More Mocking the Victims

Once again, these guys are seriously pissing me off. On 911 Blogger they recently posted this video of a conference in Canada with some truther nutters. The part I have watched thus far is AK Dewdney, famous for trying to use his cell phone on a Cessna. It is bad enough they mock the dead, but could they at least get the most basic facts straight?

I just want to point out that flight 175. It has just been admitted by the FBI that they discovered that Ted Olson was lying about his wife Barbara Olson phoning him from flight 175, so we can reduce that by one.

She was on flight 77 you moron.

On the basis of what I have learned about cell phone technology on the ground and in the air, I am ready to conclude, that those calls never happened. Oh well, if it never happened, who were all those people calling their relatives who were calling their friends. "Mark? Mom, is that you mom, yeah this is Mark Brigham."

It is Mark Bingham you complete waste of oxygen.

He continues a minute later.

The fakery, how to fake a cell phone call, if you are a fairly modern intelligence organization, you have access to the passenger lists, well before the flight. You have access to the phone numbers and you also have an easy ability to gain a wiretap if you need intel, so you can listen into those conversations days in advance, you can make recordings and finally there is a significant little piece of equipment called a voice modulator which has been on the market for almost twenty years which by changing no more than 3 settings you can imitate the timber, frequency and other key speech qualities of the human voice.

Oh really.

Mark Bingham was last to board the plane, having arrived late and nearly missed the flight. Bingham intrigues because he does not fit the image of the all-American hero quite as neatly as Todd Beamer, a family man from rural New Jersey with a Lord's Prayer bookmark in the Tom Clancy novel he had onboard.

A third of the passengers and crew were there by the slimmest of chances. Dahl had rescheduled to get home to Colorado to pick up his wife and take her to London for their wedding anniversary. Deborah Welsh had been a flight attendant for 25 years and hated early flights, but had agreed to trade shifts to oblige a colleague.

From MSNBC:

Jeremy Glick was supposed to have been on Flight 93 a day earlier, but missed the Monday flight after getting stuck in traffic on his way to Newark Airport.

Words cannot describe how disgusting these people are.

Update: Later this blithering idiot tries to explain the flight data recorder of United 93:

It looks like the flight data recorder was carried by another aircraft. Well, that's the question, was there another aircraft in the area? Yeah, there was a mysterious white twin engine jet aircraft which we have identified as an A-3 Thunderbolt, which is designed, described by Susan McElway (phonetic) and residents of the area as all white, it had two rear mounted engines it had a tailplane with two vertical rudders on either end of it and that is likely the aircraft that was carrying the flight data recorder.

An A-3 Thunderbolt? WTF? And even if this aircraft were there, why is he claiming the FDR came from it, did the pilot plunge his plane into the ground so it would have the appropriate information on it? Is he on crack?

An Evening With the 9-11 Deniers

Jeffrey Shallit, who appears to be an Accounting Professor (Correction: Computer Science Professor), discusses his attendance at an event featuring the Canadian branch of the kooks:

Why didn't the Debate Society present someone on the other side? I was told they tried, but couldn't find anyone. But they are a "debate society", not a "one-sided presentation" society, and they had an obligation to find someone to respond to the falsehoods that were presented.

Professor Shallit has put together several excellent posts on the presentations he attended:

On AK Dewdney's claim that the cellphone calls could not have been made.

This gives some background to Dewdney's presentation on March 19. He started by stating that his expertise is in cell phone calls, and that he has learned a lot about them since he began his investigations. (Dewdney, it appears, has no formal training in cellular communication. The theme of people speaking beyond their trained expertise is one that would repeat itself during the evening.)

Indeed.

Part II of Dewdney:

He showed a picture of one of the towers with an arrow pointing to part of it, with a caption reading "Molton [sic] steel pours from side of WTC 1". The resolution of the picture didn't allow me to conclude that anything molten at all was pouring out, certainly not molten steel. If anything was pouring out, why couldn't it have been molten aluminum? Aluminum melts at 660° C, while steel melts at 1370-1550° C.

On Theologian Graeme McQueen's discussion:

This indeed, sounds very modest. But soon the veneer of reasonableness was stripped away, as he described the generally-accepted model of the Towers' collapse and then said, "A rather obvious fraud, in my view." This kind of behavior is typical of the "9/11 Truth" movement. Their claims are outlandish and unsupported; yet if you do not agree, you are in league with fraud. By using the word "fraud", MacQueen denigrates the dozens of structural engineers, fire engineers, and civil engineers who have looked into the buildings' collapse and have paintstakingly devised the generally-accepted theory. There is no legitimate reason to believe that all these researchers have engaged in fraudulent activity, and it is a gross calumny to say so.

Yep, the rather obvious fraud is being committed by the "Truthers".

During his presentation, MacQueen referred several times to the Journal of 9/11 Studies for support for his claims. The editors of this "journal" are Kevin Ryan, Frank Legge, and Steven Jones -- three men heavily involved in the "9/11 Truth" movement. No one taking issue with "9/11 Truth" claims is involved. This is not a scholarly journal in any sense of the word; it is a propaganda outfit for deniers.

Kaaaa-ching!

He also takes on the purported moderator of the debate, who of course was not moderate:

Lee claimed that "Serious scholarship will be presented to you tonight". In fact, what we heard were the standard falsehoods of the 9/11 Truth movement, and discussion of the fine points of building collapse by a man not even remotely qualified to discuss the issue. Lee claimed that he would present "a forum in an atmosphere of open-minded scholarly challenge". But there was no challenge, since no one from the opposing side was permitted to speak. The question period was extremely limited.

Kudos to Professor Shallit for putting up with an evening of this nonsense to bring us his account!

The K Stands for Kook

A.K. Dewdney recorded a video for the recent Vancouver "Truther"-Fest. He claims that an employee of Canada's air security agency told him that he was placed on a "no-fly" list and didn't care to test that by attending the conference. Of course, it is far more likely that the conference organizers didn't want to pay his expenses and provide an appearance fee for the man who orchestrated "Project Achilles" even if he did provide a Canadian flavor to 9-11 crackpottery.

Dewdney continues to claim that the "cellphone calls" could not have been made from the hijacked planes. At about 1:26 he shows a poster with the "Official Story", the Flight #s, the calls made from that Flight, and the altitude the plane was at when the calls were made. But, as you probably guessed, Dewdney is wrong when he claims that the official story says these were all cellphone calls.



Among the items of evidence presented at the Moussaoui trial was a Flash presentation showing the various flights, the seat assignments, and the phone calls. They even have audio for two of the calls (Cee Cee Lyles first phone call to her husband, picked up by the answering machine, and Betty Ong's phone call to American Airlines).

If we look at the portion of the Flash presentation for Flight 175 we can see the problem with Dewdney's analysis. Here are the phone calls made by Peter Hanson from the Flash presentation.

As you can see, the Hanson's seat assignments were in Row 19, but the phone calls were made from Row 30. How does the prosecution know this?

Because the phone calls were not made from a cellphone, but from an Airfone installed on the seatback of Row 29. If we look at the phone calls made by a flight attendant, we see the same thing except these calls were made from Row 31. Ditto with the Garnet (Ace) Bailey phone calls, from Row 32.

The Flight 77 calls are more problematic; the Flash presentation does not indicate they were made with Airfones. However, you can see that the phone calls on that flight were made at a much lower altitude (Dewdney estimates 7,000 feet), and thus are more likely to connect.

And the Flight 93 calls? The only ones made by cellphone were Cee Cee Lyles' second call to her husband and Edward Felt's call from the rear lavatory, both of which were again made at low altitude.

We'll have more on Airfones later in the day.