The 9/11 deniers

The success of the documentary "Loose Change" spotlights the thousands of online sleuths who believe the U.S. government was behind the terror attacks -- to get gold, justify war, or serve Satan.

By Farhad Manjoo

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June 27, 2006 | According to Dylan Avery, a 22-year-old filmmaker in upstate New York, no terrorists hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and no passengers heroically revolted. The plane didn't even crash in that Shanksville, Penn., field, he says, but instead landed safely in Cleveland. And not only that. As Avery sees it, the true 9/11 attackers brought down the World Trade Center in a controlled demolition, most likely to get at $160 billion in gold bars he believes were buried under the towers. As for the attack on the Pentagon, Avery insists it was hit by a cruise missile, not a terrorist-commandeered Boeing 757.

Who, in Avery's telling, is the dark force behind all this destruction, the spinner of the big lie that Avery believes envelops the popular perception of 9/11? A most usual suspect: "The first person I'd bring into a court of law would be Dick Cheney," Avery says. "He's the person in the administration who I think is most responsible."

Quizzing Dylan Avery on the events of 9/11 is like taking a peek into an alternate history, a parallel universe of half-truths and audacious propositions that rarely ever disturb the peace of the reality-based world. In another time, that long-ago pre-digital age, you might have dismissed such theories as the rantings of a crank; what a young man like Avery believes about a world-shattering event like 9/11 would seem to be of little consequence to the larger narratives that have grown out of the misery of that day.

But these are days of amateur experts and self-made provocateurs, an era in which a young man with a laptop and a few far-out ideas can easily garner a huge audience in the self-referential online watering holes that dominate modern rhetoric. In the spring of 2005, Avery released "Loose Change," a feature-length documentary film that proposes that the terrorist attacks on America weren't terrorist attacks at all, and were instead conceived, planned and executed by people at the highest levels of the government. Though it has not been distributed in theaters, Avery's film -- sold on DVD and available for free online -- has emerged as the leading gateway drug for thousands, and possibly millions, of converts to the "9/11 truth movement," the loose affiliation of skeptics who doubt the official story. The film has transformed Avery into one of world's most influential proselytizers of the theory that the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job."

I've heard some of Avery's fans describe his movie as "the red pill," the drug that takes Keanu Reeves down "The Matrix's" rabbit hole. During the past month, I've swallowed the pill about a half-dozen times, following Avery and other 9/11 skeptics down a treacherous path toward the alleged truth. I'm sorry to say I didn't find it; much of Avery's film has been debunked even by fellow 9/11 skeptics, and some of its theories verge on the bizarre. If you care to look, you won't find a shred of proof that Flight 93 landed in Cleveland, or that the World Trade Center was stuffed with gold bars, or that the Pentagon was hit by anything other than a commercial jet.

But that's not the whole story. "Loose Change" may traffic in fiction, but it sinks its hooks in. If you're unfamiliar with the official story -- if you haven't, say, perused the hundreds of pages of documentation supporting the 9/11 Commission's conclusions -- you may well find the movie's false reality strangely seductive. And going online to debunk "Loose Change" doesn't necessarily boost your faith in the 9/11 Commission's story; following the path that Google presents in response to queries like "pentagon plane crash" or "world trade center collapse" could make matters worse. While discovering flaws in the movie's claims, you'll find yourself bumping up against entirely different 9/11 theories, some of which propose a theory of the case that's far stranger than you'd ever imagined. Once you jump down the rabbit hole, you find it goes only deeper.

"Loose Change" comes along at a ripe cultural and political moment. No longer is 9/11 sacrosanct in the national consciousness; in the nearly five years since the attacks, we've grown increasingly suspicious of governmental reactions to the attacks, and more amenable to various re-imaginings of that day. Today Oliver Stone is free to fictionalize scenes in the trade towers, and Martin Amis can give us a Mohammed Atta beset by boredom and blocked bowels. Meanwhile, according to an astonishing recent Zogby poll, 42 percent of Americans believe that "the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks."

Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the 9/11 Commission -- the independent committee set up by Congress to investigate that day's events -- told me that people who "should know better" routinely ask her about some of the kinds of theories presented in Avery's film. At a recent conference of business leaders in Boston, she recounted, "One prominent executive came up to me and asked me if there was any truth to the story that it was a missile and not a plane that hit the Pentagon."

Gorelick's story illustrates the power of "Loose Change." Its allegations may be preposterous and fact-free. But since when has that been a barrier to widespread public acceptance?

Next page: Flight 93 did not crash, and other "Loose Change" theories