RAYTHEON TO THE RESCUE?

RAYTHEON TO THE RESCUE?
Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
old undated piece written in 2005, posted late '06, and re-posted January 1 '08

Note 5/4/08: I haven't revised this like I planned to a few months back. See comments below for some important updates I haven't digested yet. Now it's doubly-deserving of updates and soon. Ish.
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In all the arguments about whether it was a military weapon (missile) or a comandeered civilian transport (Boeing 757) that hit the Pentagon, one point sometimes missed is that a missile and a plane are designed on very similar principles, both are propelled with fuel and streamlined to fly great distances through the air. In fact a plane basically is a missile designed to make soft landings and to blow up as little as possible if it fails in this. But if taken in the wrong hands, as the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of WWII knew, its fuel becomes explosive, its chassis piercing and in a pinch it can become a missile in a more literal sense, or at least a large flying Molotov cocktail. It’s not the best weapon but one that hijackers have been able to seize before, if previously minus the suicidal imagination to make that leap. The official story is riddled with references to the 9/11 hijackers' use of the planes as guided missiles, yet nitwits argue that in the midst of a suicide hijacking attack, on a clear and bright morning in front of hundreds of drivers stuck in gridlock traffic they break out an actual Cruise missile to strike the Pentagon. This is idiocy, this is why I never wanted to read Meyssan.

So a plane is a missile, and if Boeing jets really were responsible, as nearly all evidence indicates, another key question is not entirely resolved – who was piloting the plane. The bolder revisionists remove the terrorists from the scene and are left with the chilling possibility that remote control was used. But officially, this is impossible. The State Department, refuting conspiracist claims in 2005, stated flatly as an evident fact “Boeing commercial aircraft can not be remotely controlled.” [1]

A Raytheon 727 lands in New Mexico in August, 2001. [Source: Associated Press via Cooperative Research]

But it is not actually impossible by a long shot - let’s turn to Raytheon, a big player in the military-industrial complex involved in high-tech projects like the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System (JPALS), a landing guidance system for military aircraft. They worked with the Air Force in testing and development for JPALS, carried out at Holloman AFB, New Mexico from June to September 2001. [2] The system was completed just before the 9/11 attack and publicized just after; in an October 1 press release they boasted of their role in “the first precision approach by a civil aircraft using a military [GPS] landing system.” On August 25, a FedEx Express 727-200 landed using “a Raytheon-developed military ground station.” [3] They explained details, which included a total of six successful pilotless takeoffs and landings of their specially rigged Boeing airliner. This was done just seventeen days before someone helped four Boeing jets jointly and precisely approach and “land” in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a strip mine in Pennsylvania.

JPALS was a military project but designed to be “fully interoperable with planned civil systems utilizing the same technology,” Raytheon explained, and they were also involved with this, under contract with the FAA. [4] For this they worked on the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) and the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), designed to improve on the GPS guidance system and bring it up to the FAA’s standards for safety and accuracy. [5] By merging JPALS with these GPS-refiners, a nation-wide, extremely precise matrix for automated landings – that is remote-controlled flight – of distressed civilian airliners was a real possibility- if still officially years off.

Raytheon published the fact only on October 1, just four days after President Bush announced at a speech in Chicago “we will look at all kinds of technologies to make sure that our airlines are safe [...] including technology to enable controllers to take over distressed aircraft and land it by remote control.” [6] A company official noted in the release their dedication to providing satellite-guided landing systems for “the flying public,” and their pride in being “part of the success achieved this summer during JPALS testing at Holloman.” [7] And proud they should be, that’s some mighty fine timing.

This series of Raytheon-centered events is only one illustration of the possibility of remote controlled flight, and the curious timing in fact makes the whole thing a little too obvious for my liking, possibly another honeypot set up in advance to distract us from real leads. But even if this angle should ever be conclusively proved unrelated to shadow 9/11, it does help remind us that remote control aircraft has been a reality for the military since the late 1950s at least, and civil airliners have been being remotely landed in foggy weather for over two decades. Most disturbing are the allegations – tentative at best but still possible - of secret FAA/NORAD systems of remote control built in to all (American) civilian Flight Control Systems, allegedly dating back as far as the 1970s. [8] Though if such a system exists - and Raytheon’s work for the FAA proves it was feasible by mid-2001 anyway - it has not been proved and has been kept thoroughly secret.

Sources:
[1] United states of America State Department. Identifying misinformation. Thierry Meyssan: French Conspiracy Theorist Claims No Plane Hit Pentagon.” Created: 28 Jun 2005 Updated: 28 Jun 2005 Accessed November 5, 2005 at: http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jun/28-581634.html
[2] “Raytheon and Air Force Demonstrate Civil-Military Interoperability for GPS-Based Precision Landing System.” Raytheon press release. October 1, 2001. Accessed October 28, 2005 at: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=149999&TICK=RTN&STORY=/www/story/10-01-2001/0001582324&EDATE=Oct+1,+2001
[3] See [2].
[4] See [2].
[5] See [2].
[6] Long, Jeff. “Landing by remote control doesn't quite fly with pilots.” Chicago Tribune. September 28, 2001. Accessed January 2, 2005 at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0109280208sep28.story
[7] See [2].
[8] Vialls, Joe. “Home Run: Electronically Hijacking the World Trade Center Attack Aircraft.” October, 2001. Accessed October 30, 2005 at: http://www.geocities.com/mknemesis/homerun.html

VIALLS, VON BUELOW, HOME RUN:

NAMING NAMES
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/The Frustrating Fraud
January 5 2007
Updated 5/8/07

[The following is an excerpt (slightly edited) from my original Shadow9-11 Series book III, "Scenario 12-E" ] I've more recently found that Von Buelow is more directly related to this page as well - after this interiew he released a book called Die CIA und der 11 September alleging remote control for the WTC attack planes we saw, and that despite this great system's availability, the planes we didn't see didn't exist, and certainly did not crash into the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. Von Buelow is definitely a fraudster.]

Anreas Von Buelow: 9/11 was "unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatuses of state and industry.”

In January 2002, as the dust was just starting to settle in Afghanistan and the world started to settled into the first full year of America’s “new century,” the German paper Tagesspeigel published an incendiary interview with Andreas von Buelow, former German Secretary of Defense and Minister of Science and Technology. The interviewer started out noting “you seem so angry, really upset.” Von Buelow responded “I can explain what's bothering me. I see that after the horrifying attacks of Sept. 11, all political public opinion is being forced into a direction that I consider wrong […] I wonder why many questions are not asked.” [1] He then proceeded to ask some of these questions himself, wondering why the 9/11 hijackers were not stopped, why warnings were ignored, why the air defense was so inadequate, and why the U.S. government then proved so nimble when it came to assigning blame. He also said of the perpetrators:

“Planning the attacks was a master deed, in technical and organizational terms. To hijack four big airliners within a few minutes and fly them into targets within a single hour and doing so on complicated flight routes! That is unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatuses of state and industry.” [2]

It must be noted that von Buelow is not an impartial observer in all this. Germany in general stands to lose much from the state of affairs unleashed by 9/11, and von Buelow in particular is keen on conspiracy theories, having praised Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon as “touching on the inner sanctum of the hidden government agenda.” In this interview, von Buelow also cited the opinion of one (unnamed) “British flight engineer,” according to which “the steering of the planes was perhaps taken out of the pilots’ hands, from outside.” This could have been done by a technology devised in the 1970s whereby the American government “could rescue hijacked planes by intervening into the computer piloting.” Von Buelow said that this technology was named “Home Run.” [3]

Some other sources explain that “Home Run” is merely a nickname for a DARPA program whose real name has remained classified. Either way, the system was first addressed by this name by Joe Vialls, apparently the unnamed Brit von Buelow was referring to. A self-described aviation engineering expert (British-trained), Vialls made a fairly convincing sounding, and I think plausible, case for how this system worked, and evidence that it was used to carry out the September 11 attacks. [4] LetsRoll posters like TitleForce, strike2Force, and General Carter seem to be inspired by this enigmatic and little-photographed theorist, the precise source of many of the pieces they re-posted. They may have been him for all I know.

He first came to my attention for tackling the Frustrating Fraud, calling French accusations of a missile a "sick joke." He postulated neither a missile nor an empty drone, but the regular Flight 77 with everyone aboard but the hijackers, seized remotely and slammed into its target. He saw the same basic plan at work in New York as well, in a simple, chillingly possible scenario I later came to adopt as "Shadow 9/11."

But as a source he has problems – Vialls offered few if any sources of his own, yet seemed an expert in almost any field he tackled. He was a mysterious and controversial writer to say the least; he has called the Peak Oil theory a “Zionist scam,” [5] accused “New York” of causing the Indonesian tsunami of 2004, accused Isreal of running New York, and argued that smoking cigarettes prevents lung cancer. Vialls Died in July 2005, apparently of natural causes (presumably not lung cancer), in his native Perth, Australia. His exact history and credentials are unclear, but he had set up and mirrored a galaxy of websites offering certain analyses of world event in his trademark crayon fonts. He started out leaving the perpetrators of 9-11 nameless, but offering links to self-hosted articles by others who pointed to Israeli execution. Vialls’ later articles were more blunt, with one article from his last month of life laden with grisly images of crimes perpetrated on “bewildered” Muslims by “American and/or Jewish soldiers and brutal sub contractors.” [6]

Oddly, Vialls is alleged by at least one Australian researcher as born Otho Jewell Vialls, seeming suspiciously Jewish himself, and therefore likely an agent of someone’s sent in to hijack legitimate conspiracy theories and crash them into the ground, as he is alleged to have done in several previous cases. [7] It must be noted that this is from Judicial.inc, which I don't take as a reputable source; their site is rather sickening in fact, but they probably have at least some facts, like this one, straight. Nor do I personally care about Vialls' ethnicity - Jews are as free as anyone to call themselves “Joe” rather than Otho and to criticize Israel and even come across as anti-Semitic. I just liked the image this gave me of covertness and of hijacking theories, noting his early involvement in the most plausible of the dark conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11.

Whatever then to make of his interesting argument and its detractors, Vialls published his first article on Home Run in October 2001, in which he had noted:

“Nowadays there are large numbers of people apart from the author privy to the basic data [on Home Run]. As long ago as the early nineties, a major European flag carrier acquired the information and was seriously alarmed that one of its own aircraft might be "rescued" by the Americans without its authority. Accordingly, [the airline] completely stripped the American flight control computers out of its entire fleet, and replaced them with a home grown version. These aircraft are now effectively impregnable to penetration by Home Run, but that is more than can be said for the American aircraft fleet.” [8]

He left the nation and airline unnamed at the time, but after von Buelow’s interview, Vialls updated this, revealing the nation as Germany, and the airline as Lufthansa. “Bearing in mind his former posts as Secretary of Defence and Minister of Science and Technology” at about that time, he noted, “Herr Von Buelow would have known all about this mammoth but secretive task.” Vialls also praised the timing; “how very clever (and discreet) of Von Buelow to sort of ‘drop the information’ into the middle of an interview about the 9/11 attacks!” [9] How very clever and discreet of Vialls to cite as evidence, of all the “large numbers of people” aware of Home Run, almost the very guy who would come out and cite Vialls as evidence later.

Hmmm…

Sources:
[1], [2], [3] Tagesspiegel, 13 Jan 2002 interview. Partial translation. Accessed October 30, 2005 at: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/VonBuelow.html
[4], [8], [9] Vialls, Joe. “Home Run: Electronically Hijacking the World Trade Center Attack Aircraft.” October, 2001. Accessed October 30, 2005 at: http://www.geocities.com/mknemesis/homerun.html
[5] Vialls, Joe. “Russia Proves 'Peak Oil' is a Misleading Zionist Scam” August 25, 2004. Accessed November 13, 2005 at: http://www.vialls.com/wecontrolamerica/peakoil.html
[6] Vialls, Joe. “Bush, Blair, and Howard Photo Atrocities.” May 24, 2005. Accessed November 13, 2005 at: http://www.vialls.com/torture/criminals1.html
[7] Beattie, Stewart. “Did Joe Vialls ever Play Fullback for Jerusalem?” Judicial Inc. November 16, 2003. Accessed November 7, 2005 at: http://judicial-inc.biz/Vilas_Beattie.htm.

THIERRY'S THEORY

Thierry Meyssan was president of the Paris-based Voltaire Network, a think tank “whose left-leaning research projects,” the Manchester Guardian reported, “have until now been considered models of reasonableness and objectivity.” [1] But after 9/11 he went off the deep end, and started publishing his controversial ideas about what happened on the internet just weeks after the attacks, and it was less than six months before the Pentagon attack formed the centerpiece of his early 2002 book 11 Septembre 2001: L’Effroyable Imposture (roughly “the Frightening Fraud” or “9/11: The Big Lie,” as it was later translated for the English edition). Meyssan’s basic point was well-summed up in an interview on France 2 television (“no plane crashed into the Pentagon […] I believe the government is lying”) [2] and at an April 2002 lecture (“if we only concentrate on the explosion of the Pentagon, we shall discover the ‘Big Lie’ that is the official story!”) [3]

For some reason this just never sounded right to me. I’ve never read his book, and hardly gave it a second thought until its ideas had spread so wide I felt I could ignore it no longer. Meyssan’s case, as mirrored by 911 IPS, Loose Change, et al, seems to have been the basic no-plane platform – the lawn is not scuffed up, there’s ‘no plane debris,’ only ‘one small hole’ in the Pentagon’s outer wall, the collapse of only the outer ring, etc. In the end analysis, the attack vehicle - if it existed - was too small to be an airliner. But as far as the NY attack, where everyone clearly saw both airliners, he seems to have argued that these were remote controlled drones. Again, no part besides scapegoat was afforded for any Arab terrorists, and any part of the official story that could realistically be denied was. Drones in NY, missile in VA.

Meyssan with his book, Paris, April 2002

The Frightening Fraud quickly became a bestseller in France, reportedly selling out its initial run of 20,000 copies within two hours of going on sale, and selling another 200,000 in the following weeks. [4] This evidenced a latent suspicions harbored in France, especially in its large Muslim community and the anti-Bush left, and many sales were to French-speakers overseas. The mainstream media and majority opinion there dismissed the book as stupid and full of flaws; indeed, looking closely at the way the attack looked to prove it was other than how it looked seems a troublesome approach. But it hit American news in February as a runaway French bestseller, evoking a curiously defensive backlash. In a muted precursor to the “Freedom Fries” episode, some Americans responded with disapproval and Francophobic boycotts.

Meyssan later expanded his thesis into a second book, “Pentagate,” but in the meantime, critical books and essays spawned by revulsion to his case were released, including The Big Liar: Some Facts about Thierry Meyssan, and The New Liars. Guillaume Dasquié swiped the very same name for The Big Lie: Theses and Nonsense about September 11. [5] A Pentagon spokesman, Glen Flood, described the book as “a slap in the face and real offence to the American people, particularly to the memory of victims of the attacks.” [6] As late as July 2005, Condi Rice’s State Department saw fit to publish on the Internet a lengthy rebuttal and refutation of the book, which continues to be fairly popular, if not in the U.S., than at least everywhere else. [7]

Early help came from Sheikh Zayed, President of the United Arab Emirates, through his “Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow Up.” In April 2002, the Center hosted a talk by Meyssan, and in July released an Arabic translation of his book. [8] This was reportedly handed out to some 5,000 leading Arab minds, and was boosted by the Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council. Many saw this as a concerted attempt by Arab elites to deflect blame from Islamic terrorists and to the US government (probably with Zionist-Mossad assistance. [9] The Zayed center was shut down in 2003 after a campaign lead by the ADL, and the Sheikh died the following year.

Meyssan has left his print as well on the decreasingly subtle new Cold War with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where state-run TV reportedly ran a series of shows explaining Meyssan’s theories to the public there. [10] General Leonid Ivashov, who had been chairman of Russia’s Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11, felt free to speak his mind after retirement. In 2005 Ivashov spoke at the “Axis for Peace” conference in Brussels, chaired by Meyssan. Ivashov has since then argued that September 11 was an inside job engineered by the “Atlantists” (vaguely, the West); Western elites were “not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction,” so they turned to systematically using international terrorism as “an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. […] the organizers of [the 9/11] attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the [current] world order.” [11]

Thus the obvious primary drive behind the book’s spread could thus be seen as campaigns by various “anti-American” forces in France, Russia, the Arab world and beyond, using the book for their own nefarious ends. It could also be seen as a natural response to the questions and suspicions over 9/11, which was after all a questionable and suspicious event. It was partly both; the book 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 Meyssan’s son called “Hunt the Boeing! And Test Your Perceptions!” 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.

Sources:
[1] Henely, Jon. “US invented air attack on Pentagon, claims French book.” The Guardian. Monday April 1, 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,677112,00.html
[2], [4], [6] “French lap up Pentagon crash 'fraud'” BBC News. April 2 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1907955.stm
[3 ] http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR01603
[5], [8]. [9], [10] “9/11: The Big Lie.” Wikipedia. Last modified 10:12, 13 September 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11:_The_Big_Lie
[7], United States of America State Department. Identifying misinformation. Thierry Meyssan: French Conspiracy Theorist Claims No Plane Hit Pentagon.” Created: 28 Jun 2005 Updated: 28 Jun 2005 Accessed November 5, 2005 at: http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jun/28-581634.html
[11] Nimmo, Kurt. “Russian General: Nine Eleven a Globalist Inside Job.” Another Day in the Empire. Sunday January 22nd 2006, 6:28 pm http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=201

PRECISION LOW-RIDER

PRECISION LOW-RIDER
THE UNLIKELY FINAL ALTITUDE
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
Last updated July 21 2007

Perhaps the strongest point still worth considering in the no-plane/Pentagon overflight argument is the suicide pilot’s precise attack, a feat of piloting some have flat-out called impossible for a jetliner, which would crash or fall apart or something under the pressure of what the expoerts call ground effect. Nila Segadevan, for example, found it evident "that it is physically impossible to fly a 200,000-lb airliner 20 feet above the ground at 400 MPH," and presumably even tougher to handle one as low as five feet or less and at speeds topping out at 575, as recorded in the FDR.

The attack craft’s performance as seen by the Washington controllers immediately raised eyebrows of suspicion. As the Washington Post reported the day after the attack how “just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver. The plane circled 270 degrees to the right to approach the Pentagon from the west, whereupon Flight 77 fell below radar level, vanishing from controllers’ screens.” Danielle O'Brien, an air controller at Dulles airport, told ABC News “the speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don't fly a 757 in that manner. It's unsafe.”

But safety apparently wasn’t the top concern; as he closed in, Hani Hanjour (we’re told) got even more bold and decided not to simply nose-dive his missile into the upper part of the fairly squat building (77 feet high in total) but to skim the ground like a hot rod even though it meant clipping light poles as he crossed a freeway (luckily no tall trucks there). In the last couple of hundred yards, he was reportedly flying only a few feet above the crew-cut lawn, and that with the wings wobbling under a deadly combo of high speed and atmospheric pressure, before slamming into the ground floor when he had five to choose from. Coming in so low means the engines would be nearly touching the ground, and any slight banking or upward irregularity in the surface would cause an engine to hit dirt and send the whole thing cart-wheeling into the lawn. Thus in addition to excellent control, Mr. Hanjour must have spent some time studying the exact topography of the Pentagon’s lawn to be sure it wouldn’t foil his daring precision approach with any pesky hillocks.

The ASCE's Pentagon Building Performace Report, for example, reproduced the five frames of security camera footage made public in 2002, seeing in them the approaching aircraft with its top about 20 feet above ground, "so low to the ground that it reportedly clipped an antenna on a vehicle on an adjacent road and severed light posts." Indeed, five poles a few hundred feet from the building were clipped and knocked over, their placement indicating the same wingspan and trajectory reported, as well as the plane's remarkably low altitude. On its path across Pentagon’s lawn, the plane banked with its right wing higher; about 100 feet before impact, the right wing struck a construction generator and the left engine was so low it impacted a “ground-level, external vent structure,” the report notes. These may have led to a pre-impact explosion in which “portions of the wings might have been separated from the fuselage before the aircraft struck the building.”

So while the final approach may not be as perfect as widely believed, it is remrkable, and looks a bit like the work of a precision-guided missile. But after a look at the physical evidence and eyewitness accounts, it looks like a projectile the exact shape, size, weight, paint job, etc. of an American Airlines 757 or similar model. The plane may have had a long life of peaceful flights until re-rigged in its final days, and may well have been filled with the very people we were told it was. Captain Burlingame may well have been running the plane normally at takeoff as we’re told, but lost control as the plane turned around over Ohio, dropped its transponder signal, and closed communications with the outside world. This is far from provable, but well within the realm of possibility. Hani Hanjour, to put it mildly, is not the only pilot in the world who could pull all this off, and whoever or whatever was at the controls, it seems, knew the target very well.