Just How Dumb is Dylan Avery?

Pat has already started talking about the James Whale radio show. The George Monbiot vs David Ray Griffin part is rather interesting. Although no two people could probably have any less in common politically than me and Monbiot, he does call them as he sees them. He does well in not getting into the minutiae of evidence as Griffin wants him too, since he knows that he can throw out a overwhelming array of unconnected assertions, but when Monbiot asks him to actually take a stand on something and form a coherent theory, he gets indignant.

The second part features Dylan Avery and Tim Sparke. Sparke is a full blown truther of the highest caliber. One post would not be long enough to list all the ridiculous things he says, including the claim, given up by most of the truthers long ago, that bin Laden's relatives were spirited out of the country secretly, by the "Secret Service." Sparkes also claims that Norman Mineta, whose name he repeatedly butchers, told the 9/11 Commission that he heard Dick Cheney order that "nothing be done to flight 77" avoiding even the usual truther spin on that claim. He also repeatedly claims that it is established fact that the hijackers trained at US military bases, avoiding even the mildly hedged phrasing normally used by truthers.

Avery though, continues to be mind-numbingly dense. I was struck mostly by this claim, repeated from Loose Change: the Final Insult, but with an even more elaborate twist added in the short time since the movie came out. Now I see why they have needed 4 versions of the movie.

The second thing that people are going to see, is the connection between, and widely reported, between the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence agency, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, and the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Widely reported? All you guys do is complain that the media is part of the cover-up and won't report the "truth" on 9/11, and now all of a sudden this story is widely reported? Bizarre. Notice that there now were hijackers. They appear and disappear at random. Dylan continues:

There was a $100,000 wire transfer that was sent from Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmed who was the head of the ISI at the time. This $100,000 was sent to Mohammed Atta back in the summer of 2000. This wire transfer has been verified by the Wall Street Journal, the FBI, it has been reported on by the Times of India. Jason Bermas, our associate he confronted Joseph Biden and a number of other people, who were present at the meeting on the morning of 9/11 where Mahmoud Ahmed was, and they were actually discussing this transfer .

OK Dylan, maybe you missed it when we last mentioned this, but about the only part you got right there was when you said it had been "reported on by the Times of India". The FBI did not verify this, and neither did the Wall Street Journal, all they did was link to the story. As for the part where Joseph Biden was confessing to Bermas, well I think someone is having delusions of grandeur.

Now when should we expect Loose Change Version 5, to correct all the lies you are still telling?

George Monbiot: Griffin and Avery are Frauds and Charlatans

Bingo! I haven't listened to the entire program yet, but left-wing columnist George Monbiot debated DRG and Dylan Avery on the James Whale radio program, TalkSport. Monbiot does a pretty good job on the debunking aspects and (mostly) succeeds in avoiding getting caught up in the minutiae that the Troofers specialize in. But at about 25 minutes in Monbiot gives us a stand up and cheer moment. Talking about the many changes in the various versions of Loose Change (he's seen Final Cut):

Monbiot: But what infuriates me about Tim (Sparke, Loose Change executive producer) and about David and these other people is that when their first story collapses, they don't acknowledge that fact, they just pass on to the next crazy story, without recognizing that the first story has been swept away from under their feet, and that to me is the mark of a fraud and a charlatan.

Whale: Are you accusing the moviemakers of being frauds and charlatans?

Monbiot: Yes.

An in-your-face slam-dunk on David Ray Griffin who is reduced to sputtering about his "evidence". The segment comes up as Monbiot hits on the ever-changing nature of the "Truth" as revealed in the various Loose Change versions. Monbiot stings Griffin well by asking him to come down as to whether he agrees with Loose Change II, which came down heavily on the "no-planer" side of the Pentagon issue, or Loose Change FC, which does some modest debunking of the "no-planes" theory. Of course, Griffin conveniently professes agnosticism on the issue.

You can download the MP3 here; it's a 90-meg file. I am not sure if the entire three hour program is dedicated to 9-11 issues.

In my previous post, I pointed out a video that I assumed was a clever parody of Loose Change espousing "no-planer" type theories. Of course, as several commenters pointed out, it was actually Loose Change I. Which proves Monbiot's point; Dylan has never acknowledged the errors he made in his earlier films, despite the fact that they now look pretty ludicrous. Indeed, the last official comment Dylan made on the nutty "pod" theory was that he still believed it (at the end of their video on the 9-11-05 Trooferfest).

Update: I originally said it was BBC radio; I should have just said it was British radio.

Griffin Responds to Monbiot

Over at Information Clearing House.

If my books are moronic nonsense, then people who have endorsed them must be morons. Would Monbiot really wish to apply this label to Michel Chossudovsky, Richard Falk, Ray McGovern, Michael Meacher, John McMurtry, Marcus Raskin, Rosemary Ruether, Howard Zinn, and the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who, after a stint in the CIA, became one of America’s leading civil rights, anti-war, and anti-nuclear activists?

Monbiot might not wish to do so, but I'll happily call all those guys chowderheads.

The Twin Towers came straight down, which means that each building’s 287 steel columns all had to fail simultaneously; to believe this could happen without explosives is to believe in magic.

At the onset of each tower’s collapse, steel beams were ejected out as far as 600 feet; to believe that these horizontal ejections could be explained by gravitational energy, which is vertical, is to believe in magic.

Which is it, David? Did they come straight down, or did they spread debris "as far as 600 feet"?

Virtually all of the concrete in the towers was pulverized into extremely fine dust particles; to believe that fire plus gravity could have done this is to believe in magic.

And to believe that controlled demolition would have pulverized the floors (the main location of concrete in the building is to believe in magic.

He pulls a nifty little sleight of hand here:

Pools of molten metal were found under each building. Because steel does not begin to melt until it reaches about 1,540°C and yet the fires could not have gotten over 1000°C, to accept the fire theory is to believe in magic.

And this might be relevant if Griffin could prove that the "molten metal" was "molten steel".

Well-Written Nonsense...

Is still nonsense. Kurt Nimmo takes on George Monbiot:

Not unlike his brethren, most notably Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn, Monbiot buys the Ward Churchill version of events in regard to the attacks of September 11, 2001—that is to say Osama and a small number of cave-dwelling Wahhabi fanatics magically made NORAD stand down and defied the immutable laws of physics, thus delivering one to the conclusion a piece of paper cannot be slipped between Monbiot and the moonstruck followers of the neocons, as they all buy the same Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

I would venture to say that you cannot slip a piece of paper between Monbiot and the neocons on the law of gravity, on the fact that the earth rotates around the sun, on the fact that the sky is blue. I note the usual "cave-dwelling" comment about Al Qaeda; they were not living in a cave prior to 9-11.

He doesn't really have an argument with the substance of what Monbiot writes, so he concentrates on arguments that Monbiot is serving his corporate masters. It's the usual refrain from those whose ideas are so crazy that they can't even get the far Left to endorse them.

Nimmo writes well, but in service to a lousy cause. I note that he has more than the usual share of nutbar websites on his blogroll, including Ziopedia, World Socialist Website, What Really Happened, Wayne Madsen, American Free Press and Prison Planet. Looks like he's yet another Lefty Jew-basher.

Yes, George Monbiot Is On Our Payroll

Sheesh, it took me long enough to find the accounting code for Left Gatekeepers, but now that I look, I do see George and Noam and Alex and Matt down there. Hey, when you're paying off 75% of the structural engineers in the world it can get tough to find the mere columnists!

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." "Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and special branch recruit agents?" "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 United States government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my leftwing 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.

Hey, George, we're only pretending to be furious so we can negotiate a better deal when your contract comes up next quarter. The Loose Change boys are insisting on a bigger cut this time around and it's gotta come out of somebody's pocket!

Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements 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.

Climate change? George, we own climate change. You haven't noticed that Halliburton controls 90% of the solar power industry?

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.

Heheh, welcome to our world, George! In the first few months of 9-11 debunking I was always concerned that we were going to butt up against the hard cases sooner or later, the folks who really knew their stuff. Now I know why Gravy's so confident; there are no hard cases.

Loose Change Fever

The man about whom the term "Moonbat" was coined, George Monbiot, isn't batty enough to fall for the Loosers:

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 US, 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 that 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.

He does draw on some excellent debunkings, but in the end he goes for the Maddox conundrum:

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.

And one that has been proposed on more than one occasion! Think about it; every time we see Dylan he's wearing black--as in the Men In Black.