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Scientific American's Dishonest Attack On 911Research
This is an initial version of the SciAm debunking and may be revised - check back for updates.
Scientific American's Dishonest Attack On 911Research
by Jim Hoffman
Version 0.9, May 26, 2005
5/26/05: 911Research publishes Version 0.9 of this critique
The editors of Scientific American followed in the footsteps of Popular Mechanics in exploiting a trusted brand in order to protect the perpetrators of the mass murder of 9/11/01. The column by Michael Shermer in the June, 2005 issue of Scientific American, titled Fahrenheit 2777, is a pathetic attempt to deceive the magazine's readers into dismissing the overwhelming evidence that 9/11 was an inside job without ever looking at that evidence. More specifically, Shermer attempts to inoculate readers against looking at the decidedly scientific refutation of the official story found on our website, 911Research, with a cluster of disinformation techniques including:
- Mis-attributing to 911Research the erroneous statement that steel's melting point is 2,777ºF
- Falsely implying that 911Research embraces a straw-man argument that the official account of the Twin Towers' collapses depends on the fires having melted steel.
- Contextualizing 911Research as nonsense by surrounding its mention with absurd claims, and racist ideas.
Although the column aims to marginalize the 9/11 Truth Movement generally (without ever acknowledging it by name), mentioning the books Inside Job, The New Pearl Harbor, and 9/11: The Great Illusion, it appears to be aimed primarily at911Research for several reasons:
- It is one of only two sites Shermer mentions.
- It's the alleged source of his 2,777 figure.
It's the target of his mis-attribution of the straw man claim about melted steel.
Its most persuasively argued claim -- that the Towers were destroyed through controlled demolition -- is the only point Shermer attempts to debunk.
Shermer's Bold-Faced Lie
Just after mentioning "creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics," Shermer states:
[A]ccording to http://www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
In fact, nowhere does 911Research contain the figure 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, nor its Celsius equivalent. What 911Research does contain is passages like the following:
1535ºC (2795ºF) - melting point of steel
~825ºC (1517ºF) - maximum temperature of hydrocarbon fires burning in the atmosphere without pressurization or pre-heating (premixed fuel and air - blue flame)
(See The Killer Fires Theory is Pure Fantasy.)
Shermer's blatant lie about 911Research appears calculated to discredit the site in the eyes of the casual reader. Even the reader who doesn't know the melting point of steel is likely to conclude that 911Research chose 2,777 for numerological reasons and ignores physics, and will be very unlikely to type in the unnecessarily long URLhttp://www.911research.wtc7.net .
Shermer's Melted Steel Straw Man
In the above excerpt, Shermer implies that our argument for demolition is that the fires could not have melted the steel. In fact, 911Research nowhere embraces the claim that the melting of the structural steel was a prerequisite for a gravity collapses of the towers. What we do is debunk the claim made by apologists of the official story that the fires melted the steel. This claim appeared in several places, includingan article in Scientific American itself, in which M.I.T. professor of civil and environmental engineering Eduardo Kausel states:
"I believe that the intense heat softened or melted the structural elements--floor trusses and columns--so that they became like chewing gum, and that was enough to trigger the collapse."
The fire-melts-steel idea was also endorsed by structural engineer Chris Wise, who was quoted by the BBC as stating:
"It was the fire that killed the buildings. There's nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning. The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of each other."
In the article that quoted Wise and in other articles, the BBC ran the graphic to the right, which asserts that fires of 800ºC were "hot enough to melt steel floor supports."
For more information on claims by "experts" that air-aspirated hydrocarbon-fueled open fires can melt steel, see:
"Experts" claim fires melted the towers' structures
The Killer Fires theory
Shermer Parrots Debunked Fantasies
After prevaricating about 911Research, Shermer gives a short narrative of the truss failure theory, featuring MIT Materials Sciences Professor Thomas Eagar, who gave us the zipper and domino theory. Shermer cites Eagar's article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, failing to mention that 911Research had long ago debunked that same article. Shermer, not one for facts, exaggerates the article's already fantastic claims, stating that "rugs, curtains, furniture and paper" ignited by the jet fuel "raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Compare Shermer's description of the "inferno throughout each building" to the photo on the right showing the South Tower moments before its collapse.
The claim that the Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled demolition is the only one that Shermer attacks, which he does with the following rendition of the zipper and domino theory:
Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble.
The errors in this passage include:
- The misrepresentation of the steel shelves that held up the trusses as "angle clips".
- The theory of sequential truss failure (Eagar's zipper) -- impossible given thecross-trussing and floor-pan connections.
- the theory of sequential floor failure (Eagar's dominoes) -- impossible since an intact floor would easily absorb the impact of a floor falling 10 feet.
- the suggestion that floor failures could progress to total collapse, when it would leave the the columns standing.
- the idea that a steel-frame building can "crumble" without being shredded by demolition charges.
Shermer goes on explain the symmetry of the collapses:
Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.
Shermer fails to note that no structure before or after 9/11/01 has ever exhibited the phenomenon of top-down total collapse, no matter what fraction of it was air. The non-repeatability of this phenomenon will trouble students of the scientific method, but not Shermer.
Shermer's Unscientific Method
In fact, Shermer's entire method of attacking "conspiracy theories" is unscientific. Consider his language. Scientists almost never use universal qualifiers such as allto describe inexact phenomena. For being published in a magazine titled Scientific American, Shermer is fond of sweeping generalizations.
The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics).
All the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.
All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted.
There are several errors in Shermer's assertion that "a handful of unexplained anomalies" cannot "undermine a well-established theory". First, a single anomaly can undermine a well-established theory, as illustrated by the success of single anomaly -- the Michaelson-Morley experiment -- in overturning the well-established theory of ether. Second, the unexplained anomalies of the official story are better described as a mountain than a handful. Third, the official story is not well-established in any scientific or legal sense, but only in the sense of being endorsed by corrupt government bodies, such as the 9/11 Commission, and unquestioningly embraced by nearly all media.
Shermer's approach is worse than unscientific -- it's fraudulent: he misrepresents his opponent's positions and attempts to associate them with nonsensical and offensive ideas. While failing to identify a single argument of the hundreds made by 911Research, Shermer fraudulently implies that our entire case rests on a straw man argument built on a single fact:
Such notions are easily refuted by noting that scientific theories are not built on single facts alone but on a convergence of evidence assembled from multiple lines of inquiry.
No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
'For example, according to http://www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.'
One needs only to read the slides for my talk The World Trade Center Demolition to appreciate Shermer's contempt for the truth. In that talk, we refer to the vast bodies of evidence compiled on the 911Research site and apply them in multiple lines of inquiry, examining:
- The historical record on the effects of fires in steel-framed skyscrapers
- The evidence-destruction operation at Ground Zero
- The failures of the column-failure and truss-failure theories
- The unverifiability of the progressive collapse theory
- The Twin Towers' collapse features -- the symmetry, rapidity, blast wave, pulverization, and excess heat -- consistent only with controlled demolition
- Four proofs that the Twin Towers were destroyed through controlled demolition
Shermer: Chertoff Protoge
Shermer's column exhibits many of the same propaganda techniques as the ambitious feature article in the March issue of Popular Mechanics by Benjamin Chertoff, for which Shermer professes admiration:
The single best debunking of this conspiratorial codswallop is in the March issue of Popular Mechanics, which provides an exhaustive point-by-point analysis of the most prevalent claims.
Comparing the two attack pieces is instructive. Both pieces mention a similar range of issues, with Shermer adding Jewish conspiracy rumors and UFOlogists to the mix. Both employ the following three deceptive techniques, but with different emphasis.
The straw man argument: attacking a position falsely attributed to your opponent
The reverse straw man argument: falsely attributing a straw man argument to your opponent
Bracketing: mentioning a position of your opponent, but surrounding it with other positions so as to discredit it.
Both pieces use the reverse straw man argument about melted steel. Popular Mechanics makes much more extensive use of the straw man argument. Shermer, in contrast, relies heavily on bracketing. Consider the following paragraph:
'From these sites, you will discover that some people think the Pentagon was hit by a missile; that U.S. Air Force jets were ordered to "stand down" and not intercept Flights 11 and 175, the ones that struck the twin towers; that the towers themselves were razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the planes; that a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania; and that New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved).'
It begins with the Pentagon no-plane theory and ends with the Jewish conspiracy rumor -- ideas with no supporting evidence, which most people will reflexively reject. Sandwiched between them are two valid ideas -- the lack of timely military response and the controlled demolition of the towers -- which Shermer attempts to further muddle with omissions and distortions: he fails to mention the non-interception of Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon almost an hour after the North Tower crash, and misrepresents demolition claims by saying explosives were timed to go off "soon after the impact of the planes," ignoring the 102 minutes the North Tower stood after the impact.
The article as a whole echoes this structure. It opens with a mention of the "9/11 conspiracy book" by Thierry Meyssan -- the original source of the Pentagon no-plane hoax, and ends with an incredible theory of the fate of Flight 77's passengers, hinting at Operation Pearl, in which the jetliners are landed on a secret military base and passengers are herded onto one plane and the others are "electronically towed" out over the Atlantic Ocean for disposal. Such complex zero-evidence-based theories require large numbers of operatives, which is probably their purpose: people are unlikely to believe a theory that requires the silence of hundreds or thousands of people, a point Shermer exploits. In contrast, 911Research speculates that the attack was executed by a team numbering fewer than the alleged hijackers: a feat made possible through computer automation and the exploitation of top-down military command structures. See Operation Pyramid.
Conclusion
Shermer uses an array of deceptive methods to persuade the reader that challenges to the official story of the 9/11 attack are worthy only of ridicule and should not be scrutinized. His primary technique is to use hoaxes and unscientific ideas -- long promoted on the web and in videos -- to bracket the valid ideas that he seeks to shield the reader from. That Shermer went to such great lengths to thoroughly misrepresent the painstaking, scientific, evidence-based work of 911Research is a testament to the site's success
by Jim Hoffman
Version 0.9, May 26, 2005
5/26/05: 911Research publishes Version 0.9 of this critique
The editors of Scientific American followed in the footsteps of Popular Mechanics in exploiting a trusted brand in order to protect the perpetrators of the mass murder of 9/11/01. The column by Michael Shermer in the June, 2005 issue of Scientific American, titled Fahrenheit 2777, is a pathetic attempt to deceive the magazine's readers into dismissing the overwhelming evidence that 9/11 was an inside job without ever looking at that evidence. More specifically, Shermer attempts to inoculate readers against looking at the decidedly scientific refutation of the official story found on our website, 911Research, with a cluster of disinformation techniques including:
- Mis-attributing to 911Research the erroneous statement that steel's melting point is 2,777ºF
- Falsely implying that 911Research embraces a straw-man argument that the official account of the Twin Towers' collapses depends on the fires having melted steel.
- Contextualizing 911Research as nonsense by surrounding its mention with absurd claims, and racist ideas.
Although the column aims to marginalize the 9/11 Truth Movement generally (without ever acknowledging it by name), mentioning the books Inside Job, The New Pearl Harbor, and 9/11: The Great Illusion, it appears to be aimed primarily at911Research for several reasons:
- It is one of only two sites Shermer mentions.
- It's the alleged source of his 2,777 figure.
It's the target of his mis-attribution of the straw man claim about melted steel.
Its most persuasively argued claim -- that the Towers were destroyed through controlled demolition -- is the only point Shermer attempts to debunk.
Shermer's Bold-Faced Lie
Just after mentioning "creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics," Shermer states:
[A]ccording to http://www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
In fact, nowhere does 911Research contain the figure 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, nor its Celsius equivalent. What 911Research does contain is passages like the following:
1535ºC (2795ºF) - melting point of steel
~825ºC (1517ºF) - maximum temperature of hydrocarbon fires burning in the atmosphere without pressurization or pre-heating (premixed fuel and air - blue flame)
(See The Killer Fires Theory is Pure Fantasy.)
Shermer's blatant lie about 911Research appears calculated to discredit the site in the eyes of the casual reader. Even the reader who doesn't know the melting point of steel is likely to conclude that 911Research chose 2,777 for numerological reasons and ignores physics, and will be very unlikely to type in the unnecessarily long URLhttp://www.911research.wtc7.net .
Shermer's Melted Steel Straw Man
In the above excerpt, Shermer implies that our argument for demolition is that the fires could not have melted the steel. In fact, 911Research nowhere embraces the claim that the melting of the structural steel was a prerequisite for a gravity collapses of the towers. What we do is debunk the claim made by apologists of the official story that the fires melted the steel. This claim appeared in several places, includingan article in Scientific American itself, in which M.I.T. professor of civil and environmental engineering Eduardo Kausel states:
"I believe that the intense heat softened or melted the structural elements--floor trusses and columns--so that they became like chewing gum, and that was enough to trigger the collapse."
The fire-melts-steel idea was also endorsed by structural engineer Chris Wise, who was quoted by the BBC as stating:
"It was the fire that killed the buildings. There's nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning. The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of each other."
In the article that quoted Wise and in other articles, the BBC ran the graphic to the right, which asserts that fires of 800ºC were "hot enough to melt steel floor supports."
For more information on claims by "experts" that air-aspirated hydrocarbon-fueled open fires can melt steel, see:
"Experts" claim fires melted the towers' structures
The Killer Fires theory
Shermer Parrots Debunked Fantasies
After prevaricating about 911Research, Shermer gives a short narrative of the truss failure theory, featuring MIT Materials Sciences Professor Thomas Eagar, who gave us the zipper and domino theory. Shermer cites Eagar's article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, failing to mention that 911Research had long ago debunked that same article. Shermer, not one for facts, exaggerates the article's already fantastic claims, stating that "rugs, curtains, furniture and paper" ignited by the jet fuel "raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Compare Shermer's description of the "inferno throughout each building" to the photo on the right showing the South Tower moments before its collapse.
The claim that the Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled demolition is the only one that Shermer attacks, which he does with the following rendition of the zipper and domino theory:
Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble.
The errors in this passage include:
- The misrepresentation of the steel shelves that held up the trusses as "angle clips".
- The theory of sequential truss failure (Eagar's zipper) -- impossible given thecross-trussing and floor-pan connections.
- the theory of sequential floor failure (Eagar's dominoes) -- impossible since an intact floor would easily absorb the impact of a floor falling 10 feet.
- the suggestion that floor failures could progress to total collapse, when it would leave the the columns standing.
- the idea that a steel-frame building can "crumble" without being shredded by demolition charges.
Shermer goes on explain the symmetry of the collapses:
Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.
Shermer fails to note that no structure before or after 9/11/01 has ever exhibited the phenomenon of top-down total collapse, no matter what fraction of it was air. The non-repeatability of this phenomenon will trouble students of the scientific method, but not Shermer.
Shermer's Unscientific Method
In fact, Shermer's entire method of attacking "conspiracy theories" is unscientific. Consider his language. Scientists almost never use universal qualifiers such as allto describe inexact phenomena. For being published in a magazine titled Scientific American, Shermer is fond of sweeping generalizations.
The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics).
All the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.
All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted.
There are several errors in Shermer's assertion that "a handful of unexplained anomalies" cannot "undermine a well-established theory". First, a single anomaly can undermine a well-established theory, as illustrated by the success of single anomaly -- the Michaelson-Morley experiment -- in overturning the well-established theory of ether. Second, the unexplained anomalies of the official story are better described as a mountain than a handful. Third, the official story is not well-established in any scientific or legal sense, but only in the sense of being endorsed by corrupt government bodies, such as the 9/11 Commission, and unquestioningly embraced by nearly all media.
Shermer's approach is worse than unscientific -- it's fraudulent: he misrepresents his opponent's positions and attempts to associate them with nonsensical and offensive ideas. While failing to identify a single argument of the hundreds made by 911Research, Shermer fraudulently implies that our entire case rests on a straw man argument built on a single fact:
Such notions are easily refuted by noting that scientific theories are not built on single facts alone but on a convergence of evidence assembled from multiple lines of inquiry.
No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
'For example, according to http://www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.'
One needs only to read the slides for my talk The World Trade Center Demolition to appreciate Shermer's contempt for the truth. In that talk, we refer to the vast bodies of evidence compiled on the 911Research site and apply them in multiple lines of inquiry, examining:
- The historical record on the effects of fires in steel-framed skyscrapers
- The evidence-destruction operation at Ground Zero
- The failures of the column-failure and truss-failure theories
- The unverifiability of the progressive collapse theory
- The Twin Towers' collapse features -- the symmetry, rapidity, blast wave, pulverization, and excess heat -- consistent only with controlled demolition
- Four proofs that the Twin Towers were destroyed through controlled demolition
Shermer: Chertoff Protoge
Shermer's column exhibits many of the same propaganda techniques as the ambitious feature article in the March issue of Popular Mechanics by Benjamin Chertoff, for which Shermer professes admiration:
The single best debunking of this conspiratorial codswallop is in the March issue of Popular Mechanics, which provides an exhaustive point-by-point analysis of the most prevalent claims.
Comparing the two attack pieces is instructive. Both pieces mention a similar range of issues, with Shermer adding Jewish conspiracy rumors and UFOlogists to the mix. Both employ the following three deceptive techniques, but with different emphasis.
The straw man argument: attacking a position falsely attributed to your opponent
The reverse straw man argument: falsely attributing a straw man argument to your opponent
Bracketing: mentioning a position of your opponent, but surrounding it with other positions so as to discredit it.
Both pieces use the reverse straw man argument about melted steel. Popular Mechanics makes much more extensive use of the straw man argument. Shermer, in contrast, relies heavily on bracketing. Consider the following paragraph:
'From these sites, you will discover that some people think the Pentagon was hit by a missile; that U.S. Air Force jets were ordered to "stand down" and not intercept Flights 11 and 175, the ones that struck the twin towers; that the towers themselves were razed by demolition explosives timed to go off soon after the impact of the planes; that a mysterious white jet shot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania; and that New York Jews were ordered to stay home that day (Zionists and other pro-Israeli factions, of course, were involved).'
It begins with the Pentagon no-plane theory and ends with the Jewish conspiracy rumor -- ideas with no supporting evidence, which most people will reflexively reject. Sandwiched between them are two valid ideas -- the lack of timely military response and the controlled demolition of the towers -- which Shermer attempts to further muddle with omissions and distortions: he fails to mention the non-interception of Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon almost an hour after the North Tower crash, and misrepresents demolition claims by saying explosives were timed to go off "soon after the impact of the planes," ignoring the 102 minutes the North Tower stood after the impact.
The article as a whole echoes this structure. It opens with a mention of the "9/11 conspiracy book" by Thierry Meyssan -- the original source of the Pentagon no-plane hoax, and ends with an incredible theory of the fate of Flight 77's passengers, hinting at Operation Pearl, in which the jetliners are landed on a secret military base and passengers are herded onto one plane and the others are "electronically towed" out over the Atlantic Ocean for disposal. Such complex zero-evidence-based theories require large numbers of operatives, which is probably their purpose: people are unlikely to believe a theory that requires the silence of hundreds or thousands of people, a point Shermer exploits. In contrast, 911Research speculates that the attack was executed by a team numbering fewer than the alleged hijackers: a feat made possible through computer automation and the exploitation of top-down military command structures. See Operation Pyramid.
Conclusion
Shermer uses an array of deceptive methods to persuade the reader that challenges to the official story of the 9/11 attack are worthy only of ridicule and should not be scrutinized. His primary technique is to use hoaxes and unscientific ideas -- long promoted on the web and in videos -- to bracket the valid ideas that he seeks to shield the reader from. That Shermer went to such great lengths to thoroughly misrepresent the painstaking, scientific, evidence-based work of 911Research is a testament to the site's success
For more information:
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/sciam/i...
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Firstly, let me say that I am in total agreement that the buildings were deliberately demolished and that Scientific American's attempted debunking is deserving of the contempt that Hoffman gave it.
Here's my compilation of S11 evidence
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth.html
where - unlike Hoffman - I try to promote every aspect of the evidence, rather than cherry pick for the purposes of a limited hangout agenda. For those who might find the compilation overwhelming to begin with, here is a summary article.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/manufactured.html
Let's look behind the scenes of Hoffman's pretend counter to Shermer .
Why is Hoffman "two faced" ? To get to this, lets examine his limited hangout agenda. Hoffman does a fairly good job of promoting the evidence relating to the demolition of the towers. He would have you believe that he's the great hero of this issue. In fact he's a Johnny come lately, who arrived on the scene after a lot of the hard work was already done, and now runs around trying to take the credit for it, now that the issue has reached a critical mass of awareness.
Well, that would be so bad, if it wasn't that he also spends a lot of time slandering the very same people who blazed the trail before him, and using his support for the demolition issue as a platform from which to launch attacks on most of the rest of the S11 evidence.
Let me explain. At every opportunity, Hoffman attacks the proofs that no big plane went into the pentagon.he also attacks the people who promote it, ignoring the fact they were mostly the same people who blazed the trail for the demolition evidence, the coat-tails of which he now rides so comfortably on.
See the relevant section for the no pentagon plane evidence in my compilation at
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth2.html
At every opportunity he attacks proofs that no big planes hit the WTC. See that evidence at the above link.
Also see
http://members.iinet.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
and also see an archived debate on the issue at
http://members.iinet.au/~holmgren/salter.html
Heh! Hoffman himself makes a rather undistinguished appearance in this debate. His contribution was to argue that the main evidence that a big plane hit the Sth tower is because there isn't any witness evidence for it. That's right ! Hoffman argues that if such a thing happened, thousands of people would have seen it, and thought it so obvious that no would have mentioned what they saw, so if there were thousands of witnesses, then we would expect to have any witness reports, so the fact that there aren't any proves that thousands of people saw it, which proves that it happened.
Heh! Two faced, but only half brained. Hoffman himself doesn't mind descending to the gutter of lunatic debunkery when it suits his limited hangout agenda.
But I'm still coming to the two faced part. This is how the limited hangout agenda works. Everyone and their dog is going to try to use S11 for their own agenda - whatever it is.
A small number of people are interested in simply exposing the full truth for its own sake. Others want to cherry pick those parts which suit their particular agenda and then tell as many whoppers as the Govt to cover up what isn't convenient to them.
And because there are many different agenda involved with the many different people involved, you'll get many different kinds of cherry picking.
Hoffman however, belongs to a group of cherry pickers which seems to be one of the larger groups. That which does a good job of promoting the demolition evidence, mumbles vaguely about the stand down evidence while actually refusing to promote the very good research which was done in relation to it
See the relevant section at
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth.html
and attacks or ignores most other evidence.
The likely motives of this group could be a subject for a very detailed discussion, so at this point, I'll just observe that this "faction" - for want of a better word - is well represented.
Which brings us to the "two faced" aspect of Hoffman's counter to Scientific American. He used exactly the same tactic in his response to Popular Mechnics.
That is, when the stupid debunkers attack Hoffman's pet evidence, he cries foul that they could be so stupid as to deny such proof. That's fine as far as it goes. But when they attack the same evidence which he does - like the no pentagon 757 proof, he does a complete back flip in his logic. He claims triumphantly that this proves that the no plane evidence is "straw man".
See how often they attack it ! he shouts triumphantly. This proves that the no plane evidence has been fabricated to give the debunkers a target. They are able to call us silly. They are able to accuse us of junk science.
Umm, Jim...they use *exactly* the same tactics against your pet evidence - the demolition. But when they do that, Hoffman cries triumphantly
See, they feel the need to attack our evidence. They are worried ! They are launching a huge counter spin operation !
Jim, you can;t have it both ways. You can't claim that the attacks of people like Shermer and Popular Mechanics on the no plane evidence prove how stupid that evidence is, while at the same time, claiming that their attacks on the demolition evidence prove how stupid they are.
That's right ! Hoffman is actually telling us that attacks by morons like Shermer and Popular mechanics on the no plane evidence are proof that its BS ! myself, I prefer to just stick to dispassionate examination of the evidence itself, something whihc Hoffman runs screaming from. But if one were thinking so circumstantially as to try to draw *any* conclusion from the fact that morons like Shermer attack it, surely that conclusion would be that it's valid ?
This is what I mean by double standards. Two faced. This is how the NWO works. They give us villains like Shermer and then set up heroes like Hoffman in fake opposition to him.
Which ever side people take is fine by them. Every time people like Shermer take a swipe at S11 evidence, it gives Hoffman a chance to take a swipe too. When they attack the no plane evidence, Hoffman attacks it too - on the basis that it's giving people like Shermer ammunition.
Shouldn't the very same logic apply to Shermer's attacks on the demolition ? Not in the loony land of two faced Hoffman.
The evidence Hoffman doesn't want you to know about
The object striking the North tower is not a plane.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
The videos of the Sth tower hit which appears superficially to show a large plane hitting the tower are fakes. They were animated with flight simulator. There is no real plane there.
http://thewebfairy.com/911
http://911hoax.com
Two of the allegedly hijacked planes did not even fly that day
htt://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/1177.html
Hoffman's response to this evidence when it was first published was very revealing. He attacked it because he said that it supported WF's no planes video work. Not because he find any fault with it. The fact is that the official flight logs from the Bureau of transportation say that the flights which are alleged to have hit the pentagon and the Nth tower did not even exist.
Unable to find any fault with the documentation, Hoffman attacked the article on the basis that it might lend credence to
no planes theory.
How's that for logic ? If this evidence points us in a direction which we don't want to go, then we should ignore or ridicule it, even if can't find any fault with it.
And even better logic. We should ignore this because it might make people believe something that no-one will believe. That's right ! Unable to come up with any coherent argument against the no planes proofs, Hoffman resorts to the cringing bleat that beause its so unbelievable (why he wont say, but never mind...) that it will discredit other things that are more believable. So when something comes up which makes it more believable, he then complains that this will make the it seem not so unbelievable. Work that one out !
Mind you, this is from someone who believes that the best evidence that a big plane hit the Sth tower is because there isn't any witness evidence to such an event.
Hoffman should be writing for Skeptics Magazine himself, because that's about the level of his logical thinking ability and his capacity for honesty.
As if all that wasn't enough, here we have proof that the passenger lists for the alleged AA 11 flight, published by the media purporting to be official flight manifests, are fakes.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/fake.html
Hoffman doesn't want you to know that either. If he did , he would link it on his site. He would promote it at least as an "anomaly", in the interests of making all relevant information available, even if he's not buying the no planes stuff in general.
But he won't. And the reason is not any fault in the research. It's because it provides more evidence for something that Hoffman doesn't want you to know. That this was a war of the worlds con job. There weren't any hijacked planes. the news is just a movie. This goes way beyond the implication of Govt involvement in S11 and a subsequent media cover up. This proves that it was a giant matrix constructed reality job right from the beginning.
Hoffman is merely playing the script of a "truth seeker' within this movie. He is lying to you just as actively as CNN and the Bush regime.
Visit my links and see the evidence. We no planers deal with real evidence, and can always provide it on demand. Two faced limited hangout perps like Hoffman, resort to cynically using those who they claim to be countering - like Shermer - as a smokescreen from which to launch their continued attacks on that part of the evidence which doesn't suit them.
Besides, steel doesn't have to melt to cause structural damage. I've seen fires where the structural steel inside of a building changes shape from excessive heat. that's all it takes!
You mean those Arabs which are still alive ? Flying the flights that didn't exist ?
And it doesn't matter that the main official explanation for why the buildings collpased was based on lying about a basic technical detail like the melting point of steel ?
No steel framed skscraper has ever collpased from fire. Never. And then we get 3 in one day ? All falling miraculously straight down instead of toppling over ? All at the same speed as a free fall when they're supposed to be smashing through the resistance of their own structure ?
What kind of Unscientific American articles have you been reading ?
Recently a 32 storey building in Madrid burned so fiercely that you can;t even see the building in the photos. Its just a giant torch. And this went on for hours and hours.
And the building didn't collpase. Just like many others.
In spite of my dislike for Hoffman, he did write a very good piece called "The progressive collpase challenge", which if he's reading this, I think would be a good thing to post here, as an example of the absudity of the official story.
Since the lying schmuck occasionally writes something good in the process of his cherry picking activities, we might as well try to get get the best out of what little truth he's prepared to tell.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/06/318706.shtml
Apparently the Portland indy media center was low on his visit list. This thread had some good discussion before the disinfo agents weighed in.
I learned something from Holmgren and his ilk. I learned what a disinfo agent is and how they try to impersonate different kinds of people as part of a strategy to repeat lies ad naseum in an attempt to cover up the truth. It is the smoke-and-mirrors. Disinfo agents are enemies of America. They are no different than spies.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/06/318706.shtml
So rather than fill up the comments column here with the same stuff, I'll just refer readers to the above link for my demolition of the garbage above.
Also, lesser evident to some, Mr. Holmgren has shown a considerable 'tenet' of his own character, in so much as he constantly strives to make ALL of his own output 'read' as precisely as possible.
Where Gerard has shown a considerate effort to assist Jim in the debate, Jim has been more or less evasive and downright weird to follow.
Although he doesn't define his role explicitly, Gerard's issue with Jim raises another point for all. Why are we here? Who is 'stuck' in this process of endlessly debating the melting point of.......blagh-blagh?
No. It's simple as this, we either will or will not exercise our GLOBAL right to demand 'transparency' from the US government about ALL KNOWN INFORMATION CONCERNING SEPTEMBER 11th.
Gerard's US 'patriotism' is therefore highly commendable. I do wish the American's would illustrate a similar, educated response to the omni-present, 'al-C.I.A.-duh' -threat, especially since there is NO VIABLE SECURITY ISSUE for the US citizenry which would be comprimised in revealing every single known detail about the Sept. 11th 'attacks.'
-my 2¢
As for Hoffman, i have to dissent from TS Gordon, i think his work on the WTC collapases is excellent, and he recognizes the complete lack of evidence for any hijackers, though once he goes into anythying else, like the Pentagon, or what hit the WTC, he quickly sinks in self-generated crap.
Pentagon Attack Errors
http://911review.com/errors/pentagon/
There are numerous pieces of evidence that point to the attack on the Pentagon being an inside job. These include:
* The location of the attack: The portion of the Pentagon that was struck was nearly empty due to a renovation program.
* The aircraft approach maneuver: The attack plane executed an extreme spiral dive maneuver to strike said portion of the building from the southwest, opposite the direction from which it approached the capital.
* The incompetence of the alleged pilot: Flight 77 was supposedly piloted by Hani Hanjour, about whom a flight instructor said: "He couldn't fly at all".
* Signs of a cover-up: Numerous actions by officials indicate an ongoing cover-up of the facts concerning the attack.
These and other undisputed facts, constituting highly incriminating evidence of involvement of officials in the attack and coverup, have been largely eclipsed by an ongoing controversy over whether the Pentagon was hit by a jetliner at all. From early 2002, some skeptics of the official story have maintained that the Pentagon was attacked, not by a jetliner, but one of or a combination of a truck bomb, a missile or cruise missile, an attack drone aircraft or commuter jet, a flyover by a 757, and internal demolition charges. 9-11 Research provides a history of Pentagon strike theories.
The debate over what hit the Pentagon has thrived due to the apparent contradiction between the eyewitness and physical evidence. Whereas a large body of reports of eyewitness accounts strongly supports that a twin-enginer jetliner swooped in at a very low altitude and exploded at or in front of the Pentagon; photographs of the damaged facade and lawn show an apparent near-absence of aircraft debris and a pattern of damage to the Pentagon's facade showing unbroken windows in the paths of the outer wings and the vertical tail section.
Numerous points based on the physical evidence of the crash site seem to make an overwhelming cumulative case against a 757 having crashed there, provided one ignores the eyewitness evidence. However, most of these points involve some error in evaluating the evidence. Those errors include the following.
* A Boeing 757 could not have executed the attack maneuver.
* Eyewitnesses saw a small plane.
* The Pentagon attack left no aircraft debris.
* Aircraft crashes always leave large debris.
* The Pentagon attack left only a small impact hole.
* The wings of a 757 should have been visible outside the Pentagon.
* Engine parts from the Pentagon crash don't match a 757.
* Standing columns in the Petagon impact hole preclude the crash of a 757.
* The C-ring punch-out hole was made by a warhead.
* Flight-path obstacles can't be reconciled with the crash of a 757.
Give me a break!
I don't really care about the character of Holmgren, I care about the research. How excited were you about Monica while we blew up people in the Middle East? Trying to bring CHARACTER into this is another age-old disinfo effort. Drop it.
What you SHOULD be looking at are the facts of Holmgren's positions on the WTC. He thinks that a FAKE PLANE was masking an OBJECT that hit the towers.
That's right everyone, a fake plane at the WTC . . . guess you missed it when you were watching CNN all day that day and saw the commercial jets hit. You goofed! Only Holmgren knows that it was actually all fake, what we were seeing.
And this is the guy who has all these great CHARACTER TENENTS?? Who CARES when he's spreading extremist theories about FAKE PLANES and NO PLANE etc.
This is how disinfo works.
They showed us ANIMATIONS, animations that in retrospect don't look convincing at all.
http://thewebfairy.com/911/krash
This is one shown "LIVE."
Notice it is sharply banked, but moving straight ahead.
Notice it hippityhops, like a bug.
Animations are easier to animate when there's only half as many frames, so they duplicated them.
The reporter on the ground didn't see no plane. There's no plane noize drounding out his mike either.
The newsbunnie in the studio "saw" the plane, on it's monitor, and reported to the obviously confused reporter that it was a plane that hit the building.
This sort of live insertion animation technique was used to put a blimp over football stadiums before 911. It was cheaper to animate a blimp and insert it into "live" broadcast than to hire a real blimp.
"live" broadcast has a 20 second (or more, nowadays) delay built in.
It was a MEDIA HOAX event, with CIA/Media partnership well established.
Operation Mockingbird
http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_louise_01_03_03_mockingbird.html
They used missiles.
They showed us cartoon animation of planes along with a B-Grade fictional storyline so that we would attack Afghanistan and get the poppies growing again.
It worked. There have been record poppy harvests since.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/printer_010305I.shtml
Bush Administration Faces Record Afghan Poppy Crop
but not in time to save the Enron drug money laundry and death machine.
First (s)he defends Hoffman's plane at the pentagon spin, simply by cutting and pasting from Hoffman what is no more than a series of stated conclusions without a shred of evidence or common sense to back them up.
Hoffman's style of stating these conclusions with the pompous air of a puffed up academic hero who thinks that simply stating conclusions is a substitute for providing an argument is because he doesn't have any - except for lies.
He parrots the thoroughly busted myth of the "hundreds of witnesses"
http://members.iinet.net.au/holmgren~witness.html
and manages to engage in some carefully selected blindness to not see the standing columns only 16 ft apart, and manages to find a 90 ft hole in the building.
Even if one where to concede a 90 ft hole, I can still prove that its impossible for a wingspan of that size to have been accounted for, and if anybody wants to have that argument, then I'm happy to.
As for the fact that the official records from the BTS say that there was no flight as AA77 that day, Hoffman's one and only attempt to address that of which I am aware, basically said that we should ignore it because it lends credence to the no planes stuff.
Little wonder that "reader" resorted to quoting Hoffman on the pentagon, because unlike Rader, Hoffman writes quite well, to the extent that even when he's writing complete BS, his confident tone might suck in morons like "Reader". And its clear from "reader's" magnificent critique of the no WTC planes proof that (s)he is better off cutting and pasting from others where possible.
It wasn't possible for Reader to quote Hoffman on the no WTC planes , because every time Hoffman has tangled one on one with myself or Rosalee on this issue he's got such a hiding, that he now prefers to cower behind his website and snipe from under a rock.
The fact that the best argument he could come up with for a big plane hitting the Sth tower is that he couldn't find any witnesses for it, therefore it must have happened
archived debate
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/salter8.html
means that Reader had to resort to trying to find his/her own argument for supporting the Bush regime's story of the WTC planes, because Hoffman is being much help.
Hee! "Argument" isn't the word I'd use to describe "Reader's attempt". It's more like a illiterate, choked apoplexy - simply repeating my position over and over in capital letters, I've often debated people who seem unable to distinguish between a conclusion and the argument used to reach that conclusion.
For example, see this hilarious exchange with the now silent and discredited Salter brothers.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/salter.html
But the salters did at least get to the stage of putting forward a conclusion, even if they couldn;t manage to find any argument for it, and resorted to just stating the conclusion over and over. You can hardly blame them I suppose. They didn;t have much to work with, trying to put the planehugger case.
But Reader sinks to new lows in intellectual standards by simply repeating my position over and over with an abundance of capital letters, and somehow thinking that this presents "argument".
The Nth tower object is not a plane. Thats what the video shows. It's simply a fact.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
Salter's best argument about this was to claim that video isn't capable of making a plane look like a plane.
So I went out and took some videos myself, and showed that it does. Not only that, I present those videos in mpeg format , which is what Salter claimed was the problem with the Nth tower video.
Heh ! After all Salter's crap about how the problem is all to do with compressed mpegs, on that site I now prsent mky plane videos in exactly that format against a video of the Nth tower object in a far superior format.
And guess what ? Mine still look like planes, and the Nth tower object doesn't.
And recently when I debated this with someone, they dragged up Salter's argument, and I asked them to explain why my mpegs looked just like planes, so then they said "ah well you see not all mpegs compress"
"So Salter was wrong when he said the mpeg foramt was the problem"
"No , Salter was right. Mpegs are hopeless."
"So why do mine lok like planes?"
"Ah, well not all mpegs are hopeless..."
Round and round the fruit loop. This is the insanity that the planehuggers descend to in their desperation to support the lies of the Bush regime.
The next time they get frustrated with someone who denies the WTC demolition because they think that the law of gravity is only an opinion, they should take a look in the mirror.
The Sth tower plane defies laws of perspective by maintaining the same size relative to the towers regardless of its distance from them, passes through the wall like a ghost without making a hole and without breaking off any parts, and exceeds its maximum speed at low altitude while banked sharply and flying in the opposite direction to what its banking.
We went to war over cartoons.
reader gives a hit of the reason for his her refusal to accept this. Embarrassment that (s)he could have been taken in by such a corny trick, as putting a movie to air and passing it off as a real event.
I tend to think that the truth is more important than protecting one's ego - but "reader", just in case it's important to you, don;t worry most of us were taken in initially as well. I believed it was real plane up until mid/late 2002.
Although, I must add here an anecdote from one of my friends who's very first experience of S11 was seeing the Sth tower hit rear view shot with the sound turned down on the TV, only just having switched it on.
She thought it was some stupid Hollywood action movie with really bad special effects, and wondered why it was on at that time in the morning. And she watched these endless replays of what should thought was a rather cheap movie, she got curious as to what this junk was before she finally realized that it was supposed to be real.
It was a movie. There is no reason to think that it's real except that CNN tells you it is. It's no more real than the scene in Harry Potter where the kids charge straight through a brick wall without making a hole. This is easy technology.
http://thewebfairy.com/911
http://911hoax.com
As for the plane which is supposed to have done it N612UA - sorry planehuggers, the FAA aircraft registry shows the plane as still registered.
Go to the FAA aircraft registry
http://162.58.35.241/acdatabase/acmain.htm
and do an "n number" search for N591UA ( UA 93 on Sept 11) and N612UA
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/salter8.html
Chagrined by the savaging which was justifiably handed out to this imbecilic claim, Hoffman grumbled that he had two other points which we hadn't addressed.
Triple the lunacy, triple the fun.
One was in relation to the Nth tower and one was a generic plane supporting argument. Although "argument" is a somewhat generous word for the murky process produced by his plane addled brain.
Here's what the idiot said
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/salter9.html
[[Of my three points:
> 1. The information content of images/video is proportional to their > resolution.
>
> 2. The conclusions that the no-planers draw from the WTC videos are entirely unsupported.
>
> 3. Hundreds must have witnessed the South Tower crash. If it wasn't a plane, or was something much different than a 767, there should be abundant eyewitness evidence to that effect.
Gerard and Naserian jump on the last one... ]]
Let's look at point 1. Here Hoffman seems to be supporting the Salter claim that the Nth tower video is simply too poor quality to draw any conclusions.
Well, if you just want to say that it's inconclusive and stick to that consistently and use it as the founding assumption for the rest of your argument, at least its logical and honest, despite the tenuous nature of the assumption.
However, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim that that it actually looks like a plane, while simultaneously bickering about the whether the quality of the video is good enough to draw any conclusions. One or the other. Either you claim that it looks like a plane - in which case arguments about video resolution are completely irrelevant - or else if you claim that the video is too poor to tell, then you must concede that your starting point is that you don't what it is and that you are speculating that it *might* be a plane.
The Salters got themselves in a dreadful tangle because they tried to argue both contradictory cases at the same time.
So I asked Hoffman whether he was claiming
a) that the object clearly looked like a plane, and if so, then why was driveling about video quality ?
or
b) whether he was conceding that the object was unidentifiable and he was therefore merely speculating that it *might* be a plane.
He never answered. Not surprising really. He had been watching the mauling that the Salters got when they tried to play both arguments simultaneously. And it's clear that the only semblence of an argument that it's a plane - poor video quality - if used honestly, mandates that one first concede that it doesn't look like a plane and one is merely speculating that it *might* be.
Given that the BTS records show that the alleged AA11 - the main reason for speculating to begin with - never even took off, then it doesn't give the planehugges much to work with.
And the argument about poor video quality has been thoroughly debunked here
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
But it shows the fundamental dishonesty of the 767 argument in relation to the Nth tower. When people try to weasle out of directly stating what argument they are using, then it's clear that they don't have one, and they know they don't have one and are just playing semantic games to try make it look otherwise.
As we've seen Hoffman can be quite skilled with the forked tongue - as long as he can hide behind his own website and not have to debate it. His comments about Popular Mechanics were mostly dedicated to supporting their attacks on S11 evidence, but he did a good job of making it look like the opposite to the careless reader.
But I've saved the best for last. Lets look at Hoffman's second "point" on the planes issue.
[[2. The conclusions that the no-planers draw from the WTC videos are entirely unsupported. ]]
Excuse me, but this is not a "point". It's a crime against the philosophy of logic.
"They're wrong because they're wrong "
One can't use a concluding statement as evidence for itself.
This idiocy is very characteristic of the depths of madness that people descend to in trying to support the Bush regime's story.
The reason is clear. When one does not have an argument, one must resort to the cheap substitutes, one of which is simply stating a conclusion over and over and trying to pretend that it’s an argument, and thinking that the more times you say it, the stroger the argument is.
The fact that Hoffman so eloquently counters this kind of muddled thinking when he writes about the demolition, but then puts on a different face for the rest of the S11 evidence is highly suspicious.
It seems that Hoffman effortlessly oscillates between intelligent and moronic as the agenda suits him.
He appeared on the scene well after the proofs for the demolition had already been established, jumped on the bandwagon, trying to create the impression that he had played a major role in it, and used this as a platform from which to launch incessant attacks against the rest of the S11 evidence.
In his reply to Popular Mechanics, he is caught lying about the stand down evidence - to support PM - while trying to pretend that he's doing the opposite.
Whether you are ready to face it or not, your government has all but admitted that they are NOT accountable to the people they were trusted to protect. The up-shot of 9/11 has been to dissuade us from accepting that reality.
I didn't get to "enjoy" WWII, but next summer, there will be newly completed, "Interment facilities" throughout the warmer Southern states. If you do not act now, there will surely be a small patch of ground where you can rest on your 'BinLaden' -laurels, when the time comes for team Bush-Laden to instigate their planned roll-over to a "New World Odor".
Which crowd of Perps gets to play Judge?
This makes the false assumption that there is a working judicical system with an interest in justice and a respect for truth.
Instead what we have is a Liars Club banquet where the best lie supported by the most money wins.
Courts are about making lawyers rich, not about seeking justice or righting wrongs.
First there was a large trailer parked in font of the impact hole.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/12/305614.shtml
[url]http://investigate911.bravehost.com/trailer.html[/url]
He relies heavily on witness accounts, many who worked for the pnetagon or military.
he seems not able to address his own questions
"Photographs show no signs of gouging of the lawn by a 757's low-hanging engines, even though direct impact damage was limited to the first and second floors of the building. How could such a large aircraft be flown so close to the ground, and with such precision?"
to his credit, he got this right, but it is on his "errors" page, and never addresses the fact to explain how a 757 could have hit it.
(except the theory that it blew up outside)
on the punch out hole, he doesnt even mention the peice of debris that is laying in the hole...
911review.com/errors/pentagon/punchout.html
he says the hole could have been made by a large airliner,
but the idea that the nose, or any other part of the craft made the hole, but totally dissappeared doesnt seem to bother him.
To his credit again, he calls to a question here...
The five frames raise a number of questions about the attack. The first frame shows a vapor trail of the kind made by missiles, not jetliners, and the mostly obscured plane is much too small to be a 757. The second frame shows an explosion whose white color indicates the detonation of an explosive rather than the combustion of jet fuel.
but doesnt address it.
i personally think the video was fake or manipulated.
He keeps this on his page, but says he thinks a 757 hit the pentagon ? is he trying to capture readers?
there are too many "errors" to list, but the idea that a plane blew up seconds before it hit the pentagon seems pretty absurd to me.
as far as the planes/no planes idea,
i dont know.
i DO know that the videos dont seem to make sense, even when you take into consideration the idea of "low quality".
What some people seem to foget, is that people like the WF, and Gerard have done a ton of work for the 911 cause to bring about the truth, well before plane/no plane was ever considered.
When you look at the evidence and it tells you one thing, but the official story says another, you have to make a calculated guess.
Gerard and the WF have come up with just as good ideas as anyone. i sure cant blame them for trying.
if you think all of the videos were real, then google
"ghost gun 175"
i dont claim to know what happened, but its not the official lie...
Brad
[url]http://911index.batcave.net/[/url]
more on the pentagon and hoffman here...
http://www.911-strike.com/PlaneBomb.htm
911batcave (has probably the lowest quality photos that try to prove a "pod" under a plane of any of these sites)
This site seems to be mostly a fan of the pod story, not a primary source for it. It's strangeness is mirrored at a variety of domains (the author is "Brad M," whoever that is, it is a person with the ability to register lots of domain names, but without the ability to differentiate strong evidence from photoshopped fakery).
These photos from the 911batcave website are supposed forensic evidence for the "theory" that the plane that hit the second tower had a pod under the plane that proves it was not the passenger jet it was supposed to be. The photo on the left has a number of attributes that show it has been dramatically altered, and the photo on the right looks like an image on a tie dye t-shirt, not evidence that proves anything other than certain peoples' gullibility.
http://www.oilempire.us/pod.html
the most absurd claim: 9/11 was supposedly done with King Kong sized holograms and missiles, not planes
Perhaps the single most bizarre 9/11 website, it claims that a plane did not hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. Instead, the "webfairy" theorizes that King Kong sized holograms were used to fool bystanders, and missiles were fired at the towers. The fact that the hole in the side of the North Tower is the same size as the cross section of a 767 and even shows the impact of the wings is irrelevant to this incredibly paranoid site.
The fairy godmother of this modus operandi is an internet persona called "webfairy," who claims to be Rosalee Grable, an elderly, poor grandmother in Chicago who somehow has learned how to do sophisticated video analysis and host a very high bandwidth expensive website that hosts more video clips of the 9/11 attacks than any other website. Since the "webfairy" is a befuddled grandmother in Chicago, it makes debunking "her" slightly more difficult psychologically, because who wants to attack a grandmother? Webfairy has spent years creating "new footage" of the 9/11 attacks, even though all of the authenticated video clips were taken that day. Those who are still churning out "new" videos of the 9/11 attacks are almost certainly disinformation, since it is not possible to take any more photos or videos of the event! Debunking the nonsense claims at this site earns the debunkers a steady stream of abuse, but none of this abuse contains any actual evidence to bolster these extremely implausible and illogical claims.
The webfairy's "no planes at the North Tower" claim took advantage of the fact that there is really only one, low quality video publicly available of the North Tower attack. However, the webfairy is easily disproved by the most obvious "physical evidence" - the hole in the side of the North tower is the size of a 767 (see the photo below) The "webfairy" thesis has been of limited utility in discrediting the 9/11 truth movement. It is probable that this wasn't intended to attract supporters, but merely make 9/11 skeptics look silly.
Webfairy, Letsroll911 and In Plane Site
At the very least, the Webfairy and Letsroll sites are closely allied, and may be the same operation. Som spam (unsolicited emails) from the pod theorists has stated that the webfairy has done photographic work for the letsroll site. Webfairy and Letsroll are both located in the same community (Chicago), a city without much 9/11 skeptic organizing. Letsroll hosts webfairy's video alteration work on their website. And the newest promotion of these themes -- "In Plane Site" -- directs viewers to only look at the Letsroll website, bypassing the credible investigations based on verifiable evidence and logic.
http://www.oilempire.us/bogus.html#webfairy
I don't understand why Jim has his head up his ass regarding the reality that no evidence proves planes, and much evidence suggests no planes.
And, frankly, I don't care. It doesn't matter. Should I attack Jim just because I disagree with him on something? Hell, no. (We have Scientific American for that!)
We need to pay more attention to the vast good Jim's done and stop attacking him over garbage issues (that's a tactic of disinfo agents, such as Mark Robinowitz of oilempire infame). And who wants to be bogus like Mark? (It's quite clear, actually, from reading the above comments, who does.)
Good job rebutting the UnSciAm propaganda piece, Jim!
Keep up the good work (and please pull your head out of your ass soon regarding "planes").
In terms of all this talk about "controlled demolitions" vs planes bringing down the building, wasnt there an attempt to bring the WTC via controlled demolitions years before the planes brought the towers down? Is the theory that bombs went off right when the planes hit the building or before they collapsed quite a bit later. There arent many video tapes of the planes hitting the tower but plenty of footage of the towers after the planes hit and before they collapsed so it seems like there is enough information out there to know exactly waht happened after the planes hit. In terms of what happened when the planes hit (in terms of explosions) do the 9/11 conspiracy accounts include any first hand accounts of people in the buildings (there were tens of thousands who did get out)?
Do most 9/11 conspiracy theorists believe that the cause of the WTC collapse wasnt the plane crashs (as SA and PM attempt to debunk) or are the theories mainly about alternatives to the offical story on who carried out the attacks and who knew ahead of time Although for there to be an alternative to "the offical version" there actually has to be an "official version" and Ive never heard any real offical version linking Bin Laden to the WTC attacks via actual connections (its always said he admitted to it on tapes after the fact)
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/manufactured.html
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth.html
From the tone, of the criticism, I believe that that it was made in good faith, so I'm not angry about it, but I'd just like to make an important point.
Hoffman dedicates a very large part of his website to such pissing. Some of it is personally directed at me.
By contrast, my website
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren
contains none. I do not have a section on "disinformation" and "bogus sites ". Because the aim of my site is simply to try to promote as much of the good S11 research as I can in a way which can as easily as possible be understood by the average person. I don’t want someone who is becoming interested in the subject to become immediately drawn into what would look like an endless petty shitfight amongst people who are supposed to be on the same side.
So I turn the other cheek to the numerous sites which dedicate themselves to attacking work which I support, and in some cases my work directly.
So who site is doing the pissing?
But its a bit rich to expect that when the guy who spends so much of his website attacking us, also posts more attacks on us on IMC to not respond. Read Hoffman’s reply to PM carefully.
He actually spends most of the article agreeing with them. It becomes a dual attack - from PM and from Hoffman.
But for those being attacked to respond in the same public forum in which is was posted is "pissing" ?
Please think it through more carefully. I also experienced the destructive effect of Jim Hoffman on email lists when he first appeared on the scene. I saw him twist people's words, deliberately press their anger buttons, turn creative open minded discussions into slanging matches and then after he had provoked people into temper outbursts, mock them for losing their temper.
Then, when it was exposed that he receives his paycheque from a company with contracts to the NSA, he spat the dummy himself and then lied that he had been fired. When that lie was exposed, Hoffman all of a sudden thought that losing one's temper was OK after all.
Now, look around at his site. When he can tear himself away from attacking other people's work, he doesn't mind stealing it and passing it off as his own.
His stuff on the stand -down is almost all stolen directly from http://www.tenc.net without attribution. He also uses original sources dug up by tenc as his own sources - as if he were the original researcher.
By contrast, go to my evidence compilation
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/truth.html
and you'll see that instead of trying to paraphrase the work or fraudulently pass it off as my own, I link directly to the tenc articles, making brief introductory comments. I do *not* pretend that documentation unearthed by others is my own work.
Not content with stealing their work, Hoffman then lies about what that work says, in his reply to PM. He falsely attributes to TENC an agreement that fighter jets were in fact scrambled and just didn’t get there in time, when in fact the TENC research is dedicated to proving just the opposite.
In making this false attribution, Hoffman thus supports the official lie, limiting his complaint about PM to the fact that they accurately report what TENC actually says.
Talk about two faced ! Steal someone's work and take the credit for it on your site, but when its convenient, lie and say that this work actually says the exact opposite of what it does. Pretend to oppose the official story when you are actually supporting it.
But Hoffman's plagiarism doesn’t stop there. His section on the fat Bin laden video is directly stolen from the German site which first published it. The exact name of the site escapes me at the moment, but this is again old work, done by someone else, which would give the impression to an S11 novice inquirer of more of the "mammoth" contribution of hero Hoffman.
In my evidence kit linked above, I also have the fat Bin Laden video evidence - again fully attributed to the original researchers.
But the hypocrisy gets worse. In order to support his work on WTC 7 demolition, Hoffman makes good use of some squib close ups. What he doesn't tell us is that he stole these from the Webfairy, a person who he has relentlessly maligned from the moment that first stuck his two noses into our research discussion groups and started disrupting them. What's outrageously ironic about this, is that Hoffman has constantly supported attempts to ridicule WF's video abilities, mocking her no planes research as someone who doesn't know anything about video. But on the sly, he doesn’t mind using her video work and passing it off as his own.
Hoffman also highlights the important evidence of the time that it took the towers to fall. What Hoffman doesn’t tell you is that it was me who first (as far as I'm aware) noticed this and quantified it. Other people may well have noticed it independently, but I know from discussions we had that Hoffman became aware of it through me.
So while making this a centrepiece of his site's evidence, he then doesn’t mind launching a scathing attack the originator of this evidence in his "disnifo" section.
Meanwhile, my site turns the other cheek to this and just concentrates on what this is supposed to be all about.
But to then suggest that it’s somehow "pissing in the pool" to respond to more attacks from this two faced creep in a public forum is way out of line.
Again, I don't think your comments were badly meant, I just don't that you were fully aware of much shit we've taken from this NSA funded plagiarist and that you hadn't fully thought through the situation.
Most likely the reason that Repost showed up on this thread, was because in a similar discussion
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/06/318706d.shtml
I caught "repost" flat out lying. Apparently too embarrassed to respond, Repost thought it better to hightail to a different discussion site and start again.
The lie was related to my article
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/1177.html
in which I provide official documentation from the US bureau of transportation that there were no such flights as AA11 or 77 on sept 11 2001.
In trying to spin some way out of this documentation, repost claimed that the database I used is only for "completed flights" and that it was therefore incredibly stupid of me to expect flights which were not completed to show up in the database.
Even a cursory examination of the database shows that it is in fact a database of *scheduled* flights and a big part of its specific purpose is to record which scheduled flights are cancelled or diverted - that is which scheduled flights do not complete their flights.
This fact is so obvious that repost's misrepresentation of the database can only have been a premeditated lie.
After I exposed this lie in the discussion linked above, repost thought that maybe it was time to show up somewhere else and hope that I didn’t turn up to remind people that repost is a proven liar.
So, to the evidence.
Firstly, repost also finds in necessary to lie about what WF's position is - "King Kong holograms".
In fact, the situation is somewhat different for the Nth and Sth tower strikes.
In relation to the Nth tower, the object we see in the video is not a plane.
http://members.iinet.au/~holmgren/planevideos.html
http://members.iinet.net/~holmgren/salter.html
Some people think that it's a small plane of some kind. I disagree with this, but anyone can see that at least it's not a large passenger jet.
Which is hardly surprising, since the flight which is supposed to have hit the tower - AA11 did not even exist.
Which is why repost resorted to lying about the BTS database – and why NSA funded plagiarist Hoffman runs screaming from this evidence, refusing to even acknowledge it's existence.
And its also hardly surprising that the passenger lists for the alleged flight also fell apart under close scrutiny as being fabrications.
http://members.iinte.net.au/~holmgren/fake.html
Heh! Four passengers even managed to die on UA 175, on the same day that they died on AA 11 ! Evidence you wont find on Head-in-sand Hoffman’s site.
Now to the Sth tower. The apparent plane in the video is a fake. Not a hologram, just a fake video.
This can be easily discerned by a critical look at slow motion of the various footage.
http://thewebfairy.com/911
http://911hoax.com
and in particular
http://thewebfairy.com/911/krash
http://thewebfairy.com/911/ghostplane2
http://thewebfairy.com/911/mindblower
Real planes do not pass through a wall without making hole or breaking off any parts, like going into a bucket of water without making a splash. They just don't.
Neither do they defy laws of perspective, by remaining the same size regardless of their distance.
Neither do they move against backgrounds which are still.
Neither do they alternate between hovering motionless and leaping forward at 1200 mph, a regular alternation frame by frame. This is because video is easier to fake by duplicating frames.
Neither do they exceed their maximum speed at low altitude while banking sharply and flying the opposite direction th what they are banking.
And this is hardly surprising since the plane which flew UA 175 that day N612UA is still registered as valid in the FAA aircraft registry,
Go to the FAA aircraft registry
http://162.58.35.241/acdatabase/acmain.htm
and do an "n number" search for N591UA ( UA 93 on Sept 11) and N612UA (UA 175 on Sept 11).
even though its supposed to vapourized itself into nothing, at the same time as making cartoon shaped hole in the tower, while being invisible to witnesses.
None of this bothers repost or Hoffman. Hoffman claims that the fact that there aren’t any witnesses to a large plane hitting the Sth tower is proof that hundreds of people actually saw it, which is apparently proof that planes can do all the miraculous things mentioned above.
Before Repost replies with the usual rant of simply writing my name in apoplectic capital letters, with the word "Holograms" similarly emphaszsed with lots of exclamation marks – this appears to be repost’s substitute for argument or documentation - I think it would be appropriate for Repost to explain why (s)he told a premeditated lie about the contents of the BTS database.
Exactly, because your own positions are not based on anything scientific, so there's no way for you to actually evaluate the work of others without dooming your own positions.
To claim the planes were 'fake' is no different than to claim that the cars passing outside your window are also 'fake,' or that everyone who attends a baseball game is being 'fooled,' and the tv footage of the plays is 'doctored' to create fake scores.
There's nothing scientific about it.
Give me a break!
Having established that, lets now look at how Repost and Hoffman use junk science - cartoon physics - to try to support the ludicrous theory that large passenger jets hit the WTC.
[[However, the webfairy is easily disproved by the most obvious "physical evidence" - the hole in the side of the North tower is the size of a 767 ]]
For anyone who has observed the physical world past the mental age of about 3, this is actually proof that it could not have been a 767.
If an object bursts clean through another object - so decisively that it makes a cartoon type shape of itself,
then it means that the striking object has travelled through the the other object relatively unscathed.
Which measn that it will either come to rest inside the building, reasonably intact or else continue on its path with reduced velocity to emerge the other side.
It cant burst through so cleanly that it makes a cartoon type hole and *then* subsequently expire into nothing. Its simple conservation of energy.
It can smash itself to pieces against the building without making significant damage or it can smash the building's resistence aside to enter cleanly without doing a lot of damage to istelf or there can be some kind of compromise between these two outcomes with the destruction being more equally distributed between the striking object and the struck object.
The analogies to this can be easily seen in some every day examples. If you fire an arrow into something, and the arrow passes clean through, it emerges realtively unscathed. It doesn't pass through and then somehow subsequently disintegrate itself.
If you fire an arrow into very hard surface such as a steel plate, and the arrow smashes itself to pieces, the steel plate will be mostly undamaged.
Or if you fire the arrow into something providing medium resistance, you might find that the arrow breaks - but into large recognizable pieces, and there is damage to the struck object, but not in a neat shape of the arrow.
The idea of something making a neat shaped hole of itself and *then* expiring into nothing exists only in cartoons and in the minds of people obsessed with claiming that govt couldn't lie to us about what hit the towers, even thoguh they've lied about everything else, and who have the strange idea that video technology is beyond such fakery.
Reposts ridiculous claim is equivilant to the cartoon scenes where the cat chases the mouse through a mincer machine.
When the cat emerges, it's like a jigsaw puzzle from having been through the mincer, but keeps running for a while continuing to chase the mouse. Finally, it stops, realizes what's happened to it and collpases into pile of jigsaw shaped pieces.
Little kids laugh at this because even by their age, they can see that its impossible - and therefore funny. They realize that In real life, if the cat were to be shredded, it would happen instantly.
Little kids watching cartoons have a better grasp of physics than Repost. repost thinks the cartoons are real.
In years to come, this may be known as the war of the cartoons.
What's even more hilarious about this is that the WTC planehuggers, knowing how ridiculous this lunacy is, then try to falsely attribute this madness to the pentagon no planers.
Because Popular Mechanics , who both Repost and Hoffman support, ridicule the claim that no 757 hit the pentagon by falsely attributing to the no planers the insane idea that planes should leave cartoon shaped holes of themselves in buildings. In fact no 757 debunker that I'm aware of has ever made this claim.
How's that for an Orwellianism ? The planehuggers invent a piece of cartoon physics lunacy to try to pomote the WTC 767s, and then when it comes to the pentagon , sudddenly deny that they every used this argument, falsley attribute it to the no planers and then ridicule the very argument which they invented !
Read Hoffman's support of Popular Mechanics more closely and you'll see how he achieves this magnificently Orwellain backflip. The same for his supporter, Repost.
Complete BS. According to Phil Jayhan from letsroll, WF is the devil incarnate. According to me, Jayhan is at best a megalomaniac liar with appalling research standards. I won't put exact words in to WF's mouth as to her opinion of Jayhan, but I can tell you that its not complimentary.
Here's what actually happened. When WF first noticed the many signs that the Sth plane is a fake, one of them was that there is something seriously wrong with the shape of the planes underbelly. This was only one of the many problems with the video- and one of the more peripheral ones.
For a long time, WF was ignored or ridiculed by most of the 911untruth movement. The she started to get what *appeared* at the time to be some qualified support from people who agreed that the shape of the plane was wrong. One of these people was PJ.
Encouraged by this, after all the shit she had taken, WF made what is no more than a error of character judgment, believing that at last some people were slowly starting to come around. She felt that Jayhan was missing the main point but because he appeared to at least to hvbe come as far as realizing that it wasn’t the plane which the govt tells us, WF assumed that PJ was honest and if a little slow to catch on, at least ahead of the sheeple still bleating that it was UA 175.
So she generously gave up a huge amount of bandwidth on her site for PJ to encourage him. It seems that WF can’t win in the minds of some people. The fact that she was prepared to be so generous and encouraging to someone with whom she still had a fundamental disagreement hasn’t stopped the constant maligning that she a hot tempered bitch who spits the dummy at anyone who faintly disagrees with her.
These constant character assassinations are of course, a smokescreen because they can’t refute her work.
So for quite a while, WF hosted the letsroll site, patiently waiting for PJ to take the next step, but believing that his intentions were honest. Myself, I always thought that PJ’s work was crap, but I also believed that his intentions were good, and tried to give him modest encouragement, and so also tried to ignore the warning signs which in retrospect should have told me to give him the caning he eventually got a lot earlier than I did.
Meanwhile PJ and others were busy taking that one video clue - the problem with plane's shape (while ignoring everything else) and blowing this peripheral point up into a ridiculous theory about it being a real plane refitted with a "pod" for firing missiles.
WF and I never supported this silly distortion of her work, but again we made the mistake of believing that PJ was genuine and that perhaps this luncay was a stage he had to go through on his way to realizing that the plane isn't real at all.
WF and I both plead guilty to being too trusting and too tolerant of this sneaky idiot for too long.
However, it came to a head during an email list debate, when PJ supported one of the most moronic defences of the 757 story that I've ever seen. Someone suggested that planes are made of a soft material like butter, and that if you were to throw some butter at a piece of plastic, it might punch a small hole in the plastic and then squeeze the rest of itself through, which would make it possible for a plane to go through a hole smaller than itself without breaking off any parts.
PJ supported this lunacy, and that was the final straw for WF who already starting to tire of PJ's ridiculous pod theory. she gave him a week to get letsroll of her site.
PJ refused, and after the week was up, WF was left with no alternative but to start doing a few "imporvements" to letsroll to force him to take it off.
This caused PJ to go absolutely bezerk and tell a series of vicious lies about how WF had supposedly stolen his files and refused to give them back and denied him access to them. In fact they were archived in a perfectly accessible place - even I could access them if I wanted, but PJ’s tantrum reached the pyschotic level.
In his outburst against me, he demanded to know why I had never linked to any of his work and I told him that quite frankly it was because it was crap – something which I hadn’t really wanted to say to him, but since he had asked me a direct question , he couldn’t really complain about me giving a direct and honest answer.
As his blood pressure mounted, PJ threw a huge tantrum on his own website ranting in giant letters about WF and I had "defaced " his site, and in an email asked me how I liked the defaced the version of letsroll - to which I quipped that it was a difficult question because I'd have to decide which was the bigger load of crap - his old site or the new cyber tantrum.
Needless to say, PJ’s blood pressure shot up a few thousand more at this quip, ominously threatening to "remember" it.
I've called PJ a lying, two faced backstabber and a complete idiot - which I think is being kind. I've called the pod theory ridiculous. I've expressed mixed feelings about In plane site, expressing concern about the pod theory, but at least acknowledging that its doing a good job of shaking up a lot of people who still believe in wild eyed Arabs with tiny knives.
Heh! These are the people that WF and I are supposedly in league with ? It seems that you can't win. When we express some tolerance towards other views we are "in league" with them. if we say what we really think about them, then we "pissing in the pool".
If the pod theory is a deliberate disinfo ploy, rather than just an act of mass stupidity, then it’s purpose it to confuse people’s understandings of WF’s work.
Not surprising coming from someone who's idea of science is to believes that cartoons are real if CNN tells us.
This includes the abolition of perspective laws and the belif that soldo objects can pass through other solid objects without making a hole.
And my policy of restricting my rebuttals to Hoffman's attacks to public forums is somehow proof that the rebuttals I present here are "unscientific".
Let me see now, so if I post my rebuttals on my website instead of here, then it will suddenly become scientific...?
Make up your "mind", reader.
BTW. On the other IMC thread which I linked above, Reader denies that there is any proof that the WTC towers were demolished, and supports Reposts right to lie about the BTS database.
So, reader is frothing at the mouth about me supposedly trying to discredit the proof of the demolitiion - which (s)he denies anyway.
Reader, why did you support Repost's right to lie about the BTS database ? You approve of lying if its inthe interests of a greater good ? You find it necessary to augment your arguments with lies ?
[[To claim the planes were 'fake' is no different than to claim that the cars passing outside your window are also 'fake,' or that everyone who attends a baseball game is being 'fooled,' and the tv footage of the plays is 'doctored' to create fake scores. ]]
Reader - in case you hadn't noticed - the players on the football field who are closer to you look bigger than the players who are further away.
The cars passing by your window look bigger when they are closer than when they're further away. The window looks bigger than any of them because its closer.
The "plane" in the Sth toer video looks the same size regardless of its distance. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to restate this point.
Even those who are not convinced of this will see that at the very best, Hoffman is a liar and plagiarist, running a duplicitous agenda which has nothing to do with truth, and merely seeks to cherry pick a few selected aspects of the truth about Sept 11 for some kind of personal gain, and doesn't care how much damage he does in order to achieve this goal.
The first issue to deal with is Hoffman's habit of plagiarizing research and then defaming the very people he's plagiarized it from.
If you go to Hoffman's site, you'll see that it's basically divided into two sections.
Some of it is dedicated to pretending to expose the official story. The rest of it is dedicated to attacking most of the S11 evidence and supporting the official story to which he claims to take exception.
As we'll see, the positive section has been built purely as a platform from which to piss on other research and researchers.
Let's first examine his supposed credentials as an S11 researcher. Hoffman's section on the WTC demolition is actually quite good. This is the platform which he needs in order to launch his attacks. The reason that it's a good treatment of the demolition issue is because Hoffman actually made only minor contributions to it. Most of it is plagiarized from earlier researchers such as J. McMichael and Jeff King (also known as "Plaguepuppy" ) who had the WTC demolition case proven well before anybody had heard of Hoffman. Hoffman has made some useful refinements of their arguments, but it's only icing on the cake of proof which was already in the public domain before Hoffman appeared.
In addition , Hoffman has the unpleasant habit of attacking as supposed Govt agents the very same people from whom he steals his work. Let me give you one stunning example of this.
Hoffman has been particularly vicious in his attacks on the Webfairy http://thewebfairy.com/911
He has ridiculed her skills as a video analyst in relation to the work she's done on the no WTC planes issue. What Hoffman doesn't tell you is that at the same time as delivering this constant barrage of ridicule, and of accusing her of being a spook, he's quietly stolen some of her work on the WTC 7 demolition and passed it off as his own.
WF made some close ups of demolition squibs, close ups of which Hoffman makes good use - without attribution - while at the same time, snarling to the world that WF is a spook who is laughably incompetent with video.
Hoffman has also accused me of being a spook because of my work on the no planes issue.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren~manufactured.html
What Hoffman doesn't tell you is that while he makes much of the smoking gun proof that the towers fell too quickly for a pancake collapse to be possible, that he learned of this aspect of the evidence from me, and used my original attempts to quantify the problem as the basis from which to develop his own work. He's refined it somewhat, which is what I wanted someone to do with it. However it's a bit rich to them attack the originator of this work as a spook, while also writing them out of the history of the development of the evidence.
For a newcomer to the evidence, a visit to Hoffman's site might give the impression that he played a major role in proving the WTC demolition. In fact he's done little more than tweak and refine the already existing work of the same people he's attacking. Because Jeff King, IMO the best demolition researcher, also supports the no planes evidence, Hoffman has written him out of the history, casting him by implication as a spook, and also incorporating King's work into his list of plagiarized achievements.
Hoffman's plagiarism is not limited to the demolition evidence. In order to maintain his cover it is necessary for Hoffman to pretend to have made a contribution in other areas.
Thus he supposedly exposes the Bin Laden confession video as a fake here.
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/deceptions/binladinvideo.html
This is completely plagiarized without attribution from this site which published it about 2 1/2 years before Hoffman.
http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/bin-laden-vergleich.html
The top half is in German, but if you scroll down, there's also an English version.
Now we turn to Hoffman's plagiarism of the stand down evidence which was published by Illarion Bykov and Jared Israel on http://www.tenc.net
In some ways this evidence is now somewhat dated, because it shows evidence for a military stand down to allow the hijacked planes to reach their targets.
Since we now know that there weren't any hijacked planes, it's debatable that any such stand down would have needed. Nevertheless, at the time it was published, the Tenc research was courageous and groundbreaking work, and blew a huge hole in the official story, prompting others to dig deeper and bring the evidence to the stage its reached today.
It's also worth noting that Hoffman showed up only after most of the current evidence on S11 had already been assembled, and people had been loudly distributing it for about two years. Tenc's work was published very early, before there was any "911 turth movement", when the authors had no way of knowing how the Govt would react to such publications and so could well have been risking their lives.
The respect that Hoffman pays is by plagiarizing their work and then defaming them.
This article from TENC
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-2.htm
has been directly ripped off by Hoffman here
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/alibis/cheney.html
And he's only just warming up.
TENC original http://emperor.vwh.net/indict/urgent.htm
Hoffman rip off http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/analysis/norad/index.html
TENC original http://www.emperors-clothes.com/indict/faq.htm
Hoffman rip off http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/defense/index.html
TENC original http://emperor.vwh.net/indict/urgent.htm
Hoffman rip off http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/alibis/myers.html
And of course, for anyone who claims that there really were hijacked planes, then an allegation of a military stand down becomes a vital component to claiming to be a critic of the story. Thus the TENC evidence remains vital to the case as long as one believes in hijacked planes, and this is why Hoffman attempts to pass Tenc's work off as his own.
Not content with Plagiarizing them, Hoffman then defames them by misrepresenting them.
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/02/1720145.php
Here, Hoffman replies to a piece from Popular Mechanics which attacks S11 "conspiracy theories." If you read Hoffman's reply carefully, you'll see that he actually supports most of Popular Mechanics spin, but cleverly disguises this support as dissent. Hoffman's method is to complain that most of what PM attacks isn't really S11 evidence - that its just disinfo worthy of contemptuous dismissal, and thus he attacks them for alleging it to be serious S11 evidence. In other words, Hoffman actually spends most of the article agreeing with PM.
Apart from the demolition evidence, which as we have already seen is mostly plagiarism and refinement of already existing proofs on his part, his only point of disagreement with PM is that such evidence should even be considered worthy of attack.
However, in relation to the stand down evidence, Hoffman perpetrates a vicious defamation of the same the Tenc work which he plagiarizes.
One of the Govt's cover stories on the stand down issue is that they did scramble fighter jets which just didn't get there in time. In a brilliant piece of research (one of those later plagiarized by Hoffman) Tenc demonstrated that this is a lie and that nothing was scrambled until after the pentagon was hit. But in his reply to PM, Hoffman attributes to Tenc the exact opposite view. He accuses PM of misrepresenting Tenc in attributing to them the research that they actually did. He attributes to Tenc support for the official story. Having set up this straw man, Hoffman then attacks PM for its attack on Tenc. In other words, Hoffman implies that the official story is correct and also falsely attributes such a view to Tenc, leaving his only complaint about PM to be that they've attacked a claim which Tenc supposedly didn't make.
This is a very clever piece of lying. Hoffman has managed to support the official lies on the scramble story, while appearing to take issue with Govt supporters like PM, at the same time as defaming the people from which Hoffman plagiarized his "research". So when a newcomer to this evidence goes to the Hoffman's site to try to sort out the confusion, what they'll see is Hoffman busting open the Norad cover story, something which Tenc supposedly failed to do.
Tenc never directly entered the debate about the demolition of the WTC. However they did, very early on, dig up an important story about how a demolition expert, Prof van Romero was initially reported as calling a controlled demolition and then later retracted in mysterious circumstances.
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/albu.htm
Hoffman plagiarized it here.
http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/retractions/romero.html
In following posts I will demonstrate
:Hoffman's likely connections with Govt agencies, in particular the NSA.
:Hoffman's fraudulent use of documentation to attribute to it the exact opposite of what it says
:Hoffman's habit of using such wildly contradictory arguments that one can only conclude that he is lying.
:Hoffman's tacit support for direct lies
:Hoffman's fear of subjecting his disinformation to the scrutiny of direct debate.
However, while instinct is sufficient to invoke a suspicion that one is dealing with a cointelpro agent, it is not sufficient for confirmation. It wasn't long before the evidence evolved beyond instinct.
Michael Elliot did some digging on Hoffman and discovered that he worked for an NGO with contracts to the NSA. He alerted the list to this. This of course is circumstantial by itself - we've all got a living to make and can't always choose our employers as carefully as we would like and can't necessarily be held responsible for some of their activities over which we might have no control. In this world it's "let he who is without sin... " in relation to employment - within reasonable limits, and reasonable benefit of the doubt.
However, it's different when someone lies about their employment. Because when Elliot dug this up, Hoffman immediately snapped back in an email "For your information, they fired me".
A little later, Elliot replied "He's lying. I just phoned his work and he's still there".
Hoffman never denied this. He snapped back at Elliot with a tirade of insults but never denied that he was still there and thus that he'd lied about being fired.
Why did he lie ? While one might be given the benefit of the doubt for having a job with an NGO which has contracts with the NSA, lying that one has been fired when one has not significantly tips the scales the other way.
This was more than a year ago. And it appears that he's still there. And the nasty connections are not limited to the NSA. Here are details of Hoffman's work as far as we've been able to ascertain.
This is extracted from an email from WF
[He is still at MSRI,
http://www.msri.org/people/staff/jim/ an NGO with contracts with the NSA.
In fact, based on a careful study of our website's logs, Jim Hoffman's real job was found to be as a [WWW]computer engineer http://www.msri.org/people/staff/jim/index.html for a "research institute" at one of the US Government's most important laboratories:
Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and his real email is mailto:jim@ msri.org The [WWW]Mathematical Sciences Research Institute http://www.msri.org/ has [WWW]amongst its sponsors
http://www.msri.org/governance/sponsors/govsponsors.html :
*
The National Security Agency
*
The Office of Naval Research, which acts as the research arm of
the Office of Naval Intelligence.
*
The Department of Energy, manager of the US nuclear laboratories such as Lawrence Berkeley and Livermore.
http://911review.org/911Review.Com.shtml
These nasty connections need to be seen in the context of some who
a)never voluntarily disclosed his work place
b) lied in claiming to have been fired after he was outed.
c) Was a Jimmy-come lately on the S11 scene, and has greatly exaggerated his contribution through an aggressive progam of plagiarizing almost everything which he doesn't choose to attack or ignore.
d) devotes an extraordinary amount of his website to attacking other researchers
But the plot thickens further in relation to Hoffman's probable intelligence connections
Hoffman gained his cred as an "activist" through his "Justice for Woody" activities.
http://www.justiceforwoody.org/
Although Hoffman is only one of the people mentioned as a friend of Woody's seeking justice , from the style of the website we can clearly see that the same person who does 911research, Hoffman's site, is responsible for the JFW site.
If you have a good look around the JFW site, you'll notice a very curious thing.
Basically it concerns the shooting murder of Hoffman's friend Woody by police who were so over the top in their actions that it sounds like they must have been cracked out of their heads.
Apparently, Woody had taken refuge in a church, with only a small knife and was threatening harm to no-one but himself, and the police came in and just blasted the hell out of him, and the murder has been protected by an official cover up and obstruction of any semblance of proper inquiry.
There are many tributes to Woody, about what a wonderful guy he was, there are descriptions of the community activities he was involved in, there is information on the efforts of friends and family to break through the official cover up. There's lots and lots of information about many different aspects of the Woody case.
But there is one glaring omission. I went all over the site, and am reasonably sure that I looked everywhere, and I could find not one word about the circumstances which led to Woody's murder.
Exactly why was Woody taking refuge in a church and threatening to harm himself ? Did he have a mental illness ? Was he on drugs ? Was he on the run from legal custody or from having allegedly committed an offence ? Had the police just randomly picked him out for harassment, because they wanted to shoot somebody ? Apparently Woody was a non violent community activist.
Well, sometimes the cops can get over the top, but they don't normally do this kind of thing even to rioting crowds bombarding them with rocks.
Clearly it was none of these things because otherwise the cops would not have been so over the top. Woody's fears were justified.
Exactly what had Woody done to piss them off so much ?
Not one word from JFW. Isn't that a bit strange? Woody's attempt to take refuge clearly indicates that he had some idea of what was intended for him. Why would the police just burst in and blast the hell out of him, obviously shooting to kill in a premeditated manner ?
As the JFW site itself says
http://www.justiceforwoody.org/story/shooting.html
[[Minutes earlier he had been begging the incredulous congregation to grant him the protection of political asylum, explaining that he was being pursued by government authorities, who sought to kill him to silence him. Although he threatened himself in a desperate bid to persuade witnesses to stay, the 18 witnesses maintained that he never threatened anyone else. Why, then, did the police shoot him, and why has the state gone to such extraordinary lengths to obscure what happened that day?]]
Good questions indeed, but what's even more curious is that the JFW site never gives even a hint of trying to explain this itself. Do they really know absolutely nothing ? Is it a total mystery ? And if so, why does the site lack any sense of bewilderment at the events ? There is no hint of "we just have no idea what this was about. "
"Silence him. " About what ? What did Woody know ? What connections enabled Woody to be in a position to know whatever it was that was so important ?
In what is otherwise a fairly detailed treatment of Woody's life and death and the subsequent cover up, in relation to exactly what led up to this , the JFW site is neither surprised in it's tone nor informative.
I'm guessing of course, but to me, only one explanation comes to mind which fits all of these anomalies.
Woody was in some way involved with intelligence agencies or other covert operations. Perhaps he was wanting out of whatever he was involved with, which can be a dangerous thing to try. Perhaps he had stumbled across something which he wasn't meant to know, and met the fate which usually befalls operatives who have become inconvenient. But in some way he had fallen foul of something very big, and JFW (Hoffman ) doesn't want to talk about what it was.
Well, I can't prove this, but to me it is the best explanation which fits all 4 anomalies - 1)Woody's desperate sense that something bad was going to happen to him 2)The obvious determination of the police to shoot to kill without hesitation 3) Officialdom closing ranks behind the police action 4) The total silence of the JFW site (Hoffman) about even the slightest hint of what led up to the situation, coupled with the absence of any surprise or bewilderment in its tone.
If so, it can be reasonably concluded that many of Woody's friends - in particular Hoffman, who obviously maintains the site- are also in some way connected with intelligence or other covert agencies.
And so Hoffman's work connections as exposed by WF in the above quoted mail are hardly surprising.
I recently invited Hoffman to defend himself in an email list debate against these charges. He declined. Why would he not defend himself if the accusations were baseless ?
The invitation to defend himself was in stark contrast to Hoffman's continual accusations of cointelpro against all and sundry made from behind the safety of his website, and then the consistent refusal to subject his allegations to dynamic debate, a matter which I'll detail further in a separate post.
I gave Hoffman every chance to debate this in a less public setting. He refused.
Lying betrays consciousness of guilt. Why did he say he had been fired ? Fear of debate betrays consciousness of guilt. Why did he refuse to debate these observations when they were raised ?
Does he think that he can make consistent, shrill allegations of cointelpro against all and sundry, refuse to debate them in a dynamic situation, and then expect to remain free of scrutiny himself, when he has such nasty skeletons in the cupboard ?
I concede that the evidence compiled here stops short of absolute proof that Hoffman is a cointelpro agent of some kind. But in my opinion the evidence is strong enough for reasonable confidence in this conclusion, and Hoffman only makes his case weaker by refusing the invitation to defend himself in a dynamic debate forum.
Even if his motivations are in fact less sinister thahn what the evidence points to, I will continue my deconstruction of Hoffman's of Hoffman's poisonous, treacherous, and destructive effect on the S11 research community, in further posts. His latest attack on Reynolds is only the same as what he's been dishing out for a long time to all refuse to bow before him
I will now use Hoffman's treatment of the witness evidence in relation to the Pentagon incident to demonstrate that Hoffman is a deliberate disinformationist, consciously lying in order to give the impression that evidence says the opposite of what it really does.
For those not familiar with this issue, I suggest that you first read the article which I published in June 2002 in relation to the witness evidence.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/witness.html
This article thoroughly busted the myth that there were "hundreds of witnesses to a large jet hitting the Pentagon.
Since then Hoffman has been on a mission to revive this discredited notion, and lying is fine as far as Hoffman is concerned.
To expose the fundamental dishonesty with which Hoffman approaches this issue ,let's look at this statement.
http://911review.com/errors/pentagon/witnesses.html
[[Most no-757-crash literature ignores the body of eyewitness evidence indicating the presence of a twin-engine jetliner, and in many cases cherry-picks certain eyewitness accounts that seem to support the presence of a small plane. A common tactic is to present one part of Mike Walter's account:
I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.
while leaving out the earlier part of his account:
I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.'
In the context of his full account, it is clear that Walter was using "cruise missile with wings" to describe the way the plane was being flown, not the kind of plane he saw. ]]
In a moment we'll see who's cherry picking ! Hoffman is actually correct in that Walter's reports have been misused by both sides of the debate, and his complaints about the emphasis on the "cruise missile" part by some 757 skeptics is valid. But this is the pot calling the kettle black. It's nothing compared to the gross distortion of the Walter reports by supporters of the official story like Hoffman. For a start, notice that Hoffman refers to "Walter's account" - singular, as if there were only one, and then refers to the " context of his full account " in presenting one of the quotes.
Hoffman is well aware that this is a lie, because he is well aware of the work that I did to track down Walter's full *accounts* - because there were several - and they were so wildly contradictory that it's impossible to make any sense out of them at all.
You can see a full deconstruction here.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/witness2.html
Below is a summary of what my research on Walter found, but I recommend reading the link above to get the full picture
Hoffman says "In the context of his full account..."
And exactly *which* full account would that be, Jim ?
Perhaps the one where he told Bryant Gumbel that he saw a full on impact,
""I was on an elevated area of Highway 27 and I had a very good view. I was stuck in traffic. We weren't moving and--and I could see over in the distance the American Airlines jet as it kind of banked around, pivoted and then took a steep dive right into the Pentagon."
and then when Gumbel responded with
GUMBEL: Did you see it hit the Pentagon? Was the plane coming in horizontally or did it, in fact, go on its wing as--as it impacted the building?
To which Walter responded with
Mr. WALTER: You know, the--the--the--there were trees there that kind of obstructed it, so I kind of--I saw it go in. I'm not sure if it turned at an angle. I've heard some people say that's what it did. All I know is it--it created a huge explosion and massive fireball and--and you knew instantaneously that--that everybody on that plane was dead. It was completely eviscerated. "
So Walter's claim to have seen the plane hit the building lasted all of 5 secs before he backed off the claim.
And just to make sure, later in the interview
GUMBEL: Tell me, if you could, about the manner in which the--the plane struck the building....
Mr. WALTER: Well, as I said, you know, there were trees obstructing my view, so I saw it as it went--and then the--then the trees, and then I saw the--the fireball and the smoke. Some people have said that the plane actually sent on its side and in that way. But I can't tell you, Bryant. I just know that what I saw was this massive fireball, a huge explosion and--and a--the thick column of smoke and then an absolute bedlam on those roads as people were trying to get away."
Now you see it (hit), now you don't.
Or did Jim mean the full account he gave in another interview, only 1 hour later, where he said
"It kind of disappeared over this embankment here for a moment and then a huge explosion, flames flying into the air, and--and just chaos on the road."
So he was in an elevated area with a very good view and saw a full on impact, which he actually didn't see at all because there were trees in the way, but in spite of his elevation and very good view it "disappeared" over an embankment - which is actually what he had been saying the day before anyway, before he changed his mind the next day in the Gumbel interview,and then immediately backed off, and 1 hour later went back to his story of the previous day, where he explicitly stated that he did not see it hit the building.
So who's Cherry picking ?
The only time during Walter's muddled and contradictory statements where he actually claims to have seen a plane hit a building - a claim which was immediately retracted - he says that it took a steep dive in to the building.
In spite of this, Hoffman is untroubled by also quoting from Bart's compilation, another "witness"
"The plane approached the Pentagon about six feet off the ground, clipping a light pole, a car antenna, a construction trailer and an emergency generator before slicing into the building, said Lee Evey,"
I see, it took a steep dive from 6 ft ? No more than one of these two reports can possibly be telling the truth (even ignoring the multiple internal contradictions in the Walter report). So which one is it, Jim ?
And does the second one say what kind of plane ? Big ? Small ? Jet ? Prop?
Civillian? Military ?
It doesn't matter to Jim. They're both being truthful and accurate. It took a steep dive *and* it approached from about 6 ft off the ground. And it doesn't matter that even a hint of the type of plane is unspecified.
It also escapes Hoffman's attention that the "witness" just happens to be
" the manager of the Pentagon's ongoing billion-dollar renovation."
and is reported as making this statement on Oct 6 2001,in relation to the rebuilding program, in a context such that it appears that Levy is not claiming to have seen this first hand is and is just summing up his belief about what happened.
http://www.detnews.com/2001/nation/0110/06/nation-312016.htm
So the "witness" isn't a witness at all, but a Pentagon spokesman spinning the official line.
This is what Hoffman calls "evidence".
And Hoffman has the nerve to call those who see through this charade "disinformationists".
This is why Hoffman refuses my repeated challenges to a direct debate, because he knows that his lies will be irrevocably exposed.
What a waste of bandwidth! Hope the Indymedia editors eventually wake up to the fact that Holmgren is posting the same nonsense over and over about trashing other researchers with false information.
Too late, of course, for David Ray Griffin. But not for the rest of the web.
Let's look at the list of sites or people specifically attacked by MR.
Not that I necessarily approve of all of these sites. For example, I've given a real roasting to Karl Schwarz myself.
But it seems that MR thinks there's one rule for him and another for everone else, because this is who cops a serve from MR at
http://www.oilempire.us/bogus.html
Thierry Meyssun
911blogger.com
911inplanesite.org
911review.org
911skeptics.blogspot.com
americanfreepress.net
angieon911.com
davesweb.cnchost.com
infowars.com
johnkaminski.com
warfolly.com
Christopher Bollyn
Joe Vialls
karlschwarz.com
letsroll911.org
Pentagon Strike
physics911.org
rense.com
reopen911.org
serendipity.li
signs-of-the-times.org
thewebfairy.com
tomflocco.com
tvnewslies.org
Wing TV
911hoax.com
911closeup.com
911blimp.net
users.adelphia.net/~earthwatch/
leftgatekeepers.com
911-strike.com
My opinions on these particular sites or people are not the issue here. What's at issue is that" reader" (probably MR) is whining and moaning that I'm exposing Hoffman, when Hoffman has an entire site dedicated to attacking others (911review.com) (when he's not plagiarizing them ) and MR boasts the impressive list of targets above.
Not content with using his own site for these attacks, Hoffman also posts them on IMC. For example there were multiple postings of Hoffman's endorseemnt of the attack by Popular Mechanics, and of his attack on Morgan Reynolds.
But it seems that Hoffman and Rabinowitz are keen to dish it out, they can;t take it themselves. They think that they have the right to spam Indymedia with their constant attacks, and as soon as those being defamed defend themselves, Rabinowitz starts pleading for an editorial censorship policy.
That's the only way that Rabinowitz or Hoffman can win an argument - ban their opposition from participating.
This debate
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/salter.html
will show you why Hoffman is so afraid of me, and why he hides behind Rabinowitz who is now reduced to pleading for the protection offered by censorship.
I gave Hoffman the opportunity to debate in a less public setting. He refused it. What opportunity did he give Reynolds, before launching his attack ? Or any of the other people he has defamed and plagiarized ?
Rabinowtiz caught lying here.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/06/320469d.shtml#187004
This link also contains a rebuttal to his rubbish about me supposedly embarrassing Griffin.
That work has been valuable in exposing the absurdities around sites that promote holograms, pods and missiles having been used on 9/11. It does not try to accuse them of plagarizing with no basis or dig up where people work or and claim that because someone works at such and such they are then automatically a 'spy.'
It is an excellent site.
Begins approx 16.20
"I had the misfortune to be born into a family that was heavily rooted in the intelligence community.
Mymother was a cryptograher and crypt analyst forthe army security agency and National Security Agency during WW2. She worked for Secretary of State Cordell Hull.She worked on the Japanese and Russian Codes.
This is mymothers seperation from the NSA in Dec 1949 because she was going to have babies. But my dad was also recalled into the air force during the Korean War, he went to work for Martin Marrietta and went on to work on projects like the Titan 3C which put up all the CIA's keyhole spy sattelites.
Relatives of my father's were OSS- that's the forerunnerof the CIA and there were career at CIA and Langley. So eveybody in the family had a clearance."
Since Ruppert's articles delight in vaguely asserting that someone or other is "linked" to such and such without giving any more details, then I think we can say that by Ruppert's own standards he is "linked" to the CIA.
Furthermore, Ruppert has even admitted that he routinely lies for the sake of perceived marketability.
Not very "truthly" really ,is it ?
His quote to this effect is repeated and referenced in this article
The Truth about Truthlings - The 9/11 doublethink movement.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~holmgren/slithering.html
This article explains why the 911untruth movement is an even bigger threat to truth than the Bush Regime.