Blocking The Path to 9/11

Blocking The Path to 9/11 is a straight-to-dvd documentary about a docudrama mini-series called The Path to 9/11, which aired once on ABC before being buried forever by the evil liberal biased media. I'm going to show you a bunch of screen captures I took with my computer while watching the movie to give you a sense of how stupid it is, because I don't feel like trying to actually analyze it or say anything intelligent about it.















This is Cyrus Nowrasteh. According to Wikipedia, he is a conservative screenwriter. Most of the documentary is him talking about the movie he wrote, and all the terrible and unfair things that the liberal media did. If you can't tell from this picture, he comes off as a douchebag. The first major difference I noticed about Blocking The Path to 9/11 from other straight-to-dvd conspiracy films, is that the narrator sounds like a conservative talk show host, and, in fact, he is. While "liberal" conspiracy films (this is a strange distinction to make when talking about conspiracists, because the binary liberal-conservative thing is hard to apply, especially when a lot of dudes who think the Bush Administration orchestrated 9/11 also think that Jews secretly control the earth) like Loose Change often feature hip, young sounding narrators. John Ziegler sounds like your crazy uncle who is always yelling about killing all the sodomites or something.















This guy directed The Path to 9/11, the ABC docudrama, sorry if this is confusing. He is also on screen a lot in the documentary. He's a little sensitive, and looks like he spent to much time surfing when he was in his mid twenties. He says that he "learned too much" in the making of The Path to 9/11, like that things can be "wrong and unfair."

Liberals went after his father, who is the founder of a christian organization that reaches out to poor people in the third world, claiming that Danny himself was a fundamentalist. I don't really understand the attack, or why it would hurt his feelings so much.















There's also a bunch of conservative journalist douches like this guy.
















And this guy.
















This guy is a reformed liberal. After working on The Path to 9/11 he was shocked by the lengths to which powerful liberals would go to censor their film. He voted for Clinton twice before making the film. Twice!

What and idiot! This is sort of a bad segue to the main focus of the documentary:
















He looks pretty good there. No wonder that guy voted for him twice. So the main claim of Blocking The Path is that Clinton forced ABC to edit and eventually suppress The Path to 9/11 because the first part of the docudrama makes him appear responsible for allowing the terrorist attack on 9/11, which would not only hurt Hillary's chances in 2008, but tarnish the legacy of his presidency. To it's credit, after watching the documentary, I'm pretty convinced that Clinton had something to do with the ultimate decision, which was handed down from the parent company, Disney, to ABC, not to release the docudrama on DVD, and to air a heavily edited version, only once. While it doesn't really show that Clinton was in some part responsible for the lack of defense on 9/11, it becomes clear that Clinton and other politicians used their political power to influence Disney's CEO Robert Iger, who was a frequent contributor to both Clinton's campaigns. That kind of sucks. Coincidentally, I have been reading a book about Clinton, Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy, which covers the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment in exhaustive detail, starting with Paula Jones and not excluding a single phone call or naughty affidavit. The book isn't very biased, or one-one-millionth as biased at Blocking The Path, but Clinton still doesn't look very good. I'll blog about it soon.
















Here's Bill with Monica. Nowrasteh claims that the connection between Clinton's impeachment scandal and his inability to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and that it just came out in writing the docudrama. The documentary doesn't dwell on this particular issue, but it makes it states clearly the theory that Clinton was more involved in his political life, which was inundated in the scandal, then keeping America safe. I guess that's a pretty sound theory. The scene in the docudrama that caused the most controversy was a composite of several events that are as much rumor as fact, in which Clinton stopped military actions that could have killed or captured bin Laden. They also criticize Clinton for not making the connection between the 1993 World Trade Center attack and al Quaeda, bin Laden, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Clinton denies these claims. It creates a sort of murky water for censorship, journalism, and truth, because the film is admittedly fictional. It was originally concieved as a documentary, but was changed to a docudrama for reasons that are not given, causing liberal critics to, understandably, attack the truthfulness and motive of the docudrama.
















This is possibly a poor choice of imagery on the part of the film makers.
















The only verifiable claim of foul play by the Clinton administration made by the docudrama is that Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor, stole unauthorized material from the National Archives before testifying before the 9/11 commission. They make a big deal about this. Apparently he stuffed them into his pants. That ends up being the most interesting part, because not only were the documents not the original copies, there are electronic copies as well.
















The biggest villain ends up being Disney.
















So overall Blocking The Path to 9/11 is fairly disappointing. I was hoping for some bizarro counterpart to Michael Moore's documentaries, but instead it's just another lame story about the liberal media bias. My reccomendation to Cyrus Nowrasteh and Danny Cunningham is to use whatever footage you still have of the film, take out all the "dramatization" subtitles, repackage it as a documentary, stick it on the Internet and give DVD copies to those crazy guys who sell conspiracy DVDs in the subway.

Live Free or Die Hard

So somehow I found myself watching Live Free or Die Hard, which is I guess the fourth movie in the Die Hard series, the first three of which I'm pretty sure I really liked when I was in maybe fifth or sixth grade. Well, according to Wikipedia, Die Hard 3, Die Hard with a Vengeance, came out in 1995 (1 was '88, 2 was '90), so it's more likely that I saw that movie, and then rented the other two. Or probably, I rented 3 sometime in late '95 or '96. And I remember there was a computer video game that my friend Scott had, and we were both pretty into it. I had never intended to see number 4, but it was on, and then I watched it.

I was immediately drawn in by the "hacker" theme, which isn't to say that it was well done or interesting, but that I'm a sucker for movies about hackers. While there wasn't exactly a conspiracy to bring down the government, the movie definitely borrowed from similar visual tropes that movies like Zeitgeist and Loose Change use, as well as portraying the attitude that there are some greater forces at work in the world that ordinary people are unaware of.



After realizing that the government won't be able to help them and going off to beat that bad guys on their own, Bruce Willis (John McClane) and the hacker kid, I think his name was Farrell, (Justin Long (who is the only person in the movie trying to act at all)), have this awesome conversation about how Bruce Willis likes shitty music, and then Willis turns on the news, which is even worse. "It's all manipulated," the hacker says. Nothing they say is true. Oh and he also tells the head of the CIA or FBI or something, that his head would explode if he told him half the things he knows. I really like the idea that this grody hacker living by himself with a bunch of computers in a shitty apartment in New York, believes that he knows the real truth behind everything, because, he can use computers or something.



In the climactic scene (or maybe before) the bad guy tells Bruce Willis, "You're a Timex in a digital world." There's a lot of bad jokes in the movie. My favorite one is when the hacker kid sneaks into the bad guys hideout, and then gets caught, and the bad guy points a gun at him and says, "Is there a problem here?" (or something) and he says, "No, I just got off on the wrong floor."



So, I guess the film actually did pretty well. The action sequences are actually pretty impressive, if totally implausible. Bruce Willis hits a helicopter with a police car by driving it up a tollbooth, which acts as a ramp, and rolling out of the door just before. The most ridiculous part is when an F-35 (which is like a fighter plane) floats around between elevated highway roads shooting at Bruce Willis in an 18-wheeler. I don't know much about fighter planes, but I'm pretty sure they can't just hover above the ground, or go, like straight up. I mean, don't planes have to be going really fast just to stay in the air? I also noticed more in this movie than any other big action movie that I've seen how fake and 3d everything looked.

Apparently the movie was delayed because of September 11. It references 9/11 only once, but the central theme of terrorism obviously borrows a lot from post-9/11 aesthetics, like Iron Man or something. But there are no Arabs or Muslims in the movie, (the FBI director dude looks like he could be Arabic, but is actually of New Zealand Maori descent, at least, in real life) and the terrorist is an American, one who actually was involved in developing the government's information security system, but who was fired when he wouldn't settle for leaving things the way they were. In the moment when he's supposed to explain why he hates America now, he says he wanted to be the one to destory American, before someone from outside did it. That really doesn't make any sense, so the movie suggests he was just doing it for money.

His plan, which the Hacker kid refers to as a "fire sale" as in "everything must go" is to hack into every computer system ever, which are apparently all connected, so he can control all the communication, records of finance, and resources in America. The Hacker has a few clever hacker ways to get around his control of everything ever. The concept of "fire sale" exists, but only in financial terms. While the Hacker acts like the "fire sale" is this legendary Hacker secret that no one has ever done, it's actually just made up for the film, which was dissapointing.

But this is funny:



So, if you're still reading this, I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog again, cause I found out a lot of people already have blogs called "Occam's Razor." Any suggestions? Danny suggested "I want to believe." Which I really like, but I feel like a bit of a poser using an X-Files reference, cause I don't really watch that show.

WTC 7

Last week, the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology released a 77-page report on the collapse of the World Trade Center Building 7, which you can read here. As you might imagine the report is pretty boring, but some of the language used is pretty interesting. There is a pretty subjective "reconstruction" of the events that lead to the collapse on 9/11, and some different explanations for why certain scenarios are more likely that others, blah blah blah. But what's interesting is to compare they're language with the language used by the New York Daily News story that covers the report. The NIST report, which took three years to write, explains its purpose as an attempt to understand the safety problems that caused the building to collapse, without acknowledging the importance of an official report to quell any conspiracy theories about 9/11. The Daily News makes the implicit assumption that the reports only purpose is to debunk any theories, as we can tell from the headline, "Fire - not explosives - brought 7 WTC down."

9/11 conspiracy theorists believe that the official explanation that fires caused structural damage that ultimately led to the collapse of all three WTC buildings is physically impossible. In all of the 9/11 videos and media, you will hear pseudo-scientific explanations of why this is so, using evidence like "no building in history has collapsed because of fire damage" and videos of controlled demolitions which closely resemble the building 7 collapse. This is part of the narrative strategy of conspiracy theories, using "evidence" that may have no basis in reality, but reporting as though it is absolute truth. It works because conspiracy theorists are by definition not mainstream and not expected to work within guidelines that a institution like the NIST must. The discrepancy creates an interesting dialog, where the officials generally don't bother to acknowledge the conspiracy theories, while conspiracies don't really attack the official story or actual evidence in a credible way. The only link between the two are media sources like the New York Daily News that are able to create a more interesting story by juxtaposing the two.

As of right now there are 43 comments on the Daily News story, which create kind of a hilarious dialog between people who believe the conspiracy and others who vehemently oppose it. It's hard for me to imagine the people behind these comments, but I suppose they could really be anyone. You would assume a lot of college students and maybe some precocious high schoolers, but for all I know my parents are secretly posting comments written in all caps on news stories in the spare time.

More on Anthrax Conspiracy

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just kidding.

Youtube

This video was sent a few days ago by a friend:



It's pretty funny, though gets kind of boring. The payoff is definitely not worth the buildup. But it is successful in its attention to detail, like the fake URL at the end, and the way it imitates the the grammatical constructions of "real" 9/11 conspiracy videos. I'm not sure if this is intended, but I think it is accurate in its mocking of making vague claims that aren't actually corroborated by the video--I'm never really sure what it is I'm supposed to be looking at in videos like this one:





(Interesting detail: the URL in this vid is also broken).

Like other, longer format documentaries, I am forced to question the motive behind these kinds of videos, the "real" ones at any rate. Real meaning they aren't jokes, like the first video. This video is so annoying to watch, with its glitch-y editing, it seems more like a stylized video art project than anything else.

The juxtaposition of these videos seems to capture the dichotomy of responses to the art of conspiracy theory. I find that most people are either quick to believe conspiracies, if not all, then some, while others are even quicker to make some sort of "mature" analysis like this one which was added by the editor to my brooklyn rail article: "Like all conspiracy theories, it taps into the powerlessness felt by the masses." I guess if I really had to think about it, I would probably be on the side of the editor, but I like to at least entertain the possibility of conspiracies before asserting my intellectual superiority over those who invent them. If nothing else, the creators of conspiracy theories, at least decent ones, are magnificent story tellers and fabricators, worthy of that much more praise for convincing at least the gullible among us that what they say is real. Much better than this guy anyway.