ABSTRACT
In April 2005, 22-year-old American Dylan Avery released Loose Change, a film about the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He had put the documentary together on his laptop, drawing mainly on material available online. The film was distributed, often for free, on DVD and available for watching and downloading online, first via Google Video, later on YouTube. Loose Change: Second Edition was released as early as December 2005, then Loose Change: Final Cut about two years later, followed by An American Coup, a further update, in September 2009. The films were so successful that Vanity Fair called them the ‘first Internet blockbuster’ (Sales 2006). And while the original version cost only a couple of thousand dollars to make, the final one was professionally produced for more than a million. For each new film, Avery deleted some scenes and material, and added new ones in their stead (partly in reaction to copyright infringement lawsuits). The films’ argument thus changed considerably over time. They started from the premise that there were anomalies in the official account that needed explaining. At first, Avery suggested that the planes that had hit the World Trade Center had been remotely controlled, and later he suggested that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolition. All versions, however, make the same central claim: the 9/11 attacks were not committed by Islamist terrorists led by Osama bin Laden, but were orchestrated in secret by the U.S. government in order to infringe on civil liberties at home and wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, seemingly with the aim of securing access to oil.
