone supervisor Lisa Jefferson, who reported Beamer as strangely tranquil, declining to speak to his wife. Eerily, Beamer's line remained open for 15 minutes after the crash.

 Cue Twilight Zone music.  As usual, the goofballs go over the edge in an effort to make everything mysterious.  Beamer was "strangely tranquil"?  He declined to speak to his wife?  1111111!

Of course, if a 9-11 Troofer had been on the plane that day, he would have been babbling like a  madman.  "We're all gonna die--But not on this jet!" Because we all know that real men lose their heads in emergencies.

As for Beamer declining to speak to his wife, the reason for that is well-known, and no, it's not what the 9-11 Nutsensus Panel states:

Beamer continued talking to Jefferson, rather than having her transfer him to Lisa Beamer, because his wife was pregnant and he did not want to upset her.

It was not just that he didn't want to upset her.  She'd had a difficult pregnancy and he didn't want her to have a miscarriage.  And later the creeps ask:

He did not ask to talk with her because he did not want to upset her, although learning of his death would presumably upset her.

This explanation is inconsistent with the FBI report that he had first tried to reach his residence at 9:43:48 AM.

But if you go back to one of the first reports about Beamer's call, which these retards know about because they link to it, the answer becomes quite obvious:

"I introduced myself as Mrs. Jefferson. I said, 'I understand that you're on United Flight 93 and it's being hijacked.' And I asked him to explain."
He knew there were at least three hijackers, two with knives who had commandeered the plane's controls and one with a suspected bomb strapped around his waist who kept watch on the passengers.
The pilot and copilot lay motionless on the floor in front of a curtain that had been drawn by the bomb-carrying hijacker. Beamer told Jefferson he could not tell whether the pilot, Capt. Jason Dahl, 43, of Denver, or first officer, LeRoy Homer, 36, of Marlton, N.J., were alive.
She told Beamer about the two planes crashing in New York.

See?  He at first tried calling his house and when he couldn't get through, he tried calling an operator.  It was only after he heard about the planes crashing in New York that he decided not to talk to his wife. On September 10, 2001, it would have been one thing to hear that your spouse was on a plane that had been hijacked.  It would be worrying, certainly, but you'd also know that historically, most people on hijacked planes survived the ordeal.  On September 11, after seeing the Twin Towers burning, it would have been quite another thing.

What a bunch of evil dirtbags the Troofers are.

Read More

Obama on Mars

No, not figuratively.  Literally:

In a statement made Sept 20, 2011, Mr. Basiago confirmed Mr. Obama’s co-participation in the 1980 Mars training class, stating:  “Barry Soetoro, a student at Occidental College, was in my Mars training class under Major Ed Dames at The College of the Siskiyous in Weed, California in 1980. That fact has been corroborated by one of my other classmates, Brett Stillings. Two years later, when he was taller, thinner, more mature, a better listener, using the name ‘Barack Obama,’ and attending a different college, Columbia University, we crossed paths again in Los Angeles and I didn't recognize him as the person that I had been trained with in the Mars program and encountered on the surface of Mars. In fact, doing so would have been virtually impossible in any case, because measures had been taken to block our later memories of Mars shortly after we completed our training in 1980.”

Mr. Basiago states that during one of his trips to Mars via “jump room” that took place from 1981 to 1983, he was sitting on a wall beneath an arching roof that covered one of the “jump room” facilities as he watched Mr. Obama walk back to the jump room from across the Martian terrain. When Mr. Obama walked past him and Mr. Basiago acknowledged him, Mr. Obama stated, with some sense of fatalism:  “Now we’re here!”

Mr. Stillings states that during one of his visits to Mars, he walked out of the “jump room” facility and encountered Mr. Obama standing beside the facility by himself staring vacantly into a ravine located adjacent to the facility.

 Not a good idea; apparently you want to stay quite alert on your visits to Mars:

When they then first teleported to Mars in Summer 1981, the young Mars visitors confronted the situation that Major Dames had covered at length during the class the previous summer – that one of their principal concerns on Mars would be to avoid being devoured by one of the predator species on the Martian surface, some of which they would be able to evade, and some of which were impossible to evade if encountered.

The Mars program was launched, Basiago and Stillings were told, to establish a defense regime protecting the Earth from threats from space and, by sending civilians, to establish a legal basis for the U.S. to assert a claim of territorial sovereignty over Mars.  In furtherance of these goals and the expectation that human beings from Earth would begin visiting Mars in greater numbers, their mission was to acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence or, as Major Dames stated during their training near Mt. Shasta in 1980: “Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten.”

What does this have to do with the Truthers?  Well, one of the people pushing this incredible story is Alfred Webre.  Webre was a featured speaker at the NYC Truther 9-11 Anniversary Celebrations in 2007:

Alfred Webre, who was given 45 minutes to talk on the topics "9/11 as a war crime" and the "development of [an] international tribunal" for the Bush administration. After touching on those subjects (to great applause), he veered off course, arguing that an "artificial intelligence matrix" controlled by the Rothschild family might have caused 9/11, that the cancer rate in Iraq now stands at 30 percent, that AIDS is a biological weapon created to control the population, that global warming is being caused by a black hole 23 light years from Earth, and that the NYPD was employing a supersonic crowd disruption device that was depressing turnout.

As I never tire of pointing out, the 2007 Truther Confab was billed as "Ready for the Mainstream."

Webre also collaborated with David Ray Griffin:

This Legislative Memorandum was co-authored by expert researcher David Ray Griffin, independent scientist Leuren Moret and attorney Alfred Webre.

He was also chosen for the Vancouver hearings that Uncle Fetzer, Barbara Honegger and some other fruitcakes had a year or so ago.

I strongly advised Jim and Joshua to dump Webre. Being fair-minded to a fault, Jim contacted Webre and was assured that no, Webre would certainly never contaminate the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings by linking them in any way with his "exotic" teleportation, time travel, and UFO material. On that condition, Jim (ill-advisedly, in my view) allowed Webre to serve as a judge in Vancouver.

After the final day of the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings, Webre had dinner with author-journalist Barbara Honegger and retired psychologist Ernst Rodin. At this dinner, in the presence of both witnesses, Webre announced that he intended to find a way around (i.e., break) the promise he had made to Jim Fetzer, and include Andrew Basiago's ludicrous claims in the "indictments" issued by the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings!

How crazy do you have to be when fruitcakes like Fetzer, Honegger, Blakeney, and Kevin Barrett realize you're not playing with a full deck?

Read More

Bits & Pieces

How's Operation Tip the Planet Going?  Gage has gotten $15 in the last week.  The good news is that with the matching funds, that's really $30.  Woot!  Expect the Earth to start wobbling on its axis any moment now.

Alex Jones and the Truthers have gotten quite a bit of bad press the last couple of weeks.  They both got a smackdown from Rachel Maddow the other day:




I'm not as big a fan of the comic book version of the 9-11 Commission Report as Rachel is; I found it a little dumbed down and melodramatic. But the Commission Report itself is terrific, as is the Popular Mechanics Debunking book.  Still, kudos to her for delivering a well-deserved spanking to the Truthers, leatherlungs Jones, and all those who support them, including Matt Drudge, who apparently tweeted that 2013 would be the year of Alex Jones.

No surprise, Box Boy and a couple other Troofers were offended that Rachel hasn't looked at their pathetic evidence:

Read More