”IT’S A PERSPECTIVE ISSUE”

”IT’S A PERSPECTIVE ISSUE”
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
June 19 2008

“Bobloblaw,” the anonymous but effective debunker of Citizen Investigation Team claims, has scored some solid hits against CIT lately, contacting their witnesses, accepted and suspect, to set the record straight as much as possible. So far he’s keeping it all off-the-record, and I can’t vouch for what’s really going on, but I tend to believe him that one of those contacted is USA Today editor Joel Sucherman (suspect, highly), who contests CIT’s placement of him, which I already found was grossly dishonest.

However, I had bought their location he could not be at as it was “underneath the flight path” and thus offered no side view of the plane to fit his account of seeing its AA stripes. Sure enough, the spot they filmed on their 2006 drive up Route 27 and included in their USA Today Parade video is right next to light poles they labeled #2 and #3, the originals of which were struck down by the plane’s wings on that day. Bobloblaw however looked closer at this light pole labeling (also viewable as stills here) and found it wrong. He challenged Craig Ranke CIT, in a thread at their forum named after me, and eventually got Ranke to admit to being wrong on pole #1 and, therefore, the others.

I had not caught this myself, or analyzed their pole labeling, but saw it as soon as Bobloblaw mentioned it. And there’s little excuse for it escaping these Citizen researchers (both of them) even as they used the wrong poles to make absolutist arguments to disprove a witness account they don’t like. Spurred by Bobloblaw’s challenge, ranke took his case to the experts at the Loose Change Forum: “Light pole/camera mast perpective question; which is in front?” Even his sympathetic friends felt it necessary to acknowledge the obvious; Look-Up said “the pole must be closer to the observer than the VDOT mast,” while SPreston and 22205 concurred and tried to spin it all back on “Bob” as a blown-up non-issue. Ranke relented at this point: “It appears to be behind the VDOT mast in those images but it is not. That threw me off. It's a perspective issue but the error is mine.”

While it may appear, in stills at least, that this pole is behind the VDOT camera mast, it is clearly before (south of) the overhead sign structure, while pole #1, the first taken down by the right wing, would be on the other side (north) of it. This graphic illustrates the concept, with multiple pole positions down Route 27 highlighted and traced across to their counterpart across the road. The pole placement could have been easily verified against satellite photos, site photos by others, and whatever else. These all indicate the arrangement on the left is light pole, VDOT mast, overhead sign, pole 1, pole 2, then an ordinary pole. If this were pole 1, they’d have to wonder what happened to the last pole before the overhead, or why pole #1 looked so big. Apparently they didn’t, officially anyway.

It always looked to me too the light pole was behind, the way the mast seems to totally cover it and also its truss arm as they are passed and separate. This made me even wonder if they re-painted the mast in to make it seem in front, but in fact the poles would merge and the arm would not really show against, so it appears most likely an innocent illusion. It should be noted this is an optical effect, not a perspective problem, as the perspective shift is clear in CIT’s own video and sequential images from it. When you see it, it gets trippy for a second, then you adjust and say ‘oh, okay. That makes more sense.’ This is how some of us learn.

I’m unable to view the CIT forum (they’ve blocked me for some reason), but Bobloblaw collected some Ranke quotes from the debate he and fellow critic “Stinky Puh” engaged Ranke in. After getting second and third opinions, he did cede the point, as these compiled quotes show:

Ok ok.

I admit it now.

I went over the video again.

I concede I mislabeled the poles.

I publicly apologize to bob and stinkey.

Well, that might seem quite gracious of him, until you read the list Bobloblaw passes on of Ranke’s words up to that point, where for ten pages he denied the conclusion I and everyone else reached instantly once spurred to look at it.

Please stop wasting my time with this nonsense.

You and Stinkey are ridiculously wrong.

Everyone knows this.

... because I am right and you are wrong.

Pole one is BEHIND the vdot mast in every image liar.

So either admit you are a liar or a stubborn fool because you are WRONG.

I am not wrong.

Your stubbornness with this demonstrates how you are willing to say ANYTHING to cast doubt

This is fact and you are wrong.

Seriously man.

If you can't concede this you will have to go.

You are wrong.

You will concede or leave.

Do you get it yet?

Ok then you are banned.

You can come back when you admit it.

You have to admit you are wrong.

It's because you know you are wrong.

Pathetic.

So either admit you are a liar or a stubborn fool because you are WRONG.

You better do SOMETHING productive because so far you are batting zero.

You have proven yourself manipulative and deceptive.

You will be banned.

Why did it disappear?

Did aliens take it as I drove down the road?

No.

It's nothing but a perspective issue.

Wow. Yeah, see, Ranke’s got this perspective where he’s determined to prove Sucherman a liar. And this is where we get into the relevance of this ‘error’ Ranke’s owned up to like the big man he is. This mislabeling shifts the flight path on the left one pole placement - about 110 feet - to the south. On its face, this is significant but not the biggest deal in the word. As he said
“No harm no foul as my original point doesn't really change anyway. I'm only off by a pole.”

Nope. In addition to this ‘non-foul,’ that makes him ‘only” off by 100 feet-plus on the left-hand side, he also ignored perspective and verification on the right, placing his “pole #3” as the first one visible after the overhead sign, right across the street from his pole #2 (actually #1). This puts his pole placement TWO spots off on the right, for a difference of app. 250 feet by my measurements. This is a second egregious mistake he might have avoided if he even tried, and implies a flight path nearly straight across the road, whereas the real pole-testified path slants more up the road as well as across (purple below).
[More graphics and some juicy comments available here]

Looking at this graphic and keeping in mind that he was on the right half of the road headed north, the implications are clear. The issue at hand is whether he could be past the trees and thus have a clear view of impact as he said, while still being far enough south of the plane to see its side. So this fortunate labeling error, read back as evidence, wound up shifting the path feet about 200 feet south, shrinking the area to put Sucherman in accordingly and squeezing him back behind the trees to make him a big fat liar when he said “no trees.” Fact is, however, under the overhead sign = past the trees + could well see the plane and its stripes just fine. From the vantage below, the impact zone itself is still barely obscured by some branches at the far right. The plane I slapped in is at about the right scale, and the approximate right angle and shows just why these “investigators” might have wanted to pull it all south a ways. Oops, they did. If only this were the first time…
As Ranke is quick to point out, all of this does not change the 2:00 and passenger window claims that, as I had previously pointed out, corroborate each other and, read literally, make him a north-path witness. While both are likely just memory errors, it is uncanny how they happen to support the same thing CIT was looking for but missed. All this revalation has spurred Ranke to alter course on Sucherman and claim "I guess you're right Larson. He HAS to be a north side flyover witness! LOL!” What the hell is he LOLing about? They squandered this gift already and are still dealing with the fallout from the distortions necessary to do so.

JOEL SUCHERMAN – NOC WITNESS?

CIT EYEWITNESS VERIFICATION PART IV:
JOEL SUCHERMAN – NOC WITNESS?
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
April 29 2008
updated 5/3

Apologies all, I'm not trying to keep finding things, but this... I just found a most interesting logical paradox of sorts while looking into the account of USA Today editor Joel Sucherman. I hadn’t examined his account closely before, and am here relying on the interview portions in the CIT video The USA Today Witness Parade with only vague background knowledge. This short video is based around the suspicious density of USA Today/Gannet-connected witnesses to the Pentagon attack, taken as a mobile propaganda outfit of sorts sent out to confirm the government story. While at least six were packed into a .16 mile-stretch of the highway that they took to work each morning, only two of these, “both Mike Walter and Joel Sucherman have confirmed their locations,” the video explains; Walter did so via Russell Pickering, a placement he agreed to that shows trees blocking part of his view from well south of impact. Sucherman was verified by CIT with a video-taped interview and careful POV work captured on camera.
Their confirmation had Joel taking up the rear of the parade, having just emerged from the I395 underpass well south of the official flight path. How they placed him here seems a bit arbitrary really. Surprised? As far as I can tell all the evidence for this is in their interview as in the video, recorded on their November 2006 Arlington foray where they talked to all the PentaCon witnesses. The part they seemed to use is

“I had come out from underneath the underpass and as soon as you come out from under there, you start to rise up to a hill and that’s where you get the view of the Pentagon off to the east, off to your right.”

Then the interview cuts to talking about his view of Flight 77 passing left-to-right ahead of him. It’s not made clear whether he saw this at the instant he emerged or at some point shortly after but they seem to have latched onto the ‘had come out’ and set it as ‘had just come out.’ To place him more precisely we could use his description of the flight path he saw the plane on, relative to his view:

“I saw it coming across my windshield but then [certainly?] the passenger side of the vehicle I had had a clear view of the pentagon. I would say The Pentagon is at 2 o’clock from me, in my car. So I’m seeing it come across the windshield and then I’m looking out the passenger side window and that’s where I see the collision with the pentagon. There were no trees at that point in the way at all. I did see it impact.”
CIT used this description and their footage of the drive up Route 27 to pinpoint Sucherman’s location. They show a still shot labeled “Pentagon at “2:00”” taken from the position they indicate in their graphics, with trees between, blocking his view of impact. Problem is the Pentagon is a large building that would occupy the space from about 12:30 to 3:00, depending on where exactly he was, so if he means a specific spot was in that direction, the impact point is the most likely choice. I mapped this out and if we take his 12:00 position as being forward up Route 27, the impact point is at about 12:30 from him as placed by CIT. Even the nearest corner is only at 1:00. Also, the patch of trees blocking his view does not fit his description of there being no trees blocking his view of the impact point. Also the entire view of the flight path would be across his windshield at this location, with nothing but the south parking lot visible out the side window. Nothing about this location matches these positional details other than arguably the underpass aspect.

Did they manage to place him wrong despite their much-lauded field work? Just from this, it would seem so; their citizen method for investigating his location was to sit down and interview him to glean the first-hand details, get video of the area, pick the wrong location that conflicts with the details, decide his testimony contradicts itself, and dismiss him as a liar with the rest of the Parade, sending him to the back of the line.

He is a mainstream media employee, and seems a good official path supporter. He actually makes no mention of altitude I noticed, though he does use the word impact. Elsewhere he’s described a plane fitting the official profile. CIT’s mobile video showed a better position for him seeing the official path, just after passing the trees, but ruled this out as right under the flight path. I’m not sure where Sucherman specified that he wasn’t under it, although he doesn’t specifically mention this. So I tried him in such a position, more or less under the official path, amongst the downed light poles, and in the middle of the USA Today Parade. No trees block his view here, but he wouldn't see the plane till the right half of his windshield, and there's still no real view from side window here either (the angled green line is an app. divide between front and side views). this is also still not 2:00, more like 1:00. This placement is arguably consistent with both his exact words and with the official flight path, but it would require that this be a while after passing from under 395, in slow traffic. Until I see a specific reason to question this, it seems a good trade-off. [ETA: In previous interviews he does mention seeing the side of it (AA stripes), so he couldn't have been directly under it and seems to have been a bit further south, which is even further from 2:00 and of course gives him no view of the Pentagon out his right side. ].

Because of these facts, his account is not possible in relation to the official path, if literally read. But just out of curiosity, I tried to see what was the best fit for his account. Again I presumed that by ‘the Pentagon’ he meant the impact point, read 2:00 as exact, and considered the view out of the windshield and of the ‘impact point’ being visible out the passenger window. Understanding the result would only be approximate, oddly, these considerations place USA Today editor Sucherman entirely north of the official flight path, so that any plane crossing in front of his windshield to a point visible through his passenger side window, and at 2:00 as he stated, would have to be from over ANC or, with a bit of fudging, at least north of the Citgo.
How about that? Did CIT pass up another north path witness in its huff to disprove the mass-media shills? Imagine if they’d been willing to believe him and make his descriptors into a graphic like that above. It would not have been dishonest, it's what I just found, and could have made it into The PentaCon along with Lagasse, Brooks, Turcios, and Paik, who were interviewed at this same time. Was the north path meant to be 5X corroborated to fit the ‘penta’ theme, but the team was too dense to get the fifth Beatle up on stage? Am I going to be forced to include Sucherman in my vast disinfo operation hypothesis when he wasn’t even used? Or am I just reading too much into this odd coincidence of imprecisions and something more like my middle guess is close enough to what he’s describing after all?
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Above Top Secret.com - I quit the forum after this.
Ranke's surreal response at the CIT forum: What the hell? Although the bolstering ad hominems were fully anticipated behavior, a lashing-out as with any cornered, wounded animal, I never expected his core argument to be this stupid and ironically surreal.

"The most obvious contradiction here in Sucherman's account should be that 2:00 is NOT a view out of the passenger window no matter how you slice it."
Ummm, except the way of slicing it that makes most sense to me and is accurate to his account, that places 2:00 exactly as a view of impact to the right with no trees in the way.
"Clocks are never horizontal and this is not how normal people interpret the analogy of direction from time!"
Umm, except the original clock, the sundial, which uses the same principle normal people use for locating other ground objects relative to themselves. As the creator of The PentaCon, Ranke is not an expert on how normal people think, and his system makes no sense. Maybe that's what his momma taught him, and if so then perhaps that's what he honestly thought he should do. Personally I'm not fooled, but good move on Ranke's part putting forward this silly explication.

JUST SOME PICTURES

ETA: better angle