Loose change

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Movie
Original title Loose change
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2006
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Dylan Avery
production Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas, Korey Rowe

Loose Change (literally "(loose) change" or "change", roughly equivalent to "detached, incipient change") is an amateur film first produced in the USA in 2005 , which was presented as a documentary film and spreading conspiracy theories on September 11, 2001 . According to this, parts of the US government are said to have planned and carried out the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 themselves (“inside job”).

Dylan Avery is the screenwriter, storyteller and director ; he, Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas are the film producers of the first edition; for the second Matthew Brown came in. Your film is largely based on video footage from television broadcasters and amateur filmmakers. In the second edition (2nd edition) and its revision from 2006 (2nd recut) , some passages contested by copyright and statements criticized as false were omitted, other passages were elaborated and their statements confirmed. This version is the best-known and, with around 10 million views, the most frequently seen conspiracy-theoretical film about the terrorist attacks. It was revised again in 2007 (Final Cut) and 2009 (An American Edition) . The conspiracy theses contained therein have been refuted many times.

The production team

Dylan Avery is from Oneonta, New York . Korey Rowe is also from Oneonta and served as a US soldier for six months in Kandahar , Afghanistan, and one year in Kuwait and Iraq before production . Jason Bermas is a graphic designer , film producer, and webmaster for the group, also based in Oneonta, New York. He often appeared as the team's spokesman in later public debates about the film.

Avery was turned down twice from Purchase College Film School . Then he planned a fictional film about a group of young people who discovered that 9/11 was an "inside job". During the research for this film, he later stated, he had come to the conviction that it was indeed the case and that the true background was being covered up. So he changed the concept of the film to a documentary, and after several conversations, his childhood friend Korey Rowe got on board. Jason Bermas became the researcher for the film.

After its release, Avery, Rowe and Bermas started an independent film production company called Louder than Words . The society supports the " 9/11 Truth Movement " and holds annual protests on September 11th in New York City . Avery and Bernas have appeared at its events since 2006, as well as on some mainstream media talk shows.

Frames

The first version, released in April 2005, lasted an hour and 22 minutes and cost about $ 2,000. She alleged that under the fuselage of United 175 (the plane that flew into the South Tower of the World Trade Center ) there was a film visible on film evidence that the planes were used as bomb carriers.

The second, heavily revised version was produced for $ 6,000 and released in November 2005. It contained a new introduction and additional video Avery bought on eBay . The hull thesis was cut out and replaced by the thesis that the aircraft were remote-controlled drones disguised as passenger aircraft . The first version, according to which flight UA 93 was shot down by a fighter jet , was replaced by the thesis that the plane landed at Hopkins Airport in Cleveland and that the approximately 200 passengers had been evacuated to a NASA building. Only this version received more attention after it was shown in Binghamton, New York on the local broadcaster WICZ-TV of the FOX network. In August 2006 the 2nd recut version was published, which changed further details and omitted film excerpts from the first plane impact, which came from a video by the brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet . On May 26, 2006, they threatened a copyright lawsuit by registered mail.

In July 2007 Loose Change Second Edition was released as a 2-DVD set (also in Germany) in stores; In some cases material is missing because not all rights holders gave their consent for the DVD. Since November 11, 2007, the Loose Change: Final Cut version can be downloaded from the producers' website for a stream usage fee. It was produced as a theatrical version by Alex Jones and Tim Sparke. Actor Daniel Sunjata was the spokesperson for the Second Edition and the Final Cut . In 2009 a third version was released under the title Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup , which was also released on DVD. The final cut version in particular is distributed on the Internet, also with subtitles in several languages. Copycats have given their videos on other topics the catchphrase "Loose Change ...".

Critics such as Mark Iradian and George Monbiot pointed out that the creators themselves had already invalidated their claim to a “documentation” and representation of “truth” with several considerably divergent versions. Avery had destroyed all trust in the seriousness of his film reporting through the misuse of copyrighted material, the need for constant self-corrections and the manipulative use of sources. Due to numerous distortions and falsifications, the film could not be classified in the category of a documentary, but had to be classified as an agitprop means to recruit activists against the then US administration under George W. Bush .

content

Opening and closing credits

Loose Change underscores publicly available film material and photographs with hip-hop music and the voice of a speaker (in the original: Dylan Avery). The opening credits refer to copied, partly unlicensed footage, the authors of which do not share the views of Loose Change . Much of the photo and film material comes from CNN , NBC , the Fox News Channel and other television stations. The film is dedicated to those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. Some undated quotes from government officials claim sometimes no, sometimes many, warnings about the attacks. Finally, Jason Bermas calls for peaceful demonstrations at Ground Zero before the American Scholar's Symposium in Los Angeles on June 25, 2006 .

Operation Northwoods

The film begins with Operation Northwoods of 1962, which became known in 1998 through the release of CIA documents. The United States Department of Defense was planning a false flag operation to simulate Cuban terrorist attacks on US civil and military ships and passenger planes in order to create a pretext for the invasion of Cuba. However, President John F. Kennedy rejected the plan; this was not carried out.

The film only shows the planning of the unexecuted action, without making any connection to the events of September 11, 2001. He suggests that these too could have been a terrorist attack faked by the US military.

Preparation sequence

Over the next six minutes or so, the film strings together various events in quick succession without explaining their relationship to the attacks:

  • In 1984 the aviation authority made take-off, flight and landing attempts with an unmanned remote-controlled passenger aircraft,
  • In 1997 the WTC was included in an anti-terror program,
  • In 1998 a drone was successfully tested,
  • In 1999, the flight control authority NORAD simulated aircraft hijackings,
  • In 2000 the WTC supervision received a manual on how to deal with weapons of mass destruction found in the building,
  • In the same year, the Ministry of Defense made a model of a plane crash on his building,
  • later in the year NORAD ruled out this case as unrealistic,
  • the possible downing of hijacked aircraft was placed under the direct orders of the Defense Minister in June 2001,
  • Attorney General Ashcroft received FBI agents to protect against kidnappers on his official flights,
  • Osama bin Laden was in a hospital in Dubai in July 2001 and met a CIA agent there. The film omits that bin Laden later rejected this newspaper report as being invented.

In this sequence, the film also quotes a sentence from a 90-page strategy paper from 2000 by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which included some members of the then US government:

"... 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 ."

The film leaves out which revolutionary transformation process was meant here: namely, new information technologies that would change society and the military worldwide. An expansion of missile defense was therefore called for, not conventional interventions with ground troops in countries where civil war is possible or in progress.

Pentagon impact

The following is a depiction of the impact on the Pentagon. The film claims that the destroyed building facade is too narrow for a Boeing 757 to hit; you don't see any aircraft debris or damage to the area. Too few parts were recovered to prove the impact of a Boeing 757. A turbine wheel found could not come from the Boeing auxiliary power unit , but rather from a Douglas A-3 , an aircraft of the United States Air Force . The indicated pilot Hani Hanjour had already had problems flying a Cessna . The maneuvers at low altitude in the Pentagon would have, according to an experienced Boeing pilots to a stall (high speed stall) out. The US government has refused to publish the entire footage from the security cameras.

These theses came from Thierry Meyssan's book The Big Lie from 2002 and had been refuted many times since then: In fact, Hanjour had not even been trained to take off and land the Boeing and, according to witness statements and flight recorders, had to fly a 360-degree turn to hit the building at the right angle. The impact zone corresponded to the width of the aircraft after a wing was torn off when it hit a generator house in front of the facade, which witnesses observed, as well as the main mass of the aircraft concentrated in the middle, as confirmed by computer simulations. The US government released the parking lot video in 2006 after the Zacarias Moussaoui trial was over ; since it captured only one still image per second, it barely made the missile visible and showed almost only one explosion.

World Trade Center

The following part presents observations and assumptions that should suggest a controlled demolition as the cause of the collapse of Buildings 1, 2 and 7 of the World Trade Center . Testimony of the caretaker William Rodriguez , some firefighters and passers-by, who heard loud popping noises interpreted as explosions in WTC 1 and 2 are given. On film recordings of the collapse of WTC 1 and 2, fountains of dust can be seen shooting out from the side of the building below the collapsing floors. Then it is claimed that the collapse did not last longer than a free fall ; This is physically only possible if the individual floors are literally pulverized by targeted explosions. The fires in the towers were not hot enough to melt the steel beams of the buildings. This is underpinned by a statement by a fire chief: He reached the impact point in the south tower and said over the radio that there were only two fires there that could be brought under control with two hoses. The film states that building 7 had only minor damage before it collapsed.

This is followed by a list of skyscrapers that would have burned longer and with more intense fires than the towers without collapsing; the three WTC buildings were the first steel frame buildings in history that apparently collapsed due to building fires.

United 93

In the case of United Airlines Flight 93 , the film deviates from more common conspiracy theories according to which the plane was shot down by military aircraft. Instead, he puts together a series of duplicate references to two emergency landings in Cleveland in such a way that United 93 landed safely in Cleveland shortly after Delta in 1989 and the passengers there would have been evacuated to an abandoned NASA research center. As evidence, missing debris at the crash site and the official thesis contradicting witness statements on site are cited.

various

This is followed by various other assumptions. The filmmakers see the fact that American Airlines only introduced a system in 2004 to make cell phone calls possible as an indication that this was not possible in 2001. Instead, it is believed that the cell phone calls were spoofed using voice spoofing technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico . The Bin Laden video, published as evidence on December 13, 2001, in which he announced his responsibility for the attacks, is also regarded as a fake. Finally, it is believed that many of the alleged hijackers disclosed by the FBI were not on the planes and some were even alive after 9/11.

Motifs

In the end, the filmmakers speculate about the motives of people who allegedly gained advantages from the attacks. They claim that the then tenant of the WTC buildings, Larry Silverstein , received billions in insurance payments due to a special clause in the World Trade Center, which he leased a few weeks before the attacks. In fact, due to the lease contracts, Silverstein had to continue to pay rents in the millions for the destroyed buildings WTC 1 and 2 every day and only received insurance benefits after a process that lasted for years and was much lower than required. He reinvested about double the amount in the new building.

The film writers also list alleged profiteers from insider trading shortly before the attacks and the profits of the Halliburton company in the war on terror that followed. They also present the attacks as a pretext for the US government to establish a surveillance state.

Public presentations

According to Broadcast Magazine , a special performance of the second version took place in the British Parliament on June 14, 2006 . Also in June 2006, a former Microsoft developer created a website that delivers the film in seven different languages.

The Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin initially allowed the film to be shown in the university's cinema, but withdrew it a few days earlier because, contrary to the application, the requirements for approval (research and teaching or university policy interests of the students) had not been met. The film contains "unscientific" as well as " racist and discriminatory allegations that cannot be supported or disseminated within the public domain". Its charisma damage the reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the university. The organizers consider the decision to be unprecedented and unjustified and have announced legal action .

criticism

In response to the amateur video, there were also a number of detailed counter-statements to the claims made in the video. The correctness and neutrality of Loose Change were among other things. a. disputed and largely refuted by the counter-film Screw Loose Change by Mark Roberts, an article in Popular Mechanics magazine and numerous other media outlets.

On September 11, 2006, Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas were on Democracy Now! , the War and Peace Report and discussed with James Meigs and David Dunbar, two editors of Popular Mechanics and authors of the book Debunking 9/11 Myths.

In the two-part BBC documentary 9/11 - The Conspiracy Theories of 2007, Dylan Avery was asked about the contradictions in various editions of Loose Change and was sharply criticized by Chip Berlet , an investigative US journalist.

The Berlin historian Wolfgang Benz uses the film in a book published in 2007 to exemplify the functioning of conspiracy theories : The purpose is to overcome feelings of powerlessness in the face of an increasingly complex globalized world, the economic and political context of which the individual can no longer see through. All information, whether right or wrong, would be used unchecked and arbitrarily in order to provide a monocausal explanation for a seemingly monstrous event that does not appear satisfactorily explainable by a “natural” explanation. This declaration usually clearly divides the world into good and evil, namely the conspirators and their victims. The recipients would have the advantage of feeling in possession of an exclusive truth , which they would honor through "faith and devotion" to the creators of the conspiracy theory. Thus, they are immune to rational counter-arguments and educational efforts. The prerequisite is a widespread willingness to engage in absurd constructions, as shown in the results of surveys on the terrorist attacks of September 11th. The pictures were arranged and commented so skilfully “that the consumer cannot escape the dynamics and drama of the compilation”.

In 2013, critics posted the seven-minute parody Luke’s Change: An Inside Job online. It is closely following the style of Loose Change - tracking shots through photographs, emphasizes serious style of language, music - the thesis argued that the destruction of the Death Star by Luke Skywalker as in 1977 Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope was shown , cannot be right, but rather has to be traced back to an “inside job”.

literature

  • KT Penn: Lifting Up the Couch Cushions: Exposing the Loose Change. Iuniverse.Com, 2011, ISBN 1-4502-9893-1
  • Farhad Manjoo: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. John Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 0-470-05010-1 , pp. 84-96
  • Stephen Prince: Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. Columbia University Press, 2009, ISBN 0-231-14871-2 , pp. 160-162

Web links

Film versions (no longer available!)

Critical videos

Part 1
Part 2
part 3
Part 4
Part 5
  • Hard Fire (March 16, 2007): Jason Bermas-Dylan Avery debate with Mark Roberts and Ronald Wieck

Critical texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karin Kails: Documentary “Loose Change”: Internet film about 9/11 breaks all records . Spiegel Online , July 30, 2006. Jonathan Curiel: The Conspiracy to rewrite 9/11 . In: San Francisco Chronicle , September 3, 2006
  2. ↑ Web movie takes flight ( Memento from October 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Interview in The John Ziegler Show (KFI AM 640, Los Angeles, CA) . Segment begins at approximately 18:10. June 23, 2006. Archived from the original on July 23, 2011. Retrieved January 11, 2011.
  4. ↑ Movie Minutiae: Loose Change (2005) . ABC News. September 15, 2006. Archived from the original on May 30, 2009. Retrieved January 11, 2011.
  5. ↑ Americanscholarssymposium.org
  6. ^ Mark Baildon, James S. Damico: Social Studies as New Literacies in a Global Society: Relational Cosmopolitanism in the Classroom. Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2010, ISBN 0-415-87367-3 , p. 92
  7. ^ Nancy Jo Sales: Click Here for Conspiracy . In: Vanity Fair , August 2006
  8. ↑ Farhad Manjoo: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. John Wiley & Sons, 2008, p. 87
  9. ^ NY FOX affiliate airs alternative 9/11 theory, "Loose Change" ( Memento of the original from December 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nowpublic.com
  10. ^ Barna William Donovan: Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious. Mcfarland & Co Inc, 2011, ISBN 0-7864-3901-7 , p. 207
  11. ↑ Jane Chapman: Issues in Contemporary Documentary. Polity Press, 2009, ISBN 0-7456-4009-5 , p. 25
  12. ↑ Richard Miniter: Osama debunks a myth . In: Washington Times , Jan. 3, 2006
  13. ↑ Page 51 ( Memento from September 23, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 873 kB)
  14. ^ David Dunbar, Brad Reagan: Debunking 9/11 Myths , Popular Mechanics, 2006, pp. 59-70
  15. ↑ Heike Buchter: Portrait: The Cloud Scratch . In: Die Zeit , No. 36/2006
  16. ↑ Broadcast website's article excerpt from search for loose change . Archived from the original on March 19, 2007. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 30, 2006. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.broadcastnow.co.uk
  17. ↑ UKFilm.org . Archived from the original on June 29, 2006. Retrieved May 30, 2006.
  18. ↑ loosechange911.blogspot.com Producer's website blog
  19. ↑ Loose-change-911.com ( Memento of the original from December 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.loose-change-911.com
  20. ↑ US critical film may not be shown . In: Berliner Zeitung , November 4, 2006
  21. ↑ Screw Loose Change ( Memento of the original from March 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. by Mark Roberts. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / video.google.com
  22. ↑ David Dunbar, Brad Reagan: Debunking 9/11 Myths. In: Popular Mechanics (2006), pp. 59-70; see. Popular Mechanics Investigates 9/11 Myths: FAQs. popularmechanics.com, August 19, 2007, accessed June 18, 2017; Michael Barkun : A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 175 ff.
  23. ↑ archive.org.
  24. ↑ DemocracyNow.org - 9/11 Debate: "Loose Change" Makers vs. Popular Mechanics - Editors of Debunking 9/11 Myths.
  25. ↑ Wolfgang Benz: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The legend of the Jewish world conspiracy. CH Beck, Munich 2007, pp. 9-12.
  26. ↑ Michael Brake: The Death Star Conspiracy. At: taz.de , accessed March 22, 2013.