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'Popular Mechanics' readies major hit piece against 9/11 skeptics
"The Lies Are Out There"
James Meigs, appointed editor of Popular Mechanics in May 2004 (former editor of Premiere Magazine), trashes skeptics of the official story of 9/11/01 as irresponsible disgracers of the memories of victims - "We as a society accept the basic premise that a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and turned them into weapons against us. ... Sadly, the noble search for truth is now being hijacked by a growing army of conspiracy theorists."
James Meigs, appointed editor of Popular Mechanics in May 2004 (former editor of Premiere Magazine), trashes skeptics of the official story of 9/11/01 as irresponsible disgracers of the memories of victims - "We as a society accept the basic premise that a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and turned them into weapons against us. ... Sadly, the noble search for truth is now being hijacked by a growing army of conspiracy theorists."
Popular Mechanics Attacks Its
"9/11 LIES" Straw Man
by Jim Hoffman
Version 1.0, February 7, 2005
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pm/index.html
The Hearst-owned Popular Mechanics magazine takes aim at the 9/11 Truth Movement with a cover story in its March 2005 edition. Sandwiched between ads and features for monster trucks, Nascar paraphenelia, and off-road racing are twelve dense and brilliantly designed pages purporting to debunk the myths of 9/11.
The article's approach is to identify the 9/11 skeptics movement with a series of mostly physical-evidence issues, while entirely ignoring vast bodies of evidence that only insiders had the means, motive, and opportunity to carry out the attack.
The article gives no hint of the put options on the targeted airlines, warnings received by government and corporate officials, complicit behavior by top officials, obstruction of justice by a much larger group, or obvious frauds in the official story. Instead it attacks a mere 16 claims of its choosing, which it asserts are the "most prevalent" among "conspiracy theorists." The claims are grouped into themes which cover some of the subjects central to the analysis of 9-11 Research. However, for each theme, the article presents specious claims to divert the reader from understanding the issue. For example, the three pages devoted to attacking the Twin Towers' demolition present three red-herring claims and avoid the dozens of points I feature in my presentations, such as the Twin Towers' Demolition.
The article brackets its distortion of the issues highlighted by 9/11 skeptics with smears against the skeptics themselves, whom it dehumanizes and accuses of "disgracing the memories" of the victims.
More important, it misrepresents skeptics' views by implying that the skeptics' community is an undifferentiated "army" that wholly embraces the article's sixteen "poisonous claims," which it asserts are "at the root of virtually every 9/11 alternative scenario." In fact much of the 9/11 truth community has been working to expose many of these claims as disinformation.
This article has a page of Editor's Notes, "The Lies Are Out There," by James Meigs, whose previous columns have praised military technology (such as the UAVs used in Falluja). Meigs places outside of society anyone who questions the official version of events of 9/11/01:
We as a society accept the basic premise that a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and turned them into weapons against us. ... Sadly, the noble search for truth is now being hijacked by a growing army of conspiracy theorists.
Meigs throws a series of insults at the "conspiracy theorists," saying they ignore the facts and engage in "elaborate, shadowy theorizing," and concludes his diatribe with:
But those who peddle fantasies that this country encouraged, permitted or actually carried out the attacks are libeling the truth -- and disgracing the memories of the thousands who died that day.
Besides trashing the skeptics, and conflating "this country" with its corrupt leaders, Meig's piece attempts to legitimate PM's "investigation." It reads:
We assembled a team or reporters and researchers, including professional fact checkers and the editors of PM, and methodically analyzed all 16 conspiracy claims. We interviewed scores of engineers, aviation experts, military officials, eyewitnesses and members of the investigative teams who have held the wreckage of the attacks in their own hands. We poured over photography, maps, blueprints, aviation logs and transcripts. In every single instance, we found that the facts used by the conspiracy theorists to support their fantasies were mistaken, misunderstood, or deliberately falsified.
This sounds impressive, but the article provides no evidence to back up these claims. It provides no footnotes to source it's many assertions, and despite the scores of experts listed in its final section, the article cites only a few "experts," who would themselves likely be suspects if normal criminal justice procedures were used to investigate the crime.
Moreover, glaring errors in the article -- such as the assertion that there was only a single interception in the decade before 9/11/01 -- don't inspire confidence in PM's "professional fact checkers." It echoes the discredited assertions of official reports such as the FEMA WTC Building Performance Study and the 9/11 Commission Report, but provides no evidence that it is anything but a well-orchestrated hit piece to perpetuate the 9/11 cover-up.
"9/11: DEBUNKING the MYTHS"
The main article consists of six two-page spreads, each with a theme. Spanning these spreads are a series of sixteen "poisonous claims," which the article purports to refute, while it implicitly identifies them as the beliefs of all in the "growing army" of "conspiracy theorists." The two-page spreads are as follows:
* The introduction
* THE PLANES
* THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
* THE WORLD TRADE CENTER (continued)
* THE PENTAGON
* FLIGHT 93
Superficially, the themes appear to address the major physical evidence issues brought up by the skeptics (while ignoring the mountains of evidence of foreknowledge, motive, and unique means possessed by insiders). However the sixteen "most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists" which it attacks are mostly specious claims, many of which were probably invented to discredit skepticism of the official story in the first place. The article debunks the more specious claims, and uses distortion to and falsehoods to counter serious claims.
Thus the main approach of the article is to set up and attack a straw man of claims that it pretends represent the entirety of the skeptics' movement. The list includes many of the same claims that are debunked on the companion to this site, 911review.com. The article gives no hint of the questions raised by the evidence in this site, nor any sense of the issues raised by the broader 9/11 truth movement.
Before proceeding to its 16 points, the article's introduction levels more insults at the skeptics -- "extremists", some of whose theories are "byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate." It begins by asking you to type "World Trade Center conspiracy" into Google.com, and claims that "More than 3000 books on 9/11 have been published" -- an incredible claim. (Of these supposed 3000 titles, we recommend only a few, listed here.)
The "claims" attacked by the article are listed under the following headings.
THE PLANES
1. Where's The Pod
The pod-plane idea has been used for over a year to discredit skepticism of the official story. It's not surprising that the article gives it top billing. See
ERROR: A Pod Was Attached to the South Tower Plane. The article mentions the site LetsRoll911.org and the video In Plane Site, implying they are representative of the skeptics. Or course it makes no reference to skeptics sites debunking the these productions and pod-plane idea, such as this page on OilEmpire.us, or this page on QuestionsQuestions.net. In fact the lifts a graphic from the QuestionsQuestions.net article without crediting it.
2. No Stand-Down Order
Here, the article falsely implies that emperors-clothes.com and StandDown.net both claim that no jets were scrambled to pursue any of the four commandeered jets. It then attacks this straw man by relating some details of the Commission's timeline (without sourcing the Commission's Report) to suggest that interceptors were scrambled, but that ATC couldn't find the hijacked flights because there were too many radar blips. The article makes no mention of the many problems with NORAD's account of the failed intercepts, but relates the following incredible assertion by NORAD public affairs officer Maj. Douglas Martin that there was a hole in NORAD's radar coverage:
It was like a doughnut. There was no coverage in the middle.
This absurd idea that NORAD had no radar coverage over much of the continental USA is distilled from the 9/11 Commission Report. Predictably, the article makes no mention of evidence that war games were planned for the day of 9/11/01. See Multiple War Games on 9/11/01 Helped to Disable Air Defense.
3. Intercepts Not Routine
This section quotes the following excerpt from OilEmpire.us:
It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers. When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes.
It then dismisses this 'claim' with the following sweeping 'fact':
In the decade before 9/11 NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999.
This bold assertion flies in the face of a published report of scramble frequencies that quotes the same Maj. Douglas Martin that is one of PM's cited experts!
From Sept. 11 to June, NORAD scrambled jets or diverted combat air patrols 462 times, almost seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001, Martin said.
It is safe to assume that a significant fraction of scrambles lead to intercepts, so the fact that there were 67 scrambles in a 9-month period before 9/11/01 suggests that there are dozens of intercepts per year. To its assertion that there was only one intercept in a decade, the article adds that "rules in effect ... prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts," and the suggestion that there were no hotlines between ATCs and NORAD.
4. Flight 175's Windows
That the South Tower plane had no windows is one of several ludicrous claims made by the In Plane Site video, and, like the pod-planes claim, is dismissed by the simplest analysis. See The Windowless Plane.
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
5. Widespread Damage
The idea that explosives in the basements of the towers damaged the lobbies at about the time the planes hit is an obscure theory that is rarely brought up by researchers citing evidence that the towers were destroyed by controlled demolition. Yet it is the article's lead point about the theories of controlled demolition.
6. Puffs Of Dust
The article reproduces this image of the early stage of the South Tower's collapse, but fails to credit Gulnara Samoilova, the photographer who risked her life to take the dramatic photograph.
Here the article cites this quote from an advertisement for the book
Painful Questions:
The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions.
By titling this section "Puffs Of Dust," rather than "explosions of concrete," and by showing only a collapse photograph from early in the South Tower's destruction, the article minimizes the explosiveness of the event, but nonetheless goes to lengths to explain these "puffs." It quotes NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder saying "When you have a significant portion of of a floor collapsing it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window" without explaining where concrete dust came from.
The article mentions none of the other features of the collapses that indicate controlled demolition, such as:
* The towers fell straight down through themselves maintaining vertical symmetry,
* The towers' tops mushroomed into vast clouds of pulverized concrete and shattered steel.
* The collapses exhibited demolition squibs shooting out of the towers well below the zones of total destruction.
* The collapses generated vast dust clouds that expanded to many times the towers' volumes -- more than occurs in typical controlled demolitions.
* The towers came down suddenly and completely, at a rate only slightly slower than free-fall in a vacuum. The flat top of the North Tower's rubble cloud shown in these photos show the rubble falling at the same speed inside and outside the former building's profile, an impossibility unless demolition were removing the building's structure ahead of the falling rubble.
* The explosions of the towers were characterized by intense blast waves that shattered windows in buildings 400 feet away.
* The steel skeletons were consistently shredded into short pieces which could be carried easily by the equipment used to dispose of the evidence.
* Eyewitnesses reported explosions before and at the outset of the collapses.
7. "Melted Steel"
The article implies that skeptics' criticism of the official account that fires weakened the towers' structures is based on the erroneous assumption that the official story requires that the fires melted the steel.
In fact the fire-melts-steel claim was first introduced by apologists for the official story on the day of the attack, by no less than a structural engineer. The more sophisticated column failure and truss failure theories, advanced in subsequent days and weeks, are the subject of detailed analysis and debunking here.
8. Seismic Spikes
The idea that seismic spikes preceded the collapses of the towers is the subject of the page, ERROR: Seismic Spikes Preceded Collapses. Unfortunately a number of web sites seized upon this idea without critically evaluating it. The article takes advantage of this red-herring by pointing out that PrisonPlanet.com and WhatReallyHappened.com support this idea, while ignoring the valid evidence of demolition these sites present.
9. WTC 7 Collapse
Here the article cites 911review.org, a site that promotes discrediting ideas but purports to speak for the 9/11 skeptics' community. The article simply repeats the site's claim that "the video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to fire, but rather a controlled demolition," without directing the reader to where they can see videos, such as on WTC7.net. The article makes no mention of the facts that skeptics most often cite as evidence that the collapse was a controlled demolition:
* The building collapsed with precise vertical symmetry.
* The building collapsed at almost the rate of free-fall.
* The building collapsed into a tidy pile of rubble.
The article lets NIST's Shyam Sunder sell the "progressive collapse" of Building 7:
What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors, it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down.
Note the guarded language Sunder uses to describe the extent of the collapse. The reader is led to believe that the collapse of a "section" could lead to the total collapse of the building, when in fact there are no examples of total progressive collapse of steel frame buildings outside of the alleged cases of the Twin Towers and Building 7.
THE PENTAGON
10. Big Plane, Small Holes
Here the article cites the claim on reopen911.org that the the hole in the pentagon was "only 16ft. across," and mentions French author Thierry Meyssan, who helped to spawn the "no-757-crash theory", the subject of
my earlier essay. The article again implies that this idea is gospel among 9/11 skeptics, giving no clue that there is controversy about the issue in 9/11 skeptics circles, and that many consider this claim that no jetliner hit the Pentagon a big distraction. The page ERROR: The Pentagon Attack Left Only a Small Impact Hole and others by 9/11 skeptics have long debunked Meyssan's wildly inaccurate description of a 16-foot-diameter entry hole.
11. Intact Windows
Here the article misrepresents an argument by skeptics of the official account of Flight 77's crash by stating that the issue is intact windows "near the impact area," when the skeptics point to unbroken windows in the trajectory of portions of the Boeing 757.
PM uses this part to backhandedly promote the Pentagon Strike flash animation, which appears to serve the same function as this article: discrediting skepticism by associating it with sloppy research and easily disproven ideas.
12. Flight 77 Debris
Here the article drops a URL for Pentagon Strike a second time, in case the reader missed the first one. The lack of aircraft debris following the Pentagon crash has been noted by many people as suspicious, but it is not surprising, considering the nature of the crash. See ERROR: Aircraft Crashes Always Leave Large Debris
FLIGHT 93
13. The White Jet
Here the article counters the idea that a small white jet reported by eyewitnesses had anything to do with the crash by relating a detailed account by the Director of Aviation of the company that owned the business jet, David Newell. According to Newell, the co-pilot of the jet, Yates Gladwell, was contacted by FAA's Cleveland Center to investigate the crash immediately after it happened. According to PM:
Gladwell confirmed the account but, concerned about ongoing harassment by conspiracy theorists, asked not to be quoted directly.
14. Roving Engine
The far-flung debris field of the Flight 93 crash site along with the eyewitness accounts make a strong case that the plane was shot down. The article takes on this issue by first citing an article on Rense.com that makes the unsubstantiated claim that "the main body of the engine ... was found miles away from the main wreckage site." It then argues that engine parts being found 300 yards from the main site is reasonable for a simple crash, because airline accident expert Michael K. Hynes, who investigated the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, states parts could bounce that far "when you have high velocities, 500 mph or more." This theory is at odds with the eyewitness reports that the plane plumetted almost straight down, such as the following:
* He hears two loud bangs before watching the plane take a downward turn of nearly 90 degrees.
* It makes a high-pitched, screeching sound. The plane then makes a sharp, 90-degree downward turn and crashes.
* He hears a sound that "wasn't quite right" and looks up in the sky. "It dropped all of a sudden, like a stone."
15. Indian Lake
The article devotes this point to the confetti seen over Indian Lake, which is about two miles from the main crash site. It explains that this distance is "easily within range of debris blasted skyward by the heat of the explosion from the blast."
16. F-16 Pilot
In the final point, the article takes on the allegation by retired Army Col. Donn de Grand-Pre that the pilot that shot down Flight 93 was Major Rick Gibney. The article states that Gibney was flying an F-16 that day, but it was not on an intercept mission; rather it was to pick up Ed Jacoby Jr., the director of the New York State's Emergency Management Office, and fly him from Montana to Albany, NY.
PM delivers its closing ad-hominem attack on skeptics in the voice of Ed Jacoby:
I summarily dismiss [allegations that Givney shot down Flight 93] because Lt. Col. Gibney was with me at the time. It disgusts me to see this because the public is being misled. More than anything else it disgusts me because it brings up fears. It brings up hopes -- it brings up all sorts of feelings, not only to the victims' families but to all individuals throughout the country, and the world for that matter. I get angry at the misinformation out there.
"9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED"
Having trashed the straw man of it's 16 claims, and accused the skeptics of "disgusting" behavior (without ever providing a glimpse of the true nature of the 9/11 truth movement, which the article never acknowledges by name), Popular Mechanics titles it's final section "9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED." This page lists "experts" that PM fond "particularly helpful." The titles and names on this page are supposed to back the many assertions the article makes in the main section, but the article gives no indication of what experts or reports backed up many of their key assertions.
"9/11 LIES" Straw Man
by Jim Hoffman
Version 1.0, February 7, 2005
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pm/index.html
The Hearst-owned Popular Mechanics magazine takes aim at the 9/11 Truth Movement with a cover story in its March 2005 edition. Sandwiched between ads and features for monster trucks, Nascar paraphenelia, and off-road racing are twelve dense and brilliantly designed pages purporting to debunk the myths of 9/11.
The article's approach is to identify the 9/11 skeptics movement with a series of mostly physical-evidence issues, while entirely ignoring vast bodies of evidence that only insiders had the means, motive, and opportunity to carry out the attack.
The article gives no hint of the put options on the targeted airlines, warnings received by government and corporate officials, complicit behavior by top officials, obstruction of justice by a much larger group, or obvious frauds in the official story. Instead it attacks a mere 16 claims of its choosing, which it asserts are the "most prevalent" among "conspiracy theorists." The claims are grouped into themes which cover some of the subjects central to the analysis of 9-11 Research. However, for each theme, the article presents specious claims to divert the reader from understanding the issue. For example, the three pages devoted to attacking the Twin Towers' demolition present three red-herring claims and avoid the dozens of points I feature in my presentations, such as the Twin Towers' Demolition.
The article brackets its distortion of the issues highlighted by 9/11 skeptics with smears against the skeptics themselves, whom it dehumanizes and accuses of "disgracing the memories" of the victims.
More important, it misrepresents skeptics' views by implying that the skeptics' community is an undifferentiated "army" that wholly embraces the article's sixteen "poisonous claims," which it asserts are "at the root of virtually every 9/11 alternative scenario." In fact much of the 9/11 truth community has been working to expose many of these claims as disinformation.
This article has a page of Editor's Notes, "The Lies Are Out There," by James Meigs, whose previous columns have praised military technology (such as the UAVs used in Falluja). Meigs places outside of society anyone who questions the official version of events of 9/11/01:
We as a society accept the basic premise that a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and turned them into weapons against us. ... Sadly, the noble search for truth is now being hijacked by a growing army of conspiracy theorists.
Meigs throws a series of insults at the "conspiracy theorists," saying they ignore the facts and engage in "elaborate, shadowy theorizing," and concludes his diatribe with:
But those who peddle fantasies that this country encouraged, permitted or actually carried out the attacks are libeling the truth -- and disgracing the memories of the thousands who died that day.
Besides trashing the skeptics, and conflating "this country" with its corrupt leaders, Meig's piece attempts to legitimate PM's "investigation." It reads:
We assembled a team or reporters and researchers, including professional fact checkers and the editors of PM, and methodically analyzed all 16 conspiracy claims. We interviewed scores of engineers, aviation experts, military officials, eyewitnesses and members of the investigative teams who have held the wreckage of the attacks in their own hands. We poured over photography, maps, blueprints, aviation logs and transcripts. In every single instance, we found that the facts used by the conspiracy theorists to support their fantasies were mistaken, misunderstood, or deliberately falsified.
This sounds impressive, but the article provides no evidence to back up these claims. It provides no footnotes to source it's many assertions, and despite the scores of experts listed in its final section, the article cites only a few "experts," who would themselves likely be suspects if normal criminal justice procedures were used to investigate the crime.
Moreover, glaring errors in the article -- such as the assertion that there was only a single interception in the decade before 9/11/01 -- don't inspire confidence in PM's "professional fact checkers." It echoes the discredited assertions of official reports such as the FEMA WTC Building Performance Study and the 9/11 Commission Report, but provides no evidence that it is anything but a well-orchestrated hit piece to perpetuate the 9/11 cover-up.
"9/11: DEBUNKING the MYTHS"
The main article consists of six two-page spreads, each with a theme. Spanning these spreads are a series of sixteen "poisonous claims," which the article purports to refute, while it implicitly identifies them as the beliefs of all in the "growing army" of "conspiracy theorists." The two-page spreads are as follows:
* The introduction
* THE PLANES
* THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
* THE WORLD TRADE CENTER (continued)
* THE PENTAGON
* FLIGHT 93
Superficially, the themes appear to address the major physical evidence issues brought up by the skeptics (while ignoring the mountains of evidence of foreknowledge, motive, and unique means possessed by insiders). However the sixteen "most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists" which it attacks are mostly specious claims, many of which were probably invented to discredit skepticism of the official story in the first place. The article debunks the more specious claims, and uses distortion to and falsehoods to counter serious claims.
Thus the main approach of the article is to set up and attack a straw man of claims that it pretends represent the entirety of the skeptics' movement. The list includes many of the same claims that are debunked on the companion to this site, 911review.com. The article gives no hint of the questions raised by the evidence in this site, nor any sense of the issues raised by the broader 9/11 truth movement.
Before proceeding to its 16 points, the article's introduction levels more insults at the skeptics -- "extremists", some of whose theories are "byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate." It begins by asking you to type "World Trade Center conspiracy" into Google.com, and claims that "More than 3000 books on 9/11 have been published" -- an incredible claim. (Of these supposed 3000 titles, we recommend only a few, listed here.)
The "claims" attacked by the article are listed under the following headings.
THE PLANES
1. Where's The Pod
The pod-plane idea has been used for over a year to discredit skepticism of the official story. It's not surprising that the article gives it top billing. See
ERROR: A Pod Was Attached to the South Tower Plane. The article mentions the site LetsRoll911.org and the video In Plane Site, implying they are representative of the skeptics. Or course it makes no reference to skeptics sites debunking the these productions and pod-plane idea, such as this page on OilEmpire.us, or this page on QuestionsQuestions.net. In fact the lifts a graphic from the QuestionsQuestions.net article without crediting it.
2. No Stand-Down Order
Here, the article falsely implies that emperors-clothes.com and StandDown.net both claim that no jets were scrambled to pursue any of the four commandeered jets. It then attacks this straw man by relating some details of the Commission's timeline (without sourcing the Commission's Report) to suggest that interceptors were scrambled, but that ATC couldn't find the hijacked flights because there were too many radar blips. The article makes no mention of the many problems with NORAD's account of the failed intercepts, but relates the following incredible assertion by NORAD public affairs officer Maj. Douglas Martin that there was a hole in NORAD's radar coverage:
It was like a doughnut. There was no coverage in the middle.
This absurd idea that NORAD had no radar coverage over much of the continental USA is distilled from the 9/11 Commission Report. Predictably, the article makes no mention of evidence that war games were planned for the day of 9/11/01. See Multiple War Games on 9/11/01 Helped to Disable Air Defense.
3. Intercepts Not Routine
This section quotes the following excerpt from OilEmpire.us:
It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off-course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers. When the Air Force 'scrambles' a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes.
It then dismisses this 'claim' with the following sweeping 'fact':
In the decade before 9/11 NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999.
This bold assertion flies in the face of a published report of scramble frequencies that quotes the same Maj. Douglas Martin that is one of PM's cited experts!
From Sept. 11 to June, NORAD scrambled jets or diverted combat air patrols 462 times, almost seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001, Martin said.
It is safe to assume that a significant fraction of scrambles lead to intercepts, so the fact that there were 67 scrambles in a 9-month period before 9/11/01 suggests that there are dozens of intercepts per year. To its assertion that there was only one intercept in a decade, the article adds that "rules in effect ... prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts," and the suggestion that there were no hotlines between ATCs and NORAD.
4. Flight 175's Windows
That the South Tower plane had no windows is one of several ludicrous claims made by the In Plane Site video, and, like the pod-planes claim, is dismissed by the simplest analysis. See The Windowless Plane.
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
5. Widespread Damage
The idea that explosives in the basements of the towers damaged the lobbies at about the time the planes hit is an obscure theory that is rarely brought up by researchers citing evidence that the towers were destroyed by controlled demolition. Yet it is the article's lead point about the theories of controlled demolition.
6. Puffs Of Dust
The article reproduces this image of the early stage of the South Tower's collapse, but fails to credit Gulnara Samoilova, the photographer who risked her life to take the dramatic photograph.
Here the article cites this quote from an advertisement for the book
Painful Questions:
The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions.
By titling this section "Puffs Of Dust," rather than "explosions of concrete," and by showing only a collapse photograph from early in the South Tower's destruction, the article minimizes the explosiveness of the event, but nonetheless goes to lengths to explain these "puffs." It quotes NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder saying "When you have a significant portion of of a floor collapsing it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window" without explaining where concrete dust came from.
The article mentions none of the other features of the collapses that indicate controlled demolition, such as:
* The towers fell straight down through themselves maintaining vertical symmetry,
* The towers' tops mushroomed into vast clouds of pulverized concrete and shattered steel.
* The collapses exhibited demolition squibs shooting out of the towers well below the zones of total destruction.
* The collapses generated vast dust clouds that expanded to many times the towers' volumes -- more than occurs in typical controlled demolitions.
* The towers came down suddenly and completely, at a rate only slightly slower than free-fall in a vacuum. The flat top of the North Tower's rubble cloud shown in these photos show the rubble falling at the same speed inside and outside the former building's profile, an impossibility unless demolition were removing the building's structure ahead of the falling rubble.
* The explosions of the towers were characterized by intense blast waves that shattered windows in buildings 400 feet away.
* The steel skeletons were consistently shredded into short pieces which could be carried easily by the equipment used to dispose of the evidence.
* Eyewitnesses reported explosions before and at the outset of the collapses.
7. "Melted Steel"
The article implies that skeptics' criticism of the official account that fires weakened the towers' structures is based on the erroneous assumption that the official story requires that the fires melted the steel.
In fact the fire-melts-steel claim was first introduced by apologists for the official story on the day of the attack, by no less than a structural engineer. The more sophisticated column failure and truss failure theories, advanced in subsequent days and weeks, are the subject of detailed analysis and debunking here.
8. Seismic Spikes
The idea that seismic spikes preceded the collapses of the towers is the subject of the page, ERROR: Seismic Spikes Preceded Collapses. Unfortunately a number of web sites seized upon this idea without critically evaluating it. The article takes advantage of this red-herring by pointing out that PrisonPlanet.com and WhatReallyHappened.com support this idea, while ignoring the valid evidence of demolition these sites present.
9. WTC 7 Collapse
Here the article cites 911review.org, a site that promotes discrediting ideas but purports to speak for the 9/11 skeptics' community. The article simply repeats the site's claim that "the video clearly shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to fire, but rather a controlled demolition," without directing the reader to where they can see videos, such as on WTC7.net. The article makes no mention of the facts that skeptics most often cite as evidence that the collapse was a controlled demolition:
* The building collapsed with precise vertical symmetry.
* The building collapsed at almost the rate of free-fall.
* The building collapsed into a tidy pile of rubble.
The article lets NIST's Shyam Sunder sell the "progressive collapse" of Building 7:
What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors, it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down.
Note the guarded language Sunder uses to describe the extent of the collapse. The reader is led to believe that the collapse of a "section" could lead to the total collapse of the building, when in fact there are no examples of total progressive collapse of steel frame buildings outside of the alleged cases of the Twin Towers and Building 7.
THE PENTAGON
10. Big Plane, Small Holes
Here the article cites the claim on reopen911.org that the the hole in the pentagon was "only 16ft. across," and mentions French author Thierry Meyssan, who helped to spawn the "no-757-crash theory", the subject of
my earlier essay. The article again implies that this idea is gospel among 9/11 skeptics, giving no clue that there is controversy about the issue in 9/11 skeptics circles, and that many consider this claim that no jetliner hit the Pentagon a big distraction. The page ERROR: The Pentagon Attack Left Only a Small Impact Hole and others by 9/11 skeptics have long debunked Meyssan's wildly inaccurate description of a 16-foot-diameter entry hole.
11. Intact Windows
Here the article misrepresents an argument by skeptics of the official account of Flight 77's crash by stating that the issue is intact windows "near the impact area," when the skeptics point to unbroken windows in the trajectory of portions of the Boeing 757.
PM uses this part to backhandedly promote the Pentagon Strike flash animation, which appears to serve the same function as this article: discrediting skepticism by associating it with sloppy research and easily disproven ideas.
12. Flight 77 Debris
Here the article drops a URL for Pentagon Strike a second time, in case the reader missed the first one. The lack of aircraft debris following the Pentagon crash has been noted by many people as suspicious, but it is not surprising, considering the nature of the crash. See ERROR: Aircraft Crashes Always Leave Large Debris
FLIGHT 93
13. The White Jet
Here the article counters the idea that a small white jet reported by eyewitnesses had anything to do with the crash by relating a detailed account by the Director of Aviation of the company that owned the business jet, David Newell. According to Newell, the co-pilot of the jet, Yates Gladwell, was contacted by FAA's Cleveland Center to investigate the crash immediately after it happened. According to PM:
Gladwell confirmed the account but, concerned about ongoing harassment by conspiracy theorists, asked not to be quoted directly.
14. Roving Engine
The far-flung debris field of the Flight 93 crash site along with the eyewitness accounts make a strong case that the plane was shot down. The article takes on this issue by first citing an article on Rense.com that makes the unsubstantiated claim that "the main body of the engine ... was found miles away from the main wreckage site." It then argues that engine parts being found 300 yards from the main site is reasonable for a simple crash, because airline accident expert Michael K. Hynes, who investigated the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, states parts could bounce that far "when you have high velocities, 500 mph or more." This theory is at odds with the eyewitness reports that the plane plumetted almost straight down, such as the following:
* He hears two loud bangs before watching the plane take a downward turn of nearly 90 degrees.
* It makes a high-pitched, screeching sound. The plane then makes a sharp, 90-degree downward turn and crashes.
* He hears a sound that "wasn't quite right" and looks up in the sky. "It dropped all of a sudden, like a stone."
15. Indian Lake
The article devotes this point to the confetti seen over Indian Lake, which is about two miles from the main crash site. It explains that this distance is "easily within range of debris blasted skyward by the heat of the explosion from the blast."
16. F-16 Pilot
In the final point, the article takes on the allegation by retired Army Col. Donn de Grand-Pre that the pilot that shot down Flight 93 was Major Rick Gibney. The article states that Gibney was flying an F-16 that day, but it was not on an intercept mission; rather it was to pick up Ed Jacoby Jr., the director of the New York State's Emergency Management Office, and fly him from Montana to Albany, NY.
PM delivers its closing ad-hominem attack on skeptics in the voice of Ed Jacoby:
I summarily dismiss [allegations that Givney shot down Flight 93] because Lt. Col. Gibney was with me at the time. It disgusts me to see this because the public is being misled. More than anything else it disgusts me because it brings up fears. It brings up hopes -- it brings up all sorts of feelings, not only to the victims' families but to all individuals throughout the country, and the world for that matter. I get angry at the misinformation out there.
"9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED"
Having trashed the straw man of it's 16 claims, and accused the skeptics of "disgusting" behavior (without ever providing a glimpse of the true nature of the 9/11 truth movement, which the article never acknowledges by name), Popular Mechanics titles it's final section "9/11 MYTHS DEBUNKED." This page lists "experts" that PM fond "particularly helpful." The titles and names on this page are supposed to back the many assertions the article makes in the main section, but the article gives no indication of what experts or reports backed up many of their key assertions.
For more information:
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Here's my compilation of S11 evidence
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth.html
where - unlike Hoffman - I try to promote every aspect of the evidence, rather than cherry pick for the purposes of a limited hangout agenda. For those who might find the compilation overwhelming to begin with, here is a summary article.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/manufactured.html
Let's look behind the scenes of Hoffman's pretend counter to Popular Mechanics.
Why is Hoffman "two faced" ? To get to this, let's examine his limited hangout agenda. Hoffman does a fairly good job of promoting the evidence relating to the demolition of the towers. He would have you believe that he's the great hero of this issue. In fact he's a Jimmy- come- lately, who arrived on the scene after a lot of the hard work was already done, and now runs around trying to take the credit for it, now that the issue has reached a critical mass of awareness.
Well, that wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't that he also spends a lot of time attacking the very same people who blazed the trail before him, and using his support for the demolition issue as a platform from which to launch attacks on most of the rest of the S11 evidence.
At every opportunity, Hoffman attacks the proofs that no big plane went into the pentagon. He also attacks the people who promote it, ignoring the fact they were mostly the same people who blazed the trail for the demolition evidence, the coat-tails of which he now rides so comfortably on.
See the relevant section for the no pentagon plane evidence in my compilation at
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth2.html
At every opportunity he attacks proofs that no big planes hit the WTC. See that evidence at the above link.
Also see
http://members.iinet.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
and also see an archived debate on the issue at
http://members.iinet.au/~holmgren/salter.html
Heh! Hoffman himself makes a rather undistinguished appearance in this debate. His contribution was to argue that the main evidence that a big plane hit the Sth tower is because there isn't any witness evidence for it. That's right ! Hoffman argues that if such a thing had happened, hundreds of people would have seen it, and thought it so obvious that no would have mentioned what they saw, so if there were hundreds of witnesses, then we would not expect to have any witness reports, so the fact that there aren't any proves that hundreds of people saw it, which proves that it happened.
Heh! Two faced, but only half brained. Hoffman himself doesn't mind descending to the gutter of lunatic debunkery when it suits his limited hangout agenda.
But I'm still coming to the two faced part. This is how the limited hangout agenda works. Everyone and their dog is going to try to use S11 for their own agenda - whatever it is.
A small number of people are interested in simply exposing the full truth for its own sake. Others want to cherry pick those parts which suit their particular agenda and then tell as many whoppers as the Govt to cover up what isn't convenient to them.
And because there are many different agenda involved with the many different people involved, you'll get many different kinds of cherry picking.
Hoffman's particular version of cherry picking is to promote the demolition evidence, and mumble vaguely about the stand down evidence while actually refusing to promote - indeed sabotaging - the very good research which was done in relation to it.
See the relevant section on the stand down at
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth.html
He ignores or openly attacks most other evidence.
Notice that although Hoffman claims to be taking exception to Popular mechanics, he actually spends most of the article agreeing with them. Many of PM's attacks are endorsed by Hoffman, and he pretends to disagree by saying that what they're attacking isn't really credible S11 evidence.
For example, where PM attacks the proof that no big plane hit the pentagon, it gets Hoffman's whole hearted support. He writes
[[Big Plane, Small Holes
Here the article cites the claim on reopen911.org that the hole in the Pentagon was "only 16ft. across," and mentions French author Thierry Meyssan, who helped to spawn the "no-757-crash theory", the subject of my earlier essay. The article again implies that this idea is gospel among 9/11 skeptics, giving no clue that there is controversy about the issue in 9/11 skeptics circles, and that many consider this claim that no jetliner hit the Pentagon a big distraction. The page ERROR: The Pentagon Attack Left Only a Small Impact Hole and others by 9/11 skeptics have long debunked Meyssan's wildly inaccurate description of a 16-foot-diameter entry hole. ]]
So Hoffman's only complaint is a little grumble that this lunacy doesn't really count as S11 evidence and that PM is being deceptive in claiming that it does.
Which brings us to the "two faced" aspect of Hoffman's "counter" to Popular Mechanics. He used exactly the same tactic in his response to the more recent attack by Scientific American.
That is, when the stupid debunkers attack the only real evidence which Hoffman supports - the demolition, he cries foul that they could be so stupid as to deny such proof. That's fine as far as it goes. But when they attack the same evidence which he does - like the no pentagon 757 proof, he does a complete back flip in his logic. He claims triumphantly that this proves that the no plane evidence is "straw man" - because the debunkers are attacking it.
See how often they attack it ! , he shouts triumphantly. This proves that the no plane evidence has been fabricated to give the debunkers a target. They are able to call us silly. They are able to accuse us of junk science.
Umm... Jim...they use *exactly* the same tactics against the demolition evidence. But when they do that, Hoffman cries triumphantly
See, they feel the need to attack our evidence. They are worried ! They are launching a huge counter spin operation !
Jim, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim that the attacks of people like Shermer (Scientific American) and Popular Mechanics on the no plane evidence prove how stupid that evidence is, while at the same time, claiming that their attacks on the demolition evidence prove how stupid they are.
That's right ! Hoffman is actually telling us that attacks by morons like Shermer and Popular Mechanics on the no plane evidence are proof that its BS ! Myself, I prefer to just stick to dispassionate examination of the evidence itself, something which Hoffman runs screaming from. But if one were thinking so circumstantially as to try to draw *any* conclusion from the fact that morons like these attack it, surely that conclusion would be that it's valid ?
This is what I mean by double standards. Two faced. This is how the NWO works. They give us villains like Popular Mechanics and then set up heroes like Hoffman in fake opposition to them. Or if you're on the other side of things, rational, sensible people like Popular Mechanics and mad conspiracy theorists like Hoffman. But both of them are lying to you.
Which ever side people take is fine by the perpetrators of the big lie. Every time people like Popular Mechanics take a swipe at S11 evidence, it gives Hoffman a chance to take a swipe too - and pretend that he's defending it. When they attack the no plane evidence, Hoffman attacks it too - on the basis that it's giving people like Popular Mechanics ammunition.
Shouldn't the very same logic apply to PM's attacks on the demolition ? Not in the loony land of two faced Hoffman.
Hoffman also doesn't mind twisting and misrepresenting the views of those who he claims to support. For example, in the above article, Hoffman states
[[Here, the article falsely implies that emperors-clothes.com and StandDown.net both claim that no jets were scrambled to pursue any of the four commandeered jets. It then attacks this straw man... ]]
Here, Hoffman is actually supporting the lies of Popular Mechanics, while pretending to oppose them. Lets analyse the above statement.
In relation to Emperors -clothes, the truth is the exact opposite of what Hoffman claims. Emperors- clothes does indeed make the claim which Hoffman says has been falsely attributed to them. In fact it not only makes the claim, it proves it with meticulous documentation. One of the great contributions of the Emperors- clothes site in the early days of the S11 investigation was to bust the myth that jets were scrambled and just didn't get there in time. Notice that Hoffman gives a link to the Emperors- clothes site, thus giving the casual reader the impression that he's making an honest statement, which he can back up with documentation. In fact, it's a smokescreen, because if one follows the link, it only takes one to the Emperors- clothes home page. Since it's a very wide ranging site, covering many more issues than just S11, and since its S11 section is itself divided into different sections, a reader not familiar with what Emperors -clothes actually said, would probably not bother digging far enough to discover that Hoffman's attribution to it is a lie.
But unfortunately for Hoffman, I have a collection of the relevant Emperor's clothes articles linked right here at
http://members.iinet.net.net.au/~holmgren/truth.html
and just to make things easier, I will here directly link to a key article, which shows that Hoffman has attributed to Emperors- clothes the exact opposite of what the site actually says.
Frequently asked questions on 9/11
Planes "did scramble " on 9/11,they just " arrived late "
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/indict/faq.htm
In this article, Emperors-clothes delivers a devastating knockout blow to the claim that jets were scrambled and just didn't get there on time. It shows that nothing was scrambled until after the Pentagon was hit, and that even then nothing went after the supposedly hijacked plane which was still at large at this time.
So Hoffman in a stunning piece of convoluted lying, has managed to roll a heap of whoppers in to one claim. Firstly, he's lied about the scramble situation - actually agreeing with the lie by Popular Mechanics, while pretending to take them on. Secondly, he's then lied about what the Emperors clothes site says, misrepresenting it as telling the same lie that he is.
So in fact, Popular Mechanics was making a pathetic attempt to debunk the evidence presented by Emperors- clothes, and Hoffman helped them out by claiming that what they were trying to debunk simply didn't exist.
For those not familiar with the details of the evidence to which I am referring, this could be getting quite confusing - which is no doubt what Hoffman wants. This was a very clever lie on his part causing many convolutions. But I suggest that the best way to sort it out is to read the compilation of Emperor's Clothes articles which I have linked, and then re-read Hoffman's statement, and then you'll see what a vicious lie it was on his part.
But that's only scratching the surface of Hoffman's duplicitous agenda.
The evidence Hoffman doesn't want you to know about
The object striking the North tower is not a plane.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
The videos of the Sth tower hit which appears superficially to show a large plane hitting the tower are fakes. They were animated with flight simulator. There is no real plane there.
http://thewebfairy.com/911
http://911hoax.com
Two of the allegedly hijacked planes did not even fly that day
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/1177.html
Hoffman's response to this evidence when it was first published was very revealing.. The fact is that the official flight logs from the Bureau of transportation say that the flights which are alleged to have hit the pentagon and the Nth tower did not even exist.
Unable to find any fault with the documentation, Hoffman attacked the article on the basis that it might lend credence to the
no planes theory. This is what the idiot said in an email dated Nov 16 2003 - 3 days after I published the findings.
[[Some people have put enormous effort into building a case that either of both of:
(1) what hit the North Tower was not a jetliner, let alone AA F11
(2) no jetliner hit the South Tower -- rather the impact was simulated using holograms or faked video and planted explosives.
I find (1) highly improbable, and (2) laughable.
The object passing over in the Naudet video -- the only known video capturing the North Tower impact, except for an even lower resolution security camera -- sounds like a turbofan: you can hear a distinct hum, not just a white noise roar that a military jet or missile would make. Furthermore, the impact hole matches the profile of a 767 down to the engine pods and wingtips.
I won't even address the evidence about the South Tower impact except to say that when I have in an e-mail list with some proponents of the no-planes theories, I've been labeled a debunker and attacked, especially by webfairy, who's conviction that the Naudet video shows that no jetliner hit the North Tower I might describe as religious. (My comments about motion and pixel-blur, sampling errors, and compression artifacts only elicited further ridicule.)
I very much doubt that webfairy or Scott Longrey (911hoax.com) are insincere, but I think the no-planes-hit-the-towers is a very destructive meme that helps to lump things like the WTC demolition in the catagory of lunatic ideas in the minds of many.
To his credit, Gerard understands this, so he doesn't focus on it despite believing, I think, both (1) and (2).
Gerard's description of (1) as "widely accepted" may reflect the people he communicates with most, and the vocal persistence of webfairy, et.al. And the idea has gained some currency, even appearing on serendipity.li in an article by Leonard Spencer.
http://www.serendipity.li/wot/aa11.htm
I feel like I have to write an article taking this on, which will distract me from the next upgrade I need to do to my WTC demolition analysis on 911research.wtc7.net . ]]
Hoffman's comment on the revelation that official flight logs show that AA11 and 77 did not exist is simply to rehash arguments he's had about video evidence of the tower strikes.
He doesn't address a single word to the documentation presented in the article.
So the Hoffman doctrine is that if this evidence points us in a direction which we don't want to go, then we should simply put our heads in the sand and talk about something else.
Hoffman should be writing for Skeptics Magazine himself, because that's about the level of his logical thinking ability and his capacity for honesty.
As if all that wasn't enough, here we have proof that the passenger lists for the alleged AA 11 flight, published by the media purporting to be official flight manifests, are fakes.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/fake.html
Hoffman doesn't want you to know that either. If he did ,he would link it on his site. Like the flight log records, he would promote it at least as an "anomaly", in the interests of making all relevant information available, even if he's not buying the no planes stuff in general. But because he knows that it adds a documentation angle to the video proof that AA11 did not hit the Nth tower , then he simply pretends that it doesn't exist.
The reason is not any fault in the research. It's because it provides more evidence for something that Hoffman doesn't want you to know. That this was a war of the worlds con job. There weren't any hijacked planes. The news is just a movie. This goes way beyond the implication of Govt involvement in S11 and a subsequent media cover up. This proves that it was a giant matrix constructed reality job right from the beginning.
Hoffman is merely playing the script of a "truth seeker' within this movie. He is lying to you just as actively as Popular Mechanics, CNN and the Bush regime.
Visit my links and see the evidence. We no planers deal with real evidence, and can always provide it on demand. Two faced limited hangout perps like Hoffman, resort to cynically using those who they claim to be countering - like Popular Mechanics - as a smokescreen from which to launch their continued attacks on that part of the evidence which doesn't suit them.
There may be evidence that the fascist bush regime was behind the atrocities of 9/11 but the claims of non-existent airplanes don't help convince skeptics that the conspiracy was real.
The object approaching the Nth tower is not a plane. This is quite obvious from watching the video slowed down, or broken in to stills.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
And here's an archived debate on the subject, in which the planehuggers - including Hoffman - finish up with egg on their faces
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/salter.html
The first hit was not shown live. By the time it was shown, people had been having the idea "big plane, big plane "rammed down their throats for a whole day non stop with endless footage of the sth tower strike - which superficially does look like a large plane - and being told that 4 big planes had crashed.
And when you look at the Nth tower video casually at normal speed, all you'll see is brief flash of something and an explosion, and so you naturally think there's a big plane there, and its just too fast to see. But it's a conjurors trick.
Go to the first link and follow the links from there, and you'll see what it really looks like.
And the flight alleged to have been involved - AA11 didn;t even exist, according to official flight log records.
http://members.iinet.au/~holmgren/1177.html
And the supposed passenger lists for the flight have been proven as fakes
http://members.iinet.au/~holmgren/fake.html
So much for the Nth tower plane.
Now the Sth tower. If you don;t watch the video carefully or critically, it looks like a large plane. But look more closely and you'll see that it doesn;t look realistic at all. Its a crude animation. Its physically impossible for this to be a real object.
http://thewebfairy.com/911
http://911hoax.com
and in particular
http://thewebfairy.com/911/krash
http://thewebfairy.com/911/ghostplane2
http://thewebfairy.com/911/mindblower
Notice how it goes through the wall, without making a hole and without breaking off any parts - like disappearing into a bucket of water without making a splash. Impossible.
Notice that it lacks perspective. It looks the same size regardless of how far away it is.
See the way it hip hops, alternating frame by frame between hovering motionless and leaping forward at 1200 mph. This is particularly easy to see if you go to
http://thewebfairy.com/911/krash
and fast forward through to still number 75, and then advance 1 frame at a time.
Notice that it exceeds it's maximum speed at low altitude while banked sharply and flying in the opposite direction to what its banking.
Notice that there is something wrong with the shape of the underbelly in the rear view shots.
So how was it shown live?
The only video of it live did not show it striking the building - because this would have been too difficult to animate. It passes behind the building, and you see the explosion, leading one to deduce that it has impacted the hidden face.
This would have child's play to animate live with technology already in common commercial use.
Lying with Pixels. By Ivan Imato MIT's Technology review. July/August 2000
http://www.nodeception.com/articles/pixel.jsp
After this was shown live, then we got days of endless replays of retrospective shots, *appearing * to show the full impact, until most people forgot what had actually been shown live, and were numbed into thinking that they actually saw two planes clearly hit two towers live.
And the flight which is supposed to have hit the Sth tower was flown by a plane which is still registered as valid in the FAA aircraft registry.
Go to the FAA aircraft registry
http://162.58.35.241/acdatabase/acmain.htm
and do an "n number" search for N591UA ( UA 93 on Sept 11) and N612UA (UA 175 on Sept 11).
As for the pentagon - where is there any evidence of a large plane ?
See some of the evidence compiled at
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth2.html
And remember that the flight which is supposed to have crashed there AA 77, also didn't exist according to the official records linked in the article cited earlier.
Supposedly four planes crashed that day. We haven;t seen any identifiable wreckage of any of them.
And according to official databases, two of the flights didn't exist and two were flown by planes which are still registered as valid.
You need to be careful about claiming witness reports unless you can actually produce documentation for them.
In fact, witness reports overwhelmingly support a small plane or missile or people who were looking right at the explosion and didn't see any plane.
I debated this question with Eric Salter. He recklessly made the sweeping statement that "thousands" of people saw it, but repeatedly refused to supply even one witness statement to that effect with documentation. Finally, he ran off and then posted something on his website saying that witness reports didn't really matter and telling the straight out lie that he's asked me to supply witness statements and that I'd refused.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/salter.html
Later in the same debate, Hoffman made the reckless claim that "hundreds" of people saw it, and then being similarly unable to supply even one, he then resorted to claiming that the fact that there aren't any such reports actually proves that there were hundreds because nobody would have bothered reporting it.
In a similar IMC debate, I've listed some of the witness evidence to the contrary.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/06/318706d.shtml#185105
That's right everyone, if you didn't DOCUMENT it when all the people, reporters, journalists in helicopters and survivors themselves claimed that REAL PLANES were involved, well, you just can't be believed!!
Give me a break! What's with all this nonsense? I assume it's just to take up the time of people doing real research. I'd guess Holmgren is a right-winger from the nonstop slinging of nonsense.
Even those who are not convinced of this will see that at the very best, Hoffman is a liar and plagiarist, running a duplicitous agenda which has nothing to do with truth, and merely seeks to cherry pick a few selected aspects of the truth about Sept 11 for some kind of personal gain, and doesn't care how much damage he does in order to achieve this goal.
The first issue to deal with is Hoffman's habit of plagiarizing research and then defaming the very people he's plagiarized it from.
If you go to Hoffman's site, you'll see that it's basically divided into two sections.
Some of it is dedicated to pretending to expose the official story. The rest of it is dedicated to attacking most of the S11 evidence and supporting the official story to which he claims to take exception.
As we'll see, the positive section has been built purely as a platform from which to piss on other research and researchers.
Let's first examine his supposed credentials as an S11 researcher. Hoffman's section on the WTC demolition is actually quite good. This is the platform which he needs in order to launch his attacks. The reason that it's a good treatment of the demolition issue is because Hoffman actually made only minor contributions to it. Most of it is plagiarized from earlier researchers such as J. McMichael and Jeff King (also known as "Plaguepuppy" ) who had the WTC demolition case proven well before anybody had heard of Hoffman. Hoffman has made some useful refinements of their arguments, but it's only icing on the cake of proof which was already in the public domain before Hoffman appeared.
In addition , Hoffman has the unpleasant habit of attacking as supposed Govt agents the very same people from whom he steals his work. Let me give you one stunning example of this.
Hoffman has been particularly vicious in his attacks on the Webfairy http://thewebfairy.com/911
He has ridiculed her skills as a video analyst in relation to the work she's done on the no WTC planes issue. What Hoffman doesn't tell you is that at the same time as delivering this constant barrage of ridicule, and of accusing her of being a spook, he's quietly stolen some of her work on the WTC 7 demolition and passed it off as his own.
WF made some close ups of demolition squibs, close ups of which Hoffman makes good use - without attribution - while at the same time, snarling to the world that WF is a spook who is laughably incompetent with video.
Hoffman has also accused me of being a spook because of my work on the no planes issue.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren~manufactured.html
What Hoffman doesn't tell you is that while he makes much of the smoking gun proof that the towers fell too quickly for a pancake collapse to be possible, that he learned of this aspect of the evidence from me, and used my original attempts to quantify the problem as the basis from which to develop his own work. He's refined it somewhat, which is what I wanted someone to do with it. However it's a bit rich to them attack the originator of this work as a spook, while also writing them out of the history of the development of the evidence.
For a newcomer to the evidence, a visit to Hoffman's site might give the impression that he played a major role in proving the WTC demolition. In fact he's done little more than tweak and refine the already existing work of the same people he's attacking. Because Jeff King, IMO the best demolition researcher, also supports the no planes evidence, Hoffman has written him out of the history, casting him by implication as a spook, and also incorporating King's work into his list of plagiarized achievements.
Hoffman's plagiarism is not limited to the demolition evidence. In order to maintain his cover it is necessary for Hoffman to pretend to have made a contribution in other areas.
Thus he supposedly exposes the Bin Laden confession video as a fake here.
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/binladinvideo.html
This is completely plagiarized without attribution from this site which published it about 2 1/2 years before Hoffman.
http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/bin-laden-vergleich.html
The top half is in German, but if you scroll down, there's also an English version.
Now we turn to Hoffman's plagiarism of the stand down evidence which was published by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel on http://www.tenc.net
In some ways this evidence is now somewhat dated, because it shows evidence for a military stand down to allow the hijacked planes to reach their targets.
Since we now know that there weren't any hijacked planes, it's debatable that any such stand down would have needed. Nevertheless, at the time it was published, the Tenc research was courageous and groundbreaking work, and blew a huge hole in the official story, prompting others to dig deeper and bring the evidence to the stage its reached today.
It's also worth noting that Hoffman showed up only after most of the current evidence on S11 had already been assembled, and people had been loudly distributing it for about two years. Tenc's work was published very early, before there was any "911 turth movement", when the authors had no way of knowing how the Govt would react to such publications and so could well have been risking their lives.
The respect that Hoffman pays is by plagiarizing their work and then defaming them.
This article from TENC
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-2.htm
has been directly ripped off by Hoffman here
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/alibis/cheney.html
And he's only just warming up.
TENC original http://emperor.vwh.net/indict/urgent.htm
Hoffman rip off http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/analysis/norad/index.html
TENC original http://www.emperors-clothes.com/indict/faq.htm
Hoffman rip off http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/defense/index.html
TENC original http://emperor.vwh.net/indict/urgent.htm
Hoffman rip off http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/alibis/myers.html
And of course, for anyone who claims that there really were hijacked planes, then an allegation of a military stand down becomes a vital component to claiming to be a critic of the story. Thus the TENC evidence remains vital to the case as long as one believes in hijacked planes, and this is why Hoffman attempts to pass Tenc's work off as his own.
Not content with Plagiarizing them, Hoffman then defames them by misrepresenting them.
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/02/1720145.php
Here, Hoffman replies to a piece from Popular Mechanics which attacks S11 "conspiracy theories." If you read Hoffman's reply carefully, you'll see that he actually supports most of Popular Mechanics spin, but cleverly disguises this support as dissent. Hoffman's method is to complain that most of what PM attacks isn't really S11 evidence - that its just disinfo worthy of contemptuous dismissal, and thus he attacks them for alleging it to be serious S11 evidence. In other words, Hoffman actually spends most of the article agreeing with PM.
Apart from the demolition evidence, which as we have already seen is mostly plagiarism and refinement of already existing proofs on his part, his only point of disagreement with PM is that such evidence should even be considered worthy of attack.
However, in relation to the stand down evidence, Hoffman perpetrates a vicious defamation of the same the Tenc work which he plagiarizes.
One of the Govt's cover stories on the stand down issue is that they did scramble fighter jets which just didn't get there in time. In a brilliant piece of research (one of those later plagiarized by Hoffman) Tenc demonstrated that this is a lie and that nothing was scrambled until after the pentagon was hit. But in his reply to PM, Hoffman attributes to Tenc the exact opposite view. He accuses PM of misrepresenting Tenc in attributing to them the research that they actually did. He attributes to Tenc support for the official story. Having set up this straw man, Hoffman then attacks PM for its attack on Tenc. In other words, Hoffman implies that the official story is correct and also falsely attributes such a view to Tenc, leaving his only complaint about PM to be that they've attacked a claim which Tenc supposedly didn't make.
This is a very clever piece of lying. Hoffman has managed to support the official lies on the scramble story, while appearing to take issue with Govt supporters like PM, at the same time as defaming the people from which Hoffman plagiarized his "research". So when a newcomer to this evidence goes to the Hoffman's site to try to sort out the confusion, what they'll see is Hoffman busting open the Norad cover story, something which Tenc supposedly failed to do.
Tenc never directly entered the debate about the demolition of the WTC. However they did, very early on, dig up an important story about how a demolition expert, Prof van Romero was initially reported as calling a controlled demolition and then later retracted in mysterious circumstances.
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/albu.htm
Hoffman plagiarized it here.
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/retractions/romero.html
In following posts I will demonstrate
:Hoffman's likely connections with Govt agencies, in particular the NSA.
:Hoffman's fraudulent use of documentation to attribute to it the exact opposite of what it says
:Hoffman's habit of using such wildly contradictory arguments that one can only conclude that he is lying.
:Hoffman's tacit support for direct lies
:Hoffman's fear of subjecting his disinformation to the scrutiny of direct debate.
However, while instinct is sufficient to invoke a suspicion that one is dealing with a cointelpro agent, it is not sufficient for confirmation. It wasn't long before the evidence evolved beyond instinct.
Michael Elliot did some digging on Hoffman and discovered that he worked for an NGO with contracts to the NSA. He alerted the list to this. This of course is circumstantial by itself - we've all got a living to make and can't always choose our employers as carefully as we would like and can't necessarily be held responsible for some of their activities over which we might have no control. In this world it's "let he who is without sin... " in relation to employment - within reasonable limits, and reasonable benefit of the doubt.
However, it's different when someone lies about their employment. Because when Elliot dug this up, Hoffman immediately snapped back in an email "For your information, they fired me".
A little later, Elliot replied "He's lying. I just phoned his work and he's still there".
Hoffman never denied this. He snapped back at Elliot with a tirade of insults but never denied that he was still there and thus that he'd lied about being fired.
Why did he lie ? While one might be given the benefit of the doubt for having a job with an NGO which has contracts with the NSA, lying that one has been fired when one has not significantly tips the scales the other way.
This was more than a year ago. And it appears that he's still there. And the nasty connections are not limited to the NSA. Here are details of Hoffman's work as far as we've been able to ascertain.
This is extracted from an email from WF
[He is still at MSRI,
http://www.msri.org/people/staff/jim/ an NGO with contracts with the NSA.
In fact, based on a careful study of our website's logs, Jim Hoffman's real job was found to be as a [WWW]computer engineer http://www.msri.org/people/staff/jim/index.html for a "research institute" at one of the US Government's most important laboratories:
Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and his real email is mailto:jim@ msri.org The [WWW]Mathematical Sciences Research Institute http://www.msri.org/ has [WWW]amongst its sponsors
http://www.msri.org/governance/sponsors/govsponsors.html :
*
The National Security Agency
*
The Office of Naval Research, which acts as the research arm of
the Office of Naval Intelligence.
*
The Department of Energy, manager of the US nuclear laboratories such as Lawrence Berkeley and Livermore.
http://911review.org/911Review.Com.shtml
These nasty connections need to be seen in the context of some who
a)never voluntarily disclosed his work place
b) lied in claiming to have been fired after he was outed.
c) Was a Jimmy-come lately on the S11 scene, and has greatly exaggerated his contribution through an aggressive progam of plagiarizing almost everything which he doesn't choose to attack or ignore.
d) devotes an extraordinary amount of his website to attacking other researchers
But the plot thickens further in relation to Hoffman's probable intelligence connections
Hoffman gained his cred as an "activist" through his "Justice for Woody" activities.
http://www.justiceforwoody.org/
Although Hoffman is only one of the people mentioned as a friend of Woody's seeking justice , from the style of the website we can clearly see that the same person who does 911research, Hoffman's site, is responsible for the JFW site.
If you have a good look around the JFW site, you'll notice a very curious thing.
Basically it concerns the shooting murder of Hoffman's friend Woody by police who were so over the top in their actions that it sounds like they must have been cracked out of their heads.
Apparently, Woody had taken refuge in a church, with only a small knife and was threatening harm to no-one but himself, and the police came in and just blasted the hell out of him, and the murder has been protected by an official cover up and obstruction of any semblance of proper inquiry.
There are many tributes to Woody, about what a wonderful guy he was, there are descriptions of the community activities he was involved in, there is information on the efforts of friends and family to break through the official cover up. There's lots and lots of information about many different aspects of the Woody case.
But there is one glaring omission. I went all over the site, and am reasonably sure that I looked everywhere, and I could find not one word about the circumstances which led to Woody's murder.
Exactly why was Woody taking refuge in a church and threatening to harm himself ? Did he have a mental illness ? Was he on drugs ? Was he on the run from legal custody or from having allegedly committed an offence ? Had the police just randomly picked him out for harassment, because they wanted to shoot somebody ? Apparently Woody was a non violent community activist.
Well, sometimes the cops can get over the top, but they don't normally do this kind of thing even to rioting crowds bombarding them with rocks.
Clearly it was none of these things because otherwise the cops would not have been so over the top. Woody's fears were justified.
Exactly what had Woody done to piss them off so much ?
Not one word from JFW. Isn't that a bit strange? Woody's attempt to take refuge clearly indicates that he had some idea of what was intended for him. Why would the police just burst in and blast the hell out of him, obviously shooting to kill in a premeditated manner ?
As the JFW site itself says
http://www.justiceforwoody.org/story/shooting.html
[[Minutes earlier he had been begging the incredulous congregation to grant him the protection of political asylum, explaining that he was being pursued by government authorities, who sought to kill him to silence him. Although he threatened himself in a desperate bid to persuade witnesses to stay, the 18 witnesses maintained that he never threatened anyone else. Why, then, did the police shoot him, and why has the state gone to such extraordinary lengths to obscure what happened that day?]]
Good questions indeed, but what's even more curious is that the JFW site never gives even a hint of trying to explain this itself. Do they really know absolutely nothing ? Is it a total mystery ? And if so, why does the site lack any sense of bewilderment at the events ? There is no hint of "we just have no idea what this was about. "
"Silence him. " About what ? What did Woody know ? What connections enabled Woody to be in a position to know whatever it was that was so important ?
In what is otherwise a fairly detailed treatment of Woody's life and death and the subsequent cover up, in relation to exactly what led up to this , the JFW site is neither surprised in it's tone nor informative.
I'm guessing of course, but to me, only one explanation comes to mind which fits all of these anomalies.
Woody was in some way involved with intelligence agencies or other covert operations. Perhaps he was wanting out of whatever he was involved with, which can be a dangerous thing to try. Perhaps he had stumbled across something which he wasn't meant to know, and met the fate which usually befalls operatives who have become inconvenient. But in some way he had fallen foul of something very big, and JFW (Hoffman ) doesn't want to talk about what it was.
Well, I can't prove this, but to me it is the best explanation which fits all 4 anomalies - 1)Woody's desperate sense that something bad was going to happen to him 2)The obvious determination of the police to shoot to kill without hesitation 3) Officialdom closing ranks behind the police action 4) The total silence of the JFW site (Hoffman) about even the slightest hint of what led up to the situation, coupled with the absence of any surprise or bewilderment in its tone.
If so, it can be reasonably concluded that many of Woody's friends - in particular Hoffman, who obviously maintains the site- are also in some way connected with intelligence or other covert agencies.
And so Hoffman's work connections as exposed by WF in the above quoted mail are hardly surprising.
I recently invited Hoffman to defend himself in an email list debate against these charges. He declined. Why would he not defend himself if the accusations were baseless ?
The invitation to defend himself was in stark contrast to Hoffman's continual accusations of cointelpro against all and sundry made from behind the safety of his website, and then the consistent refusal to subject his allegations to dynamic debate, a matter which I'll detail further in a separate post.
I gave Hoffman every chance to debate this in a less public setting. He refused.
Lying betrays consciousness of guilt. Why did he say he had been fired ? Fear of debate betrays consciousness of guilt. Why did he refuse to debate these observations when they were raised ?
Does he think that he can make consistent, shrill allegations of cointelpro against all and sundry, refuse to debate them in a dynamic situation, and then expect to remain free of scrutiny himself, when he has such nasty skeletons in the cupboard ?
I concede that the evidence compiled here stops short of absolute proof that Hoffman is a cointelpro agent of some kind. But in my opinion the evidence is strong enough for reasonable confidence in this conclusion, and Hoffman only makes his case weaker by refusing the invitation to defend himself in a dynamic debate forum.
Even if his motivations are in fact less sinister thahn what the evidence points to, I will continue my deconstruction of Hoffman's of Hoffman's poisonous, treacherous, and destructive effect on the S11 research community, in further posts. His latest attack on Reynolds is only the same as what he's been dishing out for a long time to all refuse to bow before him.
I will now use Hoffman's treatment of the witness evidence in relation to the Pentagon incident to demonstrate that Hoffman is a deliberate disinformationist, consciously lying in order to give the impression that evidence says the opposite of what it really does.
For those not familiar with this issue, I suggest that you first read the article which I published in June 2002 in relation to the witness evidence.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/witness.html
This article thoroughly busted the myth that there were "hundreds of witnesses to a large jet hitting the Pentagon.
Since then Hoffman has been on a mission to revive this discredited notion, and lying is fine as far as Hoffman is concerned.
To expose the fundamental dishonesty with which Hoffman approaches this issue ,let's look at this statement.
http://911review.com/errors/pentagon/witnesses.html
[[Most no-757-crash literature ignores the body of eyewitness evidence indicating the presence of a twin-engine jetliner, and in many cases cherry-picks certain eyewitness accounts that seem to support the presence of a small plane. A common tactic is to present one part of Mike Walter's account:
I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.
while leaving out the earlier part of his account:
I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.'
In the context of his full account, it is clear that Walter was using "cruise missile with wings" to describe the way the plane was being flown, not the kind of plane he saw. ]]
In a moment we'll see who's cherry picking ! Hoffman is actually correct in that Walter's reports have been misused by both sides of the debate, and his complaints about the emphasis on the "cruise missile" part by some 757 skeptics is valid. But this is the pot calling the kettle black. It's nothing compared to the gross distortion of the Walter reports by supporters of the official story like Hoffman. For a start, notice that Hoffman refers to "Walter's account" - singular, as if there were only one, and then refers to the " context of his full account " in presenting one of the quotes.
Hoffman is well aware that this is a lie, because he is well aware of the work that I did to track down Walter's full *accounts* - because there were several - and they were so wildly contradictory that it's impossible to make any sense out of them at all.
You can see a full deconstruction here.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/witness2.html
Below is a summary of what my research on Walter found, but I recommend reading the link above to get the full picture
Hoffman says "In the context of his full account..."
And exactly *which* full account would that be, Jim ?
Perhaps the one where he told Bryant Gumbel that he saw a full on impact,
""I was on an elevated area of Highway 27 and I had a very good view. I was stuck in traffic. We weren't moving and--and I could see over in the distance the American Airlines jet as it kind of banked around, pivoted and then took a steep dive right into the Pentagon."
and then when Gumbel responded with
GUMBEL: Did you see it hit the Pentagon? Was the plane coming in horizontally or did it, in fact, go on its wing as--as it impacted the building?
To which Walter responded with
Mr. WALTER: You know, the--the--the--there were trees there that kind of obstructed it, so I kind of--I saw it go in. I'm not sure if it turned at an angle. I've heard some people say that's what it did. All I know is it--it created a huge explosion and massive fireball and--and you knew instantaneously that--that everybody on that plane was dead. It was completely eviscerated. "
So Walter's claim to have seen the plane hit the building lasted all of 5 secs before he backed off the claim.
And just to make sure, later in the interview
GUMBEL: Tell me, if you could, about the manner in which the--the plane struck the building....
Mr. WALTER: Well, as I said, you know, there were trees obstructing my view, so I saw it as it went--and then the--then the trees, and then I saw the--the fireball and the smoke. Some people have said that the plane actually sent on its side and in that way. But I can't tell you, Bryant. I just know that what I saw was this massive fireball, a huge explosion and--and a--the thick column of smoke and then an absolute bedlam on those roads as people were trying to get away."
Now you see it (hit), now you don't.
Or did Jim mean the full account he gave in another interview, only 1 hour later, where he said
"It kind of disappeared over this embankment here for a moment and then a huge explosion, flames flying into the air, and--and just chaos on the road."
So he was in an elevated area with a very good view and saw a full on impact, which he actually didn't see at all because there were trees in the way, but in spite of his elevation and very good view it "disappeared" over an embankment - which is actually what he had been saying the day before anyway, before he changed his mind the next day in the Gumbel interview,and then immediately backed off, and 1 hour later went back to his story of the previous day, where he explicitly stated that he did not see it hit the building.
So who's Cherry picking ?
The only time during Walter's muddled and contradictory statements where he actually claims to have seen a plane hit a building - a claim which was immediately retracted - he says that it took a steep dive in to the building.
In spite of this, Hoffman is untroubled by also quoting from Bart's compilation, another "witness"
"The plane approached the Pentagon about six feet off the ground, clipping a light pole, a car antenna, a construction trailer and an emergency generator before slicing into the building, said Lee Evey,"
I see, it took a steep dive from 6 ft ? No more than one of these two reports can possibly be telling the truth (even ignoring the multiple internal contradictions in the Walter report). So which one is it, Jim ?
And does the second one say what kind of plane ? Big ? Small ? Jet ? Prop?
Civillian? Military ?
It doesn't matter to Jim. They're both being truthful and accurate. It took a steep dive *and* it approached from about 6 ft off the ground. And it doesn't matter that even a hint of the type of plane is unspecified.
It also escapes Hoffman's attention that the "witness" just happens to be
" the manager of the Pentagon's ongoing billion-dollar renovation."
and is reported as making this statement on Oct 6 2001,in relation to the rebuilding program, in a context such that it appears that Levy is not claiming to have seen this first hand is and is just summing up his belief about what happened.
http://www.detnews.com/2001/nation/0110/06/nation-312016.htm
So the "witness" isn't a witness at all, but a Pentagon spokesman spinning the official line.
This is what Hoffman calls "evidence".
And Hoffman has the nerve to call those who see through this charade "disinformationists".
This is why Hoffman refuses my repeated challenges to a direct debate, because he knows that his lies will be irrevocably exposed.
Might the fact that Holmgren is spraying the internet with his 'fake planes' propaganda and the fact that he continues to promote the hologram sites be a tiny hint of his position in this matter??
Isn't there *anything* in the editorial policy to keep endless nonstop postings about nonsense and literally LIES about 9/11 researchers from being posted over and over and over?
Reader is most likely Mark Rabinowitz of oilempireus, and I want to speak to Mark about a certain lie on his website.
In reference to my article
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/1177.html
which presents official documentation that there were no such flights as AA11 and 77 on sept 11 2001,
oilempireus makes the following claim
"An obvious rebuttal to Holmgren's assertion is that since the planes didn't complete their flights, it might not have been appropriate to include them in a database of completed flights. "
http://www.oilempire.us/bogus.html
The problem for Rabinowitz is that the database in question is *not* a "database of completed flights. "
It's datbase of *scheduled* flights, and all scheduled flights must be included whether completed or not. Part of the purpose of the database is to log the cancellation or diversion details of flights which are not completed.
This is so obvious the moment one visits the database, the address of which is linked in the article linked above, that Rabinowitz cannot possibly have made an honest mistake.
Doesn't actually matter - any number of people could have altered these records for any number of purposes, therefore, they add up useless information. They cannot be used to make conclusions. So they are not anyone's problem except yours for trying to use them to base your conclusions on. And as we've already seen, you don't actually look too deeply into your allegations (i.e., eyewitness X doesn't exist!) because then your theory doesn't stand up.
When this was exposed as a lie, he claims that it doesnt matter that he lied because he's suddenly realized that this was never his real argument anyway (just now, apparently )
Why bother using your real argument, when you can just tell a lie and base an argument on that ? One can always think up something else once the lie is exposed.
Now the argument is that the database has been tampered with in order to trick researchers into finding it and making spurious allegations on the basis of it.
I suppose that’s why it sat there for over two years with nobody being aware of it ? I suppose that’s also why the BTS immediately shut down the database after I published my article ? I suppose that’s why when they put it back up, they had moved it to a different address and didn’t leave a forwarding address from the old URL ( normal behaviour for a govt dept?) so that when people went to the link in my article they got 404? I suppose that’s why - 10 months later they finally got around to trying to doctor the database to insert the missing flights, but only got as far as now showing them as scheduled, but not actually ever taking off ?
Yes, all of this is a cunning psy -op on the part of the govt. One day, someday, over the rainbow, who knows when, they will finally unveil how we all got tricked by them pretending that the flights were never scheduled.But they are taking their time.
So, if official documentation supports the govt story, that proves that the govt story is true. If official documentation contradicts the govt story that also proves that govt story is true because they doctored it to make it look like it wasn't true in order to make fools out of people who say it wasn’t true.
Drowning witch anyone ?
[[any number of people could have altered these records for any number of purposes, ]]
Such a statement implies a knowledge of how the BTS collects and stores this data. After all, a researcher of the meticulous standards of Mark "completed flights" Rabinowitz would not make such a sweeping assertion unless he knew the process by which such data is collected and stored.
So since "reader" (heh!) obviously has a close relationship with the courageous but elusive Rabinowitz, perhaps "Reader" (heh!) can ask Rabinowitz to detail his enquiries into the process by which the data is collected and what would be the logistics of retrospectively removing flight data.
Perhaps "reader" (heh!) can also ask MR, why he found it necessary to tell a direct lie about what information the database contains.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/1177.html
In an attempt to throw smoke at this evidence, Rabinoreader lied about the parameters of the database. When the lie was exposed, Rabinoreader suddenly said that the lie didn't matter, because he had all of a sudden thought up a brand new reason why the Bush regime must be telling the truth.
Rabinoreader claims (without a shred of evidence) that these records have been doctored .
It seems that the BTS is not the only govt agency which has been busy doctoring it's records in order to blow false holes in the official story.
Because now we come to the question of the two flights which did exist, according to the BTS records.
UA 175 - alleged to have hit the Sth tower and UA 93, alleged to have crashed in PA. The BTS records the tail numbers of any flights which actually depart.
UA 175 was flown by N612UA. UA 93 was flown by N591UA.
According to the FAA aircraft registry, both planes are still valid and registered, which means that they didn't crash.
Go to the FAA aircraft registry
http://162.58.35.241/acdatabase/acmain.htm
and do an "n number" search for N591UA ( UA 93 on Sept 11) and N612UA (UA 175 on Sept 11).
Since I'm not 'Rabinowitz,' this doesn't apply to me - more Gerard assumptions that lead to ridiculous conclusions. Sound familiar?
And you'll notice how, once again, Holmgren's goal isn't to get at what really happened, his goal is to entangle people in the endless nonsense of 'what the government says' as supposed 'evidence' for events like 'fake planes' on 9/11.
Anyone buying 'fake planes' at the WTC?
No?
Didn't think so.
It would be interesting to know what Rabinoreader thinks is a productive use of time. I guess he'll tell us soon enough - once he's consulted with Rabinowitz (heh!) for the script.
Meanwhile, notice how spook Hoffman continues to skulk in his troll cave afraid to come out and face me, hiding behind Rabinowitz ,who hides behind "reader".
Everyone saw the towers fall.
At first, most people believe it was a terrorist attack. This collective belief was based on the images and on the security services versions.
The US decide to go to war in Iraq.
Some start to disbelieve.
The others continue to believe.
People who are against the war in Iraq are suspicious about the official 9/11 version.
People who are in favour of the war in Iraq are in favour of the official 9/11 version.
Both attitudes are political.
Second point :
Holocaust Denial as an overused strategy : a terrorist attack should not be compared to the extermination of the Jews.
This is Holocaust denial not the other way round.
This systematic method of calomny weakens the arguments of the so-called anticonspirationist who pretend that they refer to strictly scientific facts.
This, obviously, is not the case : the "anticonspirationists" have an ideological agenda, as the "conspirationists".
However, apart from the war question, anticonspirationists are not all nice and pure antinazis. And conspirationists are also very diverse politically.
On way or the other, to choose to believe the official version and to choose not to believe is a philosophical and political attitude.