Is it all just conspiracy wingnuts?

[angledge]

Yesterday I spoke to a man who spent 20 years as an aviation accident investigator for the US Navy. He then joined EPA, where he works as an On Scene Coordinator. He was one of the first people to respond to the Pentagon on 9/11 - he got to the building just in time to be turned away by the Pentagon police, who said they thought another plane was headed for the building.

According to this guy - an eminently knowledgeable eyewitness - there is no way a plane hit the Pentagon. He said he did not see a single piece of an airplane anywhere. The damage was all wrong - the hole in the Pentagon shows no damage from wings, for instance. The fact that two lightpoles right in front of the building are still standing is impossible, according to him. Of course, there is an enormous amount of controversy surrounding this. There are internet sites that list eyewitness accounts of the plane hitting the building. There were two cell phone calls made by passengers on the plane, one of which specifically stated that the plane had been hijacked by six individuals.

Other points he brought up:

• Why was there never an FAA/NTSB/FBI investigation of any of the four planes that crashed? You know, the exercises we're all somewhat familiar with where they comb the crash site for every last piece of wreckage & then re-assemble the plane in a warehouse, checking the parts number on every piece & exhaustively considering every shred of physical evidence?
  
• Modern aircraft have ground-linked telemetry of almost all cockpit instrumentation. Why wasn't it immediately obvious that these planes had been hijacked?

My question: supposedly the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines Flight 77. If that plane never hit the Pentagon, where is it? What happened to the 64 people who were onboard?

I don't know what to think of all this. The guy I spoke to sounded very knowledgeable, but there are experts on both sides of the debate. How to sort through all the information?

Comments

[angledge.livejournal.com]

What makes you think you have privacy to discuss such things anywhere? (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-11-nsa-reax_x.htm)

[love2loveher.livejournal.com]

true. might as well talk about it here.

It makes me sick that most people probably see that article - and think "Oh well, I'm not a terrorist, they aren't tapping *my* calls"

But they don't know that The Secret Service Reads LJ

[marasca.livejournal.com]

According to that article, "the program doesn't involve monitoring the content of telephone conversations" and also doesn't include the names or addresses associated with the numbers (though those could be looked up). I dunno... I mean, I'm certainly not apt to trust the Bush administration. The lack of oversite, etc is disturbing because it makes me wonder what other, more dangerous secret programs are going on that we haven't found out about yet. I'd certainly believe that they would use this data for things other than tracking terrorism, like trying to track drug deals or something. But for the bulk of the population who live more-or-less legal lives, a little sodomy or speeding aside (which one couldn't pick up on through simple phone numbers without recordings of the conversations).... I don't see what the problem is? Or at least I don't see why I, personally, would worry that the secret service was going to knock on my door.

[angledge.livejournal.com]

I worry about it because, if I only worry about it when I *do* have something to hide, it will be too late. What if they decide to check up on who's been calling Planned Parenthood? Utne Reader? The ACLU? There are plenty of ways that database could be data-mined to make lists of "potential enemies".

But more fundamentally than that, it offends me that this administration has unilaterally decided that I don't need the rights to privacy that I've always enjoyed. How dare they?