SEVERE GULLIBILITY?

SEVERE GULLIBILITY?
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
January 6 2008

Though I've still never seen it, I'd like to draw attention to the 2007 low-budget feature-length movie Severe Visibility, which addresses “the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unexplained” regarding the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11. The title seems to refer to the weather conditions that day, but both this and the faux-dramatic theme music at the over-packaged website gives me the impression this is to be a feature-film version of the Pentagon Section of 911 In Plane Site. It's plainly visible this a severely bad omen. [trailer viewable here] Judging by the few nifty graphics I've seen, and not knowing the context they're presented in, the movie seems to toy with fighter, missile, and even somehow guided airliner technology (as on the poster).

A man named Paul Cross wrote and directed Severe Visibility, and cast himself in the lead role, so clearly it’s a bit of a personal vision for him. According to 911 Blogger member Carol Brouillet in a post about the movie,, as the attacks unfurled on on the morning of 9/11:

“Cross was at the White House for part of the post-production work of his film Follow The Leader a documentary about the everyday life of the President of the United States. On September 12th Paul visited the Pentagon. He saw that the damage to the building, the debris and the scene were not consistent with the official claim that a Boeing 757 had crashed there.”

This sounds serious; one day Paul is hanging at the White House, wrapping up this oddly-titled documentary with a cast of one – a normally media-shy George W Bush – and the next day he’s given a tour of the Pentagon and without spurring from Meyssan or anyone, amateur crash-scene investigator Cross is pretty sure there was no 757 ever there. He presumably does some research on websites over the next years, and, as Brouillet relates, “when the truth of 9/11 hit him, he cried for days. Severe Visibility, his latest film, is his response.”

Admittedly I haven’t seen this masterwork of anguish, but it doesn’t appear spectacularly good or inspired; it currently has a 5.5 star out of 10 average rating at its IMDB page even with dedicated Truthers probably stuffing the ballot box. I don’t care much about the technical qualities, but if this Cross guy is serious about the truth, I’m interested in how he approached the evidence in crafting this fictitious scenario. From website’s dramatic announcement that a deception may have happened at 9:41 (three minutes late) it doesn’t seem to be angling for major realism or factual relevance. From what I see, I’ll have to take this as the most ambitious foray into cinema I’ve yet seen from the roster of Frustrating Fraudsters.

Cross plays the fictitious Major Stanley Kruter, stationed at the Pentagon on 9/11, who struggles with the same gut feeling his creator did, but after actually being at the Pentagon when it was hit by probably not a 757. Driven by the death of a friend in the mysterious attack, he’s searching for the truth of what really happened and why, courageously facing his darkest fears about his own country, or something to that effect I guess. … The gash on his head is interesting; it seems was incurred upon his search of the site immediately afterwards looking fruitlessly for 757 debris. This injury is brandished conspicuously throughout the movie perhaps as a metaphor for his third eye opening, or just to remind us he was actually there (in the movie) and didn’t see any 757 (according to the screenplay).

Here’s a funny contrast just from the trailer; Kruter insists to the (cover-up supporting?) brass drilling him on whether he saw the plane, “from where I was standing, sir, it would have been impossible for me not to have seen it.” “But what haunts” the Major, some on-screen text explains, “is the fact that he did NOT see an American Airlines 757 hit the Pentagon that fateful day.” Elsewhere in the trailer is a scene where he’s distracted just as the fighter/missile whatever whizzes by behind his head. Perhaps that’s a dream sequence or something, but it doesn’t seem too haunting to me.

One pivotal character in Severe Visibility is Andrew Porter (Dennis Kleinman), who seems to be the intrepid investigator, who knows no plane hit the building/ Porter fortuitously contacts Kruter from the shadows and helps him - and of course the audience - see the horror that was always in severe plain sight. Judging by the quick shots of his info-lair, where ‘obscure secrets’ are surely revealed, he seems to be a human version of any number of fraud websites I’ve scanned and panned. At a dramatic high point of the trailer, Porter passionately urges the conflicted Stanley “for the love of your country, listen to what I have to say and THEN draw your own conclusions.” Of course Major Kruter’s actual truth, unlike our own, was determined strictly by Cross himself, so his path to it is clear and Porter the right portal. For the rest of us, we’ll need to be more discerning and less gullible than that.

FACES OF DEATH: MOUSSAOUI EDITION

THE FLIGHT 77 PASSENGERS: WE SEE THE BODIES?

"Okay, well, then if it wasn't a plane that hit the Pentagon, then what happened to the plane and the people on it?" This is at root a good retort but also of course the most over-used and one I'm not going to bother with. In fact, it's beginning to seem that we have the answer anyway. There are many ways to disappear planes and passengers, but the simplest explanation for the missing status of Flight 77 and its passengers, that for which Occam’s razor would lobby, is that they were simply on board the plane when it crashed as reported, killing two birds with one stone as it were and keeping the evidence consistent. The WTC is one thing, but if no bodies turned up in the wreckage at the Pentagon’s relatively deserted Navy wing, that would look mighty suspicious. In fact, we’ve been told all the bodies were recovered and identified as Barb Olson, Captain Burlingame and the others, and Fintan Dunne's guess that this was their most convincing crime scene seems well-founded. But verification remains elusive, and the critics maintain since the bodies could not have been fit inside a cruise missile, the officials are lying.

At least this had been the situation until the Moussaoui case closed in May 2006. In an effort to clinch the death penalty, the government’s team had showed the jury new photos that seem to have answered the question Von Kleist couldn’t, a hint of the coming “bam!” The Washington Post reported on April 12 “just before the lunch break, they also showed the jury pictures of death - the scorched partial remains of Pentagon victims and a blackened body atop a blue body bag.” [1] A lunch spent unsettled and queasy from the viewing had to help the hungry jurors move closer to that guilty verdict over the afternoon as they listened to the cockpit voice recorder from Flight 93, another first, and the voices of other victims just before they too were burnt.

All this seems unrealted to Moussaoui's guilt and it seems the Moroccan's involvement was secondary, an opportunity to make an entirely different case to a much larger jury. Indeed, after the trial was finished with a guilty verdict on May 3 and Moussaoui’s sentencing to six life terms the following day, the government made an unusual move. All pieces of evidence admitted during the trial were released to the public, the US District Court, East Virginia District announced, “with the exception of seven that are classified or otherwise remain under seal.” Including both prosecution and defense exhibits, these 1,202 pieces were posted online on July 31. The court’s statement noted that “this is the first criminal case for which a federal court has provided access to all exhibits online,” or at least all but seven. [2]

Like the evidence itself, the full reasoning behind this unprecedented decision to release it to everyone remains unclear. The mass release included mug shots of terrorists both at large and in custody, copies of fax transmissions and photos of thick binders. There were new views of the devastation at the Pentagon – the entry hole, the “punch-out hole” on the A-E drive, interior shots, and a new shot of what appears to be the turbine from a jet engine.

To avoid a grisly and distasteful speactacle, here is a "chalk outline" I made of the most probable airline passenger from the government's photos

Most striking, of course, were the four grisly photographs showing charred human corpses, most in the seated position. Skeptics have wondered if the corpses were of workers from the Pentagon, but if I were an office worker hearing explosions, I’d stand instantly, alert to act as soon as I figured out what was happening where. I’d only die resigned and sitting if I was on a plane and already knew I was toast and had no choice. Therefore my guess is we have a few of our passengers from Flight 77 – one appears small enough in fact to be little Bernard Brown. Rest all their souls, and it seems near time to finally put to rest the no plane theory.

So far discussion on these new photos seems curiously muted inside the movement. Screw Loose Change posted the day after the release, August 1, regarding “the new evidence released from the Moussaoui trial.” Of the evidence Site admin James had seen, “one struck me the most, in a quite horrific way.” This was not one of the photos of bodies, but an animation “listing all the locations in the Pentagon that the bodies, or rather the body parts of all the victims were found. If you click on each marker on the map, it brings up the name and picture of the victim. I challenge any 9/11 denier to click through all these markers, and then get back to me on how all of this is fake.” [3]

Yet over at the 911 Blogger site, the endless elaborations on theories old and new was momentarily interrupted in early October by an uproar over indirect references to these photos, astutely caught and translated from the video of a Japanese 9/11 Truth conference. One poster fumed about a “right-wing” Japanese politician who showed up and countered the no plane theory by claiming he had “photos of bodies strapped into flight seats, and other bodies, at the pentagon!!” Three successive members commented:

“[A]s far as i know no such footage exists which means that he is lying out his ass!” … “First, those pics don't exist. Second, if they did exist, what business does he have with them in his computer? It's very fishy” … “What a MASSIVE lie! […] it is shocking that they would try to get away with something like this. this could be big to trace this guy down and find out where his orders to lie came from and for what reason.”

All these were posted on October 6, well over a month after the government released the photos for anyone to see. Prosecution Phase Two Exhibits P200042, P200045, P200047, P200048, not that there are many links from the “Truth” sites. Someone else at 911Blogger quickly posted several links to the photos, and soon they had confirmation – and the same photos – from the “Mr. Aoyama” in question. Some apologies for jumping the gun followed suit, then the subject shifted. [4] It was a telling episode, displaying a certain out-of-touchness indicative of a movement that’s beginning to realize it’s on crooked tracks but perhaps too late to avoid the crash.

Fintan Dunne noted on August 10 the Pentagon’s apparent victory in this set-up evidence war: “They got the lot. They got plane bits and they got all the bodies. They got photos. They got forensics. They have it sewn up. What? But weren't they all substitute planes, remotely controlled? Plane Bits! AND bodies! Yep. Just a regular plane crash. They flew the plane in by wire. It had passengers. It hit the Pentagon. It blew up.” [5]

Sources:
[1] Markon, Jerry and Timothy Dwyer. “Pentagon Attack Recalled at Trial: Moussaoui Prosecutors Shift to Spotlight Local Terror on 9/11.” Washington Post. April 12, 2006; Page A05
[2] United States District Court, Eastern District of Virginia. “United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Criminal No. 01-455-A.” Trial Exhibits.
[3] James B. “The Pentagon Victims.” Screw Loose Change. Tuesday, August 01, 2006.
[4] “Video: Japanese 9/11 TV coverage.” 911Blogger.com. Presented by: Reprehensor. October 5 2006.
[5] Dunne, Fintan. Post subject: Pentagon Honey Trap. Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 7:25 pm. “The Next Level: The Intelligent Alternative. Pentagon – Overview.