This just in; fun reading. The makers of Loose Change debating the Popular Mechanics debunkers on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now on September 11. You can find it at www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/11/1345203.


Monday, September 11th, 2006
EXCLUSIVE...9/11 Debate: Loose Change Filmmakers vs. Popular Mechanics Editors of "Debunking 9/11 Myths"

September 11, 2001 - five years after the attacks many people are asking questions about what happened on that day in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Websites, articles, books and documentaries have put forward a variety of alternate theories to the government's account of what happened. The most popular of these is a documentary called "Loose Change." Now, a book dealing with many of these theories has just been published by the magazine Popular Mechanics, it's called "Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts." In a Democracy Now! national broadcast exclusive, we host a debate between the filmmakers of Loose Change and the editors of Popular Mechanics on 9/11. [includes rush transcript]
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We continue with our 9/11 coverage today on this fifth anniversary of the attacks. Last week we heard from New Yorkers calling on the federal government to stop ignoring the health effects of the attacks on the World Trade Center. A major new study of 9/11 finds that nearly seven out of every ten first responders at Ground Zero now suffer from chronic lung ailments. We also spoke with a man whose brother was killed at the World Trade Center and is now spearheading a movement against President Bush's war on terror. And we looked at September 11th 100 years ago, when Gandhi launched Satyagraha, the modern non-violent resistance movement that continues to this day.

Today, a debate about 9/11. Ever since the attacks took place, many people across the country have raised a number of questions about what actually happened on that day in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Websites, articles, books and documentaries have put forward a variety of alternate theories to the government's account of what happened.

The most popular of these is a documentary called "Loose Change." The 80-minute film first appeared on the web in April 2005. Since then, it has had at least 10 million viewings and is described by Vanity Fair as "the first Internet blockbuster." As the popularity of "Loose Change" has soared, a book dealing with the questions it and others have raised about 9/11 has been published. It's called "Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts" put together by the editors of the magazine, Popular Mechanics.

Today, we talk about some of the 9/11 theories and the arguments against them.

* Dylan Avery, writer and director of "Loose Change."
* Jason Bermas, researcher for "Loose Change."
* James Meigs, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics. Part of the editorial team that produced "Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts."
* David Dunbar, executive editor of Popular Mechanics. Part of the editorial team that produced "Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts."
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AMY GOODMAN: Today, we bring you a national exclusive: a debate about 9/11. Ever since the attacks took place, many people across the country have raised a number of questions about what actually happened on that day in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Websites, articles, books and documentaries have put forward a variety of alternate theories to the government's account of what happened. The most popular of these is a documentary called Loose Change. The 80-minute film first appeared on the web April 2005. Since then, it's had at least 10 million viewings and is described by Vanity Fair as “the first internet blockbuster.”

As the popularity of Loose Change has soared, a book dealing with the questions it and others have raised about 9/11 has been published. It’s called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts. It’s put together by the editors of the magazine Popular Mechanics.

So today, we'll talk about some of the theories and the arguments against them. We're joined in our studio by the filmmakers of Loose Change. Dylan Avery is the writer and director of the film and Jason Bermas is the film’s researcher. From Popular Mechanics, we're joined by David Dunbar, the executive editor of the magazine. He led the editorial team that produced Debunking 9/11 Myths. James Meigs is also with us, the magazine's editor-in-chief. Before we go to all of them, let's go to a clip of Loose Change that deals with the attacks on the Pentagon on 9/11.

NARRATOR: 10:06 a.m., Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Flight 93 was en route from Newark, New Jersey to California with 45 passengers when it went off course at 8:56 over northeastern Ohio. According to the official story, Flight 93 was en route to Washington, D.C., when it was overpowered by a group of passengers and crashed into an abandoned strip mine in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Out of all the events of 9/11, the one that has caused the most confusion is Flight 93: it was shot down/it wasn't shot down. However, evidence suggests that perhaps Flight 93 was nowhere near Shanksville.

FOX NEWS REPORTER: I wanna get quickly to Chris Chaniki. He's a photographer with the Pittsburgh affiliate, a FOX affiliate. He was back there just a couple of minutes ago. And Chris, I've seen the pictures. It looks like there’s nothing there, except for a hole in the ground.

CHRIS CHANIKI: Basically that's right. The only thing you could see from where we were was a big gouge in the earth and some broken trees. You could see some people working, walking around in the area. But from where we could see, there wasn't much left.

FOX NEWS REPORTER: Any large pieces of debris at all?

CHRIS CHANIKI: No. There was nothing, nothing that you could distinguish that a plane had crashed there.

FOX NEWS REPORTER: Smoke, fire?

CHRIS CHANIKI: Nothing. It was absolutely quiet. It was actually very quiet. Nothing going on down there. No smoke, no fire, just a couple of people walking around. They looked like part of the NTSB crew, walking around looking at the pieces.

FOX NEWS REPORTER: How big would you say that hole was?

CHRIS CHANIKI: From my estimates, I would guess it was probably about 20 to 15 feet long and probably about ten feet wide.

FOX NEWS REPORTER: What could you see on the ground, if anything, other than dirt and ash?

CHRIS CHANIKI: You couldn't see anything. You could just see dirt, ash and people walking around.

NARRATOR: Wally Miller, a Somerset County coroner: “It looked like somebody just dropped a bunch of metal out of the sky.” In the Washington Post: “It looked like someone took a scrap truck, dug a ten-foot ditch and dumped trash into it. And as for the passengers: “I stopped being coroner after about 20 minutes, because there were no bodies there.” In the Pittsburgh Review: “I have not to this day seen a single drop of blood, not a drop.” It would seem that on one day, for the second time in history, an entire plane along with its passengers disappeared upon impact.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of Loose Change. We'll talk with the filmmakers, as well as the editors of Popular Mechanics, when we come back from break, and then we’ll take on the issue of what happened in Washington, the question of what hit the Pentagon. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we take on the issue of what happened on September 11th, 2001, our guests are Dylan Avery, writer and director of Loose Change; Jason Bermas, researcher for the film; James Meigs is also with us, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics; and David Dunbar, executive editor of Popular Mechanics, who led the editorial team that produced the book, Debunking 9/11 Myths. Jim Meigs, you’re the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics; your response to this excerpt of Loose Change about what happened in Shanksville?

JAMES MEIGS: You know, that clip is really interesting, because it shows how slickly made this film is, how compelling it is at asking a series of sort of hanging questions and putting some spooky music behind it and making it sound as if someone’s covering up these facts. But a brave researcher can dig down and put all the pieces together. In fact, there's answers to all those questions.

If you look at the sources that were used throughout that clip, they’re all things that came up in the first day or two after the attacks. In some cases, somebody is standing across the field and saying, “I don't see a plane.” Well, when a plane strikes the ground at 500 miles an hour, flying almost straight down, there typically isn't much visible above ground.

They also quote the coroner in the Shanksville area. We talked to the coroner. He had the horrific job of collecting the body parts and cataloging and performing all the necessary tests. Those bodies were identified. The plane wreckage in the pieces -- the tiny pieces it was in after it had hit the ground was, you know, collected from the hole, cataloged.

And the black box was recovered. And we know what went on, because of the records of the voice cockpit recorder, and in this case, quite a few phone calls from the aircraft itself to various people on the ground. So we know a lot of what happened on Flight 93.

The film is alleging that no plane crashed there at all. The people were sent off somewhere to somehow be disposed of. If you are going to allege something so far beyond what a huge body of evidence would suggest is the truth, then you do need to pull together some evidence. And so, we fully support asking questions and being skeptical, but if you’re going to ask questions, you also have to look for the answers. And when you get answers, you can't ignore them.

AMY GOODMAN: James Bermas of Loose Change -- Jason Bermas.

JASON BERMAS: I'd just like to thank you for the opportunity to take on the government's lies and Popular Mechanics, which is a Hearst yellow journalism publication’s lies, as well. And I would just say, look for yourself. This is an open field, and for the first time in history, we have a crater and no plane there. Look at any other plane crash, and you’ll find a tail section, a wing section. There were reports that this actually was strewn out over eight miles, and we have videotape of smaller pieces of debris. The coroner speaks for himself. We have the Pittsburgh Gazette, the editor-in-chief there, saying, again, there’s nothing there that looks like a plane.

Again, don’t believe us. Go to seeloosechange.com right now and watch for free. But take a look. All those people -- you would normally have NTSB people in blue jackets to get the plane parts and put them back together. That's what happened with TWA-800 that was in the ocean. And you don’t have that. You have people in hazmat uniforms. Why? So all’s we’re saying is, look, there's no plane in this open field at all. There's a ten-foot crater by 16-foot, and there’s just smoke there. So where is this plane? That's all we're saying.

AMY GOODMAN: What about what the coroner said, collecting body parts?

JASON BERMAS: Well, he's never addressed us. And if you look at all of his media accounts in the days after, when he was first asked, again, he said there were no body parts, and to this day he has not seen a single drop of blood. So, again, I would say that's more reliable than, you know, four years after the fact being contacted.

JAMES MEIGS: Did you talk to him?

JASON BERMAS: He won't address us. Basically we have had people contact him, and he hangs up on us.

JAMES MEIGS: I find typically when we investigate these things, it's very easy to find public records, to find the reports from all the various agencies that have investigated these accidents. The transcripts of the voice cockpit recorder have been released. In many cases, again, the sources, Jason, those are -- newspaper articles are written day of, day after, a couple of days after.

DYLAN AVERY: No, one of them was a year after the fact.

JAMES MEIGS: Perhaps.

DYLAN AVERY: No, it was.

JAMES MEIGS: You know what it was like on those days, and you know how chaotic it was. You know how much misinformation typically comes out in the early hours of a major news event. Over time, with further research and good reporting, you can sift through those things, and you can make progress and get into the truth. Typically, what we see on conspiracy websites is citations that go back to the earliest moments, when the least information was available, and virtually no reference to the voluminous research which was done to follow up.

AMY GOODMAN: Dylan, what about the issue of cell phones?

DYLAN AVERY: The issue of cell phones is that for a majority of Flight 93’s flight, it was flying over cruising altitude, and a number of these -- now, a majority of the phone calls were coming from air phones. But the cell phone calls were coming from cruising altitude. Now, it is pretty much impossible in 2001 to sustain an extended conversation over a cell phone at cruising altitude from a commercial airliner. But, I mean, that's not our strongest evidence. I mean, that’s just one of the many things about that day that don't add up to us.

And we haven't gotten to hear the cockpit voice recorder. We haven't gotten to hear any of these alleged phone calls. I mean, the government is cherry-picking the evidence that it releases to the government. And I feel that if our government was truly attacked by surprise and we had absolutely no inclination of the attacks, they would not be so reticent to release the 84 videos from the Pentagon, the cockpit voice recorder of Flight 93. The list of things that the government is holding from us goes on.

AMY GOODMAN: David Dunbar.

DAVID DUNBAR: With regard to the cell phones, we did what any reporter would do. We talked to experts in the field. And, in fact, cell phones do work at that altitude, up to 35,000 feet and higher. And --

DYLAN AVERY: In 2001?

DAVID DUNBAR: In 2001, and it might be instructive for you to talk to some of the cell phone experts. There are a lot of dropped calls, because the plane is moving at high-speed and the hand-off sometimes get dropped. That’s true, and we know from the public record that, in fact, a lot of the cell phone calls were cut off. And most of the phone calls were made from the air phones. But nevertheless, talk to the experts, and you’ll find out that you can make a cell phone call from a commercial plane.

JASON BERMAS: If I may address that for one moment? If that's true, then why in 2004 did American Airlines spend tens of thousands of dollars to put cell phone towers in their planes so people could make those calls? Why spend tens of thousands of dollars three years after the fact, if they worked so well on September 11? What he's saying is a total lie.

AMY GOODMAN: James Meigs.

JAMES MEIGS: We didn't say they worked well. We said they worked. And if you look at the record, many of the calls were dropped, they were incomplete, but especially over rural areas. You know, if you think about a cell phone tower, it can cover a couple hundred square miles. That coverage area goes up into the sky, as well as horizontally across the ground.

DYLAN AVERY: Actually, they’re designed to point downward.

JAMES MEIGS: The reason that they’ve improved the system was to avoid the dropped calls and to isolate the cell phone transmissions from any possible interference with the avionics.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re not going to cover any issue comprehensively. We have a lot of issues to cover, and I'd like to turn now to an excerpt --

DYLAN AVERY: Yeah, the cell phone is a weak argument.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you say that?

DYLAN AVERY: I mean, it's not our best evidence. I mean, there’s tons of things you can discuss besides the cell phone.

JASON BERMAS: Just the fact the plane is not there, I think, is our best evidence, and anyone can see that.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's turn to the Pentagon right now, in the excerpt of Loose Change that deals with the attack on the Pentagon.


JAMIE McINTYRE, Sr. Pentagon Correspondent: It might have appeared that way, but from my close-up inspection, there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. The only site is the actual site of the building that's crashed in. And as I said, the only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you can pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage, nothing like that anywhere around, which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon.

NARRATOR: The official explanation is that the intense heat from the jet fuel vaporized the entire plane. Indeed, from these pictures it seems that there's absolutely no trace of a fully loaded Boeing 757. But if the fire was hot enough to incinerate a jumbo jet, then how could investigators identify 184 out of 189 people found at the Pentagon. The Armed Forces DNA identification laboratory, which was responsible for the task, was also responsible for identifying the dead in Shanksville. Keep that in mind for later.

So what is a Boeing 757 made of? The exact details are not public knowledge. But what we do know is that Flight 77 had two Rolls Royce RB211 engines, made of steel and titanium alloy, which are nine feet in diameter, 12 feet long and weigh six tons each. Titanium has a melting point of 1,688 degrees Celsius. Jet fuel is a hydrocarbon, which can maintain a constant temperature of 1,120 degrees Celsius after 40 minutes, but only if the fuel source is maintained. The fuel would have burned off immediately upon impact. Therefore, it is scientifically impossible that 12 tons of steel and titanium was vaporized by jet fuel.

AMY GOODMAN: Dylan Avery, the narrator and filmmaker of Loose Change, a film that is getting tremendous attention. Millions of people have downloaded it. Dylan and Jason are here in New York in this weekend of the anniversary giving out thousands of copies of the film. The issue of the Pentagon, David Dunbar, executive editor of Popular Mechanics?

DAVID DUNBAR: Well, the clip starts with a red herring, claiming that experts say the plane was vaporized, which is untrue. And in addition, in our book and I believe even in the film, there is evidence of debris on the lawn of the Pentagon. There's plenty of debris that's been found inside the building. There were -- the largest chunk was probably the landing gear that punched through the C-ring to make that 16-foot exit hole. So there's plenty of physical evidence, including the flight data recorder and forensics that were done, that there was a 757 that struck the Pentagon. And I'm still waiting, after five years, to see any physical evidence of any kind that would indicate that it was a missile or anything else that hit the Pentagon.

AMY GOODMAN: Dylan Avery.

DYLAN AVERY: Well, I mean, we've been waiting five years to see clear video of what actually happened at the Pentagon. And you guys are coming on and saying that you’re experts on the fact, when nobody has seen what has happened. You guys claim to have seen photographs that have been released just to you. And I want to know why those haven't been released to the public.

AMY GOODMAN: What photographs have you seen?

DAVID DUNBAR: Can I add a point about that? I am not coming on this show and presenting myself as an expert in metallurgy or structural engineering. I'm coming on the show as the editor of this book. And what do we do? We do what you would do, Amy, or any other journalist would do. We talk to people who are experts in the field. And that's what we did with this book in order to debunk these 9/11 myths. I highly recommend it for documentary filmmakers or anybody else who wants to look at the data. That’s what we did. We talked to people who were there at the scene. We talked to structural engineers. We talked to aviation crash experts.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Berman.

JASON BERMAS: Ms. Goodman, I'd just like to address the fact that they have claimed that they have 84 videos through a FOIA request pertaining to what did strike the Pentagon. But the bottom line is, nothing should have struck the Pentagon. We know through the 9/11 Commission testimony that Norman Mineta, the head of the Transportation Department, was in a bunker with Cheney prior to the Pentagon strike. Now, this is the only three-and-a-half minutes out of the hundreds of hours that’s been censored by C-SPAN. Why? Because he says he's in a bunker with Cheney, and an aide walks in and says, “Sir, the plane is 50 miles out. Sir, the plane is 30 miles out. Do the orders still stand?” Cheney snaps his head around and says, “Of course, the orders still stand.”

By the time it was ten miles out, it was too late, and the Pentagon was struck. That is a direct stand down order. And if you listen to the NORAD tapes, later on some of these people are actually tracking these planes, asking to shoot them down, and they’re getting a negative shoot-down order. Why is that significant? Well, in June of 2001, Cheney signs a DOD memo putting shoot-down orders in his hands, Rumsfeld' hands and Bush's hands alone, where it was standard operating procedure if colonels were to intercept these planes and they saw a threat, they could do the shoot-down order.

JAMES MEIGS: Let's back up a little bit.

Second half of transcript continued below in Rosebud #12: