An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11

The official story of what happened on 9/11 never fails to shock. Four American airliners are hijacked by Osama Bin Laden's terrorists in an attack on the heart of the Western world on September 11, 2001. Two are deliberately flown into New York's famous Twin Towers, which collapse. A third rams into the United States defence headquarters at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C.

The last goes down in rural Pennsylvania, 150 miles north of the capital, after a tussle between the hijackers and some of the passengers onboard, whose bravery was recently portrayed in a Hollywood film, United 93. Nearly 3,000 ordinary, decent Americans die in the attacks, provoking the U.S. President George W. Bush to mount a global war on terror, which leads to the invasion of Iraq, with Britain in tow. Or that's how the official story goes.

Yet today, more than five years on, this accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie made for £1,500 on a cheap laptop by three young American men. The film is so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched what is being dubbed the first internet blockbuster.

The movie was shown on television to 50 million people in 12 countries on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 last autumn. More than 100,000 DVDs have been sold and another 50,000 have been given away. In Britain, 491,000 people have clicked on to Google Video to watch it on their computers. Called Loose Change, the film is a blitz of statistics, photographs pinched from the web, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, all set to hip-hop music. And it is dramatically changing the way people think about 9/11.

A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story of an Al Qaeda attack.

The video claims the Bush administration was, at the very least, criminally negligent in allowing the terrorist attacks to take place. It also makes the startling claim that the U.S. government might have been directly responsible for 9/11 and is now orchestrating a cover-up.

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