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(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.

Slow Learners

I have lost count of what iteration this is, but the Truthers attempting to sue on behalf of April Gallop, have lost yet again.  This time at least they got a mention by Reuters.

A federal appeals court sanctioned two California lawyers on Thursday over a lawsuit they filed, dismissed as frivolous, that accused former officials in the Bush administration of allowing the September 11 Pentagon attack to occur as part of a broad conspiracy.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ordered the two lawyers to pay $15,000 total in sanctions in addition to double an unspecified amount the government spent defending the case.
Three attorneys -- Dennis Cunningham, William Veale and Mustapha Ndanusa -- filed the lawsuit in 2008 on behalf of April Gallop, a member of the U.S. Army injured in the Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001.
The lawyers accused then-Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of allowing the Pentagon attack to occur through inaction, despite having what the suit described as real-time information that a hijacked plane was approaching.

Is Dylan Avery Luke Skywalker?

I'm mostly impressed that anybody bothered to watch Star Wars 2 and 3; after the travesty that was the Phantom Menace I gave up. As usual, Truthers think that because a major event was caused by a gigantic plot in a movie somewhere, that means that all major events are gigantic plots.

A Funny Video And....

A serious response.  First the video:

And the reponse? I found this over at Truth Action, where a poster named Snow Job had this to say:

The folks over at SLC are extremists who hate everybody not on board with Republicanism, and have in fact declared Republicanism to be identical to a litmus test of being American, just like... basically every Republican who ever lived.

I have, in fact, never issued such a declaration, and I would find such a declaration ignorant. I am a Republican, yes, but I do not think that the GOP has a monopoly on the best ideas. I wrote one time at JREF that I think of liberals as the gas pedal, and conservatives as the brakes. Without liberals we'd never move forward, and without conservatives we'd pretty quickly drive off a cliff. It is the dynamic tension between the two parties that results in us moving forward but at a sensible pace. More important, note that Snow Job does exactly what he accuses me of doing: writing off the other side entirely.

Hollywood Fantasists for 9/11 Truth

We have covered this attempt to create a 9/11 Truth movie, to go along with their assortment of DVDs and books, previously, but now it is getting increasingly fantastical.

“A Violation of Trust” (formerly titled “Confession of a 9/11 Conspirator”) is a feature film project that is willing to do what the world’s governments and legal bodies are unwilling to do – open a real investigation of 9/11 for the entire world to see. It dramatizes the first day of “The President’s New Investigation of 9/11”, with actors performing from a tightly-written, factually-accurate script that pits the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Reports against the work of 9/11 researcher Dr. David Ray Griffin and the scientific research highlighted by leading 9/11 truth organizations, including Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.


The filming of “A Violation of Trust” will be performed on a single set, depicting the investigation’s public hearing room. The single-set approach provides the most intense platform for the actors and the script to involve the audience. The film’s compelling drama, forceful images and real-time video clips will be woven into its often contentious question-and-answer dialogue to create opportunities for conflicting views that will be argued both passionately and in a scientific and logical manner.

They claim to have assembled a pretty decent cast, although mostly from the list of leftist Hollywood has beens that are normally attracted like moths to a flame to any such endeavor, such as Ed Asner, Martin Sheen and Woody Harrelson.  Their shooting schedule is pretty ambitious though:

The production schedule for “A Violation of Trust” is as follows:

Pre-Production: NOW


Principal Photography: 10 days beginning March 22, 2012


Post-Production: 6 weeks


Cannes “Marche du Film” Premiere: May 16, 2012


Release Date: September 11, 2012

I am no expert in the film industry, but I think 10 days is pretty ambitious, even for a film which only has one set. This has all the potential of a really bad fact-impaired documentary. 

Typical Truther Scholarship

A Truther named Dr Paul Rea has written a book, apparently his second Troofer tome.  Dr Rea is uniquely qualified to write such a book, possessing degrees in structural engineering, fire safety, history and aviation.

Okay, just kidding.  Actually he was a professor in the humanities, which means his major qualification for writing this book is that his computer has a word-processing program.  The book sells for $32.95 but is discounted on his site to only $21.00 (softcover).  He's made a few chapters available online.

As usual, it's not hard to find errors.  For example, discussing the Mexican cession of territory following the Mexican-American War, he says:

The war was short, but the gains were huge. As a price for halting its drive southward, the United States forced Mexico to sign over a vast area, which included all of what is now New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and part of Colorado (E. Foner Give Me Liberty! Vol. 1 pp. 402-405).

Well, I'm not a history major, either, and yet I knew instantly that was not true.  For starters, over half of New Mexico was originally part of the Republic of Texas, and came into the Union when the Lone Star State did.  In addition, a large segment of  New Mexico and Arizona (including the locations of the current cities of Tucson and Yuma) were added with the Gadsden Purchase.  He also attributes the US entry into World War I to the sinking of the Lusitania, which appears to be something that all Truthers get wrong.

The sloppy scholarship continues into the chapter on WTC 7:

For the first two or three hours, the blazes were scattered and not immediately visible. NIST also acknowledged that the first photographs or videos of WTC-7 fires were taken at about 12:10 a.m., and that two other photos were taken at 12:28.

Fires at WTC 7 on 9-11 at 12:10 a.m. would indeed be quite suspicious, as that was more than 10 hours before the falling debris from the North Tower hit the building.

We get the usual nonsense about Barry Jennings' recollections:

Despite the evacuation order and the police presence that must have accompanied it, the mayor’s staffers did enter the WTC-7 just after 9:00. Michael Hess, corporation counsel for the city and a close friend of Giuliani; and Barry Jennings, the Director of Emergency Services for the City Housing Authority, made it up to the OEM (Independent [UK] 9/13/01). Expecting to find Giuliani at the command center, they were amazed to find “everybody was gone.” Since evacuations take time, these reports imply an evacuation order was given before 9:03.

Puzzled, Jennings called other staffers, one of whom told him “to leave and leave right away.” A superior also commanded him to “get out of there now.” But the elevators didn’t work because the power had gone out (BBC 9/6/08).

Rea ignores the evidence supplied in that final sentence, "the power had gone out."  We know that the power went out when the South Tower collapsed, right around 10:00.  Which of course shows that Jennings was wrong with his estimation that he entered the building around 9:00.  Jenning's times are all off by about 30-40 minutes; once you adjust for that by comparing other things he said, his testimony fits perfectly with other accounts.  Truthers don't make adjustments because their whole case rests on BS, like "Oooh, look this guy says it was 9:00 but X didn't happen until 9:40, so therefor the time of X must be wrong."  Think Norm Mineta here; there is abundant evidence that Mineta's times are off by as much as an hour, and yet do any of them make the obvious conclusion that Mineta was wrong?

WTC-7’s relative obscurity is itself puzzling. This high-rise building wasn’t hit by an airliner, and at 47 stories it would have stood as the tallest skyscraper in 30 states. When New York Times reporter James Glanz characterized the fall of WTC-7 as “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world” (NYT 11/29/01), he was factoring in media environment right after 9/11. But it wasn’t just a tsunami of shocking news that has caused WTC-7 to go underreported; it also posed big challenges to the Official Story.

The fall of WTC-7 should have been a bigger story because the circumstances of its demise were anything but “normal.” While the standard narrative says the skyscraper disintegrated because of fire damage, this seemingly simple hypothesis introduces more ambiguity than it dispels. Was fire really a sufficient cause, especially when one recalls that, before 9/11, no steel-framed high rise had ever come down because of fire?

The Troofers' continual amazement at the relative obscurity of WTC 7 is amusing.  Granted, on almost any other day it would have been headline news all across the country.  But on a day when two 110-story towers collapsed, killing over 2000 people, the collapse of a 47-story skyscraper that killed nobody is absolutely minor news that will be reported, if at all, in the 83rd paragraph of an 86-paragraph story.  I forget who it was, but some baseball player had the misfortune to pass away the same day Ty Cobb did; whose death do you think was headlined and whose got a brief mention at the end of the story?

Please Read This Peer-Reviewed Paper, Which Disproves the Argument that We Are Making

Things have been slow around here at the New World Order lunchroom, but the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, in their desperate attempt to turn out new fundraising material, can always be counted on to produce some new idiocy eventually.

Now they have decided to produce a serious of FAQs addressing questions people have regarding their crackpot theories, with the second asking:

FAQ # 2: What about the planes that slammed into the Twin Towers? Wouldn’t they have disturbed the demolition devices?

They then go on to argue that the collapse started in the location where the aircraft did not have its major impact, ignoring the whole point that the fires were the primary cause of the collapse, but that isn't the major idiocy of this article, which comes to the conclusion, once again on the magical properties of thermite:

Second, a demolition using advanced nanothermite material (which has been identified in the WTC dust) may help to explain why the fires started by the planes did not set off explosive devices. As noted by Dr. Steven Jones:

It is important to note that initiating the thermite reaction requires temperatures well above those achieved by burning jet fuel or office materials -- which is an advantage of using thermite charges over conventional monomolecular explosives such as TNT, RDX and PETN. Below is a photograph of an experiment performed by the author and colleagues at BYU in which a sample of thermite was heated to orange-hot temperature (about 1700 ºF). We demonstrated that the thermite reaction would not ignite at this high temperature. Later, the thermite reaction was triggered by burning a magnesium strip in contact with the thermite. An electrical superthermite "match" could have been used and remotely triggered via radio signal.

Now the truely ironic (and moronic) thing, is although they quote Steven Jones from a Journal of 9/11 Studies paper from 2006 regarding the ignition point of Thermite, they first link to the nanothermite paper (authored by Jones and others) where they tested their alleged nanothermite sample.  That paper had this to say about the ignition point of their "explosives":

3. Thermal Analysis using Differential Scanning  Calorimetry
 Red/gray chips were subjected to heating using a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). The data shown in Fig. (19) demonstrate that the red/gray chips from different WTC samples all ignited in the range 415-435 ˚C

This of course is several hundred degrees below the ignition point of Thermite cited above (1700 F = 927C), and well within the temperatures produced within a normal office fire, so their own experiment either disproves the conclusions of the article itself, or their assertion that this was Thermite, or in fact... both assertions.

H/T to NoahFence on the JREF forum for pointing out this latest bit of idiocy.