An Honest Difference of Opinion

Prof. Jim Fetzer invited me as a guest to his internet radio program, Real Deal, to discuss my recent presentation at the DC 9/11 Truth Conference, “The Pentagon 757.” In it, I argue a Boeing 757 could very well have struck the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, although under very different circumstances from those posed in the official story. In my supposition, a group of technically competent planners set up a high-speed impact of a 757 into a hardened wall of the Pentagon. They did so to produce a crash scene unlike any previous airplane crash scene. I can’t offer a reason for carrying out such a spectacle, other than to bring a great deal of confusion to the day’s overall treachery.

My supposition is based on what can be inferred about the cr. 2000 state-of-art in analysis of high-speed airplane impacts into hardened walls. Also, my supposition assumes use of automated aircraft control available by government insiders shortly before 2001.

Our sharp differences of opinion were, I think, quite interesting, in that we both strongly believe the official explanations are completely false. Narrowing in on the specific question, did a Boeing 757 crash into the Pentagon?, Fetzer holds strongly the mainstream 9/11 Truther belief — NO.
In stark contrast, I believe the evidence available to the public is consistent with a 757 crash, and thus, the answer should be a tentative YES. I’m not insisting a 757 did crash, but rather, the evidence that one didn’t crash needs to be very persuasive to overcome that pointing to a 757 impact.
 
Fetzer’s first argument against my supposition was that aerodynamic forces would prevent a high-speed airplane flying that close to the ground. He backed up his opinion with that of a number of commercial pilots, who say it is impossible to fly that close to the ground because of what’s called ground effect. My response is that pilots make that case under the assumption the plane would have been flown by a pilot (according to the official story), and configured as a commercial airliner (again, assuming the official narrative). My supposition is that the plane would have been rigged in advance to make close-to-ground flight possible, and that it was not flown by a pilot, but rather by an automated control system. The rigging might have included center-of-gravity control through use of ballast, which could have included water tanks within the cabin, with pumps to transfer water between tanks.

A second area of dispute was the applicability of a F-4 Phantom fighter rocket-sled crash into a massive solid concrete block conducted by Sandia. Fetzer argued it had no applicability, whatsoever. saying the weights of the two airplanes were so different, there would simply be no relationship between the two. Fetzer furthermore argued that the F-4 was filled with water, which would make it completely unrelated to an airplane filled with aviation fuel. I countered, saying the water was used in the F-4 test to simulate the weight and fluidity of aviation fuel. The overall F-4 test was used to validate the analysis tools, so these tools could be applied with confidence to other airplane-impact situations. Although, we Truthers don’t have the ability to use these tools to model a 757 impact into the hardened Pentagon wall, my guess is that the planners did their analysis in advance, assuring themselves the crash after effects would be roughly what they desired.

The third area of discussion involved the lack of debris on the lawn. Fetzer maintained the lack of debris was evidence a 757 couldn’t have hit. I argued the lack of debris is what should be expected, based on the results of the Sandia F-4 test. Fetzer then did, what I consider to be an “appeal to authority,” by bringing up the opinion of General Albert "Bert" Stubblebine. General Stubblebine is featured on a widely viewed YouTube video stating a 757 couldn’t have hit the Pentagon, because there were no aircraft remains to be seen. My response is, although I greatly respect General Stubblebine, he is not aware of what the validated airplane-impact analysis tools would predict, and therefore, he is “wrong” on this matter.

The last area of discussion caught me by surprise. Fetzer showed a photo of the collapse of the Pentagon structure that occurred some time later, taking down a section of the Pentagon to the south of the alleged impact point. We both agreed that section was probably brought down on purpose. Fetzer concluded, the appearance of the Pentagon prior to bringing it down was apparently “not what the authorities desired.” Therefore, they must have brought it down to make the building appear more like a major impact had occurred. I agreed. However, that put my logic in a bind. Whereas I had been arguing the planners probably achieved the result they wished to achieve, this later “adjustment” suggests they fell short of their objectives.

Oh, if we could only know what the planners had planned.

A Shift in Reasoning: 757, Pentagon, and heliport debris

The question on the Pentagon airplane or airplanes is, I think, complicated. A number of apparent conflicts in lines of reasoning has made it difficult for me to settle in on one set of consistent answers. For the past several years, I have favored CIT's north-path airplane with flyover. This hypothesis implied, I thought, either no airplane struck the Pentagon, or an airplane struck in tight time correlation with the flyover airplane. 

Recently, I've taken a more careful look at many of the issues, and have gradually shifted my thinking toward an airplane impacting the Pentagon. One shift was deciding the north-path airplane was more likely not time correlated with the explosive event at the Pentagon face.

Another shift came relative to the "no debris on the lawn" issue. I was bothered the "no-Boeing" folks didn't have much of a comeback to the Sandia F-4 sled test implications. That test provides empirical evidence suggesting that "confetti" is what should be expected when an airplane crashes at high speed into a hardened wall.

An "ah ha" moment occurred when I ran across a photo in a different setting with "confetti-like" debris on the ground. I was familiar with the photo, as Jim Hoffman described the photo as "...portion of the lawn near the heliport." I stumbled across the same photo in the book, Pentagon 9/11, but the ledger read, "...debris-covered helipad."  The helipad, it turns out, is in the exact right spot for deflected debris from a plane flying directly over the cable spools before impacting the Pentagon centered on column 14, the official impact column. This gave a boost to the 757-on-south-path hypothesis.

Treachery in Wedge One

There is much arguing within 9/11 Truth community about what, if anything, struck the Pentagon’s recently refurbished Wedge One. I am on record supporting the idea the plane overflew the Pentagon, with planted explosives as the explanation for the fireball and internal damage. I stated that opinion on Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory” TV show back in December 2010. Since that time, I have mulled over more information, and today, find myself more on the fence if not on the other side. 

It is worthwhile to examine that change in viewpoint. Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) is the primary proponent of the overflight hypothesis. They base this on on-camera interviews of about a dozen witnesses who independently attest to the plane flying north of a CitGo service station to the west of the Pentagon. The most crucial interviews are of the witnesses who were at the CitGo station, Sgt. William Lagasse and Sgt. Chadwick Brooks, interviewed by Craig Ranke. Ranke asks Lagasse how confident he is the plane passed to the north, and he answered, “100%, bet my life on it.”

This idea of asking how confident a person is of their answer is a good idea. If the “Conspiracy Theory” interviewer would have asked me how confident I was of my “overflight” explanation, I probably would have said about 80%. The reasoning -- deduct 10% because there might have been a way to pass north of CitGo and still strike the Pentagon at the location of damage, and another 10% as Sgts. Lagasse and Brooks might have been lying.

At the time, one of my reasons in support of the overflight hypothesis was the flight data recorder (FDR) indicated an altitude higher than the Pentagon as the airplane passed across structure’s face [Balsamo]. 

New information became available with the publication in January 2011 of a new FDR analysis [Legge and Stutt] that decoded 4 additional seconds of data that apparently was on the file released by the NTSB, but had not been decoded. If these additional seconds of data are valid, the radar altitude measurement indicates the airplane did level off at a low enough altitude to strike the Pentagon. There are reasons to be cautious of the FDR, as it has no identifying numbers to authenticate it as having been installed in a particular aircraft, or even that the data came from a plane in flight. All the recorded parameters could have been outputs from of a very complete simulator. Nevertheless, I think these additional 4 seconds of decoded data warrants adjusting my 80% confidence level downward by about 30%, lowering my overall confidence in an overflight to about 50%.

More recently, I have come upon an article reporting on a careful examination of the photographic evidence of damage to the face of the Pentagon. I find it difficult to come up with explanations other than a 757-sized airplane that would cause the damage photographed. With that said, I conclude my 50% confidence should be reduced a bit more, down to 30%. The compliment of this statement, is I now have 70% confidence a medium-size transport airplane struck the Pentagon.   

This idea of making probability estimates for something that is unknowable, at least with available evidence, has been used in other areas of science. Most notably, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) makes use of the Drake Equation. That is, it provides a systematic approach to estimating the probability there is intelligent life on another planet close enough to communicate with Earthlings. As applied to the Pentagon question, possibly stated as the “probability a large airplane struck the Pentagon.” Such a percentage (if expressed that way) would be the product of a number of conditional probabilities. An example of a conditional probability related to the FDR would be “probability the data file provided by NTSB is valid, given the FDR came from aircraft debris recovered from the Pentagon.” 

If probability numbers were used on this “what struck the Pentagon?” issue, it might loosen the polarization between the two sides that now exist within the 9/11 Truth movement. As it is now, people on the two sides sound as if they have 100% confidence in their respective positions. Maybe they do, but they might be willing to back off these hard-over positions if there was a pattern of dialogue which facilitated taking more moderate views.

If we set aside the polarizing issue of what (if anything) struck the Pentagon, it may be easier to reach agreement on which military organizations had significant numbers of victims, and possibly the implications. Of the 125 deaths, the Army had 78, the Navy and Defense Intelligence Agency combined had 46, and Office of the Secretary of Defense had one [Navy History]. This Army section was primarily a financial management/audit area, and may have been devoted to trying to track the $2.3 Trillion Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld publicly announced as possibly “missing” the day before [Honegger]. The Navy and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel are characterized as being part of the Naval Command Center [ibid]. Part of this unit was the Chief of Naval Operations Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP), as described by Washington Post writer Richard Leiby. CNO-IP was responsible for production of daily intelligence briefings and other intelligence materials for the Chief of Naval Operations, Secretary of the Navy, and other senior military and civilian officials, including the Director of the ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence). The ONI was also part of the Command Center [Heidner]. The ONI, it was reported, was at odds with Bush and his primary enforcement agencies -- the CIA and NSA.

The possibility emerges these two functions, Army budget auditors and ONI investigators, may have been moved into the first floor of the vacant Wedge One to be “targets” in the larger scheme for 9/11.

September Reflections

For the first ten years, the 11th was the day to reflect on September 11th. This, the 11th anniversary, for me, the day itself was less of an event, whereas, the whole month seemed to bring on the reflections. Maybe because the background of the upcoming Presidential election, or maybe because the magnitude of the ongoing global financial crisis, whatever the reason, this anniversary of the 9/11 events seemed much different.

Notable in the Presidential campaign is the complete avoidance of the real underlying causes of the global financial crisis. Without singling out which cause is the biggest, lets just say there are several, each would be an elephant in the room. The two major candidates, Barack Obama and George Romney, as well as all their handlers, manage to find fault with their opposition without hinting at the elephants in the room. 

Likewise, there are a half-dozen or so major 9/11 issues within the Truth movement. The leading figures on either side of these issues, and their supporters, seem to be falling into the same polarizing patterns as the politicians in their Presidential races. Here are two examples:

Did a large plane strike the Pentagon?  Of course, the Official Story says American Airlines Flight 77, a Boing 757 did strike the Pentagon. But some questioning the Official Story say no, and others say yes. Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) argues on the basis of a dozen well-placed witnesses that the plane (a large one) that approached the Pentagon was on a path that couldn’t have caused the physical damage. Therefore, the plane couldn’t have struck the Pentagon -- it must have flown over, and the physical damage caused in some other manner. CIT concluded the strongest evidence against their no side, a combination of flight data recorder, radar, and other eyewitnesses, must have all been wrong. The most recent technical article on the yes side was The Pentagon Attack: Problems with Theories Alternative to Large Plane [journalof911studies.com/volume/2010/Wyndham1.pdf] authored (2011) by John D. Wyndham  (PhD, Physics). In concluding in favor of a large plane strike, Wyndham comes close to not even mentioning the strongest evidence on the no side. That strongest evidence came from three eyewitnesses situated at the pivotal point where they could see if the plane flew north of the CITGO station, or south of the station. Since they were at the station, they stated very clearly, independently, that the plane flew on the north side. No question in their minds. However, if the plane did in fact fly on the north side, it couldn’t have caused the damage path at Pentagon.

As an aside, I am on record on the no side. However, the more I continue to study it, the more I think I could change my mind. If I do, I will have to decide the three eyewitness at the CITGO station must have misremembered what they thought they saw. A politician would never admit to such a change of their mind. If they did change their mind, they would find a way glossing over it.

The second example is -- were nuclear devices used at the World Trade Center? At  The 9/11 Toronto Hearings held the weekend of the 10th Anniversary, the question wasn’t even raised. Most probably, any speaker known to have considered nukes wouldn’t have been invited. At The 9/11 Vancouver Hearings held in June, 2012, the question was not only raised, but answered by two speakers (Don Fox [Fox presentation slides] and Jeff Prager [Prager presentation slides]) in the affirmative. I followed their presentations with an assessment of several theories of Twin-Tower destructions [Deets written version]. Nuclear devices came out in first position based on the nine issues I considered.

As a second aside, I included in my “several theories”, one which has received little attention among 9/11 Truth researchers. Going by the name Runaway Open Office Space Destruction (ROOSD)[Global Characteristics of Twin Tower Collapses], it did well in my assessment, coming in second place. However, that I even included it at all drew severe criticism from one of the Vancouver Hearings co-organizers, Jim Fetzer. Furthermore, the advocates for ROOSD were angered their theory was included in a presentation that included nuclear devices, so even though their ROOSD theory received favorable treatment, they prefer to ignore its presence on the list. 

In both these examples, the different sides tend to argue at poles length. They seem to adopt similar tactics as the Presidential campaigns. Either avoid the elephant in the room, or avoid mentioning any topic that might point to evidence favorable to one’s opponent. Seeking the truth doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s play book. 

The elephant in the room for 9/11 Truth may be that it doesn’t matter which side is correct on the detailed “what happened” questions. In the bigger picture which pertains to the “why it happened” questions, it appears a decision has been made at some very high level to do what ever was necessary across international lines to keep hidden massive illegal activities, using illegal methods, with confidence the true reasons could be hidden from the public by a compliant U.S. media, controlled governments, and intelligence agencies to snuff out any potential whistleblowers. Not just hiding the true reasons, but substituting a false reason, in this case, al Qaeda hijackers who supposedly “hate our freedom.” Hopefully, next September, more evidence on the “why it happened” will be known to the public.

Seven Troubling Facts Concerning 9/11

These seven troubling facts have been drawn from the various venues and topics of 9/11. Although it is arguable if any of these reach the status of “smoking guns,” there are a number of “slam dunks,” incriminating clues, and one “dog that does not bark” kind of clue.

1. A free-fall drop of WTC 7 was the prominent feature in all the “collapse” videos. This might be called a “slam dunk,” in that the laws of physics require the addition of energy to remove all the lower steel columns that would otherwise resist the fall. The top visible part of World Trade Center Building 7 is potential energy before it descends. This potential energy must convert fully to kinetic energy during free fall, or it isn’t free fall. This means none of what had been potential energy is available to abruptly remove the lower columns out from under the falling upper section. The only possible explanation is that additional non-gravitational energy sources must have been planted. In conventional controlled demolitions, the other energy sources are placed carefully at the base of columns. When the time comes for detonation, these exotic accelerants do their destructive work as planned, serving as incendiaries or explosives.
   
   The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency assigned to investigate this, agreed the building exhibited a free-fall drop. However, they approached their analysis of the problem by creating a sophisticated computer model of the building, and then declared their computer model was "consistent with" the video records. NIST also said their computer model did not include a “blast” event, and therefore, explosives were not involved. However, this is a pathetic explanation, in that their computer model produced a visualization looking nothing at all like the video records.

2. An explosive event at the Pentagon occurred at approximately 9:32 AM. It was announced as a “fire at the Pentagon” on network TV approximately six minutes before the time of the alleged aircraft impact. This might be thought of as an incriminating clue, in that either there were two separate explosive events, or there was just one that didn’t involve an aircraft. If there was just one, the 9/11 Commission’s accounting of the aircraft impact is completely wrong.
3. The stand down of the Nation’s air defense. Each of the four airplane events started with what should have been declared in-flight emergencies. Loss of communications, deviation from approved flight plans, and loss of transponder signals has always been responded to immediately with a fighter aircraft joining on the wing of the wayward aircraft, to assess the extent of the emergency. This is routine, and the response is always rapid. But on September 11, 2001, none of the four were treated as emergencies. They were all called “hijackings,” taking them into a new protocol put into place just two months earlier. This new protocol actually slowed down the decision-making process to the point where effectively there was no response at all. The net effect was a stand down of the air defense system, an incriminating clue that has all the marks of being intentional.
4. Continual stonewalling by the government. As we reach the tenth anniversary, the continuing government stonewalling has become one of the most disturbing aspects. All three Branches of the Federal government have dug in. No member of Congress even hints at offering support for a new investigation. The Administration is equally uncooperative. For example, efforts by a building professional to gain information on the NIST computer modeling of WTC 7 was denied for such an outlandish reason as saying the release of the information “may endanger public safety.” The Judiciary is doing their share of the stonewalling as well, preventing every petitioner that comes before them from even having the chance to call their witnesses. Taken together, this stonewalling is itself an incriminating clue, suggesting powerful persons of influence may be behind this unwillingness for government officials to at least ask questions.
5. Nanothermite in the dust. Four samples of dust collected independently from assorted locations in lower Manhattan were found to contain a high-tech pyrotechnic, nanothermite. One of the samples was collected less than twenty minutes after the second tower was destroyed, therefore cleanup operations couldn’t have contaminated the dust. Although it isn’t known what role the nanothermite played in the destruction of the towers, the material shouldn’t have been there. An international team of scientists reported on their investigation of the iron oxide – aluminum nanothermite, in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2, 7-31, under the title, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” by Niels Harrit, et al. As government officials have offered no explanation as to how these chips could have found their way into the dust, it represents an incriminating clue.
6. None of the eight pilots entered the 7500 hijack code. Commercial pilots are trained to enter the digits ‘7500’ into their transponder at the first sign of a hijack. This takes only about three seconds to dial in the code and transmit. The fact that none of the eight commercial pilots transmitted this code raises serious questions concerning the hijack scenario itself. This is suggestive of the clue from Sherlock Holmes’ famous case, the “dog that does not bark.”
7. Twin Towers demolished in near symmetry, whereas fires were asymmetric. Furthermore, fires had never before brought down a steel-framed high rise. If fires were able to bring down steel-framed high rises, the resulting rubble would be at least as disordered as the fires themselves. The 9/11 Commission Final Report doesn’t try to explain how the Towers were destroyed, it only goes to the point of global-collapse initiation. Therefore, the Official Story doesn’t even attempt to explain how asymmetric fires turn into a symmetric global collapse. This is at the very least a “slam dunk.”