A rebuttal to the video "9/11 - In Plane Site" (Part One)

[MercutioATC]

I've been asked to detail what I see as misrepresentations and inconsistencies in the video "9/11 - In Plane Sight". After viewing the video again, I realized that the task was larger than I had anticipated. As a result, I will be posting my response in four parts, each dealing with approximately a quarter of the video.

The issues are time-indexed by the minutes:seconds into the video that VonKleist raises them and are in chronological order. I invite anybody with comments to respond.


A REBUTTAL TO THE VIDEO "9/11 - IN PLANE SIGHT" (PART ONE)

6:43 Vonkleist states that there was "no credible claim of responsibility" for the events of 9/11 and that, for this reason, it's reasonable to assume that the real culprits would do anything to "cover up any information that might lead to their discovery".

On 10/30/2001, Osama Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks of 9/11.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2004/10/29/binladen_message041029.html

In addition, two members of Al-Qaeda, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, admitted that they played major roles in planning the 9/11 attacks on behalf of OBL:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/09/05/alqaeda.911.claim/


7:34 VonKleist shows a videotaped interview with eyewitness Mike Walter who says that what he saw "was like a cruise missile with wings".

What VonKleist conveniently omits is the rest of the interview. Here is a full transcript of Mike Walter's statement:

"I was sitting in the northbound on 27 and the traffic was, you know, typical rush-hour -- it had ground to a standstill. 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.'

"And I saw it. I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.

"Huge explosion, great ball of fire, smoke started billowing out. And then it was chaos on the highway as people tried to either move around the traffic and go down, either forward or backward.

"We had a lady in front of me, who was backing up and screaming, 'Everybody go back, go back, they've hit the Pentagon.'

"It was just sheer terror."

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/09/11/witnesses/

In the opening statements of the video, VonKleist states "We offer no conclusions, but simply present the evidence and let you the viewing audience draw your own conclusions". If this was his true intent, why did he selectively edit Mike Walter's statement to change the apparent meaning of his account of what he saw? Rather than present the entire quote, VonKleist intentionally chose to misrepresent Mr. Walter's statement.


8:27 VonKleist says "We can see the big hole that was created by the 757" while displaying a picture of the Pentagon after the collapse of the A ring.

Plenty of pictures exist of the actual hole created by AAL77. VonKleist chooses to use a picture of the Pentagon after the collapse. Why, when an accurate picture exists, does he choose to use a picture of something different?


9:33 VonKleist makes the statement "There were no photos showing any recognizable wreckage from a 757".

Contrary to this statement, there are photos of debris which could very well be from a 757.

There is the high-pressure rotor similar to what would be found in a 757 engine:

There is a picture of a piece of fuselage:

There is a picture of a wheel very similar to those found on a 757:

There is a picture of a landing gear strut which seems to match the size of a 757 strut:

It is disingenuous to suggest there there are "no photos" of 757 debris.


9:36 VonKleist states that the hole in the Pentagon is 65 feet wide while the wingspan of a 757 is 124 feet, 10 inches. He then asks "How does a plane of those dimensions fit into a hole only 65 feet across?".

What VonKleist neglects to discuss is the damage to the limestone facade of the Pentagon which was approximately 120 feet in length.

http://www.pubs.asce.org/ceonline/ceonline03/0203feat.html

It is the opinion of the civil engineers that examined the site that this damage would correspond to a 757's wings striking the Pentagon. Approached from another direction, what DID cause the 120 feet of damage if not a large commercial airplane?


10:38 VonKleist shows a post-collapse photo of the Pentagon and uses an unburned desk, monitor and book to illustrate that there was no intense fire in the Pentagon.

The picture provided is a post-collapse photo. In the collapse, areas of the building that were not involved in the fire were exposed. The fact that flammable objects in areas of the building not subjected to the fire survived is not an indication of the intensity of the fire.


11:29 VonKleist states that approximately 8600 gallons of jet fuel would have been involved in the crash had a 757 been involved. He then shows a picture of fire damage to the A ring of the Pentagon and asks if the smoke and heat damage is "consistent with that amount of fuel being ignited".

The picture is misleading because, while three rings of the Pentagon were damaged, VonKleist chooses to use a picture showing the damage to only one of the rings. In addition, he bases his statement on the assumption that all of the remaining fuel on the 757 would have entered the Pentagon. Since there was a considerable external fuel explosion at the Pentagon, we know this is untrue.


13:59 VonKleist discusses the security camera footage that was released (the blurry 5 frames) and states "Many people ask "is this the only security camera that was on at the Pentagon?"". He then states that the government confiscated a security video from a gas station who's camera was pointed in the "exact direction" where the 757 would have hit.


The Government has never claimed that this was the only video available. It is simply the only video that has been released. The gas station video camera was allegedly pointed toward the Pentagon. To state that it was in the "exact direction" of the crash and to imply that it would have shown anything useful from that distance is speculative, at best.





This concludes Part One. Again, any and all comments are welcome. I'll tackle the rest of the video in three more installations.

[WoodrowFan]

1. thank you

That is very nice work MATC. Thank you. :yourock:


And some people wonder why I don't believe anything a CTer tells me.

[hack89]

2. Good job (nt)

[AZCat]

3. Here are links to a couple of previous "In Plane Site" threads

For those of you that want to drag up comments you've posted before, here are a couple of previous threads about the "In Plane Site" video. I'd post more, but the "advanced search" option is down right now.

I'd like some feedback on this. Could it be possible?

Have you seen "9-11 In Plane Site"?

Did a Boeing 757 really crash into the Pentagon?

Note: I'll post more when "advanced search" comes back.

Thanks, MercutioATC. Perhaps we can smoosh all this into one thread now.

[AZCat]

136. Okay here are a few more (we now have Advanced Search back)

Investigating 9/11: Missing 757 at Pentagon + Other Unanswered Questions

9/11 conspiracy video - pentagon
(locked)

Does anyone have a good 'No Plane Hit the Pentagon' debunker link?

Has anyone seen this internet short about the plane that hit the Pentagon?

Anybody see this FLASH about the Pentegon 9/11 hit?


There might be more - if I have missed anything please post a link.

[gbwarming]

4. Bookmarked. Nicely documented Merc.

Big pre-collapse photos from Steve Riskus:
http://www.criticalthrash.com/terror/crashthumbnails.html

"I took these pictures less then 1 minutes after I watched the american airlines 757 airplane crash into the pentagon on september 11 2001. I left shortly after the picture were taken in fear of further attacks.
Feel free to contact me anytime if you have questions about my pictures.
Yes, I did actually see the plane impact the building. "

[Abe Linkman]

5. Who wrote the material you posted? Did you write it? Have any help?

n/t

[MercutioATC]

7. Why?

It seems like a bizarre question to me. Who else would have written it?

To answer, yes, I wrote it and no, I didn't "have any help".

[Abe Linkman]

9. Why does it seem like a bizarre question to ask you who wrote it?

n/t

[MercutioATC]

10. Well, because you asked for my rebuttal and I posted it.

Also, because there's nothing in the body of the message that would suggest otherwise.

...and because I was under the impression that most people here wrote their own posts...


Face it, it was a bizarre question.

[The Magistrate]

6. An Excellent Beginning, Fair Mercutio!

Doubtless the "usual suspects" will be showing up to trot out new inanities, in their accustomed "Look at him, look at me, look at that thing behind the tree!" style in response; they are, after all, "well-respected researchers" we should noy dare to distract from their important work....

"The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...."

[DulceDecorum]

37. Inanities? Usual suspects?

Boy,
you sure know how make a poster feel welcome around here.

[The Magistrate]

40. You Know, Sir

A casual reader might come away with the impression you do not like me very much.

Still, perhaps there is hope: many hours have passed without you accusing me in plain English of being a rightist disruptor....

"There is no one so lonely as a dissenter at a gathering of Non-Conformists."

[Sweet Pea]

8. Nice job, Merc.

I've tried to point out in various posts here some of the aeronautical characteristics of this event that are completely twisted around by videos such as this one, primarily by people who do not understand some of the aviation-related things that occurred.

One of the biggest is the question of why weren't there bodies or luggage on the Pentagon grounds outside the impact point. While there was a significant amount of wreckage, albeit small parts of the aircraft scattered around the place, there is a perfectly valid reason why nothing of import ended up outside. A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. The body in question, the aircraft, was traveling at an estimated 45,565 feet per minute when it hit the west wall. Everything inside the aircraft would have continued traveling at that speed into the interior of the Pentagon. Why people insist on questioning this law of physics is really beyond me.

Again, nice start.

[demodewd]

12. raining down like confetti

Actually there was lots of plane debris spread over the Pentagon lawn and hiway,raining down like "confetti"

Also as indicated by the location of the main inferno, the explosion definitely took place at the very facade of the building. The heat from that explosion and fire was intensely hot as remarked by various firemen.

The coloration of the fire is very light yellow. Contrast that with the coloration of the fires from the WTC photos.

[exploited]

126. 'Everything inside the aircraft would have continued

travelling at that speed into the interior of the Pentagon'

Including the fuel. I don't see that event mirrored here though.

[MercutioATC]

151. That's the exterior ingnition of the fuel that didn't enter the building.

True, not ALL of it made it into the Pentagon. Some remained outside and ignited.

[demodewd]

11. notes

1.I was sitting in the northbound on 27 and the traffic was, you know, typical rush-hour -- it had ground to a standstill. 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.'

"And I saw it. I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.

The substitute remote controlled plane behaved simarlarly to a missile. ericbart quotes the following from onsite observers:

"Once it arrives near its target, it slows down and tilts its wings to slide laterally and vertically on its exact final fly path. When on its exact trajectory, it hit full gas to get the maximum speed power for the impact."

"He tilted his wings, this way and in this way (Ryan mimics) that happened concurrently with the engines going down. And then straighten up in sort of suddenly and hit full gas. (Ryan mimics)" Ryan James (Video available)

"It was tilting its wings up and down like it was trying to balance" Afework Hagos
"The jet accelerated in the final few hundred yards" William Middleton Sr

2.It is disingenuous to suggest there there are "no photos" of 757 debris.

It is "disingenuous" to suggest that the debris photos that are presented to the public are of a 757 yet Flight 77.


3.The Government has never claimed that this was the only video available. It is simply the only video that has been released. The gas station video camera was allegedly pointed toward the Pentagon. To state that it was in the "exact direction" of the crash and to imply that it would have shown anything useful from that distance is speculative, at best.

The BIG QUESTION here is why does the government has to suppress information on this point. Surely there is footage far more definitive than what they allowed us to see. The Pentagon would be one of the most surveilled buildings in the world. How can you not conclude that they are hiding important revealing frames? This act in itself displays the utter arrogance of those involved. It subjugates the populace.We aren't permitted to see the footage...this is degrading and probably intended to be so.We are asked to believe them at face value. I want more proof,don't you?

4. VonKleist shows a post-collapse photo of the Pentagon and uses an unburned desk, monitor and book to illustrate that there was no intense fire in the Pentagon.

This is an interesting photo(referred to by VonKleist) and I suggest that It demonstrates the initial power of shaped charges that preceded the fuel blast. From what I have observed about the fire is the following
1. The fire intensity was centered at the very point of impact and was intensely hot as remarked by various firemen.
2.The fire concentration was heaviest south of the impact point.
3.The lack of fire in the photo you present indicates that the shaped charges created a buffer of blast force that pushed the fuel fire away from the north section and spread it out over the facade and onto the roof as well as southward.

[MercutioATC]

13. Replies:

1) My purpose was to refute VonKleist, not a remote-controlled 757 in American Airlines livery. Mr Water's statement clearly states that he saw a commercial jet in 757 livery. VonKleist makes no reference to remote control.

2) There are clearly debris photos that were taken that could very well be of 757 wreckage. I didn't state that they WERE from a 757 nor did I state that they were from AAL77. What's disingenuous is suggesting that photos of what could be 757 debris (and, therefore AAL77 debris) simply don't exist.

3) Of COURSE it's reasonable to assume that the Government has better footage of what really happened. What's unreasonable is to assume that one "knows" what that footage shows without seeing it (especially in the case of the gas station video). To answer your question, yes, I'd like to see Pentagon security camera footage too.

4) Shaped charges that were 1) pre-planted or 2) in the nose of some theoretical missile or in 3) a "remote-controlled" plane? My response is different depending on which scenario you're suggesting.

[demodewd]

14. attn: Merc

What's unreasonable is to assume that one "knows" what that footage shows without seeing it (especially in the case of the gas station video).

Isn't that what you are doing? In that there is footage that does show us the plane you believe it would be Flight 77?

Shaped charges preplanted and/or strapped to the plane.

Von Kleist is very unthorough.Though he does bring up interesting and viable points. He is wrong about the Pentagon debris.

[MercutioATC]

15. I make no assumptions about what the video camera(s) recorded.

I'd agree that a detailed video would put this argument to rest one way or the other, but I'm not assuming anything. My point is that since we don't know what's on the videos, we can't assume which way they'd decide the issue.

About the shaped charges...I don't know enough about them to comment intelligently. I doubt they were pre-planted in the building and I don't believe a missile was involved at all. As I've said before, however, I've seen nothing that directly contradicts the use of remote control. I just don't understand why shaped charges would be necessary if a remote-controlled 757 was used. The ASCE engineers seem comfortable that a 757 alone could have caused the damage.

[demodewd]

19. 2 points

At least 2 points of evidence point to something more than just the plane.
1. The character of the main fire. It was extremely hot. It coloration indicates an ordnance blast. The location of the fire-concentrated to the south of the entry point,splattered over a large area of the facade and roof,and most importantly the absence of fire and smoke damage north of the entry point penetrating into the D and C rings. This explains the VonKleist photo that you present to us in original post.

2. The mysterious hole into the A-E Drive. This is not characteristic of a fuel driven blast. What physical phenomenon would gather massive material into a concentric violent force to create this outcome? From a fuel blast? This is characteristic of a jet stream from a shaped charge and/or bomb.

[MercutioATC]

20. VonKleist doesn't deal with either issue.

This is a "9/11 - In Plane Sight" rebuttal. It's not meant to rebut EVERY CT claim.

[demodewd]

25. Got an abacus?

So now you're a thread purist since its your thread! And how many times have you veered a bit from the initial topic to have a discussion with someone else,especially Abe. Got an abacus?

[The Magistrate]

28. So We May Take It Then, Mr. Dewd

That in future your own comments will in all instances directly engage the topic of the comments you are replying to?

Further, in light of this, doubtless we may take it that you have no real objections to Mr. Mercutio's critique of this particular video presentation thus far?

"You won't regret this...for quite some time...."

[MercutioATC]

32. No, I'm just not going to deal with that issue in this thread.

If you can get somebody else to bite, that's fine.

Since you don't raise any issues with my rebuttal, I take it you have none?

[demodewd]

42. I have.

I have raised issues and commented on your rebuttal. Refer to Post #11.

From now on I expect you to play by your rules on other people's threads. I'm holding you to it.

[MercutioATC]

49. Yes, and I answered those questions.

I'm not aware that I have ever changed the topic of a thread. I have responded to off-topic posts in threads before (and probably will in the future), but I don't believe I've ever initiated the off-topic discussion.

I could be wrong, but I know that I consciously try not to do it.

I'm not pissed, I would just prefer to deal with VonKleist.

[Sweet Pea]

31. Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!

How many times do we have to go over this?

The coloration means NOTHING with regards to a violent explosion of jet fuel, especially when the photo was taken with a low-grade CCTV camera. I have posted photos before here of a B-52 crashing during an air show practice and the initial fireball was WHITE. If you disagree with this image/fact, then please state why a B-52 crashing and generating a white explosive blast without explosives is any different from a 757 crashing and generating a white explosive blast.



What physical phenomenon would gather massive material into a concentric violent force to create this outcome?

From what I would call an aeroclastic flow of aircraft parts and building debris from the impact, all traveling at 45,500 feet per minute through the sheetrock walls (note: NOT reinforced concrete and steel walls)of the first floor of the Pentagon's E, D and C rings, until it impacted the A-E drive wall. There would be plenty of substantive, heavy material in that mass to hit the wall and result with the hole - engine, safes, concrete, steel, you name it.

[demodewd]

43. "aeroclastic"

I really don't believe your "aeroclastic" flow would collect itself in one big concentric force to create that hole. The engines would be flung independently from the rest of the plane in the randomness of the chaotic massive explosion which occured at the very facade of the building.The nose/fuselage (what would be left of it) would be sliced into as it would have penetrated two floors.

And here's a question.Where is the smoke damage on the walls adjacent to the hole? Why isn't there comprehensive smoke damage in those areas? With this massive volition of debris creating the hole, as you say, wouldn't this force include the fireball?


I just don't see that massive content here. Maybe it had already been removed? :)

I'll concede your point about the coloration. But the color of the main inferno is disputable along with its heat intensity.


from http://eric.bart.free.fr/iwpb/inv3.html
High explosives and shaped charges generate huge amounts of heat.

"The firemen were appreciative, as the heat inside the building was, in their words, "unbelievable." It was reported that at least three of the fireman had to be given IV fluids due to the extreme heat" Terry Morin
"We're having a lot of trouble in there. It's about 3,000 degrees inside" Willis Roberts
"The ground was on fire. Trees were on fire. He was with the hospital corps in Vietnam when mortars and rocket shells dropped on the operating room near Da Nang -- but he had never witnessed anything of this devastating intensity" Alan Wallace
"the whole back of the fire truck had melted" William Yeingst
"The fire was so hot that firefighters could not approach the impact point itself until approximately 1 P.M." Patriotresource
"The fire was so intense it cracked concrete" USA Today
"The fire was so hot, Evey said, that it turned window glass to liquid and sent it spilling down walls into puddles on the ground" Walker Lee Evey
"that heat and fire, it could eat you alive in three seconds" Washingtonpost
"It was still burning 18 hr. later" CBS News
Compare those descriptions with those of the firemen who were in the WTC2 who commented that there were just a few "small fires"

And bear in mind that a great deal of the fuel fid not enter the building.

[Sweet Pea]

52. "Aeroclastic" - cool made-up word

I really don't believe your "aeroclastic" flow would collect itself in one big concentric force to create that hole.

Fair enough. I have no problem imagining that scenario. You don't. We'll leave that one at that.

Where is the smoke damage on the walls adjacent to the hole? Why isn't there comprehensive smoke damage in those areas?

I see what I would consider acceptable smoke damage on the brickwork. I would not necessarily expect smoke damage/stains to be on the horizontal surfaces of the brickwork. Smoke damage and stains would occur from extended exposure to smoke and heat - as evidenced by the top brickwork.

One other point, and this gets back to your comment of "I just don't see that massive content here. Maybe it had already been removed? :)"

That may very well be the case. Neither of us have any photographic evidence of that hole immediately after it was made. In any event it was a ready-access port into the building and it is perhaps likely (perhaps not - merely speculating here) that wreckage and damaged material was moved to gain access for firefighters.

Not sure we'll ever know. I work on that side of the building but have yet to find anyone who was around that day and who was involved in that particular part of the events.

And as for the rest, I'm sorry but I'll just skip the silliness about bombs and missiles and shaped charges from Eric Bart. What would a missile with "shaped charges" or a warhead do that a 200,000 lb, 500 mph flying fuel bomb NOT do?

I have no doubt the fire was intense and extremely hot. People forget that the wings provided the explosive fireball outside, but the aircraft also has a centerline fuselage fuel tank that would have carried some amount of fuel into the building. And the "2,000" degree comment was a little off. Based on damage to the concrete and surrounding structures, it is estimated in the ASCE Pentagon Report that the top temps were about 1750 F. Small point, I know.

[demodewd]

54. re: "fair enough" etc

Fair enough. I have no problem imagining that scenario. You don't. We'll leave that one at that.

I think you're shirking intellectual responsibility here. You brought it up..you should be able to reference it and explain it scientifically.

I see what I would consider acceptable smoke damage on the brickwork. I would not necessarily expect smoke damage/stains to be on the horizontal surfaces of the brickwork. Smoke damage and stains would occur from extended exposure to smoke and heat - as evidenced by the top brickwork.

Fire and intense heat that I would think accompany your aeroclastic flow and set the rooms on fire as they did along the facade and roof of the building. And yet north of the entry point is remarkable for its lack of destruction created by fire.I've seen the photos of the North section's C Wall and area around it. No smoke damage but definitely exposed to a very forceful blast.

And as for the rest, I'm sorry but I'll just skip the silliness about bombs and missiles and shaped charges from Eric Bart. What would a missile with "shaped charges" or a warhead do that a 200,000 lb, 500 mph flying fuel bomb NOT do?

Eric Bart's main contention is that there was a plane the size or near the size of a 757 which exploded at the facade of the West Wing. This premature explosion was the result of shaped charges strapped on or in the plane with the possibility of a bomb also. He does not speak of missiles at all,but only to make the comparison of the plane acting like a missile.If you were to fly a drone into the building you would make sure that it was totally obliterated to cover your tracks. Also by use of a guidance system on the plane ,the plane would act like a missile and home in on the exact location creating the desired effect and minimizing casualties and building damage(as well as safeguarding the security of higher ups like Rumsfeld,Meyer and Eberhard).

[WoodrowFan]

44. How many times do we have to go over this?

That's like asking how long can we calculate the value of Pi. It's like Groundhog Day, the CTers will repeat the same stuff over and over and over and over.

[The Magistrate]

63. Apparently, Sir

We have to go over it until certain persons come to appreciate the force involved when a weight on the order of one hundred tonnes moving at more than four hundred miles an hour hits a stout wall. A convincing small scale demonstration of the sort of force involved, from which the larger event could be scaled up to, would be a claw hammer swung full arm by a grown man against a skull, and do not think that is not tempting....

"The happiest hours of my life were spent swinging sledges and axes."

[demodewd]

66. before the wall

We have to go over it until certain persons come to appreciate the force involved in a plane exploding immediately upon impact before it plows its 100 tons into a "stout wall".

[The Magistrate]

75. That, Mr. Dewd, Alters Nothing

You seem to be adopting a position analogous to the belief that, if you are in a falling elevator, and take a mighty leap off its floor the instant before it impacts the bottom of the shaft, you will alight from that jump in perfect health. You will not; you will break bones and rupture organs, just as if you had stood on the floor the while, for the fact is, even while you perceived yourself to be rising in that leap, that was only relative to the elevator floor, and you were still careering downwards at about the same rate as the elevator, and you would not have altered the impact with which the accellerated mass of your body struck the resistance of the shaft bottom in any appreciable degree.

Nor did the explosion occur "immediately upon impact before it can it plows its 100 tons into a 'stout wall'." Nothing occurs immediately; everything takes some measure of time, and in events involving high velocity masses, these fractions of seconds are crucial. The explosion took place after the rupture of fuel tanks and volatilization of the fuel and the latter's encounter with an ignition source. Long before that, in the minute fractions of a second by which such events must be clocked, the nose of the machine would have struck full against the wall and transfered to it the great bulk of the kinetic energy contained in the moving mass of some hundred tonnes. This shock would certainly have sufficed to break that wall, even as some smaller portion of the available energy was absorbed in crumpling and tearing elements of the forward fuselage of the machine. Even the fuel, both still within, and outside of, the tearing tanks, would have been moving forward at high speed into the hole smashed by the nose of the machine. Indeed, much of the explosion would have taken place on the other side of the outer wall, and only that portion of it outside the hole been registered on the photographs taken from points outside the building. Everything about the internal damage and the heat of the fire begun so quickly there is consistent with there having been such an explosion of fuel largely inside the structure, just as its presence there is consistent with the structure of the jetliner and the process of its impact against the wall, resulting in their mutual and sequential destructions.

"I love the sound of breaking glass."

[demodewd]

100. re: "breaking glass"

I would like to respond to your post and you make some very good points.Sometimes I need to digress more thouroughly in my reponses. But I will stop here and this is why. "I love the sound of breaking glass." This quote I assume is directed towards me as if it is so important to you to break me or my will.

[The Magistrate]

108. The Quote, Sir

Is from an old song, that has very often fit my mood, since that is a very musical and pleasant sound to me, and it seemed apt as a tag in a discussion of the mechanics of destruction, one of the loves of my life throughout its long course....

"Evil to him who evil thinks."

[MercutioATC]

77. A question, demodewd. What caused the explosion?

The ignition of the fuel from the ruptured fuel tanks, right?



Why did the fuel tanks rupture?

Because of the force of the impact, yes?



This seems to prove that the impact happened before the explosion, doesn't it?

[demodewd]

110. interesting question

This is an interesting question,Merc. A very important one in my estimation.

From all that I have gathered,especially the Pentagon frames, the plane exploded immediately upon impact or perhaps just before impact. Some witnesses profess to seeing the plane slow down or recoil just as it apparently hits the building.

My question is...wouldn't the plane envelope itself in the building before it exploded? It was going 500 mph or thereabouts.Compare that with the two WTC towers. Granted the surfaces were different and maybe the Pentagon plane met with more resistance. But even if the fuel lines broke immediately,there would be a split second before the fuel would ignite. And in that split second the plane would have entered the first ring if not penetrating deeper into the D and C rings.

The main infeno appears to be located at the very fore of the building spilling out onto the Pentalawn. The building apparently sustained minimal fire damage in the D and C rings north of the entry point. You show this in your original post. If the plane would have penetrated into those areas before it exploded there would have been extensive damage but as yoour photo shows there appears to be little.

This is why I suspect that there was an explosive of some type that preceded the igniting of the fuel. In that the plane was moving at a 45 degree angle in a Northeast direction I am assume assuming that its volition would carry it and the exploded fuel in that direction also. Was there a buffer created by a preceding explosion that pushed the fuel fire to the south,to the west and out over the facade and roof?

[The Magistrate]

117. Many Thanks For The Chuckle, Mr. Dewd

Do you actually believe that some witness saw the jetliner "recoil just as it apparently hits the building"? You do understand, Sir, do you not, that this is a claim the thing began moving backwards? Would you be kind enough to suggest some mechanism by which the whole inertia of a mass on the order of one hundred tonnes moving at several hundred miles an hour was reversed in mid-course before it struck something?

[MercutioATC]

150. Here's my interpretation of the crash:

(granted, it's derived mostly from the ASCE report)

The plane hit the Pentagon at a 42-degree angle. Immediately upon impact, the outer wall was breached and the majority of the mass of the fuselage and a portion of the mass of the wings, along with a considerable portion of the fuel on board was carried through the hole and caused the damage to the interior columns and walls.

As this was happening, a split-second after the initial impact, the fuel that remained outside the Pentagon ignited, causing the fireball we've all seen.

A moment later, the fuel that was carried into the building ignited, causing further damage to the interior of the Pentagon. The majority of the interior damage was caused by the initial moving mass of fuel and debris, not the subsequent ignition of the fuel.


That's just my view...I realize others have differing opinions. It is, however, based on the interpretations of the ASCE engineers.

[Abe Linkman]

154. Creative imagination at work there. Question for BUSH CT supporters.

Just curious: have you ever heard of a poster who goes by the username of "Truth"?

[MercutioATC]

157. How is that "creative imagination"?

You're acting as if you hadn't read the ASCE report again.

I DO wish that you'd occasionally support your statements rather than just making claims and moving on...

[Abe Linkman]

160. Now, would you please answer the question about "Truth"?

n/t

[MercutioATC]

161. I don't recall hearing of him/her.

Question answered.

[AZCat]

163. There's not an active profile for username "Truth"

There are quite a few with the word "truth" in the username, but none named "Truth".


Perhaps the poster is no longer with us?

[Abe Linkman]

164. Maybe "Truth" posts on another forum where 9/11 issues are discussed.

n/t

[AZCat]

165. Ahh. n/t

[MercutioATC]

177. I believe I've answered your question.

I don't recall posts by any "Truth".

Then again, this is the only 9/11-related forum I frequent...

[hack89]

56. Shaped charges make little holes.

A shaped charge focuses the force of the explosion in a narrow jet - they are designed to bore holes through thick armor plate. A common rule of thumb is the jet is 1/5th the width of the warhead ie a 10 inch war head creates a two inch hole. When you think logically about it, it makes sense - the jet has to narrower than the warhead. That hole in the A-E drive is huge - at least four feet wide. No one makes 20 foot wide warheads.

While we are at it - how does a bomb travel horizontally through a building for hundreds of feet? Anti-gravity devices perhaps? Bombs have blast fragmentation warheads - they don't create neat holes.

[demodewd]

59. my understanding

My understanding of it is thatthere was a shaped charge jet stream created by a multitude of shaped charges.The charges being strapped to the plane like a helix.

Hot plasma jet streams are designed to pierce concrete, they go far inside the building and end up in winds, smokes and heat.
http://eric.bart.free.fr/iwpb/inv2.html

[The Magistrate]

62. That, Mr. Dewd, Is Nonesense

The explosion of such charges alongside one another would produce tremendous interference by the detonation of each charge with the effectiveness of its fellows. Before going any further, it is perhaps time to ask you if you know what a shaped charge is and how it functions...?

[hack89]

71. Have to throw the BS flag on that one

Do you have a link that shows the physics behind such a warhead?

[demodewd]

125. E-mail from Eric Bart

Obtained an e-mail from ericbart from Paris this morning.

Dear Tim

Thanks for your message

I seems difficult to argue about this shaped charge theory.
I'm quite off this thing now but I'll try to discuss it.

First there are not so many theories that can account for
what we know. There are three facts we cannot deny:

1- a big plane flew into the Pentagon
2- the crash scene leaves no impression of a plane crash
3- there is a large round unexplainable exit hole in the A-E drive

I'm not aware of any other theory that can explain these 3 facts.

I will reply below to your three questions in reverse order:


> 3.A shaped charge focuses the force of the explosion in a narrow jet
> - they are designed to bore holes through thick armor plate. A common
> rule of thumb is the jet is 1/5th the width of the warhead ie a 10
> inch war head creates a two inch hole. When you think logically about
> it, it makes sense - the jet has to narrower than the warhead. That hole
> in the A-E drive is huge - at least four feet wide. No one makes 20 foot
> wide warheads.

Well I did not say there was a single war head. I said that there were
many shaped charges arranged along the fuselage. Let's say about 100 Sh. Ch.
arranged from top to bottom, from left to right and from front to rear.

The front SCs were detonated first and the rear last. While the plane was
going forward, the detonations were going backward in the plane. So if both
speeds were equal, you can guess that the "detonation point" was always
at the same distance from the Pentagon front wall. This means that the SCs
were all detonated at the same distance form the Pentagon front wall
although they were NOT at the same place in the plane.

To make both speeds equal, you just need to calculate the ignition of
the detonation according to the speed of the plane. Then the ignition
point seems is always at the same place above the ground. Right ?

In this theory the plane was not flight AA77 but a special military plane
tarted up as a AA airliner. There was no seats inside, there was SCs all
along the fuselage.

I tried to explain this here :
http://eric.bart.free.fr/iwpb/inv2.html#pestatement

Did you read it ?

The "two overlapped and opposite helices" are how the SEs were arranged
in the fuselage.

Maybe my english is not good enough.

So you should now agree that there was jet streams all along the section
of the fuselage and that your point "No one makes 20 foot wide warheads"
does not stand.

On the contrary it's seems logical that the exit hole is so large. This
hole was made by the tip of a bundle of SCs arranged in "two overlapped
and opposite helices" inside the fuselage.

Did you see "smoke spot 3" on the B ring wall ? What else could make it ?
The thing that broke the C ring should leave a mark on the B ring wall or
rest before it. All we see is a smoke spot. So this thing was a forceful
burning wind, the tip of a bundle of SC streams.

Right ?



> 2.Do you have a link that shows the physics behind such a warhead?

No. Except those on my site.


> 1.The explosion of such charges alongside one another would produce
> tremendous interference by the detonation of each charge with the
> effectiveness of its fellows.

Yes. Let me first describe the arrangement of the SCs.

The section of both helices is a single circle, all the SCs were arranged
along this circle.

The axis of this circle is also the axis of the fuselage.

Heree how these SCs are arranged along the fuselage :
(see the graphic below with a fixed size character font)

* *

* * *

* * * *

* *

graph guess 1




* *

* * *

* * * *

* *

graph guess 2


On each '*' there are two SCs, one on each helice.

I understand your question as "How rear SCs are not destroyed or bothered
by the detonation of front SC's ?"

Frankly I don't know the answer for sure. Here are my guesses :

The back effect of the explosion does exist but it's much less violent
and concentrated. This back effect would probably not bother far away
SCs.

What about the closest one, below or above ?

If the speed of the back effect is less than 700 mph it would probably
not interfere with its back neighbours. See for instance "graph guess 1",
imagine that the plane is moving at 450 mph and remember the above story
about "both speeds equal", then you should understand that the back SC
would be detonated well before it is reached by the prior explosion,
this because of the angle of the helice (the distance made by the explosion
is greater than the distance made by the plane). From "graph guess 1" we
can guess that the back effect of the explosion need to be greater than
three times the speed of the plane to interfere (ie 1350 mph).

At the time I worked on this, I believed that the back effect was subsonic,
I probably read it somewhere.

If we have to deal with a supersonic back effect, then we are in trouble !
Are we ? Let me know...

In this case, please take into account that the engineers probably protected
back neighbours either by deflecting the back effect or either by an
armour-like device before or around the back neighbours... (wild guess ...)

Please let me know your thoughts.

Regards
Eric

[hack89]

127. Have him look at my post nr 86

and explain how this helix arrangement can significantly extend the length of the shape charge jets from feet to hundreds of feet.

[demodewd]

129. I did

I e-mailed the post. Hope for a response soon. If not. I will remind him. :)

[hack89]

130. Thanks

[demodewd]

131. it came

> Another point about shaped charges - the jet is formed from
> the material used to line the charge (usually copper). Small
> warheads have a small amount of copper, which also limits the
> size and length of the jet. A typical shaped charge will penetrate
> to approx 150 percent of its width - a 10 inch warhead will
> penetrate 15 inches of material. Even if you generously
> (and unrealistically) increased the effectiveness of the charge
> by a factor of 10, each jet in your "helix" would penetrate no
> more than 10-20 feet - in other words, the jet would penetrate
> into the first room it hit and no further. There will certainly
> not be large holes punched through multiple walls over a distance
> of hundreds of feet.

First there's only one single armour at the Pentagon : the front wall.
Between this wall and the exit hole there's no other wall I guess,
only some partitions. Remember that the E, D and C drive are together
at ground level. The wall of the exit hole is made of bricks. It's
fragile.

As you said, with SC there's an optimum distance range for an optimum
effect but that does not mean that the streams vanish at further
distance. They just diverge.

I don't know how does this relate to the Pentagon front wall. Maybe it
depends on the SC technology. Maybe here we do not have the specific
effect of the narrow jet stream on the wall. But we sure do keep the
directional effect of the explosion.

For sure, the SC explosions are directed toward the wall. What I don't
know is how much concentrated they are at the impact with the wall.

Probably not much. As I said on my site the main damages on the front
wall were made by the mach stem (reflection of the explosions on the
ground ).

So I agree that there's no narrow stream effect. There's only a
directional effect of the explosions.

However we can guess that all directional explosions combine together
to create a large "weak" stream about the size of the bundle (ie about
the size of the section of the helice). This may account roughly account
for the damage at first floor and the exit hole.


> Why would you need a shaped charge to penetrate the Pentagon?
> A 100 ton aircraft, loaded with an explosive mixture of fuel, and
> moving at 500 mph should have all the kinetic energy required to
> do the job.

Do you mean that we should not complicate, speculate hazardous theories
and should search for a simple explanation ?

I do agree. I do agree that my theory is overcomplicated. But what else
do you have ? Did you happen to try to understand the plane trajectory ?
It's amazing ! Only an electronic pilot could do this. Of course it
couldn't be a kamikaze.

Do you think that both planes in NYC "did the job" ?

Maybe you think that the conspirators just needed to send an empty plane
on the Pentagon. Why add explosives ? To me there was explosives there.
For sure. Just read testimonies and all evidences I gathered on my site
(huge heat, white flash, etc ...).

If you mean that this plane bomb is a poor weapon ... well ...
I do agree :o) . There's something stupid here. Maybe it's the DARPA
not me.

I was wrong to put my plane bomb theory in the title, it's presumptuous.
But I would still put it in the conlusion. Until now there's no other
option I'm aware of.

Best Regards
Eric

[hack89]

86. More about shape charges.

Another point about shaped charges - the jet is formed from the material used to line the charge (usually copper). Small warheads have a small amount of copper, which also limits the size and length of the jet. A typical shaped charge will penetrate to approx 150 percent of its width - a 10 inch warhead will penetrate 15 inches of material. Even if you generously (and unrealistically) increased the effectiveness of the charge by a factor of 10, each jet in your "helix" would penetrate no more than 10-20 feet - in other words, the jet would penetrate into the first room it hit and no further. There will certainly not be large holes punched through multiple walls over a distance of hundreds of feet.

Why would you need a shaped charge to penetrate the Pentagon? A 100 ton aircraft, loaded with an explosive mixture of fuel, and moving at 500 mph should have all the kinetic energy required to do the job.

[Abe Linkman]

128. Remote control? Isn't that another limited, modified hang-out?

Saying that you've "seen nothing that directly contradicts the use of remote control" is a totally meaningless weasel phrase, unless it's intentionally used here to innoculate the OCT perps whenever it becomes widely known that the Pentagon attack plane wasn't AA FL 77. "Well, we sure thought that all that body tissue belonged to people on FL 77 as well as the Pentagon personnel who gave up the ghost on 9/11. But, if FL 77 didn't crash at the Pentagon, and the real attack plane was flown there by remote control, then tbere probably wasn't any humans on the plane at all (unless maybe there was evildoer or two, and if so, they got what they deserved upon termination of the flight). And see, way back there, even BEFORE the end of January, we said that we had seen nothing that directly contradicts the use of remote control. And, YES,
ALL MISSILES are flown by "remote control".

Saying you've seen no evidence...implies that you want people to know that you don't completely rule out the possibility (you've seen nothing that directly contradicts the use of remote control)...SO, explain how
remote control was used. Who got it? From where? How was it fitted on FL 77 without seomeone knowing about it?

Answer the above, and depending on how complete your answers are, I may well have a few additional follow-up questions.

[MercutioATC]

152. No, it's an honest statement.

I've seen evidence that refutes every other "alternate theory" I've seen here except remote control. I'm implying nothing, I just don't have anything that refutes a remote-control theory.

Again, do you?

[Abe Linkman]

156. Has that creative imagination ever come up with an explanation of RCCT?

I've seen evidence that makes the BUSH 9/11 CT sound like a very bad attempt to write a script for a new Ahnold movie, but I'm still waiting for you to unleash your explanation for how the Pentagon attacks could have been carried out by OBL using remote control.

I've seen no evidence that disproves that acknowledging remote control as a possibility isn't a smart way to innoculate by way of limited modified-hangout for whenever more of the public figures out the truth about the OCT.

[MercutioATC]

158. I'm not claiming that I have evidence of a remote-control scenario.

I'm claiming that I have no CONTRARY evidence.

I don't understand how somebody could have such difficulty comprehending the difference. Let me know if you need me to find a simpler way to state it to you.

[Abe Linkman]

162. I know you don't any evidence. I asked you how it could be possible.

Why won't you answer the question? In other words, by bringing up the issue of remote control in the manner you did, it sounds like the same kind of thing Rumsfeld was doing when he said a missile struck the Pentagon. Now, the question is, does at least one OCT supporter actually believe that the Pentagon WAS struck by a fighter jet that was flown there by remote control?

[MercutioATC]

178. What don't you understand, Abe?

I didn't make any claims as to its possibility. I simply claimed that I'd seen no evidence that directly refutes it.


I might be able to make this claim in another language if that would help....

[Abe Linkman]

185. Then, it's nothing more than babbling nonsense. (but I don't think so)

Sounds like a tactic from a book on how to use limited, modified hang-outs to innoculate oneself for the day when more facts come out.

[MercutioATC]

186. Or, possibly, it just is what it is.

...a statement that although I don't have any evidence that conclusively rules it out, I don't believe in a remote-control scenario.

:eyes:

[Abe Linkman]

188. Totally meaningless BS. Waste of our time. (or is it exactly what I said

Why would a SINCERE person here want to waste everybody's time by posting a seemingly nonsensical message? No one asked (or cares) about
such an empty, trite little point.

The old trick of cooking-up an alibi for future use, while "plausibly" being able to deny what's really going on.

Not impressive, but very revealing.

[MercutioATC]

190. Actually, it's a theory held by another poster here.

I'm sure they don't consider it to be "meaningless BS".

[mikelewis]

16. Your first point about UBL is incorrect

He did not claim responsibility for the attacks on 10/30/2001. It wasn't until the Friday before the Elections 2004 that he claimed responsibility as stated in the link you provided.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2004/10/29/binla...

The original video where he was discussing the attacks and congradulating everybody was clearly not UBL nor did he claim responsibility at this time.

The second link concerning
"In addition, two members of Al-Qaeda, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, admitted that they played major roles in planning the 9/11 attacks on behalf of OBL:"
This deserves some speculation. I refer you to this article.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/121103Kupf...

It seems odd that just before these two are captured they would have some desire to set the record straight on what part they played in the attacks.

I don't believe anything these stories suggest. I believe that these and other "hijackers" are intelligence assests and have been used in attacks against America in the past, most notably Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. See:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/1678779

I believe that Bin Laden has remained an intelligence asset and has not broken ties to the "CIA" as it has been reported. I believe that there are factions in the CIA that are seperate and covert and are controlling and expanding the war on terror. I believe the goal of this group is global domination and they are using 4th Generation Warfare Tactics to pursue this goal. See:
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/probestop-i.htm
for a detailed analysis of the unbroken link and:
http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/4th_gen_war_gazette.htm for a detailed description of 4th Generation warfare

I believe that the invasion of Iraq was engineered to instigate "real" terrorism against the United States and that has been confirmed by Sen. Barbara Boxer in the most recent confirmation hearings of Rice.
"Boxer quoted outside assessments that the Iraq invasion has "done what (terrorist mastermind) bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams" and a recent report by the National Intelligence Council, which advises the Central Intelligence Agency, that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as a training ground for the next generation of professional terrorists and become "a magnet for international terrorist activity."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/200...

I beleive the Usurpers are manipulating events in a attempt to destabilize the world and allowing them to a chance to sieze strategic areas and vital economic interests. They are using illicit narcotics trades and illegal sales of oil to enrich thier regime while they systematically weaken the United States. They have engineered 2 presidential elections and 1 mid-term election to further this goal. The use of terrorism has always had political goals. To use terrorism in support of religious goals is self-defeating. Every single terrorist attack has aided Bush, not hindered him. I also do not believe Bush is the "mastermind" of this campaign. I believe there is a union between Bush Sr. and several powerful companies such as Northrupp-Grumman and L-3 Communications. I believe the Saudis are allied to this cabal and help to fund certain objectives. My estimate is that we are facing an army of roughly 20-25 thousand intelligence operatives and mercenaries who have been very successful in this campaign so far. Many of these men have been trained in Afghanistan and have been used to disrupt governments all over the world to help further thier goals. We are witnessing the Russan-Afgan war on a world scale. They have infiltrated and successfully overthrown what was Yugoslavia. They are currently focusing on the EU and the United States. If left unchecked, they will have successfully destabilized the middle east in 1-5 years. The EU will be crippled by a drug trade that makes the 80's look like the 50's in America. The United States will suffer from "real" terrorism within this time period prompting further fascist and tyrranical oppression. These are my predictions for the immediate future. This is why I find the admission of these 2 "terrorist" to be highly suspect. I believe they are part of a disinformation campaign that furthers these goals just as much as the work we are doing is furthering these goals.

[MercutioATC]

17. I stand corrected. The date is a typo. It should be 10/30/2004.

I obviously feel differently about OBL's current status as a CIA asset.

[spooked911]

21. Why? Just a gut feeling?

[MercutioATC]

23. No, I don't believe a "CIA asset" would have attacked the USS Cole.

There's no doubt that the U.S. supported OBL at one time. However, his actions and religious doctrine lead me to believe that his attacks on the U.S. are his own doing.

[demodewd]

27. whaaat?

Is this pertinent to the original post?? I think not! :)

[mikelewis]

29. I was clearifying his point about UBL and the terrorists

He was debunking In Plane Sight and he had some inaccuracies. This line of thought is consistant because I do not believe the "terrorists" would have invited a camera crew in to view thier confession. It seems unrealistic and scripted. How is this inconsistant and off-topic?

[mikelewis]

198. So far, there has been no definitive evidence linking UBL to the Cole

I must admit that until you stated your objection to UBL being a a cia asset, I hadn't investigated the Cole Bombing in great detail. I was aware that there was a suggestion that he was responsible but that no defiitive evidence supports his involvement.

I submit this article for your assesment. According to this article, "If" UBL did not orchestrate the attack on the Cole as it has been suggested, how would this affect your opinion that UBL was an asset of BushCo? Keep in mind, I do not believe the CIA is the same as the BushCo CIA. I believe there are elements within the CIA that operate independantly of and act in concert with BushCo but does not include the entirety of the men and women in the CIA. {Did that make sense? I really wish I had the communication skills of some of the people I read.}

This is a website for news and whatnot in Yemen. I must question the motives of the source of this article but they are not claiming they know who is reponsible. They are not claiming that UBL is resonsible either. I would think that it would be in Yemen's best interest to have UBL or some other country's citizen to be responsible so by thier throwing a skeptical light on this issue increases thier credibility in my eyes. I will try and find other sources as well.
http://www.al-bab.com/yemen/cole4.htm

THE ATTACK on the USS Cole appears to have been a generalised protest against American involvement in the Middle East; it was not directed at any particular aspect of US policy, such as Palestine or Iraq.
The use of suicide bombers suggests it was carried out by an armed Islamist group rather than a secular political organisation. Such groups often have international connections dating back to the Afghan war. It would therefore not be surprising to find that the group who carried out the Cole bombing contained a mixture of Yemenis and individuals from other Arab or Muslim countries.

Yemen has been plagued by generally low-level terrorism for many years. Following the Afghan war, many Muslim fighters took refuge there, taking advantage of lax security, the ready availability of weapons, and the rugged terrain to use it as a base for training and activities in other countries.

Southern Yemen, under Marxist rule, was classified by the US as a "rogue state". The Marxists provided Carlos the Jackal with a passport. But Yemen was removed from the US list when the south and north of Yemen were unified in 1990.

Usama bin Laden, whose family originally came from southern Yemen, has maintained links with the country, and he has a number of followers there.

Bin Laden was reported to be "delighted" by the attack on USS Cole - though denying any involvement. According to al-Hayat newspaper, he "knelt and thanked God for this operation which has shaken the American military reputation".

Armed Islamist groups frequently have - or claim to have - some connection with bin Laden. But the links are often tenuous and do not necessarily indicate bin Laden’s involvement in specific actions.


American and Yemeni officials say there is some evidence linking suspects in the Cole bombing to associates of bin Laden, though they have been careful not to claim any direct links to bin Laden himself (CNN, Reuters, 7 December).

The Americans are especially interested in a man provisionally identified as Abd al-Muhsin al-Taifi, a Yemeni national, possibly with Saudi connections, who was wanted for questioning about the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi (which has been attributed to bin Laden’s organisation). Al-Taifi is believed to have been one of the two suicide bombers in the attack on USS Cole.

Blood samples taken from people thought to be related to the Cole bombers were sent to the United States for checking these against the DNA in "confetti-sized" fragments of human tissue recovered from the scene (CNN, 22 November).

Establishing links between the Cole bombers and members of bin Laden’s organisation provides further evidence of the international terrorist network that developed as a result of the Afghan war.

That network appears to be largely informal, consisting of people whose shared experiences during the war gave them a sense of common purpose (albeit a violent one) and created a pool of expertise which can be called upon to help in terrorist attacks around the world. While there is little doubt that bin Laden plays an important role in sustaining the network - through funding, training, contacts, and other things - it is not clear that he actually controls it.

Both Yemen and the US have a political interest in focusing on bin Laden as the "mastermind" or instigator behind the Cole bombing and similar attacks.

Yemen maintains that it is basically a victim of "imported terrorism", and the more it can highlight foreign involvement in the Cole affair, the better for its future relations with the United States.

For the US, the damage to American prestige is mitigated somewhat if it can be shown that the Cole was bombed by the world’s leading terrorist rather than a two-bit Yemeni organisation which happened to strike lucky after several failed attempts.

Blaming bin Laden also encourages the idea (comforting for many Americans) that such attacks have no real motive: bin Laden is mad or has some kind of grudge and pays people to do these things. It’s only his charisma, money and technical know-how that keeps them going. This avoids having to confront more disturbing questions about perceptions of the way America throws its weight around and the resentment that this arouses among many ordinary Muslims, not just terrorists.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE groups have so far claimed responsibility for the Aden attack - the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan and two previously unknown in Yemen: the Army of Mohammed and the Islamic Deterrence Forces (IDF). The Army of Mohammed also claimed responsibility for bombing the British embassy in Sana’a the following day. The Islamic Army has previously claimed responsibility for several incidents in Yemen which turned out not to have been terrorist acts.

The IDF’s statement said the attack was in "defence of the honour and dignity of the Islamic nation and to avenge the blood of the oppressed Muslim nation in Palestine with the blessing of the American regime for that enemy … This operation will not be the last, as such attacks will continue against our enemy, and the enemy of our Arab and Muslim nation: America and its artificial Zionist entity in Palestine."

The Islamic Army achieved notoriety in December 1998, when it kidnapped 16 mainly British tourists in southern Yemen. Four of the tourists died during a rescue by Yemeni security forces, and the leader of the Islamic Army at the time - Abu al-Hassan al-Mihdar - was later executed.

The group - one of three offshoots of the Jihad organisation which carried out numerous attacks in Yemen in the early 1990s - included veterans of the Afghan war and Islamists from various countries, though many Yemenis doubt that it still exists.

The Islamic Army has also been linked to Abu Hamza al-Masri, the imam of Finsbury Park mosque in London, and the Britons - still serving jail sentences in Yemen - for plotting to attack American and British targets in Aden.

At one point, when the Yemeni government tried to close the Islamic Army’s training camp, a bin Laden representative attempted to mediate.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO alternative theories have been put forward to explain the Cole bombing. The most bizarre of these, popular with some Islamist elements, is that the USS Cole was attacked by Israel. The idea - unsupported by evidence - is that it was intended to divert attention from the killing of Palestinians, while stiffening American resolve. The Israeli attack on USS Liberty in the Mediterranean in June 1967 is cited as a previous example. (See article by Michael Gillespie).

Another theory, advanced by the pro-Saudi magazine, al-Watan al-Arabi, is that the attack was masterminded by Iraq, and would have required collaboration with the Yemeni government. This is highly speculative, and is not supported by any hard evidence.

Although the Yemeni government has been highly critical of recent events in Palestine, it continues to seek to develop its relations with the United States. To give even tacit approval to the bombing would be to risk undoing its efforts in this area over the last four years. It is also doubtful whether Iraq, at a time when it is seeking international rehabilitation, would engage in such an action.

[mikelewis]

200. Here's a link to the CSMonitor that says Iraq did it

The CS Monitor makes my eyes bleed. I used to read them everyday but now they make me want to puke my guts out. Sometimes I wish I still thought this way, life would be a lot easier, that's for sure. Anyway, enough of this...

It seems clear some elements have been trying to link Iraq to terrorism. The implication that Iraqi Security forces were responsible for the Oklahoma City Bombing, the U.S.S. Cole, 9/11 seem weak and so far none have panned out. But by the implication that the Cole attack was perpetrated by Iraq, does this mean the CSMonitor doesn't think it was UBL who did it or are they trying to establish an indirect alliance between UBL and Saddam with the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" routine?


http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0403/p01s01-wome.html

Ex-smuggler describes Iraqi plot to blow up US warship

Saddam Hussein was allegedly planning nine terrorist operations.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SULEIMANIYEH, NORTHERN IRAQ – Iraq planned clandestine attacks against American warships in the Persian Gulf in early 2001, according to an operative of Iranian nationality who says he was given the assignment by ranking members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle.
The alleged plan involved loading at least one trade ship with half a ton of explosives, and – sailing under an Iranian flag to disguise Iraq's role – using a crew of suicide bombers to blow up a US ship in the Gulf.


The operative, who says he smuggled weapons for Iraq through Iran for Al Qaeda during the late 1990s, says he was told that $16 million had already been set aside for the assignment – the first of "nine new operations" he says the Iraqis wanted him to carry out, which were to include missions in Kuwait.

The first plot, remarkably similar to the attack on the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, was never carried out. The status of the other nine operations remains unclear.

The smuggler, Mohamed Mansour Shahab, now in the custody of Kurdish opponents of Mr. Hussein in northern Iraq, says he was first told of the role he was to play in the plan in February 2000 – one month after an apparently unrelated attempt in Yemen to target a US destroyer, the USS The Sullivans, failed when the bombers' boat, overloaded with explosives, sank. Suicide bombers later succeeded in striking the USS Cole in Yemen, leaving 17 US sailors dead and a gaping 40-by-40 foot hole in the side of the warship.

Terror's footprints

If this Iranian smuggler is telling the truth, it would represent the first information in nearly a decade directly linking Baghdad to terrorist plans. No evidence has surfaced to date that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks or the bombing of the Cole. But President George W. Bush has declared Iraq part of an "axis of evil," and makes no secret of his determination to end the rule of Saddam Hussein as part of his "war on terrorism."

The last publicly known terrorism involvement by Baghdad was a failed assassination plot against Bush's father, former President George H. W. Bush, during a visit to Kuwait in 1993. The elder Bush orchestrated the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.

"The Iraqis may have been waging war against the US for 10 years without us even knowing about it," says Magnus Ranstorp, at the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "Iraq may have fought, using terrorism as the ultimate fifth column, to counter US sanctions and bombing. Plausible deniability is something Iraq ... would want to ensure, putting layer upon layer to hide their role."

Part of the justification for any future US strike against Iraq may be the kind of information provided by the young-faced, nervous Iranian smuggler, now held in the US-protected Kurdish "safe haven" of northern Iraq.

Mr. Shahab spoke last weekend in an intelligence complex run by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two rival armed Kurdish factions that control northern Iraq. He did not appear coerced to speak, and bore no physical signs that he had been mistreated since his arrest on May 16, 2000.

Still, shaking nervously and swallowing repeatedly, he at first refused to answer questions, saying that he was concerned about his family's safety in Iran. Two days later – after learning that part of his smuggling history and role in several killings had already been made public in the New Yorker magazine – he agreed to describe information that he had previously withheld, about Iraq's plan to target US warships.

"If this information is true, it would be in the interest of the US, and of all the world, for the US to be here to find out," says a senior Kurdish security officer involved in the case. Kurdish investigators were initially skeptical of some parts of Shahab's story. But the investigators say they later independently confirmed precise descriptions of the senior Iraqi officials Shahab says he met, by cross-examining a veteran Iraqi intelligence officer in their custody, and checking other sources.

Wearing a pale-green military jacket, dark-blue sweat pants and worn plastic sandals, Shahab softly recounts how he smuggled arms and explosives for Al Qaeda and the Iraqis. He at times flashes a boyish smile – the same disarming grin he uses in images on a roll of film he was carrying when arrested. Shahab also claims to be an assassin. The photos – shown to the Monitor – show Shahab killing an unidentified man with a knife. He grins at the camera as he holds up the victim's severed ear.

During a two-and-a-half-hour interview, Shahab describes the origin of the plot to blow up US warships, while his hands work nervously. He received an urgent phone call early in 2000, from a longtime Afghan contact named Othman, who told him to go to a meeting in Iraq. In February 2000, Shahab says he was taken to the village of Ouija, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein near Hussein's clan base at Tikrit, in north central Iraq.

At the meeting, he says, were two influential Iraqis, fellow clansmen of Saddam Hussein: Ali Hassan al-Majid – Mr. Hussein's powerful cousin and former defense minister – and Luai Khairallah, a cousin and friend of Hussein's notoriously brutal son Uday. Mr. al-Majid is known among Iraqi Kurds as "Chemical Ali," for his key role in the genocidal gassing and destruction of villages in northern Iraq that killed more than 100,000 Kurds in 1987 and 1988.

The Iraqis said they considered Shahab to be Arab, and not Persian, and could trust him because he was from Ahvaz, a river city in southwest Iran rich with smugglers and close to the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Kuwait. It is known as "Arabistan" because of the number of Arabs living there.

Nine missions

Al-Majid and Mr. Khairallah spoke of the nine operations: "We've allocated $16 million already for you," Shahab remembers them telling him. "We start with the first one: We need you to buy boats, pack them with 500 kilograms of explosives each, and explode US ships in Kuwait and the Gulf."

The plan was "long term," Shahab says, and meant to be carried out a year or so later, in early 2001, after he had carried out another mission to take refrigerator motors to the Taliban. Each motor had a container attached holding an apparently important liquid unknown to Shahab. He says he doesn't know if all nine operations mentioned were similar to the boat plan, or completely different. Some were to take place in Kuwait.

The attack against a US vessel, Shahab recounts al-Majid and Khairallah explaining, was to be "a kind of revenge because were killing Iraqis, and women and children were dying" because of stringent UN sanctions, which the US backed most strongly. "They said: 'This is the Arab Gulf, not the American Gulf,' " Shahab recalls, referring to the large US naval presence in the area.

The Iraqis knew that Shahab, with his legitimate Iranian passport and wealth of smuggler contacts, would have little trouble purchasing the common 400-ton wooden trading boats. He would have raised few eyebrows sailing under an Iranian flag – the only ships in the area, since UN sanctions prohibit such Iraqi trade.

Shahab was to rent or buy a date farm along the water at Qasba, on the marshy Shatt al-Arab waterway that narrowly divides Iraq and Iran, just a few hundred yards from the Iraqi port city of Fao. Using a powerful small smuggling boat, he says he would have been able to reach Kuwaiti waters from Qasba in just 10 minutes.

Iraqi agents were to provide the explosives and suicide squad; Shahab was to handle the boats and the regular crew. "The group that worked with me would sail the ship, and not know about the explosives," Shahab says. "When we crossed out of Iranian waters, we were to kill the crew, hand over the ship to the suicide bombers, and then leave by a smuggler's way."

The job, Shahab said, "was easy for me, I could start at any time." Shahab said the Iraqis told him they "had a lot of suicide bombers in Baghdad" ready to take part in such an operation.

But the plans were never finalized for Shahab, and after delivering the refrigerator motors to the Taliban, he was arrested in northern Iraq in May 2000, with his roll of film, as he tried to avoid Iranian military exercises going on along the border to the south. Though carrying a false Kurdish identity card, his accent gave him away at the last PUK checkpoint.

Iraqi experts say that such a plot is plausible, since Saddam Hussein's multiple intelligence services are sophisticated and smart.

"Anything is possible," says Sean Boyne, an Ireland-based Iraq specialist, who writes regularly for Jane's Intelligence Review in London. "Certainly Saddam has gone to great trouble to shoot down aircraft" patrolling no-fly zones in northern and south Iraq, Mr. Boyne says. "He has invested heavily in his antiaircraft system. He is eager to have a crack at the Americans."

That impulse may also help explain the presence of a training camp at Salman Pak, a former biological-weapons facility south of Baghdad. It includes a mock-up Boeing 707 fuselage, which Western intelligence agencies believe has been used for several years to train Islamic militants from across the region in the art of hijacking. A senior Iraqi officer who defected told The New York Times last November that the regime was increasingly getting into the terrorism business. "We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States," an unnamed lieutenant general said. "The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this."

Still, the political situation Saddam Hussein finds himself in today – in light of the example of decisive US military action in Afghanistan – may not be as conducive to a strike at the US as it was when Shahab says he first heard of the plan to blow up a US warship. In recent months, Boyne notes,

Iraq has engaged in a region-wide charm offensive to portray itself as a victim, and to build Arab and European support against any US attack. Baghdad is even pursuing warmer ties with Kuwait (at the Arab League summit last week) and with Iran, in an attempt to gain mileage from Iran's anger at being listed as part of Washington's "axis of evil."

While the Bush administration focuses on Iraq's apparent pursuit of weapons of mass destruction – in the absence of UN weapons inspectors, who were kicked out in 1998 – clues to Iraq's true role may lie in the credibility of the 29-year-old smuggler from Ahvaz.

Why is he talking now? "Afghanistan is finished, so now I feel free to speak," says Shahab, who was given the name Mohamed Jawad by accomplices in Afghanistan. Asked if he fears the wrath of senior members of the regime in Baghdad, who still hold power, Shahab replies: "I lost everything. For many years I worked with assassinations and killing – it doesn't make a difference to me."

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

202. Wasn't John O'Neill denied access to Yemen by the US Ambassador

when investigating UBL?

[Abe Linkman]

203. Yes, O'Neil was denied access, but CIA Station Chief saw OBL in hospital

Apparently U.S. Ambassadors in Middle Eastern countries are called upon to deliver all kinds of news. Remember, it was Amabassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, who gave the wink and nod to Saddam to do what he had to do about Kuwait stealing Iraq's most valuable asset (oil) via slant-drilling in the Rumallah Oil Field.

Here's a link to an article which includes the answer to your question about John O'Neil...who lost his life at the WTC. Was he "suicided"?
http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-cornwall5403.htm

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

204. It was actually a rhetorical question on my part. Another good

source for info on O'Neill is the PBS Documentary, The Man Who Knew, although I'm sure you've watched it.

For those who haven't, here is a link to information on the show and below a link to view it online.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/knew/view/

[Abe Linkman]

205. Sounded like a factual question to me, but in any case...

the answer isn't rhetorical.

[Abe Linkman]

24. OBL is a valuable CIA asset. That's why he's never been captured.

As far as the Cole or Khobar Towers or 9/11, Osama bin Laden (the FAT one or the skinny 1) has only been a Patsy. The CIA (like all intelligence agencies around the world) DOES use its own agents, but often as not, they use paid assets, depending on the needs of the mission, how politically sensitive it is, the likely fallout if the perps are exposed as being on the CIA payroll etc.

The recent bombing in Chechnya was almost certainly carried out by Russian Intelligence. The bombing last year in Spain was a self-attack, and so was 9/11.

Remember: Osama was visited in the hospital by the local CIA station chief, in the U.A.E., in July, 2001, and he was in a Pakistani Military Hospital on September 10th (and most likely was still there the following morning). And in case you don't know, the Pakistani Military and Intelligenc Agency works very very closely with our own CIA. As a matter of fact, the CIA helped set up the ISI (Pakistani Intelligence Agency)...and you might recall that on the morning of 9/11, our own current CIA head (Porter Goss) was meeting with a high-ranking ISI officer, in Washington. There were two or three other people at the meeting, but the Pakistani gentleman is the person who wired $100K to the infamous Mohammad Atta.

Almost every single act that is labeled as terroism is State Sponsored. Hitler's people were behind the burning of the German Parliment Building. They found a convenient scapegoat to blame (a man from the Netherlands, who was quickly labeled a disgruntle, lone nut "COMMUNIST"). That fire (Reichstag...sorry about the spelling if it's incorrect) is what Hitler used as an excuse to further his political goals, and you know what those led to. Sound like a familiar scenario? It should. Remember, GW's grandfather was a banker for the Nazis. He (Prescott Bush) was one of many RIGHT-WING Americans who believed that the U.S. was fighting the wrong enemy in WW II. They believed we should have been Hitler's ALLY.

Go back and read up on the Oklahoma City bombing, and you'll find eerie similarities to the WTC demolitions. Just as the Federal building in O.City couldn't and wasn't brought down by a fertilizer bomb, neither was the WTC brought down by a jet fuel fire & plane hit combo.

Why anyone in a position to know better, would try to influence you otherwise is something else you ought to THINK about.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

30. Jayna Davis who was a reporter for an OKC tv station did extensive

investigations on the bombing of the Murrah Building. The main suspect in the beginning was someone labeled John Doe 2, an middle eastern looking person, who was filmed on security cameras. According to Davis, this man was an Iraqi who was a member of the Republican Guard. He came into our country with hundreds of others, allowed here by Papa Bush after the Gulf War.

Davis claims the FBI had been hot on his trail, and then abruptly called off. Davis tracked him down, took lots of depositions, but the Justice Department didn't want to hear it.

The last she had heard of this man, according to her, he moved to Boston and went to work at Logan Airport for a food catering company.

Davis unfortunately believes that this is a link to the Iraqis being involved in 9/11, and not going further that this man was probably a CIA operative. Why else would the Feds be called off?

http://JaynaDavis.com

Interesting aside. The same company that hauled away the debris (evidence) from the Murrah Bldg, was the same company that took the debris (more evidence) away from the WTC. The name of the company Controlled Demolitions.

[DulceDecorum]

36. Jayna Davis is not a trustworthy source.

She and Laurie Mylroie have insisted that Saddam was behind 911
and also that Saddam was behind the Oklahoma bombing
and also that Saddam was pals with Osama.
http://www.okcbombing.org/News%20Articles/iraq_link_911.htm
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0402/jkelly040802.asp

Not much difference between her and Rita Katz.
All three are cut from the same cloth as one Jumana Michael Hanna.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-01-23-hanna-torture_x.htm

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

41. That's why I said what I did. I believe she came to the wrong conclusion.

I believe that person was allowed in here as an operative. That is why I said in my post, why else would the Feds have called off the search. They had to have orders from higher-ups. Not unlike the Feds who were uncovering 9/11 before it happened (ie Robert Wright) and were pulled off their respective cases.

[DulceDecorum]

87. With all due respect,

you are assuming that Jayna Davis was telling the truth in the first place.

She is a lying bitch.
If she says "Good Morning,"
look around and verify that for yourself
before accepting that statement.

How could she reach the correct conclusion
when everything she was basing her arguments on
were outright lies
and toatal fabrications?

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

97. Thank you, I will look further into her statements, and you're right,

to take one person's word on face value isn't the way to do research. I just found her "research" to be very compelling.

I would just like to know how you came by the fact that she is a liar, and what you base that on. It will help lead to me further looking into this.

Thanking you in advance! :)

[DulceDecorum]

102. Have you heard of Steve Emerson?

He and Jayna Davis are basically telling the same story.
Now go look up Steve Emerson.

Emerson is best known for his controversial 1994 PBS production "Jihad in America." Muslims say he has a long history of defamatory and inaccurate attacks on the Islamic community in this country.
http://www.counterpunch.org/emerson05192003.html

Emerson's most notorious gaffe was his claim that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing showed "a Middle Eastern trait" because it "was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible." (CBS News, 4/19/95) Afterward, news organizations appeared less interested in Emerson's pronouncements. A CBS contract expired and wasn't renewed. Emerson had been a regular source and occasional writer for the Washington Post; his name doesn't turn up once in Post archives after Jan. 1, 1996. USA Today mentioned Emerson a dozen times before September 1996, none after.

"He's poison," says investigative author Seymour Hersh, when asked about how Emerson is perceived by fellow journalists.
http://www.fair.org/extra/9901/emerson.html

When Emerson could not sell his Oklahoma fib,
they repackaged it in a mini skirt
and then sent it back out to walk the streets
under the name Jayna Davis.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

194. No I haven't heard of Steve Emerson, and thank you for enlightening

me. :)

[Abe Linkman]

18. Another excellent analysis. Hard to argue with your conclusions.

Some people might contend that the rich and powerful in this country don't want real terroism to happen here because they themselves could be targets...or their property, family, or businesses. But, they forget that...

From Commander Bunnypants to Halliburton muckety mucks...the rich & powerful have enough personal and business security to not have to worry much about their own safety, and whenever the stray executive does become a victim of what the media will label as a terrorist act, that will only embolden
politicians to enact more laws to restrict our liberties and limit our rights.

[spooked911]

22. I was with you most of the way, but--

What did you mean by "a drug trade that makes the 80's look like the 50's in America."? I don't undertsand the reference.

And in your last line, who is "we" in"just as much as the work we are doing is furthering these goals. "?

Great post otherwise-- certainly an interesting thesis that I haven't seen presented quite like that before.

[mikelewis]

64. The illicit drug trade of Afghanistan threatens the EU

I'm going to do a series of post to answer these questions as they are important. I'm going to start by discussing Afghanistan and finally show you how the Drug Trade aides the Usurpers in this war. I assume you are aware of the increase in illicit drug traficking in the 80's in America. Cocaine became the drug de jour and the War on Drugs began at this time.

Heroin is the new drug de jour for Europe and since the fall of Yugoslavia in 1999, there has been a sharp spike in chemical dependancy in Europe. I believe this will continue to grow and become a difficult problem for the EU. As we have seen in our own country, drugs have a debilitating effect on our economy. It will have an even greater effect on Europe. I believe this is intentional and directed against the EU to weaken the countries that participate in the EU.

Here is an article that describes the situation in the Balkans as it relates to drug traficking.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b1a3a141e7a.htm
This is an excerpt from this article.

Interpol estimates that Kosovo Albanians may control 40 percent of the European heroin trade. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic, they may have as much as 70 percent of the market, according to the estimates.

Kosovars became Europe's heroin kingpins by dominating the ''Balkan route,'' a series of roundabout highways that run from Turkey through Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, and then, it is said, into Austria. Four to six tons of heroin move along this route annually, generating about $400 billion in revenues.

At the top of the drug-smuggling hierarchy, according to Interpol, is a group of gangsters known as ''The Fifteen Families,'' who are based in northern Albania, near the Yugoslav border.

Opium from Afghanistan and Pakistan is exported to Turkey, where it is refined into heroin, and then moved by Turkish gangs to the Balkans.

There, lieutenants of the Fifteen Families, operating from anarchic border towns around ill-defined Balkan borders, take over and administer the drugs' movement across the continent.

In cities across Europe, smaller Kosovo Albanian gangs oversee storage, sale and distribution. To avoid risk, they hire local couriers, called donkeys or horses, to move the drugs across borders.

This story was written in June of 2001, at this time the Taliban was still in control of Afghanistan and had put an end to the growing of poppy. See http://www.unodc.org/unodc/newsletter_2001-06-30_1_page002.html
Excerpt
"Farmers in Afghanistan, the world's number one producer of opium poppy, did not plant the illegal crop this year. Following a ban on poppy cultivation issued by the head of the Taliban in July 2000, UNDCP was able to verify thousands of hectares of poppy-free land in February 2001.

Since 1999, Afghanistan has produced approximately 75 per cent of the world's opium cultivated on 91,000 hectares in 1999 and 82,000 hectares in 2000. A survey team led by the UNDCP regional office in Islamabad visited 80 per cent of the known poppy growing areas in the 51 districts known to have produced 86 per cent of last year's crop. The team found less than 30 hectares of poppy which were later eradicated. This signals the potential reduction of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan by at least 70,000 hectares this year."

This is also confirmed by the gift we gave the Taliban of $43 million in aid.
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n904/a07.html
Excerpt
On Thursday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in additional emergency aid to cope with the effects of a prolonged drought. The United States has become the biggest donor to help Afghanistan in the drought.

"We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans," he said in a statement, "including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome."

The Afghans are desperate for international help, but describe their opposition to drug cultivation purely in religious terms. The end of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has come at a huge cost to farmers, Mr. Callahan and Mr. Casteel said. The rural economy, especially in the usual opium-poppy areas, had come to rely on the narcotics trade. "The bad side of the ban is that it's bringing their country — or certain regions of their country — to economic ruin," Mr. Casteel said. "They are trying to replace the crop with wheat, but that is easier said than done."

"Wheat needs more water and earns no money until it is sold," Mr. Casteel said. "With the opium trade they used to get their money up front."

The Taliban, who used to collect taxes on the movement of opium, is also losing money, adding another layer of difficulty for a government that is already isolated and not recognized diplomatically by most nations.

Afghanistan is now under United Nations sanctions, imposed at the insistence of the United States because the Islamic movement will not turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in connection with attacks on two American Embassies in Africa in 1998. {Notice the U.S.S. cole in not mentioned}

American experts and United Nations officials say the Taliban are likely to face political problems if the effects of the opium ban are catastrophic and many people die.


one year after our attack, Afghanistan is once again the number 1 producer of opium in the world. The heroin produced from this opium is still being moved along the " Balkan route" just in greater numbers. This article is from 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2282617.stm
Excerpt
A huge increase in Afghan opium production has raised fears of a new influx of heroin into European cities.
Latest estimates suggest that poppy cultivation has increased by up to 1,400% since the removal of the Taleban regime at the end of last year.
About 90% of the heroin sold in the UK originates in Afghanistan.

This is today
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2005/01/25/us_drops_afghan_opium_spraying_plans/
The United Nations estimated that 323,700 acres in Afghanistan were dedicated to opium last year. That marks a 64 percent increase over the figure for 2003. The U.S. government's estimate was even higher: 5.1 million acres, a 239 percent increase over its 2003 figure.

The United Nations says Afghanistan produced nearly 90 percent of the world's opium and the drug accounted for more than 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product.

Relatively little Afghan opium, though, reaches the United States, where Colombia has been the largest source of heroin and cocaine.

The majority of this opium is flooding in to Europe at an alarming rate. If the production is increasing then this must mean the consumption is also increasing. As the availabilty of herion increases the price begins to fall and this encourages more people to use the drug which in turn increases consumption and so on and so on.
See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1059-1439292,00.html
ExcerptYet the drinks industry is worried. It sees growing competition from drugs at the high-spending youth end of the market. Young people are drifting from pubs to clubs and turning to cannabis, Ecstasy, cocaine and smokeable heroin. These narcotics have fallen in price even faster than alcohol, to the point where a line of cocaine is cheaper than a pint of beer. According to the last Independent Drugs Monitoring Unit survey, cannabis has halved in street price under Labour. The price of crack cocaine has fallen by two thirds.

If this cycle continues, what chance does the EU stand in combatting the drug menace? What is to become of the generations of junkies this war on terror is creating? How is this related to the Usurpers plans? More in my next post.

[The Magistrate]

65. Citing 'Free Republic' For Your Lead Source, Mr. Lewis?

This is going to be rum fun....

"Kill one, warn one hundred."

[Name removed]

68. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

70. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

73. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[mikelewis]

79. Yep, that sounds about right

http://www.antichristconspiracy.com/HTML%20Pages/Skull_and_Bones.htm
After twelve years of Republican administrations, Bush passes the reins to his drug smuggling buddy from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who studied at Yale Law School. According to some researchers, Clinton was recruited as a CIA operative while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Could this be the "old Hegallian historical dialectic process"?

[The Magistrate]

76. You Want To Argue Yugoslavia, Mr. Lewis?

You will probably not enjoy it much; Emperor's Clothes is a comedic site some are fooled into treating as serious information....

The Unhappy History of Kossovo


One: Origin of the Quarrel

The clash in Kossovo of Arnaut and Vascian, as the peoples known to we moderns as Albanian and Serb were oft known in Ottoman days, differs from the usual run of Balkan bloodletting; it describes a real ethnic difference. Serb, Croat, Slovene, Montenegrin; all are Slavs, divided due to institutions only. Albanians remain in some proportion survivals of the old Dalmatian and Illyric peoples of Roman days, taken to craggy peaks for refuge from a tide of Slavic invasion commencing with the sixth century.

Medieval Albanian Catholicism offered further differentiation from Orthodox Serbs. The northeastern extension of the Albanian remnant, and the southern marches of the Serb, coincided roughly in modern Kossovo. Here the Serb Czar and Orthodox Patriarchite were able to exert authority the more atomized Albanian polity could not. After the death of the Albanian chieftain Skanderberg, and the Ottoman routing of Venice from the latter’s Adriatic lodgments, late in the fifteenth century, Albanians generally converted to Islam.

In Kossovo, this established local Albanians’ dominance over the Orthodox Serb peasantry, as the Ottoman gave landlord’s tenure only to Moslems. More enterprising or desperate Serbs migrated north; Albanians of similar motivation replaced them from the west. The locale remained poorly ordered, and a frequent theater for rebellion and consequent Ottoman suppression.

The catastrophe suffered by the Ottoman besieging Vienna in 1683 led to the swift seizure of Bosnia, Albania, and Serbia by Austrian and Bavarian Catholic armies. An Austrian force ventured into Kossovo in 1689, setting Albanian and Serb alike both to rebellion against the Ottoman and to battle against one another. The Austrians soon were routed at Nish. In Kossovo, the Ottoman killed every inhabitant they could lay hands on for days. Serbs fled north in great number, Albanians fled west.

With Ottoman authority reasserted, it was mostly Albanians who returned. These soon outnumbered the Serb survivors and progeny. Erection of an autonomous Serbia early in the nineteenth century enticed Kossovo Serbs to migrate north and acquire a freehold farm there. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877, which saw near collapse for the tottering Ottoman, was preceded and followed by Serb attacks.

These fell on Ottoman garrisons and Moslem inhabitants in the south of modern Serbia, culminating in the 1878 sack and firing of the Albanian quarter in Nish. Islamic refugees fled into Kossovo; Christians fled into Serbia for shelter from ensuing pogrom, and advancing Ottoman soldiery. The peace imposed by the Treaty of Berlin left Kossovo under unrestricted Ottoman rule.

Two: To the Yugoslav Monarchy

Albanian agitation for autonomy on modern terms within the declining Ottoman imperium began at Prizren in Kossovo, and at Istanbul. The Serb remnant in Kossovo were subjected to a wretched existence, without recourse from predation by landlord or hostile brigand. Early in 1912, declaration of an Albanian state ignited a successful rebellion in Kossovo against the Ottoman.

In the Balkan War, pitting Slav and Greek against the Ottoman that autumn, Serbian armies struck south through Kossovo with great massacre against the Albanian populace. The Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 confirmed Serbia in possession of Kossovo.
During World War One, Austria-Hungary put Serbia’s army to flight in 1915. Albanians in Kossovo rose against the retreating Serbs with utmost savagery. The Serb soldiers replied in kind to fight their way through to the Adriatic, there embarking on French ships to tremendous Allied acclaim. Serb armies re-entered Kossovo from the south by the 1918 Armistice, and were bitterly resisted by Albanian rebels. The new Yugoslav monarchy with its Serb king did not succeed in breaking organized resistance till 1924 in Kossovo. Brigandage, and brutal reprisal, remained endemic to the locale.

The Serb monarchy of Yugoslavia superintended a determined effort to secure its rule in Kossovo. Land was stolen from Albanians as “undocumented,” and made available for Serbs who would venture south to settle on it. Schools teaching in Albanian, originally encouraged in the hope they would keep Albanians backward, proved hotbeds of secessionist agitation, and were suppressed. In 1937, the monarchy entertained proposals by a leading Serb intellectual, the assassin turned historian Vaso Cubrilovic of Belgrade University, that all Albanians be forcibly expelled from Kossovo.

Near the start of World War Two, Fascist Italy seized Albania. Nazi Germany seized Yugoslavia in 1941. The mines in northern Kossovo, and most Kossovo Serbs therefore, were retained under Nazi occupation; the remainder of Kossovo was awarded to Italian Albania. Serbs in Italian Kossovo, mostly recent settlers, were pitilessly persecuted by Albanians, even against occasional Italian opposition. The S. S. security division “Skanderberg” was largely recruited among Kossovo Albanians.

Three: The Tito Era

After Italy capitulated in 1943, Tito, the Communist partisan leader, declared Kossovo would be allowed self-determination if Communists won. In 1944, his partisans succeeded in fighting their way into the place, with some local Albanian support at last. Royalist Chetnik partisans violently opposed any idea of Kossovo secession, winning Tito even more support in that locale.

Tito, however, reneged on that promised self-determination, annexing Kossovo anew to Serbia as an “Autonomous district” within his new Yugoslavia. The Albanian Communist leader, Enver Hoxha, was in no position to contest the matter, amid talk under Stalin of a Balkan Federation to include Albania itself. Tito’s break in 1948 with Stalin ended any real hope for Hoxha he could fold Kossovo into his hoped for Greater Albania.

Kossovo’s populace was then about three-fifths Albanian and one-quarter Serb, with the remainder including Moslem Slavs, Catholic Montenegrins, Turks, and Gypsies. Tito saw that Communist party and police supervisors in Kossovo were Serbs. These energetically hunted up the least hint of Albanian secessionists, harvesting batches of them for show trials in 1956 (coincident with the Hungarian revolt), and again in 1964.

Tito purged his Serb Interior Minister in 1966, for opposition to economic decentralization. Albanian Communists replaced Serbs in Party and police supervisory posts in Kossovo. In the “Prague Spring” of ’68, Kossovo Albanian students demonstrated for national status in Yugoslavia, and an Albanian language university. After many arrests, Tito granted the university in 1970. Albanian language textbooks could only be got in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, which opened a connection to the new Kossovo school in Pristina for his enterprising “special service” agents.

A new Yugoslav constitution in 1974 gave autonomous Serbian Kossovo effective national status, with a representative on the Yugoslav collective presidency. Albanian Kossovo police and party personnel suppressed radical cliques, inspired to “Enverism” (as secession became called) by Hoxha’s agents. Some of these cliques, formed about 1978, included young men who would later become leading lights of the present-day Kossovo Liberation Army.

Tito died in 1980. In spring of 1981, Kossovo Albanian students at Pristina University began demonstrations demanding independence, even fusion with Hoxha’s Albania, to applause from spectators. Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops arrived, and broke the demonstrations, shooting and beating scores to death. Kossovo Albanian party and police officials sustained the crack-down, loyally denouncing “Enverist” radicals, and arresting and beating hundreds suspected of such leanings.

Radical secessionist leaders fled to sanctuaries in Western Europe. Several, meeting near Stuttgart in 1982 to form a popular front, were ambushed and shot dead by unknown assailants. Surviving radicals concluded the bullets came from Serbs in the Yugoslav Interior Ministry, and swore blood vengeance. Under the name of Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic, a handful of such trained in Albania, and attempted a campaign of gun-battles and bombs against Kossovo and Yugoslav police.

Four: Rise of Milosevic

These largely would-be assassins had no material effect, but a profound moral one. Any crime against serbs in Kossovo was in serbia reported as secessionist terror, and crimes against Serbs in Kossovo, particularly against property of isolated farms and Orthodox sites, occurred with increasing frequency. The Serb Orthodox Patriarchite was ranged alongside the Serb Academy of Sciebces in protest of this, with the latter, in 1985, calling the current situation genocide against against Serbs in Kossovo.

At the start of 1986, the banker Slobodan Milosevic ascended to leadership of the Serb Communist Party. Belligerence in favor of Serbs dwelling outside Serbia’s boundaries, or in the autonomous districts of Vojvodina and Kossovo, offered a ready lever for political power. Kossovo Serbs were organizing militias with assistance from Serb Interior Ministry police; Hoxha’s death had not altered Albania’s support of “Enverism” in Kossovo.

Early in 1987, Milosevic arrived in Pristina’s suburbs for a meeting with Kossovo Serb leaders. A large crowd of Kossovo Serbs rioted before him against the largely Albanian Kossovo police. It was not chance; four days before, Milosevic had met with the riot’s instigators, and a schedule had been fixed for the outbreak.

Widely broadcast film of the incident established Milosevic as champion of distressed Serbs. Later that year, Milosevic used this popularity to force Serbia’s president from office. In the summer of 1988, Milosevic’s Serb Communist Party organized a campaign of Kossovo Remembrance rallies throughout Serbia proper, claiming an average attendance of half a million at each. In November, Milosevic as Party chief dismissed the Albanians in Communist Party leadership in Kossovo, and promulgated constitutional changes effectively stripping Kossovo of its autonomous status.

Albanian Communist leadership in Kossovo mobilized sizable demonstrations and hunger strikes in protest early in 1989. These were broken with loss of life by Yugoslav Interior Ministry troops, who seized the arms of both Kossovo’s national guard and police. Closely surrounded by tanks, the Kossovo Assembly voted itself out of effective existence on March 23.

Milosevic now accepted the Presidency of Serbia. Continuing Albanian demonstrations in Kossovo were broken by Serb and Yugoslav soldiers and police; hundreds of arrests were accompanied by torture. At the end of the year, Albanian intellectuals and some Communist leaders collected to form the Democratic League for Kossovo. The police terror stilled the demonstrations early in 1990.

Milosevic ratified Serb Parliament decrees forbidding Albanians to buy land from Serbs in Kossovo, and removing Albanians from civil service, including hospitals, schools, and the police. The latter quickly became overwhelmingly Serb. The Albanian membership of the Communist Party in Kossovo took up membership in the League for Democratic Kossovo.

Five: The Kossovo Resistance

This L. D. K. was led by the writer Ibrahim Rugova. He inspired Kossovo Albanians to a program of passive resistance to Serb authority. A “shadow state” emerged, quartered in private dwellings, and with a government in exile operating in Germany. Rugova’s “shadow state” held elections, administered Albanian language schooling, even collected taxes. These applied equally to Kossovo Albanians dwelling abroad; most were guest-worker laborers in Europe, but some were prosperous businessmen, or smugglers of stolen cars and narcotics and prostitutes.

The handful of violent radicals constituting the Popular Movement for the Kossovo Republic (P. M. K. R.) were denounced by Rugova as stooges of the Serb police, and he was widely believed by Kossovo Albanians when he did. The radicals’ sporadic gunshots and arsons each served to signal a fresh campaign of interrogations and beatings by Serb police, directed against the nonviolent “shadow state” organizers.

With Yugoslav and Serb armed forces devoted to war in Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic was content to leave Kossovo at this status quo. On Serb victory in Croatia, one of the leading Serb killers, an Interior Ministry employee known as Arkan, moved to Pristina with scores of armed followers. “Enverist” radicals of the P. M. K. R. secretly convened in Drenica (where resistance to the old Yugoslav monarchy had persisted into 1924), and there voted themselves the armed force of the Kossovo Republic. Albania’s newly elected government maintained cordial relations both with these radicals, and Rugova’s pacific Kossovo government in exile, now established near Bonn.

Kossovo Albanian boycott of official Serb elections in December 1993 gave Milosevic a resounding victory over his rival for the presidency, the Serb-American businessman Panic, and allowed the killer Arkan to win election to a parliament seat. The “Enverist” radicals were split into a Marxist faction, the National Movement for the Liberation of Kossovo, and a Nationalist faction, the Kossovo Liberation Army. The latter had a better footing abroad, where the pacific Rugova’s government in exile at Bonn was beginning to explore establishing its own armed force. Albania continued to assist by giving military training to dozens of radicals, and allowing transit through its borders.

The bloody summer of 1995 saw Serb massacre of Bosnian Moslems, Croat expulsion of Serbs, and NATO bombing of Serb forces in Bosnia. The Dayton Accords confirmed Serb gains in Bosnia, and recognized the rump Yugoslav Federation Milosevic dominated, from his seat for Serbia in its collective presidency. The pacific Rugova used his control of Albanian language media in Kossovo to maintain popular commitment to passive resistance, while the fledgling KLA demanded Serb departure from Kossovo, and launched a new campaign of sporadic shootings and bombings.

Serbia was greatly unsettled by the influx of refugees from Krajina and Slavonia. In Yugoslav elections on May 31, 1996, the Montenegrin presidency went to an opponent of Milosevic, and in Serbia, opposition parties won local posts in many cities. Milosevic refused to allow victorious opponents to take office in Serbia. He allowed three months of demonstrations, then bought off his principal Serb opponent by offering him a cabinet post. The demonstrations were mopped up by brutal police attack, and opposition figures allowed to take local office found their function superseded by various national agencies. The Vatican brokered an agreement Milosevic signed to allow Albanian language schools official existence in Kossovo, but he took no steps to implement it.

Six: Taking Up the Gun

In Bonn, the leading functionary of Rugova’s government in exile, Bujar Bukoshi, rejected passive resistance, and turned the radio transmitter he controlled to broadcasts supporting the KLA. Early in 1997, Albania’s banks were revealed as Ponzi swindles. Mobs looted government facilities, including military arsenals, and swiftly reduced the land to anarchic chaos, in which a Kalshnikov rifle could be had for a five dollar bill.

Bukoshi’s embryonic forces, consisting of a few hundred exiled policemen and soldiers, established themselves in Albania as the Armed Forces of the Kossovo Republic (F. A. R. K.), in competition with the KLA. Albanian students organized demonstrations against Milosevic’s refusal to implement the Vatican agreement on schooling, ignoring orders to desist from Rugova. Serb police crushed the demonstrations with extraordinary brutality.

KLA attacks, which by the Serb government’s claims had been occurring roughly once a week, and claimed ten Serb lives since 1995, began to take place almost daily at the start of 1998. In the old rebel district of Drenica, near the village of Likosane just before noon on February 28, a gunfight broke out between KLA men and a Serb police patrol. Once it was over, Serb police massacred the men of a wealthy Albanian clan considered leaders of the hamlet. Five days later, Serb police surrounded the family compound of a KLA leader and shelled it for hours, then went into the ruins and murdered women, children, and wounded, to a total of 58, including the KLA man, Adem Jashari.

These murders turned Albanian village elders throughout Kossovo against Rugova’s passive resistance. They put hundreds of their young men at the disposal of the KLA. In Drenica, and near the Albanian border, armed partisan bands appeared in such strength the Serb police retired to establish encircling roadblocks. Western diplomats threatened Milosevic with dire consequences if the murders by his police were repeated. Milosevic agreed to begin implementing the Vatican schools agreement, and to meet with Ibrahim Rugova. Simultaneously, Milosevic admitted the ultra-nationalist Chetnik party into a coalition government with his Serbian Socialist Party, and loosed his Serb police once again into Drenica.

This campaign was conducted with the same degree of atrocity that characterized previous operations by Serb police. In one typical incident near Gorjne Obrinje, after fourteen Serb police were shot in a fire-fight, a group of fourteen Albanian women, children, and old men found hiding nearby were shot point-blank by Serb police. Some 200,000 Albanians fled their homes to avoid the fighting, some to southern Kossovo and some to Albania. President Clinton ordered a show of force by U. S. warplanes over Yugoslavia, and in October, his pressure secured an agreement by which Serb Interior Ministry troops were to vacate Kossovo, negotiations with Kossovo Albanian leaders were to begin in earnest, and a body of diplomatic observers would enter Kossovo to monitor events. During the course of negotiating this agreement, Milosevic told a U. S. general that the way to bring peace to Drenica was to “kill them all.”

The monitored cease-fire brought many Kossovo Albanian refugees back to their homes. In Albania, the Kossovo government in exile’s small armed force was violently absorbed by the KLA; in Kossovo, KLA men began arresting and executing functionaries of Rugova’s “shadow state” as collaborators with Serbia. They also murdered about a dozen Serb civilians, and a Serb village mayor. By the start of 1999, fire-fights of company and even battalion scale between KLA guerrillas and Serb police were once more occurring.

Near dawn on January 15, battle broke out between KLA guerrillas and Serb police near the town of Racak. After nine KLA men were killed the rest fled. During the afternoon Serb police entered the town, raped and murdered two women, and murdered forty-three unarmed men and boys. Serb Information Ministry spokesmen in Pristina next morning invited Western journalists to visit the scene of a “successful” fight against the KLA; when they reported what they saw, Milosevic declared the KLA had fabricated the incident, and demanded the diplomatic observers quit Kossovo. The chief judge of the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia was denied entry to the country.

Seven: The NATO Intervention

NATO demanded the talks agreed to the previous October begin in February, and threatened military action to force compliance. The meeting at Rambouillet Chateau featured a severely fractured Albanian delegation; its principal factions (all of which hated one another) were Rugova’s adherents in the old LDK, old line Communist functionaries from that same umbrella group, and the KLA led by Hashim Thaci. After days of negotiation, Milosevic struck out about half the already settled agreement, substituting his initial demands, which the Albanians and NATO had already rejected, and forced collapse of the talks on March 18. Two days later, 40,000 Serb police and soldiers with 300 armored vehicles launched a fresh offensive into Drenica.

NATO air strikes commenced against Serbia on March 24. While these aimed at destroying Serb anti-aircraft defenses, Serb police and soldiers in Kossovo commenced a wholesale assault on the Albanians of Kossovo, aimed at driving them from the country by exemplary massacre. During the course of this campaign, roughly 10,000 persons, mostly young men, were murdered by Serb police and soldiers. Almost a million Albanians took to flight, either west to Albania, south into Macedonia, or into the mountains of Kossovo itself. Lightly armed KLA guerrillas could accomplish nothing against the Serb forces.

When Serb air defenses were disabled, NATO warplanes began attacks demolishing bridges, power stations, and the like in Serbia proper. With Serb police and soldiers forced to retire their heavy equipment to shelter in bunkers by NATO air bombardment in Kossovo, their murder squads became vulnerable to attack by Albanian partisans, many of whom were not, properly speaking, KLA, but village militia deployed by their clan elders. When Serb police and soldiers attempted to group together to overpower these guerrilla bands, the Serbs were savaged by NATO warplanes.

On June 3, Milosevic capitulated. Serb police and soldiers retired northward; NATO troops moved in. Kossovo Albanian refugees streamed back to their homes. Many set upon Serbs still remaining in Kossovo. NATO troops intervened to protect lives, but not property; even so, several dozen Serbs, many elderly, were killed. The overwhelming majority of Serbs resident in Kossovo fled north into Serbia, or into that small portion of northern Kossovo around the mines where they had long constituted the principal element of the populace.

A government for Kossovo, formed under NATO auspices, blended elements of the LDK and KLA, with the KLA’s Hashim Thaci emerging as Prime Minister, while Ibrahim Rugova, the nonviolent leader, found himself without power, or much prestige. The KLA has kept its word to disarm only poorly, and remains a police problem for NATO occupation troops. It has attempted to provoke guerrilla war in the adjoining areas of Macedonia which are largely populated by Albanians, but has had scant success there, either in baiting the Macedonian government into atrocious reaction to their activities, or in gaining wide support among Albanian people in those districts.

"I'm not finished. You should have got a snack."

[mikelewis]

84. This is exactly right except...

Where are the bodies? It has been stated by many sources, yours included that

"During the course of this campaign, roughly 10,000 persons, mostly young men, were murdered by Serb police and soldiers."

This was the basis for the claim of Genocide. If this is true, where are the bodies?

You have also failed to mention the sudden influx of "Freedom Fighters" from Afghanistan.

http://www.balkanpeace.org/our/our09.shtml
At the end of the civil war many of these so-called mujahadeen remained on territories controlled by the Bosnian-Croat Federation, instructing Muslim forces in terrorist activities. Those activities came to light on December 18, 1995, with the premature detonation of an automobile bomb in Zenica. It is widely speculated that the bomb was meant for U.S. NATO troops serving in Bosnia-Herzegovina as revenge for the life sentence given to Sheik Omah Abdel Rahman, the brain behind the World Trade Centre bombing in New York.

Also noteworthy is the raid conducted by NATO forces on the training center of the Bosnian Muslim secret police (AID), located in the ski center near Fojnica in February of 1996, and the arrest of several persons for preparing to conduct terrorist actions. Iranian instructors were teaching future terrorists from AID how to disguise bombs as children’s toys, dolls, and plastic ice cream cones.

In its June 26, 1997 Report on the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the New York Times noted that those arrested confessed to serving with Bosnian Muslims forces. Further, the terrorists also admitted to ties with Osama Bin Laden.

Defence and Foreign Affairs analyst Yossef Bodansky wrote in 1997 that Iran, from its terrorist bases in Bosnia-Herzegovina, planned the assassination of Pope John Paul II. The assassination was planned towards the end of September 1997. A terrorist group consisting of 20 members holding Croatian, Bosnia-Herzegovinian, Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan passports were to assassinate the Pope during his Bologna visit. The leaders of the group were all former mujahadeen from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Logistical support for the group was secured through a local terrorist network which was closely associated with GIA. Italian authorities discovered the assassination attempt in time and managed to arrest 14 members of the terrorist cell.

Many mujahadeen in Bosnia are now located in what was the pre-war Serbian village of Bocinja Donja. Today, a sign on the road into the town warns visitors to "be afraid of Allah."
//////////

There is no doubt that there was a dispute between the Albanians and Serbs, this was precisely why Yugoslavia was a prime candidate for disruption. You'll get no debate on the historical animosity between these two groups. The reason we attacked was to stop a genocide that has no factual basis. You can try to discredit the Emporers New Clothes but so far you have not. You haven't covered the effect that these Mujahadeen fighters had in exacerbating the this cultural tension nor have you discussed thier role in the resistance. If scores of trained guerrilla fighters fresh from a victory against the Soviet Union entered this fray, they would clearly have some effect. In your opinion, I guess not. I guess the Croatians murdered 10,000 muslim Albanians and ate them and these freedom fighters were outmatched by the Yugoslav Government. Why not claim that there were millions killed, it would make the story seem even more terrible. It wouldn't make it true but it would sound better. They have found about 1700 bodies and most of these were young men of fighting age. There was a "civil" war going on but it wasn't a genocide by any stretch of the imagination. You can't discredit by omission.

Now, provide evidence that 10,000+ Albanian Muslims were executed and then we'll have something to discuss but don't come at we with the same tired crap they sold us. If you believe this, that's fine. There is a huge difference between belief and proof and you have offered none in support of the Genocide which was the reason we went there in the first place.

If you have this proof, you might want to send it to the Hague. They're deperately trying to find it themselves and I'm sure they'd love the help. All they have is conversations concerning a desire to reconstitute the Croatian influence in thier country. The conversations state that they should reach this end by using the military but they do not say at any point that they plan on exterminating the Muslims.

Now maybe if you watched the movie, "Behind Enemy Lines", you might use this as proof that there was a genocide. He did get the hard-drive after all, remember. Maybe we can just call Owen Wilson and he can give us the pictures and you can show me the Genocide.

Also, maybe you can dig up the article in the NATO Charter that states we can attack a country that isn't attacking a NATO ally. I seem to have misplaced that one as well.

I have sent a copy of your post to the Emporers New Clothes and asked for thier input as well. If they reply, I will post it here as well.

Thanks for the ancient history of the region too. Maybe you can go back a little further and show how the Hallstatts clashed with the La Tene's. That might have been relevant as well.

"I hope you're not finished, I just got a whole bag of chips and am waiting anxiously for your proof."

[The Magistrate]

106. Salty Snacks Are Best, Mr. Lewis

If you imagine the past is irrelevant to the present in the Balkans, you only confirm your lack of understanding in this matter, and of the region itself. That piece was prepared several years ago, after commencement of the trial of Butcher Slobo in The Hague, as much commentary here in the question displayed an understandable, though still lamentable, ignorance of the background, so that it seemed a primer account was in order.

Some of your points above show some blend of incoherence, ignorance, or impudence, that it is quite impossible for me to decipher. You "guess the Croatians murdered 10,000 muslim Albanians and ate them and these freedom fighters were outmatched by the Yugoslav Government," but what the point of that would be escapes me. Croats certainly killed a great many Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims, but were of course absent from Kossovo. You seem from a comment above that at least to have some minimal awareness of long friction between serbs and Kossovo Albanians, so the thing becomes quite a puzzle. The most damning view that could be put on it is, of course, that you not only cannot tell the players without a score-card, but have not even troubled to acquire a score-card for yourself.

Perhaps the most important misconception you seem to be laboring under is that the disolution of Yugoslavia, after the death of Tito, had to be induced from outside. That is palpable nonsense. What was said of Czarist Russia applies en petit to Yugoslavia: it was a "prison of the peoples" throughout its brief existance. It is about as far from a natural national state as it is possible to find an example of. For most of its history, it amounted to a minor imperium, with Serbia the metropole, and the remaining jurisdictions restive colonies. Before the Second World War it was held together by police repression, and teetered on several occassions at the brink of civil war. After the the Second World War, it was held together by police repression and the political brilliance of Comrade Tito. After his death, only police repression could have held it together, and without his skills, even this was likely to fail.

To address the killings you make such light of, there are two points worth making.

The first is that the low figures commonly bruited about among apologists for Butcher Slobo derive from an early survey of suspected grave sites that had as yet examined only a very small proportion of them. What has remained quite consistent a number of persons missing, most of them young men of military age, numbering around ten thousands. The longer they remain unaccounted for, the harder it becomes for apologists for Butcher Slobo to support the pretense they are alive in the flesh-pots of Europe or the United States or somewhere else. It is well known there was a concerted effort to destroy and move bodies undertaken by Serbian security forces. There are numerous eyewitness accounts, supported by forensic examination subsequently, of corpses thick in a location one day and absent days later.

The second is that the apologist for Butcher Slobo generally mis-state the case over-all; the military effort of NATO was preventitive, made in an effort to head off a situation clearly developing along the lines had previously been allowed to occur, without much outside interference, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There is no doubt whatever that Butcher Slobo's intention was to drive out the Albanians from Kossovo and resettle the place with Serbs, particularly with refugee Serbs from the Croatia. Nor is there any doubt this plan was well in train as NATO struck. It was certainly accellerated once the conflict began, but it was already in its early stages. You may imagine that millions of persons may be driven from their homes without a good deal of killing and terrorization, but in fact, these are about the only methods that can accomplish it with any reasonable speed.

"The Balkans produces more history than can be consumed locally, and is compelled to export the excess."

[mikelewis]

181. The irrelevance of the truth.

"If you imagine the past is irrelevant to the present in the Balkans"

I would have to imagine this if I were to believe your story. Your presentation centers around a Yugoslavia that is seemingly cut-off from the outside world. You seem to think that there was no outside intervention in the Balkans. You state, "it was a "prison of the peoples" implying that it is comparble to Russia in the oppression of it's society but deny that it is comparable to Russia's failure to resist the Afghans. I guess it only suits you to make comparisons when it suits your slander.

You also refer to Milosevic as "Butcher Slobo", implying guilt but offering no proof. I must assume that you think that simply because we attacked him, he must be guilty. I guess this assumption must also be applied to Iraq. We say there is no WMD's but according to your logic, there must be because we attacked. Oh, but of course, we know now that there were no WMD's. The reason we attacked was "faulty intel". I guess that's not a possibility in Kosovo. But let's say there was a genocide taking place in Kosovo and the 10,000 or so people were massacred. We used this as our justification for going into the Balkans but ignore it when we fail to attack the Sudan which by all accounts is experiencing a Genocide right now with numbers 10 times what you claim had been massacred in Kosovo. Doesn't the war in Kosovo give us a precedent whereby we can invade the Sudan? I guess not.

"guess the Croatians murdered 10,000 muslim Albanians and ate them and these freedom fighters were outmatched by the Yugoslav Government"
Obviosly, my use of the word Croatian was a mistatement as the entire conversation we have had was centered around the Serbs in Kosovo. I guess on my score card you can place an error in reference to mistaking Croations for Serbs but the intent of the statement was clear enough. You're claiming that 10,000 people were murdered and yet there are no bodies so they must have been disposed of in a manner that leaves no evidence. Is it possible that they are buried in the same hole as Jimmy Hoffa? I didn't realize that it was so easy to conceal 10,000 bodies.

Now, let's discuss this number that I take so lightly. Here's the original numbers as stated by the State Department.

This is from April 22, 1999
Refugee reports of Serbian mass executions total over 3,800 ethnic Albanian deaths. The number would be far higher if we took into account the countless tales of individual murder.
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Current_News99.h...

This is from 14 May 1999
Refugee reports of Serbian mass executions claim over 5,000 ethnic Albanian deaths; the number would be far higher if we added the countless tales of individual murder
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Ethnic_Cleansing...

This is from June 4th, 1999.
Refugee reports of Serbian mass executions claim over 6,000 ethnic Albanian deaths; the number would be far higher if we added the countless tales of individual murder.
http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/rpt_990604_ksvo_et...

July 14: David Gowan, the British Foreign Office's Kosovo War Crimes Co-ordinator, verifies earlier British government estimates that at least 10,000 Kosovar Albanians died in ethnic cleansing atrocities.
http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/fs_kosovo_timeline...

Month after month, 1,000 more Dead Albanians, this has got to be Genocide! This is clear and undeniable proof; especially if we add in the countless "tales" of the Albanian Muslim refugees.

These peaceful Muslims weren't doing anything at all. They were just minding thier own business like sheep, no, like little lambs. These poor people. You're right, there was no outside influence, it was the "Butcher Slobo".

I guess if the story stopped here, this would suit your description of life for the Albanians. But unfortunately, there is a different and real explanation for what happened here.

You're painting of the "peaceful" Muslims falls a little shy of realistic. Yes, there was contention between the two groups. Yes there was political as well ethnic discord among the state but hardly "as far from a natural national state as it is possible to find an example of." In fact, we can look at our own country and wonder if this is a natural state. We have one of the most diverse cultures in the world, a "melting pot" if you will. Are we going around killing 1,000's of people a month? Are we as far from a natural national state as it is possible to find an example of? Are you suggesting that two seperate cultures can't co-exist without violence even if they have a difference of opinion?

The 10,000 missing Alabanians
"The first is that the low figures commonly bruited about among apologists for Butcher Slobo derive from an early survey of suspected grave sites that had as yet examined only a very small proportion of them. What has remained quite consistent a number of persons missing, most of them young men of military age, numbering around ten thousands. The longer they remain unaccounted for, the harder it becomes for apologists for Butcher Slobo to support the pretense they are alive in the flesh-pots of Europe or the United States or somewhere else."

Okay, let's examine the low figures I'm "bruiting". I'll use sites that are sympathetic to the Albanian cause to show you how wrong you are.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/781310.stm
7 June, 2000 The ICRC says the majority of the missing 3,368 people are men, mostly from the Kosovo Albanian community - though some Serbs and Roma are also still unaccounted for.
2,500 Albanians
400 Serbs
100 Roma
1,000 previously missing Albanians now traced

http://balkansnet.org/raccoon/fredalbin.html
He is one of at least 1,200 Kosovo Albanians still in Serbian prisons on charges of terrorism. Their detentions, and the more than 1,500 missing persons from the war, poison Kosovo's political scene, and further incite the current round of Albanian anger and revenge against Serbs still in the province.

http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/Rozen091399.htm...
In addition to the 1,500 missing Kosovo Albanians, and 2,270 in Serbian jails, the Humanitarian Law Center has complied a list of more than 250 missing Kosovo Serbs.

Where is the 10,000 still missing that constitutes the Genocide? I think you may be fooling yourself. The fact is we attacked them based on bad intelligence and you're perpetuating this because you are defending Clinton's actions. While I don't really like Clinton, I think he got suckered into by the same Intelligence people that brought us 9/11 and Iraq. I think he was reading the crap you are peddling and did what any President would do who had just been through Impeachment procedings. He went into to save the poor Albanians and found out he got suckered yet again.

I don't think the majority of the Muslims were terrorist. I don't think the majority of Serbs sought an all Serbian state. I think the majority of the people were just regular people, just like we are regular people. I believe they had an differing ideologies but for the most part, they coexisted. I beleive there were factions on both sides that were pushing an agenda. Clearly, certain Serbians wanted more Serbians as they were an extreme minority in the country. Clearly, certain Albanians wanted more governmental control
and were willing to resort to drastic measures to force this issue.

The Albanian Terrorists - The story the MAgistrate doesn't want you to know.
http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/fs_kosovo_timeline...

1996
In response to continued suppression by Belgrade and attacks from the Serbian police, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) begins reprisals, claiming responsibility for a number of bombings and attacks against Serbian police and state officials.

1997
In October, Serb police crush Kosovo-Albanian student demonstrations. The KLA responds by additional attacks against the Serb police.

Before the Serbians began thier mass slaughter of the Albanians, they were beset by terrorism. The KLA had obviously adopted a new policy of terrorism to get the Serbs to grant them more opportunity. I actually don't believe for a second the Albanian people supported the terrorism. I think the situation was exacserbated by the influx of "Freedom Fighters" from Afghanistan. In fact, the head "Freedom Fighter" Osama Bin Laden was in Kosovo prior to the outbreak of the "Genocide"

http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/april00/hed76.sh...
Islamic Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, wanted for terrorism by the United States, is in Kosovo, the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said Wednesday.

"After hiding out for several years in Afghanistan," the agency said in a despatch from Kosovo's capital Pristina, bin Laden "has found a new refuge in the Balkans, precisely in Kosovo, the nest of European terrorism."

Tanjug said bin Laden, whom the agency described as a "terrorist and Islamic fanatic," arrived from Albania after having formed a group of 500 Islamic fighters in the eastern region around Korce and Pogradec to carry out "terrorist acts" in Kosovo.

He also planned similar acts in the southern region of Serbia bordering on Kosovo including Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, the Yugoslav agency said.

Tension has been mounting in the region over the past 10 days, with many armed incidents and increasing ethnic Albanian demands. Its population includes some 70,000 ethnic Albanians, many of whom have complained of being harassed or maltreated by the Serbian police.

Tanjug said bin Laden arrived in Kosovo accompanied by "a close collaborator, Abu Hassan."

Bin Laden is wanted by the United States in connection with the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 224 people were killed.

http://www.diaspora-net.org/food4thought/binladen__kla....
Excerpt begins
"The Washington Times, May 4, 1999

Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden -- who is wanted in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 persons, including 12 Americans.

I guess he was just here on vacation. I guess all these people he trained were the peaceful Muslims you're alluding to. And finally, here's a article by the late Daniel Pearl. Remember, he was the reported who was murdered in Pakistan. I have included the entire article. He claims that there were heinous acts committed but there was no genocide. This was in 1999. How much more do we know now? Obviously, you stopped looking the truth a long time ago.

http://www.balkanpeace.org/monitor/mgen27.html
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Friday, December 31, 1999


Despite Tales, the War in Kosovo Was Savage, but Wasn't Genocide
By DANIEL PEARL and ROBERT BLOCK
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

TREPCA, Yugoslavia -- When the blanket-covered trucks rolled toward the mining complex near this northern Kosovo town in April, Bexhet Kurti didn't give them much thought. The Yugoslav army had a military base there, after all.

It was in July, after the fighting ended and Mr. Kurti returned to battle-scarred Trepca, that the young house painter started hearing the whispers. "Did you hear there are 700 bodies in the mine?" asked one acquaintance in the hilltop cafe above the mine-shaft tower. "No, not in the mine, but in the furnace" on the other side of the mountain, said another.

By late summer, stories about a Nazi-like body-disposal facility were so widespread that investigators sent a three-man French Gendarmerie team spelunking half a mile down the mine to search for bodies. They found none. Another team analyzed ashes in the furnace. They found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies.

In Kosovo last spring, Yugoslav forces did heinous things. They expelled hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians, burning houses and committing summary executions. It may well be enough to justify the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign and the war crimes indictment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

But other allegations -- indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead -- haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging.

Selective Terror

"Rwanda was a true genocide. Kosovo was ethnic cleansing light," says Emilio Perez Pujol, a Spanish pathologist who exhumed bodies after both conflicts. In his sector of western Kosovo, he says, the United Nations told him to expect as many as 2,000 victims. His team found 187 corpses, none of which showed evidence to confirm local accounts of mutilations.

Some human-rights researchers now say that most killings and burnings occurred in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active, or in urban streets that backed into rural areas where KLA fighters could infiltrate. They say the Serbs were trying to clear out areas of KLA support, using selective terror, robberies and sporadic killings.

"We believed NATO was using the KLA as its invasion force," says retired Gen. Radovan Radinovic, a former chief strategist for the Yugoslav Army who advised military planners during the war with NATO. Gen. Radinovic says individuals may have committed abuses, while killing "thousands" of KLA guerrillas. (A successor organization to the KLA says it lost 2,400 dead over two years.)

Official Estimates

British and American officials still maintain that 10,000 or more ethnic-Albanian civilians died at Serb hands during the fighting in Kosovo. The U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has accused Serbs of covering up war crimes by moving bodies. It has begun its own military analysis of the Serb offensive.

But the number of bodies discovered so far is much lower -- 2,108 as of November, and not all of them necessarily war-crimes victims. While more than 300 reported grave sites remain to be investigated, the tribunal has checked the largest reported sites first, and found most to contain no more than five bodies, suggesting intimate acts of barbarity rather than mass murder.

The KLA helped form the West's wartime image of Kosovo. International human-rights groups say officials of the guerrilla force served on the Kosovo-based Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, whose activists were often the first to interview refugees arriving in Macedonia. Journalists later cited the council's missing-persons list to support theories about how many people died in Kosovo, and the State Department this month echoed the council' recent estimate of 10,000 missing. But the number has to be taken on faith: Western investigators say the council won't share its list of missing persons.

Reports From the Field

Even more closely connected to the KLA was Radio Free Kosova, set up in January as outsiders were cut off from Kosovo hot spots. A former correspondent for the radio, Qemail Aliu, says he and five other journalists holed up with the KLA in the central Kosovo mountains, using satellite phones to take reports from KLA regional commanders. The radio broadcasts were just strong enough to reach the provincial capital, Pristina, where a correspondent translated the reports into English for the KLA's Kosova Press Internet site.

When the guerrilla encampment had electricity, Mr. Aliu watched NATO briefings on TV. "Many times we saw Jamie Shea talking about the number of people killed, and many times they were the numbers from Kosova Press," he says.

NATO says Mr. Shea, its spokesman, didn't get information directly from Kosova Press. But officials acknowledge that NATO's member governments had little independent information about what was happening on the ground. "We were all hamstrung," a NATO official says. As the war dragged on, he says, NATO saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO's bombs. NATO stepped up its claims about Serb "killing fields."

Human-rights groups fed the information chain directly. As human-rights researchers assembled in neighboring Macedonia and Albania to interview refugees, State Department officials handed them proposed survey forms, trying to get everybody to ask standard questions about violence to aid war-crimes cases. Among the groups cooperating was Physicians for Human Rights, which had long been calling for a ground force to protect ethnic Albanians.

Kosovo was a "genocide to come," warned Holly Burkhalter, Washington director of Physicians for Human Rights, in a National Public Radio commentary in April. "I was wrong," she says now. "But if you wait until it's proved to you six ways to Sunday, you haven't prevented it, have you?"

Human-rights groups at least used some scientific rigor, asking refugees what they personally saw. The news media's standards were more mixed. Many journalists had experience in Bosnia, where the mass slaughter of an estimated 7,000 men from the "safe area" at Srebrenica in 1995 was a warning not to be too skeptical about reports of Serb atrocities. Bosnia yielded three Pulitzer Prizes for reporters who proved atrocities. When Kosovo was finally opened to the foreign press in June, "fixers" cruising through the lobby of Pristina's Grand Hotel offered to take correspondents to burial sites.

Incident at Ljubenic

An example of the mass-grave obsession is Ljubenic, a poor western-Kosovo village of 200-odd homes below the Cursed Mountains, which KLA fighters had used as a supply route. On the morning of April 1, Serb forces surrounded the town, villagers say, and three heavily armed militiamen walked up the village's main dirt road. They say the Serbs corralled village men at a crossroads, questioning them about weapons and the KLA. Two villagers who spoke up were shot. One of the Serbs then said, "The KLA killed my brother," and the Serbs started mowing down the men with machine guns, survivors say.

Eleven wounded men later staggered away in two groups, says survivor Sadik Jahmurataj, who adds that his group found a KLA hospital in the hills a day later. When a KLA commander asked how many were killed, "the others were in a panic and said '150 to 200.' I said, 'No, that can't be. One hundred at the most.' "

Over the next weeks, Mr. Jahmurataj and others told their stories to investigators from several human-rights groups. And after the war, returning villagers, who found 12 bodies scattered around Ljubenic, told Italian peacekeeping troops that 350 people were still missing from Ljubenic and the surrounding hamlets. One villager told of seeing worms coming from the ground in a field where the grass was unusually short.

On July 9, after getting an "operations report" from the Italians, Dutch Army Maj. Jan Joosten mentioned during a regular press briefing in Pristina that a suspected grave had been found, and there could be as many as 350 bodies. He says journalists started packing their bags for Ljubenic before he even finished. "Biggest grave site holds 350 victims," London's Independent newspaper proclaimed the next day. Concern Worldwide, a charity working in Ljubenic, claimed that three-fourths of families lost their main wage-earner.

In fact, investigators found no bodies in the field. It now appears that the number killed in Ljubenic was about 65. That is how many names are listed in KLA-printed memorial posters.

Plea for Remembrance

Mr. Jahmurataj, sitting on the lawn beside the Concern Worldwide tent, says villagers who weren't there distorted the story. When a U.N. van pulls up, Mr. Jahmurataj trots over to greet Alistair Graham, a war-crimes-tribunal official who had interviewed him in an Albanian refugee camp. Mr. Graham is just dropping off candy for children, but Mr. Jahmurataj pleads with him to continue the investigation.

"If other people exaggerated, that's bad," Mr. Jahmurataj says. "But everything I told you was exactly true." Mr. Graham says the tribunal will return in the spring.

Kosovo would be easier to investigate if it had the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect. Instead, the pattern is of scattered killings. Many cases defy simple explanation: two blanket-covered bodies pulled out of a farmer's yard in a village where nobody was missing; a body that a child discovered by chance along a river; a semiclad torture victim.

Human-rights groups didn't give so much attention to the small killings. From Macedonia, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, Benjamin Ward, wrote a report about the slaying of two youths during a Serb-ordered exodus from the southeast-Kosovo village of Malisevo. Townspeople say Serb gunmen forced 20 or so young men to lie face-down in a field, fired a machine gun inches from their heads demanding information about KLA fighters, and killed two teenagers who trotted up the road from a nearby village. But Mr. Ward's report never left his computer; he says "it wasn't compelling" when reports of bigger massacres arrived.

Serbs' Own Inquiries

Meanwhile, the Yugoslav government in Belgrade is pursuing its own investigations and war-crimes trials, which skeptics regard as either an effort to deflect blame from President Milosevic or a warning to disaffected Serbian reservists to stay in line lest they be accused.

In one trial, Serbian police reservist Boban Petkovic is accused of murdering four ethnic Albanians in the western-Kosovo village of Rija on May 9, and policeman Djordje Simic is charged as an accomplice. The prosecution's documents charge that Mr. Petkovic, during a battle with the KLA, saw an ethnic Albanian running toward the forest and being grabbed by a Yugoslav soldier.

"Petkovic, believing the man to be a captured terrorist, approached the prisoner, took a sidearm from Mr. Simic, and shot the man in the head," the documents charge. They say Mr. Petkovic later heard voices from a house, and, "believing they were terrorists, Petkovic took his machine gun and killed all three people inside." The prosecution says the victims were "obviously civilians."

Mr. Petkovic's defense is that he was in battle, and that the chronic stress from being under attack by KLA terrorists affected his judgment. Mr. Simic says his gun was used without his permission.

The Mine-Shaft Story

Though brutal, these incidents don't have the impact of accounts of Serbs rounding up Albanian men and dumping their corpses down a mine shaft. The world may owe that image to Halit Berani, head of a branch of the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms in the city of Mitrovica. Mr. Berani is a former actor with a Karl Marx beard who summarizes Serb war crimes by showing a photo of a baby with a smashed skull.

Mr. Berani spent the war moving from village to village with his manual typewriter, calling in reports to foreign radio services and diplomats with his daily allotment of three minutes on a KLA satellite phone. He says he heard from villagers near Trepca that trucks were rolling in full and rolling out empty, and that a strange smell was coming from the mine complex. He phoned in a report in early April suggesting that the mines had become a body-disposal site, and Deutsche Welle, a Germany-based radio service, carried the report in Albanian.

The story spread. In June, Kosova Press's Internet site quoted a U.S. embassy official in Athens as saying there are "witnesses and still photos" of trucks carrying bodies. Western journalists phoned the embassy, but a spokeswoman said she couldn't find the supposed source.

London's Observer ran a similar story, citing a KLA commander, a girl who got a call from an elderly resident, and a Kosovar who heard the story from refugees. A Pentagon spokesman, quizzed about Trepca at the time, said, "There have been several reports throughout the last 10 weeks of bodies being burned in former industrial sites in Kosovo." Some commentators stated the theory as fact.

When French troops took over the mines, they reported to the tribunal that they had found well-scrubbed vats and piles of clothing. Tribunal investigators weren't impressed: Clothes are found everywhere in trash-strewn Kosovo, and why would the Serbs clean vats but not burn clothes? After the fruitless search, "we don't see any need to do further investigation at this point," a tribunal official says.

Mr. Berani doesn't completely stand by his story. "I told everybody it was supposition, it was not confirmed information," he says. But he adds, "For the Serbs, everything is possible."

[mikelewis]

135. As promised, the response from Jared Isreal - The Emporer's New Clothes

Dear Mike,

Good to hear from you.

Unfortunately I don't have much time right now, but I can point you to
sources for refutation. From a *quick* skimming of the text, it appears opponent has
assembled the straight NATO version of lies about Kosovo. (Hence he says the
KLA did a poor job of disarming whereas they didn't disarm at all - they were
under NATO command before and after the "disarming", and did as they were
told, for which they were supplied sufficient arms, even maps.

He says that the Serbian gov't banned sales of land by Serbs to Albanians -
but why? Because the Albanian fascists would terrorize a Serb family into
fleeing, wehereupon the Serbs would sell their farm to whomever they could. The
Albanian fascists bought it dirt cheap and then sold it at a higher price to
Albanian farmers. This demonstrates your opponents method: taking advantage of
ignorance he presents lies (that the KLA partially disarmed, whereas the Kla
neither disarmed *nor was independent*, i.e., in a position to make decisions
for itself.) and misleading "truths" (as in the land.)

Regarding the KLA being a tool of NATO, two useful articles are: http://emperors-clothes.com/mac/times-a.htm and http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/nocrime.htm

My suggestions for reading in general on serbs/albanians/kosovo:

Our collection, http://www.tenc.net/yugo.htm
And the vast storehouse of documents at
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/library.html

Please keep me informed.

Best regards,
Jared Israel
Emperors-Clothes

[The Magistrate]

138. Oh, You Will Have To Do Better Than That, Dear

Jared Israel, to put it kindly, is a known quantity. His opinion of these events, or of my work, means no more to me than does your's. The nationalist sites he provides connections to, of course, speak volumes....

"Everything he says is a lie, even 'the' and 'and.'"

[mikelewis]

168. Care to quantify that? You're peddling of propaganda is highly suspect

You offer no proof of any of your claims. All you do is say, "Well, that's a lie and he's a fraud" but you offer not one shred of evidence to back up your claims. Frankly, your credibility is seriously lacking. You offer a generic revisionist history as evidence but completely ignore the the facts. I must assume you just wish to argue and not debate a fact. Obviously, you have no desire to get to any truth or examine any other possibility other than that which the government spoon feeds you. You choose to stick your head in the sand, that's your perogative but to impugn Jerod Isreal without any substantive discourse is simply slander. From your first post, I expected a bit more than this. I assumed you would have a something other than a flippant dismissal.

[The Magistrate]

171. The Only Qualification, Mr. Lewis, Worth Offering

Would be to add intensifiers to the condemnation you object to, and there would be no point to that. It has been my lot to read a good deal of the wretch's commentary, and the impression it has left is one of distaste on the level of LaRouchite writings. The impression left on someone who has little awareness of history and the world around us may be somewhat different, of course. It is pretty clear that matters Balkan are not one of your fields, but they engaged my own interests in a small way long before the death of Tito. It is quite amusing, the belief of many here that persons who disagree with their peculiar views of events they themselves clearly know not even rudiments of are either disinformation agents or dupes of cable television programs....

"The truth is out there...."

[mikelewis]

176. Wow, still no rebuttal with any facts, amazing

You obviously found a need to condemn but only choose to do so with slander. I expected a bit better. You call me a dis-information agent...? Yep, that's me. Agent Mike!

[The Magistrate]

179. Facts Are Presented In the Main Piece, Dear

You have not even engaged them, let alone rebutted them; you have simply roped in some outside assistance to call them propaganda, which you surely are capable of doing on your own...?

It would also be of some interest to me if you could point out where my comments above have called you a disinformation agent...?

"Kill one, warn one hundred."

[mikelewis]

182. either a disinformation agent or a dupe?

"It is quite amusing, the belief of many here that persons who disagree with their peculiar views of events they themselves clearly know not even rudiments of are either disinformation agents or dupes of cable television programs...."


I have engaged in post 181, I look forward to your reply.

[mikelewis]

183. What work are you alluding to? You haven't sited any sources so far

[Lithos]

206. Please avoid using The Emperor's New Clothes as a factual site

It is considered a bigoted site (particular bias against Muslims).

Lithos
9-11 Forum Moderator
Democratic Underground

[Name removed]

69. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[The Magistrate]

90. What Is Interesting About It, Mr. Lewis

Is that you preferred to connect to its placement on Free Republic rather than to its originating newspaper. It suggests, shall we say, unwholesome interests, at best, and opens the door for more damning speculations by persons disposed to make them. Your resort to a source above alleging "terrorists" were signifigant funders of Sen. Kerry's Presidential campaign has a similarly interesting quality, as is your connection to another location seemingly devoted to the destruction of Islam as a religion, and where, among other things, endorsement of restricting the civil liberties of Moslems in the United States can be found. And of course, the final visit to the enchanting militiamen of Rumor Mill News tops off the rather heady cocktail you have put before us here. You seem to spend a good dal of time in precincts where they would sooner shoot a leftist than look at one, and to drive a good deal of the material on which you base your arguments from what is on offer there. Some people have a taste for slumming, of course, but it seems to me you ought to be able to find legitimate materials without recourse to hate sites and sites maintained for the encouragement of reaction....

"If you lie down with dogs you will rise up with fleas."

[mikelewis]

197. The KLA did make contributions to the DNC - So what?

The site which hosts the material is irrelevant. The content is the and the source is what was important. Before I learned of the DU, I gleaned my information from "all" sources. If you choose to select facts through the eyes of a bias, that's fine. The Freepers have collected a lot of articles and mirrored them on thier site, a fact that I am grateful for. Many times an article is no longer hosted by the original publication and anyone who hosts it has my appreciation. I have found the people at the Free Republic to be closed minded and overly opinionated, just as I may say, are you. They resort to slander rather than to truth and that's not a forum I prefer to engage in. Just as most of your remarks seem to contain slander based upon an arrogant bias. You seem to care nothing for the truth and only for some imaginary score-card.

Your original reply was excellent. It contained a lot of background information that was very good. It was a broad context that would allow others to frame this debate who are unaware of the background. Often times, I forget that there are those who have not investigated a topic and I forget to provide the relevant background material. It was the tone of your arguements that I find fault with. Your writing implies that you are 100% correct and others are merely imbeciles without anything worthwhile to add to the total picture. It's that sort of arrogance that hinders open debate. I am glad you challenged me on the facts of my statements as it drives me to clearify my statements and dig deeper into a subject. I just don't appreciate the tone.

Now, simply because the DNC recieved donations from the KLA means very little to me. I'm sure many politicians recieve donations from a great many unsavory sources. I have investigated Mr. Kerry prior to offering my support for him as I did not want to help replace one tyrant for another. I found very little to be concerned about but he does have a few skeletons in his closet, as do most people. Recieving a few thousand dollars does not buy political support or favors.


I had some real problems with Kerry's fraternization with the North Vietnamese government and they still remain. No matter how much I hate Bush, I would not agree with anyone who dealt with a declared enemy of the United States outside of a humanitarian context. I did not buy into the Swiftvets rhetoric but I wanted to find the truth. When Jesse Jackson went to Serbia to negotiate the release of the 3 soldier who were captured, I supported and even applauded this. Had Kerry went to Vietnam to seek the release of prisoners, I would have applauded this as well.

My uneasiness with his trip did not take away from my support for him and I applaud it in one respect. I appreciate the bravery that this action must have required as an act like this could have serious repercussions on his future in politics. I simply do not support any fraternization with enemy forces in any manner if it is not by officials of my government. I don't care if they're wrong, my job is to convince them to do the right thing, not to do the right thing for them.

If you choose to imply that they didn't take the donation then that's your perogative, it's untrue but you can say what you like. I prefer to look at the truth and weigh it against the context of the situation and then make my conclusions. You seem to think a debate should work the other way around. It can if your opponent is willing to concede without challenging you. I won't. You say there was Genocide, I say prove it. You say my choice to link to a copy of an article on the Free Republic makes my arguement weak, I say, whatever. This is ridiculous. Clearly, you have a firm grasp of the english language, you just lack ethics in your application of it.

If you choose to believe the Left is all good and the right is bad, that's your choice. I believe there is good and bad on both sides of the fence. I believe both sides have done things that are dispicable in many regards. I assumed this forum was designed to get to the truth no matter where it led and who was involved. Maybe I was sadly mistaken. But in my opinion, if I took this stance, I would be no better than the "terrorists" who are ruining my country. To me, it's not a question of us against them, it's the truth verses a lie. If you choose to forsake the truth to push an agenda, I hold you in little regard.

[mikelewis]

169. Why was this message deleted?

[The Magistrate]

180. Such Questions, Sir

Are best addressed privately to the moderators of the forum, or the Administrators of the site in the appropriate forum....

"Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it."

[DulceDecorum]

107. And just WHO here do you want to kill?

Death threats now, huh?

The Magistrate says:
This is going to be rum fun....
"Kill one, warn one hundred."

We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.
-- Ann Coulter

RUN mikelewis RUN.
I'll try to hold him off to give you a chance.

[The Magistrate]

109. You Need To Take Yourself Less Seriously, Sir

The less importance persons attach to themselves and their doings, the happier it is likely their sojourn in this vale of tears will be....

[DulceDecorum]

115. How about

you taking your own advice.

Incidentally,
I have NEVER taken death threats lightly.
Perhaps that is why I am still alive.

And now that all here have all been thoroughly intimidated,
I am going to go off
to spend some time at a DU forum where I can post freely
without care as to my personal safety.

[The Magistrate]

119. Thought That Would Fetch You, Sir

Very few people hold themselves more lightly than me.

If, however, you seriously feel you have been threatened with death, my advice would be to contact the police, or alert the authorities of the forum....

"Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad."

[demodewd]

26. agree

agree agree agree agree agree Thanks! :)

[Last Lemming]

33. I think you have a lot more work to do

and you need to nail down a lot more details if you really want to make your case at all convincing

[MercutioATC]

34. It IS just the first 15 minutes of the video.

I'm not making a case, I'm rebutting a video.

And yes, this only represents about 1/4 of it.

[The Magistrate]

35. Convincing To Who, Ms. Lemming?

Persons who hold to the peculiar sort of views embodied in the product Mr. Mercutio is dealing with are past convincing: since reason has had no part in their coming to hold what views they do in the question, no degree of reasonable argument can move them to discard those views. Their views are held owing to a variety of preconceptions, and they will clutch at bits of "fact" that seem to support them like a drowning man at straws, and will always find new ones as others are fractured or subside beneath the surface. Then, of course, there is an entrepenurial caste among them, such as Ruppert and Kliest and others, who find rewards in noteriety and cash from the credulity spread before them like a vulture's banquet after a flash flood on the high plains....

"If a man will continue to insist two and two do not make four, I know of nothing in the power of argument that can stop up his mouth."

[DulceDecorum]

38. That was really mean.

Last Lemming merely expressed an opinion:
I think you have a lot more work to do
and you need to nail down a lot more details if you really want to make your case at all convincing.

And then The Magistrate STOMPED the poor thing into the ground.
The Magistrate said:
Persons who hold to the peculiar sort of views embodied in the product Mr. Mercutio is dealing with are past convincing: since reason has had no part in their coming to hold what views they do in the question, no degree of reasonable argument can move them to discard those views. Their views are held owing to a variety of preconceptions, and they will clutch at bits of "fact" that seem to support them like a drowning man at straws, and will always find new ones as others are fractured or subside beneath the surface.
Which basically means that anyone who agrees with the people who made "In Plane Sight" are incapable of reason, grasp at straws and are stubbornly stupid.

The Magistrate concludes by saying:
"If a man will continue to insist two and two do not make four, I know of nothing in the power of argument that can stop up his mouth."

I wonder if we are ever going to see Last Lemming around here again.
Its kinda hard to talk with a mouth that just got stopped up.

[Name removed]

39. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[DulceDecorum]

88. Must you always attack the PERSON?

How about refuting an argument for a change?

You just insulted that person all over again.
And most of the other posters here to boot.

LITHOS has told us ALL
YOURSELF INCLUDED
that there is room for dissension on this board.
But there you go TRASHING a person who has a different opinion from you
SIMPLY BECAUSE
they have a different opinion from you.

What are you looking for?
When you be satisfied?
When all the "Conspiracy Theorists" here have left?

On another thread,
You, The Magistrate,
have publicly stated that you have a decided streak of cruelty.
And I am publicly stating that you,
The Magistrate,
are hurting the members of the Democratic Underground.
This needs to stop.

[demodewd]

89. monitors: why?

How about refuting an argument for a change?

You just insulted that person all over again.
And most of the other posters here to boot.

LITHOS has told us ALL
YOURSELF INCLUDED
that there is room for dissension on this board.
But there you go TRASHING a person who has a different opinion from you
SIMPLY BECAUSE
they have a different opinion from you.

What are you looking for?
When you be satisfied?
When all the "Conspiracy Theorists" here have left?

On another thread,
You, The Magistrate,
have publicly stated that you have a decided streak of cruelty.
And I am publicly stating that you,
The Magistrate,
are hurting the members of the Democratic Underground.
This needs to stop

This man Magistrate is entirely viscious in his attacks. And yet he never gets censored. Why is that monitors?

[The Magistrate]

92. Joining The Posse, Mr. Dewd?

You are doubtless familiar with the words of that great Democrat, President Harry Truman: "I don't give 'em Hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it's Hell!"

"The strong are strongest alone."

[demodewd]

93. hell

Except you got it bass ackwards,Mr. Friend. You give us hell and think it's the truth.

[The Magistrate]

95. Your Meaning Is Unclear, Sir

Surely you meant to type "Mr. Fiend", did you not?

Rest assured it would not bother me the slightest if you had....

[DulceDecorum]

104. There you go again!!

demodewd is upset, as are many,
by the manner in which Last Lemming has been so mistreated.

You posted "the truth" about Last Lemming?
That was so MEAN to start with and it wasn't even factual.
And what is this about a "posse?"

Are you going after demodewd now because
he too dared to stand up for Last Lemming?
Considering that you consider last Lemming to be female,
can you not act a like a gentleman and treat her like a lady?

Whats with this Abu Ghraib stuff?

[The Magistrate]

111. 'Abu Ghraib Stuff', Sir?

Have they taken to quoting President Truman at the detainees?

Oh, the Horror....

[Lithos]

207. Mr Magistrate

Spends most of his time talking about the comments and statements made by an individual and not about the person. And granted much of what he does is very strong and critical, it is against the statement or idea and not against the person who made it which means it is not against the rules. Please note that he says things such as "Your comment", "your view", "that statement is", and refrains from "you are"

(My apologies Mr. Magistrate for the next paragraph, it's talking about you as an individual).

Also, Mr. Magistrate has a posting style which is a bit more formal than most people are used to dealing with. He uses it with those who he agrees with as well as those who is debating against. Trust me on this point, I've been on both sides of the debate with him and he's been consistent in his use. Consider it a quirk if you must, but no harm is meant.

However, as a matter of fact, I have removed several of his posts. Because of moderator policy, I'm not going to go into any details, but when I felt he has crossed the line, I do delete his posts.

Again, if you have a particular point over a given post, please use the alert system and give a detailed reason why you feel something is offensive and against the rules.

Lithos
9-11 Forum Moderator
Democratic Underground

[The Magistrate]

91. You Have Yourself, Mr. Decorum

Frequently taken the course here of accusing those who disagree with your own peculiar views, including myself, of being disinformation agents and rightist infiltrators, such disagreement seemingly being, in your mind, sufficient proof for the charge.

Here, you seem to be veering even further, into an attempt to make the issue be me rather than the subject being debated in this forum. As you do so, in discussion after discussion, ranging even so far as the Lounge lately, doubtless you will cross soon enough over that line that defines stalking a fellow member of Democratic Underground.

My comments above do not seem to me to have been an insult to anyone. They engage the very real difficulties of debating with persons who are moved to sustain a position based on articles of faith. If you, or anyone else, chooses to feel this applies to them, that is nothing to do with me. Such a person has the option of demonstrating their views are based otherwise.

Once the Sage wrote: "The King has his executioner, but you are not that man. If you try and be him, it would be like trying to cut wood like a master carpenter. if you try and cut wood like a master carpenter, you will only hurt your hand."

[DulceDecorum]

98. Can you be polite

to people like Last Lemming?

Can people express their opinions freely here, while you are present?
Man what you did that poor Lemming was AWFUL to behold.

Listen Mr The Magistrate,
this forum is not the sparring section of Jerry Springer Show,
nor it is WWF Smack Down.
It is supposed to be a place where people can say what they think about 911 and where they can ask questions freely and have them answered in a civil manner.

I remember one poster, Lonestar,
who disagreed vehemently with me
and I am mentioning his name because he was and is,
one of the very few posters
who has EVER caused me to retract anything that have said on the DU.
Lonestar did this by pointing out my error.
And I had made an error.
And I own to it.
Now Lonestar and I come from totally different sides of the fence, but he has earned my everlasting respect
because he stuck to FACTS and never tried to bite my ankles.

Many other posters here have asked me questions
and taken me to task over FACTS I have posted.
I do not attack people because they do not hold the same opinion as myself.
I try to convince them to come around to my point of view.
I demonstrate FACTS and ask them to account for them.

It is very disconcerting to see you heap abuse upon those who come here in search of answers.
Please try to stick to discussing the merits and the demerits
of the EVENTS of September 11
as opposed to the merits and demerits
of the members of the Democratic Underground.

[The Magistrate]

114. My Comments, Sir

Are directed at patterns of argument: at the strategies, if you will, employed in marshalling facts to attain the object of convincing others by some. This is a quite legitimate area of critique; some strategies are likely to be of use in actually demonstrating something, and some are not, and it is my pleasure just now to point out those that are poor tools, yet often employed nontheless. You are, of course, free to shovel your sidewalk with a teaspoon or a sheet of cardboard if you choose, but you will not get nearly as good a result as if you use a proper shovel or a blower.

You may be assured, Sir, if my intention were to bite you, the teeth would sink in considerably above the ankles: it would be the point below the jaw, or below the sternum, you would need to guard from the fangs....

"Martyrdom is the only way a man can win fame without any achievement."

[DulceDecorum]

118. Nice, real nice.

The Magistrate says:
You may be assured, Sir, if my intention were to bite you, the teeth would sink in considerably above the ankles: it would be the point below the jaw, or below the sternum, you would need to guard from the fangs....
"Martyrdom is the only way a man can win fame without any achievement."

Boy oh boy,
the lurking freepers must be revelling at the sight of your comments.
Enjoy, kiddies. Enjoy.

As for you,
Mr The Magistrate,
There is a difference between forceful advocacy for a particular issue (which is allowed), and personally attacking people (which is forbidden). If you can't tell the difference, you are likely to get into trouble here.

Toss down another one.
That's two death threats so far in this one thread.
Let's see how many more you can make today.

[The Magistrate]

121. No Personal Attacks, Sir, Have Been Made By Me

You are doubtless familiar with the Lincolnism: "How many legs has a dog, if you call a tail a leg? Four: calling a tail a leg don't make it so."

Again, if you seriously feel you have been threatened with death, my advice would be to contact the police, or the proprietor of this forum.

"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks: dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

[Abe Linkman]

123. How many PERSONAL ATTACKS is "t.m." allowed to make w/out consequences?

Thanks for the tip, m-atc.

[The Magistrate]

124. Coming From A Fellow, Sir

Whose repertoire has included repeated statements that anyone who disagreed with his peculiar view of this matter is a disinformation agent operating in support of the current regime, the question really is a bit rich....

"Why do you look to the mote in your brother's eye and ignore the beam in your own?"

[MercutioATC]

153. You think they're personal attacks? Use that alert button.

We'll see if the mods agree.

[seatnineb]

184. Still contradicting yourself.......

For once o' venerable Magistrate.....

I agree with you.

The Magistrate quotes:
Martyrdom is the only way a man can win fame without any achievement."

Just like the 9/11 hijackers.

[AZCat]

96. Referring again to Lithos' "Please Read" post...

He says:
If you think someone is deliberately trying to be disruptive or engaging in personal attacks, then you are to use the alert system. You are not to respond in kind. However, alerting on someone because they disagree with you is not a productive use of this system.
</snip>


I suggest that if you have a problem with the behavior of a poster that you take it up with the moderators when you alert on the posts you believe are violating the DU rules. They are best equipped to handle such questions.

[DulceDecorum]

99. The mods need our co-operation

and it would be greatly appreciated BY ALL
if the rules of civility were respected by ALL of the posters here.

Lithos can remove the posts
but the damage that you have done to Last Lemming
and others who were hurt to the quick by your treatment of Last Lemming
will continue to reverberate here for months.

You have stated that you have a decided streak of cruelty.
We can testify to this.
And all I can do for Last Lemming is to offer my heartfelt sympathies.
:grouphug:

And now,
seeing as how I do hope that we have put this nastiness behind us.
What was this thread about anyway?

[AZCat]

101. I think you might have fired at the wrong target

Judging by the content of your post, I think you may have believed you were replying to another poster, as I have never owned up to a streak of cruelty, nor have I attacked Last Lemming in any posts.

I would like it if this nastiness could be in the rear view mirror. I believe the thread was originally about MercutioATC's analysis of the "In Plane Site" video, but most threads in this forum (and all forums for that matter) seem to converge to a set of disagreements that may or may not have to do with the topic at hand. It is an interesting phenomenon to observe, even if it is a bit distracting.

[DulceDecorum]

103. Ooops, my mistake!!

Yes, I was addressing myself to another poster.
Please accept my profound apologies AZCat.
:pals:

Yes, let's go back to analyzing "in Plane Sight."
Since I totally disagree with MercutioATC's analysis,
I am going to be nice and allow those that DO agree with him, to present their findings in peace.
Then I shall review those findings
and see if there is anything that I feel is worthy of a factual response.
So far, I feel the video is holding its own.

[AZCat]

105. Apology accepted

Speaking of "In Plane Site", I have wondered, now that the Demopedia is back up, if Skinner would mind us somehow using that to catalogue the argument about the video.

I don't mind discussing it (not at all) but it seems like we keep returning to the same point. It would be nice if we could at least document in some way the various positions so they don't have to be repeated - we could just refer to a page or set of pages that listed them (and then add to that after discussing new ideas here, of course). The Demopedia would offer a neutral ground for this IMHO.

What do you think?

[DulceDecorum]

113. It is a good idea

and I have considered putting some of the research on Demopedia
but some reason, I have not yet done so.
Perhaps that is just as well.

[AZCat]

116. I think we should work out some simple rules first

Otherwise it will devolve into a never ending war over the "edit" button. I have seen it happen on the Wikipedia - an example is the article on the Kosovo War (curiously relevant to the discussion some ways up-thread).

I have been thinking that we could develop some way of just introducing evidence without criticism - that could be restricted to this forum. It would centralize the evidence without relying on disparate web sites and would IMHO simplify the discussions here in the forum.

I don't mean for this to replace the forum, but rather to complement it - to hopefully make the forum more effective by cutting down on the time required to find relevant threads or evidence and to perhaps give newcomers an easier access to information.

[DulceDecorum]

120. Well, let the Official Story-tellers go first.

Especially as seeing how the idea came up on a thread sponsored by one of them.

Then as a rebuttal
the other side could ask to simply place links to alternate theories.

[AZCat]

122. I think it should focus on "evidence" rather than "theories"

I am tired of everyone having to kick their threads about particular pieces of evidence every time it comes up for discussion. How many times have you had to nudge one of the "Pilots and the Planes..." threads just to make it easy for people to find when it comes up in a new thread?

I would rather we had a place that instead was fixed - we could list the information and the web sites it comes from (and perhaps list the threads discussing it also).

For example: the "In Plane Site" video could have a link to a reliable page that hosts the video (by reliable I mean that it won't shut down a year from now), a short description of the video, and a list of links to threads in this forum that have the video as the main topic.

A second example: the 9/11 Commission report could link to the main web site for the commission along with a brief description and a list of links to threads here.


What do you think?

[Abe Linkman]

141. What problem are you having with the "edit" button?

I can't figure out what problem you are proposing a solution for, much less what your solution is.

[AZCat]

143. The "edit" button I am referring to is in the wikipedia

Wikipedia, as an open source encyclopedia, allows anyone to edit a particular entry. This can be quite a contentious process, as the Kosovo War link I provided attests to - the proponents of various perspectives have been re-editing each others work for some time now.

If we were to use the Demopedia as a reference for various pieces of evidence I think we would need to work out a set of rules regarding the placing of evidence otherwise we would suffer the same fate as the Wikipedia, and that's not what I want the project to do.

I'm still brainstorming ideas, but basically what I want is a single source that we can use to collect links for the various bits of evidence that are used in discussions here so we no longer have to re-post the evidence for every new thread that pops up. It would be nice if we could also list the threads in this forum that deal with each particular piece of evidence. I don't know if it would work or if there is a better way, but I think the way things are done now is kind of haphazard.

[Abe Linkman]

145. You might be right.

How would you handle the problem of defining what is to be accepted as evidence? You understand that OCT supporters are NOT going to accept
as evidence any facts, analysis, research, logic, or argument that undermines the credibility of the BUSH 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.

This forum is obviously NOT limited to objective seekers of the truth of what happened on 9/11, and you have to take that into consideration. So, determining what should constitute and be accepted as admissible evidence is going to be a big challenge. Who should have the right to decide what is admissible evidence?

[AZCat]

147. I agree - that's why I don't think it should replace the forum

I see this as more complimentary to the forum - it would serve to centralize the links to evidence and the discussion about the evidence would occur here, as it always has.

I haven't figured out what should be included as "evidence" or how it should be grouped. Some divisions are simple - group the Pentagon stuff and the WTC stuff separately - but if there are two similar web pages offering similar analyses, should they both be allowed? I think it would be better to be inclusive rather than exclusive and allow anything within a minimum criteria to be included.

What is that minimum criteria? Obviously it should have to deal with 9/11, but if a ten-year-old creates a web page where he talks about watching the events on television, should that be included? I don't think it should be limited to "official" documents - the "In Plane Site" video should be included for example, even though its validity is currently being disputed in this very thread, because it is relevant to our discussions (and because it comes up so often).

I don't mean for this to be where we decide what is the truth (and consequently what pieces of evidence to keep or discard), but more as a tool for simplifying the discussions here. Clearly I have more work to do figuring out the details.

[Abe Linkman]

148. You are ALREADY trying to fiddle with the truth.

There is ample evidence that the OCT is a lie.
The notion that 9/11 was somehow just "allowed to happen" has no basis in fact.
I could go on with a list a mile long.

Yet, you imply that it is only out of the goodness of your bleeding heart that you would "allow" the "In Plane Site" video to be included.
Not ONE objective person has shown it to be invalid (I don't think that's actually the word you wanted to use, but maybe it is.) Look, any
half-way intelligent person can criticize. It's much easier to be critical than it is to be correct.

To put it gently but firmly, your notion might have merit, but it's got a long way to go. Sorry, but I wouldn't vote for you to be the judge of what should and shouldn't be considered credible evidence. I'd always have the feeling that anything which proves the OCT is a Fairy Tale would be accepted only reluctantly.

[AZCat]

149. I used that as an example, Abe, because that is the topic of the thread

It seemed to be a good choice to me because this thread was about the video.

Why in the world would I be the judge? That's my whole point - we shouldn't be making value judgements about the evidence listed. That's what this forum is for - judging the evidence. We can argue here about whether or not "In Plane Site" or the ASCE Report (if you prefer that example) are valid, but I want a place where we can point people rather than continually kicking old threads because the links or discussions are there.

[Bolo Boffin]

132. The video is holding its own? Please.

Merc showed quite decisively that VonKliest twisted the statement of an eyewitness who saw a large AA jet crash into the Pentagon. VonKliest made it appear that the witness said he saw a missile in direct contradiction to what the man actually said.

And this was video, mind you, video that VonKleist had to have viewed again and again during the editing process. There is no excuse for his presentation - VonKleist deliberately misrepresented the eyewitness testimony.

He LIED.

Since the man has been caught in one clear lie, the video is NOT holding its own, and your own defense of it shows that you're not paying very close attention to what Merc said. When you do, you will find yourself granting Mercutio the same respect you have granted Lonestar.

[Abe Linkman]

134. No, he didn't lie. The man said both things. Ted Olson DID lie.

Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore "Ted" Olson (he, of the Olson family which seems to "lose" members under mysterious circumstances) lied thru his teeth about alleged phone calls from his alleged wife Barbara who supposedly called him from aboard AA FL 77.

The implications of TED'S lies are profound. His lies are powerful evidence that the BUSH 9/11 Conspiracy Theory itself is a total fabrication about what happened.

Proportionality: right-wingers who eat only meat that could be nourished back to health, with a little help, should have some. Today.

[The Magistrate]

137. What On Earth, Mr. Linkman

Does the reptile Olsen have to do with what Mr. Boffin refered to?

Mr. Boffin pointed out the fact the Kleist distorted testimony from a witness to suit his arguement. Whatever anyone else may have done or no, this certainly establishes Kleist as a liar, interested not in the truth of these events, but only in what notoriety and profit he may extract from them. That is no surprise, of course; grifters come out of the woodwork to exploit the great reservoirs of credulity existing among persons who seemingly have mistaken the television entertainment "The X-Files" for a documentary.

"The love of money is the root of all evil."

[Abe Linkman]

140. Ted Olson DID lie. Dave Van Kleist did not lie.

Ted Olson lied. Von Kleist didn't.

Ted's lies undermine the credibility of the BUSH 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.
In fact, it's reasonable to say that Ted's lies go to the very heart of
whether or not the BUSH CT is a total lie.

[Bolo Boffin]

142. Dave Von Kleist LIED, my dearest Abraham.

Stop trying to change the subject to Ted Olson.

Mike Walter said one thing alone: that a large AA jet hit the Pentagon. He didn't say that a missile hit the Pentagon.

"I was sitting in the northbound on 27 and the traffic was, you know, typical rush-hour -- it had ground to a standstill. 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.'

"And I saw it. I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon."


Dave Von Kleist DELIBERATELY edited out the first part of this testimony to make it appear that Mr. Walter said a cruise missile hit the Pentagon. Mr. Walter identified the object that hit the Pentagon as an American Airlines jet. Von Kleist surpressed that identification for his own propagandistic and financial ends.

Von Kleist is LYING in this video. This EASILY DEMONSTRATED lie impeaches his credibility.

[Abe Linkman]

144. Mr. W. told the truth & Von Kleist reported it. That's the truth.

The credibility of the BUSH 9/11 Conspiracy Theory ) is zero, and that is due in no small part to the lies told by Theodore "Ted" Olson.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said that a missile hit the Pentagon. Mr. Walter seems to agree with the U.S. Defense Secretary. Do you think Mr. Rumsfeld was lying, too? What possible reason would Mr. Rumsfeld have to lie? And, since Von Kleist accurately reported what Mr. Walter said about a missile: "it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon", you are obvously mistaken, and I assume that it is only because of your enchantment with the BUSH CT and your growing frustrations with the the fact that more and more people realize that the "Caveman Who Supposedly Did It" didn't, and that the continued piling up of evidence is causing the OCT to collapse quicker than the controlled demolitions that brought down WTC 1,2 and 7. EVEN if you include the entire quote of Mr. Walter, that doesn't make Von Kleist a liar.

BTW - you know that the law enforcement in Dallas themselves proved that LHO did NOT shoot a rifle on 11-22-63, don't you. LHO was given a paraffin test shortly after he was taken into custody. His face was tested & the results were negative. His hands were tested and the results were positive. Paraffin test results are only reliable if they are NEGATIVE. You may also know that a British Detective proved that LHO did NOT carry a rifle into the TSBD building.

You knew all that, didn't you? It's expected that an objective person is willing to change their beliefs and opinions whenever they are presented with credible information that shows they have been wrong, and likewise, one expects a partisan to remain steadfast even after they've been shown to be wrong.

Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the opinions of someone who fails or refuses to change their views after being presented with information that shows those views are not factually based, does it?

[Bolo Boffin]

159. Walter told the truth; VonKleist misreported it. That's the truth.

Again you try to change the subject. JFK's assassination has nothing to do with this thread.

Mike Walter said that an American Airlines jet hit the Pentagon. Von Kleist did NOT report that. He selected a single part of the quote and made Mike Walter appear to say a missile hit the Pentagon.

When what Walter said was that "it" was like a missile - "it" being the American Airlines jet.

Those are the facts, Abe. You are free to accept them or reject them as you wish.

[Abe Linkman]

170. Faulting vonKleist for not including a longer quote doesn't change a thing

He accurately quoted what Mr. Walker said. Even if he had included the entire quote, that wouldn't prove that he lied and it wouldn't undermine the powerful evidence he presents in the video.

When it comes to credibility gaps, you couldn't find a bigger one than the BUSH 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. And, I'm not just talking about how the exposure of Ted Olson's lies proves that the most basic claims in the BUSH CT simply aren't believable.

Regarding the JFK assassination; I thought you might like learning about some information that I don't believe you were aware of. Just tell me this: knowing what I've told you, do you still maintain that the LN (lone nut) theory makes any sense?

Thanks, bolo. You've always been good for a cheap laugh. No, No. I don't mean that. I'm sorry. Just answer the question. Thank you.

[The Magistrate]

173. Actually, Mr. Linkman, It Does Change A Great Deal

The art of composing blurbs for theater has long depended on it: when a critic's comment that "A smash on the head with a brick would have been more entertaining!" emerges as "A smash...entertaining!" most people would acknowledge the meaning conveyed has been altered somewhat....

"Everything he says is a lie, even 'the' and 'and'."

[The Magistrate]

166. Nonesense, Mr. Linkman

That is a poor effort even judged by your usual standard.

Kleist distorted testimony to suit his view of the case; this is dishonest in the extreme, and casts doubt onto any editorial judgement he exercises, since it demonstrates that he is capable of distortion by omission. People who tell untruths may not have known the truth, but persons who tell half truths have deliberately set the truth aside, and seldom can they find it ever again. If a witness' testimony is contradictory, an honorable and honest scholar presents the whole of it, or simply dismisses it as contradictory, but never selects the portion of it suitable to his own agrandizement and treats that as the whole of it.

The reptile Olsen has no bearing on that question whatever. Falsehood by him neither excuses falsehood by Kleist, nor establishes Kleist as truthful They are wholly unrelated. It would make as much sense to argue that the fact that you on my arrival in this forum engaged in personal attacks against me, calling me a disinformationist supporter of the present administration, is evidence of my engaging in personal attacks against you.

Asked whether evil should be repaid with good, the Master answered: "With what, then, do I repay good? Repay good with good; repay evil with correction."

[Abe Linkman]

172. Take it up with Secretary Rumsfeld.

I'm sure he'll be impressed with your modesty, if not with your preference for nonsense.

"Truth"? No, you couldn't disguise your style THAT much. NEXT.

[The Magistrate]

174. Is There Some Meaning In This Comment, Mr. Linkman?

My command of the mother tongue seldom fails me, but extracting any sense from that comment above is beyond me at this hour....

"My Noble Lord requires of you three thousand ounces of silver yearly. Otherwise I shall be compelled to quarter my braves upon your granaries."

[Last Lemming]

53. Well,

he did ask for input--granted mine wasn't terribly specific. I, too, had a tremendous amount of emotional baggage tied into my view of 9/11. It wasn't until I witnessed the obviously fraudulent events surrounding this election that I could ever entertain the idea that my own government could be engaged in such high treason. I think every American will have to come to terms with the events of that day in their own way. Evidence is part of it, but, as you point out, there is an emotional aspect to it as well.

It's hard..

[meppie-meppie not]

60. sounds like your journey started from the very same as my own. Nothing

wrong with emotions, heck without them we're nothing but poorly operating machines, at best. There are alot of anomalies when it comes to the events of 9/11 and we have every right to question things until such time that we feel within ourselves satisfied with whatever answers we arrive at. Some feel they are the arbiter's of appropriate lines of inquiry or conclusions derived and if we veer from their formula that we are intellectual inferiors. But take heart, windbags are always in danger of becoming deflated by their own demeanor. :-)

[The Magistrate]

61. Well, Ms. Lemming

Emotion must be left to one side in the assesment of evidence; how one feels about facts, and what one wants them very much to demonstrate, is immaterial to assessing what best explains and organizes them into a therory of events. The royal road to nonsense is to begin with an emotional conviction and seek to snatch up proofs congenial to that starting point alone: one might as well pursue theology, if determined on that style of inquiry....

"Many people think they are thinking when really, they are only re-arranging their prejudices."

[MercutioATC]

82. Yes, I did ask for input.

Whether you see things as I do or not, your responses are appreciated.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

45. The Rotor to start with. I will be researching the other parts displayed.

http://www.911review.org/Wiki/PentagonPlaneRotor.shtml

This is the photo that you have the rotor found at the Pentagon. Below will be a photo of a 757 that crashed in Spain 1n 1999, and below that a photo of its rotor. It was the same model engine as Flight 77.





From the link:
At the right above, we show the engine from a Britannia Airways Boeing 757 that crashed 14 September 1999 at Gerona, Spain. This aircraft (G-BYAG) had the same engine model as Flight 77 (N644AA) - Rolls Royce RB211-535E4. Not only is the diameter of the Rolls Royce engine is much larger, the rotor configuration is totally different.




This debris photograph of the engine rotor, if the evidence was not planted, is consistent with a small jet aircraft such as the Navy S-3B, the F-15, the F-16 or the F-18; definitely not from a Boeing 757-223. One witness that reported seeing a 8-10 seat passenger plane, others reported a small rear-engined jet, which would be consistent with the Navy T-39 Sabreliner.

This isn't the only engine from 9/11 that's too small: see our page WTCPlaneEngine. http://www.911review.org/Wiki/WTCPlaneEngine.shtml

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

46. Please see this link with incredible close-ups of the fuselage.

http://77debris.batcave.net/AA.html

[gbwarming]

47. Fan vs. compressor Rotor. These are two different parts.

These turbofan engines contain one fan, the part you can see in the Brittainia crash, and several compressor rotors, the part seen in the pantagon photo. The fan is larger in diameter than the rotors and of much lighter construction because it works at lower speed and lower pressure than the rotors. See the image above for a generic representation. Below is a RB211-535E4 cutaway view in which you can see the size difference of the fan and compressor.

[Abe Linkman]

48. We can't rule out the possibility that this is from a small fighter jet

Like the one that crashed at the Pentagon. F-16?

[hack89]

55. What did the eye witnesses describe?

Why do we have to speculate - surely someone saw the jet and can describe it?

[Last Lemming]

58. Like all good witnesses

they seemed to have seen quite different things--some saw a small jet making almost no noise--others saw a large jet that thundered like crazy

[hack89]

72. Give me some examples

of statements from people who saw a small jet and maybe we can figure it .

[Last Lemming]

80. Witness

http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/evidence/witnesses/jetliner.html
or better
http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/evidence/witnesses/bart.html
http://www.911-strike.com/pentagon.htm
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/citizen_grand_jury.html
also
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=89&contentid=1142&page=2
I'm not an expert on any of this but I figure if you want to make a convincing arguement I'm as good a person as the next to try it out on. I've read some but not a lot and had no reason to disbelieve the 9/11 saga until recent events caused me to review my previous impressions. One thing which I do need to have explained is why Jamie Gorelick asked a question during the 9/11 commission hearings and in that question she referred to "when the missle hit the pentagon"

Rumsfeld has made a few bone headed slips as well

[MercutioATC]

81. Yes, a couple of eyewitnesses speak of a small jet.

The overwhelming majority, however, say they saw a large commercial jet...some even specify an American jet.


The issue in this forum is that VonKleist intentionally edited an eyewitness report to make it sound as if he reported seeing a "cruise missile with wings" when the full statement makes it clear that the witness saw an American Airlines jet.

That's obfuscation and VonKleist himself warns that if obfuscation is discovered, the entire argument must be called into question.

[Last Lemming]

85. Gotcha

sorry if my comments were not on topic

[MercutioATC]

94. Not a big deal.

This thread has kinda lost its focus anyway. I was just pointing out how the issue relates to the video.

[Abe Linkman]

133. Simple explanation for the semingly contradictory eyewitness accounts

Different eyewitnesses DID see, hear, and experience different aircraft at the Pentagon. After all, there was all kinds of flying things in the air that day. The success of the plan depended partly on distracting the public from what was really happening. Visual overload, supported by Air Magic ("hey, look. there's a big C130. and lookee there -- see what's that big plane doing. it looks like it's headed for the Pentagon." it was. and it flew right over it, and probably landed at Reagan National Airport a few seconds later.)

It's very reasonable that some eyewitnesses saw a 757, others saw what they described as a small commuter jet, some saw a C130, others heard a fighter jet, and some heard what they thought was a missile (it WAS!).

Somewhat similar to the WTC attacks. There, you had the FOX News reporter who described the first North Tower plane as being "windowless, with a blue circular logo of some kind, definitely not from around here, maybe some kind of freight plane." There's no reason to not believe his account, either. He seems to have accurately described the B767 (tanker plane) that Boeing makes for the Air Force. It, of course, took off from a military airfield (hence, not from around "here" at JFK etc.).

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

50. Edited, I just found this.

http://www.911review.org/Wiki/PentagonPlaneRotor.shtml
Jean-Pierre Desmoulins examines this photograph carefully, and notes that:

this is a high pressure rotor element of a jet engine;
the diameter of the housing is not much bigger than the diameter of this rotor,
most of the witnesses heard a sound that they describe as the sound of a military aircraft (highly pitched and strident), not the sound of an airliner.
He concludes:

this piece and the streamlining behind don't come from the engine of an airliner, which has low pressure fans of much larger size than the high pressure rotors, so that the streamlines are much larger than the diameters of the high pressure rotors.
the engines of this plane had no low pressure fans: they are military engines, for which noise is not a problem.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/pages-en/wr-eng.html


A rotor (high pressure stage) coming from an jet engine can be seen. On the top left of the image, what seems to be the housing of this engine. On the rigtht, the leg of somebody working on the site gives approximately the scale.

The photo above, taken inside the pentagon, shows some remains of an engine. It's difficult to have an idea of the scale. But a specialist knowing this type of engine should be able to recognize it : a lot of characteristic shapes are visible.



The two photos shown here above could be interpreted as two pieces (yellow references 1 and 2) in this sketch of a Rolls Royce RB 535 engine, the model which was mounted on the Boeing 757-200 number 644 AA alledgedly crashed on the Pentagon. Note that the rotor (1) is the entry fan or one of the internal turbine rotors of the high pressure stage, a piece which is not visible from outside. It is neither the low pressure fan (3), three times larger, located at the front of the engine, nor the exhaust fan (4), about the same size, located at the rear of the engine, both of these last pieces being visible from outside on a grounded plane's engines.

[gbwarming]

51. I guess this is non-VonKleist. I'll look for diameters...

and reply on another thread. The diagrams illustrate the difference in size between the fan and core sections of the engine, but the site you reference comes to the incorrect conclusion - Of course there is a cylindircal housing which contains the fan, and another that contains the core (higher pressure, smaller diameter compressor stages and turbine stages).

I found references to several SAE and AIAA technical papers on the RB211 engines which I may be able to acccess later today. Perhaps one these will have detailed information on the diameters of the various parts.

SAE.org
892364 : The Rb211-535e4--A Commercially Proven Engine for the Military of Tomorrow 09/01/1989 Paper

872409 : Rb211 Developments 04/01/1988 Paper

760897 : Quietening a Quiet Engine-The Rb211 Demonstrator Programme 02/01/1976 Paper

811053 : Rb211 Power Plant Deterioration Review of Current Situation and Lessons Learned 10/01/1981 Paper

801224 : Tristar Engine Monitoring in British Airways 09/01/1980 Paper

780512 : The Rb211-535, New Member of the Family 02/01/1978 Paper

680338 : Design Features of Rolls-Royce Rb207 and Rb211 Turbofan Engines 02/01/1968 Paper

http://www.aiaa.org
Rolls-Royce RB 211-535 Power Plant
D.J. Pickerell
Journal of Aircraft 1983
0021-8669 vol.20 no.1 (15-20)

Computational fluid dynamics in the United Kingdom
HALL, M. G.FIDDES, S. P. (Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, England)
AIAA-1987-1132
IN: Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference, 8th, Honolulu, HI, June9-11, 1987, Technical Papers (A87-42051 18-02). New York, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1987, p. 352-364.

A technique for engine maintenance cost forecasting
DAY, M. J. (Rolls-Royce, Ltd. Derby, England) STAHR, R. S. (Rolls-Royce, Inc., Seattle, Wash.)
AIAA-1979-7007
In: International Symposium on Air Breathing Engines, 4th, Orlando, Fla., April 1-6, 1979, Proceedings. (A79-29376 11-07) New York, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., 1979, p. 45-52.

Advanced propulsion systems for large subsonic transports
PEACOCK, N. J.;SADLER, J. H. R. (Rolls-Royce, PLC, Derby, England)
Journal of Propulsion and Power 1992
0748-4658 vol.8 no.3 (703-708)

[MercutioATC]

78. Awww, screw it.

This thread has lost its "VonKleistness" anyway.

Go for it.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

193. It is related to Von Kleist as you yourself posted photos

as "evidence" that Von Kleist was wrong. My contention is that we are being told those are photos of 757 parts, and how do we know that is true. That is why I posted the parts diagram, hoping that anyone with working knowledge could or could not match up the parts found at the Pentagon site with it.

[Abe Linkman]

112. Small rotors surive crashes,explosions, fire. 757 engines don't & they're

heavy & cumbersome to "plant". Besides, the propaganda photos shows an object that can be interpreted as being "similar" to a rotor found on a 757. The perps aren't dumb. They knew that if they had trucked in a big 757 engine and planted it, smart people would ask why there weren't TWO 757 engines. Solution: just plant a small rotor & claim it came from a 757. If that doesn't work, then say it's "similar" to a rotor found on a 757. If that limited, modified-hangout doesn't work, no problemo, because if enough of the public becomes hip to the scam & figures out (thanks to researchers like D.V.K.) that NO 757 crashed at the Pentagon, the perps can say:

1.) "We never said it was definitely from a 757, only that it is "similar" to one found on a 757."

2.) " We never said that rotor proves that a 757 crashed. Secretary Rumsfeld himself said it was a missile that struck the building. We never said the rotor isn't ALSO "similar" to a rotor in a missile."

"We did the best we could...to fool the public for as long as we could.
And, it worked, too. For a lot longer than some of us expected it would. But, if there is credible evidence that supports what Secretary Rumsfeld said that he thought hit the Pentagon, we'll conduct a very thorough investigation, put together a report, and deliver it to Congress. We'll give them the full, complete raw data, and if they feel any parts of the report should be kept secret for National Security reasons, we'll respect their judgment. The investigation and report to Congress is budgeted for a period of five years. If it takes longer, we'll request addtional time. During the period while the investigation is being conducted, any and all new and heretofore unreleased Pentagon 9/11 evidence will remain classified, for National Security reasons. After the Congress examines the report, it will be up to them when and whether the full and complete contents can ever be released to the public. Of course, a summary of some kind will be made available to reassure the public that the Government has conducted a full and complete investigation of any alleged negligence, incomeptence, or bureauratic snafus that may have contributed to the success of OBL & his gang of evil-doers."

[Last Lemming]

57. Ouch

Reality bites . ..

[MercutioATC]

83. Yes it does. What's pictured is a high-pressure rotor, not a fan.

OmmmSweetOmmm shows a lovely pic of a main fan from a 757 engine. My contention is that the Pentagon photo shows the high-pressure rotor from a 757 engine....a part that's much smaller in diameter than the main fan.

[Bolo Boffin]

67. Mercutio, you've gone above and beyond

Great job, and keep them coming.

[MercutioATC]

74. Thanks, I will.

Since the first 5 or 6 minutes of the video is just BS intro, this one was relatively easy. I've previewed the next 15 minutes and there's a LOT of material to cover. I'll probably do one a week for four weeks.

Actually, I think I've already called the entire video into question. VonKleist himself states that if you uncover one obfuscation, it brings the entire argument into question. His choice to selectively edit Mike Walter's quote to change its meaning clearly shows obfuscation to me.

...but I think there's MUCH more later in the video...

[The Magistrate]

139. Indeed, Sir

We are all of us looking forward to your further efforts. You have done a superb job, and doubtless will continue to do so.

"In war, only what is simple can succeed."

[demodewd]

146. Merc..

Why is this piece burn and soot free?

[MercutioATC]

155. We're discussing this issue in another thread. I believe it has to do

with chronology.

My best understanding of the crash:

1) The plane hits the Pentagon. The fuselage breaches the wall and most of the fuselage, most of the fuel, and part of the wings are carried through the hole. At the same time, the remainder of the wings and a part of the fuselage is effectively turned into "confetti" by the force of the impact and thrown backwards from the point of impact.

2) As this is happening, the fuel that didn't enter the Pentagon ignites.

3) A moment later, but after causing the majority of the observed damage to the interior of the Pentagon, the fuel inside the Pentagon ignites.


As I said in the other thread, I realize other people interpret the crash differently, but this is my impression of events based on the ASCE report.

[demodewd]

167. hereiswhathappened

The plane hits the Pentagon. The fuselage breaches the wall and most of the fuselage, most of the fuel, and part of the wings are carried through the hole. At the same time, the remainder of the wings and a part of the fuselage is effectively turned into "confetti" by the force of the impact and thrown backwards from the point of impact.

If the force of the impact causes the remainder of the plane that doesn't enter the building to turn to confetti then why wouldn't the rest of the plane turn to confetti?

2) As this is happening, the fuel that didn't enter the Pentagon ignites.

Why would the fuel outside the building ignite just prior to the fuel inside the building?

Here's what really happened. :bounce:

1. The proxy plane has shaped charges installed in its interior
2. These charges are programmed to go off just prior to the plane engaging the building
3. The initial very light coloration of the blast is caused by the shaped charges exploding on the building's surface
4. Plane livery and assorted exterior fuselage and wing parts are obliterated into small pieces.
5. The one larger fuselage skin piece oddity located on the lawn escapes the secondary fuel blast and thus is clean and without soot.
6.The fuel blast ensues
7. Most of the fuselage is completely destroyed and ends up in the E-ring and building facade area in a ferocious very high temperature fire that literally melts most of the plane
8. Steel alloyed items survive the molten fire and are recoverable..the 1 engine photographed,the landing gear.
9. The jet stream from the initial blast flows with concentric vortex force boring its way through the D-ring and creating a hole at the far wall of the C-ring onto the A-E drive
10. Most of the fuel and fire damage is concentrated to the south of the entry point,on the facade exterior and on the roofing
11.North of the entry point is buffeted by the original shaped charges blast that is moving in the direction of the plane angle entry forcing the fuel fire to the south,to the west and up over the roof

[Abe Linkman]

175. May I come in here & offer an answer to that very good question? Thanks.

You asked: "If the force of the impact causes the remainder of the plane that doesn't enter the building to turn to confetti then why wouldn't the rest of the plane turn to confetti?"

Answer: Because it had some work it needed to do on the inside.

I don't know if m-atc has a different answer, but I haven't found any evidence that proves my reason couldn't be the right answer.

[MercutioATC]

187. Actually my answer is that it DID turn into "confetti".

That small debris, mixed with jet fuel, is what caused the majority of the structural damage to the interior of the Pentagon.

[Abe Linkman]

189. When you add in the Voodoo, even "small debris" gets Jumpin'...

like Jumpin' Jumbee Jamboree. Starts acting up (and everything), and pretty soon, before you can say "Jack Robinson", why that small debris has done up and torn up the insides of the Pentagon.

My friends; there ARE no friends. But, there is the power of Voodoo.
Do YOU believe?

[MercutioATC]

191. Are we having difficulty understanding the concept of mass again?

It doesn't matter how big the pieces are, mass is mass.

[Abe Linkman]

192. Not the concept of "mass", it's the concept of the power of Voodoo Mass.

There's no evidence that supports your zany opinion. But, since it's only an opinion, feel free to keep posting it. No one will make fun of it or call it disinfo. If they do, you just pull out your trusty copy of the ASCE report and tell 'em "necessity sent you".

[hack89]

195. What is the role of the shape charge?

Why is it needed?

[hack89]

196. I call BS on "concentric vortex force"

Show me one credible link that shows this is something more than the product of an active imagination.

Shape charge warheads are not magic - it is old technology that has been used for over 60 years. They cannot blast 4 foot holes from hundreds of feet away!

[demodewd]

199. new photo of hole in A-E drive

Debris pulled through building by jet stream of shaped charges

[hack89]

201. voodoo physics

The jet stream of a shaped charge consists of molten copper - it burns through things. It doesn't pull anything. This is some serious voodoo physics you believe in.

Why is so hard to believe that a big chunk of steel from a large airplane was able to create that hole.

[Lithos]

208. Locking

The topic has shifted woefully off of the original point.

Lithos
9-11 Moderator