No Planes on 911 – the two minute video

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

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Part I  -- The Two Minute Video

--  Do you have two minutes to look at a video?[1]

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:  

                                          Do you have two minutes to look at a video?

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:

                         Can you spare two minutes to look at a video?

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."  

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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 11^th, 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.

Question: Do you have two minutes to look at a video?

 The end

---

[1]  Do you have two minutes to look at a video?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqrqqP4fKb4

[2] Morgan Reynolds, “We Have Some Holes in the Plane Stories," (March 2006)

[3] See the  link to nine presentations  by Jim Hoffman, five on the World Trade Center in NYC and three on the Pentagon attack.   http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/index.html

[4]  For a more detailed one page explanation  why the physics are such that the fires in the Twin Towers on 9/11 could not have caused the collapses see Jim Hoffman’s, “The Twin Towers' Fires and Their Possible Effects.”

[5] http://beforeitsnews.com/9-11-and-ground-zero/2012/03/911-airplane-affidavit-by-john-lear-son-of-learjet-inventor-1935777.html

“9/11 Airplane Affidavit By John Lear, Son Of Learjet Inventor,”

[6] Morgan Reynolds, “Revisiting the WTC Building Collapses, Part I “

[7] Ronald Bleier, “Holmgren and Reynolds on No Planes on 911- Exposing the Illusion, “ (2006)

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[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.

[12] Morgan Reynolds, “We Have Some Holes in the Plane Stories," (March 2006)

[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.

[15] http://911scholars.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cell-phone-calls-from-hijacked Cell phone calls from hijacked 911 Airliners were impossible.

[16] Author Elias Davidsson, Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence (2013) and documentarian Massimo Mazzucco, September 11 – The New Pearl Harbor, [16]