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William Rodriguez (19 posts)

1. truthmod
   Administrator

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rodriguez

   Has he ever shown any proof that he worked at the WTC or performed all the heroics he claims? The James Randi connection and his association with Jimmy Walter are more than a little bit suspicious.

   Rodriguez became prominent in the Latino community for helping to institute an economic amnesty program for victims of 9/11 who were undocumented workers.[4]

   In 2004 Rodriguez unsuccessfully sued President Bush and 155 others in the federal court alleging Bush's complicity in the 9/11 attacks.[5][6]

   Subsequently, Rodriguez traveled around talking about conspiracy theories and his experiences on 9/11, giving motivational lectures and discussing disaster management.[7][8][9][10][11][12] The Herald newspaper of Glasgow characterized him as "the poster boy for a movement currently sweeping the globe… the 9/11 Truth Campaign."[citation needed] He titled his website "911keymaster", appearing on TV and having himself photographed frequently with a 'master key' to the World Trade center,[1][13][14][15][16] which, he has alleged on BBC and Dutch TV and C-SPAN, saved hundreds of lives. He also used the title "Last Man Out", touring in the UK and the US with that phrase.[17][18] Rodriguez has also employed the "Last Survivor of the World Trade Center" slogan.[19][20]

   ...

   As a young man, Rodriguez worked under the stage name "Roudy" as an assistant to magician James Randi.[23][24] A December 2005 article published on the Internet claimed that Rodriguez was adroit at insinuating himself into the good graces of Randi's targets and eliciting incriminating information, and that he had previously been featured on television in Puerto Rico escaping from a chained straitjacket while hanging from a burning rope.[25] WTC janitor

   Rodriguez moved to New York from Puerto Rico and, according to the Internet article linked above, he "found himself a small fish in the big pond of New York magicians." He took a day job as a custodian at the World Trade Center. The article goes on to say that Rodriguez's show business aspirations fell by the wayside when his responsibilities for cleaning the office of Governor Mario Cuomo at the WTC expanded to include organizing Governor Cuomo's press conferences, and that after Cuomo left office in 1994, Rodriguez was re-assigned to cleaning the windowless emergency staircases of the North Tower, where he remained until September 11, 2001.[25]

   Posted 11 years ago #
2. truthmod
   Administrator

   So is it Safe to Say that William Rodriguez is a Liar and a Fraud?

   http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa...

   Posted 11 years ago #
3. truthmod
   Administrator

   I guess it's pretty well established that he actually did have the custodial WTC job, but that doesn't automatically make him credible.

   At 9:23 in this video you can see him interviewed sometime soon after 9/11:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAJa8eu-6_g&fea...

   Posted 11 years ago #
4. mark
   Member

   Magic tricks are all about misdirection, a tactic used skillfully against the 9/11 (half) truth movement.

   Posted 11 years ago #
5. truthmover
   Administrator

   "Insinuating himself into the good graces of Randi's targets and eliciting incriminating information."

   I came to think he wasn't kosher. You can see it in his eyes if you know what to look for, the lack of honest empathy. Les had that look in spades. And with Jrefer Mark Roberts being the most present and vocal debunker at Ground Zero, they seemed to play good cop/bad cop in the process of manipulating people.

   Just as shady is the fact that Rodriquez NEVER talked about anything other than CD. He had a mission to tell a story about explosions. That was his entire MO.

   Posted 11 years ago #
6. mark
   Member

   Maybe twenty thousand people were in and near the WTC when the attacks started. If there really had been "bombs in the basement" before the impact a lot of people would have noticed.

   I recommend visiting the Museum of Hoaxes - www.museumofhoaxes.com

   Posted 11 years ago #
7. BrianG
   Member

   Willie had an enormous effect in splitting the truth movement off from the mainstream. Those who were inclined to be skeptical of his story ("Basement bombs? You're kidding, right?") could easily find the impossibilities in his story and dismissed both Willie and the movement that indulged him. Those who were inclined to be open-minded about his claims ("Who could lie about such a thing?") demonstrated their tendency to confirmation bias and group think.

   Those who tried to leverage Willie's story as propaganda (and I was, briefly, one of them) tried to inform firefighters and lawyers and independent journalists about Willie's story. And of course that was useless--all three of those categories of people could see through him in a minute. The firefighters would have winced at his bragging. The firefighters and the lawyers would have recognized that his claim that people were trapped behind locked fire exit doors was absurd. And the journalists would have found the lack of confirmation for his claims suspicious. So all of them would regard the truthers who pitched the story to them as idiots.

   Willie's claim on C-Span that "This key saved hundreds of lives" is easily shown for a lie. There were about 15,000 civilians under the impact zones in the towers. 99% of them evacuated successfully, and the 100-or-so who died included those trapped in elevators and the mobiity-impaired who were slow to get down the stairs. Thus the evacuation was successful not only on Willie's 39 floors, but also on the 120-something other floors that Willie did not reach. Statistically, there is no difference between survival rates on Willie's floors and on the other floors beneath the impact zone.

   But his dishonesty gets worse. He claimed that the reason he abandoned his life-saving climb up the stairs "opening doors and letting people out" was because there was a 22-story internal collapse from 65 to 43. Nobody else makes this claim, and it's an absurdity because structurally, the building could not have survived such a collapse. But we gave him the benefit of the doubt. The claim is the keystone of his story, without which it collapses at near-freefall acceleration. Why did he abandon his life-saving climb? Why did he turn his back on hundreds of people upstairs from 40 to 88 who were trapped behind locked fire exit doors and needed Willie to set them free? They were all dead, Willie says, the collapse killed them. Wrong. They did not exist. Hundreds of people did not die in a collapse of floors 65 to 43. They evacuated with a 99% success rate.

   But it gets even worse than that. Willie claimed "I am the one who opened the doors so people could escape." Not so. Pablo Ortiz was the one who opened the doors so people could escape. Pablo Ortiz climbed to the 88th floor near the impact zone where doors had been jammed shut or were blocked by debris. With a crowbar he broke open doors and cleared away debris and he saved dozens of lives--and the people he saved went on television to say so. Pablo Ortiz died with Frank DeMartini when the tower fell on them, so he wasn't there to object when Willie stole his story and his glory.

   Willie managed to suppress opposition to his nonsense by means of threats and intimidation and libel and the use of sock puppets. He got the 9/11 Truth institutions to squelch the truth when he claimed that he had an email list of 100,000 or so and claimed he had devoted corps of hundreds of hispanic activists.

   Lastly there's this: an uncorroborated claim that Willie had a college degree. http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=70963 SInce Willie's story fulfilled all three legs of Max Weber's formulation of "charismatic authority" (sanctity, heroism and exemplary character) I had long suspected that whoever wrote his schtick was pretty sophisticated. And then there's Willie's status as a janitor at ABM (American Building Maintenance). ABM also has a security wing. So just suppose that while everyone thought Willie was picking up the condom wrappers and cigarette butts in the stairwells that he was jet-setting around doing union-busting assignments for ABM Security? That would explain why someone who could sell freezers to eskimos stayed with a job that was ostensibly cleaning a stairwell during the unprecedented Clinton prosperity.

   Posted 11 years ago #
8. thevillage
   Member

   Actually, the seismic reports and video of the base of the WTC show disturbances and smoke rising.

   The attacks on this testimony show the importance of this information -- in fact, it's also borne out by the damage to the lobbies which the fire fighters found on entering the building.

   It's also in accord with demolition -- crack the top and the base. And there can be little denial that what we're looking at in all three WTC buildings is demolition. Even demolition experts confirm that if you need further evidence, but they make clear that it was a very sophisticated operation, probably carried out by military.

   But, of course, if Willie doesn't have a college degree, then he's lying.

   Posted 11 years ago #
9. BrianG
   Member

   The attacks on Willie's testimony are quite justified. When he tells such a whopper of a story, and when he persists for rhetorical reasons in telling about a 22-story collapse that never happened, there is no reason to believe anything he says. However, if he does not have a college degree, that does not make him a liar. That only makes the hearsay account of the Randian "Oliver" mistaken or dishonest.

   Others besides William reported explosions in the basement and these accounts were never properly investigated. Truthers tended to grab at the seismic evidence without bothering to learn what made it unreliable, and they tended to declaim breathlessly about the destruction of a 50-ton press in the belief that a machine weighing 50 tons had been destroyed. They were wrong. I used to work with a 30-ton jack. It was the size of a gallon jug, and it weighed fifty pounds.

   I had hoped that the architects and engineers for truth might investigate the basement bombs reports, interview the witnesses, and shake the trees for more witnesses. They never did. They have never to my knowledge used any of Willie's testimony in their presentations.

   I avoid unnecessary conclusions, and i don't have an opinion on whether there were or were not bombs in the WTC or in the basements. I'd like to see more investigation of the stories of basement bombs, but it seems that Willie's "colorful" tales have hijacked the issue so that researchers are reluctant to investigate it and witnesses are reluctant to talk about it, and a potentially fruitful area of inquiry has been foreclosed upon.

   Posted 11 years ago #
10. truthmod
    Administrator

    BrianG, thanks for the background info on the "Keymaster." Everything you've mentioned just reinforces the conclusion that he's not to be trusted. He doesn't offer anything to the movement for truth other than sensationalism and unverified claims.

    Posted 11 years ago #
11. mark
    Member

    The fact the buildings were observed leaning before they fell down, that floors were falling away minutes before collapse, shows that demolition was not done.

    It is fortunate the towers stayed standing as long as they did and did not topple into each other, which allowed most of the people inside to escape, if below the impacts.

    Posted 11 years ago #
12. BrianG
    Member

    I think that picture that is alleged to show a sagging floor is not a sagging floor. The floors were just 4" thick, on top of openwork steel trusses. The gray saggy thing in the picture is much thicker than 4 inches. I think it's a heating/cooling duct.

    Posted 11 years ago #
13. mark
    Member

    Floor collapses before the buildings fell

    "At 9:24, fire rescue received a call from a frightened man who said that the stairway had collapsed on the 105th floor of Tower Two. It would be an omen." - p. 641

    "At 9:47, in a nearby office, a woman called fire rescue with an ominous message. The floor underneath her, she said, was beginning to collapse."

    James Bamford, "Body of Secrets," (2002 update) p. 64

    Posted 11 years ago #
14. BrianG
    Member

    A stairway collapse would be of no structural significance. I think official story supporters would find it very difficult to provide an explanation of a collapsed stairway on floor 105 (well above structural damage caused by flight 175) without invoking incendiaries or explosives.

    What floor was Bamford's witness on, and where do you get your information?

    I think that picture that is alleged to show a sagging floor is not a sagging floor. The floors were just 4" thick, on top of openwork steel trusses. The gray saggy thing in the picture is much thicker than 4 inches. I think it's a heating/cooling duct.

    Posted 11 years ago #
15. truthmover
    Administrator

    "The fact the buildings were observed leaning before they fell down, that floors were falling away minutes before collapse, shows that demolition was not done."

    Here we see Mark demonstrating that he's not without his own biases.

    Mark that statement is just plain silly. I respect that you push back against CD speculation as we both consider it a dead end. But you trying to act like we know for sure that CD wasn't involved seems just as biased as people arguing that we know it was.

    We can't know. We won't ever know. This is pointless speculation and in my frank opinion the realm of conspiracy nerds who care more about seeming clever and deep than working for justice.

    Posted 11 years ago #
16. truthmover
    Administrator

    That being said, CD as an essential lesson in the art of subterfuge is an important topic, and on topic in the William Rodriguez thread.

    Once again, personally, I think we have quite enough CD evidence to reasonably doubt the official story without relying on speculation. On the other hand, it doesn't matter because CD research won't lead to justice.

    And it's very clear to me, having observed subversion in the NY 9/11 scene, that the physical evidence was being targeted at less literate participants. And those participants served many purposes in undermining the cause, all with a smile on their face and the best of intentions.

    Bottom line: I changed my world view around this issue with little concern for any physical evidence. If it's being used to undermine the cause and it's not essential, it should be excluded. Basic strategic decision.

    Posted 11 years ago #
17. mark
    Member

    Sorry that I trust the fire fighter crews who were at the scene over people who years later focus on fuzzy pictures.

    It is fortunate that the towers stayed standing as long as they did, which minimized casualties.

    The nit picking mistrust of people who testified that they watched what happened is precisely the sort of psychology that allowed many to smear the 9/11 truth movement as 9/11 deniers (as in Holocaust deniers).

    The idea that explosives could be sheltered from the attacks and subsequent infernos and then ignite at precisely the same points as the crash impacts is not believable. It would complicate matters to the point of ridiculousness.

    Posted 11 years ago #
18. BrianG
    Member

    Mark, interestingly, neither NIST nor FEMA trusted the firefighters. They both left out of their reports Chief Hayden's report of a bulge at the 13th floor, the claim of "Miller" that WTC7 was leaning, claims that the south side had been scooped out, and claims that there was fire on every floor.

    The claims that there was no water are not true. You can easily find images showing firefighters spraying water on WTC6. SInce no one was trapped in WTC6, obviously not all the water was needed for rescue operations, and the water being sprayed on WTC6 could have been used at WTC7..

    Since the firefighters' reports are all over the map, they can't all be right, but you want to trust them because they are firefighters. But if the firefighters are right, then NIST is wrong. You can't have it both ways.

    The minimizing of casualties is an interesting point. When the first plane struck at 8:46, there were only 18,000 people in the buildings, the evacuation of both buildings began immediately, and 99% of the civilians underneath the impact zones evacuated successfully. Had the plotters waited until 10:00 when the building was fully populated, as many of 50,000 people might have been in the towers. You couldn't get 50,000 people down the stairs in an hour. In 1993 the evacuation took 4 hours. If the plotters wanted to maximize deaths, they would have hit the buildings later in the day, they would have hit them simultaneously, and they would have obstructed the evacuation by putting smoke or poison gas in the stairways.

    Why do you think explosives could not be sheltered from the fires and the impacts by placing them inside the hollow box columns? And where do you get this inferno idea? The jet fuel burned off in four minutes, FEMA's experts said. Fire Protection Engineers and MIT's Dr. Thomas Eagar say that the black smoke indicates an oxygen-starved, inefficient, low-temperature fire. NIST has not one core steel sample showing heating above 480F.

    In WTC1 the Sauret video shows the building is clearly coming apart above the impact zone before the part below the impact zone fails. So where do you get the idea that the collapse begins at the impact zone? What would be so complicated about radio-controlled detonators, whose detonation sequence could be reprogrammed as necessary--even with a joystick in real time if desired? Did you never hear of MIDI? It's a communications protocol of the 1980s that allowed one musician to play a whole stage full of synthesizers from one keyboard, or from a computer file.

    Truthmover, I needed no change in world view. My knowledge of American behavior in Vietnam and Chile and Central America prepared me to believe the worst. But many, or perhaps even most, citizens are reluctant to go there. Laurie Manwell gave an insightful presentation on this at the 2011 Toronto conference, "In Denial of Democracy".

    Posted 11 years ago #
19. truthmover
    Administrator

    Wow, both of you have misread very clear things I've stated here and seem more interested in the same boring arguments than staying on topic or advancing the discussion at all. Yawn.

    Posted 11 years ago #

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