** NOTE THIS WAS STARTED BY BLUEBARON BUT I F'ED UP A TOPIC MERGE SO THE ORIGINAL POST IS THE ONE BELOW!! ** - TGF1984
Thought I'd undertake to put Screw Loose Change (the video, that is) under a microscope to put my own 9/11 research knowledge to the test - an important step everyone should take to ensure that they're operating under the auspices of reason rather than faith.
The results were interesting, and did home in viciously on the failings of Loose Change II. However, Screw Loose Change engaged in the same sort of prevarication it accused LCII of - context dropping, placing emphasis on unimportant aspects of Loose Change's arguments, and so forth. Check it out:
I wonder if Mark Iradian is going to try taking a swing at Loose Change Final Cut? I await such efforts eagerly.
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screw loose change
primary charges (and adequately snarky rebuttals)
in order of their appearance in the film
acronyms
SLC: Screw Loose Change
LCII: Loose Change Two
join the fun and follow along
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3214024953129565561here we go...
1. Fails to provide adequate context for quotes (we'll see)
2. Northwoods is unrelated to 9/11 (only for those that flunked their 'comprehension' classes)
3. "Bascailly, we are to believe that a government refuses a plan to fake civilian deaths as evidence that they intend to actually kill citizens."
(The author might want to , in future, check his spelling before posting finished product to Google Video? That goes for the thinking too? If what he means to ask is,)
"are we expected to believe that an existing document planning for false flag terrorism in the 60's (complete with faked civilian deaths) is evidence that governments also stage false flag terror events where they DO kill their own citizens??!"
(Then I'd say yes - if you take in the proper context, lol, of the countless additional examples of false flag terrorism where civilians indeed are killed. Including in the US.)
4. No connection is stated or given between 9/11 and Northwoods, the automatically piloted plane crash test by Boeing, or the automatic flight testing at cruising altitude that was being tested by Raytheon with its new Globalhawk drone
(Well, the connection is obvious. Planes can now be flown completely automatically. You don't have to connect the dots here - there's enough of them to make a bitmap.)
5. the article about planes being used as weapons in some NORAD wargaming test says nothing about planes being used as missiles (yes it does, right above the narrator's black comment box: "used as weapons to crash into targets". That's some deep doublethink Iradian is engaging in.)
6. PNAC is misrepresented. Arbitrary quotes about the desire to improve information technologies in the military render quote of neo-con musing for 'New Pearl Harbour' irrelevant.
(What was that complaint about context again? SLC is looking more and more intellectually dishonest, given that the broad scope of the PNAC document is about maintaining hegemony and the capability for regime change. Infotech is just one small part of that. And it is in that context that it is mentioned that this transformation of American forces worldwide [and most particularly in the Middle East - see pps. 14, 17] will be a slow, transformational one. Unless a catastrophic and catalyzing event comes along, of course. The Pearl Harbour quote isn't a summary, to claim that is yet another strawman. It's pointing out that such a door did open, and the neo-cons chose to walk through it. As was mentioned in their own planning document.)
7. The Pentagon's contingency plans for a crash into the Pentagon do not mention deliberate use of planes as missiles. (This entire section puts a lot of emphasis on the speed of the planes used and the odd question of intent to try and decouple the notion of a contingency plan from the actual event. The plan is referred to by Iradian as planning, merely, for a "simple hijacker crash". Presumably for a plane that may have lost control and accidentally smashed into the Pentagon without malice aforethought. Please.)
8. Chuck Burlingame is being smeared. (This is a good point, actually, since though the odds of his being 'in on it' and chance of irony are both high, this could just be a coincidence. Besides, not enough info is on offer about the test he participated in.)
9. The shift for responsibility in the case of 'non-immediate responses' was shifted to the Secretary of Defence, but immediate responses were left with the military.
(This is a misunderstanding, since non-immediate responses mean responses that deviate from operational procedure, not delayed responses. What Rumsfeld would have needed to give orders for were operational decisions like the shooting down of civilian craft. It's unclear whether LCII understands this, but that's irrelevant.)
(Sources available at
http://z10.invisionfree.com/Loose_Change_Forum/index.php?showtopic=1362)
10. Ashcroft continued using commercial aircraft, because he said so during his testimony atteh 9/11 commission.
(Without even getting into the absurdity of taking someone's testimony at face value I'll just present the original article, which says that Ashcroft was advised to fly privately, just as LCII claims.)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/main303601.shtml(SLC is blatantly lying when it contends that 'the threat was personal, not national': the CBS source article reads "a senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any cabinet member" so where does Iradian get off speculating that the threat was personal? This further demonstrates the muddle of his thinking. All he had to say was that this datum doesn't advance LCII's case, since other officials continued usnig commercial craft.)
11. The French report claiming Osama was met at a hospital in Dubai is unconfirmed and anonymous.
(Iradian is going to have to do better than that. The Guardian actually says that the disclosure is "known to come from French intelligence." That's a couple of steps above anonymous. It also cites Le Figaro as stating that bin Laden ordered a dialysis machine to be delivered to his compund. Further, the witness testimony given to dispute this is allegedly from a denial that bin Laden made, LOL.)
12. Silverstein's insurance on WTC proves nothing, since everyone gets insurance for terrorism.
(What's really of interest here is not the fact that Silverstein got insurance, but the timing and the fact that it represents a possible motive. If a commercial business burns down, it's normal to ask the question whether the owner/lessor is culpable. Not to do so would have been an omission.)
13. Put options are irrelevant, since high numbers of put options had been placed on American Airlines in the past, too.
(The article that SLC sources mentions also that the freakin SEC thought it was an important enough lead to investigate, based one assumes on the timing of the trade rather than the size. Anyone looking to make some change on the attack would have been savvy enough not to trigger too many red flags. So despite the attempt by Newsmax, a neo-con news site, LOL, to minimize this, it falls on its face.)
14. It doesn't matter that the extra security, including bomb-sniffing dogs, was pulled from the WTC just prior to the attacks, because it was only extra security, not all security.
(I don't recall LCII making any claim that all security was pulled from the towers - another strawman. In fact, for those capable of reading, the article's headline - HEIGHTENED SECURITY LIFTED etc - is visible in the background. Additionally, despite one guard's statement that planes were unexpected, another guard states that the 22nd floor had just been hardened against aerial attack.)
endpoint ref: 09:14
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It carries on like this. Since it looks like it might take a week to wade through all of the logical flaws in the supposed debunking, and I'm getting bored shooting fish in a barrel, I'm going to skip ahead to the stuff about the WTC site. I'm not saying that everything in LCII is perfect, mind you. But this 'debunking' is a joke.
Fast forward to 18:09, where we get into some substantive stuff about WTC7.
15. Firefighters knew that WTC7 was going to collapse.
(Yeah. At least four first responders have gone on the record as saying that a 20 second radio countdown preceeded the collapse of WTC7. Now, how could they have figured that out down to the second of collapse other than by demolishing the building?)
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2007/130907_demolition_countdown.htm16. WTC7 doesn't look like a conventional demolition because there were no big flashes and bangs. Therefore it wasn't a demolition.
(Correction. It may not have been a conventional demolition. And there are eyewitnesses who have described hearing bombs in the buildings and seeing the results of their damage. The janitor, the last guy out of the building, heard explosions between the 20th and 30th floors from teh stairwell. Mike Pecora, an engineer in the building, found whole parts of the sub-basement were destroyed.)
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=7762http://www.chiefengineer.org/article.cfm?seqnum1=102917. Larry Silverstein's comment about "making the decision pull it" is not relevant since it is not a term used to demolish buildings with explosives.
(Iradian here equates Silverstein's 'pull it' quote with a) the common metaphor of pulling personnel out of a dangerous area and/or b) the demolition term that DOES refer to bringing a building down with cables. Well, Silverstein didn't say 'pull them, he said 'pull it', he said it immediately before saying 'and then we watched the building collapse'. Additionally, there were no firefighters in the building, as reported by FEMA in section 5.6.1 of their report in which they admit they don't know how WTC7 collapsed, either, calling for 'further research' in section 5.7. So where's you point about pulling firefighters out now? Apparently we can go around in semantic circles on this one all day, so on to the next...)
18. There is no evidence that specific persons other than those named in the "official" report committed the attacks of 9/11.
(There may be no known specific material evidence against particular individuals, but the motivating factor of governments staging false-flag terror attacks against their own citizens in order to go to war is an historical fact, and happens all the time. And look at what's happening - the US is becoming a surveillance society. Even if we can never indict a single individual, we cannot wipe out circumstantial evidence and omit it from consideration. This is about building a case - motive, means, and opportunity. Watch Perry Mason sometime.)
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Okay, let's fast forward again, to 1:07:21, where we pick up the story with this point about fire damaging steel in the collapse of the three towers.
19. Fire has brought down steel buildings before.
(Loose Change seems to have ruined its own point with a sloppy overstatement. Fire has caused partial collapse and damage to long-span roof trusses, which is the situation with the McCormick Hall. It has not, however, resulted in total collapse in the manner of the twin towers or WTC7, as is explicitly stated by the professor of fire engineering cited in the first four lines of
http://tinyurl.com/nmjdu which is the first URL that Iradian directs us to.
“We have a long history of successful steel construction in this country and, in fact, the world,” says Jonathan Barnett, professor of fire engineering,” on the PBS NOVA documentary, “Why the Towers Fell.” “And one of the great successes is that under normal fire conditions, we don’t have building collapse. In fact, until 9/11, I was unaware of any protected steel structure that had collapsed anywhere in the world from just a fire.”
In fact, the article he cites expresses some degree of astonishment that the towers fell in the way they did, precisely because it was so unprecedented. The second quote Iridian brings up is a 'concern' or speculation that a building might collapse completely, and as for the third quote, the source document says that factories were 'destroyed' by fire - there is no indication of what is meant by this.)
20. The WTC was not a 'web of steel'. It was hollow.
(It was not hollow - it was a doughnut mounted between a large central column (which WAS a web of steel) and the external shell. The central columns were composed of massive pillars that supported the elevator shafts. Even if the floors around the central columns 'pancaked', then were did the central support structure go? You can view the blueprints of the towers, and a nice picture of the construction, at this link:)
http://infowars.net/articles/march2007/280307blueprints.htm21. The plane used as an example of a prior plane-building impact, a B-25, is much smaller, and it was travelling at a slower speed.
(Yes it was. Also, the Empire State Building wasn't made out of steel. This deserves to be excised, and is one of the many mistakes that has been cut out of Loose Change Final Cut. Nobody's perfect.)
21. The 1975 fire is not comparable to the 2001 fires.
(While the 1975 fire was likely of lesser severity than the North Tower Fire, it was of greater severity than the South Tower Fire, which contained only "two isolated pockets" of fire. Check 9:52 am on the Fire Dept's transcript, below, which indicates that the firefighters 'had access to' the 78th floor, and were not concerned or aware of any imminent danger.)
http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/firefighter-tape-excerpts.htm22. The Los Angeles Interstate Bank building fire was being fought by firefighters and was eventually put out. No plane hit it.
(From a fire safety site: "The fire extended at a rate estimated at 45 minutes per floor and burned intensely for approximately 90 minutes on each level. This resulted in two floors being heavily involved at any point during the fire. The upward extension was stopped at the 16th floor level, after completely destroying four and one-half floors of the building." So it seems rather disingenuous of Iradian to imply that the fact that the fire was being fought minimizes the extreme inferno that in fact raged throughout multiple floors of this structure. As to the 'no plane hit it' mantra, well, no plane hit WTC7, did it?)
http://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/interstatebank_3.html23. Philadelphia.
(Ditto.)
24. Venezuala
(Ditto.)
25. Madrid was steel-reinforced concrete, rather than steel framed. And there were explosions.
(This is a bad example, true, and does a disservice to the calibre of research put together by other sites like this one:)
http://911research.wtc7.net/reviews/loose_change/wtc.html#history(To quote its page on the Windsor Fire, "The Windsor Building fire demonstrates that a huge building-consuming fire, after burning for many hours can produce the collapse of parts of the building with weak steel supports lacking fire protection. It also shows that the collapse events that do occur are gradual and partial. These partial collapse events, spread over several hours, contrast with the implosion of WTC Building 7 in 7 seconds, and the total explosive collapses of each of the Twin Towers in under 17 seconds." The fact remains that " Severe fires in other skyscrapers which, like the WTC Towers, were 100% steel-framed, have not produced even partial collapses.")
(As to the explosions reoprted by Pravda, is Iradian suggesting that they may have contributed to the partial collapse of the top part of the building?)
Endpoint ref: 01:12:22
That's probably enough for a forum post. I'll let you guys chew on that for a while.
Peace
