Well, I'm disappointed.
This would have to be one of the poorest conclusions I've ever seen. It really makes the entire program fall apart...
It begins with three bold statements:
"The sponsors of the attack yet to be confronted"
A number of international laws passed post-9/11 have strickly clamped down on terrorist funding networks (which were incredibly comprehensive and well-networked). Organisations like Al Taqwa Bank were closed down. These are the people who "sponsor" terrorism. There's certainly holes - a number of nations continue to get away with sponsoring terrorism. This needs to be dealt with. I'm not sure a simultaneous war with Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is a good idea.
"The men named as the culprits allowed to escape"
The key word here is "allowed". The US-arrogance syndrome dictates that, if they escaped, the US must have allowed it. There's an obvious flaw in this logic. Al Qaeda were on their home turf. US forces were not that hot on alpine counter-insurrgent warfare. I'm not surprised so many escaped for so long (I'm guessing this doco is now dated since the coalition has since taken big chunks out of Al Qaeda including KSM - the mastermind of 9/11).
"The government officials who ignored warnings before 9/11 still in their positions"
As I said, I've yet to hear a single example of a credible piece of actionable intel regarding the 9/11 threat. I'm not surprised the
admin ignored vague rumours of threats. I'm sure the US public would have gone postal if the US government had clamped down on civil liberties BEFORE 9/11. People like
Michael Moore would have had a field day.
"Despite years of inquiry...the official story of what happened on 9/11 remains little changed"
Yeah. Because it's pretty much spot on. Aside from the brief CT arguments at the beginning (NORAD stand down, buildings don't collapse) the documentary actually offers no argument whatsoever that anything happened on 9/11 other than 19 Al Qaeda operatives hijacked 4 aircraft, flew three into buildings, while passengers on the 4th revolted and caused it to crash. Why would the official story change? Even if it were proved Pakistan officially DID fund the attacks, how does "what happened on 9/11" suddenly change?
Okay, so after this "conclusion" the doco loses it, because it just randomly goes off into a whole new realm that really related only loosely to the rest of the doco...
It basically goes into a rant about the media and how they have to "hold everyone accountable". It seems to imply that after 9/11 the media suddenly stopped doing serious investigating, pushing an agenda instead (never mind all the "failing to connect dots" the doco talks about occured BEFORE 9/11). It's laughable. Did the media only suddenly become subjective, biased, corrupt, political, sensationalist, and straight out false AFTER 9/11? Please. It has been that way for decades.
We get these widows saying no one can get up to speed on everything... it took them thousands of hours of research to learn about 9/11 (yet they still think no fighters were launched...
)
Apparantly there's no one "connecting the dots". Of course, these "dots" are really mainly just "false articles". These days journalists are so desperate to push a story first, they publish stuff that turns out to be false. Instead of retract it with a follow up, they just leave it hanging. Hence you get a "dot" (the Osama kidney dialysis myth is one of the "dots" the doco presents).
There's then a bit about how people are "afraid to consider the truth" which smacks of typical CT logic when confronted with a superior argument. As this subforum demonstrates, there's plenty of people who have managed to gather enormous amounts of information about 9/11, and yet none of the claims made in this documentary have surfaced. Funny that.
My favourite is the argument that basically runs "we should be questioning the official story because governments are evil liars". Bravo. Nice objective reasoning there. It's the same tired "accepting the official story" line. No one here that I've seen "accepts" the official story. They've independently researched everything and come to the conclusion that the official story is accurate.
If you want to take me, for example, I've never read the entire 9/11 Commission Report. Why? Because I've gathered my understanding of what happened from first hand evidence and materials, not from someone else's version of them. My NORAD research is entirely independent of the 9/11 commission report. Yet still I get labelled as "blindly accepting the official story". It's just ridiculous.
The tragedy is these filmmakers of this documentary are oblivious to the irony in their claim that anyone who doesn't have their point of view must be a blind sheep.
Then we have pearls like "Yes they lied, they all lieds, whether consciously or unconsciously" (from one of the widows). How exactly do you unconsciously lie?
Of course, the documentary has never really presented WHAT they apparantly lied about. It just throws in a whole heap of unsupported arguments at the end that don't really reflect the remainder of the doco. Kind of reminds me of a History Channel programme.
And in conclusion?
Well, I'll be a little insensitive here. The four widows are the centrepiece of the documentary. It's pretty clear from this documentary (unless, of course, they have been very badly misrepresented) that they are on a witch hunt, plain and simple. Their loved ones died, and they want someone to burn. The terrorists who did it are all dead, or on the loose. No one has been brought to trial.
They can't accept that the US was simply out-smarted (maybe no one has sat down and talked about this with them, because very few people seem willing to even consider it). Therefore US officials must be at fault. Someone needs to swing.
I think their sentiments are wrong, and their research appears to be flawed, but I understand their feelings - grief impairs reason.
What is sickening is the way the filmmakers have used that to their own advantage, to make a propaganda piece.
I'm not overly impressed.
On a technical and stylistic note Loose Change and Terrorstorm are both better made and better structured documentaries.
-Andrew