The statistical probability of the North of Citgo witnesses all being wrong is infinitesimally low, so as to be essentially zero. IMHO, the North Path has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Even CIT critic Adam Larson, in debate, acknowledged that the 13 confirmed North of Citgo witnesses cannot coincidentally all be wrong. The only other alternative, as acknowledged by Larson, is that not just the CIT boys, but also all of the 13 recorded witnesses, are all in on a massive disinfo conspiracy. You can hear this within the first three minutes of the debate.

I'm still waiting for three South of Citgo witnesses who were in an appropriate vantage point (i.e. the gas station) and who place the plane on the South Side as emphatically as Lagasse, Brooks and Turcios place it on the north.

"Largasse" is not merely angry at CIT; he is very "pro-America" in the flag-waving sense of the word, and is thus angry at ALL the truth movement's claims, including the WTC demolition.

Also, an analagous scenario: Many of the firefighters who reported characteristics of controlled demolition and who were shown in Loose Change were angry with the makers of Loose Change. In addition to cognitive dissonance there is also fear. Not too many 9/11 eyewitnesses, who are not already active truth activists, would be too happy having their testimony thrown onto a video in support of the claim that 9/11 was a false flag op. Indeed, the "recut" version of the 2nd Edition of Loose Change had a legal disclaimer at the beginning notifying the audience that the firefighters do not support the conclusions of the film.

You try and raise doubts about "Largasse" and give weight to his insistence that the plane hit the poles and the Pentagon. However, Lagasse would "bet his life on it" that the plane was on the North Side. And, he is hardly the only one. This flight path has been corroborated. And if the plane flew on the north side it is scientifically impossible to hit the light poles or cause the directional damage to the Pentagon from the E ring to the C ring.

You might next try to argue that the 13 north side witnesses themselves don't draw the exact same flight path, with some drawings having the plane just a little to the north of the citgo whereas other drawings place the plane quite a bit north. However, this is indeed where the fallibility of eyewitnesses comes into play; the smaller the detail. But just imagine: you and five friends are standing at the Citgo on 9/11, facing the Pentagon. The plane appears over your left (north) shoulder as it approaches. Later on when questioned individually, you say that the plane came into your field of vision at the 10:30 position. Another indicates more of a 9:30 position, while another indicates more of an 11:30 position. However, nobody is going to suggest a 1:00 or 2:00 position.

Weight and quality of testimony is everything. When someone is videotaped on location, like CIT's witnesses are, the viewer can see the witnesses tone of voice, inflections, level of certainty, etc. One cannot do this with 2nd hand media quotes. Honestly, you can show me a list on paper of a THOUSAND names of "south of citgo / impact witnesses" and for me it does not carry anything like the weight of seeing Lagasse and Brooks actually corroborate the North of Citgo flight path on video with 100% certainty.

Frank,

when you have south side eyewitnesses obviously lying about what they saw, then one has no choice but to affirm that agents were planted at the scene to convince us that a 757 hit the Pentagon, which means that NO 757 hit the Pentagon, otherwise they wouldn't be trying to convince us with what turned out to be scripted lies. That is the scientific and logical position to take on the subject.

This isn't the case of eyewitnesses, as you say, " contradict[ing] one another there". It's a case of south side eyewitnesses obviously reading from a script that wasn't undated before they read their lines. The most egregious proven south side liars are (and remember, these lying eyewitnesses spoke when there was no 9/11 Truth Movement to fool, so there was no reason to lie):

David Marra saying a large aircraft cart wheeled into the Pentagon. -- Well, that is an outright lie.

Master Sergeant Noel Sepulveda said he saw the plane drop its landing gear. -- That is incorrect.

Tim Timmerman said most of the energy was dissipated in hitting the ground. -- That is a lie.

Christine Peterson said she could read the numbers under the wing. -- That is impossible!

Army Captain Lincoln Liebner (who worked in the Cables Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon) said the aircraft struck a helicopter on the helipad, setting fire to a fire truck. "We got one guy out of the [fire truck] cab," he said, adding he could hear people crying inside the wreckage (http://web.archive.org/web/20010914091110/http:/www.abc.net.au/news/2001...). -- Totally made up!

Steve Anderson said the plane drug it's wing along the ground. -- That is a lie!

Marine Sergeant Maurice L. Bease said he saw a white commercial airliner. -- He did not (unless it was the white commuter-sized aircraft others saw)!

Frank, by the way, my source confirms CIT's research, and also explains why many of the the Pentagon clocks stopped 09:32...due to an electromagnetic surge from a BOMB (Cruise missile)!

My source's affirmation of a bomb going off is affirmed in the following September 12, 2001 news article from Austrailia (http://web.archive.org/web/20010914091110/http:/www.abc.net.au/news/2001...):

-- Eyewitness reports say two explosions have also rocked the side of the Pentagon building in Washington, part of which has since collapsed.

"There was an explosion, a fire. People kept their cool, people started working with each other to get out," said Lieutenant Colonel Robert Snyder, who was in the basement level of the Pentagon building when one of the explosions hit.

"I heard two loud booms - one large, one small," said Lisa Burgess, a reporter for Stars and Stripes newspaper. --

The eyewitnesses who saw a small jet all pretty much say the same thing, and don't make embarrassing statements about the plane crashing into a helicopter or digging its wing into the ground:

Steve Patterson said the plane appeared to hold about eight to 12 people, headed straight for the Pentagon.

Steven Gerard said it looked like a 20 passenger corporate jet.

Don Wright said he saw a commuter plane.

D. S. Khavkin says it appeared to be a small commercial aircraft.

Of course, another proof that no 757 hit the Pentagon is the damage to the Pentagon wall. The initial damage to the Pentagon is consistent with a Cruise missile/Bunker Buster hit, followed by a small aircraft entering. That would also explain the two explosions heard by Lisa Burgess.

Dean Jackson/Editor-in-Chief DNotice.org
Washington, DC

Frank,
Nobody without a political position to protect on this issue (ie. debunkers or CIT detractors) has any trouble in arriving at the conclusion that the plane cannot have hit the Pentagon based on the strongly corroborated eye witnesses CIT present. It's a no-brainer. I include in this my mother, who had a career running complex investigations of care homes and understands how to cautiously treat eye witness testimony and under which circumstances it can be considered proof.

As I have attempted to impact on you with little success: we do not have two sets of eye witnesses which contradict each other. We have one set of eye witnesses and a tidal wave of fluff.

We have CIT presenting eye witnesses corroborating each other and showing us what they believe they saw with zero ambiguity and on the other hand we have other individuals trawling the internet for unconfirmed quotes and then claiming that they show something else.

They must not be given weight if we want 9/11 truth to be taken seriously, until they have been confirmed and verified. Who has put in the effort to do this?

Not the detractors who spam these quotes all over the internet, they show an astonishing lack of interest in looking any further into these quotes than face value. If a person has said "the plane hit the pentagon" - that is automatically counted as a witness to this happening and any attempt to look into that person to find out what they actually saw is actively discouraged and closed down on. When you do look into it you find out why - a staggering number were in positions with no view of the "impact zone", in some cases they were miles away and never claimed to see the event at all. They were just referring to it.

This is your scientific method? There is only one reason you think that "evidence" such as this should be "given weight" - because you believe it justifies your continued refusal to look at real, corroborated, independently confirmed eye witness testimony which would prove your position wrong?

This is the worst kind of abuse of the scientific method.

I'll tell you Frank, give me a year and I think I could find you half a million quotes of people saying "the plane hit the Pentagon" - do you doubt that?

Of course most of those will not be from Americans let alone people who witnessed some element but regardless, if they believe it to be so, they will happily say "the plane hit the Pentagon" and by your standards of evidence they would add to your case wouldn't they?

While detractors have no interest in these "witnesses" beyond their value to their argument, CIT have contacted many of them and put a lot of effort into researching the rest. In every case with a little research those quotes fall apart when you put effort in to fact checking them and can only exist as "evidence" when the person doing so makes a concerted effort not to look any further than the page they are printed on and lazily conclude they support their own pre-formed conclusion.
Frank, you are incredibly keen on pointing out that eye witness testimony is unreliable when that testimony refutes your pre-chosen conclusion…
…at the same time your argument against that confirmed, verified and unambiguous testimony rests entirely on your request that we accept that unconfirmed, ambiguous and non conclusive quotes from the media are worthy of consideration and cancel out the real testimony we have.

Make up your mind.

If you agree, as any sensible person does, that eye witness testimony is unreliable, then you must also agree that we only accept any details from eye witness testimony when:

A) It has been confirmed and verified, not just heresy milled from the media or any other source;

B) It corroborates with other eye witnesses.

And if the claim is then something which directly contradicts an existing claim which is largely corroborated – then we need to investigate further to see whether one party has an ulterior motive.

These tests are essential, thorough analysis is needed when using eye witnesses to get clarity on an event. Presenting a long list of five to ten word quotes, culled from the media and copied and pasted into an Arabesque article is utterly meaningless and you know it.

As for your answer regarding why they would fake the FDR and then still hit the building and light poles, as I like to call it - the Russian Doll Conspiracy? Are you even remotely aware of the impact on the public image of 9/11 truth this kind of paranoid fairy tale would bring if it was ever accepted as mainstream?

That within the conspiracy to launch a false flag attack on their own nation in order to justify a sea change in foreign and domestic policy, they then put forth a second conspiracy buried within that conspiracy - to make the "truth movement" think there was something wrong with the Pentagon when really there wasn't?

The problem I find with this, other than the complete and total lack of evidence for it and the fact that it is the apotheosis of a paranoid conspiracy theory, is that their faking of a flight path is incriminating for them; if proved false (and CIT and PfT have proved it false) it irrevocably proves a conspiracy to mislead the public on their own part. It is not a deception that could be waved away by incompetence, and neither is it one which the public could agree was intended to cover up incompetence. There would be no way for them to explain why they faked it.

Given the gaping holes and proofs of wrong doing in every other part of the official story, being rumbled on faking the FDR would cause the public to look at the whole story and find it false - it would be curtains for them. You think they care that much about us that they would sign their own metaphorical death warrant?

Frankly, Frank, it's an utterly absurd proposition.

I'm aware of the use of the autopilot idea in your paper, I was commenting on how you seemed to be throwing up the idea here, on this specific thread, as though it could be used to counter Hanjour's spiral descent, which I think we both agree it cannot.

There are some simple facts you continue to resist acknowledging:

1. That until we confirm the details of these often misleading quotes we cannot take every scrap of a quote saying "the plane hit the building" as confirmation they saw this. We know this from quotes like the McGraw quote presented by Arabesque as a light pole witness, confirmed by CIT to be nothing of the sort, much more so from the inclusion of Lee Evey, Hovis and others as witnesses when all have confirmed they were no where near and did not see the event at all that we cannot take standalone out of context quotes as evidence. If we know these witnesses (STILL on the lists Arabesque, Hoffman and Ashley use despite the above being common knowledge) are bunk, why should we accept the rest without confirmation? Why do you take them seriously? You have demonstrated you know well that eye witness testimony is unreliable - so why on earth do you only seem interested in the most flaky and unconfirmed type of eye witnesses while using them as an excuse not to acknowledge confirmed, documented and verified eye witnesses who corroborate each other. I cannot make sense of this at all.

2. There is a difference between perception of a plane flying through the air, and perception of an explosion. In some cases the experience of a huge commercial jet liner flying lower low and close to them lasted up to 10-15 seconds. Conversely, the key moment where the plane either hit or missed the building was an instant, and an instant in which there was an enormous disorientating explosion, then the sight of an enormous fireball rising into the sky and then heavy plumes of black smoke and the building in flames. Add this to the fact that those on the side of the building the plane flew would likely have gone through an instinctive fight or flight reaction at the moment it became clear an impact was about to happen. The witnesses at the Arlington Cemetery maintenance buildings admit they were running in the opposite direction at the time and even from the witnesses who do say they saw it hit, Sean Boger says he dived to the floor and William Lagasse says he found himself ducked inside his police car with no real idea of how he got there. Walk up to someone and burst a balloon behind them and see what happens. When people are shocked or scared they react automatically and their ability for complex reasoning goes out of the window in that instant. Now this is the instant which the CIT detractors expect us to agree they will have the most reliable memory of, while the 10-15 seconds before that where there were no deafening explosions and no pyrotechnics they all expect us to believe they all got completely wrong, and also all got it completely wrong in the same way so as to give the illusion of extremely strong corroboration?

3. Corroboration is Corroboration. This is important. If we have over a dozen people all confirming the same details of a flight path, all independently of each other and all with nothing to gain, then this is certainly extremely strong evidence or proof beyond a reasonable doubt that it happened. If somebody claims to have evidence which refutes these witnesses, something has to give and further investigation is needed. You seem to think that the dozen plus witnesses CIT have presented no longer exist if you can wave a bit of paper in the air with 100 5-20 word long quotes milled from the media and websites on it. No dice. Only one can be true, so which is the more credible body of evidence? The paper or the people? Even if it was people against people there are clearly still grounds for investigation. Is there a motive behind one view being promoted? Is there a conflict of interest? Since we can see plenty with the official story, and none with the NoC flight path, still the logical choice is to go with the latter.

4. Unconfirmed Apparent Corroboration of "Common Knowledge" Means Nothing At a point when millions of people all over the world were saying "a plane hit the Pentagon" it is no surprise many people who were witnesses to some element of the event would say the same, whether they saw it or not. We know for a fact the majority of positions around the Pentagon did not give a view of the "impact zone". Therefore we know that the majority of people would see the plane and see the fireball and smoke. They would hear an explosion but would not be able to see whether the plane hit it or not. This has been demonstrated empirically and anyone can go on Google Street view and confirm it for themselves. Since every one of those people would believe it to be completely true that a plane hit the Pentagon, we could expect lots to say that. Since all flow of quotes came through the media, we would not expect "outliers" such as people saying the plane flew away to be reported on.

5. People say the plane flew away Roosevelte Roberts saw a large commercial jet liner seconds after the explosion, the argument against this from the detractors is one of the most insultingly absurd I have ever encountered. Just as the detractors ask us to believe that a witnesses recollection of a second of time which involved a huge explosion, fireball and smoke will be more reliable than the ten to fifteen calm seconds before, the detractors again ask us to chose them in favour of logic and reality. They look at Roosevelt’s description of the plane's position and direction and say that this couldn't be a flyover jet. That's it. What they are asking you to believe is that while it is completely infeasible that Robert's could have got his positions and directions mixed up during the hurried phone call in which he provided these details - we should accept it as normal and uncontroversial that he hallucinated a large commercial jet liner. Good god... these are the people who you are linking to and promoting the arguments of? There is testimony from Eric Dihle which is archived at the centre for military history and is quite revealing. Dihle was inside his work place and only heard the explosion, when he ran outside to see what had happened he describes “people” saying that a bomb had gone off at the same time a plane flew past the building; at the same time “someone” was saying no, no, the plane hit the building. The significance of this cannot be underplayed. Imagine this happening in the context of the official story at the Pentagon being true: the whole world was watching a plane hit the South Tower of the WTC over and over again on their TVs, the media was telling us more planes were unaccounted for and more targets might be hit, and then right in front of their eyes a plane hit the Pentagon… and more people on the scene conclude the building was bombed and the plane flew on than that the plane hit the building??? This is utterly beyond belief.

Everything about this debate is beyond belief. The facts are conclusive and speak for themselves. Attempts to obstruct the truth will only have the effect of destroying the credibility of those making the attempts.

The truth always wins.

Adam,

Kerberos is in a world of his/her own: The jet fuel "would have been distributed thinly in the direction the plane was traveling at impact". Really? Well, if the wings didn't penetrate the Pentagon wall as you suggest, then where's the fire on the lawn? If the wings did enter (which is the official narrative), then the jet fuel would have hit up against in Wedge 1:

1. office walls;
2. cubical dividers that extended up to near the ceiling; and
3. the corridor walls.

The fact that there is no inferno after the 10,000 gallons spilled into the Pentagon is one of many proofs that no 757 entered!

Dean Jackson/Editor-in-Chief DNotice.org
Washington, DC