Moron 9-11 Eyewitness

BG pointed this movie out to us a week or so ago, and I reviewed the first 30 minutes last week. I happened to see another brief clip of this movie while browsing around, which is off the scale in nutbar heaven.

Unfortunately that clip does not appear in the second half hour of the movie (he's saving the best for last), so we'll have to discuss that at a later date.

The Good:

I wrote last time that he missed the collapse of WTC 1, the North Tower. That turns out to be wrong; after packing up from the first pier he was on, he moved up to another pier (named after Hoboken's most famous blue-eyed boy--anybody? Bueller?), where he had a good view of the second tower going down.

He (or whoever worked with him) makes some reasonable attempts at being scientific. Recognizing that the sounds he's hearing across the water are happening much earlier than the sights he's recording, he pushes back the sounds from the city to compensate for the delay. This may cause some confusion because of course the people on the pier with him are reacting to what they see, but he appears to have done it correctly regardless, to capture the sounds of the city in real time with the camera.

And the footage of the collapse of the second tower (first shown at 37:57) is tremendous. This is one case where distance actually helps, you really get a feel for what the time is on the event. Of course, what you get a feel for is that it's nothing like 8 seconds, which is what the seismic record indicates. Which again tells me that the numbers people are throwing around on a lot of their calculations are dead wrong. I'm not quite convinced the building is down at 38:11, which is a lot later than the official estimates. You do see bits of the building still falling away as late as 38:31 (apparently part of the core) and this is a big (my guess is 50 stories high) part.

The Bad: The conspiracy part, same as last time. In this 30-minute segment we still don't get the big theory (wait for it in a later post, it's off the Nutbar-o-Meter), but the little stuff grates. The narrator says that lots of people could have been easily saved by police helicopters, the choppers were ordered away. They were ordered away because the smoke and the fire made flying close to the towers dangerous.

The Ugly: When discussing the arrival of the first fighter planes over New York, he expresses disgust rather than relief. "Where were you guys?" he asks. Of course, he's already told us that he took a shower after hearing the first plane hit the WTC; hardly the reaction of somebody who knew we were under attack, which was why he and the military missed the second plane into the WTC.

Food for Squirrels: More explosions seem evident. It's always scary accepting footage from a CT, and sounds are particularly easy to fake. But they should also be reasonably easy to check, since there were a lot of live mikes in downtown Manhattan. I've seen no evidence in the first 60 minutes or so that the guy is lying to us; he's just making wild accusations. In that respect he's far more honest than Dylan and company.

As history this is really quite tremendous footage. I'd give it an A to A plus--this time he's got the subject building squarely in his sights, we see the North Tower fall with no obstruction. It's actually better than many of the closer shots.

The conspiracy theory here is pretty sedated, but the innuendo should be enough to tick off anybody with law enforcement or military background.

Coming Soon: 9-11 Eyewitness: Nuttier than Loose Change?