The Incomplete 9/11 Timeline

Some of our truther visitors have asked in the past why we don't talk about the "Complete 9/11 Timeline" more often, arguing that we "are afraid to debunk it". It is not that, it is just that I have never seen much point in posting about a site which has very little original content, but is just a bunch of links to other sites. Seems rather derivative if you ask me, not really much to talk about.

I noticed an interesting aspect to this though in a recent post on 9/11 Blogger which points to the aforementioned Timeline. Using it as a source, it points out that the book Firefight, which I have mentioned numerous times, has a bit in it about a mysterious assistant who helped during the cleanup:

"Johnny" - Arlington firefighter Bob Gray is introduced by his colleague Bobby Beer to a man wearing a hard hat. Beer introduces the man only as "Johnny," and adds, "He's our go-between with PenRen [the Pentagon Renovation Program], and he knows some of the military guys too." Although "Johnny" is not wearing any identifying badge or ID, he seems knowledgeable, appears "taut and serious, with a purposeful military stance," and even introduces Gray and Beer to a couple of friends of his who say they work for Special Forces. Johnny says if Gray and Beer need anything from the military, he can help. As a security perimeter has now been set up around the crash site, Gray assumes Johnny must be there officially. [Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 367-368]

The implication being that they were there to plant evidence or for some other nefarious reason. There are, of course, numerous other more plausible reasons, but I don't even want to get into that silliness for now, the more interesting aspect is that they are citing Firefight, and at numerous parts of the book, indicating one of the truthers actually read it.

So given this, and the fact that "truthers" claim that they are pursuing "truth", this is called the "complete" 9/11 Timeline after all, then one would logically expect to find dozens of other references from this 500+ page work, which involved the interview of over 150 first responders, and had scores of bits of information indicating a plane hit the Pentagon, including descriptions of bodies still belted into their seats and airplane engines embedded in concrete columns. All items which all but the most hard core fantasist would have to admit is evidence beyond the capability of even several "fake firemen".

But alas, I was disappointed, none of this was there. Other than the bits on the fake fireman the only reference to the book was the discussion of when they found the black box, and then only in the context of arguing that there were some discrepancies as to who found it.

So much for being "honest truthseekers".

These Are the People You are Accusing: Part IV

I wasn't going to do any more excerpts, I don't want to push the spirit of fair use too far, but this was requested by a reader. From page 401 of Firefight:

Whitworth had positioned himself at the edge of the punch-out hole to eyeball everything searchers were hauling out. Hill walked by with square object, blackened with soot, headed for the bin, when he stopped her. "Hey, gimmee that," he said, pulling the burnt object out of her hands.

The device was roughly the size of a shoe box, melted on one end. It was ashen-colored and looked nothing like the pictures of the black boxes- which were orange- but Whitworth could tell that it wasn't part of the building. "We need to let the NTSB look at this," he declared.

Whitworth found one of the NTSB analysts. "Oh fuck," she groaned when she looked at the mangled device. She identified it as the airplane's cockpit voice recorder, which captured sounds in the cockpit. It looked to be nearly demolished- there was a marginal chance they'd be able to get any information from it.

Still it was a breakthrough. Whitworth returned to the punch-out hole a moment later, empty-handed. "Hey, that was a great find," he told Hill. "That was one of the black boxes. Where'd you find it?"

"Right over here," she said, pointing to a stack of jumbled rubble. Searchers formed a circle around the pile and started digging, since the black boxes on 757s were both in the same section of the airplane.

About half an hour later another NTSB expert uncovered a device that looked like it could be the other black box. It turned out to be the flight data recorder, which collected electronic information about the operation of the jet. Both of the black boxes had finally been found, pulled like two broken shells from an ocean of debris.

These Are the People You Are Accusing : Part III

From Firefight, Page 425. This will be my last excerpt, although I will probably do one more review as a summary. Excellent book. Highly recommended.

The airplane had nearly disintegrated, but Dan Fitch's group found several huge cogs, bent and blackened, that weighed a couple hundred pounds each; it took a couple of workers to handle each one. Other objects nearby looked like large gears, and strips of metal that appeared to be fan blades. Workers realized that they were pulling apart the remnants of one of the aircraft's two engines. The aluminum cowling that had encased it all had been torn away, but the guts of the engine were there.

FEMA crews used a blowtorch to free the core of the motor from the column in which it was embedded. Then Fitch and several others used pieces of six-by-six to pry the motor loose from the column and push it off the pile. With the help of some Old Guard troops, they rolled the heavy piece of machinery onto a dolly and finally managed to push it outside. The whole effort took the better part of an entire shift.

These Are the People You Are Accusing : Part II

Another excerpt from Firefight, page 373:

For the first time, Regan's team saw something they had expected to see all along but had been scarce until then: recognizable airplane parts. They all thought they would find big pieces of the airliner laying everywhere, the way car parts end up strewn across a highway after a crash. But the physics of an airplane crash were obviously different: Mostly there was just tons of shredded metal and melted plastic.

Finally, they found several airplane seats, piled among the usual mounds of upturned office furniture and random wreckage. A couple of the seats still had bodies belted into them, which had already been found and marked for the FBI. Most of the workers inside were conscientious about not gawking, yet the seats attracted a lot of attention. They were the first objects the nonaviation experts had seen that unmistakably belonged to an airplane.

These Are the People You Are Accusing

Truthers like to accuse abstract entities, like the "government" or "New World Order" of crimes, while pretending that they are not slandering real people. So in this excerpt from my continued reading of Firefight, I would like to point out the real people, the heroes, that they are accusing of covering up mass murder. From page 267:

Special Agent Tara Bloesch was assigned to set up the morgue. She had all the right experience- before joining the FBI, she'd worked as a forensic investigator near Philadelphia and as a parole officer in the city itself. With the FBI, Bloesch had helped run morgue operations in Kosovo and Serbia, documenting war crimes and mass graves, after NATO troops intervened in the war there in 1999. Her colleagues knew her as an articulate, tough Philly girl who didn't blanch at difficult jobs. She would keep the morgue under tight control.

O'Connor needed other people to work with her. He gathered several dozen agents on the lawn, near the helipad, to sort out who would deal with remains, evidence, and other aspects of the huge job. "Obviously we'll be doing a lot of human remains and body recovery," he announced to the crowd. "If you're comfortable doing that step over here. If you're not, that's okay, because I need people doing other things too." More than half the group moved to the spot he had indicated. Then he added, "This is not a normal event. If anybody needs to talk to someone, nobody's going to think any less of you."

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the investigators, all but one of the victims were identified. There were 5 sets of unmatched DNA, including a pair of brothers.

Firefight and the No-Planers

Earlier I discussed how, while reading Firefight, I was trying to look at it from an historical viewpoint, and not a conspiracy theorists viewpoint. While I have tried to it is still impossible not to notice things.

On this note, I have come to the conclusion that we need to change the way we view the truthers. Earlier I have stated that the people who don't believe a plane crashed into the Pentagon were almost as stupid as those who believe that no plane crashed into the Twin Towers, the infamous "no-planers". I take that back. I was wrong.

It is now my belief that those who do not believe a plane crashed into the Pentagon are even more idiotic than the original no-planers, because there is actually more evidence of a plane crashing into the Pentagon, if only because the less extensive, albeit still horrific damage at the Pentagon, allowed for more witnesses and an easier collection of evidence.

The evidence is in fact overwhelming, and beyond question. Dozens, if not hundreds of people who saw the plane crash, witnesses to the wreckage, pieces of shredded aluminum that covered the lawn, firefights who smelled, and fought the jet fuel fires, pictures of the fuselage, engines, landing gear, and black box. Not to mention the bodies of the passengers.

So for now on, I am just going to lump in all those who question whether a plane hit the Pentagon as "no-planers", so to that list we add such illustrious figures as David Ray Griffin, Thierry Meyssan, Webster Tarpley, Dylan Avery, and even Steven Jones and Richard Gage. Jones and Gage, as far as I know have remained officially agnostic on the subject, but I will include them anyway, just for being unprincipled wusses.

On this note, I also thought this quote from Firefight was interesting, in response to the idiots who claim that no investigation was done, from page 182:

[Special Agent] McKenzie gathered a dozen photographers on the lawn for a briefing. "We don't need to photograph all the plane parts," he told them, "only unique airplane parts or something specific. Like the pilot's yoke, or anything with part of a serial number on it. If we have to prove what king of plane this was, the serial numbers will be what we need" One of the debris pieces McKenzie photographed himself was a piece of aluminum with the American Airlines twin-A logo on it."

A Few Thoughts on Firefight

As I mentioned previously, I am reading the book Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11 (shameless plug), and I am about 120 pages in. As I am reading, all of the "debunking" evidence is going through my head, the firefighters standing on the lawn who nearly got hit by the plane as it was coming in, the first responders who noticed all the pieces of shredded aluminum from the fuselage or even shoes strewn about from the luggage, and the former pilot who talked about the stench of jet fuel that overwhelmed the scene.

After a while though, I got thinking, "this is stupid". One of the reasons I got involved in writing a blog on these issues was that I was upset that a handful of morons were trying to steal and corrupt our history, and here I am letting them do it. This book is about the heroism and professionalism of the first responders, not a rebuttal to a bunch of irrational idiots. I don't read a book on the D-Day invasion with the intent that it should be rebutting people who think that D-Day never happened, so why should I let these idiots frame how I see this book? Screw them.

Firefight: Update

I have discussed the book Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11 several times, mostly because I am still trying to get a troofer to address the subject. Ballantine Books though was nice enough to send me a copy to review, so I will be posting a more in-depth review shortly. I read through the first 4 chapters last night, and all I can say so far is that anyone who reads this book, and still thinks that a plane didn't crash into the Pentagon needs to immediately check themselves into the nearest mental health facility. Of course, this will pretty much guarantee that no troofers read the book.

Book Review: Firefight

Tim Sumner from 9/11 Families for America has posted a review of the recent book, Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11.

In Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11, authors Patrick Creed and Rick Newman slam you awake as to what happened there that day.

While many staggered through smoke, rising heat, and shockwave-strewn wreckage in search of an exit, it took the sheer valor of troops, civilians, and first responders to save the lives of hundreds — some died in the attempt. Firefighters from far and near came running, found a vortex of chaos, sucked rancid smoke, and fought the ‘big one’ fire of their careers. Even as carbon monoxide levels rose in the national command center, our nation’s senior military leadership refused to evacuate, the fire was spreading, and the entire Pentagon was at risk of burning down.

Pat Creed and Rick Newman described it all, as best as anyone could within 486 pages.

If you wish to learn more about the courage and tragedy of 9/11, buy their book.

I read it in one sitting.

I am still looking forward to reading the book when I get a chance. Meanwhile, over on 9/11 Blogger, it is still being ignored entirely.

The Sounds of Silence

Last week we discussed the new book Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11, and the difficulties it would present for the 9/11 truth, no plane at the Pentagon movement. Yesterday a blogger at 911 Blogger asked a good question:

Book review: Firefighters at the Pentagon, public records, 150 interviews with participants and eye-witnesses... anyone reading this?

Uhh yeah, a 9/11 truther is going to read a book which actually interviews the people involved, and does not have a forward by David Ray Griffin. Yeah, that is going to happen. To no surprise over a day later the post has yet to receive a single comment. By comparison Pat's post on the same book is currently standing at 76 comments.