No. Attributing a motive is a matter of interpretation: fitting their act with previous acts, and telling a plausible story about it. This is why people may be confused or mistaken about their own motives.

Incredibly patronising. Scientists easily understand it, philosophers don't, therefore what scientists think they understand must be true?
I have no trouble conceding that absolute truths exist; just not in this case.
Scientists like you find it hard to concede that in certain areas no absolute truths exist, and discussion will have to be on normative territory.

I have no memory of conceding that. I may have not taken you up on it any further, since I believe that such intent is not relevant to the meaning of the public statement.
I contacted NIST to give them a chance to clear it up; a further public statement might have made it clear how to interpret the earlier statement.

No. As you may have gathered above, I deny this. A well-worn topic in the philosophy of mind, which is one area well within my expertise.

No, it's not as simple as that. Motives of organizations: a well-worn topic in business ethics. What I deny is that it 'must be a unified motive'. An organisation's act may be deliberate, even as it is the product of a number of individuals each acting with their own motive. And it may be a deliberate act of baiting, if the resulting act is one of baiting, even if that rests upon the motive(s) of one or two individuals.
That, in fact, is to my mind the most plausible line a conspiracist would take here.
So the evidence would then consist of looking at the acts of that individuals (those few individuals), and providing a plausible interpretation fitting those actions. That is a normative discussion. And it would first require identifying the relevant individuals (and their actions) which I have no idea how to do.

I'm not an expert in video manipulation or photographic enhancement. But I do have, what I think, is a possible to take a VHS recording, transfer it to digital, then back to VHS. The security camera we had at the store where I worked made tapes that could not be viewed on regular VCRs. This is becasue each frame was 4 seconds apart. It was mentioned a bit above. If the tape that had a 2 frame per second rate could be shown in a regular VCR, it would have displayed at about 15 times normal speed.

Playing it in a VCR that could play it at the correct speed, but still have the 2 fps framerate, and recording that image on a normal VCR would produce 15 or 16 identical frames for each frame of the video. Putting it on a digital format first would have two benefits that I can see. It would make it much easier to make a lot of copies for rapid release to the news agecies. And, it coluld reduce any of the analog noise that would change from frame to frame, allowing for a 'cleaner' master copy of the video.

Also, it's really hard to post analog anything on a website.

So no, I don't think it's suspiscious at all. What would be suspiscious would be if they really did manipulate the footage, and this is the best they could come up with.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

LOL amen to that.

Actually, that's another point that I forgot to mention. Movie special-effects explosions are almost invariably created using gasoline, as it's (relatively) inexpensive and safe, plus gasoline explosions look "cooler" than demolition explosives, due to the large fireballs. Therefore, people with little or no real knowledge of explosives (such as most conspiracists) might well not realize that the fireball in the videos could only have come from a large amount of jet fuel.

Here is a video of a Tomahawk cruise missile striking a test target. Unfortunately, the fact that the test explosion looks completely different from the fireball in the Pentagon videos cannot be taken as conclusive evidence without knowing what type of warhead and how much fuel the missile was carrying, but it is highly suggestive.

[edit: repeated word]

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

RELATED: Charlie Sheen's Pentagon Questions Remain Unanswered

Now that is a travesty!

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

That is not quite accurate. The first camp disbelieves or ignores all of the available evidence coverging on the conclusion that AA77 hit the Pentagon.

But there is no visual information to suggest the plane is behind the box, and what information there is suggests it is visible, as advertised. What is visible is slightly higher than the top of the box. There is also no change in the tree line above the box between the frame before the objects appears and when it does.

Google "Pentagon Building Performance Report" (not sure if the full report is still out there) which is the American Society of Civil Engineers report on the Flight 77 crash. It has the best image of the security camera shot in question and being better makes it clear that what I point to is the plane and not smoke, and they also point to it as Flight 77.

Pentagon and Flight 77: an animated size analysis

You can see the tail of the plane sticking out from behind the box, even in that animated gif.

The images in that report are most certainly not the best in terms of quality. At best they're no better than what's available on the Judicial Watch website.

Personally, I believe they're painfully wrong in their identification, for a few of reasons:

1) To the left of what they identify as the plane, there is an object sticking above the horizon. This object forms a point, much like the vertical stabilizer of an airliner. This object is also not present in the very next frame.
2) The object they identify as the plane looks "wavy", suggesting some non-uniformity in the fuselage or the image. This is just not the case with an American Airlines 757, and other objects bearing straight lines do not appear "wavy" in the same image. This object, to me, matches a rapidly moving column of smoke better than a solid entity.
3) If that white object is the plane, then what's that white stuff in the very next frame, where the plane has already impacted the building?

Granted, I'm no expert in photo analysis, so don't take my word for it, but the first two points seem rather obvious even to me.

you can see a black triangle. Maybe it's an artifact. Maybe it's a tree bent in the wind. You can't tell for sure.

Though if the white thing in the first image is the plane, why do we see white when the explosion already occured?

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I hate to jump up and down but can you not see the airplane shape in front of the smoke? The smoke starts behind the left engine. The tip of the vertical stabilizer can be barely discerned above the dark triangle dealie in the second frame.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

One thing a CTer posted on one board I frequent;

why don't they release footage from cameras from the hotels, gas stations, and traffic cams?
He futher asks why the FBI took such tapes and has not released them.

Myself and another pointed out how little that would actually reveal.
I just wondered if such tapes really exist.

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This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. - Jor-El

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

No. Attributing a motive is a matter of interpretation...

Yes, attributing a motive is a matter of interpretation, but the attribution of motive is unequal to the discovery of truth. Rather than discover a motive you wish to infer one probably because inference provides enough rhetorical "wiggle room" to keep the conspiracy debate artificially active whereas a more straightforward approach defeats it outright. My previous point still stands: what you or I believe about someone else's motive is independent of what that motive really is, no matter how strongly we believe it or upon what evidence.

You're quite predictably playing out the scenario I outlined. Rather than look to see whether John is alive or dead, you're trying to rewrite the question to ask if Jane can be inferred to have taken certain actions. In a search for truth it doesn't matter what motives, beliefs, or actions can be attributed to Jane and what might be their consequents. If the consequents didn't happen, they didn't happen and the attribution is wrong no matter how cleverly it was inferred.

...fitting their act with previous acts, and telling a plausible story about it. This is why people may be confused or mistaken about their own motives.

So then may I argue that you are confused or mistaken about your motive in posting at BAUT?

Your line of reasoning would be more persuasive if you yourself hadn't contradicted it when the tables were turned against you. You may recall some weeks ago there was a discussion about you and your motives for posting here at BAUT, and your motives for having argued a certain way. I attempted to fit your acts with those of others (namely other conspiracy theorists), alleging that you and they had similar motives. I told a plausible story.

Do you recall how you responded? I can tell you how you didn't respond. You certainly didn't address the line of reasoning upon which my attribution of motive was based, which is what I would expect you to do if you thought attributed motives were valid. You didn't argue that I had improperly interpreted your actions. You didn't dispute the observations that fed the interpretation. Instead you dismissed the whole exercise as invalid, and my "opinion" of your motives as empty and inapplicable. It seems your position on the validity of attributed motives differs depending on whose motive is in question.

That motives may sometimes be confused is not proof that some particular motive is confused. But you elucidate below, so we don't need to discuss it here.

Incredibly patronising. Scientists easily understand it, philosophers don't, therefore what scientists think they understand must be true?

Yes, for certain values of "true". Scientists engage in investigation whose results depend for their value on the congruence of their implications with observable behavior. Engineers are scientists who can be held legally accountable for the accuracy of that congruence. Predictiveness and accountability are not served by arbitrary or conjectural relaxation. You cannot argue yourself out of responsibility for a collapsed building by contemplating that gravity is merely a normative experience and therefore not subject to objective characterization, nor does such an approach help you correct the process by which buildings are designed and constructed.

Philosophers have little such accountability. While this frees them to discuss esoteric matters of epistemology, and to define away the notion of "fact" in favor of universal subjectivity, such exercises provide no practical discovery of truth in actual occurrences. No amount of academic combustion of neurons substitutes for metallurgy and dynamics in determining why an airplane disintegrated in flight.

When you rewrite my questions to make them normative (which you have done since the very beginning) you eliminate their power to discover. An investigation seeks an answer, not ongoing debate. Philosophy seems instead to gravitate toward the latter.

I have no trouble conceding that absolute truths exist; just not in this case.

If you attribute to me a motive that is not mine, your attribution is wrong. Period.

Below you discuss where motives might be ambiguous. But if the motive is not ambiguous then an attribution of motive clearly has the opportunity objectively to be wrong. And if an attribution of motive might be objectively wrong, then it is proper to ask what steps were taken to test its objective correctness -- whether it's true, not whether it follows inferentially from something else.

Scientists like you find it hard to concede that in certain areas no absolute truths exist...

As you've probably guessed, I have no problem conceding that absolute truth is absent in some areas -- just not in this case. My reason is given below.

I have no memory of conceding that. I may have not taken you up on it any further...

My memory may be in error as well.

A well-worn topic in the philosophy of mind, which is one area well within my expertise.

Ah, so expertise is relevant, but only when you employ it?

[sarcasm]Of course forensic engineers know nothing of human factors and the sociological aspects of decision-making[/sarcasm]. (Hint: it's a cornerstone of the field.)

What I deny is that it 'must be a unified motive'. An organisation's act may be deliberate, even as it is the product of a number of individuals each acting with their own motive.

Yes. Actually this would be a fun topic for non-confrontational discussion as well.

I addressed this earlier, but not clearly or fully. And because of what I say in the paragraph below, I won't dwell a lot on it. Nevertheless I do want you to believe that I understand your point and am not evading it. I agree that corporate actions can derive from the aggregated but uncoordinated individual motives of its constituents. But if you have a nonunified policy, and it has great social importance, then you breed whistle-blowers and other forms of internal dissent that can themselves be made externally visible. My purpose in speaking of unified motives was to establish the proposition that arriving at it would leave behind evidence that others could see. The same can also be said for uncoordinated motives, except that the evidence in that case would be evidence of dissent, not of consent, and may arise subsequent to the expression of motive. In either case the consequent is scrutable evidence, which then becomes the premise for imposing a burden of proof.

But let's withdraw from the abstract and return to the concrete. There is a statement of motive from the Pentagon. One of the straw-men hypotheses I posted previously was, in fact, the stated reason for the delay. I realize you have questioned the credibility of that reason, and we can debate that another time. The existence of the reason is salient to this discussion: it substantiates that deliberation likely took place at the Pentagon (or elsewhere), either to agree that this was the true motive, or to concoct it as a cover story to supplant the secret (agreed-upon) motive. Thus I believe a corporate motive exists in this case as an absolute. Thus an attributed motive is either correct or incorrect.

That, in fact, is to my mind the most plausible line a conspiracist would take here.

This is a perfect example of the fence-sitting that makes this an unworkable discussion in its current form.

You constantly remind us that you speak only for yourself, and to that end you refer to conspiracists in the third person and to their arguments with a certain detachment.

You've provided an engaging (if disputable) line of reasoning in their defense, but neither you nor I have any way of knowing whether any conspiracists actually subscribe to it. If they don't, then I'm debating you over your ideas and your defense doesn't apply to them. But on the other hand if they do, then you really do espouse their ideas and arguments and thus advocating them here commits you to a responsibility that contradicts your preferred detachment.

If the idea is central and not the proponent, then you can't substitute one idea for another in red-herring fashion. A constructive discussion must allow for an idea to be rejected, because the aim of constructive debate is to test the strength of an idea. Not all ideas are strong and can withstand the test. But the surreptitious substitution of a stronger idea for a similar but weaker one in a discussion is more consistent with the centrality of a proponent seeking to save face.

So the evidence would then consist of looking at the acts of that individuals (those few individuals), and providing a plausible interpretation fitting those actions. That is a normative discussion.

I agree that what you propose is a normative discussion. I do not agree that the normative discussion you propose is an effective method of discovering the truth. My question is what have the conspiracists done to discover the truth of why the Pentagon delayed the release of the video. You respond that they (may) have attributed a motive based on a defensible line of inference. I have argued at length why I do not accept that as valid precisely because it is normative. I don't care what motives conspiracists attribute to the Pentagon; I want to know whether they have tried to discover any.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

[W]hy don't they release footage from cameras from the hotels, gas stations, and traffic cams?

The footage just released was photographed by a Pentagon security camera, which means it's the property of the Pentagon, which means it's the property of the people of the United States. Under ordinary conditions the public therefore has a right to see it.

Footage taken by traffic cameras would be the property of the people for the same reason.

Footage taken at hotels and gas stations is the property of the owners of those establishments. They retain ultimate authority over whether or not it is released to the public.

He futher asks why the FBI took such tapes and has not released them.

If they exist and are what they purport to be, they would constitute evidence in a criminal proceeding arising from the attack on the Pentagon. That is one possible reason why the FBI would take them. We empower law enforcement officers and courts to compel the delivery and disclosure of information potentially useful as evidence.

There are several possible reasons why the FBI does not release them. First is that much of it is private property. While the owners of that property may be compelled to release it as evidence to the FBI, that does not mean the FBI has further power to publish it. In fact, the FBI can be constrained not to release it, and instead to keep it quite safe.

Let's say I own a company that makes widgets. I compete against a company that makes gadgets. Now let's say I arrange for the gadget company to be investigated for fraud. The police come and seize their records, including the proprietary trade-secret designs for their gadget. If I make a Freedom of Information Act request for those records held in police custody, and if the police were required to satisfy it, I might get unfettered access to my competitor's innermost secrets. And if I improved my widget design based on what I learned from the gadget design, there would be no legal recourse against me.

Not everything in government custody should be made generally available. You have to carefully distinguish between custody and ownership.

Another reason would be tainting of potential jurors. That evidence was collected does not ensure it will be used. The FBI is empowered to collect the evidence and keep it in custody according to a broad set of guidelines. But whether it actually ends up in a court case will be a matter of its legal admissibility and various rulings in limine that vary greatly from case to case.

One of the (sometimes deplorable) oddities of our court system is that evidence may be pertinent to the question before the court, but for various reasons the jury is not allowed to see it. It may, for example, have been obtained illegally (e.g., an illegal wiretap in which a defendant incriminates himself). Or it may reveal something prejudicial. Or in the worst cases, it may be a quid pro quo negotiation between counsel -- "I'll agree not to talk about your client's arrest record if you agree not to ask my client about his dishonorable discharge from the military."

So if a jury is allowed to see evidence outside the controlled setting of the courtroom, the impartiality of the judgment is compromised.

Myself and another pointed out how little that would actually reveal.

Well, we don't know what it contains until it has been released. So we can't reason effectively along those lines.

Unfortunately this becomes a fertile field for tautology. When it's released, it will either contain pertinent material to fuel the debate, or it will contain little useful data and lead to speculation it has been doctored to remove it.

Prejudging the value of unknown evidence is bad on all counts.

I just wondered if such tapes really exist.

And maybe we should ask those questions. Conspiracists frequently repeat allegations among themselves until they reach a critical mass of reporting that wrongly acquires the status of established and documented fact. If "everyone knows" that tapes existed and were confiscated, then soon you lose track of where that notion actually came from.

I have seen it often reported that certain materials were confiscated. But I don't remember if an original source was given.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

There was a FOI request for the tapes. It's on the web somewhere (I don't have the URL handy).

There were were something like 68 'tapes' confiscated. Of those, only two showed the actual aircraft approaching the Pentagon.

They were being withheld because they were evidence in an investigation.

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

I found the following in this article on National Geographic's website, dated December 2001.

Not at all surprising to me, though. As has been said numerous times, it's potential evidence. Seeing as how this particular gas station only services DoD personnel, I don't think it'd be too much of a stretch to say that the relevent government agencies would know exactly what its security camera could see.

I can't believe a gas station security camera would show anything except gas pumps and license plates

That's generally my impression as well. (sample)

The 9-11 Research page related to this lists the same article I linked to as the source for the gas station confiscation story. Strangely, the page linked to as the source of the hotel confiscation story no longer exists, and I've been unable to find any mention of it on the parent website ("Unanswered Questions").

Edit: I can't speak much for the validity or stance of the website, but this particular page contains some results of FOIA requests about the tapes. Both the FBI and DoJ state that no tape was confiscated from the Sheraton hotel. The DoJ confirms that the gas station video was confiscated, but that it doesn't show the impact.

Second edit: Although, seeing this picture, I just can't understand how in the bloody hell these CTists seem to think a security camera sitting on the roof (meant to monitor a parking lot or something, I assume) could possibly have a view of the impact. Actually, can anyone look at this satellite image and tell me exactly what a security camera on the roof would be looking at, especially on the Pentagon side (image)?

Seems to me the idea that the Sheraton hotel had a great view of the impact is just another factoid.

While Wilson's work links together a lot of photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts it's still far from conclusive. Yet it allows one to check his accuracy, which IMO lies way above the rense article and the rest of the ilk.

I downloaded the models and played around with them for a couple of hours this afternoon--I measured the plane and the Pentagon, and the dimensions match those from published sources. The satellite photo Wilson used to position the objects and the plane's approach line is correctly scaled and oriented. I'm convinced this model is accurate and useful--much more so than anything I've seen on any conspiracist web site.

[edit: also, I measured the distance from the nose of the aircraft to the projected impact point to be about 200 feet. As the aircraft was traveling at nearly 800 ft/sec (according to the ASCE report), the vertical stabilizer will not be visible in the next frame if this is the aircraft's correct position.]

[edit: missing word]

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

The image in the ASCE report is significantly better than the JudicialWatch (JW) image! Sure, both are far less than one should want, but it's clear to me that there's a large, mostly white sunlit object fitting Flight-77 criteria in the ASCE image. One should expect an internet video as provided by JW to suffer degradation. Alas, my animation suffers further degradation from JW screenshots having to be converted to GIF format, necessitated by my animation program.


There's no difference along the treeline I can see to indicate the vertical stabilizer, which would be just off the single frame showing Flight 77 in the video.


When the width of a distant bright object in a compressed digital photo is exhausted by around 3 pixels, "wavy" is plausibly attributed to format-induced degradation. There's no reason to believe Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon, and there's no reason to assume it is not visible as advertised in the released Pentagon videos.

There is a "smoke" trail in the wake of Fight 77, which I suspect is ground dust drawn up into the engines. Aerial photos indicate local ground was exposed dirt, being an area under construction. While jet engines don't emit "smoke" (contrails at high elevation are a product of moisture condensation), in this case, drawing in air with massive force a few feet above dusty ground, the engines would be expected to draw in available ground-resting aerosols, depositing them along Flight 77's wake over the dusty ground. I see no data to suggest that Flight 77 is not visible in the Pentagon videos. ~Ian

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Goddard's Journal

You really don't see this?

That's not my argument. My argument is that the object that you and the ASCE have identified as Flight 77 is actually the dust/smoke trail you later acknowledge.

Jet engines that have ingested metal components due to striking light posts emit smoke.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

Man, I miss these boards. Wish I had more time to spend here like I did when I worked shift work... oh well.

As some one who worked at the Pentagon for six years right up to September of last year and experienced 9/11 first hand I'd like to interject a few thoughts.

1. I did not see the plane hit the building I was almost on the dead opposite side two level underground. In fact, I didn't feel or hear a thing. Not unusual if you are in a large steel-reinforced concrete building. That said, individuals who worked for me witnessed the explosion from the central courtyard of the building and could feel the heat from the fireball. Co-workers and friends significantly closer to the impact area were indeed thrown off their feet by the impact and explosion.

2. Over the next several days I did, personally, talk to about 4 individuals who personally saw the plane strike the building including two Pentagon shuttle bus drivers. These were just regular working people, with no reason to lie, no indication of any undue stress or coercion (other than what you might expect from witnessing an aircraft full of human beings being flown into a building full of human beings).

3. Why isn't there more video? Without telling too much of what I know of Pentagon security, you would be suprised how few cameras there are outside the building. Humans actively patrolling a building's perimeter are a tad more effective than dozens of monitors which may or may not be watched at any given moment. Given the limited number of entrances to the facility (all highly controlled areas), cameras are generally only needed in high traffic areas like vehicle control points (such as the one this video came from). What about the surrounding buildings. I've been to the AFFEES gas station on the hill more than a hundred times and can honestly tell you I never noticed a camera pointed towards the Pentagon... that doesn't mean there isn't one, but the filling stations don't seem to be arrainged in such a way as to provide camera coverage of the pumps and the Pentagon.

As for the hotels and shops over in Pentagon row or Crystal City Mall? Why should their cameras capture the Pentagon? Commion sense, and practical security experience, would dictate that any cameras they had would necessarily be pointed at their own properties. I do know for a fact that there is a traffic camera on I-395 right next to the Pentagon, we would check it regularly towards the end of shifts to see how bad traffic was. As I recall you can see part of one of the parking lots, but like most cameras it is focused towards it's own purpose... namele monitoring traffic in I-395 for the local television stations and commuter websites.

4. I can't speak to what happened with this specific tape and its alleged transition from VHS, to a digital format, and back again. I can say that standard operating procedure would be to put any video in a digital format. It is easier and less costly to store, much simpler to duplicate, takes up less space, and less likely to be lost or accidentally destroyed than a physical tape. Once you've got it digital on a server it's there to make as many copies as you need in whatever format; VHS, DVD, Beta (and a whole bunch of others) that your users or customers need. My last eight months at the Pentagon were spent in a facility that did exactly that with news feeds, surveillance video, gun-camera video, video taken from the internet, video from official events like dignitary visits and important ceremonies... you name it. Trust me when I say digital is better. So, it is possible (probable even) that the original security feed or tape was stored digitally after 9/11, then later released on VHS or Beta. This would not be unusual in my (admittedly limited) experience. Certainly, no one thinks that the original tape was the one released to dozens of news organizations simultaneously... do they? Besides the obvious physical impossibility of giving one tape to dozens of people at the same time... is there any way to distribute such a video without (a) making copies or (b) transfering it to a digital format and distributing it that way? Finally, if you are veiwing the video on the internet or on a television I can virtually gaurantee you are looking at a digital copy of the video. So, you've got another transcription right there.

All that said, if there is actual evidence that the data contained in the video was actually tampered with I sure would like to see it. That seems to be what is very loosely being implied here. Such manipulation would certainly leave very evident and particular artifacts in the images, if the guys who used to work for me actually knew what they were talking about.

5. Finally, I worked with a great many decent, honorable, and patriotic people at the Pentagon. For the purposes of full disclosure I was a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force with a very high security clearance and served in some pretty cool sensitive jobs about which I often can't say a whole heck of a lot. To many CBers these facts automatically makes me suspect or even a colluding member of whatever conspiracies they might dream up. Hence, I point to the first sentence of this paragraph again.

I'd like to think I'm a decent and honorable person, and that my sense of decency, honor, and even patriotism would compell me to speak out if I thought I had even a shred of evidence about any type of conspiracy such as the ones alluded to here. No amount of threats to my career, finances, freedom, life, or even the lives of my loved ones would persuade me from speaking out. If I had knowledge that the government I served was engaged in such activities I would scream as loud as I could from every hill, and then I would scream some more. My honor, patriotism, and hopes for the kind of nation and world I want to leave future generations would demand no less. And I am very proud to say that I personally served with hundreds of men and women who feel the same way. This doesn't even consider the many federal employees and contractors that I worked with over my 8 years of active duty service, the vast majority of which I can say with confidence would not just sit idly by, let alone actively participate in such crimes. I'd love to say that every member of the Armed Forces feels exactly the same, but I can only speak for those I with whom personally worked and served.

Military members, government employees, and defense contractors (from high faluting, high-tech gurus to the folks who mop the floors and clean the toilets) are generally pretty good and decent folks. They work hard, love their families, have hopes and dreams for a better future, and try to do the right thing. I try not to take these conspiracies personally, much as I don't take Apollo CBs personally, but it gets a little hard to deal with essentially being accussed en-masse. So, I do take it personally, because I served with every good intention, and I served with a great many good, decent people. And frankly, I resent to implication that we all actively or passively lent our hands to one of the greatest crimes and mass murders ever committed in our country.

Well, that's my piece on that aspect anyway.

Hope I gave a little helpful information.

Hope I gave a little helpful information.

You certainly did.

Of course you are correct in assuming that most conspiracy theorists would consider you 'part of the plot'. It is to the CTers benefit to portray folks like you as mindless, order-obeying automatons.

The fact that they miss and we all know is that you are real people, with real feelings. The very idea that in a conspiracy this complex and this nefarious not one single person would grow a conscience and spill the beans is beyond ludicrous.

One possibility for a camera on the roof could be to watch the machines on the roof for signs of fire. That's just a guess. If a fire alarm goes off on the roof of a tall hotel like that, someone would probably have to verify it was a fire and not just some freak incident like a watter drop passing in front of the IR sensor every 3 minutes setting off the alarm. (happened at the hotel where I work). Since elevators are a bad idea in a fire, a camera on the roof would make looking for smoke a matter of looking at the monitor and the presence of a fire could be confirmed much more quickly that someone running up there. If no fire or smoke is observed, then a person could be sent up there.

This is all conjecture on my part. I'm just offering one possibility of something a roof camera could be looking at. The problem with this is, I think a camera mounted on the roof for this reason would be on the south side facing north along the narrow axis of the building to get it all in one field of view and to avoid the lens flare from the sun during daylight hours. This would mean it wasn't even looking at the Pentagon, though it's possible that some might think it caught the approach. Also, a focus of 100 yards or less may not have been clear enough to see anything at the range of a jet flying by. Again this is assuming a lot, and I throw it out only as a possibility, not as fact.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Absolutely. I've a friend from college whose dad was working at the Pentagon that day while my friend was in his first week of Teach for America down in Mississippi. Cried in front of his second graders because he didn't know if his dad was alive or dead--he got whisked into meetings right away and couldn't call his family for hours. I may not know Brian's dad's name, but I know that my friend's dad was there and can say himself that it was a plane, all right.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Perhaps it was from a spy cam set up by the evil Sheraton Cabul to spy on the Pentagon.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Of course, if the engines ingested metal bits and doing so ensures smoke, then they'd emit smoke. But unless you can cite some factual reference, I don't know that they did ingest metal or that doing so necessarily ensures smoke. But it sounds plausible. It might also be the case that atmospheric vortices left in the wake of Flight 77's engines provided pathways for the most rapid motion of smoke away from the explosion such that the "smoke" (which is thickest closest to the explosion) was drawn out from the explosion by residual vortices. In fact, aerosols flow and rotate vigorously within the vortices left in the wake of jet engines (pages 399-405). ~Ian

Pentagon and Flight 77: an animated size analysis

I'm afraid you haven't understood the point. There is no truth beyond, or underlying, an attribution of motive. This quite simply is what motives are.

Indeed. But of course you'd have to support that view properly.

Again my memory of how the discussion went does not seem to fit yours. Note, by the way, that it doesn't contradict my point above to claim that my knowledge of my motives is superior to other people's knowledge of them.

A quite predictable putdown of my discipline, with your usual trump card of accountability.

Yes, like that it's a tautology. But the point was: how to establish that "a motive is not mine"?

I know that you find expertise important, hence I mention it.
The subject you mention is, by the way, a different cup of tea altogether. The difference between psychology and philosophy of psychology. One may discuss motives and so on on a well informed basis as pertaining to eg. engineering, without necessarily being knowledgeable about how things like motives figure in our language.

I'll concede the point to you, even though I am rather less optimistic about how easily dissent would come out.
I don't know, quite frankly, whether conspiracists have tried to discover any motives of the Pentagon.

Perhaps it was from a spy cam set up by the evil Sheraton Cabul to spy on the Pentagon.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran