What a breath of fresh air! The website Screw Loose Change reports that Gedeon and Jules Naudet, the French film-makers who captured images of the first plane striking the World Trade Center on 9-11, have sent a "cease and desist" letter to the makers of the all-too-popular (though transparently bogus, to anyone with a modicum of critical reasoning skills) conspiracy video Loose Change, taking the lugubrious vultures to task for appropriating their footage to advance irresponsible claptrap, and threatening litigation if they don't back down. For the moment, the video has been removed from the Loose Change website.

We anticipate a torrent of abuse from the conspiranoid legions for posting this. They will, of course, accuse us of toeing the "Consensus Reality" or "Official Story" line. Which we do not. There are loads of unaswered, very disturbing questions about 9-11, and we have never hesitated to raise thm on this website. But Conspiracy Theory dogmatism is no more useful to finding the truth than Consensus Reality dogmatism. The problem with the poorly-named "9-11 skeptics" is that they are insufficiently skeptical—about their own version of reality. And the worst of them are just as cynical as Bush, even if they have considerably less power to act on their cynicism (thank goodness!). While Bush exploits 9-11 to start wars and repeal our freedoms, they exploit 9-11 to sell videos.

See our last post on 9-11 conspiranoia.