911 cover up

If you believe every scrap of evidence this movie presents - and the conclusions it draws - then it's time to march on the Capitol.

But hold on - there is no way of proving many of these facts; the movie's sources include Wikipedia, and the filmakers conclusions are ambigious. The "are you sitting down" conclusions are very disappointing. After a solid hour of reporting, it falls back on kids spy stories about hidden gold bullion and clandestine Wall St manouvres. Get this conspiracy theorists: stock options in airlines are bought and sold in "above average" amounts every day, and millions of dollars of options go unexercised each week. It doesn't mean someone knows something you don't about a terrorist attack. And tiny flashes of light/dust purporting to be demolition charges in the two towers of the World Trade Center could be explained a million different ways, especially given the poor quality of the videos available. Take a picture of any airplane flying overhead on your mobile phone camera and you could probably see enough suspicious shadows to turn it into a cruise missile.

The movie states with absolute confidence that the cell phone calls made from Flight 93 are fake. This, if proved true, would be huge news. The filmakers base this claim on cell phone call research made by a doctor in a light aircraft, who found call success rates above 8,000 feet to be impossibly low. But whether the researcher was flying over the same airspace, and on the same handsets and networks as the victims as Flight 93 is not explained. If this is valid research - then, wow - something is indeed going on. If not - then it falls into the same sham basket as quoting Wikipedia on the amount of gold deposits "rumoured" to be in the WTC basements.

Alas like every other conspiracy theory the movie itself falls down with its "and another thing" arm-tugging child attitude - if the filmmakers just spent some time investigating one or two inconsistencies in the "official" story rather than trying to discredit almost everything that happened that terrible day, they might be able to expose some truths. The mobile phone calls seem like a good place to start. The dialogues do seem strange, absurd even. But then, who knows what you might say to a loved one on the ground when under such duress? The "fakeness" of the conversations is not evidence in itself, but perhaps a pointer to something amiss. True, a flight attendant shouting "oh my god i can see water, buildings" reads like a bad novel character, when a real flight attendant would probably recognise Manhattan and say so... but it's not hard proof and perhaps just insulting to her memory to pick holes in her final words like this.

Nevertheless, something is rotten in Denmark for sure, and I hope these filmakers continue their investigations and come up with something more solid. Finding Flight 93 "heroes" alive and well and living in North Carolina would do it. But coming up with a theory based on grainy news pictures of the events seems childish, pointless and arrogant.