By:
ScootleRoyale and
John-Michael P. Talboo
“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
~ John F. Kennedy
Browsing the Screw Loose Change
blog earlier we were somewhat alarmed to learn that David Ray Griffin and Richard Gage are endorsing the work of the
Citizen Investigation Team. A
post on 911Blogger includes their endorsements:
“This new film by CIT is far more professionally produced than their previous efforts. It is also more convincing, given the addition of more witnesses, so that they now have a total of 13 witnesses reporting that the actual flight path of the plane that approached the Pentagon was drastically different from the official flight path (which would have been needed if the plane was to knock over the felled light poles and to strike the Pentagon at the designated spot and angle). This part of the film’s thesis is now established beyond a reasonable doubt. The film does not establish its related claim—that the airliner pulled up and flew over the Pentagon—as clearly, but it does make a good case for it. One of the film’s most valuable parts is a scene in which cab driver Lloyde England, who otherwise gamely tried to maintain the truth of his testimony supporting the official story, admitted that the Pentagon operation had been planned by powerful people with lots of money. I am pleased to be able to recommend this important film with enthusiasm.”
~ David Ray Griffin, Author of The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé
“The exhaustive effort by Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis of Citizen Investigation Team to contact, record, document, and analyze numerous first-hand eyewitness accounts of the actual flight path of the airliner at the Pentagon on 9/11 has been long overdue, but worth waiting for. The evidence they have uncovered and compiled in their DVD “National Security Alert” deserves serious attention – particularly in light of what we now know about the explosive destruction of the three World Trade Center high-rises that day.”
~ Richard Gage, AIA, Architect, Founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Now we weren’t so much surprised by David Ray Griffin, he has after all been making a case for Pentagon no-plane theories for years, but Richard Gage, like many other researchers, has always remained neutral when it comes to the Pentagon so it was very surprising to learn he was endorsing them.
In all fairness however, we admit that years ago, we too were convinced by
the Pentagon no-jetliner claims, and even 9/11 researcher and Pentagon no-jetliner claim debunker Jim Hoffman admits the same, while also pointing out these ideas have “tremendous intuituve appeal.” The apparent lack of large plane debris would seem to support such theories, and again Hoffman points out that this is “reasonable given the fact that other jetliner crashes have left large pieces.” Not to mention the fact that ideas such as these have been popularized in many films, such as the earlier versions of Loose Change. However, when one learns that
the plane that hit the Pentagon was traveling at 500 mph, and in the words of Loose Change film maker Dylan Avery, crashed into the
“only section that was renovated to withstand that very same kind of attack,” a different picture emerges.
The renovations included exterior walls reinforced with steel, exterior walls backed with Kevlar, and nearly two inch thick blast-resistant windows.
In the video below the narrator informs us that “the US government wanted to test what would happen if a plane crashed into the concrete walls of a nuclear power station.” As we see the jet take off towards the wall in the video we are informed that it is traveling at 500 mph, watch and see the results…
In a previous post it was argued that CIT & Pilots for 9/11 Truth are promoting disinformation and after
a long debate on the Prison Planet forum it is clear that some uninformed judgments were made, and arguments put forward that they had already countered. However, we are now even more convinced that they are disinformation artists.
In an
article by H. Michael Sweeny entitled
“Twenty-Five Ways To Suppress Truth: The Rules of Disinformation”, the author outlines 25 techniques used by promoters of disinfo. The article is essential reading for anyone genuinely interested in the truth. Some of the most notable are:
4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent’s argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.
5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary ‘attack the messenger’ ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as ‘kooks’, ‘right-wing’, ‘liberal’, ‘left-wing’, ‘terrorists’, ‘conspiracy buffs’, ‘radicals’, ‘militia’, ‘racists’, ‘religious fanatics’, ‘sexual deviates’, and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.
8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough ‘jargon’ and ‘minutia’ to illustrate you are ‘one who knows’, and simply say it isn’t so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely why or citing sources.
9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues except with denials they have any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for maximum effect.
15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions in place.
17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well with companions who can ‘argue’ with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more key issues.
18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can’t do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how ‘sensitive they are to criticism.’
19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the ‘play dumb’ rule. Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed or withheld, such as a murder weapon.) In order to completely avoid discussing issues, it may be required that you to categorically deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.
20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations — as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications.
22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.
The author also outlines 8 common traits of disinformationists. The two most interesting are:
3) Coincidental. They tend to surface suddenly and somewhat coincidentally with a new controversial topic with no clear prior record of participation in general discussions in the particular public arena involved. They likewise tend to vanish once the topic is no longer of general concern. They were likely directed or elected to be there for a reason, and vanish with the reason.
4) Teamwork. They tend to operate in self-congratulatory and complementary packs or teams. Of course, this can happen naturally in any public forum, but there will likely be an ongoing pattern of frequent exchanges of this sort where professionals are involved. Sometimes one of the players will infiltrate the opponent camp to become a source for straw man or other tactics designed to dilute opponent presentation strength.
To anyone who has ever debated a “debunker” or no-planer, these traits and techniques will seem very familiar. We have noticed that supporters of CIT’s work seem to exhibit the two traits highlighted and use some of the above techniques. During the Prison Planet forum debate, four new users coincidentally signed up to post exclusively to that thread. They worked as a team and complimented each other. They ignored testimony of first responders, photographs and video of the heavily damaged Pentagon interior and people who actually SAW the plane hit the building. They instead focused on weaker arguments, attacked peoples characters, and questioned motives. Some even went as far as to accuse Scootle of being an undercover debunker!
Even
Pat Curley of the Screw Loose Change blog, who is famous for his
ad-hominem laden commentary,
recently pointed out that CIT supporters claim to be just arguing the
“evidence,” but “throw around ad hominems like frisbees.”What was especially worrying though is that until the moderators showed up Scootle was pretty much on his own. Virtually all of the participants in the thread sided with the CIT trolls…
Hey, Scootle, just F**K OFF ALREADY – I’ve been very patient with you, but that’s it. F**K YOU AND YOUR IDIOCY. You’re EXACTLY like those billions of sheeple who refuse to WAKE UP. You deserve your New World Order. I’m sorry it’s come to this but you’re a twat.
~ Mike Philbin
The Pentagon attack is shrouded in mystery: there is no clear video of the attack, witness accounts are so varied and conflicting and photographs are inconclusive – and that’s the way it was designed!
The whole thing is a psy-op to trap researchers.
CIT have 13 witnesses who all recollect a different flight path from the official story. To counter claims of fuzzy memory, CIT will argue that because they correlate with each other it proves they are all correct because they couldn’t all be mistaken the same way. If they were the only 13 witnesses then we would agree. But they weren’t the only 13 – they were 13 out of more than 100. When you have that many witnesses you are bound to have some correlation of incorrect recollections. That being said,
the preponderance of reports supports a plane hitting the pentagon.
This fact is not lost on debunkers, the
government, or the
media; always eager for easy ammunition against the 9/11 truth movement. Ludicrous objections of
witness fraud and witness contamination are commonly used to explain away this overwhelming body of eyewitness testimony.
Ockham’s razor dictates that indeed a Boeing 757 did hit the Pentagon, but who needs simple logic when by cherry picking witness statements and photographs we could probably build a strong case for a theory that a flying saucer hit the Pentagon if we wanted to.
We might start with the photograph showing a “small, round hole” and the video footage of UFOs over Washington in 1952, then pick out witness quotes that mention hearing strange sounds (or no sounds) while ignoring all the people who saw a commercial airliner, then interpret the “It is not a part from any Rolls-Royce engine that I’m familiar with” quote to mean it is a part only people at Area 51 would be familiar with and claim this photo is of officials removing the advanced alien technology from the scene and finally analyse the photos of burnt human remains, picking out every small anomoly and insensitively claim that they are actually alien remains.
There are witnesses who saw the plane come in from the south side, such as the four
“operatives” CIT interviewed, there are witnesses who actually saw the plane hit the building such as
Penny Elgas, who is also an operative according to CIT…
“Penny Elgas has a significant position in government and a very high profile highly publicized account so should be instantly considered suspect.”
~ Craig Ranke CIT
…And Steve Anderson, who was in the perfect position in relation to the Pentagon to actually see a flyover, but didn’t!
If CIT would actually interview someone from the Arlington Fire Department who was in there fighting the fires then maybe we’ll start taking notice of them. But there’s no need, it’s already been done. For the book “Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11,” the authors interviewed more than 100 Pentagon first responders…
“They walked closer. At the mouth of the third hole they saw a piece of a wheel and countless shards of wreckage. Some of them looked like pieces of seats.” ~ Firefight, Page 149.
“For the first time, Regan’s team saw something they had expected to see all along but had been scarce until then: recognizable airplane parts. They all thought they would find big pieces of the airliner laying everywhere, the way car parts end up strewn across a highway after a crash. But the physics of an airplane crash were obviously different: Mostly there was just tons of shredded metal and melted plastic.
Finally, they found several airplane seats, piled among the usual mounds of upturned office furniture and random wreckage. A couple of the seats still had bodies belted into them, which had already been found and marked for the FBI. Most of the workers inside were conscientious about not gawking, yet the seats attracted a lot of attention. They were the first objects the nonaviation experts had seen that unmistakably belonged to an airplane.” ~ Firefight, Page 373.
“The airplane had nearly disintegrated, but Dan Fitch’s group found several huge cogs, bent and blackened, that weighed a couple hundred pounds each; it took a couple of workers to handle each one. Other objects nearby looked like large gears, and strips of metal that appeared to be fan blades. Workers realized that they were pulling apart the remnants of one of the aircraft’s two engines. The aluminum cowling that had encased it all had been torn away, but the guts of the engine were there.
FEMA crews used a blowtorch to free the core of the motor from the column in which it was embedded. Then Fitch and several others used pieces of six-by-six to pry the motor loose from the column and push it off the pile. With the help of some Old Guard troops, they rolled the heavy piece of machinery onto a dolly and finally managed to push it outside. The whole effort took the better part of an entire shift.” ~ Firefight, Page 425.
“As crews dug deeper, unmistakable remnants of a passenger plane were everywhere. Wallets, shoes, jewelry, and the everyday items that had been stuffed into dozens of suitcases were littered throughout the debris.” ~ Firefight, Page 426.
Tell those people a commercial airliner didn’t hit the Pentagon!
Now that we have addressed the eyewitnesses, the physical evidence, and the different scenarios in which the propaganda machine may be at work, what are we left with? We are left with CIT’s sister organization Pilots for 9/11 Truth, and their study of the Flight 77 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report. First off, let’s look at Pilots for 9/11 Truth; from the Debunking the Debunkers blog “CIT Stuff Is Disinfo – Wake Up!“:
“A number of Pilots for 9/11 Truth’s members promote World Trade Center no-plane theories – arguing that the speeds at which the planes were travelling were aerodynamically impossible at the altitudes they were flying at. Rob Balsamo, the head of the group, has defended these people’s opinions, saying they are qualified to have them. This was all debunked recently using a simulator. This fact alone is enough to raise serious questions about the credibility of Pilots for 9/11 Truth.”
Now, what do they gather from their study of the NTSB report? Here it is in a nutshell from their founder Rob Balsamo:
“The flght data recorder raw file that we have just decoded … it’s still showing too high for the Pentagon. … It shows the radar altimeter at 273 feet. That means 273 feet above the ground. OK? The Pentagon only gets up to 77 feet.”
In essence, they believe it supports the flyover theory, which we have demonstrated is not supported by the preponderance of eyewitness testimony, or the physical evidence. Might the propaganda machine be at work here also? Well the NTSB report does come from the government after all. Even their own press release on the matter was headlined “OFFICIAL ACCOUNT OF 9/11 FLIGHT CONTRADICTED BY GOVERNMENT’S OWN DATA.”
As one commenter pointed out:
“Designed to confuse us?
I think we should be careful with any evidence that the government supplies. The ‘five frames’ and the black box data come from the government. Both were in the hands of the government for weeks and months before release to the public.
Do people here agree that this alone renders those two sources of evidence suspect? That’s how I view it. Why base theories on such suspect evidence? To me it looks as though these two pieces of evidence, which contradict each other, are meant to confuse.”
The largest problem in this whole ordeal is not the fact that Pilots for 9/11 Truth raise these issues, without any such commentary of their own, but that they almost exclusively focus on such issues, while much more concrete facts pointing towards complicity, of which pilots would have keen insight, are almost totally glossed over.
Another glossed over issue is an inherent contradiction in the Pilots for 9/11 Truth premise recently brought to our attention by Michael Wolsey of the website Visibility911.com, who states:
“You can’t contend that a plane didn’t hit the Pentagon and then use the flight data recorder that was found in the pentagon to bolster your argument that it didn’t hit!”
All that being said, it’s important to note that there is other research indicating that the flight data recorder of Flight 77 actually supports the official flight path, and that instead, the animation is wrong!
The Pentagon no-plane theories have taken on near religious preportions. It’s as if believing a plane didn’t hit the Pentagon somehow comforts people. On 9/11, planes crashed! That’s what 9/11 was all about, planes crashing! We’re interested in finding out who crashed the planes – not whether or not they did. The CIT/Pilots for 9/11 Truth theory is the only 9/11 theory that we actually laugh at…
“Yeh thats right … We crashed two planes into two skyscrapers… And completely demolished those towers killing thousands … And we ALMOST crashed a third plane into the Pentagon … Except we didn’t! … What we actually did was fly the plane low enough above the Pentagon to make it look like it hit and high enough above the building to not be caught on the Doubletree Hotel security camera… then we landed the plane, killed all the passengers and crew and disposed of the plane… We hired operatives to plant some light poles and stage the scene with the taxi to make it seem like the plane came in from a different direction … just for fun! … Some operatives also posed as fake witnesses… they all used their real names and were friendly to independent investigators to make it seem like they had nothing to hide… the best part was … we didn’t have to pay them! … they just wanted to be involved in a mass murder plot … Finally, we bribed the forensic officials and first responders to say they found and identified the burnt bodies of all of the passengers at the scene…”
“… And we would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling CIT kids!”
The 2009 iteration of this spectacle is notable for the contrast between the designated brand and the obligatory message. That brand, best known for its high-brow photojournalistic National Geographic Magazine, has existed since 1889, complete with a non-profit Society dedicated to education in geography, archaeology, history, world cultures, and natural science. One can’t help but wonder how National Geographic’s many benefactors would feel if they understood how the brand was being used to prop up the “War on Terror” with its Popular-Mechanics-style attack piece to be aired on August 31, 2009.
Some of the false statements made in that NGT article had to do with an early version of the Pancake Theory for destruction of the buildings. One claim was : “As the steel columns at the core of the Twin Towers collapsed, the floors they supported fell on each other like two stacks of pancakes.” Another statement was more authoritative, saying: “Once the structural support of the upper floors is removed, a few falling floors can bring down an entire building.” The Pancake Theory did not make sense to many people but was tested by my former employer, Underwriters Laboratories (UL), in August 2004. The tests showed that the floors in the WTC buildings could not have pancaked, even when exposed to higher temperatures for longer periods of time than was actually the case. Two years later, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally made clear that its “findings do not support the ‘pancake theory’ of collapse.”[4]
