Introduction
The impetus for my latest
No Planes on 9/11 article, (17 pages,
7450 words) was a two minute video which exposes the fakery of the video everyone saw of Flight 175 crashing
into the South Tower. In the course of my research I also learned more about
the difficulty amateur pilots would have attempting to steer a Boeing jet into
a targeted skyscraper.
One of the difficult
questions I’ve been asked time and again is: If no planes crashed on 9/11, then
what happened to the passengers? I
finally found a credible scenario in a
twenty minute section of Italian documentarian, Massimo Mazzucco’s s
five hour 2013 documentary, “September 11 – The New
Pearl Harbor,” It turns out that the answer is
closely related to the impossibility in 2001 of making cell phone calls from cruising
airliners. By chance I found corroboration
that cell phone calls at such heights and speeds may still be impossible today when
I recently flew cross country and found that I was unable to text at 35,000
ft. I belatedly realized that my research had explained why my three attempts
to do so were unsuccessful. -- RB
***
Part I -- The Two Minute Video
As soon I saw “Flight
175 – Slow Motion Video,” a two minute video on youtube (h/t JG) regarding the
strike on the South World Trade Center Tower on 9/11, I realized that I had
finally found a vehicle -- and the magic words -- that would get the attention
of friends and family. Since the
video was only two minutes long I was able to approach people whom I suspected would
otherwise balk at entertaining conspiracy theories, especially on this topic.
The video supplied me
with the magic words:
It worked
beautifully. Reactions more than
fulfilled my optimistic hopes. Virtually everyone among the handful of people
to whom I showed it was profoundly affected. Viewers were thrown into confusion
if not outright disbelief about the government’s version of what happened that
day. After watching the video, as often as not, conversation ensued about the implications
of what was seen.
The first anomaly
As the video title --
“Flight 175 – Slow Motion Video”
-- indicates, we see, in “super slow motion,” the purported United
Airlines flight 175 passenger jet crashing
into the South Tower on 9/11. The narrator/producer, Kevin Walsh, an
independent researcher, announces that by slowing down the video he’s going to point
to two “impossibilities.”
The first
impossibility is that when the “plane” strikes the building, we see that it doesn’t
break up into pieces as might be expected, but disappears and is swallowed up
into the building which returns to its per-contact state as if it had never
been struck. Already this suggests a physical impossibility since a building
struck by a passenger jet would not return to its pre-strike state, nor could a
crashing plane slip into a building.. As
Walsh puts it: “a real airplane couldn't have sliced through a building with a
steel façade with reinforced concrete flooring, with 47 steel support beams. A
jet’s wing can’t slice through a steel
building like a hot knife through butter.”
9/11 activist, Morgan Reynolds, author and chief economist
in the Bush administration (2001-2002), helps explain why a jet plane could not
be swallowed up by a steel tower. The
fuselage of an airplane is relatively fragile and is not built to penetrate a
tall steel building. “With only minor
hyperbole,” he writes, a plane’s fuselage is essentially “a hollow aluminum
tube.” Compared to the weight of the
building -- half a million tons—vs the weight of the plane – 140 tons – “the
plane, of course, would be crushed.”
.
Among large jetliner components, only engines and landing
gear would retain serious structural integrity in a collision although small
parts like actuators would remain intact too. ...[P]lanes running into
mountains,...,
concrete barriers, and steel buildings
fare very
poorly, just as speeding
automobiles hitting
a ...
telephone
pole or
tree do.
A plane flying into a WTC tower should break up, shatter and scatter pieces
everywhere.
[2]
The Second Impossibility
Walsh explains that the second impossibility
is in plain sight – pun apparently intended – though he says with chagrin that
the anomaly is sufficiently subtle that it took him almost twelve years to spot
it. He begins with a still picture and
points to a building that’s clearly behind the South Tower. Walsh explains
that if the video was what it was
purported to be, a real amateur video credited to Michael Hezarkhani, a diamond merchant from
Los Angeles, the wing of the plane, as
it moves toward the Tower, would appear in
front of the background building. As
the video proceeds, we see that the plane’s wing appears behind the building, not in front of it. Something is wrong.
Walsh identifies this
as a “glitch,” a layering CGI (Computer Generated Image) “glitch.” Once it’s
pointed out, it seems an absurdly obvious mistake, and goes a long way to cracking the video’s credibility. It seems clear that this video, so critical
to upholding the official story of hijackers, crashing planes and falling
towers, cannot be trusted. It is a fake. My brief experience showing Walsh’s
video indicated that it is this second anomaly of the wing appearing in the
wrong place is that most persuasively exposes it as a scam.
Complacency and fear
As it happens, I’m an
atheist so I don’t believe in God, nor do I believe in alien abductions, or
shape shifting Illuminati. However, if someone presented me with the
opportunity to spend two minutes looking
at what they claimed was evidence for
the existence of any of these phenomena, I suspect I wouldn’t mind taking that
much time out of my busy schedule to
satisfy myself or to please my
informant.
Yet I suspect that my
willingness to look at such evidence arises from my confidence that nothing
shown me in two minutes – or two hours – could rock my world view. But what if
someone were to offer me the opportunity to look at evidence that I actually
feared might overturn my belief system, the means by which I manage to control
and navigate in my own little world? Would I have the courage to spend two
minutes looking at such evidence?
Question:
Part II -- My journey to No planes on 9/11
For about three years
after 9/11 I believed the official story
– I believed that fanatical Muslims used planes as weapons to bring down the
Twin Towers – and all the rest of the
9/11 fable. What I lacked that day was very little. All I needed was someone to
point out that steel-framed buildings do not, cannot and never have been
brought down by fires, no matter how large or intense.
It wasn’t until 2004
that my belief in the official story was overturned by watching a one hour presentation on controlled demolition by 9/11 researcher Jim
Hoffman.[3] From Hoffman’s talk and from other videos on
9/11 research, I learned that for a tall
building to collapse at the speed of
gravity – less than 10 seconds in the
case of the Twin Towers – the intervening resistance, floor by floor, must be
removed. For example, the resistance
provided by floor 89 must be removed before floor 90 can fall freely; and so
forth all the way down. Only by means of
controlled demolition, where explosives are used to remove resistance floor by floor can such free fall take place, By the end of Hoffman’s presentation, I
agreed with his conclusion that 9/11 must have been an inside job since Osama
Bin Laden (OBL) could not have arranged for the controlled demolition of the
Towers.
A prominent real world example of an even more massive fire
which did not cause the collapse of tall buildings was
the One Meridian Plaza
fire in Philadelphia in 1991 which burned for 18 hours and was described
by local officials as “the most significant fire in this century.” Other such
examples include the First Interstate Fire (1988), the One New York Plaza Fire
(1970), the Caracas Tower Fire (2004) and the even more severe Windsor Building
Fire (2005). Sufficiently hot fire above 2500 F – not the relatively small
fires which were quickly going out on 9/11 --
will cause steel to melt and bend but will not remove the intervening resistance
from floor to floor – the only means by which
free fall collapse can occur.
[4]
Hoffman’s convincing
presentation stimulated me to seek additional information about what really
happened on 9/11. I found an authoritative voice regarding anomalies in the
official story in books by Professor David Ray Griffin. Known by his fans as
the Guru of 9/11, he has written at least eleven books on the subject. After reading his first two books, The New Pearl Harbor (2004) and The 9/11 Commission
Report: Omissions and Distortions,(2005) I was convinced that 9/11 was an
inside job. Griffin’s clear and eloquent
prose offered persuasive evidence that
reinforced my understanding that since OBL and fanatical Muslims could
not have arranged for controlled demolition, the alternative must be
that the 9/11 terror attacks were
planned and executed by the U.S. government. In that case, they would have
been masterminded by Vice President Dick Cheney, President George W. Bush, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld et al. Their
motive? They intended to jump start their permanent war agenda via the “war on
terror,” beginning with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
I learned that the
term “a new Pearl Harbor” – which Griffin used as the title of his first book
on 9/11 -- was coined in the 1997 founding document of the neoconservative
Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The phrase encapsulated their stated
objective to maintain a high level of military spending despite the end of the
Cold War. They hoped to effect a “revolutionary” program of unprecedented U.S. global
dominance through unbounded militarism. They actually had the chutzpah to write
that an extraordinary terror event would be necessary to “catalyze” the drastic
change they desired in the political culture
-- to move America off its complacent course as they saw it, into a new
world of endless aggression. As they put it:
“the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change,
is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like
a new Pearl Harbor."
***
No Planes on 9/11?! Some of the
evidence
About a year after I
was convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, an email from a colleague pointed me
to “the best single article on 9/11.” My
friend’s praise turned out not to be
hyperbole. I was soon convinced by
Gerard Holmgren’s ten-page article, "
Manufactured Terrorism – The
Truth About Sept 11," (2004) – that no planes were involved in the
9/11 attacks. Holmgren’s article was also the stimulus for a follow up article
by Morgan Reynolds, author and chief economist in the Bush administration
(2001-2002),
“We
Have Some Holes in the Plane Stories," (March 2006). Reynolds’s
article added gravitas and more detail to the theory and together, the two
articles made for me a powerful, credible case.
Among their strongest points is one similar to the first of
the anomalies pointed out by Kevin Walsh’s video: if a plane with a mostly
aluminum body was to strike a tall building it wouldn’t be swallowed up by the
building: it would break up and parts of the planes would fall to the ground.
The steel jet engines would survive in recognizable form and wreckage of all
types would be available for independent verification. A real plane crash would
leave behind body parts, seat cushions, luggage, and similar evidence. Yet no
such evidence has ever been produced for independent inquiry. (A more recent terrible real world example of
visible post-crash debris can be seen in media photos of the remains of
Germanair crash in the French Alps in March 2015.)
John Lear, a
celebrated professional pilot, the son
or grandson of Bill Lear, the founder of the Lear Jet, whose experience in 40
years of flying included flying jets of
all types, has lambasted the official account of 9/11.[5] In a 2008 affidavit he flatly asserts that no Boeing passenger jet
crashed into the Twin Towers because such an event would have left visible
evidence of wreckage. With regard to Flight 175 – the same flight as in the
Walsh video – he argues that “a real Boeing 767 would have begun ‘telescoping’
“when it struck the steel framed building.
“The vertical and horizontal tail would have instantaneously
separated from the aircraft, hit the steel box columns and fallen to the
ground.”
In another article Reynolds argues
that the ‘unprecedented collapses in steel
framed skyscrapers, bear all the hallmarks of demolition – virtual free fall
speed of collapse, pulverization of concrete
... film and photographic evidence of explosions.”
Reynolds dismisses theories that anything other than explosives caused
the WTC collapses. “In sporting parlance, the contest between two rival scientific
theories produced a rout: demolition 100, impact-fire-pancake-collapse theory
O. The official ‘pancake’ story cannot
account for the wide range of incontestable facts involved in the collapses
while demolition can.” [6]
Holmgren directs attention to the contradiction between the
almost instant claim that Osama bin Laden was responsible, and the surprise of
the Bush administration at the attacks. He points to the apparent inaction and
disinterest of President Bush and Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Richard Myers, during the attacks. Holmgren cites the immediate threat
to invade Afghanistan when it turned out the decision to do so had already been
made by July 2001 and the plans were on Bush’s desk by Sept 9. He takes special
notice of the urban myth that Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Indeed Osama bin Laden’s denial that he had anything at all
to do with the attacks was was briefly reported
in the major media. Six days after 9/11,
CNN
reported Osama bin Laden
saying:
"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks,
which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons."
In its report, CNN included President Bush’s
response. “No question he [OBL] is the prime suspect. No question about
that."
Where are
the Muslims?
Holmgren wonders how credible it was that the FBI was able
to so quickly identify 19 Arab hijackers within a few days. We later learned
that the FBI was ready with the list even before the last plane crashed.
Canadian author and researcher extraordinaire, Peter Dale Scott, reported in
2006 that by 10 a.m. on 9/11
the
“FBI had distributed a list naming 18 of
the 19 alleged hijackers.” Holmgren
is also skeptical about the allegation that passports of some of the hijackers
as well as suicide notes were found at the crash sites. He found it
“miraculous” that the luggage of the purported ringleader, Mohammed Atta, just
happened to be left for the FBI to find at Logan airport. The FBI also found
Atta’s written instructions to his fellow hijackers.
More reason for skepticism appeared when some of the alleged
hijackers began turning up alive after 9/11 and denying any part in terror
activity. Nor were there any Arabic names on the passenger lists provided by
the airlines. Circumstantial evidence that no hijackings occurred was that “not
in not one of the four alleged hijackings did any of the crew punch in the four
digit hijacking code to alert Air Traffic Control.” Holmgren also wonders why
there was no distress call from Flight AA 11 (which allegedly struck the North
Tower) when there was a purported 25-minute standoff, including shooting and
stabbing of passengers.
[7]
More important work researching the lack of evidence for
hijackers has been done by Elias Davidsson, author of Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence (2013).
Davidsson goes into great detail pulling together evidence that there is no
authenticated CCTV video of the hijackers at the departure gates; there are no
authenticated passenger lists or boarding passes; there has been no positive
identification of the hijacker’s bodily remains; nor are there any witnesses
who have seen the hijackers at the security and boarding pass checkpoints.
Impugning Muslims
The “key to acquiescence in the government’s war on terror
and global domination project is public belief in Arab hi-jacked airliners and
crashes,” writes Morgan Reynolds. Widespread belief in Muslim responsibility
for 9/11, Reynolds believes, explains some of the “intense resistance” to the
theory of No Planes. Muslim culpability for this extraordinary terror event
supports the Israeli-Zionist agenda of viewing the Islamic world as an
existential threat and helps to ensure pro-Zionist support for the official
story. It’s difficult to imagine the planners of 9/11 going forward had the
official story not been in support of the Zionist, anti-Muslim agenda.
Practical Difficulties with Planes
Holmgren takes up some of the practical
difficulties of actually pulling off the 9/11 attacks by means of passenger
jets. For example, the planners would
have to choose between using suicide pilots or piloting the jets by remote
control. He writes that the difficulties of using real pilots are not difficult
to imagine.
What if, for example, the Arab pilots haven’t been trained to
fly jets? Or if they haven’t been trained to fly jets without responding to
ground control? What if they don’t wake up in time to make their flights? Eric
Hufschmid, an advocate of the theory that the passenger jets were piloted by
remote control asks similar questions: "What if the hijackers decide to
switch from hitting the World Trade Center to hitting the U.S. Capitol…or they
miss the towers and hit some other building?"
[8]
What about the option of remotely controlling the planes --
which some researchers believe gets around the unlikelihood of U.S. officials
coordinating with Muslim terrorists to drive planes into tall buildings? Holmgren
writes that the option of using remotely controlled planes either with or
without passengers runs into “potentially insurmountable problems with the cover up." A
remotely controlled plane might "hit some other building, just clip its
wing on the tower and crash into the streets or cause a cascade of damage on
other non-targeted buildings, miss altogether and finish up in the Hudson."
To the planners of 9/11, even the smallest risk of missing
the target exactly would be unacceptable, writes Holmgren, since difficulties
with the alternative scenario – perhaps employing cruise missiles, for example
– would be “easily manageable.”
Holmgren suggests some of the problems that the planners
might envision.
“For example, an
unacceptable outcome would be if the plane missed or slightly missed its target
and it was found that there were no passengers. Similarly if there were passengers
and one or more survived to tell their story. Even if no passengers survived,
innocent rescue workers might arrive before the cover up crew and discover and
release forensic evidence inimical to the cover story.”
[9] Holmgren argues that any of these outcomes
would be “far worse” than the relatively negligible risk involved with
potentially contradictory witness testimony in the “18 minutes between the two
tower strikes.” "
[10]
Media: The Key to the Official Story Fortress
If the circumstantial evidence
against the official 9/11 theory is so strong, how does one explain its
popularity and its durability? Although none of those responsible for 9/11 has
come forward and no smoking gun documentation has as yet come to light,
circumstantial evidence is routinely acceptable as the basis for prosecution
and guilty verdicts. The reason the official story continues to be so durable,
it seems, is that most people will tend, as I did, to accept the government’s
version when it is backed up by the media.
Since we rely so strongly on the government for our security and the
stability of our system, we tend not to seek out or take seriously
contradictory scenarios. Especially in such dramatic, high stakes cases, when
there is a media consensus, a magic circle, a fortress of allowable discourse,
is created so that skeptics tend to be
marginalized or invisible.
When Lee Harvey Oswald, the
alleged murderer of President John F. Kennedy was himself murdered two days
later on live television while in police custody, many instantly suspected that
he was shot in order to prevent the exposure of a conspiracy. Such a shocking
and blatant silencing of an indispensable witness was so obviously scandalous
that it seemed a certainty that it would be followed up vigorously by the media
and by high profile politicians and others, forcing a government response.
But in the succeeding days and weeks there
was no such follow-up and no outcry developed. As a result, in time, the public
was lulled into complacency and fell back on reliance upon the government
account.
For all practical political
purposes, an impenetrable magic circle developed around the official story,
which has lasted – in respectable discourse on both the left and right -- to
this day.
[11]
Is the Slow Motion Video a fake?
Two of the dozen or so people to whom I showed the Walsh
video
wondered aloud if it were certain he could be trusted. Was it not
fair to ask if a 9/11 activist like Walsh might be manipulating his audience by
altering key images.
The answer to such
a question would seem straightforward and easily dealt with by viewing the
original CNN video, available on youtube --
Twin
Towers Attack [CNN] - 911 Plane crash.
Comparing the Walsh
video with the CNN video will convince many that the Walsh video is genuine; that Walsh has simply slowed down the CNN
video exactly as he represents. Yet some might still complain that the real
time CNN video proceeds too quickly to observe Walsh’s first impossibility --
that the building has swallowed the plane and closed up afterward
without a trace of damage. The building’s absorption of the plane cannot be
easily seen if at all in real time.
Is (the lack of) Plane Wreckage Decisive?!
By replaying the
early part of the CNN video -- seconds 6-12
-- as the plane strikes the building, viewers can see that the crash
yields no visible evidence of plane wreckage falling to the ground or stuck
into the building. No independently verifiable evidence of plane wreckage has
ever been produced. Morgan Reynolds believes the question of wreckage is pretty
close to decisive.
The most obvious defect of the official story is an absence
or near-absence of conventional airplane wreckage at
each crash site. Government could have ended controversy over planes long ago
by allowing independent investigators to examine part numbers and compare them
to each plane’s maintenance logbook. This did not happen following the 9/11
crashes. (my emphasis)
Reynolds adds that it
is actually difficult to find proof that airplanes crashed on 9/11 since “no
air accident investigations were conducted,” The government’s theory apparently,
is that since there is no doubt that the events of 9/11 were caused by Muslim
terrorists, there was no need to proceed with air accident investigations. [12]
Rebutting Walsh?
It didn’t take long to find an on-line rebuttal to the Walsh
video entitled ,
“9/11 WTC Second Plane -
Michael Hezarkhani Footage - NOT FAKED
by one Thomas David Dilley. Dilley speaks with a British accent, and
provides a photo of goateed young man, perhaps in his late 20s. At first I
wondered if he was an independent activist or a government sponsored
disinformation agent.
Dilley claims that
Walsh’s second impossibility, the apparent layering CGI mistake of a wing
appearing behind a building which is itself behind the South Tower, is NOT
actually a mistake. He claims that the wing is really in the right place
because if you look from another angle, the building supposedly behind
the South Tower is really in front of
it. Therefore, he concludes,
the (CNN)
Hezarkani video is not faked because the wing is really in the right place.
I had little difficulty dismissing the Dilley video as
witting or unwitting disinformation. His argument seemed, after I thought about
it for a bit, deliberately confusing. It’s hard to imagine a building behind
another from one view, and in front of the same building from another view. In
the end, I wondered whether whoever might be behind the Dilley production
considered that they might unintentionally be lending Walsh support by tacitly
granting that his was indeed a bona fide slow motion copy of the CNN video.
I also noted that the Dilley video didn’t address the way
the “plane” was absorbed by the building and closed up afterwards – which can
only be seen when the video is slowed down; nor does Dilley address the
question of the lack of evidence of plane wreckage.
Part III – No Planes
Controlled Demolition Means No Planes
Critical to my understanding of 9/11 as an inside job has
been, what I believe is incontrovertible evidence for controlled demolition –
steel high rise buildings cannot fall at the speed of gravity into their own
footprints absent controlled demolition. They never have done so before or
since.
While working on this paper I was startled to belatedly
realize that those like me who believe that the Twin Towers (as well as
Building 7) were brought down by controlled demolition should ALSO by default
understand that no planes were involved in the 9/11 events since both at the
same time requires the unrealistic scenario of
remarkable coordination between those U.S.
based elements who arranged for controlled demolition of the Towers with
Muslim hijackers.
If it were the case that the U.S. had planned
to bring down three tall buildings in NYC via controlled demolition it was hard
to imagine, for example,
agents of Vice
President Dick Cheney on the phone to Mohammed Atta, warning him not to indulge
in his usual routine of night clubs, alcohol and women the evening before his
big day.
[13]
It’s not that U.S. government agents don’t routinely traffic
with “terrorists” – those willing for money or ideology to take up terror assignments.
Rather, in an operation like 9/11 where all the damage was arranged and
conducted in house, Occam’s Razor suggests
it makes no sense to enlist outsiders.
My view of the incompatibility of employing both planes and
controlled demolition was corroborated by a high profile critic of the official
story who, even while he embraced the controlled demolition theory,
nevertheless insisted that planes actually crashed into the Twin Towers. My
colleague resolved the difficulty with the theory that the planes that crashed
were remotely controlled. As noted above, Holmgren helped me identify this
theory as impractical and essentially unsatisfactory. In the end, I concluded that
proponents of remotely controlled planes were tacitly admitting that in the
real world there would have been no coordination between U.S. officials and
Muslim hijackers.
I later recalled that years earlier the late great left
journalist, activist, and author, Alexander Cockburn, pointed out that the
planes were just a distraction from the shock and awe of the collapsing Towers.
He reasoned that if the Towers were brought down by controlled demolition,
planes were unnecessary. To be sure,
Cockburn was writing from the perspective of someone supporting the official
government theory of hijacked passenger planes. As with the assassination of
JFK, he supported the government theory because he was opposed to conspiracy
theory on principle.
Cockburn’s point about the planes as a distraction was
intended as a rebuttal to those – in the great majority of the 9/11 research
movement -- who still strongly maintain controlled demolition AND hijacked
passenger planes. I suppose they support this arguably illogical position
because they fear they will be
discredited even within the ranks of their own supporters if they risk
venturing onto No Planes territory.
I had anecdotal evidence that it was for political rather
than evidentiary reasons that many 9/11 skeptics insisted on both controlled
demolition and planes when one of my activist 9/11 colleagues admitted as much
to me some time ago. Years earlier he had been far more optimistic than I that
our 9/11 activism would actually lead to
a media and political breakthrough. At that time he argued that embracing No
Planes would damage the 9/11 truth movement since everybody “saw” a plane
crashing into the South Tower. In a
happy twist, it turned out that it was this same colleague who was the one who
emailed me the link to the Walsh video, with the report that due to the video, he had now been converted to
No Planes.
Cockburn’s view is characteristic of the anarchists/Marxist
systemic critique of capitalism and imperialism which holds that individuals
are merely weeds tossed about on history’s great currents. Such a position seems to be the basis for
Chomsky’s (in) famous statement that the assassination of JFK was relatively
insignificant because he was “just a man” – meaning that the blame should
rather fall on the entire corrupt system and not on conspiracy theories that require
specific individuals as decisive historical
forces. As David Ray Griffin has written in The
New Pearl Harbor, it’s not clear why a systemic critique should not be
compatible with an understanding that particular actors in positions of power can also
change history.
Our post 9/11 history has taught us, there can be a high price to pay for accepting uncritically
self-serving stories from the government and the media. Too many millions have already paid their
terrible price in death, destruction and suffering since 9/11 and the future
only seems more bleak for many many more millions. Even in relatively untouched
countries, government encroachment on liberty and privacy are ominous signs of
a loss of democratic protections and a drift toward totalitarian control.
Inexperienced pilots
On the day of 9/11, I readily accepted the notion that
fanatical Muslim pilots had the operational skills to steer a passenger jet
plane into the Twin Towers. Years later,
I was to learn that such a thing was impossible in practice. I learned that the technical impediments were
such that even the most skilled jet pilots could not routinely manage it. John Lear confirms that even he couldn’t do
it without practice – and how does one practice flying a passenger jet into a
skyscraper? The lack of a realistic basis for the government theory
that planes crashed into the Twin Towers was compounded when we learned that
the alleged pilots of September 11th, were amateurs, trained only on
small propeller planes and whose proficiency on these planes was judged “average” or “poor.”
Some of the impossibilities of using a plane as a weapon
John Lear’s 2008
affidavit supported a lawsuit brought by Dr. Morgan Reynolds challenging the
government theory “as to
how and why the World Trade Center buildings collapsed on 9/11.” Although the lawsuit was dismissed “with
prejudice,”[14]
Lear’s affidavit provides striking practical and technical details explaining how difficult it is in practice to steer a
passenger plane from cruising altitude of 35,000 ft into a tall city
building. Lear believes it “would have
been impossible ... for anyone with
little or no time in a Boeing 767 ...
to have taken over and then flown the aircraft at high speed, then descend to
below a thousand feet above sea level and then flown a course to impact the twin towers.” He says that even he couldn’t do it on his
first try.
What is so difficult about
steering a Boeing 767 into a skyscraper?
Lear begins his explanation citing the government theory that the
hijackers would have to murder pilots with box knives. In that case, he points
out, “there would be blood all over the seat, the controls, the center
pedestal, the instrument panel and floor of the cockpit.” The dead pilot would have to be removed; the
seat would have to be adjusted, spreading more blood over the controls and
throttle, making them more sticky and difficult to operate.”
After disposing somehow of
the pilots, the hijackers would have been confronted with an “’EFIS’
(Electronic Flight Instrumentation System) display panel, with its several
screens and clusters of hard instruments.
Lear finds it hard to imagine how an amateur would be able to interpret
the display panel if they had not had the requisite training. How would such a
pilot use the controls, “including the ailerons, rudder, elevators, spoilers
and throttles to effect, control and maintain a descent? The Boeing 767 does
not fly itself nor does it automatically correct any misuse of the controls.”
Even on a clear day a novice pilot would be wholly
incapable of taking control and turning a Boeing 767 towards New York because
of his total lack of experience and situational awareness under these
conditions. The alleged hijackers were not 'instrument rated' and controlled
high altitude flight requires experience in constantly referring to and
cross-checking attitude, altitude and speed instruments. Using the distant
horizon to fly 'visually' ... is
virtually impossible particularly at the cruising speed of the Boeing 767.
The next difficulty Lear
addresses is the irritating clacking sound that would have sounded in the
cockpit as soon as the air speed went above 360 knots (414 mph) since such
speeds exceeds FAA guidelines. This clacker could not be turned off on
9/11/2001, but has since been changed since it interferes with pilot decision
making. The clacker and speed of the
airplane figures in the Lear affidavit because the government version explains
the lack of wreckage due to the high speed of the Boeing jets flying into a steel
framed building, thereby crushing all the wreckage into invisibility.
Last minutes of purported flights into New York City
Another reason a hijacker
would have difficulty finding a relatively straight course into New York City
was “because of the difficulty of controlling heading, descent rate and descent
speed ...” And what would happen, Lear wonders, after the pilot has managed to
effectively use the 67 seconds it would have taken to navigate the last ten
miles to NYC? At that point he would
have had “to line up perfectly with a 208 ft wide target ... and stay lined up
with the clacker clacking plus the tremendous air noise against the windshield
and the bucking bronco-like airplane.” The added difficulty would arise out of
the plane “exceeding its maximum stability limits and encountering early morning turbulence caused
by rising irregular currents of air. [In addition] the control, although
hydraulically boosted, would be very stiff. Just the slightest control
movements would have sent the airplane up or down at thousands of feet a
minute.”
To propose that an alleged hijacker with limited experience
could get a Boeing 767 lined up with a 208 foot wide target and keep it lined
up and hold his altitude at exactly 800 feet while being aurally bombarded with
the clacker is beyond the realm of possibility. ... At the peak of my
proficiency as a pilot I know that I could not have done it on the first pass.
And for two alleged hijackers, with limited experience to have hit the twin
towers dead center on September 11, 2001 is total fiction. It could not happen.”
Cell phone calls are impossible from cruising airliners
Central to the government’s version are the cell phone calls
that were supposedly made from cruising airliners on 9/11. From these calls we
learned that Muslim hijackers had taken control of the planes. Years later I learned that successful cell phone connections from cruising
airliners were (practically) impossible in 2001 and were impossible as
late as 2005 for the same technical reasons (and may also be to this day for
the same reasons).
The reason cell phone calls
from cruising airplanes
were
impossible in 2001 was because
a cruising aircraft at 30,00 - 35,000 ft,
travelling at 500 mph will pass beyond the range of the ground cellphone
tower
before the electronic connecting
procedure, known as the
“handshake” can
be completed. The speed of the airplane and the limitations of cellphone
transmitting power of only five watts (usually only three) make cellphone
communication unworkable from a cruising aircraft.
[15] Cell phone power is deliberately limited to
keep the costs of the phone down and to preserve battery life.
Experiments in the
wake of 9/11 to determine the range of cell phones in airplanes have confirmed
that the higher – and faster -- a plane travels – the fewer chances of success
of a cell phone connection. Both Elias Davidsson and Italian award-wining documentarian,
Massimo Mazzucco in his five hour 9/11 documentary,
“September 11 – The New
Pearl Harbor,” cite a well known experiment conducted in Ontario, Canada, in 2003 by Prof A. K. Dewdney.
[16] Dewdney found “a distinct trend of
decreasing
cell phone functionality with
altitude” such that chances of success were less than one in a hundred for “a
typical cell phone call from cruising altitude. (p. 218).
Supporting such experimental findings, we learn
that the basis of the business model of the airphone industry was to provide a
service not available with cell phones.
When it became clear that claims that cell phone calls on
9/11 were problematic, supporters of the government version shifted their
talking points to claim that the calls were made mostly on airphones. Mazzucco
cites the example of U.S. Solicitor General, Ted Olson, who first claimed that
his wife Barbara, a passenger on AA Flight 77, (Pentagon crash), called him
with her cellphone. However, he later changed his story and claimed she made
her calls on an airphone.
The difficulty for the switch to the airphone version is
that there is official testimony from FBI interviews with the recipients of
calls from the 9/11 passengers that the calls came from cell phones, not
airphones in at least nine cases. Recipients of calls reported that they could
tell from their caller IDs that the calls came from cell phones. This testimony
was so definitive that the government and debunkers alike were forced to
acknowledge that in two cases the
calls were made from cell phones, with the implication perhaps that in these
two cases, the odds were defied and the cell phone calls were connected despite
the technical challenges. Left
unaddressed, apparently, by official
sources are the testimonies of at least seven other calls.
Both Mazzucco and Davidsson present
a good deal of additional evidence that suggests that the phone calls did not
take place on cruising airplanes. The official record is rife with all sorts of
inconsistencies and anomalies. Typically
there is no convincing airplane noise or sounds of struggle or panic, or
credible witness testimony of what might be expected to happen in the case of a
hijacking. In more than one instance
the time of the phone call doesn’t match up with the government scenario of
when they were hijacked.
A notable example is the celebrated case
of Todd
Beamer, a passenger on UA 93, whose widely reported “Let’s roll,” battle cry, as reported by
Lisa Jefferson, a GTA Airphone
operator, decisively established in the public mind, the scenario of the
passenger uprising that supposedly
caused his plane to crash near
Shanksville, PA.
Mazzucco summarizes some of the
anomalies in the record. According to the 9/11 Commission the hijacking took
place at 9: 28. His call to Lisa Jefferson was connected at 9:43, but the
contents of his call are strikingly at odds with the official narrative. Beamer
stated that the plane was about to be hijacked by three individuals with knives
including one with a bomb strapped to his waist. Jefferson estimated that the
call lasted 7 minutes before the hijackers entered the cockpit. This would have
been at about 9:52, but according to the 9/11 Commission Report, the hijacking
took place at 9:28. Mazzucco asks how Beamer could be describing
events that are supposed to be happening in front of his eyes, when in fact
they had already happened half an hour before.
How could they be preparing to take control of the flight when they had
already been in the cockpit for 15 minutes?
And this is only one of many anomalies that Davidsson
records in his fifteen pages record of the details surrounding Todd Beamer’s
call. Davidsson opens his discussion of this call citing Blogger John Doe II’s
summary: “There is basically not a single sentence of the call that is not in
dispute.... Even the famous last words, “Let’s Roll” are in dispute.
(Davidsson, p. 185)
Calls on 9/11 actually came from cell phones
Since it’s clear that
cell phone calls were made and that they could not have been made from the air,
the question becomes where and under what circumstances were they made? Mazzucco’s
five hour documentary includes a twenty minute section analyzing
this question (the last section of DVD
1) with chapter headings such as “What
happened to the passengers?,” “The cell phone calls” and “If not from
the planes, from where?”
What happened to the airplane passengers on 9/11?
Mazzucco frankly admits that we are not likely to ever get
the true story of what happened to the passengers, but from the available
evidence he is able to suggest a not unlikely two-part scenario. In the first
part, the government arranges for a mid-air swap in order to confuse the air
traffic control system. In the second, the government lands the passengers in
an unknown location and persuades them to participate in a “terror drill”
before, we deduce, they were murdered and their bodies disposed of.
Mazzucco explains that the first part, the swap scheme,
would have been similar to the CIA plan proposed by the Joint Chiefs of
Chief-of-Staff and rejected by President Kennedy in the 1960s. Codenamed
Operation Northwoods, the plan called for the shoot-down and murder of airplane
passengers to be attributed to Fidel Castro’s government as a pretext for a
full scale U.S. attack on Cuba. The proposal
“involved the in-flight swapping of commercial
airliners with military drones.” On 9/11, the airplanes could have been swapped
“with a military drone in mid-air unbeknownst to the air traffic controllers.
After the swap the airliner[s] would be landed in a military base. The drone
would continue to fly appearing on radar as the original plane and would be
remotely guided all the way into the target.” The airline passengers would have
been taken to a military base (or some other unknown location) and under the
pretext of cooperating with a terror exercise, pressured into making the cell phone
calls.
Perhaps the most striking bit of
evidence that the phone calls were scripted and the callers under duress comes
at the end of the voicemail to her husband left by flight attendant Cee Cee
Lyles in United Flight 93. At the end of her
cell phone call --- her mobile number was recorded on their caller ID -- she
says good bye to her family and whispers a clue at the very end.
Mazzucco gives the text of her revealing
message. She begins by addressing her husband:
Hi baby,
I’m ...
Baby, you have to listen to me carefully
I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked.
I’m on the plane.
I’m calling from the plane.
I want to tell you I love you
Please tell my children that I love them very much
and I’m so sorry babe.
[The narrator adds that we notice the absence of background noise.]
I don’t know what to say.
There’s three guys
They’ve hijacked the plane
I’m trying to be calm
We’re turned around and I’ve heard that there’s
planes that been, been flown into the World Trade Center.
I hope to be able to see your face again baby.
I love you.
Goodbye,
[Narrator: “After saying good bye she seems to fumble
with the headset as she whispers a few more words into the mouthpiece.”]
It’s a frame.
The narrator repeats her last whispered words, “It’s a
frame,” several times so that the audience can clearly understand that she is
trying to send a subversive message. Adding support to the view that the phone calls were scripted, Davidsson
notes the intriguing detail that at the
end of Cee Cee’s call, some acute
listeners claim to be able to hear someone whisper ... ‘You did great.” (p. 303)
Davidsson writes that if someone actually praised her
performance, it could lend credence to
the theory “that she was acting within the framework of a hijacking drill.” (p.
303) It’s not difficult to imagine why
Cee Cee Lyles’s handler would have been pleased. Cee Cee made two important
points. She gave the impression that she was witness to a hijacking. Also, she
puts a human face on the tragedy as we get a snapshot of someone who knew her
life was in danger.
Zeus and Leda
Yeats’s famous poem, “Leda and the Swan,” begins with a
rape, “a sudden blow” when Zeus, the most powerful actor in the universe, in
the guise of a swan, a false flag, exploits his dominion to achieve his
purpose. In Yeats’s retelling of the myth, Zeus’s rape leads step by step to
the fall of Troy, to the end of a civilization. -
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
The 9/11 attacks were also a beginning: the beginning of a
crusade, stoking permanent war, making
the world a battlefield, in accord with the vision of Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, et al, continued, escalated
and institutionalized by the Obama
administration.
Kevin Walsh’s two minute production, “Flight 175 – Slow Motion Video,” helps to put the lie to one of the
signature videos that helped propel the U.S. and the world into its “global war
on terror,” and perhaps into a tailspin from
which it seems more difficult to escape, month after month and year
after year.
The end
“9/11
Airplane Affidavit By John Lear, Son Of Learjet Inventor,”
[11] The singular popular culture phenomenon of Oliver
Stone’s remarkable movie, JFK (1992)
exposing much of the falsehood of the official story had a remarkable,
unprecedented and long lasting effect on
public opinion. Wide scale rejection of the conclusions of the Warren
Commission is evident even today. ; But the lesson seems to be that if there is
no official follow up in these cases, and no pointed media coverage to stir public protest, there
will be no substantive political
consequences.
[13]
See Daniel Hopsicker
Welcome to
Terrorland: Mohammed Atta & the 9-11
Cover Up in Florida (2004) for a detailed account of the lifestyle of
Mohammed Atta and some of the other “hijackers’”
in the run up to 9/11 in Florida.
[14] Reynolds felt that the court’s
dismissal was highly likely if not certain since his case had the potential to
expose the 9/11 conspiracy in a formal and high profile setting. Had his
lawsuit gone forward, plaintiffs world have had the opportunity to seek answers
from government officials who would be subject to charges of perjury. Reynolds
suggests that “when push c9mes to shove” there is no realistic opportunity to
get justice because “the powerful will be served.” And since the government would not be able to
withstand discovery, it was not surprising that in June 2008 Judge George B.
Daniels dismissed his and two other 9/11 lawsuits with prejudice.
