Fast & Loose?

I was watching the intro to Version 2 of Loose Change, when I caught something interesting. Avery has made a habit of filming newspapers and magazine articles, so that when he says "the New York Times wrote..." it's there in front of you. But check out the film at 6:09-6:15. He says:

"September 10, 2001: Newsweek reports that a number of top Pentagon brass cancelled their flight plans for the next morning."

He zooms in on the supposed text, but here's a screen cap just before the zoom:



What's that funny thing up at the top left? It's a little blurry in the film, but isn't that "Blog This!" You can see the same thing at the top left of this blog. That's right, Avery's presenting something to you as coming from Newsweek that's actually coming from a blog. The whole thing is only a 5 second segment, and he quickly dissolves to discourage you from discovering that on your own, but here's the blog:



I think you can see there have been a few changes to the blog (most notably the removal of the Blog This! part and the "Headline" that proved Avery's point, but the blogroll looks remarkably similar--911 Conspiracy, New World Order, plus of course the "Free Press International" bit.

He said he was citing Newsweek and instead he was citing a blog which claimed to have a transcript of something Newsweek said before they "removed it from their website", as you could read if you were Evelyn Woods. So let's stop the tape:



"Newsweek removed the story from the internet, but you can read the transcript below." Transcript? That's a bunch of hooey--you only transcribe what is initially provided in an oral format. If you copied and pasted it, then why didn't you also screen capture it? And anyway, Avery doesn't even trust the transcript enough to show us the passages he thinks are so critical--the "headline" (which is really the blog title) is supposed to be enough. And he certainly doesn't trust us enough to tell us "the truth" even as he supposedly believes it--that Newsweek was not standing by the story even if we assume it was written at one point.

No kidding, now I see why even some of the nutbar 9-11 conspiracists oppose this movie. The good news is that it seems to possess rich veins of falsehood and deception for anybody willing to dig.

We'd like to get some more volunteers to tackle specific claims in the movie. We'd especially like to find some people willing to transcribe small (say 5-10 minutes) segments of the two different versions of the movie.