In my day, I've heard enough conspiracy theories to make me not believe in gravity. While it takes a lot for me to believe any of them, it doesn't take a lot for me to hear them out, because hell, if they're really totally bullshit than there should be a way of telling, right?
So here's my first installment in my crusade to debunk the debunkers.
I stumbled upon a youtube video called "Laser Targeting UAV, Evidence of Military Technology on 9/11"
Scary, right? It makes sense if you take it at face value from a cynical liberal standpoint. Who's benefited the most from the September 11th attacks? The Middle East certainly hasn't. Our economy certainly hasn't. The Bush Administration's approval ratings undeniably have.
That doesn't make it true, though. What if they just got lucky?
Here's the video in question:
Seems reasonable enough. The US Government has been using laser guidance systems in their missiles and bombs since the Vietnam War.
But then why does the laser swoop across the tower so sloppily? If it behaved like it did, the laser would have been visible to the missile/airplane only during the few moments before impact, making the benefit of such a system pointless, as the missile's trajectory was already carrying it directly into the tower.
Well, maybe the UAV was sloppy, or maybe the camera only caught the final moments of the laser's path, or maybe I'm wrong for some other reason I didn't think of. Okay, I'll cede that. But look how the dot goes across the face of the "neighboring building."
That building is in the foreground. It's on the banks of the East River, while the towers stood on the Hudson. That's half a mile.
Here are some images:
This is the view from where the camera was. The towers would stand roughly in the middle of the image, in the background:
Now here's another view, a birds-eye one, of downtown Manhattan Island. See the "neighboring building" at the shore on the bottom? See ground zero? Near the top, on the left-middle?
In this image the "neigboring building" is all the way on the right, the towers would stand all the way on the left. Kinda far, no?
In fact, somewhere around a half a mile.
But look how fast the laser travels from the face of one building to the next:
1.
2.
That means whoever was aiming the thing, assuming this laser bullshit is true, was somewhere in this direction.
The way the laser traced across the face of both buildings means that the aimer had to constantly be at or above the position of the camerman, and could not have been moving across the sky, as the author of the video claims, unless the UAV was lower than 1,000 feet above the cameraman at the moment the beam switched from the smoke plume to the face of the "neigboring building."
This means that the UAV, if spotted from Broadway street, was traveling in the same direction as the aircraft that struck the tower. This doesn't make much sense with regards to the reasoning behind laser-guided systems.
Here's an approximation of the only possible trajectory the UAV could have taken (moving from bottom to top, with the point of impact of the airliner being the very bottom point)
Here's the flight path of the airliner (the point of impact being the topmost point:)
UAVs almost always take perpendicular paths to their targets, and if their target was vertical, like the face of a skyscraper, that would put it above the New York Harbor, which is impossible given the path the lazer beam takes.
Also if you look at the video you can see that the UAV is two birds flying together, because in successive frames the wings are flapping.
Wings down...
...wings up.
Which seems more likely? That the Bush administration is competent enough to hide a blatant and ridiculously well-photographed lie from the American public or that a terrorist attack on American soil has been over-analyzed? Keep in mind, it's the Bush administration we're talking about. The guy was almost assassinated by salty delicious pretzels.
