Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
first posted August 12 2008
last update 10/11
NOTE: The full post isn’t done – I’ll be adding some details and graphics for a couple days. I've opted to simplify the process by not citing and linking to all my sources. Dig around if you have any doubts. Props to Mangoose at JREF for a couple of these leads.
“We Tried…”
Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) brags of their growing list of explicit eyewitnesses to a North-of-Citgo (NoC) flight path that rules out their decoy plane hitting the Pentagon or anything on the ground, no matter what any of the same witnesses themselves say to the contrary. I believe they’re claiming 13 such witnesses at the moment, as featured in their latest full-length mockumentary, and sure to grow judging to their rhetoric. Corroborated 13 times! That’s fatal to the “official story”, which has the plane passing south of the Citgo station along the path of physical destruction before and into the Pentagon and ending there. CIT frequently boast how “all the witnesses” place the plane north of the Citgo, as clearly as they saw it crash into the building anyway, and NONE of them saw the plane on the south path.
The claim was repeated, for example, in our first phone ‘debate’ in November 2007 [40:00–42:00 or so], in their new video [link above, 3:20 in] and recently at the Loose Change Forum, when Aidan Monaghan was probing CIT’s Aldo Marquis. "Are there any south-of-Citgo witnesses?" he asked. Marquis responded simply “That is a negative,” and re-posted the one-liner ten minutes later for emphasis. And it’s not that they haven’t looked; they tried hard to debunk their own findings, but as their main site explains:
“We tried to find someone who might have seen it on the south side but it just wasn't happening.
[…]
We sure haven't been able to find ANYONE who is willing to directly contradict the north side claim AND we have not found a single previously published account that directly contradicts it either.”
How odd. I didn’t really have to even try to find previously published south path accounts, although a startling number have been pre-dismissed by CIT as among the suspect. I will offer my services free of charge. I found 13 worth making graphics for, though I’m sure there are some others. In fact, it could be said that all witnesses who saw the plane at all, whatever they may say later, saw it on the south path.
The Scene and the Spectators
The “official path” (violet in the graphics below) runs roughly along I-395 at its bend, but nearer parallel with Columbia Pike and the edge of the Navy Annex it flanks (the big harmonica building). The path had to be nearly straight but with a slight left curve and accompanying mild wing bank - left low, right high. After the Annex (entirely south), it passed south of the Citgo station (the smallish structure after), descending as it crossed Route 27, striking lamp poles, skimming the lawn, and entering the building low. The north path is also shown below for comparison, in yellow. This is CIT’s most-widely promoted possibility, never meant to be THE path, and shown to be aeronautically improbable (as have their others, to differing degrees). This angles across the Annex s-n, banking hard right along the way (left high), passing to the north of the Citgo almost at Arlington National Cemetery, descending a bit, then pulling up to fly over, yet somehow appearing to still impact low into the building.
The reason their case has some traction is the same reason that even 13 accounts can’t override the overwhelming case for the real event - eyewitnesses are the weakest type of evidence. Memory is notoriously prone to various errors and psychic distortions. Their memories are usually vague on trivial details like which side of a gas station the plane passed by, easy to be confused, misread, and maybe deliberately dishonest, especially when pushed on points like the above. There are however exceptions that freely and clearly delineate the “official path.” Now just as the whole point of NoC is that it means no impact, the unanimous impact reports could be taken as evidence the plane was on the path consistent with the damage caused. I could also use altitude clues to rule out a pull-up above the light poles, ruling out all but the “official path.” Either would make my job entirely too easy, so here I will only cite specific South of the Citgo (SoC) clues as they sporadically pop up. This is a short list and there are plenty of others that offer decent clues pointing directly at a south path, but these here are13 of the strongest that each confirm it in multiple ways. 1) Albert Hemphill
At the Navy Annex, “peering out of the window looking at the Pentagon.... the large silver cylinder of an aircraft appeared in my window, coming over my right shoulder as I faced the Westside of the Pentagon directly towards the heliport. The aircraft, looking to be either a 757 or Airbus, seemed to come directly over the annex, as if it had been following Columbia Pike.” He also gives the wing bank (remember, north path means left high) “He was slightly left wing down as he appeared in my line of sight […] As he crossed Route 110 he appeared to level his wings […] as he impacted low on the Westside of the building
2) Terry Morin
Another witness at the Annex (“FOB” in account). From his stated vantage point, Morin could only see the plane for the length and detail he describes if it were on the south path. CIT and Pilots for Truth have cited problems with the line of sight blocking final moment and this is valid – and doubly so for a plane passing entirely north of that line. "Teri" Morin has changed his once-vilified story and this one has gotten very weird, to hear the dispatches from CIT-land. I don’t believe them. This is what we know Terry Morin said right after the event:
“I started to hear an increasingly loud rumbling […] One to two seconds later the airliner came into my field of view. […] The aircraft was essentially right over the top of me and the outer portion of the FOB (flight path parallel the outer edge of the FOB). […] The plane had a silver body with red and blue stripes down the fuselage […] Within seconds the plane cleared the 8th Wing of BMDO and was heading directly towards the Pentagon. […] As the aircraft flew ever lower I started to lose sight of the actual airframe as a row of trees to the Northeast of the FOB blocked my view. I could now only see the tail of the aircraft.”
Trees to the northeast of the building is the only thing that doesn’t fit – he must mean northeast of where the plane had passed the Annex. These run along the Pike as it bends, at the crest of the hill looking down over the Pentagon (at the "n" in "line of sight"). Seeing stripes is consistent with it being a tad south of him and banked left.
3) Madelyn Zakhem
A VDOT employee previously published as a witness, Zakhem was verified by the LTW/CIT/Pickering entourage in August 2006. Aldo Marquis was not impressed and noted soon after participating “her account placed the plane "inches" from the roof of this small building [she was at]. With the left tilted down. Unfortunately, this would place it BELOW treetop level which we all know is impossible.” A figure of speech read too literally and debunked is a straw man tactic of course, and a convenient one, as the building that plane was (some number of) inches directly above, clearly puts it on the south path, and with the official bank to the left. Marquis later expanded at Above Top Secret : "Trees blocking her view. Madlene is a suspect witness. She is clearly lying about the flight path. We know because Edward blew it out of the water and we interviewed her, and now her bizarre behavior is explained.” [For Edward Paik, see below]. They can’t find any south path witnesses who’ll go on record, but the reason for strenuously denouncing this witness specifically IS that she’s a south path liar on record with THEM. So Aldo pulls the old Crypyo-Jew move: “Madlene Zackem, the lady with the jewish last name, Israeli accent while displaying a crucifix around her neck is not telling the truth about what she saw."
4) Edward Paik
The guy who blows "Madlene"'s account "out of the water" is not really a strong case for a south path in that his testimony and flight path drawn for CIT in late 2006 directly contradicts it - three versions running across the Navy Annex and thus pointing either OTC (Over-the-Citgo) or slightly NoC. However, his account is jumbled and has south path clues mixed in. When he first talked to the CIT guys and Russell Pickering earlier, he had said he thought the plane clipped an antenna tower just south of Columbia Pike: the wing "knocked down the antenna… the plane was in the middle of the road… that’s why it hit the Antenna." It didn’t really do this, (or did it?) but for him to think so, it would have to be close to it, which it almost certainly was. Also even as he draws a path entirely north of the Pike, his instinctive gestures belie ambiguity, pointing almost straight down the road, and indicating a left bank, which directly contradicts the massive right bank needed to go ONA and NoC. I believe he’s a south path witness and for whatever reason his account came out sort of supporting the north path (really it’s right between the two). How odd that the guy who proves suspicious crypto-Jew Zakhem a liar matches her account more than it differs!
5) Keith Wheelhouse
Wheelhouse, the famous C-130 ‘shadowing’ witness, was actually ‘verified’ by CIT, and for their cameras DREW the south-of-Citgo path to a T. The graphic below is based on his drawing as shown by CIT, rotated correctly to north, CIT’s path added for reference, and his lines color-coded. Light blue is his 77 path, south of the Citgo, .Lavender is the C-130 divergence he put down, happening at about the same time. They already felt he was part of the “ambiguous blending” of the C-130 and the decoy - timewise - to disguise the flyover jet (oh, it was the other plane that veered away a few seconds later…). So this drawing only affirmed their suspicions that he’s a government operative by showing the decoy plane come in on the south path while the “2nd plane,” which he describes as a C-130, peels away well short of the impact point. Once ‘verified’ at least, this here could only provide cover for… the gray, 4-prop C-130 that flew that path about a minute after The silver/white 2-engine flyover plane that no one saw or reported anywhere near the fireball and flyover point is left naked. Some operative!
6) Alan Wallace
One of three firefighters at the heliport for the President’s scheduled arrival later in the day. “The plane had two big engines, appeared to be in level flight, and was only approximately 25 feet off the ground and only about 200 YARDS from our location.” He was a bit off on the color, but felt it was close enough to match: “The airplane appeared to be a Boeing 757 or an Air Bus 320- white with blue and orange stripes. Mark later recalled the plane was silver and even identified that it was American Airlines.” White/orange/blue – silver/red/blue - close enough. Similarly with heading? “I later said the plane approached the Pentagon at about a 45 degree angle, but later drawing showed it was closer to 60 degrees.” I’m presuming here he means relative to the building’s west wall, where 90 would be a perpendicular track. From this there are two 45 degree-angle paths (in orange below). His account shows no perceived discrepancy between the angle he thought he saw and the final official path he saw later, so we must look for the “45 degrees” closest to this. Which one is a fit for ANY proposed path?
7) Timmerman/Vignola
Witnesses Hugh “Tim” Timmerman and his then-girlfriend Dawn Vignola saw the plane from a upper-floor apartment south of impact. With a panoramic view, they were able to see most of the path from at least the Navy Annex and forward. Timmerman had more plane knowledge and lodged a detailed report, while Dawn first spoke to the news on 9/11 and years later talked with another person going by the name Plan 271 online, who drew this path (in blue) based on her description. The apartment location wrong and the view blocked by another building (long red arrow) is set a bit wide, perhaps to fudge it in the interests of privacy (too late!) So the span where it passed the Citgo is deduced – did it suddenly swerve north there? No, because it had no time to correct from the left turn it was observed in (surely not as shown here, distorted by perspective, but the idea is the same), and a north path would mean the plane pulled-up and over, but to these witnesses it seemingly crashed into the ground just before the building.
8) Father Stephen McGraw
*Alleged witness DoJ lawyer and spooky just-ordained Opus Dei Catholic-priest* Stephen McGraw has described the flight path as from directly over his car, about 20 feet up and descending ahead of him and to his right to the impact point where he clearly saw it impact. He even told this to Aldo and Craig, and so all we need is his location to draw the path to the building, which CIT didn’t think to gather and hasn’t tried since. This line should also include, as McGraw deduced afterwards, the light pole that was clipped “just before it got to us” and the taxi damaged by it (see England, below) that was “just a few feet away from my car.” The plane passed from over the pole/cab area to over him and descended ahead all on a line he feels was “controlled and straight” into the building and CIT dismisses him as a “no-pather” witness and highly suspicious. CIT got no verification of his location, and they doubt he was at the scene at all, more likely fabricating for his Opus Dei NWO masters. He was placed in the correct spot (“a few feet” from England’s taxi and ahead of pole 1) in their graphics, “because we are typically discussing his account in the context of the official story,” which, in CIT land, is now a proven lie.
9) Penny Elgas
Headed north on Route 27 “almost in front of the Pentagon,” Penny Elgas reported “I heard a rumble, looked out my driver's side window and realized that I was looking at the nose of an airplane coming straight at us from over the road (Columbia Pike) that runs perpendicular to the road I was on. The plane just appeared there - very low in the air, to the side of (and not much above) the CITGO gas station that I never knew was there.” Finally a witness that mentions the Citgo, and a reason others don’t, and a side! It’s tempting to simply declare it was passing along Columbia, which puts it south, but she only placed it over the road. Below I offer NoC and SoC variants for comparison.
She recalled it coming “toward my car” and passing low “about 4-5 car lengths in front of me.” Along the way, the plane was descending and “banked in the slightest turn in front of me, toward the heliport.” Left or right turn? Coming from NoC, it’d have to bank right, which means right wing low. South path could be level and straight or, some evidence shows, banking slightly left wing low. With the right wing closest to her, Elgas said “I saw the end of the wing closest to me and the underside of the other wing as that other wing rocked slightly toward the ground.”Straight at her, banking left and passing ahead of, and then impacting, which she is quite clear on. She actually had a piece of the plane
land in her car, confirming her location about under the plane as it started losing parts, which a NoC plane would not do. She is a south path witness, plain as day, and no hunt was necessary. Why does CIT still claim no published SoC witnesses even though this one is quite well-published? Oh she’s all kinds of suspicious, her account is too public, too detailed, the plane part thing is too weird, and she has government connections. Not a real DC witness and not worth talking to. “Penny Elgas has a significant position in government and a very high profile highly publicized account so should be instantly considered suspect," they say.
10) NEIT 567
This witness is among the CMH interviews, designated with a number like the rest, and according to CIT “one of the most compelling accounts.” A member of an Army band who was at the ANC, her location as read by CIT is actually accurate, I believe, and labeled below. Partial account:
“I hear what I think is a fly over, over my head because that's standard. [...] And I looked, I looked directly up for it, and I also had some tree cover so I wasn't able to see, but I was facing the Pentagon [...] And we're facing the site that was struck. And that's what was also weird, is that it seemed like it struck on the other side whereas I found out later, I saw [the impact point?] so that whatever plane that disappeared, it was it happened so quickly.”
Aldo Marquis announced “She describes the plane as being "over my head" and having looked "directly up" for it which can only be the north side flight path,” which is not true. It would be A north path, but nowhere near the one they’ve been promoting. “Tree cover” implies a lateral distance with several trees in the way, rather than straight up through a single tree’s branches. This means it was at some distance, I think we can all agree to the south. Marquis also trumpets how she “thought that it flew over the Pentagon and crashed on the other side!!! […] Sounds like a flyover account to me.” She said no such thing. What did she mean about the other side thing? She knew where it hit, so we have four choices to work with here, below. Only one makes sense to me and it strongly implies a south path with perspective error.
ETA: A more detailed debunking of her inclusion as a CIT NoC witness
11) Steve Riskus
Headed south on Route 27, well north of the crash site when he saw the plane come in low and crash square into the building. When offered a graphic showing two possible flight paths he explained “The plane looked like it was coming in about where you have the "MAX APPROACH" on that picture... I was at about where the "E" in "ANGLE OF CAMERA" is written when the plane hit...”
He erroneously gives his distance from the plane about 100 feet or so when he actually would have been over 1,000 feet up the road from the plane. A 10x factor mis-estimation might seem unlikely, but he himself placed the plane about right on the map and just that far away. Just not a numbers guy apparently, but definitely a south path witness.
Riskus also said “It knocked over a few light poles in its way,” but has affirmed to others and to me in an e-mail that he did not actually notice this event. Like most other pole-impact witnesses, he admits deducing this from the evidence and, one might suspect, from the match between the observed path and damage. 12) Wanda Ramey
However, at least one observer bucks the trend – DPS/PFPS officer Wanda Ramey says she saw the poles clipped by the plane. "I saw the wing of the plane clip the light post, and it made the plane slant. Then the engine revved up and crashed into the west side of the building.” Ramey says, explicitly, that she saw this, unlike most other deducing light pole witnesses. CIT say they have tried to find her and verify that she truly differs from the others, but have had no luck. The original article described her as having “a clear view” from “the mall plaza booth.” My best guess as to the exact location of this is included below, and gives here a wide-angle view from a moderate distance of about 900 feet from the pole impacts. Perhaps the key to noticing the pole pruning is distance, not closeness, as CIT have presumed.
ETA: Ramey was at some point interviewed by CIT, and they have made the audio available. They'd been trying a while to get ahold of here to confirm or deny that she saw the poles actually hit. She could do neither, after years of memory atrophy, etc,, couldn't recall if she actually saw that or not. She does however specify a left bank, the "slant" being the wing nearest her lower than the other, which further supports the south path.
13) Lloyd England
So suspicious is this elderly cab driver that he gets his own short video; ‘The First Known Accomplice?” It’s not surprising that CIT and their allies make a huge deal of his account all over the place and put his damaged taxi cab on their main page. Unluckily for their case, he’s the best light pole witness, who says plane that passed right over his car “was so low it hit the light pole. And when it hit the pole it knocked the light part off and nothing came through the car but the pole itself." He screeched to a halt at an angle there, he says. “Did you actually SEE the plane hit the poles,” the old CIT standard, gets real silly in this case, but oddly enough, even Lloyd, who was closest of all, failed to actually SEE the pole(s) being struck, and offers a possible clue to why others missed it. He told the CIT/LTW/Pickering “elite research team” “this airplane flew over top of my car. It was real close, and uh, I just looked at it. And when I looked at it flying over, something - [glass?] - a loud noise happened and the pole came through the dashboard, right through the car, all the way to the rear.” This looks bad for their planted light debris theory. Luckily, the specifics of England’s accountare problematic. He has clarified in detail how the big curved pole segment is what stabbed his car and nearly killed him (the one out front in the picture below). That this would enter the windshield and come to rest long heavy end out as he says without leaving a mark on the hood doesn’t make much sense. This proves nothing except that a witness is telling a story that apparently makes no sense; his windshield was likely damaged by a different pieces than he says, and he constructed the memory he’s shared, perhaps honestly or perhaps not. This shows why witness accounts are weaker than objective verifiable evidence, but CIT is determined to make it a strong something. Since “his story is physically impossible and proven false by the evidence,” they’ve decided he was actuallt involved in the planting of the pole and was making the story up to cover for it. They’re unsure if he’s a willing accomplice or simply a “coerced […] victim,” but simply wrong is not an option, nor is it conceivable to them that he’s actually right, even though most people who think it out can’t see how.
As the CIT video asks of this account, “isn’t it interesting how Lloyd’s story supports the official flight path while being irreconcilable with the eyewitness flight path?” That’s right – not a witness. “At this point the debate regarding what happened at the Pentagon boils down to whether you choose to believe the CITGO witnesses or Lloyd.” Well whaddya know, a fasle dichotomy.
Conclusion: 8=0?
CIT’s wild-eyed fast talker Ranke recently reiterated the bogus claim yet again, in response to Mangoose at the JREF forum: “None of the witnesses we spoke with placed the plane on the south side of the gas station.”
Alright then, just from this list of people who place (or at least strongly imply) Flight 77 SoC, they spoke with Zakhem (understood her south path testimony, and used it to dismiss itself), Vignola (breaking agreements and burning bridges along the way), and with that liar Wheelhouse (it was THEY who gave him the paper to draw his south path on!) When they talked with Paik, and got him to draw lines that were either NoC or OtC they also video-recorded his south-path-supporting gestures. They of course talked to Morin, Ranke says, and I think they talked with Riskus via e-mail as it seems everyone has. McGraw spoke more with Avery and Pickering, but CIT was present at the taping, and they used the footage in a video dedicated to tearing down and obfuscating his south path testimony. Same with Lloyd England, and they even make it look like they defied ‘the devil by stealing his cab light. Where’s Mr. T when you need him to defend his fellow DC cab drivers? So just out of these thirteen south path witnesses, the CIT have spoken with EIGHT! Of these eight witnesses, at least four have been strenuously dismissed as non-witnesses of the most sinister kind, doubt cast on two, and two distorted and claimed as NoC after all. So by CIT logic, no, they haven’t found any south path witnesses in their journeys and likely never will. That’s just neat how much they’re winning. Good for them.
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Post-13 witnesses with no graphics guaranteed:
14) Here's another, if weaker, SoC witness, using Aldo's formula for NEIT 567: Levi Stephens, who later is said to have said it was NoC, had earlier said "I was driving away from the Pentagon in the South Pentagon lot when I hear this huge rumble, the ground started shaking … I saw this [plane] come flying over the Navy Annex. It flew over the van and I looked back and I saw this huge explosion, black smoke everywhere." Now no one is saying it was directly over the van, but how far NoC could it be and even seem that way? Hasn't he been placed around the lane one area? Why does he report a plane over there before the explosion rather than "after" like Roberts?
ETA: Also, a real SoC view is strengthened by CIT's own interview with Stephens, where they say he says it was north of the Citgo. As if it helps their case, they point out how he thought it was not an AA jet due to its unusual paint scheme - including a brown or tan underbelly. No one else really reported this (except I think Omar Campos), and most people thought it was a silver in color, as AA would be. Funny enough, the bottom of a silver plane would reflect the colors beneath it. A north-of-Citgo path would mostly show grass green, while a SoC passage would put it over the brown or tan unseeded, just built dirt mound just south of the station.
15) Roosevelt Roberts: Speaking of Roberts, his full interview reveals quite clearly a witness to Flight 77's actual SoC approach. It was a silver airliner with jet engines, he saw it in the space to the west over the south lot ("around the lane one area"). It was coming from the west ("from the 27 side ... heading east towards DC", from the southwest, past where I-395 merges with Route 27, from "almost like where that ne- that first plane had, um. . . flew into the, um, Pentagon right there. It- it- di- it looked like it came from that direction." And it was banking about 50-100 feet above the ground, just above the light poles. All the stuff about a second plane headed away is made up. The "another plane" he saw was clearly NOT after 77's impact, if he saw it coming in on the path 77 took, at its altitude, with its appearance.
16) NEIT 405: Another CMH interviewee, on one of the walkways on either side of the loading dock at the south lot. So nearly the same position as Roberts. "Walking on that elevated area that's right outside the door. It's actually on the second floor level. And I turned and glanced off to my right [...] I saw a plane coming over 395 and very, very low. Essentially coming into eye level as it flew across 395 and come across the end of the south parking off to my right as I went through that door." Across 395 probably means 27, and it appearing over the end (lane one edge) of the lot indicates it was probably SoC.
17) George Aman: CMH witness NEIT 419, Arlington Nat'l Cemetery facilities manager, inside a south-facing office at the time of the attack. He saw the plane descending and impacting out the window, and said so to CIT. His ability to determine just how far away it was or what it was over, would have been very limited. He placed it as passing between the Citgo and the ANC south maintenance parking lot. That's north of the Citgo, about as far north as witness should be expected to warp a plane passing them over a great distance. [Fuller explanation]. So how on earth is he a SoC witness? Light poles. CIT says no one actually saw them get hit. Ramey had said she did but can't remember now when they ask. Brooks said he did, but recanted to CIT. It was deduction, he said. George Aman, from his perspective, had a clear view of the first poles up on the bridge mound a few hundred feet away, and had said back in 2001/02 "When I was looking over here and I seen things fly up in there, not knowing really what the hell they were but come to find out they were street lights. So the plane was clipping the tops of the streetlights off." CIT had every chance to ask him if he deduced this, but just decided instead that he clearly was and it wasn't worth asking. [see comments at link above] They know he's a SoC witness.
