The assault on CIT: Who is really undermining 9/11 Truth?

By Craig McKee (http://truthandshadows.wordpress.com)

A lot of people think they know what’s good for the 9/11 Truth movement. Many of the same people think they also know what’s bad for it. And virtually everyone claims they really want to find the truth about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

But how many of them really do?

If you depend on the web site 911Blogger.com – the supposed gold standard of 9/11 sites – you’d think that the greatest obstacle to finding the truth is two guys from California named Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis. Under the name Citizen Investigation Team, they’ve spent several years analysing what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11.

As the result of their research, Ranke and Marquis believe that a commercial airliner did approach the Pentagon shortly after 9:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 but on a different flight path than the official story contends. They have conducted video interviews with several people who were situated near the Citgo gas station or near the Navy Annex building that morning and who say they saw the plane fly past them.

These witnesses, who include two Pentagon cops, say they are certain the plane passed to the left of the gas station and/or over the Navy Annex. If they’re right, the plane could not have knocked down the five light poles that ended up on the ground, and it had to have flown over the building. And if it didn’t the poles, this means the whole thing was staged to make it look like a 757 hit the building – in other words, an inside job.

The thing I find bizarre is that many of CIT’s detractors on 911Blogger believe that a 757 did hit the building. This ignores most of the physical evidence. Where’s the wreckage? Where’s the damage caused by the wings hitting the building? Where are the wings? What caused the punch-out hole? What caused the destruction and deaths in the Pentagon’s innermost ring?

Am I missing something here? Of course no 757 hit the building; that’s the whole reason the Pentagon event screams inside job. If you ‘re going to say Flight 77 really knocked over the five light poles and then disappeared into the side of the Pentagon, then why not say planes really did bring down the twin towers, or Flight 93 really did bury itself in a field?

If Flight 77 had hit the building, we’d have seen some of the videos of the event that the government is keeping secret. We know there were many cameras outside the Pentagon that would have shown the impact, and the same thing for the interior cameras. The fact that we’ve seen none of this is all the proof I need that something is being hidden.

The fact is, we don’t know what – if anything – hit the building. We have strong evidence that explosives were planted inside, and, according to the Flight Data Recorder that was supposedly found inside the building, the plane would have been too high to hit the building anyway. Its trajectory would also have had it missing the five light poles.

Ranke and Marquis are among the many who have been banned from 911Blogger (me included), so they can never answer the constant stream of attacks levelled at them on the site. The two have been called every name in the book: divisive, foolish, malicious, irresponsible, and lots more. Their research has been ridiculed, and they have been accused of undermining the credibility of the Truth movement. Some come right out and accuse them of being government agents.

But is this criticism out of proportion with the facts being debated? Does it ring true? Is it sincere, or is there another agenda? It certainly seems like this vicious in-fighting is doing much more to undermine the 9/11 Truth movement than the work of any one researcher could do.

Anyone considering the arguments of the Truth movement based on what they saw on 911Blogger would have to think the whole movement is in desperate need of getting its act together.

The claim from the anti-CIT gang is that if “foolish” and “nonsensical” theories are allowed to flourish they will take the movement down if they are later found to be false. I think this is a highly dubious claim. The anti-CIT people continually say that “science” should be paramount. But where’s the science that can explain how a 757 can disappear into a 16-foot hole?

Does fear of a theory turning out to be false stop anyone from considering the research of Steven Jones, who believes thermite was used to help bring down the twin towers? The presence of thermite residues in the tower dust does support the idea of explosives being used, but does it explain the molten metal under the rubble that continued to burn for three months? Does this anomaly mean we should attack Jones’s character relentlessly?

I tend to be suspicious when people write off a point of view by dismissing it as if it isn’t worth responding to. Frankly, this is often a tactic used by the pro-official story contingent. Should supposed truthers be using these same tactics?

In January, 9/11 researchers David Chandler and Jonathan Cole submitted a piece to 911Blogger attacking CIT again. This piece does nothing to advance the debate despite the gushing praise that the anti-CIT crowd has lavished on it.

And this week, CIT published a detailed response on its own site which is highly critical of the essay. Now, I won’t go through the piece line by line; CIT has already done that, and they can defend themselves (heaven knows, they’ve had enough practice). I will, however, deal with my impressions of the essay, response, and resulting 911Blogger comment stream in my next post.