Re: planes hitting things. It is very helpful and useful to remember just how a plane is constructed. It's not a tank, or armorplated or a solid block. It is an "skin" of metal over a skeleton. it is mostly air and spaces with chairs and luggage compartments and things like that. It isn't built to crash and stay whole. Weight is important in will it get off the ground.
Ebor
Conspiracy theorists down but not out
BY Paul Reynolds
World Affairs Correspondent, BBC News website
The release of new video pictures of the Pentagon being attacked on 9/11 will not quell the endless claims in the world of conspiracy theorists that a missile or military aircraft hit the building instead.
The theorists do not believe eyewitnesses, physical evidence, engineering studies or even the claims of Osama Bin Laden, so it is unlikely that they will be convinced by grainy video frames.
The latest pictures are the missing frames from a series taken from two cameras at a filling station.
If you look closely, you do see what could be a plane, flying very low and then hitting the building, causing a huge fireball. It is consistent with the official account.
However, the new frames do not absolutely without doubt show that this was American Airlines 77 in its final moments, so hope will spring eternal for the conspiracists that they have not been knocked out.
And even if the pictures did clearly show the doomed airliner, the theorists would probably just change their charge.
After all, in the case of the Twin Towers, they argued that the attacks were carried out by, or tolerated by, the US Government. The Pentagon could easily be fitted into that category as well.
Claims
To understand the conspiracy theory, it is worth considering a film called "Loose Change: 2nd edition". Available on the internet, it reveals the full alternative version of what happened to the Pentagon in all its glory. It states:
AA 77 did not crash into the building. And if there was no AA 77, it must have been a missile, a military aircraft or a drone that did it.
The alleged pilot Hani Hanjour was not skilled enough to execute the manoeuvre and the plane would have stalled in the tight turn alleged.
Street lights were knocked down but did not bring down the plane; therefore there was no plane. They could have been deliberately lifted from the ground.
The damage was not consistent with the size of the airliner and therefore there was no airliner.
There were no remains of either the 757 or passengers and therefore neither existed.
Pieces of fuselage found nearby were planted.
Eyewitnesses who said they saw the plane were confused. Others said they saw a commuter jet or a helicopter.
Answers
There are, of course, answers to all of the above, to be found in the report of the 9/11 Commission, in other technical assessments and in common sense.
For example, the limited damage on each side of the impact zone was due to recent strengthening work on the building. Windows that survived were made of shatterproof glass.
Another obvious weakness in the film is that the eyewitnesses chosen are all treated as if they have equal value. And did nobody see the lampposts being lifted out of the ground?
And the passengers...?
The most glaring gap in the theory is surely this. If AA 77 did not end its flight hitting the Pentagon, what happened to it and its passengers?
This appears to be of little relevance to 9/11 theorists. In the course of an e-mail exchange with one of them I asked this question and was told that for all she knew, the plane could have been diverted somewhere and the passengers gassed.
One of the passengers was well-known. She was Barbara Olson, wife of Ted Olson, the US Solicitor general. However, I was told by the theorist that two calls she made to her husband from the plane probably never existed. Exactly where she might be now remains a mystery, it seems.
The film "Loose Change" also claims incidentally that United 93 which came down in a field in Pennsylvania, never crashed (the "crash site" was dug out by bulldozers) but landed at Cleveland and the passengers taken off. What happened to them, one wonders.
It also says that the Twin Towers were brought down by "controlled demolition". Again, great emphasis is placed on immediate eyewitness accounts of "explosions" within the towers, and almost none on later engineering examinations of the sequence of the collapse.
The film is the work of three young American videomakers, who started off making a fictional film about how they revealed that 9/11 was a US government conspiracy.
One of them Dylan Avery has described what happened next: "It was that month that I began writing 'Loose Change', a fictional story about my friends and I discovering that 11 September was not a terrorist attack, but rather, an attack by their own government.
"Upon researching for the movie, it became apparent that the subject matter might not have been entirely fiction. Over two years time, adding more and more information, the fictional movie evolved into what it is today: a documentary."
The film is quite professionally done on a technical level, with sinister music and fast cutting. Avery said it cost only $2,000 to make and was done on a laptop.
Internet influence
It is proving popular on the internet in reinforcing beliefs that 9/11 might not have been all it seems.
The theorists are very small in number but are working in fertile soil. The events are endlessly fascinating.
And the fact remains that some people around the world believe that somehow the US Government might have been involved. Part, most probably, of that suspicion has to do with anger against the United States. There are always conspiracy theories involving the US right across the Middle East and beyond. Many people want to believe the worst.
The new pictures will not have much effect on that kind of thinking.
It might well be that, as in the case of the Kennedy assassination, it will take many years for a settled view on the events of 11 September 2001 to take hold.
Paul.Reynolds-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/a ... 990686.stm
Published: 2006/05/17 15:03:48 GMT
© BBC MMVI
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They say that I am bad news. They say "Stay Away."
AndyHolland wrote:The odds of getting hundreds to thousands of Americans to go along with a conspiracy to kill their own people is 0.
The odds of getting tens of Muslim nutcases trained in Afghanistan to conspire to fly planes into buildings is 1.0.
The degree of difficulty in flying a plane in flight when one has been rudimentarily trained on the flight deck is 0.
The imagination, ill will and lies required to reverse the odds by any contortion of reality - staggering.
If man can be so delluded about this, no wonder we are so delluded to follow the devil by following our own self willed view of reality.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Save us!
andy holland
sinner
1. It doesn't take hundreds of thousands, just the top learders, of the Military and Government, (The simple fact I have to explain this shows you CAN be lead to believe "FANTASTIC LIES" http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4525
ICONOPHILI wrote:1. It doesn't take hundreds of thousands, just the top learders, of the Military and Government, (The simple fact I have to explain this shows you CAN be lead to believe "FANTASTIC LIES" http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4525
Let's go to the link:
The photos below from a Closed Circuit Television Camera in the Pentagon's parking area show something impact against the Pentagon�s walls on 9/11 2001. However, as can be seen these images show absolutely no sign of American Airlines Flight 77.
In other words it could have been caused by anything, even a missile.
Now, back to a message I posted six days ago:
Let's go to the eyewitnesses for a minute. One of the things one might notice on these conspiracy sites is that the same small set of pictures and statements appears over and over. One might think that only a few people saw the Pentagon plane, for instance.
So we go to an official government response to one of the conspiracy theorists. Near the bottom of the page is a list of twenty-five or so eyewitness statements. The plane is identified as an American Airlines jet in all but a handful of these. The two people who identified it as a commuter plane were at considerable distances, and the "cruise missile" identification was cherry-picked out of Mike Walter's account, in which he specifically identifies the plane as an American Airlines jet. Moreover, the remains found at the accident site tally with the passenger roster of Flight 77.
The truth is that nobody has to rely upon a security camera taking pcitures at one second intervals (I watched the "film", Iconophili, and about all it's good enough for is to show that something hit the pentagon). There were dozens of eyewitnesses who testified to fact of an airliner. You already know this, yet you just keep repeating the same old stuff. When I refute something you've claimed (the witnesses, the absence of the commission report on-line) you don't even have the Christian decency to admit your sins.
This is worthwhile for me when it leads me to new sources of evidence and the like. But when you just reuse old garbage, you're not worth anyone's time.
ICONOPHILI wrote:AndyHolland wrote:The odds of getting hundreds to thousands of Americans to go along with a conspiracy to kill their own people is 0.
The odds of getting tens of Muslim nutcases trained in Afghanistan to conspire to fly planes into buildings is 1.0.
The degree of difficulty in flying a plane in flight when one has been rudimentarily trained on the flight deck is 0.
The imagination, ill will and lies required to reverse the odds by any contortion of reality - staggering.
If man can be so delluded about this, no wonder we are so delluded to follow the devil by following our own self willed view of reality.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Save us!
andy holland
sinner1. It doesn't take hundreds of thousands, just the top learders, of the Military and Government, (The simple fact I have to explain this shows you CAN be lead to believe "FANTASTIC LIES" http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4525
Really?
So the fellow I know, Walley Miller who identified the body parts of flight 93 at the scene beginning the day of the crash is a top US government official. Wow!
So who shot the cruise missile into the Pentagon? A top US military leader?
Who faked the television spots of Osama claiming he did it and pass it on to Al Jazeer network? High government officials?
So who rigged the demolition charges at the WTC - top US military leaders?
Come on Iconophilli - its absurd! You have to have hundreds or even thousands of people in on it or doing things that would cause any normal human being to stand up and say - STOP! Its foolishness on top of foolishness.
In WWII, during the Manhattan project, security was tight but by no means perfect. Never-the-less, patriotism tended to keep things under wraps. However, in this, you are requiring people to lie and cheat in order to defend fatherless kids who would destroy 3,000 of their own. The odds of that are 0.
However, 19 fanatics flying 757s - that is very understandable. Trained at US flight schools cause they throw Osama's money around - very understandable. Ask to train on 757 flight decks cause they pretended to be friends with a Saudi Prince who had such a plane, very understandable.
andy holland
sinner
