Friday, February 23, 2007

THE CRIME SCENE / OBSTACLE DODGE

THE CRIME SCENE / OBSTACLE DODGE
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Last updated 8/11/07


Ever the master of re-inventing the wheel, I’ve assembled an accurate map of the West lawn crossed by Flight77 and some key features that play into the attack. The helipad itself is pretty obvious, but the other features I’ve done in a color code system with a key. Neither the angle of attack nor the linear measurements here are mathematically precise, but generally accurate. The red lines are based on the 920-foot width of the Pentagon’s façade and indicate widths across identifiable spans of the lawn.
Lets look closer at these, from left to right. The unidentified walkway (neon green) with its small structure at the end is not terribly important in the layout or the attack, but is a good foreground reference point for the views from the CCTV security cameras. The post they occupied is just off frame here to the left, their field of view encompassing almost exactly the lawn’s area in near-useless resolution. The green expanse is of course the west lawn itself, the one so widely noted to bear no visible mark of a 757. True enought, the "Pentalawn" itself was untouched in this plane-into-building crash, but there is plenty of evidence of such a missile even in the sparesely-filled space in front of the building.

Next is the heliport (yellow), only about 100 feet from the impact site but essentially untouched. It also housed a mini-fire station with a fire engine. Obviously designed to hanndle helicopter crashes, it seems rather convenient the 757 should hit where the engine could basically spray the fires down without even pulling out. The heliport also served later in the day as the gathering point for the famous fuselage scraps.

Next the blue rectangle represents a ventilation/exhaust structure, obviously just renovated along with the rest of wedge one. This is set into the ground, and surrounded by a low concrete lip, about one foot high. This is the dark outline on the map, which suffered damage to the south wall, the vents inside scraped and mangled, and its east wall, closest to the building, was obliterated. In this photo, we see the gouge in the low south wall, bearing the curve of the bottom edge of an engine on the scale of a 757's. I don’t know the purpose of the light at left usually referred to as a locator light. It’s not far from the helipad I guess. What we have at right is the damage anyone in the know means when they say the plane hit the ground or anything on the ground before striking the building. This is the closest thing to a mark on the unmarked Pentalawn, and indeed a couple feet of turf seems scraped off right here.

This shot also gives us a good look at the next feature, the cable spools (magenta). There were at least five of these feeding communications cables into the new office space in the renovated wedge. They are at least six feet high when on edge, and some have taken these remaining intact as showing that no part of the plane was lower than that – putting a 757 too high unless it could pass through these, which of course it couldn’t. In fact these are small enough to have been passed over by the gaps between fuselage and engines, or even been rolled aside by the plane’s wake. They are built to roll after all, and probably rolled more during the explosion on impact, and so what we see here is not necessarily the configuration they had WHEN the plane came in. And anyway, they weren’t untouched – note that the one on its side at far left looks slightly deformed, probably by the main fuselage or left wing faring.

Moving on to the other side of the plane’s trajectory, we encounter the fenced-in construction area, shaded lavender. The fence was torn through at that corner by the right engine, as seen below (photoshopped to illustrate the cable spools all evident in the background).
Finally we have the backup generator (orange), parked at the stricken corner of the construction area. It’s the thing on the right above. The giant truck trailer had a front half (generator), and a back half (diesel engine). The issue of having diesel fumes being emitted right by the intake vents is beyond the scope of this site. Anyway, the generator trailer was pushed aside, suffered a burnt spot, a dent in its top, and a massive deformation of its front (generator) half, presumably by the right engine, and possible subsequent melting in the diesel fire. It started out totally rectangular and somehow ended up like this: According to the impact damage and the most astute of eyewitness accounts, the plane was indeed banking starboard high, its left engine basically scraping ground, its right high enough to smack a 12-foot high trailer. It must be noted that the majority of the warping seen here is probably not from the engine itself, but melting from the ensuing fire; it was the diesel fuel in this generator burning that caused most of the smoke at the Pentagon.
---
Not enough evidence? Here are some other quality pages with maps of the scene/details on the obstacles to help you ponder:
- My map is too close to account for the light poles, except the last one. Excellent analysis of these at Eric Bart’s site: LINK
- Desmoulins: The damage before impact LINK
- Pickering/Pentagon Research: Scene map -detailed, includes positions of fire trucks and plane scraps. LINK
- 911 review.com, Jim Hoffman: Error: Obstacles preclude a 757 LINK

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

JAYWALKING AND SPANGING ACROSS AMERICA

Just after I left the LetsRoll 911, the Site's main administrator Phil Jayhan announced on June 25 2005 a “second wave” of action, a plan to tour the country and promote Loose Change. First he’d go to Indianapolis, showing the new vid along with In Plane Site, then mosey on over to Shanksville to meet Chertoff-busting Christopher Bollyn, and then elsewhere to meet other luminaries like Tom Flocco and Jack Blood, maybe even Charlie Sheen in the planned stop-off at Hollywood. Jayhan planned to have his exploits filmed and used for a new documentary called “9/11 - Taking it to the Streets - Jaywalking Across America.” The “Jay[han]” who planned to do the “walking” explained the purpose of the new video would be “to show people how easy it is to convince people of 9/11 with a few simple pictures.” [1]

He solicited and received donations from dedicated members over the next days, but on July 5 a “slight delay due to scheduling difficulties” was announced on a thread for news on the tour and video. “More information is forthcoming soon,” it promised, but that’s the last post in the thread. [2] Apparently the tour never happened and the whole idea died within two weeks.

Yet nearly a year later, on April 27 2006, 9/11 skeptic Greg Szymanski interviewed Phil on his RBN radio show. Greg explained that Jayhan was finally on his grand tour of America, "trying to spread the truth about 911 for an upcoming video,” and headed to Washington DC. He talked with Greg about the Geiger counters at Ground Zero – implying mini-nukes – and about the people he'd interviewed and convinced of 9/11 on camera. But wouldn’t you know it, trouble prowls the path of the warrior and Phil told Greg's listeners how after a stop in Alabama his car engine died and he was stuck in Chattanooga. Greg encouraged his listeners to e-mail him at Arctic Beacon to donate money or possibly help him buy or secure a used car to help him “enlighten people about really what happened on 9/11” with the video that was in the works, on the road, and on its way to the Capital. Phil likewise directed listeners to his Paypal account. [3]

So I checked to see how the video came out. As of November the info thread is still inactive and the official picture links “for more info and to donate” are still up but only connect to the general donations page. There is no word there about the video, but for your convenience, Phil still takes Paypal, Visa, Master Card, Discover, and American Express. [4] Perhaps this is part of the reason Victor Thorn once called Jayhan "the biggest mooch and beggar in this movement." [5]

Sources:
[1] “Jaywalking across America - 'Lets Roll'” Posted by Phil Jayhan on June 25, 2005, 6:13 am am http://www.letsrollforums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=72915&highlight=&sid=2d57de11698157b0f0e55267d96277e9
[2] Final entry posted by “F/O” Sat July 5 2005 10:52 am thread: “Jaywalking across America - 'Lets Roll'” http://www.letsrollforums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8492&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25&sid=de7be816dc892950d16f94995e10e47a
[3] Greg Szymanski interviews Phil Jayhan. Republic Broadcasting Network. April 27 2006 http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Greg06.html
[4] Jayhan,Phil. Time for the Revolution to Start! - First shot fired tonight.” Posted May 17 2006, 2:10 am http://letsrollforums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13927&sid=f2b4ee4b3314d952007d5dd3bde40cbb
[5] "Jayhan-Avery Smackdown?" Screw Loose Change. October 19 2006. http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_screwloosechange_archive.html

Friday, February 16, 2007

EMANUEL SFERIOS ON DISINFO IN THE WAR FOR TRUTH

January 25 2007

Emanuel Sferios is the Seattle-based webmaster for the 9/11 Visibility Project (http://www.septembereleventh.org/). In 2006 he marked the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with a hard-hitting piece that reflected his growing doubts about the prospects for full truth in our immediate future. He noted how at a talk earlier that year, he told his audience in essence, “the movement was over, that we had failed, and that the window of opportunity for obtaining justice for 9/11 was closed for good.” He later regretted he didn’t “leave any of these new activists with much hope,” but still stood by his assessment; in five years, movement had accomplished “everything and nothing.” As he wrote, a majority of Americans had just been found to reject the full official story of 9/11, skepticism that had been steadily rising since the attacks and was by then wider than most had ever expected.

But as Sferios points out - and as is obvious - nothing had changed politically. The mainstream media and ruling elites were only weakly reflecting the popular mind-shift if at all, no one had been charged at all, and certainly not the President, the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash, and the global “War on Terror” rolls on unabated. Thus the apt diagnosis of resounding failure within apparent victory. Of course things simply don’t change so easily, and I wouldn’t recommend being so hard on ourselves. But others were just as upset that we hadn’t been able to put some necks in the guillotine, and cited a "lack of political will” on the part of america's citizenry.

While this is certainly a key part of it, and an illustration of why (as some argue) we’re engineered to be so docile and distractable, Sferios went beyond this simple argument, and decided “the reason for the discrepancy between what people know about 9/11 and what they are willing to do to stop the War on Terror […] has to do with the scope and sophistication of the political and social control mechanisms used against us; namely, disruption and disinformation." He knew "COINTELPRO-style disruption" when he saw it; in his 20-year career, "never before have I witnessed it used on such a scale and with such precision as I have within the 9/11 Truth Movement.”

“The shadow government,” as he dubs the villains behind 9/11, had long ago learned “that the best way to defeat your opposition is to become your opposition.” To this end, the powers that be have largely coopted the Truth Movement, "channeling new skeptics (and old) into endless debates around physical evidence and other ineffective actions,” which I guess icludes the debunkings and this website. As with previous COINTELPRO efforts, the plan was to “suck rebellious […] energy and dissipate it ineffectively, preventing the formation of a legitimate, effective opposition.” The no-757-at-the-Pentagon Frustrating Fraud figure most prominently in this set-up:

“To prove that agents are among us, and that they have succeeded in taking over the bulk of the movement, one needs to go no further than compare the number of people who believe no plane hit the Pentagon with the number of people who know about the simultaneous wargames that were taking place on the morning of 9/11, and that prevented NORAD from intercepting the planes before they hit their targets.

The former claim, widely believed, is perhaps the most successful and sophisticated disinformation campaign injected into the 9/11 Truth Movement. Supported by doctored video footage released by the Pentagon itself, it has almost single-handedly made the movement the laughing stock of Washington DC residents [...]”


He further maintains that the no-757 claim "has also been the primary wedge used to divide the movement from itself," a stinging accusation to those pushing such theories, and also perhaps to folks like myself. To prevent unwarranted strife, Sferios didn’t name the suspected infiltrators, noting “you can never really prove who is an agent and who is simply duped by the disinfo itself, much of which is easily believable on the surface.” Of course this is a necessary distinction, but on this site I feel I must name names of people pushing the fraud and hold the offenders accountable – just becuase motives are hard to tell doesn't mean wrong theories creating false certainty don't need to be challenged. It's called hard love. Initially Sferios himself bought the no-757 line, but cited Mark Robinowitz at Oil Empire “for having the stubborn persistency to keep challenging me back when I, too, believed the hoax,” and to Jim Hoffman at 9-11 Research “for his unparalleled analysis of the Pentagon physical evidence.”

Such careful analysis is crucial, especially in this case; as Sferios noted of those Washington DC residents "hundreds of [them] saw the plane hit the building, and thousands of [them] have relatives or friends who did." The Fraud's turning the Truth movement into a sick joke for them (if it didn't start that way), "was likely its intention, for it has successfully alienated from the movement precisely those DC professionals (senators, congressmen, federal judges, prosecutors, etc.) who hold enough power to effectively investigate and prosecute the crime.” Of course it's not as if the more honest elites were about to step up until they saw Pentagon Strike, but it's something to think about when casually batting around theories and then making movies about them. Loosing the change is one thing, properly aiming it is another.

source:
Sferios, Emanuel. "9/11 Five Years Later: What Have We Accomplished?An Assessment of the 9/11 Truth Movement." 9/11 Visibility Project. September 11 2006. http://www.septembereleventh.org/five_years_later.php

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

LOOSE CHANGE vs. TIGHT CONTINUITY

THE CHANGE IS LOOSE AND SO IS THE BACKLASH (AND IT AIN'T PRETTY)
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
January 2007
updated, correction spurred by a reader, 2/12/07


After taking the underground by storm in 2005, Loose Change went mainstream in 2006, with widespread screenings, celebrity endorsemenrts, etc. By September, the Telegraph (India) reported “the runaway success of Loose Change has garnered the mainstream press’ attention and has begun to influence how the public perceives the entire 9/11 Truth Movement,” which seems to be taken by the author as a good thing for the "Truth" movement. [1] Over at least three evolving releases, the video went viral with free posting on the internet, and by the time of its second edition in 2006, it was a phenomenon. It was boosted by a more tolerant attitude in the media, no doubt partly due to receding memory of 9/11 itself. Notably, the August 2006 Vanity Fair ran an uncritical piece, whose writer Nancy Jo Sales summed up that “Loose Change has struck a nerve.” [2] Sales asked Director Dylan Avery what he thought was going to happen when this growing wave hit shore. He predicted a “second American revolution. […] There's going to be a lot of anger. […] When it becomes irrefutable public record that 9/11 was done by our government, the shit is gonna hit the fan.” [3] I have a hunch that mess will not occur in this country in any near future - after the initial long odds plus wave after wave of false promises like Loose Change leaving the movement drained, it will fall to another generation if to anyone to collectively reach and live the truth about that day.

But in the meantime, with its appeal to legitimate questions, its techno-savvy editing, and cartloads of crippling crap sneaking in behind good compelling evidence, it has risen to the top and dominated and skewed the entire field; Avery told the CBC by August its viewership was in the “millions, millions, is the best way to put it. I would even go so far as to say 100 million people have seen our film.” [4] The video remains in the top ranks of downloads, number one for a while, at Google’s new video page, and if he’s exaggerating, it isn’t by much. Reports of awkward, scripted-seeming lectures on controlled demolitions and obscure defense contractors have been sharply on the rise. Indeed, the "change" is loose.

So is the backlash, as seen in the Popular Mechanics 9/11 Myths book, and in recent 5th anniversary articles on 9/11 in Time, US News, etc. that treat the “conspiracy theories [that] won’t die” almost exclusively by examining Loose Change and its flaws, as if it were the truth movement. Their claims were lampooned prominently by South Park in October 2006.

A new internet force clearly inspired directly by the video and taking it as its window onto the movement is the Screw Loose Change weblog. The site’s “Chief,” James B., describes himself as “a combination software geek from Bellevue, part-time Chief Warrant Officer in the Army National Guard (thus the clever name), and current MBA student,” and interesting to me he’s also a “graduate in Russian and East European studies from the University of Washington.” His cohort on the site is more mysterious: Pat, like the SNL character, is just Pat. They delve well beyond Loose Change into the wider 9/11 Truth scene, who all in all give the site plenty of material to ridicule. The rich pickings, some clever words and decent work tackling them have earned them Michelle Malkin’s praise as “the single best clearinghouse on the 'net for fighting the tinfoil hat brigade.” The partisan slant is muted but evident, and clear enough from its enthusiastic support by a halfass be-bunking ‘blog called “The Truth About 9/11/01,” dedicated to the propositions that “over 90% of people don’t have common sense,” and “believing in any conspiracy theories about 9/11 is anti-american [sic].” [5]

A member of Screw Loose Change named Mark Iradian put together his own edit of Loose Change with “corrections” and commentary inserted, and released it under the title "Screw Loose Change," which like the original later spawning a revised version called the “Not Freakin’ Again Edition.” Iradian summed up his reason for the sarcastic video: “when you try to label the government for being a butcher and slaughtering 3000 of his own people, you better provide concrete evidence to back that up.” [6] Another cohort, Mark Roberts, put together a detailed critique of the video and later a list of telling interviews in which "Loose Change Creators Speak (and it ain't pretty)." The latter spawned another Iradian video of the same title comprised of audio interviews overlaid with contrasting text and images to make them look as heartless as possible in their casual mocking of the deadly attacks.

Even as disbelief of the official version surges to all-time highs on the back of Loose Change in the second half of 2006, others like James and Pat and Michelle and Mark and Mark are taking issue with their approach; Avery’s flippant attitude is one lightning rod for controversy, his laughing in phone interviews about the absurdity of hijackers taking over Flight 93 in particular with box cutters or even plastic knives. It sounded to Malkin like “a taste of how sick these people are and how much they enjoy mocking the suffering of 9/11 victims” [7] Listening to the interviews I do cringe at the lack of tact, but this of course could be blamed on Avery’s age – he’s barely out of High School remember. I also know from experience that one gets a bit desensitized when dealing with dark subjects day in and day out; the whole hallowed ground thing is hard to keep up, and gallows humor often simply happens. Ask any mortician or soldier.

Avery’s flippancy, as revealed especially in his treatment of the Bernard Browns seam, is a telling clue to the emerging script in which grave charges are laid out in a sloppy and immature way, ordinary folks see that Loose Change represents the “Truth” movement and it’s clearly wrong, and so in the long run there’s nothing to worry about. This paranoia is an adolescent phase, based on simple misunderstandings, deep anxiety and an irrational hatred of Bush, both of the latter fed by the extended Iraq War. PopMech, Screw Loose Change and the others have the misunderstandings largely under control, the Iraq war will be changing course shortly, and Bush has only two years left. And while the “Long War” rolls on into its planned decades, new battlefields are being laid out, and other elites and other catalyzing events wait in the wings, of course there are drugs to treat that anxiety and counseling to rescue minds lured by the "cynical imaginations" of "extremists here in the United States." [8]

Mary Katharine Ham’s analysis at Town hall.com is telling; after first dismissing them, she realized “I shouldn’t have moved on. I should have stopped and looked at the Truthers and listened to them a lot sooner.” She urged other to listen closer and understand – via the filter of Screw Loose Change and the PopMech book – to confront the “dangerous deniers we’re facing in our own country.” [9]

[1], [2] Ray, Turna. “11/9, a conspiracy?” September 3 2006.http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060903/asp/look/story_6682430.asp
[3] Sales, Nancy Jo. “Click Here for Conspiracy.” http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060717roco02
[4] 9/11: TRUTH, LIES AND CONSPIRACY." Iinterview with Dylan Avery. Canadian Broadcasting Croporation. August 22, 2006
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911avery.html
[5] Screw Loose Change video website. http://www.lolloosechange.co.nr/
[6] Welcome to the Truth about 9/11/01. http://www.threegroup.net/personal/adam/Opening.html
[7] Malkin, Michelle. The 9/11 Tinfoil Hat Brigade.” September 10 2006. http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005885.htm
[8] "9/11 Debunking the Myths." Intro. the editors. Popular Mechanics. March 2005. page 71.
[9] Ham, Mary Katharine "Beware the Truthers. Don't Ignore Them." Townhall.com. Monday, September 11, 2006 http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=beware_the_truthers_dont_ignore_them&ns=MaryKatharineHam&dt=09/11/2006&page=1

Saturday, February 10, 2007

FLIGHT 77'S HOME STRETCH

HOW LONG TO CROSS THE LAST YARDS?
And an analysis of "Zebra's" alleged missing frames
last updated 3/6/07


I've been looking at the two Pentagon CCTV security cameras that captured the "white blur" crossing the West lawn before exploding into the building. Both videos show a portion of the blur in exactly one frame, and the next is the explosion. Here I attempt to break down how this lines up with the camera's frame rate. For simplicity, we are here going to ignore possibilities like different craft or speed range, different distance from the camera or approach angle, and the possibility of manipulated footage. Those all open an infinite number of variables that makes it impossible to verify anything.

First, Flight 77's speed: reports vary but include:
FEMA: 532 mph
ASCE: 479 mph
9/11 Comm: 530
Russell Pickering: more than 400
Flight Data Recorder, NTSB study: about 550-575 mph
others have cited figures like "at least 250" and "at least 300 mph." The high end speeds would seem less likely, as the higher the speed the harder the handling at extremely low altitudes. Yet the Flight data recorder shows a final rate pushing the plane’s top speed of about 600 mph. So I settled on a range of sample speeds; 350mph (0.097 mps), 420mph (0.117 mps), 460mph (0.1333 mps), 530mph (0.1472 mps), 575 (0.159 mps).

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in their 2002 Pentagon Building Performance Report, calculated the distance to the building from nosecone in the 2002 stills (camera two) as 320 feet. My same distance based on my camera field of view analysis and generally accepted flight path is 350 feet. Close enough, I’ll go with their numbers for now.

Time needed to cover remaining distance to the building (320 feet / 0.05 miles):
@ 350mph = 0.58 sec
@ 420mph = 0.48 sec
@ 480mph = 0.42 sec
@ 530mph = 0.38 sec
@ 575mph = 0.31 sec

So I can only offer a liberal range of times needed to cross that last distance, from 0.31-0.58 seconds, give or take for exact distance, all well under the one-second frame rate. From Camera one’s view, the plane is further back - the frames captured by it seem to have been a split-second ahead and caught the nosecone just crossing the threshold of peripheral vision – distance to building then, by my estimates, is about 450 feet (.08 miles), increasing the time needed to cross – then the span is more like .5 to .8 seconds – nearing the frame rate expectation of a second glimpse, but still falling short.
Left: camera two. Right: camera one. (click to enlarge)

Presuming neither video is missing any frames, this gives us 0.4-0.6 seconds for the impact fireball to erupt before the next frame was taken by camera two. With camera one we have about 0.2-0.5 seconds for the same phenomenon, explaining the overelming brightness of the younger burst recorded there. In short, at that frame rate and those speeds, we should expect exactly one frame of the plane from each camera’s view, no more and no less.
The explosion: what's the time lag in these corresponding frames?
Now to the analysis presented by a fellow member at Above Top Secret (screen name“Zebra”) whose well made website alleges that one frame is missing from each camera’s record just as the plane enters. Seeing the plane nosing into cam 1 and fully present in cam 2, he saw two different frames and wondered why there weren’t corresponding frames for the nosing-in phase on cam 2 or the fully-present phase in cam 1. After the analysis above, it’s clear however that if such frames did exist and were excised, this means the plane flew about 130-feet between the frames, given the ASCE’s numbers, which roughly jive with my own.

At one second apart, that gives it a speed of 72 mph between the two stages. To cover the remaining distance from the fully-present stage to the building’s wall (320 feet) at that rate would take it three seconds, necessitating another three frames missing from each camera’s record. In fact, I'm pretty sure airliners stop flying altogether when they get down to 72 mph.

So what else could account for the positional difference in the two frames we’ve seen? As Zebra summed up the possibilities, “either the speed of the flying object is tremendous or another incident with the camera generated a frame totally out of synchronization or those two frames are in fact 1 second apart and have each a corresponding frame missing in the other video.” My money’s going on the speed one. At even the slowest sample speed of 350 mph, that 130 foot difference would be covered in .2 seconds, and the higher speeds would in fact lessen the time difference needed. So 0.2 is the high end. and Zebra himself admits a delay of "no more than 0.1 second" (I'm not sure where he got this exact difference). At any rate, a difference of .2 seconds falls closer to the small time lag between the two cameras than it does to the frame interval within either camera. Judging from the differences in other correlary frames compared to frame-frame differences within a camera, I'd guess the time lage between them at noticeable but well under 0.5 seconds - anywhere from 0.1 to 0.3 and a perfect fit for the differences in the white blur frames.

Updates: Now here's where I went wrong the first time. The frames before the plane, as Zebra lays them out, seem to line up with a slight delay, camera one ahead. After the plane, they line up about the same, even with the three blank spaces inserted. (except at row 27, frames 0864 and 2719, where camera two seems to be slightly ahead judging by the projectiles at the top, though this is probably a trick of perspective I can't explain right now). Anyway, the point is even if we ignore the two "missing" frames that give the plane a ridiculous speed and that cancel each other out, one camera must be missing a frame for these to line up both before and after.

But I'm also seeing other problems with the anlysis I'd glossed over before. Zebra's identification of the plane is off, in my opinion. In cam 2, he sees nosecone, right wing and right engine. At almost no angle but near-head on would we be ale to see even the tip of the right wing out ahead of the nosecone. They are set too far back for that. and in cam 2, he's been tricked by the dark tailfin, seeing the same white that was just plane now as smoke behind it, and seeing the plane itself suddenly black. This makes the possibility of the frames being off seem more likely, giving us a greater positional difference of about 475 as compared to 105, giving us a semi-plausible speed of 320 mph. But this is still far slower than most reported speeds, and of course relies on that baing the tailfin, which I'm pretty sure it isn't.

Friday, February 9, 2007

ON THE PAGE DESCRIPTION CHANGE

Updated 2/9/07

In mid-January I noticed that the previous description for this page "the Hijacking of the 9/11 Truth Movement by the No-Plane-at-the-Pentagon Theory" is not the correct one for what I'm doing here. As one miffed message board poster I ran across characteristically put it: "don't lump me in with the "no planers." I believe a plane hit the pentagon, just not flight 77 or any kind of 757." People with such beliefs are certainly not no-planers, many of them in fact pushing the plane of the year (2004-Global Hawk.. 2005-A3 Sky Warrior. Etc.). True no-planers are rare any more; regarding hte Pentagon, the fraud has become more adaptive, and can now account for a small, selectively-screened portion of the plane wreckage found. They narrow their denial down - "okay, we can allow a plane, just not a 757."

So they aren't old-school 2002 no-planers, but they are also wrong and are pushing the Frustrating Fraud, so this page is for them too. Therefore a new sub-title description: ""the Hijacking of the 9/11 Truth Movement by the No-757-at-the-Pentagon Theory" Okay, it's really more of an anti-theory, but I'm not changing it again.

On Oil Empire’s Link to This Site
Apologies to Mark Robinowitz: I had wanted to e-mail him about it but couldn’t find an address on the site, so what the heck, I’ll just do a quick post on it. He initially posted a description with the link to my site under his 9/11 front page, under the "Best 9/11 Websites" section, which I was greatly honored by.

He later modifiedthe description, in part noting the description change: “This site has been pressured by "no-planers" and has been renamed part of the title from "No Plane" to "No 757" in deference to those who pretend there is any evidence (there isn't) for an alleged crash of a smaller-than-757 plane.” Well it's not really fair to say there's no evidence. They've been pointing at evidence for years and some of it's even fairly good. But taken as a whole, of course, as some Texan might say, "that dog don't bark" or whatever.

And second, my bad for ambiguous wording, there was no pressure from no-planers, other than when Phil Jayhan in a big gray car ran me off the road into a culvert. Just kidding. The “angry message board poster called a no-planer” was just the one I ran across somewhere else that made me stop and go “oh yeah, I’m investigating the bunk A3 Sky Warriror plane theory.” There’s been no personal pressure on me yet (except a little by Bill Giltner but he stopped early). I like to think they know not to waste our time.

For Those Who’ve Hunted The Boeing and Still Can’t See It:
It's not that I'm 100% certain a 757 did hit, but it's intellectually dishonest to claim - as so many have - that the evidence "clearly" precludes such a scenario. I have looked at a large cross-section of the available arguments and evidence and find the no-757 claims based on circular repetition of initially flawed claims, while the now-demonized and off-limits official story matches the physical evidence and most eyewitness accounts, while all other lines of inquiry have been eclipsed and maybe atrophied in the process. Despite their psyop of information withholding, the powers that be seem to believe their official story there will hold up once all the (physical) evidence is released. Regarding the Pentagon at least, I suspect the story will continue to parallel facts on the ground, so long as the question remains whether a 757 was or was not responsible. Yet despite this striking vulnerability, those suckered by the fraud remain confident enough of their case that few if any are keeping an eye out for such evidence - they insist on ignoring the barreling freight train of evidence that's picked up a lot of steam since 2002.

So for the record, I am saying - my best guess - it was NOT a truck bomb, NOT an energy weapon, NOT a Cruise missile, NOT a fighter jet, NOT a Global Hawk, NOT an A3 Skywarrior. It was a Boeing 757, possibly piloted by remote control, possibly even piloted by the Muslim terrorist Hani Hanjour. I would not use the word "drone" to describe the former possibility, as the word implies unmanned and empty. I believe the reported passengers were most likely aboard the plane. Whether or not they were in control, the pilots were probably in the cockpit and the rest of the crew was in place. The hijackers may or may not have been present, the phone calls, as upsetting to some as it is to point out, may have been real or fake. No matter how precisely they were carried out, I believe air defenses/intel/immigration/law enforcement/whoever else was really relevant were purposefully scuttled to allow the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. I see no reason why the two succesful legs of the attack would have been done significantly differently, and that the physical evidence at the Pentagon, after all the tooth-gnashing is done, will ultimately corroborate the physical end of the official story. Sound crazy? Read on...

Monday, February 5, 2007

THE CHERTOFF TANGENT

POPMECH SPEWING DHS PROPAGANDA?
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
December 2006, updated 2/5/07


911 In Plane Site's approach of focusing on the mechanics of the government attack – and doing so piss-poorly – could not long go unnoticed. First-released in mid-2004 to wide acceptance, the first ill effect the video suffered was the early unraveling of its popularity through well-timed interventions like those of Oil Empire and 9-11 Research, which surfaced before the end of 2004. The next was its widely read flogging in the pages of the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics. Thus many Americans first heard of the video that “will change September 11” in between articles about Jay Leno’s giant trucks and a “lawn tractor face-off.” The article looked at a narrow slice of easily-debunked 9/11 theories in its areas of expertise and sponsorship, and spent much of its ink slaying the then-popular IPS. But wait! The article was principally by Benjamin Chertoff, Popular Mechanics’ 25-year old research editor. He was immediately suspected by many 9/11 Truthers of being a cousin (or a nephew in one report) to the just-appointed Director of the Department of Homeland Security, one Michael Chertoff. DHS was a new agency with little-understood powers, and some now suspected they included propaganda, with deals to be made over heaping plates of potato salad at family reunions, and with revalations targeted to the PopMech crowd - a segment of the population best known not for their seething political power but for their manual skills and prominent ass cracks.

Most people who care simply state the cousin link as an evident fact with no source needed; when they do cite anything, the only source seems to be Christopher Bollyn at American Free Press (AFP), a paper suspiciously suspicious of Israel, alternately accused of anti-Semitism by the Anti-Defamation League, and accused by others of ADL infiltration. A dedicated 9/11 Truth warrior, Bollyn had already discovered “cousin” Michael held dual American-Israeli citizenship. He says he called Ben Chertoff directly, and questioned the editor until he became “uncomfortable.” Unable to get a confirmation there, he called Ben’s mother in New York and got her to admit “yes, of course, he is a cousin.” In his March 6 article Bollyn included the first name and home city of this alleged mother of a possible Israeli-Illuminati agent. He also dropped the line “this is exactly the kind of “journalism” one would expect to find in a dictatorship like that of Saddam Hussein's Iraq,” referring I presume to the PopMech piece, not his own work. For what it’s worth, Bollyn was fired from AFP in late 2006 for “disloyalty” and submitting false stories, including pushing Sam Danner's fictitious account of the Pentagon attack despite numerous red flags. [2]

In a March interview with Art Bell, while the “wing nuts” were still following this lead, Ben could neither confirm nor deny a relation to the just-appointed Director. His only line of defense was that he was unaware of the possibility until after the article had gone to press. He later postulated a relation “back in 19th century Belarus,” but by the September 11, 2006 US News, he was stating categorically “no one in my family has ever met anyone related to Michael Chertoff.” He would not likely say this so firmly if it could be proved wrong, and so far no Internet sleuth has shaken the family tree and posted any juicy fruit.

In fact Ben’s little article that caused such a big uproar was later expanded into a book: “Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts” (Hearst, August 2006, with a forward by Senator John McCain). Ironically enough, the book was able to take advantage of this whole tangent to illustrate their point: in the afterword, PM’s Editor-in-Chief, James Meigs noted “as often happens in the world of conspiracy theories, a grain of truth - it's possible that Ben and Michael Chertoff are distantly related - was built into a towering dune. In fact, Ben and Michael Chertoff have never spoken.” And more to the larger point everyone else has glossed over, “no one at Popular Mechanics” by any name “had any contact with Michael Chertoff's office while preparing the article.” [3]

Nonetheless, there may still be more than coincidence to this episode, with the same uncommon name appearing twice in as many months, both flanking the official 9/11 story - especially when we consider the proximity to the release of the curiously bad IPS. Just as von Kleist’s video has sunk into the collective mind of that certain skeptical segment of the population, in January 2005 Michael was appointed to head DHS, a post created by 9/11. At the end of February a hit piece slaying “lies” about the terrorist attacks, primarily those advocated by IPS, went public with another Chertoff listed as in charge. This certainly seems odd to the people who are into the Truth scene. It seems odd to me. I was there, and saw the movement surge with anger and strengthened resolve. It may have sounded silly and blatant to task such things to one’s cousin, but after all, we remembered Jeb Bush handing his brother the election in 2000...

In retrospect, I would go so far as to speculate that Bush’s people in fact helped somehow in getting In Plane Site out there, probably through some intermediary – since I’m speculating, let’s say Karl Rove - to set up the straw man in advance. While they were grooming Michael Chertoff for DHS, the video was at work shifting the debate to the mechanics level while shedding all circumstantial evidence of motive that allows the plot to make sense. On top of this, it analyzed the mechanical evidence with unprecedented ineptitude so Popular Mechanics could easily take it on. The operatives behind the scenes of course knew a “Chertoff” was working there and would be in charge of any such article, giving the wing nuts yet another red herring to stumble over for a while.

Sources:
[1] Bollyn, Christopher. “Chertoff's Cousin Penned Popular Mechanics 9/11 Hit Piece.” American Free Press. March 7 2005. via
Prison Planet.
[2] World Independent News Group/WING TV.
“American free Press Fires Christopher Bollyn.”
[3] Meigs, James B.
“The Conspiracy Industry.” Afterword to Debunking 9/11 Myths. June 2006. Published online October 13, 2006.

THE WHITE BLUR

OF SMOKE AND MIRRORED SURFACES
February 7 2007
Last Updated 5/23/07


despite their overall poor quality as evidence (serving better as a Rorshach test for pre-existing 9/11 theories), the surveillance video stills released in 2002 can yield some screts to the patient eye. I admit that's not normally me, but I've taken a crack at it; Prime among the features that stand out is the “white blur” which inhabits the stationary background briefly – for one frame – before it disappears into a brilliant fireball on the building’s façade in the next. Passed off by the official story as proof of a plane, it has most often been interpreted not as the plane but as the vapor or smoke trail behind the plane, which is mostly hidden behind the security box in the center.

For example, “Cat Herder” at Above Top Secret, in an otherwise sterling and pivotal mega-post “9/11: A Boeing 757 struck the Pentagon” (posted mid-2004, up to more than 4,000 responses now) took this tack, seeing an oddly black plane emitting a white vapor trail. To be fair, CH did admit: “this is entirely subjective and the image quality [...] is not good enough to form a factual opinion.”

I'm sure it was addressed somewhere in the thread, but a 757 shouldn’t have a vapor or smoke trail behind it if it crosssed the Pentalawn. The normal contrail seen behind jets in the sky is a result of high altitudes, and does not happen near ground level. I didn’t know this until I learned of it from Karl Schwarz of all people, but it seems to be true anyway. Thus the vapor trail meant a missile, which burns rocket fuel that does leave a trail at sea level (although that doesn’t seem to explain an A3 Skywarrior any better than it does a 757).

Mike Wilson’s animation of the attack helps explain and visualize the source of smoke as consistent with a 757 with engine damage, proably from ingesting a light pole "luminary." But like Cat Herder, I believe he got the plane and this smoke confused in the still analysis. Again as have most others, he identified the plane as hidden behind the security box - what they show as tailfin is the same tall part of the horizon line, and what I believe is the plane is shown as the engine smoke.

Allow me to explain: there are things we can tell from these stills if we look close. The first thing is to look not just at the first still but at all five to get asense of motion. the five frames below are closely cropped on the area in question, slightly enhanced, with the fisheye effect uncorrected. I've looked for movement and stillness, measured by changes in pixels from one frame to the next. Spots that match up in frame after frame I've taken as stationary objects/background and the few that don’t I've taken as things that are moving. The plane/missile was moving, so clearly we look for pixels that change suddenly. for the moment I'm ignoring the black tailfin to simplify this stage of the analysis, but I'll get back to it shortly.

Frame One This is the key frame that supposedly shows the vapor trail - I would note the dark pixels on underside that could well be its shadow on the lawn – if a smoke trail it's pretty dense. If a 757, recall the angle of attack, and that the alleged plane was silver, and NOT in the building’s shadow yet, so it should show up brilliant white with sun beaming right on it, and possibly affected by glare to look larger.

Second frame, one second after the first. Already we can see that where the white pixels were there is now “vapor” or more likely smoke, running evenly gray up to the building. The dark green horizon line is steady in all shots – none of the darkness there is part of the craft, unless it left some black bits of itself floating behind in mid-air, now obscured by suddenly-gray smoke that had been bright white a second earlier.



Frame three:
Again this is about one second after the previous. Note the gray smoke hasn't changed much, even as the fireball evolves, rises slowly, and darkens.







Frame Four:
No significant change in color of smoke, projectiles working their way up through the cloud and emerging.






Frame Five: Same. gray smoke,expanding and darkenin explosion. the little white "nosecone" some have seen peeking out from behind the security box is still there, attached to the box.





So then lets revisit the first frame here in simplified cartoony colors – background, forground, building and shadow, check-point, and the “blur.” Looking also at the color of “smoke” in the red sample area from the five stills, we see a sudden shift from white to gray, which stays gray for the next four seconds. Clearly the white is NOT smoke, most likely the plane itself.

Not that I can't see what people think is a tailfin, and I admit the pixel change here is significant. In fact looking again I've decided I may have been wrong in blending it into the horizon, and so I'm working on clearing this up with more analysis. I'm seeing not only a remarkably sharp vertical aberration, but also a notable blue-shift in the dark horizon area that happens to correspond exactly with it. The color enhanced inset helped reveal at least some of this is apparently in the pixels themselves, appearing over the whole image, and also present in the other frame from this camera, perhaps a digital artifact (orange lines illustrate edges of rectangular areas tinetd blue and orange, respectively). We see the white emerging from the tail end as we would if the right engine were damaged. But again, this would be amazing shadow-casting white-then-gray smoke... and if the tailfin were at that location, at least by my mapping of the scene, it would be sticking out to the left of the box, probably beyond the security box lip's ability to hide it.

I had rebelled against the "black tailfin," insisting on seeing only a slight, irrelevant extension of an already high point on the skyline, but this really does look like a tailfin. When it comes to the chassis, I'd expect sunlit silver glare to dominate, and certainly not the all-black plane Cat Herder saw. But looking on the north side and as the plane was beginning its starboard bank, the visible side would be in shadow. But again, how could the whole plane, including its massive banking right wing stay hidden in that blind spot without peeking over or to the left? Is the high point the banking right wing and engine? No - the wing would catch sunlight at almost any angle but sideways, and the engine would glint at any angle. Only the tailfin can do this darkness trick, which makes the tailfin there seem possible and makes the white again seem like smoke.

In short, I'm confused again. Nonetheless...
In May 2006 the full video the stills were taken from, along with a second video from a different camera that has no such obstruction of view, was released by Judicial Watch. In this new view, besides a horrible glare and what looks like a splat of bird crap, we see the blur alone and unobstructed, if just the tip of it at far right. In this shot at least this is clearly NOT a smoke or vapor trail unless of an invisible craft, and strangely about the same color as the possible smoke recorded by cam 2. Although less of it is visible, we also see more clearly a shape to it. It looks like it's again underpinned by a shadow. Even adjusting for light distortion, this looks much bigger than a Global Hawk or other smaller craft often cited.

But the shapes do seem to fit nicely, giving us something like this, resembling a giant ghost Albatross. I can't tell you how exactly this must be a 757, nor can I see how anything else could be readily identifiable in this ill-defined cluster of optic distortions. But it's of a good size, the largest number of eyewitnesses described an AA liner, and something like a 757 seems to have damaged the building and killed nearly 200 people there within the next couple of seconds. You do the math. My best guess still, after looking at all this, is the "tailfin" is nothing more than some kind of digital "artifact" after all. But I'm still looking at it...

Sunday, February 4, 2007

PENTAGON CAMERA FISHEYE CORRECTION

Well, it looks cooler but seems less useful than I thought it would. In analyzing the footage from the Pentagon's CCTV security cameras, I had been concerned with the distorting effects of the fisheye lens, the kind like on your motel room door. The cameras are designed to monitor car traffic coming into the northwest entrance, but do have a good view to the south of the large west lawn and heliport. Here is an original, uncorrected shot of a police car pulling into the gate just seconds before Flight 77 screamed across the lawn. The red lines show distortion caused by the lens.

I opened the shot in Photoshop, used an elliptical selection tool lined up with the rounded corners at the bottom, and applied the spherize filter, full inversion (-100%) and got this, again with lines to show the correction. It's not perfect, but helps some.
The rooflines still has a bit of a curve to it, so I tried anti-spherizing it again.

And clearly this isn't helping much. It also appears the effect diminishes with distance. Countering the fisheye effect on the white blur frame itself doesn't add much to our analysis except shrinking the scene some and starting to distort the plane with the edge effect. I'm not even going to bother showing separate frames for comparison - here they all are together: lowest level is uncorrected, middle layer de-spherized once, top layer done twice.

LETSROLL’S ROLE

9/11 MADE SIMPLE-MINDED BY THE POD PEOPLE BEHIND THE SCENES
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
December 2006
(updated 2/6/07)


The website LetsRoll 911 (or more fully "LetsRoll 911 Made Simple") is a central player in the propagation of the Frustrating Fraud. Since its establishment in early 2004 its forums have focused on simplifying the complexities of the evidence - especially the physical - and boiling it down to digestible pellets. These could then be painted red and popped into as many mouths as possible in hopes of waking up the masses of brainwashed "sheeple" to resist the Matrix.

podnopod
Let’sRoll’s front-page "pod" analysis, which they carefully compared to a real, unmodified toy plane
Sounds like a good enough idea, but of course, however it happened, their pellets were poison. The tiny hole at the Pentagon and the origins of all the gears and parts found there, obscure and shifting accounts of the WTC's construction and endless speculation on what precisely brought it down, etc. My favorite is their proud achievement in discovering “the pod or extra piece of equipment on the bottom of Flight 175” and “the missile firing from its undercarriage or side-carriage.” Both the pod and the yellow missile flash were also seen with Flight 11, if less clearly. Compare this to the official explanation: the pods were simply wing faring, the "shoulders" where the wings attack and landing gear is stored. They are roughly the shape of the attachments seen, but looked larger due to glare from the alluminum skin high in the brilliant sky. The planes then gave off yellow flashes, as aluminum would do, upon impact, not before (it’s not as easy to precisely read shadows from half a mile away as they think). While I'm not scientist enough to know for sure, I think that makes sense (as does Jim Hoffman's case at 9-11 Research).

The general consensus formed by the core members of the crew I thus came to know as “the pod people” was then passed on to others. As he was putting together 911 In Plane Site, Dave Von Kleist drew heavily on their evidence pool in developing his approach of zooming in on pixels to see the pods and the yellow flashes. Von Kleist mirrored their take on the Pentagon and mentioned their help repeatedly in the video while directing people back to the site, apparently the only one mentioned in the video.

Let'sRoll later expanded their influence, advising Korey Rowe, Nick Bermas, and Dylan Avery as their video Loose Change first took shape. IPS-boosting site administrator Phil Jayhan promoted it's planned premier in DC on 9/11/ 2004, was handing out limited copies of the first cut by mid-October, and helping sell them by the end of November. The 2nd edition from late 2005, which hewed less closely to the LetsRoll line, still thanked prominent LetsRoll member “Red Pill Neo” for his contributions, and Jayhan “for getting the first edition off the ground.” But by the second Edition, there was a rift and feud between Jayhan and Avery, which I will cover in another post.

Jayhan has also thanked himself for the site's pivotal role in world history, in a nice rumination intercepted by Jeff Wells at Rigorous Intuition: "When I decided to then publish my findings, I thought I would end up within a week, with either a bullet in my head or CNN trucks in my driveway. It was kind of a hard decision, as I really desired neither. But I chose to publish. So on April 15th, 2004, I released a press release that literally changed the face of the world and its politics. [...] Had Phil Jayhan never existed, and never taken out this website, all of you would be experiencing an alternate reality, quite different than the one which you now enjoy." [1]

I was at first intrigued with their approach and the possibility of hard proof, as seen in the LetsRoll-promoted short internet video “Pentagon Strike.” I signed up on as member “Vigilant Guardian” and so was an active member from January to March 2005, just as Loose Change was going from local fame to wider acceptance. My meager enthusiasm soon soured though as I scored a copy of the new “director’s cut” of IPS and watched it tumble right off the tracks, then returned to the LetsRoll forums. With growing trepidation and occasional rants, I watched their praise for IPS morph into missionary zeal for Loose Change, then just being finished.


Braveheart Jayhan
Jayhan in war paint: time for the revolution to begin!
After I left the site, things got rather odd there. On May 17 2006,following a rousing speech he'd given to an ad hoc group of car license lawyers in Los Vegas, Phil Jayhan started a new thread: “Time for the revolution to Start!” He told his followers “they will NOT simply give back what they have hijacked,” and he foresaw no help coming from Congress, the Judiciary, or much of anywhere else. “The press is under the same MK Ultra subversion as the Justice Department, and thus we cannot expect anything from them.” Cleary it would be up to the vanguard; “we need to take it back, by force if necessary.” [2] The Let’sRoll truthers had apparently been holding back their secret army, hoping for a peaceful solution, but the elites’ intransigence was just too much. As of writing in early November, I’ve heard nothing of the country being taken back by force nor of Jayhan’s public impalement and crucifixion. But they’re still taking donations.

Then four months later things got even weirder with the hack attack of 9/11/06, but for that you’ll need to read another post.

sources:
[1] Wells, Jeff. "Cynical, sophisticated and subtle." Rigorous Intuition. Posted May 27 2005. http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_rigorousintuition_archive.html
[2] Jayhan, Phil. "Time for the Revolution to Start! - First shot fired tonight." LetsRoll Forums -> 911 For the Tired, weary, huddled masses... Posted Wed May 17, 2006.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

LOOSE CHANGE, “A FINE PIECE OF DISINFO”

A SLICKER PRODUCT HITS THE MARKET
updated 2/5/07


Loose Change started as a hazy idea in 2002 in Oneonta New York with Dylan Avery, a hopeful filmmaker and recent 9/11 skeptic, who had just graduated from High School. His suspicions of conspiracy, while not serious, were clear enough by then to suggest the first version of Loose Change. He visualized “a fictional story about myself and my friends, basically, doing what we've done now; doing our research and discovering that 9/11 was done by our own government, and then, you know, taking the steps to release this information, you know, get chased by the FBI, you know. Just a fun film.” Then in a bizarre and unexpected twist the script came to life and the movie about breaking the truth became them actually breaking the truth as Avery and his friends saw more and more evidence coming to light.

Avery’s childhood friend Korey Rowe was by this time an “Army specialist” [not in disinformation, we presume] who had served in uniform in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Avery described his friend’s disillusionment and evolving thought process on the “war on Terror” and the attacks that underpinned it:

“He goes to Iraq, and that's when things really started to click in his head, where he was like, ‘Wait a minute, I just invaded one country, and now they're telling me I have to go and invade another country, and neither of these countries have the person that we were originally supposed to be going after.’ And I think that's when things really started to click with Korey's head, when he realized he was not an army of one getting the terrorists, but a pawn on one of the biggest chessboards that we've ever seen.” [1]

Loose Change Crew
The Loose Change crew: L-R, Rowe, Bermas, Avery
Rowe then went “rogue” as the producer of Loose Change, and the team was completed with their friend from college Nick Bermas, joining them as the movie’s "fact" researcher. On the title they chose, one may think it a reference to the reported budget of $6,000, but Avery clarified “it actually means the change is loose, you can't stop it - you know, again, it's just one of those titles that, to me, it just seemed perfect. I didn't think that there could have been a better title.” [2]

As for the effectiveness of their project, that depends on just what their real motive and message is. If they meant to convince people of an inside job as is generally presumed, they seems to have done so, and quite well, but largely for the wrong reasons. If they meant to research and present all the disinfo and expose it, they did a fairly good job, but the sarcasm was not clear enough and no one's caught on. If they employed disinformation in a coordinated plan to create false belief in the 9/11 "conspiracy theory" that can be easily discredited, as many suspect to be the case, then they're right on the mark. It's spread wide, it's convinced many, and it's currently being discredited point by point in the minds of anyone willing to face the obvious.

Dave Von Kleist, the mastermind of In Plane Site, called Loose Change “the best damn 9-11 documentary out there,” and the others on his tangent, like the pod people at LetsRoll 911, saw it as an improved and repackaged version of Von Kleist's masterpiece of misinformation. Indeed it is much better, notably in the graphic and musical presentation. They also ignored some of the worst evidence like the pods on the WTC attack planes and their yellow flashes (at least by the newest edition; I recall the first edition paused the video to point them out). They also included at least some of the compelling circumstantial evidence ignored by IPS that can trigger real and rewarding insight to those who follow the leads; the 1962 Operation Northwoods, a long and informative timeline of the development of remote control flight, the PNAC’s September 2000 call for “a new Pearl Harbor,” and a dead-on de-bunking of “Osama’s” 2001 confession video, among others.

As for their take on the Frustrating Fraud of the planeless Pentagon attack, Loose Change corrects IPS on the Mike Walters quote, playing a different part of the interview and citing him specifically as witnessing an “American Airlines jet.” But now he’s a witness they don’t believe and they still chose to put the most weight behind a Cruise missile theory, opening their coverage of the Pentagon with Rumsfeld’s 2001 missile “admission." Point five in their analysis was a virtual copy from IPS: “the damage to the Pentagon [is] completely inconsistent with a Boeing 757.” A rather silly point is where Avery says “the only damage to the outer wall is a single hole no more than sixteen feet in diameter” while the shot on screen has the spray from a fire hose completely covering both this hole and the 65-foot-plus damage area around it that even IPS showed. That's because they were looking at the wrong floor, as explained in the "Entry Wounds" post.

Many errors, like their initial inclusion of the pods and yellow flashes, were “caught” and changed in the second edition, but others were not excised; producer Korey Rowe claimed in an interview “we know there are errors in the documentary, and we’ve actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves.” [3] So far they’ve given their viewers no hints which eggs are rotten, and some folks have swallowed the whole basket. Perhaps it’s meant as a cover for any further "mistakes" that are spotted; “oh yeah, we meant to include that. Good job, you found one!”

And there were mistakes, many of them. Even in the second edition. Mark Robinowitz at Oil Empire titled one review of the video “Loose (with truth in an effort to prevent social) Change.” Between “errors of fact,” “Post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacies,” and other categories, he counted a total of 426 “flubs” in less than an hour and a half – that’s over five per minute on average, or one every 12 seconds. Oilempire also noted its links to IPS, calling it a “reworking” of that train wreck, and noting three major differences: “more true claims in Loose Change than in IPS, which makes the fake parts more believable,” “new hoaxes (and more of them),” and its targeting “toward a younger audience” with its “hip and slick” marketing. He summed it up in the same terms assigned to IPS: “Loose Change is a hoax - a real conclusion using fake evidence.” [4]

Whatever their motives or the quality of their arguments, the video closed, as IPS had, with a call to arms: “Are you angry yet? You should be. […] Why are they hiding from us? What are they hiding from us? And what’s it gonna take until people in this country give damn and do something about it? America’s been hijacked – not by al Qaeda, not by Osama bin Laden, but by a group of tyrants ready and willing to do whatever it takes to keep their stranglehold on this country. So what are we gonna do about it? Anything.” Indeed, an “anything” sort of desperate flailing is the primary acitivity spurred by this video – Avery told his viewers it would be up to them to “get the word out,” of course meaning their word. We would have to “ask questions,” preferably the hard ones they had just presented, and to “demand answers,” preferably the ones Avery and crew had just laid out.

Among the video’s critics, 9/11 Truth warrior Mike Ruppert was perhaps the most explicit, calling it “a very fine piece of CIA disinformation.” [5] Avery called such charges “ridiculous.” “The idea that three kids from a hick town in upstate New York are part of a CIA disinformation campaign would just show how desperate our government is.” [6] Or the video’s success could show just how desperate certain 9/11 Truthers are for final “proof” of their suspicions.


Sources:
[1] "9/11: Truth, Lies, and Conspiracy." Interview with Dylan Avery. Canadian Broadcast Corporation. August 22, 2006
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/911avery.html
[2] See [1].
[3] Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change_%28video%29
[4] Robinowitz, Mark. Loose Change: Loose (with truth in an effort to prevent social) Change. Oil Empire. Posting Date Unlisted. http://www.oilempire.us/loose-change.html
[5] Green, Michael B. "Loose Change, an Analysis. 911 Research. August 3 2005. http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/green/loose_change.html
[6] Sales, Nancy Jo. “Click Here for Conspiracy.” Vanity Fair. August 2006. http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060717roco02

Friday, February 2, 2007

ON THE 737 WTC ATTACK THEORY

A SMOKING GUN AND THE BULLETS DON'T MATCH

Jon Carlson's Smoking gun, found in the photo record, of the plane that he alleges was wiped from the photo record real-time on 9/11
In his drive to expose the truth about the 9/11 attacks, oddball presidential candidate Karl W.B. Schwarz has cited articles by a "Jon Carlson" (thought by some to be Schwarz himself though Schwarz denies it) posted at Rense.com. Carlson analyzed photos of engine and landing gear parts found at Ground Zero in Manhattan. By looking at undamaged parts, he was able to match some parts to those from a CFM56 engine from a Boeing 737, not the 767s that allegedly hit the towers. [1] Carlson later claimed he received an e-mail from an anonymous “Boeing 767 airliner mechanic” that agreed with his fingering a CFM56 engine, and insisted “THOSE ENGINES ON THE STREET IN NEW YORK DID NOT COME OFF A 767.” [2]

To back up Carlson's charge, Schwarz located “a piece of obscure video footage which will conclusively show that the government lied about what type of plane struck the South Tower of the WTC,” as campaign manager Jack Allis explained. It was pure luck that he ran across video footage proving this in a French film, unrelated to 9/11, called "The Barbarian Invasion." Allis’ piece explained: “Contained in the film […] is a 1:52 second video segment, shot by an unknown amateur photographer at the WTC, which Schwartz says clearly shows a 737 airliner striking the south Tower [...] he has had the tape analyzed by experts proving it’s not a fake. "We are tracking down the original photographer and want to get to him before the government does in order to prove its authenticity.” [3]

Schwarz seems to believe the video “should be the smoking gun, which proves the whole story given to us by the government about 9/11 is untrue." [4] If the “Barbarians” video shows a 737, it truly does differ from what we’ve all seen time and again – which is of course the point of tracking down a special unedited video. Just to clarify this point, I did the graphic analysis myself. Here is the famous shot of Flight 175 as it impacted the South Tower, the sides of which are 208 feet wide.

My math is based on my red line, and only approximate. If anything the green numbers are a bit high due to the fact that the plane was slightly closer to the camera and thus would look slightly larger. Wingspan, app. 163 feet. The width of the “penetrating core,” the engines and the chassis between them, looks to be about 61 feet wide.

- 767-200, the plane the “govmint” claims hit the tower: 156 foot wingspan, app. 62 foot penetrating core.
- 737-400, a sample model of 737 (not for sure the same exact make KWS cites): 94 foot wingspan, 40 foot core width.
You do the math - which one fits?

Did they only doctor pictures of the actual impact, of which there were only so many, or of all the aftermath pictures as well? Here again, with a width of 208 feet, I’ve superimposed the (app.) wingspans of a 737 and 767. The analysis here is a little less clear due to the smoke. You be the judge. Is this real evidence of a real 737 strike, doctored evidence for a 767 to cover up for such, or real evidence for a real 767?

The tower fell at just about exactly 10:00 am – so for nearly an hour, Schwarz says, the tower sat naked and exposed, its 737 wound pouring smoke in the single-most watched spectacle that moment – and either the extra damage was blown out by carefully placed charges, or everything from all these hundreds of cameras was doctored before hitting our eyes, as the impact shots obviously were. And recall much of this footage was broadcast live. If the evidence here is doctored then Carlson’s photos and that lone French video are just as suspect and we can trust nothing. A funny thing about Carlson's photo we saw at the top o' the post - if all film was seized to erase the 737, such a job may be tasked to the FBI, but this one magic photo of the telltale engine was snapped just as a uniformed FBI agent was walking by (see uncropped version below) and yet - miraculously? - it escaped the dragnet.


If one is unwiilling to swallow the video erasure theory, we are left with holographics. The cameras saw what the eyes did, but the shield ended with impact and the engine was visible for what it was. Oh, and the extra-wide damage pattern must've been blown out by bombs to make it look like a 767's profile. If one is unwilling to buy either of these, then what hit the South Tower really did have a body matching a 767, NOT a 737. Somehow this makes more sense to me.

I was considering getting ambitious and looking closer at Carlson’s engine, do some manual scouring. But for the time being I’ll let it lie. I’ve not seen anyone argue it was a 767 body equipped for some reason with piddly 737 engines, and so I see I see no need to look into the engine claims. Carlson’s anonymous airliner mechanic in fact insisted “no 767 in existence uses CFM56's. Not enough power to lift a '67.” [5] The only way this makes sense is by the holograph theory that the attack plane was masked to look bigger.

But if his partner Schwarz’s video shows a 737 - and IT can be proved undoctored itself – that would disprove the holographics possibility (unless it was shot with a special hologram-proof camera), and indicate again the erasure theory that the government managed to silently drop a net around all imagery of the WTC before it collapsed. Again, they intercepted, seized, altered and doctored all photos and video - all but this magical one - and then had them broadcast, sometimes live – to show a different attack plane all because they were too stupid to simply use the right model in the first place. That possibility, remote as it is, has gotten Schwarz attention and some diehard followers – but it remains an enormous IF. The video has still not been released. He’s apparently waiting for just the right moment because his case hinges on this - well this and the A3 Skywarrior theory. So who feels like voting Schwarz in '08? I can just feel the revolution ready to break. It's... exhilarating.

Sources:
[1] Carlson, Jon. "Is Popular Mechanics Hiding 911 NYC Engine In Street Photo?" Rense.com. March 7 2005. http://www.rense.com/general63/hiding.htm
[2] Carlson, Jon. “WTC Jet Engine Confirmed NOT From Boeing 767.” Rense.com. April 4 2005. http://www.rense.com/general63/wtcc.htm
[3] Szymanski, Greg. “Former RNC Insider and Bush Strategist Says He Has 9/11 'Smoking Gun,' Proving Government Complicity.” Arctic Beacon. April 16 2005. http://www.arcticbeacon.citymaker.com/articles/article/1518131/24248.htm
[4] "Articles: Pop Goes the Bush mythology bubble, Part 6." KarlSchwarz.com. Undated. http://www.karlschwarz.com/pop-goes-6.html
[5] See [2].

OLD MILITARY FRAUDSTERS WITH WEIRD NAMES

With their specialized training and lifetimes of dedicated service to country to call on, the military retiree crowd was much sought after by those seeking to push their interpretations of 9/11, and there was a steady stream of “defectors,” curiously consistent especially regarding the attack on the Pentagon. Dave Von Kleist, producer and host of 9/11 In Plane Site, is apparently not military himself, but is married into it via his wife Captain Joyce Riley Von Kleist (US Army, ret.). Herself a Gulf War vet and a nurse interested in health and natural cures, she’s the founder of American Gulf War Veterans Association, crusading for justice over Gulf War syndrome (or “biological warfare conducted on U.S. military members, and corporate bio-genocide levied on the planetary population.”) [1] It was perhaps Joyce who introduced Dave to the AF Colonel and Army General he has cited as supporting his views. Their curiously relevant expertise has lent credibility (in some minds) to the otherwise ludicrous theories expressed in 911 IPS.

Stubblebine giving his “where is it?” interview
Major General Albert Stubblebine is President of the Natural Solutions Foundation, for natural health and longevity, now retired after a 32-year Army career. He’d been Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), 1981-84. Reportedly an oddball who's previously created Remote Viewing for the purpose of Army intelligence gathering, [2] helped wreck the UFO movement in the 1980s, and reportedly believes he can walk through walls. He styled himself an evil Yoda to the Army’s Luke Skywalker, once giving, as James Lippard put it, "a seemingly very poorly received talk to the heads of the Special Forces at Fort Bragg about the need to train the troops to perform psychic healing, levitation, invisibility, and bursting the hearts of animals with their minds. Shortly after the talk, Stubblebine resigned in humiliation." [3]

But despite his eccentricities, his sharp eye and keen mind were highly valued; in addition to heading INSCOM, Stubblebine was once the head of Imagery Interpretation for Scientific and Technical Intelligence during the Cold War. “I measured pieces of Soviet equipment from photographs. It was my job,” he explained in an interview for William Lewis' 2006 IPS follow-up video One Nation Under Seige. With this background, he looked at photos of the hole in the Pentagon “and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, ‘The plane does not fit in that hole.’ So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What's going on?” [4] Who am I? (Sorry, couldn’t resist). He can walk through walls no problem, but for a plane to fly/pour through that hole is simply too much to ask of the old man.

Von Kleist dropped Stubblebine’s esteemed name during an interview with Glenn Beck on CNN, as well as pointing to the testimony of retired Col. George Nelson, U.S. Air Force, as supporting his claims regarding 9/11. This means something, since Nelson has behind him a 34-year USAF career, including as an aircraft accident investigator and airplane parts authority. In addition to core-member status in Pilots for 9/11 Truth and having a permanent top-post status at one of LetsRoll911’s forums for “Colonel George Nelson Confirms Pod” (on the second plane to hit the WTC), he also noted in a a well-written and presumably well-researched essay:

“[N]ot one piece of hard aircraft evidence has been produced in an attempt to positively identify any of the four aircraft. On the contrary, it seems only that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from public view. […] With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged. Similarly, with all the evidence available at the Pennsylvania crash site, it was most doubtful that a passenger airliner caused the obvious hole in the ground and certainly not the Boeing 757 as alleged. […] a most troublesome and nightmarish probability remains that so many Americans appear to be involved in the most heinous conspiracy in our country's history.” [5]

These are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also Capt. Russ Wittenberg, a Former Air Force fighter pilot with over 100 combat missions under his belt. More relevant is his 35 years of experience as a Commercial pilot for Pan Am and United Airlines, flying all Boeing models and allegedly the very two United planes (allegedly) hijacked on 9/11 Regarding the Boeing 757, which allegedly hit the Pentagon, “the airplane could not have flown at those speeds which they said it did without going into what they call a high speed stall. The airplane won’t go that fast if you start pulling those high G maneuvers at those bank angles. … To expect this alleged airplane to run these maneuvers with a total amateur at the controls is simply ludicrous.” Beyond this, he had stock contributions to the Fraud. “It’s roughly a 100 ton airplane. And an airplane that weighs 100 tons all assembled is still going to have 100 tons of disassembled trash and parts after it hits a building. There was no wreckage from a 757 at the Pentagon. … The vehicle that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77. We think, as you may have heard before, it was a cruise missile.” [6]

Major Douglas Rokke, PhD, U.S. Army, is the retired former director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project. Regarding the impact at the Pentagon he has said “when you look at the whole thing, especially the crash site void of airplane parts, the size of the hole left in the building and the fact the projectile's impact penetrated numerous concrete walls, it looks like the work of a missile. And when you look at the damage, it was obviously a missile.” [7] Well, if all these esteemed, independent and retired experts agree a missile did it, I must be wrong after all. How on Earth could the Pentagon get to a bunch of retired military guys to partake in Rumsfeld’s obfuscation plot? It’s not like they’re sworn to do his bidding, at least not since they all went “rogue.”

Gene Sharp
Col. Donn de Grand Pré on the watch for barbarians inside the gates
Finally there's Col. Donn de Grand Pré, USA (ret.), who served in Burma and China during World War II and was twice wounded commanding combat forces in Korea. Later, under then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, he was chief arms negotiator for the Middle East. He oversaw the sale of over a hundred billion dollars worth of military equipment, and was still a Pentagon arms negotiator in the 1970s under President Ford. [8] Soon after the second attempt on his life, Ford told Donn “something has gone terribly wrong in our country when a president can no longer walk among the people.” An official, BTP Holdings/AFP-connected website explains:

“This jarred Donn from his heady pursuit of striving to become the world’s leading arms peddler. Disillusioned with our government’s course, both at home and abroad, Donn exited Washington, DC for his farm in Virginia where he began an intensive program of research which slowly unmasked a deadly “Bolshevik” peril to our Republic […] “hidden Barbarians” already inside the gates; an enemy totally dedicated to the destruction of our sovereignty as a nation-state and the enslavement or extermination of all who might block their plans for World domination.” [9]

Since 1975, Colonel de Grand Pré has written a number of books, including his three-volume novel series Barbarians Inside the Gates, released in 2000. 9/11 apparently fit right into his mythos, and after that pivotal day his list of questions expanded: “was the official version of 9-11 a gigantic hoax? Did the War Party, led by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and other Neocons lay the groundwork for a major Mideast War? Did they trigger the 9-11 tragedy?” [10] In February 2004 de Grand-Pre outlined for Alex Jones “how 9/11 was carried out by order of an inside group of Neo-Cons.” He claimed to personally know the pilot who shot down Flight 93. On the same show, he was asked about what hit the Pentagon and answered “it was a cruise missile. It could have been a Global Hawk. It was not a commercial aircraft."[11]

[1] "Gulf War Syndrome: Biological Warfare Conducted on U.S. Military Members, and Corporate Bio-Genocide Levied on the Planetary Population." Natural Health and Longevity Resource Center. A Lecture By Captain Joyce Riley in Houston, Texas on January 15, 1996 http://www.all-natural.com/riley.html
[2] Stubblebine bio. http://www.undersiegemovie.com/bio_stubblebine.html
[3] From "The Men Who Stare at Goats" By Jon Ronson. http://www.ntskeptics.org/news/news2005-04-17.htm
[4], [5], [6] Senior Military, Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and Government Critics of 9/11 Commission Report U.S. MILITARY OFFICERS: http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/
[7] Szymanski,Greg. "High-Ranking Army Officer - Missile Hit Pentagon: Radiation Expert Claims High-Radiation Readings
Near Pentagon After 9/11 Indicates Depleted Uranium Used." Rense.com. August 19 2005. http://www.rense.com/general67/radfdf.htm
[8], [9] http://www.neoconned.com/index.php?id=124
[10] http://btpholdings.com/barbarians.html
[11] "Transcript: Alex Jones Interviews Col. Donn de Grand-Pre, U.S. Army (ret.): Explosive New 9/11 Revelations and Explanations.” Feb. 29 2004. http://www.prisonplanet.com/022904degrand.html