OBSCURED BY FOAM

OBSCURED BY FOAM: A TOO-OBVIOUS SIGN OF FRAUD
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
January 14 2007
Updated 4/11/07

One of my favorite tricks used by the pushers of the Frustrating Fraud is also among the oldest, but still was given its spot in the lineup for Loose Change, second Edition. Point five in their analysis of the Pentagon strike was the assertion that “the damage to the Pentagon [is] completely inconsistent with a Boeing 757,” notably in being far too small. After briefly showing a portion of the 100-foot-wide damaged area on the first floor where the plane entered, they fade to the above picture as Avery intones “the only damage to the outer wall is a single hole no more than sixteen feet in diameter.” This is certainly not the only damage, the worst of which is hidden behind the fire spray. While a sixteen foot hole can describe the central portion of that wide swathe of davastation, it also describes the incidental missing wall on the second floor, probably from the lower tailfin (the black hole with no fire inside, dead center and on floor two), which he is talking about and incorrectly cites as the entry point. [segment at 21:39 in video]

Loose Change were far from the first to push this particular technique, which has been mirrored in both Pentagon Strike and 911 In Plane Site, as well as posted for years at the site “did Flight 77 Really Crash Into the Pentagon?” Run by the clandestinely code-named "Killtown," his/her/their page on the entry hole showed the above picture plus the one at left and asked “Is this all the damage that was done to the façade?” This is the classic two-picture set-up Loose Change only hinted at; the duplication helps clarify that the first shot was no fluke - they’re purposefully showing you shots that don’t and wouldn’t show the major damage to illustrate there was none, even though other photos on other Killtown pages show clearly enough the damage hidden here, where the question about finding plane damage is not being directly posed. He/She/They bolstered the case by citing a clearly confused eyewitness: “Where did the plane go? For some reason I expected it to bounce off the Pentagon wall in pieces. But there was no plane visible.” The site sums up by asking triumphantly and rhetorically “Where is the impact hole Flight 77 supposedly made?” Simple answer: behind the foam. This site was Last updated and still not changed on December 4 2006.

The formula Killtown’s page used is exactly the one used on Raphael Meyssan’s original Hunt The Boeing site, first posted in February 2002, even to the point of using precisely the same two photos as seen above. Meyssan had explained "the two photographs in question 7 were taken just after the attack,” that is in the “mysterious” and “covered-up” pre-collpase period, during which the "telltale" small hole was still visible. “They show the precise spot on the outer ring where the Boeing struck. Can you find the aircraft's point of impact?” As do its later imitators, the photos indeed show the precise spot, and I can still locate the damage just from memory, no thanks to the foam.

And yet so many have been unable or unwilling to take this blatant calling card at face value. It says in large enough type “hello, I’m a fraud.” No need to even read the fine print, people, their methods of deception are obvious. And yet the case built on such boldface manipulations is accepted by easy marks, and repeated ad nauseum in all manner of forum by "fraudbots" that dismiss any contrary claim as a "Bush lie." How on earth could this happen in a segment of the population that prides itself on its exceptional intelligence and skepticism?

More Examples of the foam fraud discovered recently:
- Jon Carlson: Closing the coffin on the Pentagon lies, he said: "This photo shows the A3 impact from a different perspective. The A3 knocked out 5 foot long limestone blocks leaving a clear IMPRINT. Clearly two windows frames were knocked out with associated column damage and obviously no Flight 77 Boeing 757 (or the missile some claim) went through those two 5 foot openings." He then shows a photo with a scribbled plane outline, with alleged imprints covered in fire spray.
- Cat Herder: A Boeing 757 Struck the Pentagon (@ Above Top Secret.com) - actually arguing FOR a 757 strike, he left the dor to criticism wide open by ignoring the major impact damage and zooming in on one of the foam shots, implying the whole plane went in that 2nd floor window with n marks on either side. As should be expected, his anallysis has not quelled no-757 theorizing there.
- David Icke: Presenation - video (Youtube) Using the header shot, with the second floor damage highighted, Icke asserted it "must've been a sodding small plane, that's all I can say."
- Peter Meyer, page at Serendipity.li
- Brad May of 911review.org - on his "Batcave" page "no 757 hit the Pentagon you idiot."

THE FRENCH REVELATIONS (besides Meyssan)

The Frustrating Fraud
Last Edited 4/19/07

Whatever the Truth, those who would challenge the official story in the early days after 9/11 saw a weak spot in the military’s façade and were soon focused on the collapsed section of the Pentagon, hoping for another, metaphorical, collapse. Much of the skepticism would come from overseas, and notably from France, and Thierry Meyssan was just the beginning. Okay, the main event really, but he had helpers.

Meyssan’s Direct Supporters in France:
- Emmanuel Ratier: Regarded a nationalist, right-wing journalist obsessed with Masonic and Jewish conspiracy theories, Ratier worked for various newspapers (Le Figaro, Valerus, Minute, of which he was a writer in chief in charge of investigations). Since 1996 he’s published semi-monthly “Faits & Documents: confidential Newsletter of Emmanuel Ratier.” [1] It was in this forum that he published Thierry Meyssan’s first piece on the Internet on October 18, just a month after the attacks. “On 21 March,” Desmoulins noted, “it was in fact to him that Le Monde and Actualité juive gave first prize for this incredible news, illustrated with a series of photographs entitled: No plane crashed into the Pentagon.” [2]

- Jean Guisnel: co-author of the Big Lie who helped Meyssan put his theories into words. Guisnel is a well-known journalist, the author of several books in French on the intelligence community (including “Cyberwars”), writer for Le Point and defense specialist for the French daily Liberation. [3]

- Pierre-Henri Bunel: A military expert who wrote a complete chapter of Meyssan's book explaining why the explosion captured in the Pentagon’s CCTV video is from high explosives and not jet fuel. [4] Here is a website @ Globalresearch where he explains this again after the CCTV video release in 2006. Rather silly it seems to me, on seeing his graphics as used for Pentagate.

- Raphaël Meyssan: “9/11 The Big Lie” was widely promoted and widely found by independent skeptics via the Internet. Meyssan’s use of the new medium included a visually based website run by his son Raphaël, called “Hunt the Boeing! And Test Your Perceptions!” First posted in February 2002, the site offered further evidence, including extensive and highly curious photos of the crash site that most of the world had never before seen, with some interesting observations tainted with sloppy analysis and unwarranted leaps of logic.

(Short review of site removed to form into its own post: Hunting the Boeing (and Finding it!))

Three More for the Pentagon Fraud:
- Jean Pierre Desmoulins: Fellow traveler and unofficial historian of the French revelations Jean-Pierre Desmoulins noted of Hunt The Boeing: “This web site has an enormous impact on american internauts. As a matter of fact, the book of Meyssan is not yet translated into english, and this little web site is the first publishing in english which puts a doubt on the official version of this crash.” [5] I once exchanged e-mail with him over his videos of a silver plane near the Pentagon scene, and he seems a nice enough guy. One of his sites describes him as a resigned Christian and non-Muslim Islamophile who settled on the Baha’i faith. “I have no strong political engagement and am not member of any party," he wrote. "I didn't vote for Jacques Chirac […] willing not be party to an african style plebiscite. […] My personal conviction is that a new world order must be settled and rule the relations between the nations.” [6]

His websites have a variety of names, including : “Pentagone le 11/9/01: la fraude!” The English version noted: “the cover-up of what happened in Washington D.C. on 9/11 is obvious. The official thesis of the suicide of an Arab hijacker, Hani Hanjour, flying a Boeing 757 and striking the Pentagon's front in a perfect horizontal flight doesn't stand when all evidence is examined.” As for skills he brings to this Pentagon analysis, Desmoulins cites his engineer’s training, professorship, and hobby of running flight simulations: “for fun, I crashed several times against the World Trade Center towers before Mohamed Atta, just to see the subjective effect.” [7] I’ve looked little at his evidence, but found at least one spot where he seems to be wrong on the Pentagon evidence where he saw a tiny 3-foot wide engine clearly not from a 757.

Later Desmoulins made an about-face on the Pentagon evidence, siding with those who sa plenty of evidence for a 757 there, an admission of error that's all too rare - if not unprecedented - among pushers of the fraud.

- “Silent but Deadly” – Anonymous French researcher, creator of the Pentagon 3d test website, which ultimately and scientific-like deduces that a 757 was quite unlikely. In the selective quotation section, is noted an edit: “sam danner said he lied, so statements are removed. Nevertheless, the best version is still the globalhawk one,” among the dumbest theories, and only reported by ONE eyewitness - Danner.

Alain DeClercq: Perhaps it was an effort to reconcile Mike Walter's accounts of both an A.A. airliner and a cruise missile that led to this art installation: “American Airlines,” a 2003 piece by Paris-based conceptual artist Alain Declercq. The fiberglass missile, about eight feet long and painted with American Airlines stripes and insignia, was part of the exhibition at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. An art review site explained how a video was shown of a workshop in which the missile was being so painted by workers in full-body protective gear and gas masks, interspersed with scenes of the 9-11 attacks. [8] While the Meyssan family’s approach is as hard and fragile fact, when done up in the arena of conceptual art, I take this as semi-literal metaphor, and I appreciate it.

Incidental Frenchmen, non-Pentagon-related, catching rare footage of the WTC:
- The Naudet brothers: They were the only camera crew to capture the first plane’s impact, and they were French. They had been in New York filming a documentary about firefighters and were near to wrapping it up when they happened to be filming a fireman in downtown Manhattan. Their camera captured the impact that everyone first thought was accidental, and it was finally obtained from them and shown on TV on the evening of 9/11. Their footage has been widely used by conspiracy theorists, who the brothers later sued for using the footage without permission and for causing people to think they were conspiracy theorists too.

- Anonymous French cameraman: An unknown Frenchman was alleged in April 2005 by Karl W.B. Schwarz to have captured unambiguous footage of a 737, not a 767 as we all saw, hitting the South Tower. Originally released in the non-9/11 related documentary Barbarians at the Gates, so far I’ve heard no news of its verification as of early 2007. Guess he's saving his "smoking gun" 'till the 2008 election season to blast a path to the White House.

Sources:
[1] "Emmanuel Ratter" (mis-spellin on original page) Wikepedia, translated from French by Google. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Ratier&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DEmmanuel%2BRatier%2B%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG
[2], [4], [5] Desmoulins, Jean-Pierre. “Background of this research.” http://perso.orange.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/pages-en/his-backgnd.html
[3] "About the Author: Jean Guisnel." http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/author_detail.jsp?id=1000015653
[6], [7] Desmoulins, Jean-Pierre “Who is the author.” http://www.earth-citizens.net/pages-en/his-whoiam.html
[8] Conrads, Martin. “Dangerous it is not! The Renewed Emergence of Activism in Art - "Hardcore" in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.” Posting date unlisted. Acc Nov 4 2005. http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1332&lang=en