Saturday, March 1, 2008

Correcting Mark Roberts

Mark Roberts is considered by some to be the greatest defender of the the official 9/11 story and the greatest debunker of the 9/11 Truth Movement. His encyclopedic knowledge of 9/11 is so vast that no one should dare challenge his towering intellect. Anyone who steps into the ring with him is bound to get clobbered. He is the 800 pound gorilla who's mere presence causes truthers to run for the hills. In reality, he is more comparable to a scarecrow, from a distance he may look menacing, but upon closer inspection he is just made out of straw.

So where is Mark Roberts wrong? This was a question posed to members of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Mark Roberts wrote a long paper on the collapse WTC7, or more to the point, the "lies" of the 9/11 Truth Movement and their beliefs regarding WTC7. The goal of his paper was to attack people for asking questions about WTC7, not to discover how the building collapsed. In fact, Mark Roberts does not devote a single sentence to explain how WTC7 collapsed. This is not surprising since the government has yet to offer an explanation for the collapse. If someone does not have an explanation for something, then it is not possible to say where their explanation is wrong. So I will move on and show where Mark Roberts is wrong regarding the Pentagon attack.

Where did the right wing impact the Pentagon? Mark Roberts has this picture on his website.














Mark Roberts states this regarding the "hole", "The hole made by flight 77 extends along the wing line, left and right of the fuselage hole. It is not a cookie-cutter hole: that simply cannot happen when a plane hits a heavily- reinforced concrete building. Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at a 43-degree angle to its west wall. It came from the right of the photo below." If the right wing hit within the area shown by the rectangle, then this contradicts the information in the Pentagon Building Performance Report(PBPR). At the moment of impact the plane was tilted to the left between 7 to 9 degrees. The PBPR states, “The left wing passed below the second-floor slab, and the right wing crossed at a shallow angle from below the second floor slab to above the second-floor slab.” It goes on and reports, "The right wing was below the second-floor slab at the fuselage but above the second-floor slab at the tip, and the left wing struck the building entirely below the second-floor slab, to the north of column line." So the right wing could not have damaged all of the area within the rectangle. Somewhere between column line 17 and 18 the right wing should have impacted the second floor slab and gone up from there. Mark Roberts has the all impact beneath the 2nd floor slab. So for Mark Roberts to be accurate, he should show the rectangle at a slight upwards tilt. If he does, will he refer to this as the “hole” and no longer refer to the damage on the first floor as the “hole”? The area beneath the first floor slab appears to be more damaged so maybe that is why he chose to show the impact there. If the right wing is sloped upwards slightly a "hole" becomes less obvious.

This also brings up another important issue. Regardless of where the right wing impacted the building, how were the columns behind the facade, where the right wing hit the Pentagon, damaged? If the wing disintegrated or folded back what caused the damage to the columns behind column lines 15 to 18. If the wing never punctured a clear hole through the facade, how were the columns on the other side damaged?

Of course, I don’t know if Mark Roberts is wrong, because I don’t presume to know everything that happened that day. However, we can say that his claim contradicts the information in the PBPR.