Salon's resident coincidence theorist weighs in on Loose Change [View All]

[iconoclastNYC]

This is the same guy who attacked the Barbara Boxer for contesting Ohio's electoral votes, Mark Cripsin Miller for his book fooled again, and RJK Jr for the Rolling Stone Piece.


"The 9/11 deniers"

The success of the documentary "Loose Change" spotlights the online sleuths who believe the U.S. government was behind the terror attacks -- to get gold, justify war, or serve Satan.

Who, in Avery's telling, is the dark force behind all this destruction, the spinner of the big lie that Avery believes envelops the popular perception of 9/11? A most usual suspect: "The first person I'd bring into a court of law would be Dick Cheney," Avery says. "He's the person in the administration who I think is most responsible."

Quizzing Dylan Avery on the events of 9/11 is like taking a peek into an alternate history, a parallel universe of half-truths and audacious propositions that rarely ever disturb the peace of the reality-based world. In another time, that long-ago pre-digital age, you might have dismissed such theories as the rantings of a crank; what a young man like Avery believes about a world-shattering event like 9/11 would seem to be of little consequence to the larger narratives that have grown out of the misery of that day.

But these are days of amateur experts and self-made provocateurs, an era in which a young man with a laptop and a few far-out ideas can easily garner a huge audience in the self-referential online watering holes that dominate modern rhetoric. In the spring of 2005, Avery released "Loose Change," a feature-length documentary film that proposes that the terrorist attacks on America weren't terrorist attacks at all, and were instead conceived, planned and executed by people at the highest levels of the government. Though it has not been distributed in theaters, Avery's film -- sold on DVD and available for free online -- has emerged as the leading gateway drug for thousands, and possibly millions, of converts to the "9/11 truth movement," the loose affiliation of skeptics who doubt the official story. The film has transformed Avery into one of world's most influential proselytizers of the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job."

I've heard some of Avery's fans describe his movie as "the red pill," the drug that takes Keanu Reeves down "The Matrix's" rabbit hole. During the past month, I've swallowed the pill about a half-dozen times, following Avery and other 9/11 skeptics down a treacherous path toward the alleged truth. I'm sorry to say I didn't find it; much of Avery's film has been debunked even by fellow 9/11 skeptics, and some of its theories verge on the bizarre. If you care to look, you won't find a shred of proof that Flight 93 landed in Cleveland, or that the World Trade Center was stuffed with gold bars, or that the Pentagon was hit by anything other than a commercial jet.

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/06/27/911_conspiracies/