http://arabesque911.blogspot.com/2007/11/cit-craig...
CIT, Craig Ranke, Aldo Marquis, and the PentaCon Flyover Theory: Origin, Debate, and the ‘Smoking-Gun’ Anti-Controversy
By Arabesque
CIT and the Origin of their PentaCon Flyover Theory
Craig Ranke (a.k.a “Lyte Tripâ€) and Aldo Marquis (a.k.a “Mercâ€) are part of Citizen Investigation Team (CIT), a group of researchers primarily devoted to investigating the Pentagon attack on 9/11. Significantly relying on their original eyewitness testimony research, their Pentagon flyover theory formed the basis of their PentaCon ‘smoking gun’ documentary. In late August 2006, Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis along with the Loose Change Filmmakers and Pentagon researcher Russell Pickering visited Arlington and the Pentagon on a research trip which included interviews of 9/11 witnesses. After the trip, Ranke commented in a thread about the many cameras pointed at the Pentagon, “great work Russell. It's looking more and more like a ‘fly-over’ scenario every day.â€
CIT explains how they evaluate eyewitness testimony:
“Everyone knows that eyewitness accounts are fallible but as they become corroborated the claim becomes exponentially validated. With enough corroboration, ALL claims can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. When we are talking about a simple right or left claim of this magnitude this is particularly the case. To get the side of the station wrong for people who were literally on the station's property would be a ridiculously drastic and virtually impossible mistake to make that would require hallucinations. For all of them to hallucinate the same exact thing is simply not a viable consideration.â€
Corroboration of witness accounts is clearly important for determining their validity, but Ranke completely contradicts his own argument for corroborating statements when he claims that the plane approaching the Pentagon was “used as an instrument of deception during a perfectly timed military sleight of hand illusion.†So much for not believing in mass hallucination!
No one saw a missile, global hawk... or flyover!
While correctly pointing out that “nobody saw a global hawk… Nobody saw a missile,†no one saw a flyover either, as admitted by Ranke, “we have never claimed that we have a witness that claims they saw ‘the’ plane fly over.†While CIT admits that corroborating facts are an important basis for evaluating evidence, they “have never claimed that the citgo witnesses didn’t believe the plane hit the building. The claim we make is quite clear. Their independently corroborated placement of the plane proves they were deceived… The plane was used as a psychological tool during a military sleight of hand illusion in order to FOOL people into believing it hit the building.†Not only does CIT acknowledge that their own witnesses claimed to have witnessed the plane hitting the Pentagon, they admit that they do not have a single supporting witness to corroborate the flyover theory.
That very distracting C-130 Plane
Ranke repeats the claim that the C-130 served to confuse eyewitnesses about the commercial airliner that “barely flew over†the Pentagon: “There are dozens of eyewitnesses to the plane..... We know that a plane flew over… most eyewitnesses were interviewed after the fact and already knew what the media said happened so very few were interviewed without a predetermined mindset. Anybody on the other side that saw a plane flyover would not be published as an eyewitness and their report of what they saw would be confused with the C-130 and blown off as unimportant and therefore never published…†Further to this scenario, Ranke insinuates that these planes were all intentionally coordinated as part of the Pentagon deception: “They purposefully made sure that other ‘mysterious’ planes were placed in the same place at the same time so the accounts would be blended.†Video evidence captured the C-130 on I-395, about 15 seconds after the alleged impact high in the sky, showing the clear absurdity of confusing it with the plane alleged to hit the Pentagon.
The FDR controversy:
The FDR data is another can of worms and even the speculative flyover CIT theorists admit on their website, “The complete witness flight path that we report does not match the flight path as indicated by the FDR and we have never cited the FDR as supporting evidence that the witnesses are correct… the FDR and witness flight paths do not match each other.†The FDR is a separate controversy to deal with since as Caustic Logic explains, “The NTSB ‘animation’… is in fact at least 20 degrees off from the Black Box data it's supposed to be based on.â€
The Taxi Cab Driver is the "Devil"
Dylan Avery observed of the CIT investigators, “anyone who's watched [CIT’s] behavior on our [Loose Change] forum knows exactly where [they] stand. ‘The generator damage? It was faked! The light poles? They were faked! These eyewitnesses? They're lying or agents! Bla bla bla...’ Aldo's tirade in the TNR pretty much seals the deal. You think Lloyd England is a government operative, ‘THE DEVIL’ as Aldo put it.†Ranke attempted to justify calling Lloyd the taxi cab driver a “devil†by saying, “if ‘demon’ isn’t a fitting description for someone willingly involved what is?â€
Russell Pickering comments:
Pentagon researcher Russell Pickering observed of the CIT investigators, “When I watched you guys bending reality in person conjuring up black operations for everything that didn’t agree with you - I saw where this was going. When your partner tipped over and the forums melted down - it was clear what the motives were. But I do have to admit your dissociation from reality has exceeded what I thought possible… Ego is a blinding force - but spreading this as gospel and irrefutable instead of adding it to the body of evidence truthfully and honestly is .........â€
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.†- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 191