Gage ignores challenge by 9/11 Truthers to justify Pentagon reversal

By Craig McKee

Richard Gage had a lot to say in February about what did and didn’t happen at the Pentagon on 9/11. But in recent weeks he’s been sticking to more familiar territory – the twin towers.

The founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth has declined to respond to a letter signed by 27 members of the 9/11 Truth movement criticizing his stance on the Pentagon and Citizen Investigation Team (which contends that no commercial airliner hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001). In his statement he withdrew his support of CIT and its film National Security Alert.

The film features a number of interviews with people who were working near the Pentagon that day – including two Pentagon cops. The interviewees recounted that a large commercial plane approached the Pentagon to the north of the Citgo gas station, which is located across the street. If accurate, their accounts would mean that the downed light pole evidence must have been planted.

There continues to be a relentless and seemingly co-ordinated attack by some 9/11 Truthers (or people who purport to be Truthers) against CIT and its supporters. CIT’s position is ridiculed, and its research methods are viciously and repeatedly maligned.

Many of these critics are contributors to the largest 9/11 web site, 911Blogger, which first published Gage’s statement. “Blogger” was condemned recently by the 9/11 Truth Teleconference group for its practices of banning those who agree with CIT while permitting its opponents to have free reign in launching their unopposed attacks.

Gage’s withdrawal of support for CIT (which closely followed a similar statement from David Chandler and Jonathan Cole, also on 911Blogger) put him in the same camp as those who believe that the official story of what happened at the Pentagon on Sept. 11 is essentially true.

The list of signatories to the letter, which was sent to Gage in April, features a number of familiar names from the 9/11 Truth movement, including Barrie Zwicker, Rob Balsamo, Adam Syed, Sheila Casey, Kevin Barrett, Dwain Deets, and Sheldon Lankford. It also includes my not-so-familiar name.

Here is the letter, reproduced in its entirety. It was sent to Gage’s home and had to be signed for, so it’s certain that it was received. I’ll follow up with more details and analysis in another post.


Dear Richard,

We were dismayed and concerned to see the February 8 blog post in your name at 911blogger announcing your withdrawal of support for Citizen Investigation Team (CIT). As one of the leading figures of the 9/11 truth movement, your opinions matter and will tend to be assumed to be well thought out, and not arrived at hastily, by those who look to you for inspiration and leadership.

Many of us have contributed time and/or money to support Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth, and several of us are listed as supporters on the A&E website. Richard, we admire the work you’ve done with A&E. However we simply cannot stay silent about the stance that you and other members of A&E have taken about CIT and the Pentagon, as we believe it is hurting the movement and could potentially cripple it.

Although controlled demolition of the World Trade Center could be spun to minimize government complicity, evidence for bombs at the Pentagon is un-spinnable. The idea was recently floated on Fox News that perhaps the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition, but our government might not have done it, or even known about it. This could never be said about the Pentagon.

You conclude your blog post by stating that our focus should be on the fact that nothing should have hit the Pentagon. But this is not our strongest evidence. While dozens of excuses could easily be fabricated for why the defenses at the Pentagon failed that day, no excuse could ever conceivably be found for all the many preparations that were necessary – prior to that fateful Tuesday – to fake a plane crash at the Pentagon.

Hence we believe that it would be a grave mistake for us in the 9/11 truth movement to abandon our most incriminating evidence – a faked plane crash at US military headquarters – without very good reasons to do so.

It is completely predictable that our most damning evidence, pointing directly at the highest levels of the US government, would be a target of counter intelligence operations, and we believe that this is what we are witnessing. We know that those who have issued statements of support for CIT have been harassed and cajoled endlessly to retract their statements, and we wonder if you might have been subjected to a similar campaign?

We also wonder whether this retraction was actually written by you, as it uses obviously faulty logic, while giving praise to some very dubious characters. Given your high level of intelligence and integrity, these tactics do not seem worthy of you. Nonetheless, until we hear otherwise from you Richard, we will assume that you wrote it freely and willingly.

In recent months there appears to be a concerted effort from A&E to discredit CIT and its defenders, including the Rock Creek Free Press. Four prominent members of A&E (Kevin Ryan, Gregg Roberts, David Chandler and Jon Cole) have recently published articles (their names link to those articles) bashing either CIT, the Rock Creek Free Press, or both, while strongly promoting the view that a plane did hit the Pentagon. Now that you have not only withdrawn your support from CIT, but leveled accusations of dishonest behavior at CIT, we can only conclude that there is an orchestrated campaign at A&E to push the official story at the Pentagon and smear anyone who has evidence proving otherwise. This concerns us greatly.

For us, your retraction raises more questions than it answers. For starters, the sources you say “should be among those studied by anyone seeking the full truth about these matters,” give us pause.

Are you aware that Jeff Hill, a source you cite, is on the record as stating that Architects & Engineers is “crap” and that you, David Ray Griffin and Steven Jones are “corrupt?” In his January 2011 podcast, Hill accused David Ray Griffin of being a “lying scum-bag.”

A drunk Jeff Hill can also be heard here repeatedly calling a WTC attack witness on the phone at 1 am to push the idea that no planes actually hit the WTC towers. Are you sure you want to send people to Jeff Hill to learn more about anything related to 9/11?

You also evidently think highly of A&E member Gregg Roberts who wrote a 13-page article attacking the November 2010 Rock Creek Free Press article that pointed out the censorship and wholesale banning of CIT supporters at 911blogger. Note that Roberts does not attempt to actually refute any of the evidence in the RCFP article about blogger censorship, but attempts to discredit it with dishonest means.

For example, although the writer(s) of the RCFP article are anonymous, Roberts states that they “drew warnings” about their bad behavior at 911blogger prior to being banned. He professes not to know who wrote the article, yet knows they were warned at 911blogger and knows they were banned?

Roberts quotes the RCFP as inaccurately stating that “there was no wreckage at the Pentagon.” But Roberts is clearly taking this out of context, drastically changing its meaning. The entire thought, as written in the sixth paragraph of the RCFP article, is:

“For starters, plane crashes leave wreckage, and there was no wreckage at the Pentagon. No wings or tail, no fuselage, no luggage or bodies, no skid or burn marks on the pristine green Pentagon lawn.”

The second sentence in that thought is not even a sentence, as it contains no verb. It’s a sentence fragment, an extension of the first sentence. The writer(s) could be faulted for ungrammatical prose, but no honest reader would disregard that fragment when attempting to convey the writer(s) meaning.

Roberts misleads his readers into thinking that “no wreckage at the Pentagon” is the entire thought, and then disproves it with images of small pieces that could be hauled away (or brought in) in a wheelbarrow. Of course he has no images to show of wings, tail, fuselage or luggage, the indisputable evidence of a crash that the RCFP writers are referring to here.
You also refer readers to a blatantly misleading and deceptive blog post by Jim Hoffman. Hoffman uses Google Earth to try to convince readers that the Pentagon can easily be seen from all the highways surrounding it.

But Google Earth images are taken from satellites, so are accurate only as an aerial view. Although it is possible to simulate a view of looking across a landscape rather then down on it, all objects are then rendered flat, with the exception of important buildings such as the Pentagon. So trees, overpasses, and other buildings appear to be no more substantial than a coat of paint on the ground, while the Pentagon stands straight and tall, the only three dimensional object in the entire neighborhood. This suits Hoffman’s agenda well, as it makes it appear as if the Pentagon is visible from miles around with nothing obstructing the view from any direction, which is assuredly not the case. CIT addressed this in detail here.
Once again, you seem to have used very poor judgement in recommending sources for information on the Pentagon.

While you seem to be all too willing to dismiss errors and insult – even directed at yourself – from Jeff Hill, Gregg Roberts and Jim Hoffman, your blogpost levels accusations at CIT which frankly hold no water. You state accusingly that CIT characterizes your statement on their “praise page” as an endorsement of their flyover conclusion, but we see nothing of the kind. If you have a link showing where they have stated or even implied that you endorse the flyover theory, please forward it to us. CIT describes their attempt to discuss this with you here.
It is also quite alarming to see you claiming that you are now “surprised to learn” that all of CIT’s witnesses believe that the plane hit the Pentagon, because in National Security Alert Craig Ranke makes it very clear that all the witnesses believe that the plane hit.

We are sure that if we had been at the Pentagon that day, we too would have concluded that the plane hit. As reporter Craig McKee states in his article “Richard Gage joins perplexing gang-up on Citizen Investigation Team,”

“9/11 WAS MEANT TO BE AN ILLUSION. It was supposed to look like the U.S. government was taken by surprise by a group of Muslim fundamentalists. And the destruction of the World Trade Center wasn’t supposed to look like a controlled demolition. So eyewitness accounts of the plane hitting the Pentagon have to be considered in this light.”

Sheila Casey wrote in her April, 2009 Rock Creek Free Press article about CIT:

“Less than an hour earlier, America had seen the south tower of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane and exploding into a huge fireball. Most people were aware that an attack was underway. If they saw a jet heading directly towards the Pentagon, and next saw a massive fireball, it is doubtful that one person in a thousand would question whether the plane had crashed and caused the fireball. To conclude that the fireball was caused by explosives pre-planted in one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the planet, in an intentional false flag attack to justify war, would require observers to have a degree of perspicacity that was extremely rare in the pre-9/11 world, and only slightly less rare now.”

We do not find it worrisome that witnesses at the Pentagon believe the plane hit, any more than we find it worrisome that witnesses at the WTC believe in a gravitational collapse. (Even the firefighters who reported explosions believe in gravitational collapse.) Witness interpretations about what they saw are not the last word on what happened that day.
Why, Richard, would you pretend that CIT deceived you about what the Pentagon witnesses believe? If you watched National Security Alert prior to issuing your statement of support for it in summer 2009, you already knew what the witnesses believe, and thus could not have recently been “surprised to learn” it.

For all these reasons, we are alarmed and perplexed as to why you would put your name to such a statement. We are concerned about the public image of our movement, but most of all, we are concerned about the truth. We implore you to get in touch with Craig Ranke (we know you have his cell phone #) and sort out any motivations you may have had for issuing this baffling retraction. Please also reply to us, and help us understand why you have taken the actions you have.

Richard, those of us who believe, based on overwhelming evidence, that no passenger 757 hit the Pentagon, constitute the vast majority of the 9/11 truth movement. Without some clarifying communication from you, many members of that majority are likely to question your judgment.

In truth,

Rob Balsamo, Kevin Barrett, Greg Boyd, Mill Butler, Sheila Casey, Candice Clough, Dwain Deets, Dominick DiMaggio, Shelton Lankford, Jeffrey Long, Jill Mann, Craig McKee, Shirley Miller, Nelisse Muga, Ted Muga, Erin S. Myers , Jeffrey Nowicki, Nancy Purks, Adam Ruff , Edward Rynearson, Stefan (chooses not to disclose last name), Adam Syed, C. Scott Taylor, Julia TenEyck, Darrel Vincent Willis, Louis Wolf, Barrie Zwicker