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The Yoda of 9/11

Continued from page 6

Published on August 09, 2007

In the spin room after a Republican debate in early June, troofer Matt Lepacek aggressively questioned Giuliani pollster Ed Goeas, was booted from the room, and was later arrested after essentially challenging a couple of cops to slap the cuffs on. The incident, which seemed an overreaction by the police at the time, hit the Drudge Report and was the talk of the troofer community, with Lepacek as the movement's new hero.

  • Religion professor David Ray Griffin, author of Debunking 9/11 Debunking, joins South ParkÂ’s Mr. Mackey on the hunt for whoever dropped the
    Religion professor David Ray Griffin, author of Debunking 9/11 Debunking, joins South ParkÂ’s Mr. Mackey on the hunt for whoever dropped the "urinal deuce."

Subject(s):

troofers, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Pat Curley, Screw Loose Change
Curley thinks it's only a matter of time until some WACer takes it a step further and goes Taxi Driver on someone's ass.

It's intriguing that prototypical, foaming-at-the-mouth radio firebrand Alex Jones regards the Oklahoma City bombing as — you guessed it — an inside job by our own government. In his 2002 book, 911: Descent into Tyranny, Jones writes, "There are staggering amounts of evidence which we will cover in this book proving the fact that the government had prior knowledge and was instrumental in engineering the attacks on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City."

Staggering amounts of evidence? Similar claims are made by the troofers in defense of their 9/11 notions. The 9/11 Commission Report and the 43 volumes of the study into the collapse of the World Trade Center by National Institute of Standards and Technology are considered to be worthless whitewash by the troofers. The institute is studying the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, which is often cited by troofers as proof that their claims are correct. But who are we kidding? No amount of evidence to the contrary will make them relinquish their core beliefs: 9/11 was an inside job; the Pentagon was hit by a missile or a drone plane; the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the product of controlled demolitions, and United Flight 93 was a colossal hoax.

The troofers don't really have any "evidence" on their side. They have arguments, anomalies, beliefs. The efforts of 9/11 researcher Mark Roberts are instructive. His Loose Change Second Edition Viewer Guide goes through Loose Change line by line, refuting nearly every assertion made by the filmmakers. He counts 81 errors of fact, and "345 instances of conjecture not supported by evidence, logical fallacies, uses of images that do not support the conclusions being drawn. And that's only counting errors of commission. The errors of omission are even more serious."

Roberts' full report is offered in a link right at the top of Screw Loose Change. Read it and you'll never take Dylan Avery and his fellow Loosers seriously again. Roberts has photos of the plane parts Loose Change says are not at the Pentagon crash site. He exposes dumb errors like the filmmakers getting the number of passengers wrong on United Flight 93, and refutes such lies in the film as "The Twin Towers came down in nearly freefall speed," by pointing out the obvious: photographs and video of the towers collapsing show debris from them falling faster than the bulk of the towers themselves. Additionally, he reveals one of the film's sources as being the anti-Semitic American Free Press and its discredited reporter, now felon-on-the-lam Christopher Bollyn.

Roberts, an avowed liberal, blasts the film for taking out of context and misinterpreting statements made by the coroner on hand after the United 93 crash, Wally Miller. Loose Change would have us believe no body parts or plane parts survived Flight 93.

But 1,500 human remains were found. All onboard were identified. And 95 percent of the plane was recovered.

Even more interesting was a face-off between Roberts and Jason Bermas and Dylan Avery when they appeared on the NYC cable access show Hardfire. Roberts very patiently and confidently blows the filmmakers back to Oneonta with an understanding of the facts that practically makes him the Obi-Wan of debunkers. It's during this debate that Avery makes a startling admission.

"We made that film essentially as a bunch of kids," explains Avery, now two years older than when his film came out. "That's the reality of the situation; we were a bunch of kids tackling a subject far beyond the scope of any one documentary. I would be the first to admit that our film definitely contained errors, it still does contain some dubious claims, and it does come to some conclusions that are not 100 percent backed up by the facts."

But hey, don't take his word for it. Read Popular Mechanics' Debunking 9/11 Myths or watch the BBC episode of its series The Conspiracy Files, which takes on the 9/11 conspiracy theories and thoroughly trashes them. Or just tune in Monday, August 20 as The History Channel takes on the troofers with a new doc, The 9/11 Conspiracies.

Yet the movement continues to draw wombats to the tunnel, loons to the lake. Even the most respected of troofers, upon close inspection, end up having soiled pedigrees. The most august of the pack are retired theology professor David Ray Griffin, author of Debunking 9/11 Debunking, and Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.

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