PrintFebruary 6, 2007
The Guardian's Monbiot takes on the moonbats
The British paper, the Guardian, is the paper that the New York Times strives to emulate. Like the Times, it despises George Bush, America's war in Iraq, Christian religious believers and Israel, and is captivated by the wonders of multiculturalism. But even the Guardian can smell an overcooked turkey, and it has found one in the moonbat offering in the 9/11 conspiracy annals, the film: Loose Change.
J.R. Dunn has dealt with a number of these conspiracy theories in the pages of American Thinker. But the Guardian taking a skeptical position is much bigger news. It is from their side of the political spectrum that these contentions issue.
George Monbiot, an author who may feel the need, given his name, to create some space from real moonbats, has written an excellent piece on the lunacy on display in the film, which the creators say has already been viewed by a 100 million people (I doubt it). Here is one delicious section of the article, explaining the film's narrative of what happened to United flight 93, and offering the real reasons for the inside job on 9/11. It is interesting that 3 of the 4 reasons given for creating the attacks relate to greedy capitalists, and only one to President Bush's need for world domination:
"Flight 93 did not crash, but was redirected to Cleveland airport, where the passengers were taken into a Nasa building and never seen again. Their voices had been cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and used to make fake calls to their relatives. The footage of Osama bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the attacks, was faked. The US government carried out this great crime for four reasons: to help Larry Silverstein, who leased the towers, to collect his insurance money; to assist insider traders betting on falling airline stocks; to steal the gold in the basement; and to grant George Bush new executive powers, so that he could carry out his plans for world domination."
This would all be laughable except that there are lots of folks who are open to some if not all of these absurdities. Monbiot provides the scientific response to the argument that controlled explosions brought down the twin towers, and to other ludicrous themes in the movie. But in a world, where a need for simple stories of how everything fits together are popular, conspiracy theories will abound and draw attention. In supposedly sophisticated France, a book saying the Pentagon was never hit by an American Airlines plane (but rather a US fired missile) was a bestseller.
The constant bashing of the President for supposedly lying to get us into the war with Iraq has morphed into a broader argument that the US lied to get us into the war with Afghanistan after 9/11 as well. It is interesting that the critics of the Bush administration who say Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism have been silent as the 9/11 conspiracy theorists use the doubt engendered by the failure to find substantial amounts of WMD in Iraq, as proof that 9/11 was a fabrication and arranged attack.
