Loose change (and gold hit $728 an ounce today)
In response to my 5/9 posting, my friend Jason (yes, the one who arrived late to the 9/11 documentary :-) sent me a link to a documentary titled Loose Change. You can see it on Google video or check out their website where you can also download the movie or order the DVD.
I just watched the documentary which is an hour and 20 minutes long (and if you watch it to the end you'll understand the significance of my noting the price of gold). Like other videos I've seen, it highlights anomalies in the evidence surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon incidents. What was new for me was information about government plans to stage terrorist attacks on Washington, DC, as early as 1962 in order to justify certain military responses, such as invading Cuba, and discrepancies in the explanation for what happened to United flight 93.
Watching the interviews with eyewitnesses of the events of 9/11, it's easy to make one of two opposing arguments: on the one hand, that the shock and horror of that day led to confusing and contradictory accounts of what happened, and on the other, that that same confusion was then used to obscure what really happened.
Two scenes from the documentary stand out for me. First, the opening sequence detailing government plans for simulated terrorist attacks in the years before 2001 and the odd confluence of events that left America's air defenses so totally unprepared to deal with a real threat on 9/11. Second, the interview with the chief flight instructor at Freeway Airport who refused in August, 2001 to rent a single engine plane, to Hani Hanjour, the man whom the government says flew American 77 into the Pentagon. Why the refusal? Because Hanjour seemed insufficiently skilled as a pilot in a pre-rental test flight just a month before 9/11. And yet somehow he flew a Boeing 757 through such high-skilled maneuvers on his way to the Pentagon that air traffic controllers at Dulles Airport thought that flight 77 was a military plane.
The truth is out there...
I just watched the documentary which is an hour and 20 minutes long (and if you watch it to the end you'll understand the significance of my noting the price of gold). Like other videos I've seen, it highlights anomalies in the evidence surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon incidents. What was new for me was information about government plans to stage terrorist attacks on Washington, DC, as early as 1962 in order to justify certain military responses, such as invading Cuba, and discrepancies in the explanation for what happened to United flight 93.
Watching the interviews with eyewitnesses of the events of 9/11, it's easy to make one of two opposing arguments: on the one hand, that the shock and horror of that day led to confusing and contradictory accounts of what happened, and on the other, that that same confusion was then used to obscure what really happened.
Two scenes from the documentary stand out for me. First, the opening sequence detailing government plans for simulated terrorist attacks in the years before 2001 and the odd confluence of events that left America's air defenses so totally unprepared to deal with a real threat on 9/11. Second, the interview with the chief flight instructor at Freeway Airport who refused in August, 2001 to rent a single engine plane, to Hani Hanjour, the man whom the government says flew American 77 into the Pentagon. Why the refusal? Because Hanjour seemed insufficiently skilled as a pilot in a pre-rental test flight just a month before 9/11. And yet somehow he flew a Boeing 757 through such high-skilled maneuvers on his way to the Pentagon that air traffic controllers at Dulles Airport thought that flight 77 was a military plane.
The truth is out there...Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
-- from "Rebuilding America's Defenses," a September 2000 publication of the Project or the New American Century; the list of authors includes Paul Wolfowitz, formerly Assistant Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration and now President of the World Bank, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, formerly VP Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff (who resigned in October 2005 after being indicted by a grand jury)
Labels: movies
posted by michael at 11:46 AM
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