A Clarification on Disinfo

In a recent article by Erik Larson of visibility911.com, where he revealed that Peter Dale Scott does not endorse a Pentagon flyover theory, he relates the following concerning calling people disinfo:

In his message giving me permission to post, Dr. Scott also said, "I am now aware of [CIT’s] ad hominem attacks on good people, which is a big reason why I am giving you this permission." In my email to him, I had included a link to the CIT forum thread titled "Face to the Name", where they post names and photos, and insult and attack those who question their methods, conclusions and behavior:

z3.invisionfree.com/CIT/index.php?showtopic=508

My name and photo are on page 4; CIT co-founder Aldo ‘Investigangsta’ Marquis claims I have made "accusations of being disinfo" against CIT. This is not correct; I have criticized CIT’s evidence, claims and behavior, but I have not accused them of ‘disinformation’, i.e. intentionally misleading the public.

Lessons from Dr. Scott’s message:

1) Labeling people or questioning their motives instead of critiquing their evidence and arguments is not persuasive to people skilled in research and debate, and may even be offensive. Facts are facts, and offensive behavior does not change the truth, but civil discussion promotes greater understanding. Personal attacks can cloud the issues and cause bad feeling and suspicion among 9/11 researchers and Truth activists. The FBI employed such techniques effectively during their COINTELPRO operation, as a means of disrupting and distracting activists. Dr. Scott wisely asks that those seeking truth "not discredit the truth movement by wanton attacks on each other."

And as 9/11 researcher Arabesque has observed:

About the issue of "disinformation" and "agents" and all of that. I think it is best to reject labels altogether and just give the information. Particularly since there are disinformation enablers who will use these kinds of characterizations and attacks to defend CIT and their endorsements of CIT. I have seen time and time again how this is used as a straw-man to deflect attention away from the bad information and behavior. Instead of addressing these issues, enablers of disinfo/misinfo will point to the "attacks" and accusations of "disinfo" and simply ignore the information.

These are all very good points, and everyone at this blog will be more careful with such terminology in the future.

That being said, we have demonstrated that CIT and their supporters use many of the "The Rules of Disinformation" as outlined by H. Michael Sweeny, but just in case we didn't drive this point home, let me expand.

Rule #5 as outlined by Sweeny is to "Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule." Keeping that in mind...

A topic on the Loose Change Forum asked the question: "Why is CIT evidence omitted frequently?," so I thought I would provide an answer...

Visibility 9-11 Welcomes 9-11 Researcher Jim Hoffman...
http://visibility911.com/blog/?p=1351

Aldo Marquis of CIT responds:

And? Your point? Doesn't that belong in the skeptics section?

So does someone want to inform my daughter, my mom, my family, my friends that I am a disinformation operative for the gov't? Michael Wolsey is a bumbling fool.

Speaking of bumbling fools...

Jim Hoffman is wrong on so many levels. I mean the guy fucking used Google Earth to provid POV'sfor flyover witness (using the old absence of evidence argument) and claim us driving around the highways with a video camera is deceptive. The idiot uses Google Earth flattened out then writes an article on it, then advises everyone to use Google Maps Street View which is what he should have used in the first place. Which,keep in mind, also is a camera sitting mounted a feet on the roof of a car, not a person sitting inside of a car.

The guy sites people who weren't even at the Pentagon as witnesses.

Ask him why he refused to debate or discuss his concerns with us? We called his house and left a message, no return call. Because he is a coward who would rather cobble together a weak ass argument to save face and not admit he was wrong. What a pathetic excuse for a truthseeking researcher."

First off, Michael Wolsey did not say that CIT was definitely engaged in disinformation, he actually said he could not prove such a thing, but that he can point towards behavior. I'll let Jim Hoffman's analysis speak for itself and only add that I recently had the chance to see the Pentagon while on a bus ride and my first thoughts were how ridiculous a flyover theory is! I would have seen it!



So, because of this, Marquis calls Wolsey, who hosts the longest-running podcast for 9/11 truth, a bumbling fool. Then he calls Hoffman, arguably one of the most well respected 9/11 researchers ever, a "bumbling fool, idiot, coward", and "pathetic excuse for a truthseeking researcher." That is "name calling and ridicule" if I ever heard it!

Also, after posting the interview on the Loose Change forum, under my user name of "infowarpatriot" a CIT supporter attacked the name, stating:

"'infowarpatriot'... talk about blatant disinfo. How about 'Super9-11Truther' or 'TotaleeLegitPatriot' or 'ImNotDisinfoIpromise'"

But hey, maybe CIT and their fans were victims of number #18 of the "Rules of Disinformation," maybe they were "Antagonized and Goaded" by their "opponents."

I mean how dare Wolsey and Hoffman suggest they might be disinfo, it's not like CIT dismisses hundreds of other witnesses (Disinformation Rule #19. Ignore proof presented) giving easy straw men to debunkers, (Disinformation Rule #4 suggests using a straw man; use one; pass one off; what's the difference?) and accuses some witnesses of being cover-up agents, or worse, active participants.

It's not like their theory depends on an absurd amount of fakery, including: wreckage and the flight data and cockpit voice recorders found at the Pentagon, human remains and DNA indentification, the aforementioned witnesses, and a trick that would make Criss Angel look like a dime-store magician. (Disinformation Rule #15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions) Oh wait, yes it is, but again, insinuating disinfo is a bit beyond the pale, CIT's fans may do that, but they never would, right?

On May 9, 2008 "Reprehensor" of 911blogger.com posted the following:

Posting these critical resources for 911blogger users to examine, when evaluating the Pentagon Fly-over theory and eyewitness evidence as presented by the CIT team... Users should be aware of this criticism:

John Farmer's blog:
http://911files.info/blog/index.php

Caustic Logic:
http://frustratingfraud.blogspot.com

Arabesque:
http://www.arabesque911.blogspot.com

I have no further comment on these blogs other than to say that they exist.

Aldo Marquis of CIT responds:

"You are now guilty of promoting disinformation."

And it seems that if Jim Hoffman is a coward for not debating, then so is Craig Ranke of CIT. The resident 9/11 truther at the Screw Loose Change blog, Brian Good, had this to say:

"Craig Ranke demanded that I debate him. After we had some back-and-forth in an email group he ran away and never came back."

The overall point here is that for anything CIT's critics are guilty of, they are guilty at least tenfold! And if they are not disinfo, they are a striking facsimile of it. So, while I think I have demonstrated that this blog calling them disinfo and their theories BS was more of an educated guess than ad hominem, I still do concede that we need to be more careful due to only having circumstantial evidence, just like their entire theory! Direct evidence would be witnesses actually seeing a flyover!

Related Info:

The CIT Deception - Mock Trailer!

Debunking the Citizen Investigation Team Hoax

Visibility 9-11 Welcomes 9-11 Researcher Jim Hoffman

Hoax-Promoting Videos

The CIT Virus

CIT Stuff Is Disinfo - Wake Up!

A Clarification on Disinfo

9/11 Researcher Jim Hoffman on Building Collapes

Pentagon Attack Photos

9/11- A Boeing 757 Struck the Pentagon

The Pentagon Attack: What the Physical Evidence Shows

Pentagon Attack & Flight 77 Evidence Summary & Links

Pentagon Eyewitnesses - Analysis of the Pentagon Attack Eyewitness Accounts

CIT WITNESS VERIFICATION, PART 1: THE PREVIOUSLY SUSPICIOUS FATHER MCGRAW REDUX: THE MASTER OPUS

CIT WITNESS VERIFICATION PART II: THE LADIES OF 13th AND POE (summary)

CIT WITNESS VERIFICATION PART III: ROUGHSHOD OVER THE SUSPICIOUS ONES

Google Earth Exposes Pentagon Flyover Farce, or, Critiquing PentaCon (Smoking Crack Version) - Showing the absurdity of The PentaCon's premise

Misinformation: Flight 77 Flight Path Contradicts Official Story according to Black Box Data

9/11 Pentagon Strike Cover up Re-Mastered and Extended

Loose Change Final Cut Part 1

Five Video Frames Leaked in 2002 Show Moments of the Pentagon Attack

What do the frames show about the attack and its investigation or cover-up by authorities? This analysis suggests the answer is not the immediately obvious one.

A field guide to disinformation - mixing truth with lies to distract and discredit

Debunking the Rebunking

"If we start debunking rebunking 9-11 debunking, where will it all end?" - Pat Curley

Pat Curley over at the Screw Loose Change blog had a listen to our recent interview with Michael Woolsey of 9-11 Visibility and has attempted rebunking our debunking.

Pat states, "They say that they are not interested in hearing debunking of Steven Jones' latest paper (Active Thermitic Material...). Nope, if we are going to debunk that laughable attempt to claim that bits of red paint and rust amount to Thermite we have to do it with a peer-reviewed paper."

Yes, if you are claiming that highly credentialed scientists have been fooled by paint, after two years of research, when paint was one of the very first considerations, then you should back that claim up in the way they have backed up theirs. When the lead author of the paper, associate professor of chemistry at Copenhagen University in Denmark, Dr. Niels H. Harrit, was asked during an interview on Denmark television if he was in any doubt that the material was present, he replied unambiguously, "You cannot fudge this kind of science. We have found it: unreacted thermite."

If you think this author/or co-author of nearly 60 peer reviewed scientific papers is fudging, or was fooled by paint, someone on your side should demonstrate this beyond the blogosphere. I think physics professor Dr. Steven E. Jones put it best when he noted that:

Debunkers may raise all sorts of objections on forums, such as "Oh, it's just paint" or "the aluminum is bound up in kaolin." We have answered those questions in the paper, and shown them to be nonsense, but you have to read to find the answers. Here's what you need to know (especially if you are not a scientist): UNLESS AN OBJECTOR ACTUALLY PUBLISHES HIS OR HER OBJECTION IN A PEER-REVIEWED ESTABLISHED JOURNAL (yes that would include Bentham Scientific journals), THEN THE OBJECTION IS NOT CONSIDERED SERIOUS IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY. YOU SHOULD NOT WORRY ABOUT NON-PUBLISHED OBJECTIONS EITHER.

Getting back to paint being one of the very first considerations, it's worthy to note that one of the first things indicating the materials were not paint chips was their explosiveness! At the Boston 9/11 Conference on 12/15/07 Steven Jones first reported his findings, stating:

Many red chips I found in the WTC dust, last June I started noticing these. Their attracted by a magnet, a thought came, well maybe it's just paint. It's hard to get thermite to ignite, and I finally thought, how can we tell if this is thermite or not?... It has the right chemical signature.

A friend of mine has an oxyacetylene torch with a very fine tip, he uses it for repairing eyeglasses, and so I had him pass it over one of these red chips... And it flamed, it flashed, as he passed over it.

He went on to state that this, in conjunction with the chemical signature and the red color, was a strong indication that this was indeed a form of thermite.

During a debate with architect Richard Gage 9/11 "debunker" Mark Roberts also suggested the red chips were paint, after Gage replied, "That's why they're extremely explosive I suppose," Roberts conveniently ignored him, stating, "These chips... One thing that should ring a bell, is that they look exactly like all the primer paint that's on the structural steel."

Of course Robert's assumption has nothing on empirical evidence. In a recent interview with Dr. Harriet conducted by national Emmy nominee and regional Emmy award-winning investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe, he notes that, "In the primer paint, which was used on the steel beams at the original World Trade Center – we looked up the original recipes for those paints. The paints contained as an anti-corrosive: chromium and zinc, which we do not find. And magnesium, which we do not see either. These are negative indications why the red-gray chips are not paint."

More detailed analysis can be found in Harrit's article "WHY THE RED/GRAY CHIPS ARE NOT PRIMER PAINT."

Also of note is the fact that, as Jim Hoffman of the website 9/11 Research points out, "Soaking the chips in methyl ethyl ketone, a solvent that dissolves paint, with periodic agitation for 55 hours, the red layers swelled up but remained intact and attached to their respective gray layers, and the thin plates tended to migrate and aggregate."

The next part of Pat's supposed rebunking involved my mentioning of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001, which he pointed out I did misspeak of and call a PDF. Here's a PDF of the PDB! Speaking of nitpicking masquerading as debunking, I also spoke of "outward" bowing columns instead of "inward," and I called a reviewer of the nano-thermite paper an author. Just like with the PDB, I knew it was inward, and I knew he wasn't an author.

Pat states, "Note in particular that the two paragraphs which do not appear historical in nature are also not very accurate in predicting 9-11; federal buildings in New York were not attacked and the attacks were not done with explosives."

One commenter by the name of Brian Good on Pat's blog thanked him for his candor, "Thanks, Pat, for confirming that the 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US' memo actually did warn of new attacks, though Condi claimed under oath in the presence of the 9/11 widows that it did not."

Condi's bio on Wikipedia also contains this tidbit:

Rice characterized the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US as historical information. Rice indicated "It was information based on old reporting."[45] Sean Wilentz of Salon magazine suggested that the PDB contained current information based on continuing investigations, including that Bin Laden wanted to "bring the fighting to America."[46]

I have blogged about the PDB before, where I pointed out that when we look at it in a larger context we start to get a clearer picture of the situation.

9/11 Family Member Patty Casazza: Government Knew Exact Date and Exact Targets

Rockefeller Predicted "Event" To Trigger War Eleven Months Before 9/11 - Hollywood director Russo recalls remarkable "forecast" of coming attack

Not to mention the massive amount of mainstream news reports concerning ignored warnings.

Yes, there was a section that mentions "bin Laden supporters in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives," which as Pat pointed out, "the attacks were not done with explosives," meaning of course that it wasn't a bombing attack akin to the 1993 WTC bombing, but the memo also mentioned "suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks..." It then mentions that this included "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York," to which Pat points out that the towers were not federal buildings, but the "recent surveillance" would be in addition to the "most attractive terrorist target" at the WTC as detailed by several reports dating back to the 1980s.

FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, in an open letter to the 9/11 Commission, reported that there was "specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama bin Laden," that mentioned major cities, airplanes, approximate timeframe, and operatives already in place in the US. This was reported by FBI agents to "Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism Thomas Frields at the FBI Washington Field Office," but was subsequently ignored.

The FAA also received 52 pre-9/11 warnings, including five that "specifically mentioned Al Qaeda's training or capability to conduct hijackings," and two that "mentioned suicide operations." In regard to the FAA warnings a "debunker" would likely focus on the fact that the suicide operations mentioned were "not connected to aviation," while ignoring that the FAA warned airports that "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable."

NORAD had drills of jets as weapons

By Steven Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY
4/19/2004

In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.

One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center...

A White House spokesman said Sunday that the Bush administration was not aware of the NORAD exercises...

On April 8, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks heard testimony from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that the White House didn't anticipate hijacked planes being used as weapons.

The article notes that, "The exercises differed from the Sept. 11 attacks in one important respect: The planes in the simulation were coming from a foreign country." But it then mentions that there were other drills involving domestically hijacked planes as weapons and as noted above, the FAA stated this was a consideration.

From OilEmpire.us:

In 1995, the US stopped plans for "Project Bojinka," a planned terror attack on commercial airliners (12 planes were to be hijacked simultaneously, and the plotters also envisioned driving a jet into CIA headquarters in Virginia). Bojinka was thwarted when a group of Islamic terrorists were apprehended in the Philippines. This proves that the Cheney administration lied after 9/11 when they claimed they didn't forsee the possibility of hijacked planes being used as weapons.

Of course this brought up the issue of how this all corresponds with the idea of 9/11 being an inside job. As I have pointed out before, many people make the mistake of only seeing the issues concerning 9/11 in black and white, as opposed to shades of grey.

In a post from today entitled "Was Popular Mechanics Fair?" Pat tries to make the case that Popular Mechanics did not set up straw men in the way I suggested, he states, "Overall, I'd say that Popular Mechanics did a pretty good job. Most of the theories they discussed are quite common in the movement, and the less common ones were mostly at the end."

I suggest Jim Hoffman's essay "Popular Mechanics Attacks Its "9/11 LIES" Straw Man" written in 2005.

Related Info:

Debunking Popular Mechanics' 9/11 Lies

Viewers See History Channel 9/11 Special As Straw Man Hit Piece

Nano-thermite Demolishes 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Sibel Edmonds: In Congress We Trust...NOT