Sept. 11, 2007 / New York Times.
A Sept. 11 Photo Brings Out the Conspiracy Theorists
SHANKSVILLE, Pa., Sept. 7 — Valencia M. McClatchey thought she was doing the right thing when she gave the F.B.I. a copy of her photo of the mushroom-shaped cloud that rose over the hill outside her home after United Flight 93 crashed in a field here on Sept. 11, 2001.
And, after it became apparent that hers was the only known picture of that ominous gray cloud — and the first taken after Flight 93 crashed — Mrs. McClatchey thought she was still doing the right thing when she gave copies to people who asked for them, and let newspapers and television stations use it.
But fame for the photo has had an unexpected cost for the photographer.
“Every time I’ve done any stories it goes online and all these conspiracy theorists start up and they call me and harass me,” said Mrs. McClatchey, 51, who runs her own real estate company.
In online postings, critics have ripped apart every element of the photo and Mrs. McClatchey’s life. They accuse her of faking the photo, of profiteering from it and of being part of a conspiracy to cover up that the government shot down Flight 93.
They claim the mushroom cloud is from an ordnance blast, not a jet crashing; the cloud is the wrong color for burning jet fuel; the cloud is too small and in the wrong position.
They have posted her personal e-mail address, phone numbers and street address online. One Canadian “9/11 debunker” surreptitiously taped a phone conversation with her, questioning her about the photo, and then uploaded it to his Web site.
“It’s just gotten so bad, I’m just fed up with it,” Mrs. McClatchey said. “This thing has become too much of a distraction in my life. I have a husband and a new business to deal with, too.”
The photo is considered legitimate by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Smithsonian Institution, which used the photo in an exhibition on Sept. 11; and the Flight 93 National Memorial, which has used the photo in pamphlets.
“We have no reason to doubt it,” said Special Agent Bill Crowley, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh F.B.I. office, which oversaw evidence collection in Shanksville.
Along with the rest of the nation, Mrs. McClatchey was watching the coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington when she was shaken from her couch by a blast just over a mile away. She grabbed her new digital camera and took just one picture from her front porch.
The photo shows a sloping green farm field with a brilliant red barn in the foreground. Hovering above the barn in a brilliant blue sky is an ominous dark gray mushroom cloud. Mrs. McClatchey titled the photo “The End of Serenity.”
Barbara Black, acting site manager for the Flight 93 memorial, said, “What makes the image so powerful is that it’s this serene scene in Pennsylvania, this typical red barn, green trees, and then this terrible cloud above it that changed our life here forever.”
At the temporary memorial site, Flight 93 “ambassadors,” local residents who volunteer to tell visitors what happened here, always start the story by showing people Mrs. McClatchey’s photo.
From the beginning, Mrs. McClatchey said, she tried to use the photograph to help remember the 40 passengers on Flight 93. She sells copies to people and lets them choose whether $18 of the $20 fee goes to the Flight 93 National Memorial or the Heroic Choices organization (formerly the Todd Beamer Foundation).
To ensure that she controlled distribution of the photograph, in January 2002 she copyrighted it. To “protect the integrity of the photo,” Mrs. McClatchey said, she filed suit in 2005 against The Associated Press, saying that it violated her copyright by distributing the photo to its clients as part of an article. The lawsuit is pending.
Mrs. McClatchey’s neighbors here defended her against the accusations of the people they called the “Internet crazies.”
The McClatcheys “are as good neighbors as you could possibly have,” said Robert Musser, who owns the red barn that is so prominent in Mrs. McClatchey’s photo.
To accommodate visitors who will show up on Sept. 11 to recreate the picture, and who eventually find their way to the Mussers’ 94-year-old barn, they have tried to spruce it up this past week, adding a touch of paint. They plan to spend thousands in the near future to shore up the foundation on one side so the barn will endure for years to come.
“Here this barn could fall down, and it’s in the picture that’s so famous,” said Mr. Musser’s wife, Phyllis. “We have to do something.”
10 comments:
This is precisely the sort of thing I expect from the New York Times. The blatant attempt to portray people who question the cause of the events of September 11, 2001 as 'nutters'.
I'm also disappointed that there exist 'discussion' networks that refuse to discuss the disturbing revelations about that day and the events that led up to it. What have you got to lose by addressing the obvious questions that have arisen?
Here's a list of reasons why I am concerned about the veracity of the official account:
- Bush's premeditation of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq;
- The basement blast witnessed in the lower levels of the North tower at the same time the plane hit it;
- The failure of NORAD to carry out a routine operation;
- Deficiencies in the Government's 'jet fuel' theory to explain the collapse of the towers. Espcially in the light of (i) a third building collapsing in the same manner in the WTC complex that WASN'T hit by planes (ii) explosions at the corners of the buildings and the reported presence of thermate found in samples from the building (iii) the molten metal found (iv) lack of any historical precedent for such a structural failure..
- The president's brother's responsibility for the security of the WTC;
- The reports of many 'power-downs' and evacuations in the WTC prior to Sep11;
-Sibel Edmonds fired for trying to expose a major cover-up of 9/11 evidence in the FBI. A lawsuit she initiated was dismissed in July of 2004, only after Attorney General John Ashcroft personally invoked a rarely used power and declared the case as falling under "state secrets" privilege.
- "hijackers" remains have never been positively identified and the BBC has documented that a couple of the alleged hijackers are alive and well.
- Robert Mueller was nominated by President George W. Bush and became the sixth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on September 4, 2001. He had previously led the Pan Am 103 investigation (Lockerbie). But "A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated."
- The exercises that went on that morning simulating planes crashing into buildings, the exact thing happening at the WTC that SAME morning. Too convenient. The people who planned and carried out those exercises should be the object of investigation."
- On August 2, 2006 the Washington Post reported that “...staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public, rather than a reflection of the fog of war. Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of the tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.”[xxxvii] Thomas H. Kean, panel chairman, told the Post: “We, to this day, don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us. It was just so far from the truth.” John Farmer, another member of the panel, who happened to be a former New Jersey attorney general, described his gut reaction: “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described.” Unfortunately, the Post story quickly dropped out of the news and was forgotten.
And so on.
Enough evidence to raise serious questions. so why the censorship?
Here's my summary on September 11, 2001 (with the help of info provided by the research of Catherine Austin Fitts).
2001 – September. World Trade Centre and Pentagon attack. Inadequate investigation. President Bush decides to attack Afghanistan accusing the Taliban of supporting the terrorists. Taliban offer to surrender to an international criminal court. Offer is denied. There is widespread speculation and hard evidence that the invasion is really about access to mid east oil. Meanwhile the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) finds the Pentagon had incurred $3.4 trillion of ‘undocumentable transactions’. After this report the Bush administration stopped publicly disclosing information about ‘undocumentable transactions’. Lockheed Martin supplies financial control and accounting systems to the Pentagon. The Pentagon is, in turn, Lockheed Martin’s biggest customer. A subsidiary company of Lockheed is employed by HUD to administer housing in American cities.
Brenda,
This will be my only comment on this, as this could easily go on and on as it did when I posted on maxspeak about the case of the conspiracy theorist whose teaching position at UW-Madison was threatened. That one went to over 70 comments, and your and others views were not changed. So, I shall keep it brief.
Yes, there are weird loose ends, but there are in my mind several really big problems with the main conspiracy theory.
1) Too many cooks needing to be too brilliant and perfect. To pull off a conspiracy of this scale one needed lots of people, I mean hundreds, with perfect timing and so forth, coordinating planes to hit the WTC just as the bombs that were supposedly destroying the buildings were being set off. This is the gang that brought us a total fiasco in Iraq. They cannot shoot straight. Bush does not know Slovakia from Slovenia (or didn't until he visited them). It is incredible to assume they could pull this off so perfectly, and that none of these hundreds (or at least dozens) of people would leak about it, which nobody has.
2) The theories argue that a missile was fired at the Pentagon, not a plane hitting. Problem is that there were too many publicly known people, including the wife of the Solicitor General, Theodore Olson, who were on the plane and telephoning as it went in and who are definitely dead. It was a plane, period. I know, conspiracy theorists are willing to have conspirators attack their own facilities to get what they want, but I find it not credible that US military people would be involved in attacing the Pentagon itself, not without anybody leaking about it after all. This is highest treason, after all, highest.
3) They did not get the oil. See my postings on the ludicrous situation going on with the Iraqi oil industry and non-law. Only now is a US oil company (and a smaller one at that, Hunt Oil of Dallas) getting in to the industry itself rather than the sort of sideshow and support activities that Halliburton has been involved in, and that is in Kurdistan with the Iraqi oil minister threatening to declare the contracts illegal. The others operating there are largely non-US and small, like the Norwegian wildcatter, DNO. If these people are so brilliant, why can't they pull this off better? (Of course, one can put it all on Cheney, money for Halliburton, which has made out like a bandit, and say that the plan was to crash Iraqi oil production, not increase it under US company control, so as to push up oil prices, which do increase oil company profits, as I noted in my 1981 JPKE paper on "The Megacorpstate and the Acceleration of Global Inflation," although I doubt that even the sneaky and evil Cheney could pull of running the dozens or hundreds of people needed to pulls such an operation as 9/11 off without some of them leaking, which nobody has.)
Barkley
Though it won't do any good.
If the Twin Towers had been brought down by controlled demolition it would have been child's play to blame al-Qaeda or Iraq or whoever the Administration wanted, after all they had the 1993 precedent. Why introduce the airplane element? If the Pentagon was actually hit hith a missile why not report it was hit by an Iraqi drone? If it were all faked why not have 11 or 14 hijackers identified as Iraqis?
Brenda, as Barkley points out these guys have not shown the ability to organize a two car funeral procession. I suppose you could use that as an argument that they would use identified Saudis and Yemenis to justify an attack in Iraq, me I would have had half named some version of 'Omar al-Tikriti' and identified as a third cousin of Saddam.
Bruce and Barkley, your arguments would be an interesting topic for a thesis. I'm working on it.
Bruce said: "...I suppose you could use that as an argument ..."
Certainly I could use the argument that there is sufficient inconsistencies in the 911 evidence to assert that 'they' did fumble the operation; ie fumblers did not 'shoot straight'. And many other arguments if I had the time or opportunity.
Here's one: The difficulty with someone on the 'inside' speaking up - if this is indeed a CIA-FBI-Neocon-Govt job- is that the whistleblower's life (and possibly their family's life) would be on the line.
Barkley, would it be so unusual for hundreds of people to be involved in a conspiracy? I thought that was precisely what happened with respect to Americans being conned into accepting (one way or another) an illegal attack on Iraq. How many people were involved in the promulgation of the lies about WMDs and others? And if I recall correctly the coverage in The New York Times, Washington Post and other corporate media enabled and encouraged these high-level deceptions, in my humble opinion and also that of many far-more- informed writers.
It's not far-fetched to say that there are many actions taken by an alliance of Govt-media-corporations that could be construed as a conspiracy against the public interest. Actions that involve deliberate deception and outright illegality. Remember Watergate? The secret bombing of Cambodia? The assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton? The schemes against the sovereign and democratically elected Allende government in Chile and others. The COINTELPRO operation against the anti-war movement. Mena drug smuggling operations in the 1980s. How were the Clintons implicated in this? The fraud in national elections that appears to be continuing to be perpetuated over decades.
What about the now obvious divide between the rank and file of the Democrat Party and the party leaders? How can the US have 80-90% of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention being anti-war, yet there being " a decidedly pro-war candidate up on stage giving the nomination acceptance speech."??
Many conspiracies are not secret.
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/chowkwanyun12162004/
Brenda,
P.D. Scott's concept of "deep politics" fits.
Juan: "P.D. Scott's concept of "deep politics" fits."
Thanks. Interesting research info from this person.
'deep politics' though. I just thought it was called psychological 'denial' ;-)
Barkley: "The theories argue that a missile was fired at the Pentagon, not a plane hitting. . ."
Well, there are a number of theories. Some of them appear far-fetched to me. Could it be that certain entities have an interest in promulgating 911 theories of a form that have no obvious credibility??
Meanwhile, from:
“JFK, 9/11 and War"
By Dr. Peter Dale Scotthttp://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20070813214130200
- “puts” purchased in advance in 2001, in the stock of United Airlines and American Airlines.
- the obstruction by the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) at FBI Headquarters of the Minneapolis FBI’s efforts to interview the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, especially after Moussaoui’s arrest on August 15, 2001. 11 Moussaoui knew most of the other nineteen alleged hijackers, and an interview of him, if not have impeded, could have led to the detention of the nineteen. A Minnesota Special Agent, Harry Samit, later testified that he wrote FBI headquarters about seventy memos on Moussaoui between August 16 and September 11, all to no avail. 12 Similarly the CIA failed to tell the FBI that two of the terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were in the United States. [the obstructions of the FBI’s RFU would be understandable if Atta and Moussaoui or their names were being used as part of a contemporary intelligence operation. In this case what looks outwardly like senseless and incoherent behavior would actually be the result of FBI-CIA coordination.]
- In 2003 the work of the 9/11 Commission, and later the writing of the 9/11 Report, were tightly controlled by Philip Zelikow, who prior to becoming the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission had been appointed by President George W. Bush to PFIAB.
- on 9/11 the FBI already had a list of alleged hijackers by 9:59 am on September 11, which was when the second tower collapsed. 33 9:59 AM was at least four minutes before Flight United 93 had hit the ground. Even within the bureaucracy there were suspicions that the FBI was drawing on pre-9/11 files for its identifications..."I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming," a former FBI official with extensive counter-terrorism experience has since said. "Within 24 hours [of the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and somebody was sitting on it."
- Earlier this month, the Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, reported that FBI agents had been told by the Bush administration to back off investigating members of the bin Laden clan living in the U.S. In September, the Wall Street Journal documented the lucrative business connections between the bin Laden family and senior U.S. Republicans, including the president’s father, George Bush Sr.
What are we to make of all this? One possible conclusion is that the bin Laden terror problem was allowed to get out of hand because bin Laden, himself, had powerful protectors in both Washington and Saudi Arabia. In The Road to 9/11 I suggest that those protectors included U.S. oil companies eager to invest in Central Asia.
- in 1998 Clinton came to the support of the al Qaeda-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). He did so even though “In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA … as an international terrorist organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the international heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like Osama bin Laden.” 60
- Sibel (Edmunds] says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money. 64..There was also another witness, Indira Singh, who said publicly when speaking about 9/11: “I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.” 69
Some of the similarities noted here are probably extrinsic to the events described. But others point to a strong common denominator between JFK and 9/11. We can mention in particular the following features of a common modus operandi:
1) The prior designation of a suspect or suspects. These had a past intelligence involvement, which obstructed proper investigation of them, and of the deep events attributed to them. In both cases the suspects either were or involved double agents, with life stories or legends on two different levels.
2) The laying of a paper trail. This was strong enough to ensure that investigation would lead promptly to the designated suspects.
3) The immediate attribution of the deep event to the designated suspects.
4) The announcement that the suspect or suspects acted alone, even when there was clear evidence to show this was not true. 119
5) Both deep events involved experienced criminals, drawn from the world of organized drug trafficking.
JFK and 9/11 as Gateways to Already-Intended Wars
...
-
Brenda,
Here's how he put in, I beleve, '96:
The key to understanding this book is the distinction I propose between traditional conspiracy theory, looking at conscious secret collaborations toward shared ends, and deep political analysis, defined on page 7 as the study of "all those political practices and arrange- ments, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknow-ledged." The essence of the first is a single objective and/or control point; the second in contrast is an open system with divergent power centers and goals.
The line between the two is not always easy to draw. ...
[...]
Having reflected on the deep politics of other countries besides America, I would propose a second and more capacious definition from a different perspective. A deep political system or process is one which resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those sanctioned by law and society. What makes these supplementary procedures "deep" is the fact that they are covert or suppressed, outside public awareness as well as outside sanctioned political processes.
Deep political analysis focuses on the usually ignored mechanics of accommodation. From the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption. The phenomenon of "organized crime" arises: entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals. In time one may arrive at the kind of police-crime symbiosis...
[...]
Speaking metaphorically, and a little over my head, I would suggest that deep political analysis enlarges traditional structuralist analysis to include indeterminacies analagous to those which are studied in chaos theory. A deep political system is one where the processes openly acknowledged are not always securely in control, precisely because of their accommodation to unsanctioned sources of violence, through arrangements not openly acknowledged and reviewed.
Thanks, Juan.
""all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged."
I'll think about this.
Post a Comment