State Department: Identifying Misinformation

Rosetta Stone to 9/11 disinformation

promotes 9/11 conspiracy hoaxes, ignores “Crossing the Rubicon” and other quality investigations

[an expanded version of an original article written for Michael Ruppert's From the Wilderness]

Table of Contents


"There's fool's gold because there's real gold."
- 13th-century Persian poet Rumi

"Lots of conspiracy theories are bogus, but rejecting them all just because of how they're framed is not wise. The way it is today, a gang of conspirators could get away with anything: they just need to start an Internet rumor of what they just did, framing it as a conspiracy theory, and anyone who tries to talk about it will be ignored."
- comment posted in discussion about "Petrocollapse" conference at http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/10/5/212831/898#more

"One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known… nothing of significance, that is."
-- E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy"

“I have a legal case that will convict Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, General Myers, right now in court based upon evidence that is not scientific in nature, I don’t need to go there, that is a red herring when we focus on the crime that has been committed against this country. We’ve already proven who did it, the how doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out. ...
“These discussions of what possibly induced that [collapse of the towers] is a major psychological operations campaign designed to keep the american people from looking at the evidence of guilt.”
- Michael Ruppert, February 14, 2005, interview on KZYX, “The Party’s Over”


Successful propaganda is not "based on lies but rather on truth interpreted in a particular war," wrote William Dorman. While the Reagan administration's presentation of the Flight 007 case did contain outright falsehood, limited truth and irrelevancy were much more common. As Anthony Marro put it, half-truths are "a specialty at the State Department" and for a reason Tennyson described a century ago:

That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

-- David Pearson, "KAL 007: The Cover-Up," Summit Books (1987), p. 159


 

Crossing the Rubicon: a best seller without reviews

Michael Ruppert’s book Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil is the best selling book about 9/11 from the skeptics point of view. It has sold very well despite a deafening silence from the media, an extremely unusual circumstance for a book. Even the publications that attacked From the Wilderness in the months after 9/11 for daring to connect the dots about 9/11 foreknowledge have refused to say anything (good or bad) about Rubicon. If the thesis was flawed, surely someone somewhere would describe the errors.

After Rubicon was published in September 2004, a strange smear campaign accelerated on the internet making a variety of bizarre accusations about the author. Most of these attacks came from internet personalities who promote extreme ideas about 9/11 complicity that lack substantive evidence, an effort that is probably the official response to the book.

No administration representative has dared say anything specific about the book or the evidence contained in it. The only politician in Washington who has publicly tried to get an answer to the book’s accusations is the Honorable Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia). This writer is aware of a few Democratic politicians and party officials who privately agree that there was official complicity in 9/11 -- one admitted to this author that he knew Cheney was running war games on 9/11, but an hour later, when in front of a microphone, refused to touch the subject when asked. Fear is the currency of empire.

www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/030105_mckinney_question.shtml
"Mr. Chairman, I have a question"
On-the-Record: Representative Cynthia McKinney Rocks Rumsfeld on War Games
and a follow-up: www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031505_mckinney_transcript.shtml

 

State Department “Identifying Misinformation” website

In 2005, the U.S. State Department posted a website for "Identifying Misinformation" as part of their public relations efforts http://usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html to defend the undefendable.

Their website, run at public expense, is an excellent guide to nearly every disinformation tactic on 9/11 complicity claims. It contains a mix of obvious government lies and highlights of fake claims that distract from the best evidence.

It is not surprising that the State Department, like other defenders of the official story, focused on the hoax that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon. but ignoring serious documentation of foreknowledge, and complicity as documented by Michael Ruppert, Paul Thompson, Nafeez Ahmed, Peter Dale Scott, Daniel Hopsicker, among others.

The State Department is promoting the sloppy (fake?) efforts to allege 9/11 complicity while avoiding serious efforts to establish the truth. 9/11 skeptics who don't believe the official story should recognize this is a crude effort by the government to select which "conspiracy theories" should be considered representative of the 9/11 truth movement.

 

Depleted Uranium: the real dirty bombs

The State Department webpage http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-107572.html “False Allegations Regarding Depleted Uranium” is misleading government propaganda. The State Department cites a variety of eminent sources, claiming that they have all exxon-erated accusations of toxicity about the use of uranium tipped weapons. However, their citations do not include peer reviewed scientific studies . Instead, the State Department provides links to the United States Department of Defense (the prime culprit), its wholly owned subsidiary the UK Ministry of Defence, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA is a cheerleader for nuclear technology promoting the illusion of safe, peaceful nuclear power even though the agency was given the Nobel Peace Prize for refuting Bush’s lies about Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

The State Department mentioned other government entities that have dismissed claims of depleted uranium: NATO, the Rand Corporation (a major military contractor), the European Commission and the World Health Organization. WHO is the only one of these agencies with a public health mission, but their independence on nuclear issues was compromised in the 1980s when they signed onto endorsements of food irradiation on behalf of the IAEA. www.organicconsumers.org/irradlink.html

The State Department offers this explanation for the term “depleted” uranium”
-- http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jul/27-595713.html

Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium.  In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name.  But facts like this are less important in peoples’ minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world “uranium.”  For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is.

So-called "depleted" uranium is called this because the much of the uranium-235 isotope (0.7% of natural uranium) useful for nuclear power fuel and weapons has been removed. “Depleted” does not mean that its biological hazards have been mitigated.

DU burns on impact, the reason it is used in some weapons system. Burning uranium pulverizes it into tiny particles that are easily inhaled and cause lung cancers. Uranium-238 has a half-life roughly as long as the Earth has been in existence. DU tipped weapons are the real "dirty bombs" and are a war crime to manufacture and use. From a public health perspective, calling this material "depleted" uranium is a form of linguistic detoxification.

The chemical toxicity of uranium, a heavy metal, is not changed by having its isotopic percentages changed -- uranium-235 and uranium-238 are the same, chemically. www.oilempire.us/depleted-uranium.html

Two sources of accurate information about DU on American veterans and Iraqi civilians are the National Gulf War Resources Center at www.ngwrc.org and the Military Toxics Project at www.miltoxproj.org

The best films on uranium poisoning in Iraq are Hidden Wars of Desert Storm (2000) and The Oil Factor (2005), both from Free Will Productions (filmed on location in Iraq). www.freewillprod.com

The film “Beyond Treason” (2005) about depleted uranium was produced by The Power Hour, the group that produced the film 911: In Plane Site, an effort that was mostly disinformation (a review is at www.oilempire.us/inplanesite.html).

 

The destruction of Fallujah in November 2004

The State Department webpage at http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html claimed that “napalm gas” was not used during the destruction of the city of Fallujah. These propagandists discuss how napalm is not technically a gas but avoid the topic of the bombing of a densely populated city or the number of casualties that were inflicted. The State Department seems more concerned over linguistic quibbles over whether particular weapons are supposedly legal or illegal than the fact the United States turned a city of three hundred thousand people into a 21st century equivalent of Stalingrad, which qualifies as a war crime under any common sense definition.

Time has a way of exposing all lies. In November 2005, it was revealed that the US used white phosphorus weapons as part of the arsenal unleashed on the people of Fallujah, and that the US government had classified white phosphorus as a chemical weapon. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article328703.ece

When this information was leaked, the State Department posted the following retraction:

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/Illegal_Weapons_in_Fallujah.html
[November 10, 2005 note: We have learned that some of the information we were provided in the above paragraph is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, "The Fight for Fallujah," in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, "as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes …." The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.]
There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using "outlawed" weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.”

One observer noted “soon this site will have to be updated every few hours to keep up with the doublespeak.”

The “Baghdad Burning” weblog has a very good, sobering commentary on the white phosphorus revelation at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#113218124805731713

 

December 27, 2005 - The Progressive Review
DAVID SWANSON - Last week, [Rep. John Conyers] released a 273-page report titled "The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War." This 273-page report covers many war-related crimes, including the use of white phosphorous. On page 165, following discussion of other crimes against humanity, the report states:

"Finally, there is evidence that the U.S. Military used an incendiary weapon in combat known as White Phosphorus, even though the U.S. Battle Book states, '[i]t is against the Law of Land Warfare to employ WP against personnel targets,' and which would be in contravention of the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the War Crimes Act.". . .

As George Monbiot makes clear in the Guardian, a chemical weapon is illegal, according to the Chemical Weapons Convention, regardless of whether the people targeted with it are civilians. "The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people," Monbiot wrote, "rather than poisoning them, and is therefore covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the U.S. has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1647998,00.html
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/5769

 

al-Qaeda’s role in 9/11

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-610042.html
Al Qaeda Says They Carried Out September 11th Attacks
Allegations doubting Al Qaeda involvement proven false
In a videotape broadcast on October 30, 2004, Osama bin Laden unequivocally admitted that he and al Qaeda had planned and directed the September 11 attacks.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html
Did the U.S. "Create" Osama bin Laden?
Allegations that the U.S. provided funding for bin Laden proved inaccurate

Walter Cronkite told CNN’s Larry King on October 29, 2004, after seeing this video of Osama taking credit for 9/11, that he was “a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.” http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/29/lkl.01.html This “October Surprise” video, released on the eve of the election, likely boosted support for Bush’s “re-election.”

The State Department “misinformation” website ignores well-documented financial connections between the Bush and bin Laden clans that go back more than two decades. James Hatfield, in a July 3, 2001 article titled “Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?” detailed some of these business ties. http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html

The Carlyle Group, a secretive international financial organization, had the Bush and the bin Laden families as key investors before 9/11. When the planes hit the towers, bin Laden family members were at a Carlyle meeting at the Ritz Carlton hotel a few blocks from the White House. (“Crossing the Rubicon,” p. 129)

The BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares” (2004) concluded that “al Qaeda” as an organization did not really exist before 9/11.

“The terrible truth was that there was nothing there because Al Qaeda as an organisation did not exist. The attacks on America had been planned by a small group that had come together around bin Laden in the late 90s. .... the real danger was the way this idea could inspire groups and individuals around the world who had no relationship to each other. In looking for an organisation, the Americans and the British were chasing a phantom enemy and missing the real threat.”

Unfortunately, “The Power of Nightmares” avoided the issue of how the Bush regime deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, but otherwise is one of the most powerful examinations of how the terrorist “threat” has been systematically exaggerated by those seeking to maintain their own power.

 

Crossing the Rubicon is structured as an investigation of the “motive, means, and opportunity” for exposing the crimes of 9/11. There are certainly many forces in the Islamic world that have the motive to attack the United States in retaliation for its policies in the Middle East, but al-Qaeda did not have the means and opportunity to accomplish the attacks of September 11. The fact that someone takes credit for a crime is not proof that they perpetrated it, since there can be many political and psychological motivations. Whatever role the bin Laden organization had in 9/11, it is clear that the culpability is not exclusively theirs.

Chapter 12 of Crossing the Rubicon documents how multiple FBI investigations that could have prevented 9/11 were sabotaged by Special Agent Dave Frasca of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters. al-Qaeda does not have the means or opportunity to disable this normal function of government to protect against terror attacks.

Crossing the Rubicon shows how multiple war game exercises were scheduled at the same time as the actual “attacks” and that these simulations helped paralyze the air defenses over New York and Washington. al-Qaeda does not have the means or opportunity to control Air Force and intelligence agency exercises. Osama bin Laden also does not have the power to promote those in charge of air defenses or to ensure that the so-called independent Commission set up to examine 9/11 would cover-up the facts.

An anonymous report written by an intelligence insider on September 11 (“Peeling the Onion”) suggested that the bin Laden group may have been manipulated:

“The onion [US / CIA, Pakistan, Taliban, bin Laden] provides plausible deniability. Assistance will be provided through cooperating elements of Pakistani intelligence and then through cooperating elements in the Taliban to bin Laden and perhaps on to elements of Laden's network operating without his direct control. The network cell conducting the operation will be suicide squads, perhaps recruited from the Palestinian population. Deniability for everyone and obliteration for the perpetrators. Pretty clean all around.
“Laden will never know that he is a pawn of the U.S. national security state. He will believe that Allah has suddenly blessed him with resources and capability that previously eluded him.” archived at www.oilempire.us/qaeda.html

In the 9/11 truth movement, a false dichotomy emerged between those who think that the government “Let it happen on purpose” (LIHOP) and those argue it was completely an inside job. While the full details of precisely how 9/11 was perpetrated may forever remain unknown, the most likely scenario is a combination of LIHOP and “inside job.” A hybrid scenario that fits the known evidence is "hijacking the hijackers." In this view, the hijackers were allowed to finish their preparations, board the planes, hijack the cockpits but then remote control technology was used to ensure that the planes not only completed their missions but also did not strike targets (Indian Point nuclear power station, north of New York City and the other parts of the Pentagon that were full of people) that would have caused even more damage. This hybrid scenario is described in more detail at “Understanding 9/11 paradigms.” www.oilempire.us/lihop-mihop.html

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/10/skinny-on-osama.html
I've long thought that if we assume a decision had been taken to let it happen, then we should expect that measures were be taken to ensure it happened precisely as desired, and spectacularly so. With so much at stake, nothing would be left to the skill and luck of the 19 hijackers. Flight 77's 270 degree turn to hit the ground floor of the virtually unoccupied side of the Pentagon, while supposedly piloted by the grossly incompetent Hani Hanjour, is the most striking example. The recent report that the WTC black boxes were recovered after all, is suggestive of the same: that the data conflicted somehow with the received fiction. Perhaps the hijackers were themselves hijacked. [emphasis added]

from Nicholas Levis, 911truth.org:
"Staging 9/11 as an inside job is going to work best (in fact, is likely to work only) if there actually exists an active network of anti-American terrorists who are deeply committed to killing Americans in response to U.S. policy. In other words, those who would blame Qaeda need a (relatively) real Qaeda. A partly-real enemy is much better than an entirely fabricated one.
"The most robust way for insider masterminds to stage 9/11 and get away with it is to arrange for their agents to infiltrate among "real foreign terrorists." Let them come up with their own plots (or plant plots among them), choose a plot that will produce the results desired by the masterminds, and see that through to fruition. At some point, the masterminds and their agents will hijack the plot from the would-be hijackers, to make sure it happens. You won't risk the whole game on the ability of amateurs to get away with it, you will help them along or even replace them (with a remote control hijacking, for example). But it's best to have "real terrorists" in play. They leave a more solid trail of evidence internationally. Cops and agents and academics of two dozen countries can honestly confirm the existence of an al-Qaeda network. That way there is less need to initiate outside observers into the plot and you don't have to hope they are all stupid, as they would have to be to fall for a complete fabrication of "Qaeda." (Qaeda at this point is just a term of convenience for the Islamist extremist networks.)
"The best result would be for a whole bunch of Islamist extremists running around believing that their crew pulled off 9/11 all by themselves (how inspiring for them!). The patsies should believe they actually did it. This was the case with the Reichstag Fire and Marinus van der Lubbe: the patsy believed he had done it."

The Reichstag Fire seems to be the closest historical parallel to 9/11, where the perpetrator / patsy was allowed to try to commit the crime, but the full crime was actually done by a faction of the secret police. www.oilempire.us/reichstag-fire.html

 

Smearing Skeptics as Anti-Semites

The State Department webpage “The 4,000 Jews Rumor” at http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-260933.html is a subtle insertion of anti-semitism into the 9/11 truth movement and is an example of government propagandists using racists to smear government critics.

This page ostensibly is an effort to refute the hoax that 4,000 Jews, or 4,000 Israelis, were warned not to go to work at the WTC on 9/11, thereby showing Israeli involvement (or complicity) in the attacks. The State Department cites the bin Laden videotape of October 2004 to disprove Israeli involvement (Israeli foreknowledge is carefully avoided by this effort). The anonymous authors at the State Department say:

Vague conspiracy theories blaming Israel began to appear within 24 hours of the attacks. Syria's government-owned Al Thawra newspaper may have been the first newspaper to make the "4,000 Jews" claim. According to U.S. embassy reporting, its September 15th edition falsely claimed "four thousand Jews were absent from their work on the day of the explosions."
The 4,000 figure apparently came from an article entitled "Hundreds of Israelis missing in WTC attack" which appeared in the September 12th internet edition of the Jerusalem Post. It stated, "The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks."
Unknown conspiracy theorists apparently seized upon the 4,000 figure, transforming it into the false claim that 4,000 Jews did not report for work at the World Trade Center on September 11.

In this article, the State Department references the Jerusalem Post article at fpp.co.uk, the website of Holocaust Denier and pseudo-historian David Irving. (FPP is Focal Point Publications, which is Irving’s organization.) In other words, a United States Government media campaign dedicated to refuting “misinformation” is promoting a notorious neo-Nazi promoting Holocaust Denial without even mentioning his political affiliation and his efforts to promote lies about the Nazi genocides. Is Irving’s website really the only place to find this article by Jerusalem Post? Does the State Department consider Irving a reliable source of information? Or is the State Department trying to bait 9/11 skeptics to think of Irving’s website as a credible source of information about 9/11? (Note: the Jerusalem Post, a publication with extensive connections to the neo-conservatives, has an on-line archive that goes back to the late 1990s, but this September 12, 2001 article is not accesible from their archives.)

Irving, like several other Holocaust deniers, has published information about 9/11 complicity that might be true, but is unverifiable. He published a claim that Condolezza Rice was the source who warned then San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown not to fly on 9/11 (the September 12, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle published a story noting that Brown had been cautioned the night before not to fly to New York City on 9/11, but Brown has never revealed who warned him). It is plausible that Rice was his source (she probably knew him from her tenure at Stanford and on the board of San Francisco based Chevron corporation), but it is unlikely that proof will ever be made public. If Rice really was Brown’s source, then leaking the truth to a famous racist would be a great means to discredit the information.

From the Wilderness editor Jamey Hecht wrote in a public letter to the Anti-Defamation League that “Those who believed the rumor think they needn't look further, and those who rejected it think the same, for opposite reasons.” www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101304_open_letters.shtml

The “4,000 Jews” story distracted from well documented evidence of foreknowledge. Many of the US’s closest allies provided extremely specific information in advance. www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp? timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=foreignIntelligence and www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essaytheytriedtowarnus.html are excellent references to this material.

Mainstream news sources document that a few people were warned not to fly or to get out of the way. Barbara Bush’s book Reflections: Life After The White House stated

“my nephew Jim Pierce narrowly escaped injury or possible death. He was scheduled to attend a meeting on the 102nd floor of the South Tower, which was the second building hit. However, the night before, the meeting was moved to an adjacent building because the group had outgrown the conference room.
an excerpt is posted at http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3225746/site/newsweek/

Newsweek also reported two weeks after 9/11 that “On Sept. 10.... a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” Like most suspicious evidence about 9/11 in the mainstream media, there was not ever any follow-up.

The “4,000 Jews warned” story was a great false target for media attention to distract from a lot of evidence for foreknowledge (and consciously allowing it to happen). Since about one-third of New York is Jewish, having a lot of anti-semites promote information about 9/11 complicity was a brilliant technique to discourage many of the victims and bystanders from questioning the official story. Some of the websites now promoting disinformation about 9/11 complicity (fake claims that distract from real evidence) are also advocates of Holocaust Denial, which ensures that most Bush opponents will shy away from the embedded truths about 9/11 in the websites. www.oilempire.us/holocaust-denial.html discusses in detail how Holocaust Deniers are inserting disinformation into the 9/11 truth movement.

One curious fact that might or might not be relevant is the towers were less than half full when attacked. Figures vary, but the WTC had between 15,000 and 25,000 people inside at 8:46 am on 9/11 -- on a normal workday at least 50,000 people worked there. However, one WTC employee that I personally know of (a low-level computer operator) merely had not arrived at work and saw the events from a distance.

The idea that thousands in the towers would have been specifically warned makes no sense considering the perpetrators could not risk letting lots of people know what was going to happen. Warning more than a tiny handful of people would have risked exposing the operation. The fact that Barbara Olsen, wife of US Solictor Ted Olsen, was on the doomed Flight 77, suggests that very few actually were warned, and it was her bad luck to be caught up in the events. Once trapped on board, there was nothing anyone could have done to save her despite her loyalty to the regime. Her fate is reminiscent of a story from the Nazi death camp at Treblinka -- a German non-Jewish woman and her sons accidentally got on a train that took German Jews to the camp. According to survivors, she protested that she was not Jewish and her husband was a military officer. But she and her sons were killed anyway, since there was no way she could have been allowed to return to Germany with knowledge of the terrible truth.

 

Karl Rove paradigm: muddy the waters with fake evidence

Sifting through the volumes of 9/11 evidence is analogous to archeology. Only some of the evidence for the distant ancestors of all living beings has been unearthed and catalogued. However, the fact that the currently known fossil record is incomplete does not prevent science from attempting to determine patterns and draw tentative conclusions about the history of life on Earth, knowing that additional evidence is likely to alter the story as we gain further knowledge.

The early days of archeology saw spectacular forgeries "revealed" by unscrupulous advocates of particular theories, which parallels current efforts to distract and discredit 9/11 skeptics with disinformation. Some religious fundamentalists are now engaged in bizarre efforts to “prove” that the fossil record is consistent with a timeline for the Earth being about 6,000 years old, which shows the depths of distortion that some will use to discredit physical evidence.

It is unlikely that any story of 9/11 is 100% true, and hopefully enough of the documentation will be made public in the years to come - and enough whistleblowers step forward - so that historians will be able to more fully explain what happened to the United States of America.

The official story of 9/11 is dependent on bogus evidence to support a conspiracy theory -- the claim that 19 guys directed by a wealthy dialysis patient in a cave in Afghanistan managed to outwit the largest military and intelligence system in history, a system so incompetent that it needs a massive budget increase to protect the public from a repeat of the attack.

But a more subtle, different set of bogus evidence is also in wide circulation, making wild claims about official complicity based based on poor quality images, fraudulent photos, and misrepresentation of facts. This material masquerades as investigative journalism, but is largely devoid of verifiable evidence (some of it does include real facts to establish the bona fides of the disseminator to make the hoaxes more palatable to the reader). The volume of this disinformation became increasingly prominent as the 9/11 Truth Movement experienced political successes in persuading larger numbers of people that 9/11 was not a surprise attack.

White House advisor Karl Rove is famous for his skills with dirty tricks to sabotage political campaigns. Perhaps the most widely recognized Rove success was the allegedly fake memos given to CBS (see BS?) News in September, 2004 that documented how George W. Bush went AWOL from the Air National Guard. Those memos were immediately proclaimed to be fake after CBS used them, and in the ensuing brouhaha, the AWOL story was completely discredited even though the facts were correct. It would have been much harder for Rove to steal the 2004 election if the reality of the AWOL scandal had been taken seriously by the media, and using this faked, but true evidence was a successful gamble to immunize his candidate from these explosive facts.

The film Horns and Haloes documents the effort in 1999 and 2000 by writer Jim Hatfield to publish his book “Fortunate Son,” a biography of George W. Bush. Rove was a source for Hatfield’s revelation that Bush had indeed used cocaine as a younger man, but when the book was published, the media focused instead on Hatfield’s past, not Bush’s. Hatfield had served time in prison for attempted murder, and leaking the story to a writer with a criminal record was a very cynical strategy to neutralize the impact of Bush’s drug use.

Similar tactics were also used to wreck the “JFK Truth Movement,” the independent investigators who examined the assassination of President Kennedy. Perhaps the most notorious is the case of Charles Spiesel, a surprise witness for the prosecution who popped up during the trial of Clay Shaw (as depicted in the film JFK by Oliver Stone). On the witness stand, Mr. Spiesel admitted having heard Shaw discuss plans for the assassination with Lee Harvey Oswald and other conspirators. Under cross examination, he stated that he fingerprinted his daughter before she went to college and after she returned, to make sure she was the same person. Jim Garrison, the prosecuting attorney, wrote in his memoir “On the Trail of the Assassins”

I realized that the clandestine operation of the opposition was so cynical, so sophisticated, and, at the same time, so subtle, that destroying an old-fashioned state jury trial was very much like shooting fish in a barrel with a shotgun. .... it was clear by now that no jury would find an eminently respectable, prominent, distinguished community leader guilty of conspiring to kill the President, especially following an unforgettable example of genuine lunatic testimony from a prosecution witness."

This disinformation strategy is used to coverup many crimes of State. It is very effective, but not very creative, since the same approach is used over and over. Its practioners are like a musician with a one string guitar connected to a very loud amplifier -- they can’t play many notes, but everyone hears their noise.

 

The “Two Front War” for truth

http://cuban-exile.com/doc_001-025/doc0019b.html
The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi
The first question I tried to get approved was the one by experience in investigating the case had dictated as a priority: Was there an intelligence agency connection through anti-Castro Cubans and Oswald to the Kennedy assassination? That, I knew, would never pass muster because of the investigative approach and effort it would require. By the nature of its operations, an intelligence agency doesn't leave authentic tracks. One had to look for patterns. The issue I wanted to pursue involved the patterns of verified misinformation -- almost all linking Oswald to Castro -- which were born in Miami immediately after the assassination.

Propaganda Patterns, a report at www.oilempire.us/map.html, is an effort to analyze the patterns of disinformation used to discredit serious investigation and exposure of numerous crimes, including 9/11. This analysis shows that the best evidence is usually in the middle between the “limited hang outs” (efforts to partially expose that ensure the full truths stay concealed) and distracting disinformation (efforts that encourage those drawn to limited hang outs not to probe deeper).

Most activists who have made efforts to spread information about official complicity in 9/11 have experienced the reluctance of many to face these truths, even among liberal opponents of the Bush regime. Many who have been active is discussing this evidence have been the recipient of similar psychological strategies by advocates of disinformation claims, urging deeper and deeper examination. The history of the “COINTELPRO” campaign contains countless examples where activists were encouraged to prove how radical they were, with the result that they alienated themselves from their allies. With 9/11 investigation efforts, it is important to ensure that ones suspicions mesh with documented evidence.

www.questionsquestions.net/WTC/review.html
A Critical Review of WTC 'No Plane' Theories
by Eric Salter
28 September 2005
It should go without saying that an investigation of a conspiracy like 9/11 will always be a two-front war against disinformation. On one side are the gatekeepers pursuing a limited hangout. On the other side are crackpots and disinfo agents pushing bogus, discrediting evidence. Weeding out bogus claims is neither gatekeeping nor censorship but an absolutely critical activity. [emphasis added]

 

Bad intentions and reverse psychology

Sometimes, it can be difficult to discern the intentions of family members and friends. Determining the motivations of website authors publishing inaccurate material is almost impossible

Many websites, publications, books and movies that contain erroneous 9/11 information about 9/11 complicity issues are well-meaning and merely have been fooled by some of the hoaxes -- but good intentions do not make the claims true. Many 9/11 websites that claim to have proof about 9/11 complicity promote claims that are not true -- some of these sites are incompetent, a few appear to be promoting nonsense deliberately. Most of the liars make sure to include enough real material to establish their bona fides before lying.

Some of the false claims about 9/11 conspiracy are probably disinformation to smother actual evidence with distracting nonsense, but some are possibly created (or at least echoed) by people without fact-checking skills. These increasingly wilder stories make truth seeking far more difficult. These smokescreens obscure public examination of a large body of incriminating evidence that is proven beyond reasonable doubt plus other evidence that has good standards but is not totally proven.

The REAL evidence that 9/11 was an inside job is hard to find due to loud liars offering phony evidence used to distract (and discredit) 9/11 skeptics. The growing flood of fake claims for complicity is evidence of a sophisticated psychological warfare effort to cover the tracks of the conspiracy.

Blurry photos that magically appear years later, just as the 9/11 truth movement grows in popularity and political influence, are not evidence if there is not a “chain of custody” proving the images authentic. Just because someone says "inside job" does not mean that their theories of what happened, whether well-intentioned or malicious, are proven or even provable.

Many, if not most of the people echoing these hoaxes are sincere in their beliefs - but their sincerity doesn't make these claims true, nor does it mitigate the ridicule factor that the hoaxes generate among the majority of the public. The idea that 9/11 was an inside job is a difficult enough point of view to advocate for the majority of people in the United States without making the thesis dependent on blurry images or other fraudulent types of evidence -- it is critical to focus on the claims that are proven beyond reasonable doubt, with the highest quality documented evidence.

There will never be complete agreement in the 9/11 truth movement given the widely varying quality of standards used by different people, the complete lack of peer review, and the presence of hoaxers trying to keep people off balance. It's more productive to persuade people outside the "truth movement" about the best evidence, and caution them about the hoaxes.

In early 2002, Kelia Ramares, a journalist at KPFA-FM / Pacifica Radio, wrote a blistering critique of syndicated columnist Norman Solomon’s “gatekeeping” efforts to discourage Pacifica from covering evidence of 9/11 complicity:

“You are leveraging your reputation in the community to commit character assassination against Ruppert, knowing it is highly unlikely anyone will call you on it.”
-- Kelia Ramares letter to Norman Solomon and Steve Rendall of FAIR

It is hard to know what Solomon’s intentions were in defending the official “surprise attack” story, although the timing of his attack (just as the evidence of foreknowledge was becoming more widely known) is suspicious.

But there is no ambiguity about the State Department’s intentions. Their “misinformation” campaign is doing the exact opposite that Mr. Solomon was doing -- the State Department is leveraging their lack of credibility among critics of US government policies to ensure that skeptics focus on the hoaxes and avoid the provable evidence. The State Department knows that anyone who suspects government collusion in 9/11 is unlikely to believe anything that they say -- and their choice of targets reflects a curious focus on the speculative and the bogus, apparently hoping that the skeptics would see this emphasis as a reason to embrace the claims that are “debunked” by the State Department.

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/10/left-right-and-wrong.html
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2005
The Left, the Right, and the Wrong
Last July 27, the US State Department very thoughtfully posted a resource tool for journalists and media consumers entitled "How to Identify Misinformation." Though "there are no exact rules" to tell whether a story is true or false, the State Department offers clues. First among them, "Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory?"

Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations.
The U.S. military or intelligence community is a favorite villain in many conspiracy theories.
To demonstrate a pattern of falsity, the "counter-misinformation team" provides links to just three of the "many conspiracy theory websites which contain a great deal of unreliable information": Rense.com, Joe Vialls and Conspiracy Planet ....

Consider its solitary example of 9/11 conspiracy theory: Thierry Meyssan's Pentagon cruise missile. I've written numerous times here what I think of the supposition that something other than Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. Regardless of what any of us think, it remains the most divisive wedge issue and energy sink for 9/11 activists. Of course the State Department would draw attention to it, to the neglect of all others. No mention of insider trading, squelched investigations and coincident wargames. The "counter-misinformation team" is trying to proscribe counter-information by accentuating the preposterous. Meyssan's work becomes, in a sense, "approved" conspiracy theory, because it's the only one to receive official recognition. Not only in this State Department publication, but in virtually every mainstream treatment of alternative appraisals of 9/11 the "no plane" theory still takes pride of place. (A similar process is occurring with respect to reports of Katrina "conspiracy theory," in which soft rumours of the levees being blown take precedence over hard analysis of the intentional withholding of aid.)
What the State Department is doing by holding up these sites - one, Vialls, rather obscure - as exemplars of "conspiracy theory," is to administer a poison pill to contrary analysis. To the poor journalist or media consumer taking cues from the "counter-misinformation team," it will appear as though conspiracy theory has an essential core of anti-semitism.

 

Meyssan and Rumsfeld manufacture the missile hoax

The "no Boeing hit the Pentagon" claim is the most important and widespread 9/11 hoax. It was probably set up before the event since government agents seized surveillance camera videos within minutes of the crash (which is evidence for foreknowledge, but not for “no plane”). It is extremely unlikely that the conspirators who allowed (and assisted) 9/11 would not have taken care to create misdirecting hoaxes before the "attack," since they are very aware that large segments of the population would have suspicions about the events and therefore they would "need" to disrupt skeptical inquiry with red herrings, hoaxes, false dichotomies, etc.

This hoax is based on misrepresentation of photos taken shortly after the crash, ignoring of physical evidence and documented reports from hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw the plane. There is NO credible, verifiable evidence in support of ANY of the many and varied "theories" pretending that a plane did not crash into the Pentagon, and therefore, 9/11 was an inside job. See www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html for details.

It was first floated in early October 2001 by French author Thierry Meyssan and US War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Monsieur Meyssan started a webpage that suggested a plane did not hit the Pentagon on October 7, and Rumsfeld gave an interview to Parade magazine on October 12 where he said a "missile" hit the Pentagon. That "missile" quote was then used by many no plane advocates as part of the campaign to draw attention to this claim. Meyssan went on to create the "Hunt the Boeing" website and then published two books "The Horrifying Fraud" (published in English as "9/11 The Big Lie") and Pentagate. These books have been translated into a total of 28 languages, which ensures that they are the dominant version of the claim suggesting complicity or conspiracy that is seen around the world.

On September 4, 2004, two months before the pseudo Presidential election, Parade magazine claimed that this quote was a mis-statement and the sole source for the no plane hoaxes, thus dismissing 9/11 "truth" to an audience of millions of voters.

www.pentagate.info/revue-en.html
Chronologie
Lundi 8 octobre 2001 : le Réseau Voltaire publie sur son site internet « Les mystères de l'attentat contre le Pentagone ».

translation: Monday October 8, 2001 - the Voltaire Network published on its internet site “The Mysteries of the attack on the Pentagon.”
This was the first website to suggest that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon.

www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t11182001_t1012pm.html
Friday, Oct. 12, 2001
Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Parade Magazine
(Interview with Lyric Wallwork Winik, Parade Magazine)
Q: This is a question that's been asked by many Americans, but especially by the widows of September 11th. How were we so asleep at the switch? How did a war targeting civilians arrive on our homeland with seemingly no warning?
Rumsfeld: There were lots of warnings. The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the worldwide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what you can find. And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing -- the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues.
They [find a lot] and any number of terrorist efforts have been dissuaded, deterred or stopped by good intelligence gathering and good preventive work. It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center.

www.parade.com/aol/current/columns/intelligence.html
Parade magazine, September 4, 2004
In this week's "Intelligence Report," Lyric Wallwork Winik writes that 9/11 conspiracy theories are growing and that people from all walks of life believe them. How do these theories get started? ....
The Internet, too, is a potent tool for spreading conspiracy theories. PARADE found this out after Lyric Wallwork Winik interviewed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Oct. 2001. In a transcript of Winik's interview with Rumsfeld, which was published on the Department of Defense's Web site, Rumsfeld seemed to indicate that the Pentagon was hit by a missile on 9/11 instead of a plane. It turns out that a transcription error led to the confusion, but conspiracy theorists latched onto Rumsfeld's supposed admission and spread it over the Internet.

If this was really a “transcription error,” then why does the official Pentagon news service still have this quote on their website? Rummy’s “missile” quote was probably bait to set up the “no plane” hoax.

 

“REPORTS THAT say something hasn’t happened are interesting to me, because as we know, there are known unknowns; there are things we know we know.We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
-- Donald Rumsfeld

 

Physical Evidence: the hole in the “no plane” theories

The loudest claim for the no plane hoax is that the "hole" in the facade of the Pentagon was supposedly too small to have been created by a 757. Many of these claims state that photos taken during the half hour between the crash and the collapse of that part of the building show a hole merely 16 to 18 feet across. However, these photos show only the area hit by the fuselage of the plane, and the larger damage caused by the rest of the plane is obscured by firefighting foam and smoke. The hole on the ground floor (where most of the plane hit) is about 90 feet wide, with additional damage caused by the wingtips visible for tens of feet beyond the hole. The impact on the outside of the building was the size and shape of the cross-section of a 757. A number of photos and reconstructions documenting these facts are linked from www.oilempire.us/pentagon.html

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pentagontrap.html
The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory:
Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics
by Jim Hoffman October 7, 2004
The idea that no 757 crashed at the Pentagon is easily the most controversial and divisive issue among researchers of the 9/11/01 attacks. Effectively promoted since early 2002, this idea has enjoyed an increasing acceptance in the 9/11 Truth Movement, despite its blatant incompatibility with the extensive body of eyewitness evidence that a 757-like twin-engine jetliner flew into the Pentagon and exploded.
Many researchers have ignored or dismissed this eyewitness evidence in favor of a seemingly overwhelming physical evidence case that no 757 crashed at the Pentagon, based on photographs of the crash site. As I show below, however, each of the pieces evidence adduced in favor of the no-757-crash theory can be reconciled with the crash of a 757.

 

Hoaxes Hidden in Plain Sight

The State Department campaign simultaneously cites rense.com as unreliable and as a source to debunk the no plane hoax.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jul/27-595713.html
There are many conspiracy theory websites, which contain a great deal of unreliable information.  Examples include:
Rense.com

Nevertheless, the State Department included a link to this page as part of its effort to debunk the “Pentagate” book of Thierry Meyssan.

Photos Of Flt 77 Wreckage
Inside The Pentagon
Exclusive Photos & Story
From Sarah Roberts, 12-4-2002
www.rense.com/general32/phot.htm
“The following photo, which ironically enough graced the cover of T. Meyssan's "Pentagate" book, shows both the fuselage fragment and the wheel hub:”

It seems obvious that the State Department’s propagandists understood how this no plane disinformation could be used to discredit 9/11 skeptics.

Others have also noted the odd placement of a photo debunking the main thesis of Monsieur Meyssan on the cover of his book:

www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html
The next photo is from the cover from one of the conspiracy sites that demands "where is the plane?" -- they must not have looked very hard, there are 2 obvious chunks of it in the photo. Another rim from the airplane on the right, and a large chunk of bulkhead on the left.

The fact that the cover of "Le Pentagate" shows Boeing components (which refutes the book's claim that a Boeing didn't hit the Pentagon) is an insult that assumes the 9/11 skeptics won't look closely at the details.

This photo also implies that this hole was the contentious issue of an impact zone allegedly too small for a large Boeing jet. However, this photo shows the "punch out hole" at the end of the debris field (supposedly made by the firefighters), not the outside of the building where the plane actually hit. Some hoaxers claim that this hole was the impact zone on the outside of the building - which shows either grotesque incompetence or a deliberate effort to deceive. The 2004 film “911 In Plane Site” also had a cover photo that disproved its main allegation. This production claimed that Flight 175, which hit the South Tower (second to be struck), had a “pod” dangling underneath it that fired missiles at the building a split second before impact. This bizarre claim was central to the film’s thesis, implying plane substitution in mid-flight and therefore an “inside job.”

The cover of "Plane Site" used a photo of a 757 showing the normal "fairing" structure on the underside of the fuselage which was misrepresented as an anomaly. This photo was posted in early May 2004 to the "911 Truth Alliance" email list by a member who was debunking the "pod" claim. Is it a coincidence that the film uses the exact same photo (out of all of the countless photos ever taken of Boeing jets), or is it just a bad joke hidden "in plain sight?" A detailed review is at www.oilempire.us/inplanesite.html

 

Sandwiching the truth with lies

A more sophisticated effort to promote 9/11 disinformation was the March, 2005 cover story of Popular Mechanics, part of the Hearst corporation media empire. Their “9/11 Lies” article was a confusing mix of debunking bogus and real evidence of complicity. The first claim that it addressed was the “pod” hoax, and the article used evidence from the website questionsquestions.net to debunk the pod as a fantasy.

This article’s use of Questions Questions to debunk the “pod” shows a deliberate intent to use 9/11 truth websites that expose the hoaxes to show that the authors understand that the “pod” is not a real claim but still promote it to their readers as something “we” supposedly advocate.

Popular Mechanics: focused on bogus 9/11 claims to discredit real evidence of complicity
www.oilempire.us/popular-mechanics.html

"Popular Mechanics Attacks -- Its 9/11 LIES Straw Man" by Jim Hoffman
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pm/index.html

"Popular Mechanics' Deceptive Hit Piece Against 9/11 Truth" by Jim Hoffman
http://911review.com/pm/markup/index.html

 

The missing Pentagon videos prove complicity, not “no plane”

Perhaps the most intriguing claim for “no plane” is the fact that the Pentagon is hiding footage from the video surveillance cameras that filmed the event. This suppression of evidence suggests foreknowledge (since FBI agents who seized the film were immediately able to grab the videos), but not "no plane." Hotel workers who watched "their" video before it was seized saw the plane. And the hundreds of commuters and other bystanders who were in the area also saw the plane, and those who cleaned up the damage afterwards saw the plane parts and remains of passengers.

The video is being withheld in a form of "reverse psychology" to get the skeptics to think the Pentagon is hiding something when they are not, which is needed to keep this hoax alive. Some 9/11 activists who disbelieve the "no plane" stuff think the Pentagon is planning to release "newly discovered" video of the plane hitting the building to discredit 9/11 truth. “No plane hit the Pentagon” is the most important 9/11 hoax, and the Pentagon is probably having too much fun watching the conspiracy people sink deeper into discrediting. They probably know if the "no plane" claims are extinguished, many of those focused on the "Pentagate" would shift their attention toward real issues such as how Flight 77 was aimed at the nearly empty part of the Pentagon and why it was not intercepted, even after the second plane hit the WTC. Publishing these videos would also make it difficult for hoaxers to continue to invent wilder and wilder nonsense.

After Thierry Meyssan made his spectacular claims, the Pentagon released five photos taken from a surveillance camera in the parking lot. A reasonable case can be made that the photos supposedly showing the Pentagon attack were deliberately doctored to mire the skeptics movement in endless debates and arguments -- which is what has happened. These photos state they were taken on September 12, which is probably a subtle clue. It's a nice trick that the one frame in the video before the plane crashed includes a pylon in the parking lot partially obscuring the approaching plane -- making it conveniently difficult to use the video to prove anything about the identity of what hit the building and giving credence to those proclaiming it proved a missile hit the building. It is ironic that there are 9/11 skeptics who distrust everything the Pentagon says but then accept these photos as authentic without evidence that they are.

www.freedom-force.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=burningquestions&refpage=issues
A security camera atop a hotel close to the Pentagon [the Hilton] may have captured dramatic footage of the hijacked Boeing 757 airliner as it slammed into the western wall of the Pentagon. Hotel employees sat watching the film in shock and horror several times before the FBI confiscated the video as part of its investigation.[50]
If this report is accurate, then we know that something important was captured on this tape. Otherwise, the employees would not have watched it in shock and horror. The FBI has never revealed the images from this camera.
[50] "Video of Attack" by Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, Inside the Ring, Sept. 21, 2001, http://www.gertzfile.com/gertzfile/ring092101.html.

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/05/cynical-sophisticated-and-subtle.html
... consider the Pentagon crash, and the confiscation of the video from the service station security camera. That the video has never been released is regarded by many as damning evidence that authorities are trying to hide the true nature of the crash: that the video must reveal that it wasn't Flight 77 but a missile, or a fighter jet. But think: perhaps the video remains hidden because some people are quite happy to mindfuck the conspiracists and perpetuate an erroneous line of inquiry. Would they want to lay to rest a mistaken hypothesis, when it misdirects the efforts of so many? It may be that the question is not What have they got to hide? but rather, Why do they want us to think that they're hiding something?

These images succeeded in creating an endless debate, with various factions arguing for one theory versus another: the Global Hawk theory, the missile theory, the plane plus missile theory, the small plane theory (none of these claims were encumbered by actual evidence).
The debate on what hit the Pentagon is the best possible thing for the perpetrators, since it fuels speculation that makes discerning the truth(s) much more difficult. Few people care about the plane/no plane pseudo-debate, and release of additional photos are not a priority for most US citizens. Furthermore, none of the no-plane promoters offer plausible arguments why “inside job” conspirators would have substituted a missile or drone for Flight 77 . If they had the ability to redirect Flight 77, why not just fly it into the Pentagon?

None of the "no Boeing" theorists have explained why the perpetrators would have risked certain exposure by a bystander capturing video of something that wasn't a Boeing 757. Video footage from nearby surveillance cameras was immediately seized by the FBI. Workers at a nearby hotel did get to see their film (prior to its impoundment) and did not report seeing anything other than a plane hitting the Pentagon. Keeping the film footage secret allows extreme speculation to flourish, which serves the interests of the plotters.

 

Black Boxes would be much more interesting to examine than the video

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3069699
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Web Exclusive: Washington Heroes
On the ground at the Pentagon on Sept. 11
Sept. 28 (2001)
Early Friday morning, shortly before 4 a.m., Burkhammer and another firefighter, Brian Moravitz, were combing through debris near the impact site. Peering at the wreckage with their helmet lights, the two spotted an intact seat from the plane’s cockpit with a chunk of the floor still attached. Then they saw two odd-shaped dark boxes, about 1.5 by 2 feet long. They’d been told the plane’s “black boxes” would in fact be bright orange, but these were charred black. The boxes had handles on one end and one was torn open. They cordoned off the area and called for an FBI agent, who in turn called for someone from the National Transportation Safety Board who confirmed the find: the black boxes from American Airlines Flight 77. “We wanted to find live victims,” says Burkhammer. But this was a consolation prize. “Finding the black box gave us a little boost,” he says.
--Debra Rosenberg

http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/blackboxes.html
Black Boxes
Contents of Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders Are Missing

www.summeroftruth.org/groundzero.html
Firefighter Said Black Boxes
Were Found at Ground Zero
By Bryan Sacks and Nicholas Levis
Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2004

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/12/back-to-black.html
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2005
Back to black

In his defense of the end of the pretense of constitutional rule, Dick Cheney says "you know, it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years." Of course he's right. And since Cheney warned Americans last year that a vote for Kerry was inviting another 9/11, maybe that's how he means it to be heard this time, too: the veiled threat of a protection artist.
Remember the claims of Ground Zero firefighters, contradicting the official account, that they had actually recovered the black boxes of Flights 11 and 175? Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi said the boxes were seized by federal agents, who then told them to keep quiet about it. They didn't, though their story never even rippled the mainstream's consensus fabrication. (But I wonder what the world would sound like if everyone bullied into silence by one method or another found their voice at the same time.)
Now comes corroboration from Dave Lindorff, a Counterpunch fixture who has perhaps the best insight over there on the darkness and the weirdness of America's present condition. (Alexander Cockburn, Whiteout aside, has a awful Chomskyite blindspot when it comes to deep politics, let alone high weirdness.)
Lindorff writes:

A source at the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that has the task of deciphering the date from the black boxes retrieved from crash sites-including those that are being handled as crimes and fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI-says the boxes were in fact recovered and were analyzed by the NTSB.
"Off the record, we had the boxes," the source says. "You'd have to get the official word from the FBI as to where they are, but we worked on them here."

That federal authorities, across agencies, perpetuate a lie regarding the recovery of the World Trade Center black boxes strongly suggests that both the voice and the flight data recorders contained information that would seriously damage, if not outright deflate, the Great Myth to Make War By. (I say "contained" because I expect they were effectively destroyed shortly after falling into federal hands.) As Lindorff writes, the data could prove "whether [the hijackers] were getting outside help in guiding them to their targets."
Will we ever know what was on the recorders? Probably not. But as I've said before, we already know enough. We haven't answered the how, and likely never will, but I think we have the who and the why.
Ironically, tragically, it's the how - the popular mechanics of the stage magician's craft - that consumes most of the fuel of the "9/11 movement." As it was meant to, so the perpetrators could grandfather their innocence with the passage of time and opportunity for justice.

 

hundreds of eyewitnesses saw the plane

The eyewitnesses who had a good view of the event are unified in their reporting -- they saw a large, twin engine jet. No one saw a truck bomb, a cruise missile, a Global Hawk robot plane, an F-15 or a flying saucer piloted by giant lizards. The eyewitnesses and the "physical evidence" are in complete agreement that the plane did indeed hit the Pentagon.

Some people had better views than others, some saw the crash, some had the final moment obscured from their vantage point. Some were stuck in rush hour traffic on nearby roads. Some were military officials, others include cab drivers, ordinary commuters and even a Unitarian minister (a cross section of people normally found in northern Virginia during rush hour).

Some of those promoting the no plane stories insult the eyewitnesses by claiming they are unreliable, had a poor view of the events, or are in great disagreement, and that the "physical evidence" should be used instead -- except the physical evidence also proves Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

Hundreds (if not more) people saw the plane, and hundreds more participated in the cleanup and saw plane debris and bodies of the passengers. The no Boeing stories imply that everyone in the vicinity was an agent or dupe of the "inside job" conspirators -- that would have expanded the needed size of the conspiracy to absurd levels.

Some of the voices on the web trying to keep this hoax going have selected a few of the eyewitnesses who have Republican political connections or work for mainstream media, and use this to dupe those who distrust Republicans and mainstream journalists to insinuate that the eyewitnesses are all lying about what they saw. However, since most of the people who saw the plane did not have "deep political" ties - many were merely commuters on the nearby roads - this manipulation of the evidence quickly is exposed as lying if one takes a few minutes to check the veracity of those who blatantly "cherry pick" the evidence. Furthermore, it should not be a surprise that military people and insiders with connections to the administration would be found in the vicinity of the Pentagon, just like it is not a surprise that stock brokers were among the witnesses on the streets of lower Manhattan.

"One of the most important characteristics of a covert operation, in addition to the fact that it must be secret, is that it be very small. There is no such thing as a successful big clandestine operation. The bigger the operation, the less chance there is that it can be secret."
- Col. Fletcher Prouty, "The Secret Team" www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html

The people who saw the plane told their families, friends, co-workers, etc about the fact they'd seen a major, shocking, historical event (wouldn't you if you saw something like that?). This insinuation ensures that the eyewitnesses, their families, friends, co-workers, etc. think that 9/11 skeptics are making up insulting nonsense. Cui bono? Who benefits?

Washington, DC voted 90% against Bush in 2004, and Arlington County (where the Pentagon is located) is the most Democratic constituency in the Commonwealth of Virginia. (The Republicans in the DC area are more concentrated in Fairfax County and other outer suburbs, especially those outside the Capitol Beltway.) The “no plane” hoax is a primary reason why there have been very few “9/11 truth” events inside the Beltway despite overwhelming opposition to the regime.

This hoax shows the limitations of doing research on the web about highly controversial topics with enormous political stakes. While the internet is an incredible tool, it is also an imperfect means of discovering the truth. It is very easy to create fake websites can be created and not all of human experience is archived in on-line. With the Pentagon crash, some of the witnesses did tell the media that they saw the plane, but most were not interviewed. Therefore, instant experts writing about this issue from several time zones away who ignore the need for on-the-ground investigation (and ignore how photos show a 757 sized impact zone) are likely to make serious mistakes.

Washington, DC based political activist John Judge was probably the first 9/11 skeptic to warn about the no plane hoax:

www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/PAandAAF77.html
The Pentagon Attack and American Airlines Flight 77
by John Judge
"Hundreds of people saw the plane from windows of nearby buildings, from cars along the nearby highways, and some ducked because it flew over so low. Pentagon employees and construction workers at the site saw the events unfold before their eyes. Hundreds more took part in the clean-up operation and saw the wreckage. It is not difficult to find eyewitnesses to the event in DC. ...
"Families of victims and others who work at the airlines, as well as many witnesses I have spoken to, are offended and shocked by these unfounded speculations. Those willing to do a modicum of investigative work here in DC will be quickly disabused of this disinformation.
"There are many legitimate unanswered questions about the events of September 11, 2001, its sponsorship, and the official version of events. We benefit from serious research and the issues raised by victim's families seeking accountability. Not the least of these is the apparent lack of standard FAA/NORAD response to these emergency events. Rather than use our time proving and belaboring the obvious, or focusing on areas of total speculation that can only hurt our public credibility, I encourage serious researchers to focus on the historical context of the event, the alleged conspirators, the funding, and the government response or lack of it."

Dutch author Joel v. d. Reijden has an excellent website that summarized the Pentagon controversy. His conclusions summarize the evidence as well as any published comments:

Why it is most likely that an American Airlines 757-223 hit it the Pentagon
by Joel v.d Reijden
In my complete review of 911, I have taken up many dozens of witness accounts. When put together you get the following story: A large American Airlines jetliner came screaming over the highways with it's gears up, after having circled the Pentagon area. It balanced a little to the left an right, clipped some light poles and other stuff, barely pulled itself straight again and fired up it's engines to full throttle in the last few seconds. Some say it struck the helipad with it's left wing right before it hit the Pentagon and a few others claim it hit the ground with it's nose, only inches before the wall. Just like the two airplanes that hit the WTC; "it disappeared.". A few claim they could see the tail sticking out of the building for about one or two seconds before a very heavy explosion engulfed everything in flames. (Like the WTC) People who were close by, were blown off their feet and some even went flying. Small pieces of airplane, concrete and other rubble was blown out of the building and landed up to hundreds of yards away. The blast was so powerful it blew a few big chunks of the engines hundreds of yards through the air. An intense heat has been described, which melted the back of at least one firetruck which was standing in front of the building. ....
The witness testimonies
Keep in mind that the Pentagon has 25.000 people working there. A lot of these witnesses have high ranks in the army, navy and air force. Some of the witnesses were commercial airline pilots and many people in the neighborhood are familiar with military and commercial airplanes, since there are multiple military and commercial airfields close by. So, if all those witness testimonies form a coherent story, why then do so many people support the "theory" that an F16, missile or global hawk hit the Pentagon? The funniest thing is, that nobody even reported seeing any of those planes (or a missile). ....
I have proven the following things, which seem to make a couple of dents into the works of most of the well-known 9/11 gurus:
Claims that the Pentagon hole is (much) too small for a 757-223, are false.
Claims that witnesses have said they saw a missile, are false.
Claims that witnesses have said they saw a small plane and implying a significant amount did the same, are misleading.
Claims that witnesses have said the plane was quiet were an extreme minority and are brought to the public in a misleading way. As usual, the context has never been addressed. (In the car, windows shut, radio on. One person said it was the shock)
Claims that a Global Hawk or a F-16 hit the Pentagon aren't backed up by any witnesses. So why have these theories been put forward in the first place?
Quotes from the aftermath of the crash site are no proof something else than a 757 hit the building. As you can read in the quotes I gathered, even a few people who saw a large airliner dive into the building wondered about the relatively small amount of visible damage it did.

 

Fake Debate: No Plane or No Complicity

The “no planes” debate is a false dichotomy between “no plane” and “no conspiracy” when neither position is true.

Most of the debunkers of the no plane hoaxes ignore the other evidence that shows complicity. For example, www.snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.htm has a reasonably accurate debunk of the Meyssan material. However, the authors avoid looking at the flaws in the official story: the flight school drop out turned into an ace pilot, the aiming at the nearly empty part of the Pentagon, the war games that paralyzed the air defenses. Those are topics that Snopes and most other debunkers will not touch.

It is interesting that both the “limited hang out” film Fahrenheit 9/11 and the disinformation film 911 In Plane Site avoided using the words NORAD and “war games.”

The State Department "misinformation" website lists what they call "myths" about 9/11 that focus on the hoaxes while ignoring the best evidence.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Jan/20-672210.html

September 11 Conspiracy Theories
Confused stories continue
Conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks continue to circulate, especially on the Internet. Many of the most popular myths are addressed on this Web site, in a March 2005 article “9/11: Debunking the Myths” in Popular Mechanics magazine, and in The 9/11 Commission Report.
Some of the most prevalent myths are:
American Airlines flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon (see “Did a Plane Hit the Pentagon?” and Popular Mechanics, part 6)
The planes that hit the World Trade Center towers were remotely controlled (see “Did a Plane Hit the Pentagon?”)
World Trade Center towers 1 and 2 were destroyed by controlled demolitions (see “9/11 Revealed?” and Popular Mechanics, parts 4 and 5)
A missile was fired from a pod underneath the aircraft that struck the south World Trade Center tower (see Popular Mechanics, part 2)
The plane that struck the south World Trade Center tower was a cargo plane or fuel tanker (see Popular Mechanics, part 3)
World Trade Center building 7 was destroyed by a controlled demolition (see “9/11 Revealed?” and Popular Mechanics, part 5)
The U.S. Air Force had more than enough time to intercept the hijacked planes (see The 9/11 Commission Report, section 1.2, “Improvising a Homeland Defense” and Popular Mechanics, part 3)
United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was shot down by a missile (see Popular Mechanics, parts 7 and 8)
Insider trading in the stocks of United Airlines and American Airlines just before September 11 is evidence of advance knowledge of the plot (see “9/11 Revealed?”)
Four thousand Jews failed to show up for work at the World Trade Center on September 11 (see “The 4,000 Jews Rumor”)
Al Qaeda is not responsible for the September 11 attacks (see “Al Qaeda and September 11th”).

 

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Feb/02-767147.html

Confessions -- or Fantasies -- of an Economic Hit Man?
Purported links to National Security Agency appear dubious
Washington -- John Perkins’ popular, but misleading, book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is being released in paperback. Perkins claims that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) recruited him to be an “economic hit man,” who deliberately entrapped foreign countries in unmanageable amounts of debt so they would be beholden to the United States. ...

Perkins revealed his fondness for conspiracy theories during a January 10 presentation at a bookstore in Washington. At one point, he claimed, falsely, that the U.S. government had been involved in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., former Beatle John Lennon, and several unnamed U.S. senators who had died in plane crashes.
In response to a question about the September 11, 2001, attacks, he cautioned that although he did not know much about this subject he thought that if a bank had been robbed, the police would investigate the possibility that it had been an “inside job,” implying that the U.S. government may have been involved in the 9/11 attacks. He also recommended a Web site that puts forward the false claim that no plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. (For a discussion of this issue, see “Did a Plane Hit the Pentagon?”)

 

 

Why the “No Plane” Hoax protects the plotters

"No Plane" has been the most effective way to discredit issues of complicity inside the Beltway, both for the overwhelming majority who vote against Bush and the high level military and civilian officials who had saw the plane, plane parts or have firends who did.

Making the conspiracy dependent on the no plane hoax gets Bush and Cheney off the hook. The issue is not what the peons (us) think about these issues -- the perpetrators are more concerned what what the military and political leadership in DC think. How long would Cheney and Bush be in office if the most of the military thought that the neo-conservatives deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen?

 

Media chaff

Some of the defenses used to protect military planes against heat seeking anti-aircraft missiles involve shooting flares to confuse and distract the incoming missile so that it will lock onto a fake target instead of the plane. Another technique is to drop metal strips out of the plane to hide the plane’s radar signature and confuse the air defenses.

Crossing the Rubicon references a Toronto Star article published two months after 9/11 that mentioned there were fake blips inserted into the air defense radar systems as part of one of the war game exercises underway during the attacks

The disinformation efforts surrounding 9/11 evidence perform this “chaff” function. It is a big clue that the media efforts to discredit 9/11 skeptics focus on this claim (the absence of Flight 77) while ignoring evidence proven beyond reasonable doubt. They are more interested in creating the illusion for the public that people who think there was complicity are loonies who see things that don't exist (like the no plane stuff).

www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/f77FoF.html
Flight of Fantasy: Flight 77 Didn't Hit the Pentagon 23 October 2002
.... That side of the Pentagon was virtually empty and had been for some time because the building had been under reconstruction quite visibly on that side for 5-6 years and part of that was to reinforce the building from external attack. In fact some photos show the difference in damage on either side of that reinforcement work and it is striking. That plane went 270 degrees out of its way at high speed, a very sophisticated maneuver with no possible military advantage, to hit the empty side of the Pentagon. There, as in New York, I would argue that they minimized the number of deaths by timing and method of attack. ....
There is no question that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. Remaining agnostic on this point also gives ammunition to the perpetrators of the stand-down and serves to discredit the other good work that continues to be done about the reality of what happened that day. It is my feeling that this thesis was actually part of an intentional disinformation campaign that spreads red herrings to discredit the real findings. [emphasis added]

 

Washington Post review of New Pearl Harbor

David Ray Griffin’s book “The New Pearl Harbor” (2004) was the first analysis of 9/11 complicity claims that got widespread attention, especially among liberal / left constituencies. It sold lots of copies and became an underground sensation without any media reviews, and helped the 9/11 truth movement gain needed momentum due to its readability, a grassroots promotional effort, and recommendations by liberal icons such as historian Howard Zinn.

A month before the 2004 election, The Washington Post published a review that focused exclusively on the “no plane hit the Pentagon” claims and ignored the other 90% of the book. The review put the mention of Griffin’s book in the middle of a discussion of the creators of the “Pentagon Strike” hoax film, highlighting their claim that they talk to alien beings living in other dimensions from their European palace (thus ensuring that “9/11 truth” would be considered lunacy). Limiting the discussion of 9/11 complicity to whether a plane hit the Pentagon ensured that this would not become a political issue in the Washington area during the final weeks of the campaign.

Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet
By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page B01

 

Don’t Want to Know

The website wanttoknow.info, published by former State Dept interpreter turned internet political activist Fred Burks, considered The Washington Post’s review of New Pearl Harbor to be a great breakthrough, not a discrediting attack. www.wanttoknow.info/911storybreaks Burks wrote that:

“We are thankful for any media attention, even that which refutes the 9/11 movement, as any press brings the subject more fully into public awareness.”
www.WantToKnow.info/051208coverupnewssummary

Unfortunately, not all publicity is good publicity. The corporate media wants the public to know that there are people who think 9/11 was an inside job -- as long as the claims contain poison pills that can be used to alienate and discredit.

Wanttoknow promotes the Pentagon Strike hoax film www.wanttoknow.info/powerofnightmares, and is among the 9/11 “truth” websites that bought into the “no plane” hoax and now is unable to admit having made a mistake.

Wanttoknow also promotes Rense, What Really Happened and Arctic Bulletin, websites that promote poison pill claims about 9/11 www.wanttoknow.info/conspiracytheories Rense pushes the “abiotic oil” hoax and has praised Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel (What Really Happened also has promoted Zundel). Arctic Bulletin aggressively promotes “no planes” and writes for American Free Press, a long time promoter of Holocaust Denial that works with KKK leader David Duke (by their own admission).

Some left wing groups explicitly refuse to address 9/11 complicity because they have figured out that some of the claims are traceable back to neo-Nazis.

 

Political Immunization

I think there's a grave problem of "sexing up" the truth with spectacular yet specious arguments. For instance, some of the splashiest and attractive 9/11 material is devoted to supporting the "Pentagon Missile." Sure, it gets people's attention - in fact, it dominates the public perception of alternative theories of the attacks - but is it right? Well, no; as I've said, I don't think so. And truth will suffer again and again when those who fell for the missile "hook" come to the same conclusion and chuck the whole thing, and those who were turned off the "missile" refuse to look any further.
-- Jeff Wells, Rigorous Intuition, http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/05/no-way-and-yeah-so-what.html

www.awitness.org/journal/september_11_norad_standdown.html
“perhaps this spreading of such nonsense around is part of some psyop by some intelligence agency in the government the purpose of which is to create people just like me who are reacting with growing disgust and deep mistrust and suspicion to each and every new 9-11 conspiracy type story that comes out, having been burned so many times before, and thus this psyop can work to undermine any 9-11 investigation.”

Emanuel Sferios, SeptemberEleventh.org
It took me a while, but it's now easy to see/understand. There *are* 757 plane parts in the photos, and the fire/impact area of the photos *is* the size of a 757. The reason there aren't any large, obvious pieces of 757 in the photos: planes flying that fast into large buildings get pretty shredded. (Nonetheless, there are clearly visible 757 parts in the photos.)
Remember the videos of the south tower hit? Recall the fact that the plane hit at an angle, and the big fireball appeared on the outside of the building (unlike the north tower, where it hit straight on center). The significant thing to note here is that you didn't see the plane come through the building, or any big, obvious pieces of the plane come through. That's because planes hitting buildings at that speed get pretty darn shredded in the massive explosion. The same thing happened at the Pentagon. Go look at the photos, though. The damage to the building is in the shape of a full-sized 757.
Also, you know that hole in the back wall of the Pentagon. Who was it that supposedly claimed that was from the "nose cone" of the plane? Did the government make that claim? I don't think so. Clearly that claim is false, and easily debunked. However, the counter-claim that it must therefore be from a missile is not the only other explanation. It very likely was a hole knocked out by the rescue workers, from the outside inward! The whole debate between "nose-cone versus missile" seems a big red-herring, part of the hoax to convince us (people inside the movement that is) that it was a missile.
Also, remember the five Pentagon security photos (the ones dated September 12), which when played in sequence looks clearly like a missile struck the Pentagon. Who released these photos? That's right. The Pentagon released them. Should make us think.
... I've finally come around, and I'm not that embarrassed about it having taken me this long, because, well, it was a damn good hoax--a professional job well done.
.... if you think that the "no plane at the Pentagon" claim, even if it is wrong, is harmless... or if you think perhaps even it is beneficial because it converts a lot of people into 9/11 skeptics (and it certianly does), please think again. ... its intention was to alienate people inside the beltway, and make us look foolish among D.C. professionals. It succeeded.

These events are among the most traumatic ever in the United States, as culturally important as Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President Kennedy. Linguist George Lakoff in his book “Don’t Think of an Elephant” stated:

“those images were intimately tied to my identity, both as an individual and as an American ... I now realize that the image of the plane going into South Tower was for me an image of a bullet going through someone’s head, the flames pouring from the other side like blood spurting out. It was an assassination.”
“Don’t Think of an Elephant,” p. 53

The 9/11 “truth” advocates run the risk of being seen as denying that 9/11 happened at all, especially if they float obviously made-up stories of the planes landing at secret military bases and denying that victims talked with their spouses (on air phones!). Perhaps it is appropriate that some of those pushing the most hoaxes also advocate Holocaust denial, since both forms of lying require willful ignorance of physical evidence and eyewitness testimony.

Jim Hoffman (wtc7.net, 911review.com, 911research.com) observes that the nonsense injected into the 9/11 truth movement attracts people without critical thinking skills, who then alienates logically thinking people from being associated with it. It's a brilliant strategy of disruption.

"What could be more effective [for the perpetrators] than to recruit people into the 9/11 truth movement who are self-motivated to proselytize with nonsense?
- Jim Hoffman

www.911review.com/disinfo/videos.html
• Many people are turned away by seeing such as In Plane Site, especially people whose rational sensibilities are offended by the video's patently ludicrous claims and sensationialism.
• As a tool for motivating involvement, IPS selects for people who tend to undervalue critical thinking skills and scientific evaluation of evidence. Such people will tend to promote IPS and other flawed materials, playing into the stereotype of 9/11 conspiricists as lunatics.
• IPS is, by itself, a powerful tool for smearing the movement, as the Popular Mechanics piece illustrates. Any promotion reinforces the case of the the movement's detractors.

 

There are several other examples of actions by authorities that I think are calculated to function in the same way as bait for the skeptics:
• The first frame of the 5 leaked (and forged) Pentagon CCTV frames that shows the small plane hidden behind the post; baiting people to think "Look! they're trying to hide that it was a small plane".
• Rumsfeld's reference to "the missile" that damaged the Pentagon; leading people to think it was an inadvertant admission by him of knowledge that the attack involved a missile.
• The refusal of authorities to provide proof of the identities of the planes that crashed at the three sites, such as identifying part numbers from aircraft debris; exploiting peoples' tendency to confuse lack of proof with evidence to the contrary.

The destruction and suppression of evidence -- a pattern seen throughout the response to the attack -- serves the coverup in two ways:
• preventing investigators from definitively disproving false elements of the official story.
• luring investigators into thinking that true elements of the official story are false.
- Jim Hoffman, 911review.com

 

“9/11 revealed” promoted by State Department

After highlighting Thierry Meyssan’s books, the State Department moved on to review a newer effort from Britain called “9/11 Revealed. Wanttoknow claims that the State Department “misinformation” website is attacking the new book “9/11 Revealed” because

“The US State Department decided that this book was dangerous enough to post a webpage dedicated to disproving its theories.” www.wanttoknow.info/051122coverupnewssummary

The State Department’s review is at

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Sep/16-241966.html
9/11 Revealed?
New book repeats false conspiracy theories

Under the guise of rejecting this publication, they encourage 9/11 skeptics to gravitate toward this book in a similar effort to their promotion of “Le Pentagate.”

However, “9/11 Revealed” has been exposed as merely the latest mix of real and not-real.

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/911revealed/index.html
Revealed OR Concealed?
A Critical Review of 9/11 Revealed
by Victoria Ashley and Jim Hoffman

9/11 Revealed is impressively packaged. It has 253 pages with scores of color photographs, and sophisticated graphic design. The writing is dramatic. It has a broad scope, and appears to cover most of the challenges to the official story of the 9/11/01 attack.
The book pretends to speak for the 9/11 Truth Movement. It is written in the third person, and presents most challenges as things that "9/11 skeptics" or "Nine/Eleven skeptics" say. The undiscerning reader is likely to think that the book represents the work of the community of serious independent investigators working to expose the truth about the attack. Finding that the book fails to make a strong case that the attack was the work of insiders, the reader may conclude, incorrectly, that investigators have failed to make a compelling case.
In essence 9/11 Revealed is a slick package designed to sell the numerous hoaxes that have long been used to marginalize the 9/11 Truth Movement as nothing but a bunch of loony conspiracy theorists lacking the critical thinking skills necessary to correctly evaluate evidence.

Some of the criticisms the State Department has for “9/11 Revealed” are simply recitations of the official story that are easily disproved, for example their discussion of the 9/11 insider trading.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Sep/16-241966.html
The book repeats long-standing rumors of insider trading based on alleged advance warnings of the attack.  It ignores the conclusion in The 9/11 Commission Report that all trades that initially appeared suspicious were found to have innocuous causes, after an exhaustive investigation.

Footnote 130 in the 9/11 Commission report claimed that “A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts,” which understates the scale of the insider trading and avoids the real issue. No one has charged that any of the inside traders had ties to al Qaeda, rather, their ties were to intelligence agencies. See Chapter 14 “9/11 Insider Trading, or: ‘You Didn’t Really See That, Even Though We Saw It’” in “Crossing the Rubicon.”

 

What or Where? Redirecting the 9/11 truth movement

The State Department’s dismissal of the issue of where the Pentagon was hit is a sneaky means to discredit one of the most sensitive pieces of evidence.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Sep/16-241966.html
Similarly, 9/11 Revealed gives credence (p. 177) to nonsensical statements such as the one made by “Internet activist” Brian Quig: “[when Flight 77] bypassed a straight-in shot at the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, only to hit an insignificant spot in the back of the Pentagon, I said to myself then, it is not a real terrorist attack.”
The authors of 9/11 Revealed apparently do not believe that the largest terrorist attack in history was large enough to demonstrate that it was real.  Instead, in their minds, the fact that the terrorists did not fly even larger Boeing 747 jumbo jets into the World Trade Center towers, or attack an hour or two later, when more people would have been at work, or hit the offices of the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, means that the events of 9/11 were not real terrorist attacks, but were engineered in order to minimize the number of deaths.  9/11 Revealed states bizarrely, “the attacks … seem almost designed to limit casualties.”  One wonders how many more thousands of people would have had to die to convince the authors of 9/11 Revealed that the attacks were real.The fact that the Pentagon was hit in the nearly empty, recently reconstructed and strengthened sector is accepted by the mainstream media.

http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0209/08/lklw.00.html
CNN LARRY KING WEEKEND
Stories of 9-11
Aired September 8, 2002
Michael Flocco, whose only son Matthew was killed at the Pentagon
“some of the columns and the windows had previously been reinforced for the first phase of the renovation. It was a five-phase renovation program. The first phase had just been completed only a week before. And where the plane hit was under restructured, reinforced part of it. So initially, it hit a very solid part and then, glanced off of that and went into the old section that had just been evacuated for phase two renovation. Had it hit anywhere else, it could have been catastrophic.” [emphasis added]

www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0901/091701kp2.htm
September 17, 2001
Defense Department signs contract to begin rebuilding Pentagon
By Katherine McIntire Peters
During last Tuesday’s attack, terrorists slammed a passenger airliner into a newly-renovated portion of the Pentagon, killing 188 people and rendering about one-third of the building inoperable. Despite the awful loss of life, Defense officials said the damage to life and property would likely have been much higher had the airliner crashed into any other portion of the building.
“This was a terrible tragedy,” said Lee Evey, chief of the Pentagon renovation project. “But this could have been much, much worse.”
The portion of the building hardest hit in the attack was the only part of the building that had been renovated thus far. Because that section of the building had steel-reinforced walls, blast-resistant windows and Kevlar panels, the damage from the impact and resulting fire was mitigated. [emphasis added]

WHERE the Pentagon was hit is strong evidence for official complicity, since a flight school drop out would not have chosen (nor been able) to fly a plane into the mostly empty sector of the Pentagon. Hani Hanjour, a flight school drop out, clearly could not have performed this extremely difficult flying maneuver. While it is possible that a expert pilot, perhaps one with decades of experience in the Saudi or Egyptian Air Force, could have been substituted for Mr. Hanjour, a terrorist would not have chosen to hit the Pentagon in the one way that minimized casualties. Some coincidence theorists claim that it was a one-in-five chance that the nearly empty part of the Pentagon was hit, even though the flight maneuvers were world-class precision flying. It is impossible to believe that a terrorist intent on causing as much damage as possible would have flown around the Pentagon to hit the one area with the fewest victims.

An expert terrorist pilot would not have chosen to fly the plane in a 270 degree spiral to hit the side of the least populated part of the Pentagon. Why would al-Qaeda, a group claiming to want to cause as much damage as possible, perform this bizarre flight maneuver to reduce damage to the building? Who chose to hit the one place that would minimize casualties while maximizing the "shock and awe" of the event?

While is plausible that the paralysis of the Air Force defenses could have been arranged in order to ensure the success of the hijackers (and therefore, the pretext for the Oil Wars and Homeland Security), it is unreasonable to assume that these hijackers would have chosen (or been able) to aim for the nearly empty part of the Pentagon.

Flight 11, the first hijacked plane, flew over Indian Point nuclear power station, just north of New York City. September 11 was a clear, cloudless day, and Indian Point is very visible from a distance. An official decision to allow 9/11 to happen would have risked the possibility that a hijacker pilot might have picked the nuke as a more important target -- an attack there would have been catastrophically worse than 9/11.

 

Remote controlled planes

The State Department claims that remote controlled Boeing planes are not possible.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jun/28-581634.html
Remotely Controlled Flight Not Possible
A Boeing Company official stated that Boeing has designed its commercial airplanes so that it is impossible to control them remotely. Elizabeth Verdiev, a spokesperson for Boeing, stated on June 16, 2005:

No Boeing commercial jet transport can be controlled from outside the airplane. No Boeing commercial jet transport can be "commanded" or have its flight controlled other than from within the flight deck by the pilots. Pilots can program the airplane to take off, fly to a destination and land automatically, but Boeing design philosophy keeps pilots in control and in the decision-making loop at all times.

USA Today published an article shortly after 9/11 admitting that remote control technologies actually do exist for Boeing planes.

www.usatoday.com/tech/techreviews/2001/10/2/remote-pilot.htm
10/02/2001 - Updated 12:18 PM ET
Remote piloting: Solution or disaster-in-the-making?
A FedEx 727 cargo plane lands using remote control technology being developed by Raytheon
BOSTON (AP) — There's little doubt that landing a plane from the ground — technology that could prevent hijackers turning a commercial jet into a weapon — could soon be feasible. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question. Raytheon is one of several companies looking to use new satellite technology that could someday allow jets to be landed by people on the ground, in much the same way that hobbyists bring in their model airplanes by remote control. The company announced Monday that its technology had guided a Federal Express 727 to a safe landing on a New Mexico Air Force base in August — all without the need of a pilot. Raytheon says the technology, primarily designed to help navigation, could be useful in a remote landing system. ....
"There's some pretty overt national security concerns I would think," said John Carr, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "The devil is in the details. Is this something we would put on all aircraft? Because I'm sure you can imagine if I can control all aircraft you would create a new target."
But according to James Coyne, president of the National Air Transportation Association, the technology could be a way to avert disasters like those in the terrorist attacks or even prevent others like the 1996 Valujet crash in Florida and the 1998 SwissAir crash where crews were apparently stymied by fire.
"Perhaps in both of those cases, if people on the ground could have been made aware of the problems, those planes could have been brought back to safety," said Coyne, who thinks remote control could be a good idea.
Military and civilian jets have been landing on autopilot for years, but the Raytheon test used technology that provides the extremely precise navigational instructions that would be required for remote control from a secure location. .

One of the companies that manufactures remote control flight systems for planes is the military contractor System Planning Corporation. One of its officials was Dov Zakheim, a project participant in the Project for a New American Century “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” report that concluded a “new Pearl Harbor” was needed to implement the neo-conservative agenda for global domination.

From 2001 through early 2004, Mr. Zakheim was the Comptroller of the Pentagon, in charge of the money flow (a little noticed but extremely important position). On September 10, the day before the “attacks,” Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to admit that $2.3 trillion (not billion) was “missing” from Defense Department financial systems. The timing of this press conference seemed calculated to bury this extraordinary confession under the events of 9/11. Information about this press conference is still archived in mass media websites such as CBS (see www.oilempire.us/trillions.html for details). The case of the missing trillions is also described in Crossing the Rubicon.

It is probably not possible to prove 100% that remote control was used to guide the planes to their targets, but it is the only theory that fits the proven evidence. The black boxes retrieved from the World Trade Center and Pentagon crash sites would confirm or refute this accusation, but their hiding is a form of evidence suppression that indicates the evidence on these recorders would not support the official story.

 

Political Physics: for every Ph.D., there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.

The State Department website about World Trade Center Building 7 verifies how inferential evidence of physical anamolies are unlikely to accomplish needed political changes. Two discussions about “physical evidence” and 9/11 complicity are worth reading to see how their predictions have been shown to be correct.

“The case of 9/11, now being tried in our metaphorical court of the corporate media and public perception, leaves no doubt as to who could produce more expert witness testimony or present them in the most impressive manner. ... It is something else to analyze the temperature at which steel is weakened and determining whether or not an unproven amount of burning jet fuel, in unspecified concentrations and unknown locations could have weakened steel supports in the World Trade Center to the point where an unspecified amount of weight might cause them to buckle.
- Crossing the Rubicon, pp. 13-14

www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/112603_kennedy.html
The Kennedys, Physical Evidence, and 9/11
by Michael C. Ruppert

Investigators of these sorts of crimes have to contend with numerous false leads being offered to distract those with the interest and stamina to stay focused on the details. Gaeton Fonzi was an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the only Congressional effort to get toward the truth of what was done to President Kennedy. Here is his description of how this strategy was used to reduce his effectiveness:

http://cuban-exile.com/doc_001-025/doc0019a.html
The Last Investigation
by
GAETON FONZI
I discovered there are a lot of Cubans in Miami named Julio Fernandez. There are more than a dozen lawyers named Fernandez. Many Cubans, like Americans, are commonly known by their middle name, not their first, and some Cubans are commonly known not by their by father's family name by their matrinomy. Nevertheless, selecting them by their age and word of their anti-Castro activism, I spent weeks talking with scores of Cubans named Julio Fernandez. Schweiker particularly interested in the Julio Fernandez whose name did turn up in an FBI report buried in the Warren Commissions' volume of evidence.  I finally tracked him down in upstate New York. He wasn't the Julio Fernandez who had called Clair Boothe Luce. It wasn't until more than a year later, with the broadened access to information I had with the House Assassinations Committee, I discovered that there was no Julio Fernandez who called Luce.  She had simply concocted the name for Schweiker.
What was interesting about the Luce story was that it had a couple of the characteristics common to so many of the other leads which were fed to Schweiker and, later, the House Assassinations Committee and, when checked out, went no where.  One such characteristic was that the leads usually could not be dismissed outright because they always contained hard kernels of truth mixed in the fluff.

 

Most 9/11 skeptics are now familiar with the statement by Larry Silverstein, who leased the WTC shortly before 9/11, that he decided “pull it” regarding Building 7 (the building that collapsed but was not hit by a plane). Some in the 9/11 truth movement made this comment a “smoking gun” for demolition claims, even though the case for demolition of WTC 7 was made long before his comment was publicized, most notably at the website www.wtc7.net

http://wtc7.net/pullit.html
A review of the numerous websites that assert that Silverstein's remark constituted an admission of demolishing WTC 7 is revealing. Few such sites note that the physical characteristics of the collapse exactly match conventional demolitions, or that fires have never before or since felled steel-framed high-rise buildings -- two facts that constitute an overwhealming case for the controlled demolition of WTC 7. Instead, the pull-it controversy seems to have created a distraction, eclipsing the case for controlled demolition.

“Pull it” is a deliberately ambiguous statement that could have been a form of bait, and now has been discredited by its utterer, probably in an effort to discredit its promoters just as the Rumsfeld “missile” quote was floated and then withdrawn.

The best website that discussed the “pull it” controversy was by Dutch author Joël v.d. Reijden, who has unfortunately “pulled” his excellent analysis from the web (he evidently grew tired of the abusive emails from promoters of the “no planes” hoaxes). Here is his analysis of “pull it”

http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/911_my_own_review.htm [no longer on line]
9/11 – My own review of the entire event.
Apparently Larry Silverstein tries to explain something to us in the 2002 PBS documentary ‘America Rebuilds’:

“I remember getting a call from the, uh, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "You know, we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is, is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse.”

I mailed Jowenko BV and asked if 'pull' was an industry term for 'demolish'. They said it wasn't. Implosionworld said the same thing. I run into the same problem when looking into different dictionaries. There is always a distinction made between 'pull down', 'pull away' and 'pull back'. And I have not been able to find one person on the internet who uses this word as a substitute for 'demolish'. So I think it's safe to assume that Larry needs to clarify what he meant, but unfortunately he refuses to do that.
In the same PBS documentary this is said by one of the construction workers:

"[narrator]The department of design and construction had leveled World Trade Center buildings 4 and 5...[telephone rings] Hello?...ow, we're getting ready to pull building six....[The documentary moves on to the next person] We had to be very careful how we demolished building six..."

Now, lets see what implosionworld told me:

"There is no such phrase in explo-demo. Most likely he meant "pull out" as in have people evacuate. Conventionally, "pull a building" can mean to pre-burn holes in steel beams near the top floor and affix long cables to heavy machinery, which then backs up and causes the structure to lean off its center of gravity and eventually collapse. But this is only possible with buildings about 6-7 stories or smaller. This activity was performed to bring down WTC 6 (Customs) after 9/11 because of the danger in demolishing conventionally."

Of course these companies are not going to adhere to any conspiracy theories, but they did help in dispelling another possible red herring. The fact that it is very likely that 7 WTC has been blown up doesn't change at all, but I wonder why Silverstein made this strange statement and especially why PBS conveniently put that 'ready to pull building six' sentence in. Maybe someone is messing with our heads. I don't know.

and from the same author:

http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/911_summary.htm
Were there explosives in WTC I, II and/or VII? If I had to guess, I would say it's likely, but this theory sounds so ridiculous, that we need more eyewitness accounts and videos. Something that makes me very uncomfortable is that all the prominent 'researchers' I do not trust are peddling the explosives-at-the-WTC-theory.

Update: General Benton K. Partin doesn't seem to agree with this theory. Read that article here

[note: retired General Partin publicized his beliefs that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing involved multiple explosions, and therefore was more than merely a crime involving just Tim McVeigh]

 

It is hard to say whether the Silverstein "pull it" quote is (1) bait, (2) boasting or (3) greatly misinterpreted. Any attorney or public relations representative would state that the context is "the firefighter team had such a terrible loss of life, so therefore they made the decision to pull it (the firefighters)."

The State Department discussion of “pull it” shows that this prediction has been verified.

In September 2005, Silverstein's office issued a "clarification" that shows the futility of relying on this sort of "evidence" to make political change.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Sep/16-241966.html
The Collapse of World Trade Center 7
Allegation:  9/11 Revealed suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, was intentionally demolished.  The primary piece of evidence for this is a comment that Mr. Larry Silverstein, who owned the World Trade Center complex, made on the September 2002 television documentary American Rebuilds.  Mr. Silverstein said:

I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire.  I said, you know, “We've had such terrible loss of life that the smartest thing to do is just pull it.”  And they made that decision to pull it and we watched the [World Trade Center 7] building collapse.

9/11 Revealed and other conspiracy theorists put forward the notion that Mr. Silverstein’s suggestion to “pull it” is slang for intentionally demolishing the WTC 7 building.
Facts:  On September 9, 2005, Mr. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement on this issue:

Seven World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001, after burning for seven hours. There were no casualties, thanks to the heroism of the Fire Department and the work of Silverstein Properties employees who evacuated tenants from the building.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a thorough investigation of the collapse of all the World Trade Center buildings.  The FEMA report concluded that the collapse of Seven World Trade Center was a direct result of fires triggered by debris from the collapse of WTC Tower 1.
In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center.  The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires.  Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.
Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed.  No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, “I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life.  Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.”  Mr. McQuillan has stated that by “it,” Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building.

 

Conclusion: Where, What, How, Who, Why

Where Pentagon was hit: the mostly empty part

What hit the Pentagon: Flight 77, probably electronically hijacked

How Flight 77 was not intercepted: war games that paralyzed the air defenses

The most damning issue is why the Trillion Dollar Air Force did not defend its own headquarters, even after the second plane crash into the World Trade Center (which removed all doubt as to what was happening). The fighter planes that were scrambled from the Norfolk Virginia area after the WTC was hit, before the Pentagon strike, flew east over the Atlantic Ocean instead of northwest toward DC -- an "error" that has not been explained but could be related to "wargames" that apparently inserted fake blips into radar screens. Perhaps a future, authentic, independent investigation with subpoena power will examine the role of the war game exercises in confusing the military response to the hijackings.

John Judge 5/19/2002
www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/WrongQuestion.html
They have spent $13 trillion tax dollars since the end of WWII on this military/intelligence complex, and it cannot protect its own headquarters? It can track every electronic communication on earth, crack the codes of the Al Quaeda in advance of 9-11, locate bin Laden's cell phone, but it can't decipher what it all means?
And beyond that question is the more pertinent one hardly anyone is asking.
* Bush clearly and undeniably had advance knowledge of a terrorist attack on US soil using planes as weapons by 9:05 am on September 11.
* NORAD had it by 8:45 in an unprecedented simultaneous hijacking of four planes.
* The Pentagon had it, as did everyone in DC by 9:05 as well.
* The Pentagon began to evacuate the building, as did the White House and Capitol.
* EVERYONE had advance knowledge of Flight 77 coming towards DC for 40 minutes.Yet, there was a complete defensive stand-down. Interceptors from distant Langley AFB took off late and flew at subsonic speeds to arrive 5 minutes too late. Planes from nearby Anacostia Naval Air Station, Andrews Air Force Base, and the 73rd Air Wing at Atlantic City, NJ never took off. Scramblers in the air already at 9:05 from Otis AFB turned to target Flight 77 and were called off, despite a formal shoot-down order from Bush/Cheney "moments after" the 9:05 crash -- which had ended any speculation of accident or coincidence or hijacking motives.
By that moment they undeniably knew in advance what was coming and where it was headed. Local news announced that DC was the destination. Surface-to-air missiles at the White House and Pentagon remained sheathed in their silos. Despite the planes having turned off communications with ground control towers and their identifying transponders (which also shuts off their own near-range radar screens to avoid mid-air collisions), they were clearly visible to all external radars, they were being tracked by NORAD and DC towers, and they were somehow being navigated directly to their target.
How were they allowed to come into the most restricted air space in the world with no challenge or defense? That is the question that answers both when Bush knew in advance and begs any rational response.
The White House and Pentagon officials have been lying since day one about both advance intelligence knowledge that could have foiled the operation, and about their own ability to prevent, at least, the attack on the Pentagon. Let them answer that.

 

Who coordinated the war games on 9/11: Cheney

An excellent summary of the main points in Crossing the Rubicon is:
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011805_simplify_case.shtml
Crossing the Rubicon:
Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney
by Michael Kane

 

Why 9/11 was allowed (and assisted): Peak Oil and Homeland Security

More important that the technical details of how 9/11 was perpetrated are the motivations for allowing it to happen. This author is not aware of any supporters of the official story that attack the evidence for 9/11 based on:

Additional details on Why 9/11 Happened are at www.oilempire.us/911why.html

In conclusion, the 9/11 truth movement doesn’t need to tell people that 9/11 was an inside job, the message that a portion of the population thinks this has been spread widely by the mainstream media, although to discredit the idea with poison pills. If there is a future for this activism, it lies in emphasizing the best evidence, distancing from the hoaxes, and showing how 9/11 “truth” could be used to shut down the pretexts for war so that resources (people, money, materials) used for “the war that will not end in our lifetime” could be used for a “Power Down” www.powerdown.ws positive scenario for wisely using the remaining oil as a bridge toward a more ecological society. How we “spend” the rest of the oil will determine the future of humanity. www.permatopia.com has some ideas on how this could be done in order to achieve the best case scenario of “permaculture for nine billion people.”