JULES NAUDET'S FIRST PLANE SHOT WAS STAGED
A Clue to the Truth about 9/11 ?



Appendix 2 : The 9/11 film industry

The Naudets, Pavel Hlava and Wolfgang Staehle are notable in having photographed the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, but theirs are by no means the only examples of fraudulent film in that field: there is now a veritable industry specializing in 9/11 films, and it seems likely to carry on into the indefinite future — unless we can make progress demolishing some of the packs of lies that have built up over the last eight years. There has been a whole series of TV documentaries on one aspect or another of 9/11 both before and after the Naudet film : some — very few — are, or at least seem to be, perfectly genuine; most have to be treated with some scepticism; the worst, like the Naudet and Hlava films, are loaded with lies and distortions, and it would be a fair presumption that the folk who produce them and appear in them are either themselves complicit in 9/11 or know who is.


James B. Stewart

Among the latter category, I would certainly include "The Man Who Predicted 9/11" from the appended list of just 21 of the genre : the story of Cyril "Rick" Rescorla, based on the book "Heart of a Soldier" by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James B. Stewart. Rescorla — "Celtic warrior," folk singer, playwright, impressionist, speaker of Cornish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic and etc, cancer victim, former British Army intelligence officer in Cyprus and Rhodesia* turned US Army hero (but "uncomfortable" about it) of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, master survivalist, shot putter, rugby player, self-taught student of Shakespeare, Kipling and Churchill, graduate in law and literature, brilliant ballroom dancer, heroic security officer for an investment bank at the WTC, etc etc — I'm not making this up, but I think somebody is — seems to have not a single living blood relative, or at least one willing to take part in this film biography. For the details of his life story, we are dependent on a widow who only met him in July 1998, and the word of people like his old comrade-in-arms Dan Hill, who claims to have been involved in the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and Afghanistan 20 years later, among other things. Do we really have to be pathological cynics to have doubts about films like this, crammed with every tear-jerking clichι and stereotype in the book ? "One of those inspirational hero-tales that have sprouted like wildflowers from the Twin Towers rubble," as Michael Greenwald put it; some of us would use different analogies, probably lavatorial.

* Stewart has the strange idea that this was Northern Rhodesia, and the conflict ended with a "British withdrawal" in the 1960s before Rescorla and Hill went off to "the next major fight against Communism," in Vietnam. If there was an Anti-Pulitzer for Distortion of Historical Fact, this would be a hot favourite. The war was in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, it was about white minority rule, not Communism, and what happened in the 1960s was the colonial Smith regime starting a 15-year rebellion against legal British and international authority; if Rescorla had stayed there — if he was ever there in the first place — he would have been working for an illegal racist regime under UN sanctions — hardly very heroic.


From left to right, Security Chief Rick Rescorla and his two deputies, Jorge Velazquez and Godwin Forde — Rescorla and Forde British-born, Rescorla and Velazquez employed by Morgan Stanley, Forde by Merrill Lynch — photographed on 9/11, the day they all died, "leading the evacuation" from the South Tower, with, unfortunately, not a single one of the hundreds of people they rescued visible in the picture, to help substantiate the legend. And who took this amazing picture ? From "102 Minutes" by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn : "someone."

In previous editions, I compared the Rescorla story to another film now removed from my list — "Victim 0001," a biopic of Rev. Mychal F. Judge, OFM (born Brooklyn 1933, to parents from Leitrim, as Robert Emmet Judge, after the United Irish martyr of 1803; he changed his name to Michael (sic) on joining the Franciscans at 15), shown on ITN 10.9.04, Director Peter Minns. Repeated viewings and research have persuaded me of the sincerity of almost everyone in the film (Shannon Stapleton excepted — see below and Appendix 4, Picture 18).


Shannon Stapleton, Reuters photographer, from "Victim 0001"

Father Judge's twin sister Dympna, now Mrs Frank Jessich, and his other sister, Erin McTernan, are very much alive — unlike Rescorla's missing relatives — and may have had perfectly valid reasons for not wanting to appear in the film. I do suspect, however, that the authentic Judge story may have been used as the model for a manufactured life — for Judge and his Irish roots, Rescorla and his Cornish ones, for Judge's Catholicism, Rescorla's Zen Buddhism, for Judge's heroism on the streets of New York, Rescorla's in Rhodesia and Vietnam, for Judge allegedly killed on 9/11 giving last rites in or near the North Tower, Rescorla allegedly killed on 9/11 helping evacuate thousands from the South Tower, etc etc.

In "Heroes of Ground Zero," a New York fireman claims to have seen people jumping that day, a sight he still had nightmares about. Let's have it said, for the record, that anyone who says he can see a human being jumping out of a building, through flame and smoke, a minimum of 1,200 feet above the street — very nearly a quarter of a mile away — is either a complete liar or has the most incredible eyesight in medical history. Unless he meant he had seen it through binoculars — but he didn't mention any — or maybe he just assumed that a falling body he saw much nearer the ground must have jumped from higher up. Whatever — he could not possibly have seen it with the naked eye from ground level. But he is in very distinguished company: Mayor Giuliani makes the same claim in "In Memoriam," and adds the extra touch of seeing "a man" — he could even tell the sex ! — fall "all the way down," with no intervening buildings, traffic, people or anything else blocking his perfect view of the base of the North Tower. From 17:19 into the DVD : "So I started looking up as I was walking. I was looking up at the — at the — at World Trade Center 1. And all of a sudden I saw a man come out of the 100-somethingth floor. It was clearly a human being. And I just — I was just transfixed. I just watched him come all the way down, and then — and then hit the ground." (See diagram at end of this section.)

But let's have something else said, in that film's favour : that it proves a falsehood in the Naudet film. The prologue to the DVD version of "9/11" claims we are about to see "the only known footage from inside Tower 1" — but "In Memoriam" includes three film clips captioned "Evan Fairbanks — Lobby WTC 1, North Tower" (see stills from each in Appendix 4, Picture 35). Fairbanks' film inside the North Tower was well known long before the Naudet DVD was issued, and the claim should never have been included — either in caption form, or, as in the original TV film and the 2006 "update," actually spoken by Robert De Niro. The Fairbanks footage also raises serious questions about another dubious element in the Naudet story — Jules asking Pfeifer for permission to follow him into the North Tower. Fairbanks was apparently filming without permission from fire officers, policemen or anyone else (one of the three shots in Picture 35 shows a policeman right in front of him, not noticeably concerned about filming going on), so why should Naudet need it ?


Evan Fairbanks, photographer with KSK Studios (now defunct)

"9/11: the Falling Man" claims that 600 people were trapped in the South Tower, which is about right, and that 1,000 people were trapped in North, which is extremely wrong : it should be about 1,500. The official statistics may not be perfect, but a 50% underestimate is beyond acceptability. Richard Drew, the film's subject, is no stranger to controversy: in 1968, he was one of four photographers in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, none of whom managed to capture Sirhan Sirhan committing murder. What were they photographing, in preference to Bobby Kennedy — the contents of the freezer, maybe ? Cracks in the ceiling ? Somebody's shoes ? Another triumph for photojournalism, after Dallas — or is there a better explanation than uselessness ? Like complicity ?

All the films in this list, giving their date of broadcast on British TV, include things like the above. You would almost think they were all coming out of a film factory somewhere, made by the same production company, with the same cameramen and narrators and scriptwriters. The names in the credits may be different, but the same style and content are easily detectable — the same crass tastelessness, the same contentious nonsense, the same fakery. Just as we see the same style in all the al-Qaeda tapes and the ones from Iraq that keep anonymously turning up at Arab TV stations or being posted on the Internet — the Bin Laden ones, the Zarqawi ones, the Pearl murder, the Saddam execution, etc etc. Let's — again — have something else said for the record : there can only be one possible provenance, and one function, for all these tapes. Only the US military has the incentive to put them out, only US military and political purposes are being served, the tapes are quite obviously the product of US Psychological Operations officers, and they are uniformly puerile insulting drivel, from people who think it's the rest of us who are the morons. And any journalist who says otherwise is as much a liar as these PsyOps idiots themselves.

The Naudet, Hlava and Staehle pictures and the 9/11 documentaries may be from a civilian source — or they may not — but they have the same function : in one word, as boring and unsubtle as its meaning, propaganda — keeping the pot boiling, and stoking up the War Against Terrorism. No matter how disastrous the news from Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter how unpopular Bush was for most of his eight years, and his "New Labour" pals still are, the film teams keep cranking them out, as if nothing has changed since 2001. And in the sense that the replacements for Bush and Blair have turned out to mean more of the same — and that those who perpetrated 9/11 and its aftermath are still out there, waiting for someone to expose them and having a good laugh meanwhile, nothing has changed. The al-Qaeda bullshit industry is still doing a roaring trade, with no end in sight.

Attack on the Wires (BBC2, 5.8.02)
How and why communications failed — or not

Conspiracy Files : The Third Tower (BBC2, 8.7.08)
Producer, Mike Rudin

Cutting Edge : The 9/11 Faker (Channel 4, 11.9.08)
Producer Adrian Gatton, Executive Producer, Helen Littleboy
What an outrage : lying about being a 9/11 victim. Have they no shame ?

The Fight for Ground Zero: an Equinox Special (Channel 4, 6.9.04)
Director, Kevin Sim

Heroes of Ground Zero: New York's Firefighters (Channel 4, 8.11.01)
Director, Katharine English — with more lying firemen, as in Naudet, but from a different house

Horizon : Skyscraper Fire Fighters (BBC2, 24.4.07)
Digging it all up again, with some fatuous fire prevention theory as a threadbare excuse

The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer (BBC2, 18.8.02)
Writer/Producer, Martin Wilson
Which, eight years later, has been about as productive as the Jack the Ripper debate

In Memoriam: New York City (Channel 4, 4.9.02)
Hosted by Rudolph Giuliani ; Producer Brad Grey

Let's Roll: the Story of Flight 93 (ITN, 4.9.02)
See also "9/11 — The Flight that Fought Back" — the remake

The Man Who Predicted 9/11 (Channel 4, 5.9.05)
Producer/Director, Steve Humphries

9/11: Clear the Skies (BBC2, 1.9.02)
Producer/Director, Peter Molloy

9/11: Ground Zero Underworld (Channel 4, 11.9.07/6.9.08)
Searching for survivors ; Producer/Director, Steve Humphries

9/11 : 102 Minutes that Changed America (Channel 4, 7.9.09)

9/11 : Phone Calls from the Towers (Channel 4, 6.9.09)
Director James Kent

9/11: The Conspiracy Files (BBC2, 18.2.07)
Producer, Mike Rudin

9/11: The Falling Man (Channel 4, 16.3.06)
Richard Drew's photos ; Producer/Director, Henry Singer

9/11: the Firefighters' Story (Channel 5, 29.8.02)
Director, Paul Berriff

9/11 — The Flight that Fought Back: the True Story (Channel 5, 5.1.06)
Flight 93 again ; Director, Bruce Goodison

The 9/11 Hotel (Channel 4, 10.9.08)
Executive Producer, Steve Humphries

9/11 — The Plane that Hit the Tower: The True Story (Channel 5, 30.5.05)
Writer/Producer/Director, David Hickman

Panorama: September 11 — A Warning from Hollywood (BBC1, 25.3.02)
With Philip Strub, Pentagon Film Liaison ; Producer, Ricardo Pollack

The Rudy Giuliani Guide to Seeing People (and Telling Their Sex) from 400 Yards Away



In the lower photograph (from "In Memoriam," 17:46 into the DVD), probably posed for the camera, Mayor Giuliani and, behind him, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik (currently, I believe, ensconced in jail) allegedly watch someone falling from above the 100th floor, i.e. higher than the figure marked as A in the diagram. The upper photograph shows a typical view from the base of one of the towers. How could Giuliani possibly have seen what he describes as "clearly a human being" — or even "a man" — falling from the extreme top end of that building ?

Figure A represents — to scale — a six-foot human falling* from where the first plane hit, about 1,200 feet up (the impact zone was between floors 93 and 99), and B represents a six-foot Mayor at ground level. Giuliani may well have seen someone fall part of the way to the ground, but he could not have seen "a man come out of the 100-somethingth floor," and it is highly unlikely that he saw him "come all the way down" and then "hit the ground" : those claims are either embellishment or downright lies. Only people at around the same height — in the other tower, or in a helicopter — or using binoculars or a telescope — could have seen what Giuliani claims he saw from street level. It is a physical impossibility to see someone coming out of a window a quarter of a mile away.

Kerik himself, shortly before this scene (16:53) tells us : "It was an aerial attack, and I don't have an Air Force. So you know the first thing in my mind was 'we have to close down the airspace, we have to call for air support.' And, you know, is there a number to do that ?" Yes there is a number : try looking up "Pentagon" or "Department of Defense" : of all the pathetic excuses. Kerik may not have had an air force, but his country had — much as the Bush administration tried to persuade us to ignore the USAF's existence, and the size of its workforce and its budget — to the extent of creating a new government department, Homeland Security, as if that was not already the function of the Department of Defense. What the hell else was it there for — bombing foreigners ? When you have people like the Mayor and the Police Commissioner of New York City lying and talking nonsense about what happened on 9/11 — and getting away with it, for years — you have a measure of the task of finding out the truth, and a measure of the sentences those folk are going to get when we do.

We now have the 9/11 liars moving in, with or without his knowledge, on the story of Philippe Petit — the tightrope walker who famously walked between the roofs of the Twin Towers on 7 August 1974, when, we are told, Manhattan's commuters stopped what they were doing and drivers abandoned their cars to gather in the street, watching Petit's act above them ... a quarter of a mile above them. They quite rightly wanted "a better view," according to Murphy Williams (Telegraph Magazine, 26 July 2008), so perhaps some of them stood on tiptoes, or gave each other piggybacks. Williams goes on to tell us that, preparing for the walk, Petit once peed the word "happiness" on to the plaza from the top of one of the towers : presumably he could read his 100-foot-tall letters in the snow — it must have been in winter — and maybe hear the complaints from Christmas shoppers unhappy about being soaked, shaking their fists at the man they could clearly see laughing at them, 1,400 feet above. Except that his urine would have evaporated before it ever hit the ground ... except, in fact, that the whole idea is ludicrous, insulting nonsense. But if people are stupid enough to believe the Giuliani story, why not this crap ?

We are told a radio had to be passed over the line strung between the towers, apparently because it never occurred to the folk who spent months planning this criminal enterprise to have each team take their own. Then we get told the arrow that was shot across to set up the first line landed right on the corner of the other tower, where a puff of wind could have blown it off, and Petit only found it by rolling around on the roof naked — as you do, when you need to find something in the dark, even if you happen to be on the roof of the tallest building in New York. Or how about that we have no film of Petit's walk, because — brilliant planning again — the cameraman's arms were tired from setting up the wires ?

The resemblance of "Man on Wire" to the Naudet film is remarkable : the same totally contrived drama, and the same sense that these folk are deliberately pushing their luck, seeing just how fatuous and idiotic they can make their claims and how brainless we would have to be to believe any of them. Philippe Petit — professional pickpocket, con artist, ego the size of Mount Everest : does he, I wonder, know the Naudet brothers ? Is the Petit story another 9/11 spin-off, or was it turned into one 27 years after it happened ? We know "Man on Wire" was a post-9/11 cash-in : why was it never made at the time ? Were the events of 1974 rewritten by the same liars who produced the Naudet film ? It certainly looks that way, and perhaps Petit and his associates deserve a full-length investigation of their own.

* If not for the complication of terminal velocity, that human would fall at a constant rate of 9.81 metres (about 32 feet) per second per second, and the blue numbers show how far he or she would have fallen after each second : 32 feet after one second, 96 feet after two, 192 after three, 320 after four, 480 after five, 672 after six, 896 after seven and 1,152 after eight).