An American Coup Documentary - Movie Review Example

Analysis of Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup documentary September 11th 2001 is a day that has been etched into the memories of the American public as one of the most horrible and painful days in modern history and probably the closest America has ever felt to a full-scale war on its soil for centuries. In the morning of that fateful Tuesday, an American plane loaded with over 20,000 gallons of jet fuel was crashed into the world trade center’s north tower, 18 minutes later; another plane was smashed into the south tower. The attacks resulted into the deaths of approximately 3,000 people among them over 400 emergency workers who had come to respond to the first crash. Taking credit for the attack was Osama Bin Laden a notorious international terrorist who has since been neutralized by US forces in connection to that and many other terrorist attacks in American and abroad. The hijackers were all Islamic terrorists from the Middle East and under the auspices of Osama and the Al-Qaeda organization, and they carried out the attack to pay back America after their support for Israel in the Persian Gulf War. Using box cutters and knives, the terrorists had taken over the planes in midair, it is speculated that since all the flights were commercial continual flights, they had been picked for the fact that they were loaded with huge amounts of fuel. Following the incident, a plethora of conspiracy theories emerged, many of them implicating the US government claiming that among other things it was complacent or even complicit in the attack so as to garner support for its military activities in the middle east. One of the most prolific conspiracy theories was embodied in the documentary film loose change; created by Dylan Avery, Kory, Rowe, Jason Bermas and Mathew Brown it claimed that the historical anomalies in the records point towards the involvement of elements within the US government. The series proposes, that the US government had retrospectively acted in a manner to make them suspect of orchestrating attacks and passing them off as accidents of war crimes by other countries for political ends (Dunbar and Reagan 1). According to them, the passengers in the flight 93 were alleged to have been kidnapped by the government that had turned the planes in missiles and the telephone calls they are alleged to have made were actually staged. In addition, they also posit that the collapse of the twin towers was not a result of the crash, it bespeaks controlled demolition using explosives, and that a missile hit the pentagon. Throughout the film, there is evidence of rhetorical techniques directed towards persuading the audience to agree with the supposition that the government’s complicity in the event and this paper will explore some of these techniques in respect to the claim. One of the tactics that has been employed in the film is the large scale demonization of the government and anyone associated with it, their presentation suggest that they have already determined the government was complicit so it’s just a matter of providing “evidence” to back this up. For one, the claim that the Bush administration had not only had prior knowledge of the operation but also orchestrated it is directly aimed at making the government appear evil in the eyes of the public. During the first reviews of the incident, Romero a Mexican explosives expert said that the explosion appeared to have been caused by explosives (Dunbar and Reagan 92). However, he later retracted this statement after realizing conspiracy theorist were using his name to legitimize their theories by clarifying and saying it must have been caused by fire. However, unwilling to accept this, and the theorists turned around and claimed the diabolical government must have gotten to him forcing him to retract his statements so that he could protect their “evil”, plot this is just one of many such examples. Another prominent technique in the film is guilt by association, to justify someone’s perceived guilt they have taken any connection they could find and tried to use them to evince a conspiracy. For example, one of the evidences that was presented as the fact that the one if the people who had sat on the board insuring that towers was brother to president bush “whose guilt had been established”; and this was used to support the claim that the president had known all along what would happen. Circular reasoning was also applied in several instances where the film intended to implicate the government, and this technique involves taking advantage of the tiniest flaws of gaps in evidence and using them as evidence of a wrongdoing. For example, security feed form some three cameras near the buildings was not released by the government until after the trial of some of those who were implicated in the act (Dunbar and Reagan 97). The film claims that the cameras had captured every moment of the attack and the evidence was being hidden from the public because it would prove the states involvement. However, after the film was released in line with the right of information act, it turned out that they were not even capable of capturing the events as theorized since their speed of shooting was way behind the speeds of the planes in question. Finally, for purposes of this discussion there was the slipshod handling of the facts, the film makes several attempts to manipulate the facts to explain their theories, take for instance the fact that very little wreckage was found near the Pentagon. While the film and most conspiracy theories claimed it was proof that the “plane” was actually a missile launched by the US government later investigations produced radically different answers. It turned out that contrary to what the theorist claim, the plane did not actually crash near the pentagon, it crashed “into” it; therefore, and most of the plane was actually in the building which explains the little debris outside. Sir Author Conrad Doyle said that one should establish facts and then come up with theories to explain them. The makers of the film however took the reverse approach, and they had their theories and in most of the documentary, they were trying to arrange and manipulate evidence to suit these theories. Work Cited Dunbar, David and Reagan, Brand. "Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report – Popular Mechanics". New York City: Hearst Books. 2006. Print. Read More