EASTMAN AND THE DECOY THEORY

LAGASSE AND EASTMAN PART 1: EASTMAN AND THE DECOY THEORY
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
January 12 2008
Last update 2/25/08

Update 2/13: I’ve made numerous edits for flow, tightened of parts that rambled, improved grammar and spelling to compensate for limited English proficiency of Lagasse, Eastmann, Desmoulins, and myself.

Intro: The North Path Star Witness
The purpose of this ambitious three-part series is to explore the roots of Sergeant William Lagasse, a Pentagon Force Protection Service dog handler, as a witness to the Pentagon attack. For those who don’t know, Lagasse is arguably the star witness of the flyover-theory-promoting video The PentaCon, produced by Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) and released early 2007. Lagasse is the most convincing of their four witnesses of the north-of-the-Citgo flight path that proves, no matter what Lagasse himself says, that the silver 757 he saw must have flown over the building instead of into it. Among their growing cast of witnesses, the good Sergeant is also the longest-running and in many ways most perplexing player of the north-path tragicomedy. He was brought to their attention, if not directly funneled to them, by controversial 9/11 researcher Dick Eastman. It was Eastman who discovered the officer in 2003 and publicized his north-of-the-Citgo account. This is a curious episode worth looking at in some detail and in context, which is where this story will begin.

The Only Way?
Yakima, Washington-based e-mail warrior and 9/11 researcher Richard “Dick” Eastman is trained in economics, and is apparently a religious man; an acquaintance has described him as a "fool in Christ" and notes his “high cost of Christian discipleship standards.” [link] Adopting a fiercely populist, libertarian, anti-N.W.O. stance, he seems excitable and is said to have gotten rather belligerent and confrontational with fellow 9/11 researchers, quickly dismissing them as complicit in the cover-up if they happen to disagree with him. Eastman is well-known to be staunchly ‘anti-Zionist,’ and sometimes accused of anti-Semitism; he’s wondered aloud, as many have, if 9/11 were a Mossad operation, but for the woes of the world he doesn’t blame all Jews, just the ‘86%’ who support Zionism [source]

I suspect there’s at least some truth to some of Eastman's broader concerns, or the ones he appeals to, and I appreciate his emphasis on grassroots, de-centralized action to fundamentally alter the way things work. But then I disagree strongly again with his ideas on waking up the masses; in a supposed farewell letter issued early 2004, he summed up 9/11 in context of his world view. What was needed was to:

“...discredit the entire ruling elite in government, big business, big finance, big law, big media, big organized crime, big defense - and there is only one way to do that to the degree necessary, only one way to discredit the entire structure so as to bring it down by instant popular demand - and that way is to expose the truth about the 9-11 black-op false-flag inside-job mass-murder frame-up - and the only way to expose the frame-up is with the evidence that shows beyond all possibility of doubt that the Pentagon was not hit by a Boeing airliner.” [emphases mine]

By this definition we’re all screwed. Luckily I also feel his assessment of our global options was wrong and there’s still hope even though an airliner did crash itself into the Pentagon. Either way, he feels his no-757 case was a serious boon to the cause of Truth and global justice – if not its only salvation.

In early 2003 evidence was more scant than it is now, and mystery flourished with Meyssan and others insisting on a missile or small drone strike. Amid the gathering din, one research piece by Eastman rose above for its ambition (three parts!) and apparent sophistication of info-mulching: What convinced me that Flight 77 was not the Killer Jet, published by the equally concerned American Patriot Friends Network. As with other no-757 impact theories, Eastman’s analysis rests heavily on the physical evidence that ‘disproves’ a 757 impact; he found the entry hole "too small to accommodate a Boeing 757 [with] a width of no more than 10 feet.” (90 feet wide in reality) He marveled at the unmarked lawn, and decided the debris evidence available at the time was ‘portable’ and so probably planted.

He also found that the famous security camera stills showed a blackish missile hidden from view but trailed by white missile exhaust (based on a common mix of errors I’ve explained here). But the key problem with the missile theories then purporting to explain these same misread ‘oddities’ was the widespread awareness of dozens of eyewitness reports of a 757 flying in that way and even impacting. Eastman was among the first to find a way to (apparently) acknowledge this class of evidence with bizarre treatment that still allowed a non-impact scenario, and the Flyover theory was born.

The Killer Jet, the Light Poles, and the Decoy
In essence his theory, at least as it stood at that point, is this: the decoy he insists on calling Flight 77, a large two-engine silver airliner painted with American Airlines standards as seen by many, flew in from the west, while a drone ‘killer jet’ came in synched, below it and from a similar angle, fired a missile, and then itself impacted the Pentagon as Flight 77 passed over and disappeared. Eastman offered “a profile of the remote-controlled killer jet,” in essence a "‘non-standard’ General Dynamics F-16 aircraft.” There were no eyewitness reports of an F-16, just one ear-witness (whom Eastman doesn’t even cite) who thought the jet sounded like one. An F-16 has a single engine centered in the rear compared to the two massive RB-211 engines under a 757’s wings. “Only one engine broke through the C-ring,” Eastman states based on something or other (actually neither engine seems to have made it that far); “The one engine is on a line from the downed lamp posts to the entry hole to the last exit hole -- indicating a single engine jet.” A Boeing as said to have done all damage and widely reported as impacting low is three times as long as an F-16 and at least thrice as massive, and thus seems a better match for the damage necessary to reach the exit hole. But if the entry hole were only ten feet across, no Boeing could have entered, so F-16 it must be.

Also take note that the five downed light poles match a 757’s wingspan of 124 feet, and know that an F-16’s wingspan is 33 feet. The accused killer doesn’t seem a candidate to take down the poles, and at first Eastman denied any were downed; “Ron Harvey says that 5 poles were downed. Ever hear that from any other source? […]I have not seen a picture of five downed poles. If there is one I would like to ask whether it was faked […] you will notice that in the picture Harvey does send that the downed poles are not shown with the Pentagon wreckage in the background. ” [link]Later he clarified “I have long acknowledged the existence of the poles as soon as I finally got my hands on an actual picture of one (Ron Harvey was not forthcoming with me at the time)" [link]

“In fact it was the pole data in contrast to the witness accounts.” Eastman continued, “that first suggested the presence of two converging aircraft paths.” In this construct, the impact/pole damage path still is attributed to the killer F-16 by the time of his 2003 piece, which explains “the light poles […were] hit by wind force concentrated in a vortex coming off the wings, rather than being hit by the aircrafts fuselage or wings, denting and fallen forward.” Yes, he thought (or said he did) that air was responsible for bending, cutting, and crimping these aluminum poles so acutely.
So his conclusion, based in part on the light poles, was of two converging flight paths, with the implausible F-16 doing the damage “while Flight 77 […] in fact flew over the building, concealed immediately from most witnesses by fire and smoke rising to the rear and by the "blend-in" environment of Reagan National [Airport],” where it ten landed. With that airstrip just a couple thousand feet behind the Pentagon, the incredibly tight loop required to reach it, according to French researcher Jean-Pierre Desmoulins, “shows how imagination can bring somebody who doesn't know physics and laws of flight to propose nonsense.” [link]

Riskus Dyslexia and the ‘South’ Path
Attack witness and skateboarding enthusiast Steve Riskus, according to his own account, was “traveling on route 27 towards 395,” which means he was headed south with the Pentagon to his left, when the airliner “crossed my path from the right,” or west, “about 100ft in front of me and crashed into the pentagon.” Within seconds he was out of his car and taking photos of the scene, revealing his excellent view. “I could see the "American Airlines" logo on the tail as it headed towards the building,“ his seminal account clarifies, and Eastman is quite sure Riskus saw the Boeing decoy, but he also clearly states “I saw the plane hit the building,” even though it was the killer jet that did that. “From where Riskus was, the low and level approach of the killer jet was camouflaged by the "busy" background,” Eastman concluded, so he simply presumed the flyover jet is what caused the explosion. That’s it. The core assertion of this account is disposed of quickly, the remainder free to pilfer.

Riskus’ scene photos reveal his approximate location, across from the heliport tower just north of the impact point. The graphic at left is from the text-graphic Dick Eastman used to convey his position, which looks about right except one thing – at the bottom in red are labels southwest and northwest of crash, which do not line up with his description or the evidence. The poles were south of the impact, not north, and if Riskus were south, the Pentagon would be to his right, not left. Eastman clarifies that he thinks “Witness Steve Riskus was headed north on the turnpike, south of the crash site, when he saw Flight 77 pass by.” Just imagine for a moment this guy’s compass: east is to the left of north? He has the whole area half-backwards, and it carries through into his analysis of the killer jet’s “straight northwest to southeast line” taking out the light poles “north” of Riskus, “to that final hole where the bare engine of the plane exited.”

Eastman caught the error eventually (see part II), and it does not really effect his overall findings, anyway; if we re-orient his N-S axis while keeping the E-W, the decoy would fly north of the killer jet’s path, given Riskus’ standing 100-foot measurement. This roughly gives us a flight path very north of the Citgo, over the middle of Arlington National Cemetery. This is in no way a candidate for the light pole or building damage, and would have had to have flown over. If not for the dyslexia that has him reading north as south, this is the best evidence yet for a north path and flyover, an issue that will clarify itself and come into play in the next installment. By my measurements, the official 77 path/Killer Jet path would have crossed Route 27 roughly 1,000 feet ahead of Riskus, which leaves me wondering if 100 was a typo, a grossly imprecise estimate, or whatever Eastman took it for when he noted "there is no feasible path by which the killer jet could have hit those lamp posts, flown to within 100 feet of Riskus and then returned to the northwest to be able to enter at the crash point at an angle that would enable it to rendevous with the exit hole in the C-ring. No jet could do it, and especially no Boeing 757 airliner could do it." When J.P. Desmoulins looked at Riskus’ account he found that Eastman “developed this "100 ft" statement, making it one of the bases of his theory," while it seemed more likely that this number was "just an irrelevant statement" on Riskus' part, a casual and far-off estimate of an unprecedented sight.

Dividing One Plane Into Two
At one point Eastman confidently summarizes “all evidence and witness testimony presented in this paper are consistent with the [killer jet] thesis.” It’s in the use of eyewitnesses that the piece shines. It seems it was no simple task to see the patterns, and some careful prep work had to go into the process. To make 77 appear the over-passing decoy, he set about Minimizing impact accounts associated with it, as we’ve seen he dismissed Riskus as visually fooled but took a different tack with Tim Timmerman, following his cited account, which was clearly describing Flight 77, with the comment: “most significantly, he actually states that the plane he was watching "didn't appear to crash into the building"!!!!” [bold mine]. Really he said “it didn't appear to crash into the building; most of the energy was dissipated in hitting the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I saw the wings fly forward, and then the conflagration engulfed everything in flames. […] it was right before impact, and I saw the airplane just disintegrate and blow up into a huge ball of flames.” Sounds like an account he shouldn’t have cited – a ground impact and then into the building is about the opposite of a flyover Eastman feels happened, which would make this witness a liar, which would leave one wondering why he’s quoting liars. In fact, Eastman once called Timmerman and Penny Elgas “two witnesses that I believe have lied about their experience.” [source]

In all Eastman analyzes sixteen witness accounts of the plane(s), not all verified by me as free of the selectivity shown with Timmerman’s, and divides all but three of them into “two distinct groups, each seeing a different plane, on a different path, at different altitude, with different sound, at different speeds.” Some saw “an airliner, shiny, red and blue markings, with two engines, in a dive, and flying "low" in terms of one or two hundred feet, and silent (engines idle)” Others saw “a plane that came in at tree-top level, at "20 feet" all the way, hitting lamp posts in perfect low level flight […] engines roaring; pouring on speed; smaller than a mid-sized airliner.”

If we combine the two descriptions we get a composite of the one plane official story. Conversely, by fragmenting the descriptors and creating two piles he creates two jets. Here is the roster: Timmerman, Campo, Munsey, Peterson, Riskus, Robbins, and one anonymous witness saw both the decoy Flight 77 and the impact of same, but either the part where they saw it hit was removed and ignored, or they were tricked. (Robbins “saw the Boeing that did not crash and the explosion and smoke made by the killer plane that did.”). O’Keefe saw the decoy Flight 77 and heard the killer. Vaughn saw the decoy but no impact. The account Eastman shares has Joel Sucherman seeing a “large plane” that was “not going to make it across the river to National Airport” as it passed too fast for him to see “any of the horror- struck faces inside.” Yep, Sucherman saw the F-16, since it “was 20 feet off the ground” and he actually re-prints “the plane slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon.” Gaskins gives nothing Eastman uses besides altitude clues (making it 77 he saw), while Liebner’s is inconclusive for lack of altitude clues. One anonymous “falls between the two categories,” using adjectives that could describe either decoy of F-16.

That’s 14 of the 16, and the final two comprise Eastman’s third category, seeing both planes; He reports that Kelly Knowles saw “two planes moving toward the Pentagon, one veering away as the other crashed.” Actually she was miles away, and saw only the tail of one plane pass and then another also disappeared to the east “a few seconds later.” This is almost certainly the C-130 cargo transport sent to examine the scene, passing over the Pentagon about two minutes after the crash. [source] Keith Wheelhouse was at Arlington National Cemetery when, as Eastman states, he "saw another plane flying near the jet that crashed." As widely reported, one article from three days after 9/11 implied they passed at the same time; “[Wheelhouse] believes it flew directly above the American Airlines jet, as if to prevent two planes from appearing on radar, while at the same time guiding the jet toward the Pentagon.” While another article published the next day clarifies that Wheelhouse says the second plane was probably a C-130 [source, Eastman decided he saw the killer jet and the decoy.

Even as he dropped the known ID to bolster his two-plane theory, Eastman was aware of the C-130, and mentioned it once in the paper. He noted the cargo plane could have aerially planted the 757 debris indicating impact, especially the “wheel in the parking lot," as it passed "just 30 seconds later.” It is never mentioned in connection with two-planes accounts despite at least one that was quite clear on being a C-130 witness. Therefore, this graphic pretty well sums up how the killer jet theory works: [r-click, new window for full-size]

A Killer Theory… NOT
Here we have a proposition that Eastman calls “the only way” to “discredit the entire ruling elite […] to the degree necessary.” And this way, this bridge to victory offered up to support the weight of the world, is strewn with wrecked logic and supported by a teetering tower of poorly piled debris. As I have shown, the Killer Jet Theory is a laughable construct slapped together from misquoted quotes, vague words turned to hard geometry, and that geometry to ‘proof’ of something trumping hard, consistent facts. Its architecture is almost entirely of ‘errors’ too egregious to be accidental or to even be mistaken for such. Perhaps each one is a little tip-off to those paying attention that this theorizing isn’t meant to be taken seriously, a wink as he fleeces the less vigilant. A series of winks. A prolonged seizure of the eyelid.

But there are only so many so dumb, and Eastman must have been left a bit embarrassed by his own piece. The bridge was too rickety. Rescue, however, was just a few e-mails away. Already hinting at a decoy north path (if called a south path at the time) based on nearly nothing, out of nowhere a self-appointed debunker gives the only solid, clear, undeniable north path account yet – Enter William Lagasse and the next post in the series.