NASA Flight Director Confirms 9/11 Aircraft Speed As The "Elephant In The Room"
06/22/2010 - (PilotsFor911Truth.org) Recently Pilots For 9/11 Truth have analyzed the speeds reported for the aircraft utilized on 9/11. Numerous aviation experts have voiced their concerns regarding the extremely excessive speeds reported above Maximum Operating for the 757 and 767, particularly, United and American Airlines 757/767
Captains who have actual flight time in all 4 aircraft reportedly used on 9/11. These experts state the speeds are impossible to achieve near sea level in thick air if the aircraft were a standard 757/767 as reported.
Combined with the fact the airplane which was reported to strike the south tower of the World Trade Center was also producing high G Loading while turning and pulling out from a dive, the whole issue becomes incomprehensible to fathom a standard 767 can perform such maneuvers at such intense speeds exceeding Maximum Operating limits of the aircraft. Especially for those who research the topic thoroughly and have expertise in aviation.
Co-Founder of Pilots For 9/11 Truth Rob Balsamo recently interviewed a former NASA Flight Director in charge of flight control systems at the NASA Dryden Flight Research facility who is also speaking out after viewing the latest presentation by Pilots For 9/11 Truth - "9/11: World Trade Center Attack".
Retired NASA Senior Executive Dwain Deets published his concerns on the matter at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) as follows:
A Responsibility to Explain an Aeronautical Improbability
Dwain Deets
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (Senior Executive Service - retired)
AIAA Associate Fellow
The airplane was UA175, a Boeing 767-200, shortly before crashing into World Trade Center Tower 2. Based on analysis of radar data, the National Transportation and Safety Board reported the groundspeed just before impact as 510 knots. This is well beyond the maximum operating velocity of 360 knots, and maximum dive velocity of 410 knots. The possibilities as I see them are: (1) this wasn’t a standard 767-200; (2) the radar data was compromised in some manner; (3) the NTSB analysis was erroneous; or (4) the 767 flew well beyond its flight envelope, was controllable, and managed to hit a relatively small target. Which organization has the greater responsibility for acknowledging the elephant in the room? The NTSB, NASA, Boeing, or the AIAA? Have engineers authored papers, but the AIAA or NASA won’t publish them? Or, does the ethical responsibility lie not with organizations, but with individual aeronautical engineers? Have engineers just looked the other way?
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/911_Aircraft_Speed_Deets.html
Let's ignore the actual video footage of the plane hitting the towers and rely ONLY on the data that could be wrong to make our final decision about what happened.
That is standard conspiracy theory crap
The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it." -- John F. Kennedy
I'd imagine a so-called conspiracy of this magnitude will come out in the wash in the near future. Because as I've stated before, if it is a cover-up, the truth can't be hidden for much longer by the multitudes it would have involved.
"...in four months,
five times as many
people died in
Indonesia as in
Vietnam in
twelve years."
-- Bertrand Russell, 1966
The following article appeared in the Spartanburg, South Carolina Herald-Journal on May 19, 1990, then in the San Francisco Examiner on May 20, 1990, the Washington Post on May 21, 1990, and the Boston Globe on May 23, 1990. The version below is from the Examiner.
Ex-agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians
After 25 years, Americans speak of their
role in exterminating Communist Party
by Kathy Kadane, States News Service, 1990
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government played a significant role in one of the worst massacres of the century by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them, former U.S. diplomats say.
For the first time, U.S. officials acknowledge that in 1965 they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of Communist operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to the U.S. officials.
The killings were part of a massive bloodletting that took an estimated 250,000 lives.
The purge of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) was part of a U.S. drive to ensure that Communists did not come to power in the largest country in Southeast Asia, where the United States was already fighting an undeclared war in Vietnam. Indonesia is the fifth most-populous country in the world.
Silent for a quarter-century, former senior U.S. diplomats and CIA officers described in lengthy interviews how they aided Indonesian President Suharto, then army leader, in his attack on the PKI.
"It really was a big help to the army," said Robert J. Martens, a former member of the U.S. Embassy's political section who is now a consultant to the State Department. "They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."
White House and State Department spokesmen declined comment on the disclosures.
Although former deputy CIA station chief Joseph Lazarsky and former diplomat Edward Masters, who was Martens' boss, said CIA agents contributed in drawing up the death lists, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said, "There is no substance to the allegation that the CIA was involved in the preparation and/or distribution of a list that was used to track down and kill PKI members. It is simply not true."
Indonesian Embassy spokesman Makarim Wibisono said he had no personal knowledge of events described by former U.S. officials. "In terms of fighting the Communists, as far as I'm concerned, the Indonesian people fought by themselves to eradicate the Communists," he said.
Martens, an experienced analyst of communist affairs, headed an embassy group of State Department and CIA officers that spent two years compiling the lists. He later delivered them to an army intermediary.
People named on the lists were captured in overwhelming numbers, Martens said, adding, "It's a big part of the reason the PKI has never come back."
The PKI was the third-largest Communist Party in the world, with an estimated 3 million members. Through affiliated organizations such as labor and youth groups it claimed the loyalties of another 17 million.
In 1966 the Washington Post published an estimate that 500,000 were killed in the purge and the brief civil war it triggered. In a 1968 report, the CIA estimated there had been 250,000 deaths, and called the carnage "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century."
U.S. Embassy approval
Approval for the release of the names came from the top U.S. Embassy officials, including former Ambassador Marshall Green, deputy chief of mission Jack Lydman and political section chief Edward Masters, the three acknowledged in interviews.
Declassified embassy cables and State Department reports from early October 1965, before the names were turned over, show that U.S. officials knew Suharto had begun roundups of PKI cadres, and that the embassy had unconfirmed reports that firing squads were being formed to kill PKI prisoners.
Former CIA Director William Colby, in an interview, compared the embassy's campaign to identify the PKI leadership to the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam. In 1965, Colby was the director of the CIA's Far East division and was responsible for directing U.S. covert strategy in Asia.
"That's what I set up in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam -- that I've been kicked around for a lot," he said. "That's exactly what it was. It was an attempt to identify the structure" of the Communist Party.
Phoenix was a joint U.S.-South Vietnamese program set up by the CIA in December 1967 that aimed at neutralizing members of the National Liberation Front, the Vietcong political cadres. It was widely criticized for alleged human rights abuses.
"You shoot them"
"The idea of identifying the local apparatus was designed to -- well, you go out and get them to surrender, or you capture or you shoot them," Colby said of the Phoenix Program. "I mean, it was a war, and they were fighting. So it was really aimed at providing intelligence for operations rather than a big picture of the thing."
In 1962, when he took over as chief of the CIA's Far East division, Colby said he discovered the United States did not have comprehensive lists of PKI activists. Not having the lists "could have been criticized as a gap in the intelligence system," he said, adding they were useful for "operation planning" and provided a picture of how the party was organized. Without such lists, he said, "you're fighting blind."
Asked if the CIA had been responsible for sending Martens, a foreign service officer, to Jakarta in 1963 to compile the lists, Colby said, "Maybe, I don't know. Maybe we did it. I've forgotten."
The lists were a detailed who's-who of the leadership of the party of 3 million members, Martens said. They included names of provincial, city and other local PKI committee members, and leaders of the "mass organizations," such as the PKI national labor federation, women's and youth groups.
Better information
"I know we had a lot more information" about the PKI "than the Indonesians themselves," Green said. Martens "told me on a number of occasions that ... the government did not have very good information on the Communist setup, and he gave me the impression that this information was superior to anything they had."
Masters, the embassy's political section chief, said he believed the army had lists of its own, but they were not as comprehensive as the American lists. He said he could not remember whether the decision to release the names had been cleared with Washington.
The lists were turned over piecemeal, Martens said, beginning at the top of the communist organization. Martens supplied thousands of names to an Indonesian emissary over a number of months, he said. The emissary was an aide to Adam Malik, an Indonesian minister who was an ally of Suharto in the attack on the Communists.
Interviewed in Jakarta, the aide, Tirta Kentjana ("Kim") Adhyatman, confirmed he had met with Martens and received lists of thousands of names, which he in turn gave to Malik. Malik passed them on to Suharto's headquarters, he said.
"Shooting list"
Embassy officials carefully recorded the subsequent destruction of the PKI organization. Using Martens' lists as a guide, they checked off names of captured and assassinated PKI leaders, tracking the steady dismantling of the party apparatus, former U.S. officials said.
Information about who had been captured and killed came from Suharto's headquarters, according to Joseph Lazarsky, deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta in 1965. Suharto's Jakarta headquarters was the central collection point for military reports from around the country detailing the capture and killing of PKI leaders, Lazarsky said.
"We were getting a good account in Jakarta of who was being picked up," Lazarsky said. "The army had a 'shooting list' of about 4,000 or 5,000 people."
Detention centers were set up to hold those who were not killed immediately.
"They didn't have enough goon squads to zap them all, and some individuals were valuable for interrogation," Lazarsky said. "The infrastructure was zapped almost immediately. We knew what they were doing. We knew they would keep a few and save them for the kangaroo courts, but Suharto and his advisers said, if you keep them alive, you have to feed them."
Masters, the chief of the political section, said, "We had these lists" constructed by Martens, "and we were using them to check off what was happening to the party, what the effect" of the killings "was on it."
Lazarsky said the checkoff work was also carried out at the CIA's intelligence directorate in Washington.
Leadership destroyed
By the end of January 1966, Lazarsky said, the checked-off names were so numerous the CIA analysts in Washington concluded the PKI leadership had been destroyed.
"No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered," said Howard Federspiel, who in 1965 was the Indonesia expert at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "No one was getting very worked up about it."
Asked about the checkoffs, Colby said, "We came to the conclusion that with the sort of Draconian way it was carried out, it really set them" -- the communists -- "back for years."
Asked if he meant the checkoffs were proof that the PKI leadership had been caught or killed, he said, "Yeah, yeah, that's right, ... the leading elements, yeah."
http://www.namebase.org/kadane.html
Because as I've stated before, if it is a cover-up, the truth can't be hidden for much longer by the multitudes it would have involved.
Six Questions for Deborah Nelson on Vietnam War Crimes, and Why They Matter Now
By Ken Silverstein
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Deborah Nelson is the Carnegie Visiting Professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland at College Park. She is the author of the new book, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes (Basic Books, 2008), based on a declassified army archive and interviews with suspects, whistleblowers, survivors, former commanders, investigators, and Pentagon officials. Nelson was formerly the Washington investigations editor for the Los Angeles Times (full disclosure: I worked for her there), and also reported for the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Her national awards include a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series that exposed widespread problems in the federal government’s Indian Housing Program. She recently replied to six questions about her new book.
1. The Vietnam War crimes you wrote about were covered up for many years with government and military complicity. How did they remain buried for so long?
They were classified for the first twenty years, buried in a bureaucracy for the next ten (think closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark), and currently are held hostage by the Privacy Act.
Here’s the history in brief: After Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre, the Army Staff assembled an internal team of officers to collect and monitor war-crime allegations. They kept tabs on incidents reported to Army investigators, members of Congress, the press, and at public forums. Over the next five years, they amassed an estimated 9,000 pages of evidence. All that motion did not appear to be directed at addressing or preventing atrocities–but rather served as an early-warning system and butt-covering operation for the administration. Few outside a small circle of Pentagon officials knew about it. After the war, the records were packed away, until about 1990, when the Army declassified them. They were stored in boxes on the back room shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration. A decade passed before a small number of scholars and journalists learned of their existence. One of them was Nick Turse, who had researched the files for his dissertation at Columbia University. He thought some of the cases might be newsworthy and emailed the Los Angeles Times in 2005, when I was the Washington investigative editor. We joined forces to investigate the origin and fate of the files. We tracked down suspects, witnesses, former commanders, investigators and Pentagon officials; we traveled to Vietnam and entered the information from the files into spreadsheets. We discovered that investigators had confirmed cases involving at least 300 allegations of murder, massacre, torture, assault, mutilation and other war crimes–but the Army kept the findings secret from the public. Fewer than half the confirmed cases resulted in courts martial, and convictions were rare.
The use of body counts was lethal for civilians and ineffective as a measure of success in a counterinsurgency operation. Yet it resurfaced during the Iraq war.
Unfortunately, the National Archives put the war-crime records back under wraps some time in the last few years. I was told that they contained private information on individuals and had not been properly “sanitized.” Last I checked, there were no plans to process the entire collection. However, NARA is processing individual case files requested under the freedom of information act. I, along with others, have managed to win re-release of some of the cases, although the wait can be inordinately long.
An interesting side-note: During Kerry’s run for president, the Swift Boaters attacked the testimony he made as a young veteran in 1971, when he told the Senate that war crimes were common in Vietnam. One of the officers who helped compile the secret war-crime files. Ret. Brig. Gen. John Johns, contacted Kerry’s campaign staff in 2004. He wanted to tell them that there were records at the National Archives that would show Kerry was right. Johns said he left three messages, but no one called him back.
2. Were you surprised to discover the scope of these crimes?
We didn’t really discover the extent of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. While the war-crime archive is the largest compilation of government records on U.S. atrocities in Vietnam to surface so far, it’s not close to a full accounting. Evidence indicates the archive represents a small window into a much bigger problem. An anonymous letter-writer tried to convey the bigger picture to Gen. William Westmoreland, then Army chief of staff, in 1970. He described the routine killing of civilians in the Mekong Delta to meet command pressure for enemy body count. He estimated more than a hundred people perished a month. An internal analysis concluded the letter was credible; and, in 1972, a Newsweek article by Kevin Buckley drew similar conclusions based on hospital records and interviews with military sources and residents. Yet the allegations were not investigated, so they weren’t counted in the task force’s official tally of war-crime cases.
3. What were some of the more shocking cases you found?
Army investigators documented routine torture of detainees by a military intelligence detachment over a 19-month period from 1968–69. Interrogators used “water rag,” a near-drowning technique similar to water boarding. They beat and kicked detainees, and shocked them with electric wires from field phones. The Army identified 20 U.S. suspects. We exchanged emails with one of them. He was more than willing to discuss his technique: “Water poured over a cloth gave a sensation of drowning that generally scared the PW into talking.” By the way, many of the “PWs” turned out to be innocent civilians swept up by battalions competing to capture the most VC suspects. At least eight interrogators confessed to investigators. Yet no one was prosecuted and the findings were kept secret.
I’ve had people say to me that things are better now, that war crimes have been limited to a few isolated incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have to remind them that it took 30 years for these records to surface.
A 3-and-a-half-year investigation confirmed the massacre of 19 civilians in February 1968–a month before the My Lai massacre. Children, infants, women and an elderly man were rounded up and executed after the platoon leader received radio instructions to “kill anything that moves,” according to sworn statements of numerous men on the scene that day. As in the torture case, investigators identified suspects, but the Army didn’t prosecute anyone nor publicly disclose the findings. In both of those cases, Army investigators threatened the soldiers who reported the incidents, but they persevered. We’ll never know how many others faced the same sort of intimidation and gave up.
4. You went back and talked to some of the soldiers directly involved in these cases? What sort of reactions did you get?
Some of the men seemed to have been expecting our call for a long time. It was almost a relief for them to be able to talk to someone who already knew their secret. Most were willing to talk–a couple with their wives’ encouragement. But not everyone was glad to hear from us. When I approached the former battalion commander about the 1968 massacre, he suggested that I “get a respectable job.” The captain in that case refused to talk about the massacre for 2½ years. I tried everything–doorstep, phone, email, express shipping. He finally sent an email to me last year in which he acknowledged the atrocity and admitted issuing an order shortly before it. He said he couldn’t remember the words he used but did not intend them as an order to shoot civilians.
I had a particularly hard time getting through to a former Army Staff officer, whose name appeared on periodic status reports sent up the chain of command. He wouldn’t pick up the phone, so I flew cross-country to knock on his door–only to find that he lived in a gated community guarded by a fence, a razor-sharp hedgerow and a small moat. Upon clearing those last obstacles, I finally got my interview, in which he echoed what I had heard from others: As far as he knew, the top brass were keeping tabs on war-crime allegations to cover their rears.
5. You’re writing about crimes that took place decades and decades ago. Why?
First of all, I believe you should write about the truth whenever it reveals itself. This is a chance to set the record straight on an issue that has divided the country for 30 years. These are the Army’s own records that show atrocities were systemic and not confined to isolated incidents by a few rogue units, as the military asserted then and since. Secondly, the records provide an extraordinary opportunity to analyze the conditions and policies that lead to atrocities, particularly in other counter-insurgency operations, such as the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of body counts, for example, was a bad idea from both a moral and pragmatic perspective. It was lethal for civilians and ineffective as a measure of success in a counterinsurgency operation. Yet it resurfaced during the Iraq war. Free-fire zones and excessive use of firepower in Vietnam led to significant civilian casualties that turned communities against U.S. forces. The same thing is happening in Afghanistan, where we’ve see repeated incidents in which the victims of air strikes and ground attacks by U.S. forces turned out to be civilians instead of insurgents. Certainly the Army’s failure to address torture by U.S. troops has resonance today.
6. Did you reach any broader conclusions from the history of war crimes by American soldiers? Are these sorts of the abuses inevitable when a country invades and occupies a foreign land?
Ret. Brig. Gen. Johns–I mentioned him earlier–did an analysis in the late 1960s of counter-insurgency operations from World War II onward. He said the Army rejected a significant conclusion in his report: That U.S. involvement should not extend beyond an advisory role. His research showed that whenever foreign combat forces were sent into counter-insurgency operations, they committed atrocities. Fighting an elusive enemy embedded in the population inevitably led to substantial collateral damage and deliberate killing of civilians, he found. When that happened, the foreign troops lost the support of the population, giving the insurgents an almost insurmountable advantage. So when reports of atrocities began crossing Johns’s desk at the Pentagon in the 1970s, he wasn’t surprised. He said he didn’t speak out then or in the years after the war, because he still thought the Army would see and learn from its mistakes. The Bush Administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq changed his mind.
I’ve had people say to me that things are better now, that war crimes have been limited to a few isolated incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have to remind them that it took 30 years for these records to surface.
http://harpers.org/blog/2009/02/six-questions-for-deborah-nelson-on-vietnam-war-crimes-and-why-they-matter-now/
Quote:
"If a piece of the puzzle is manifestly out of place, the rest cannot be right."
--Adam "Dewpoint" Shaw
It fails to explain where the plane went if it didn't hit the Pentagon.
Let's ignore the actual video footage of the plane hitting the towers and rely ONLY on the data that could be wrong to make our final decision about what happened. That is standard conspiracy theory crap JTT. Select only the inconclusive evidence that can be manipulated to come to a different conclusion while ignoring all other evidence that conclusively shows the conspiracy is wrong.