Memenography

Well, things go missing and sometimes they reappear--I try just to turn it over when it happens But once in a while something disappears and I hold onto the sense of loss. That's the story behind the apparent reappearance of this wee prodigal survivor, an image in thumbnail never seen before or since by me, which once had its publishing history attached, from some small market paper within a radius of a couple of hundred mile of Washington D.C.--like the Charlottesville Pilot-Express maybe. I loved it because it carries such a heavy culture kick for 20KB. When I saw it, I thought: wings.




An image of somebody's cat also suddenly appeared on my hard drive and now I've got to feed it and clean its litterbox.



Of course the picture was never named as wing debris, that's just what my head did as I tried to piece together a story. The pictures out of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 never once named anybody or anything, saving any caption or label space for one repeating drumbeat: "Suicidal Arab terrorists deliberately crash a hijacked American Airlines 757 commercial airliner fully loaded with jet-fuel into the side of America's symbol of military might, constantly, over and over.

The debris depicted could also be the metal lids to the buried missile defenses lying directly in front of the collapsed section of the Pentagon, which got flung aside that morning, but that's a limited interpretation. Whoever art directed this shot clearly cut and curled these two pieces to fit together as a cultural unit, saying wings. These little seeds that travel between people's heads, blossoming, getting weeded out, hybridizing, sometimes ending up as fields of tended rows of facts, are called memes in the blogosphere.

Maybe the Johnny Memeseeder who tossed out this contrived effort, started small first, testing how the meme was received in a controlled market, seeing if it relaunches, or if there is resistance.

All that would explain the extreme rarity of this image, and account for what in my mind, was a temporary suppression, but most importantly, it explains why no understanding exists for what happened to the wings of the aircraft that crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11.

I'm going to create a new science of identifying the cultural intent behind contrived images used to construct reality and call it memenography.

Jack White: Regent of the Rumsfeld Retouch

Jack White's 911 Photo Studies was the the first web site I accessed on the topic of digitally remastered images taken at the Pentagon on September 11, and it remains the last word. Apparently, long out of active hosting, the pages are maintained by the folks at www.911studies.com as full-page "grabs," similar to pages of a published book, and although the individual photographs are not available for downloading, the whole page can be saved as a JPEG. But since this JPEG comes as fully loaded with extensive stenography as a Riskus scene, (plus, I have noticed changes made to the incorporated text relevant to new information I brought forth, and which my ego thinks is causal,) we can safely label 911studies.com as a governmentally sourced effort at, if not disinformation, meta-information..

These "middle ground" advocacy and skepticism efforts must have been started in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, as the conspirators realized the degree the public hadn't "bought" the narrative. Making sure that the unanswered questions remained just that, they "got out ahead" of the story, secretly working against their stated aim of truth, by "blending" realities, with canards and straw men, or like in this case, incorporating fundamental flaws.

Which explains a problem I had with Jack White from day one. He makes quite a big case about a guard rail supposedly photoshopped out of the Route 27 triage vignette shots, but he uses as his evidence for its existence only a small overhead shot, where other interpretations are possible, even preferable.

So everything of his carried a burden of doubt in after this in my book.



So to realize Jack's tiny cropping was in fact part of a larger high-resolution aerial shot, one which provides a mother load of information relevant to the guardrail issue, exposes a primary technique of disinformation, and surely damns everybody connected with this effort. It is likely that many, many other people active in the truth movement have more complicated agendas than they let on.



In Jack's shot it is unclear what purpose the truncated guardrail served. In the overhead image the design and function is clear--the railing connected to an automated traffic arm controlling access to a service drive skirting the front of the Pentagon. The guardrail crosses the lawn in a straight line then wraps around a curved sidewalk until it terminates, unseen, beneath a tree. It served to keep vehicle traffic off the lawn.

It appears that a sidewalk fronts the guardrail along its straight run, between a door in the Pentagon over to a pedestrian crosswalk painted in an access drive. However, there is a large gap in the guardrail and where it's missing, so is the sidewalk, but a vague attempt at something that looks like yellow police crime-scene tape is strung in its place.

Although the meme-shadow record mentions that rescuers cut through the steel guard rails at several points, in order to get stretchers into ambulances, that doesn't appear to be the intent here, which is far removed from the location depicted in the triage images and far larger than necessary. The absence of a corresponding sidewalk suggests the use of digital image manipulation.

So it is unbelievable to have in the official public record the following image, of Donald Rumsfeld and his aides, supposedly returning to his office after helping load wounded onto stretchers. I was convinced this picture was a bad fake before I learned its source, U.S. Army, Staff Sgt. Carmen L. Burgess, who also took the doctored triage photos. The way the tall black man is picking his teeth like he was leaving a restaurant indicates he isn't watching where he's walking and he should.

But for some unknown surreal reason, not only is the missing guardrail present, it has achieved it's Platonic ideal in freshly silvered guise, putting in on one photograph what was taken out in others and in both cases doing so in quite obvious fashion.

The background scene depicting the firefighting response was taken on 9-11 and then married to the view of the Rumsfeld triumvirate who like many other actors that day, seems emotionally disconnected. But since the later aerial shot also has signs of manipulation it is impossible to figure out what the intent was, and what went wrong.



"Photo by U.S. Army, Staff Sgt. Carmen L. Burgess Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld returns to Pentagon inner offices Tuesday morning after surveying the damage from the hijacked plane which crashed into the building moments before." 45KB At first I had thought this picture had to be a fake. The man picking his teeth like he was exiting the Palm better look out where he's going. So I was surprised to find it safely here among the orthodox, officially DoD "released" Carmen Burgess shots.www.army.mil/Soldiers/sep2001/pentattack/index.htm

My current theory is, the retoucher was given two piles of photographs to work on and told to take the guard rail out on one pile, and to put the guardrail in on the other, and the two piles got mixed up. Silly I know.

No, now I have a really good theory. Looking at this high-resolution shot can go to your head, with a "Now I see!" So the little trickster of a touch-up artist interjected that wobbly little stretch of railing, and stupid Jack bought it, without a single source of backup. Bad Jack!

Luke Frazza is de bomb!

"Emergency personnel battle a fire at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, 11 September, 2001 after an airplane crashed into it. At the same time, two passenger planes were crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Both towers collapsed." AFP PHOTO/ Luke FRAZZA

It just goes to prove mother was right: when you go looking for the good you will find it--in people as well as in archives. She also said never trust a journalist--they are not your friend.

A star truth teller to join the ranks of...or shall I say rank of...professional photojournalists working at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001--a high ground occupied solely by Ron Sachs--is Luke Frazza, of Agence France Presse, whose work the New York Times published post 9-11, after the gray lady had caught on to her hoodwinking. I don't know how Sachs and Frazza were handled differently, but they managed to garner results which were not only newsworthy in their time, they pass a critical test of history, which impeaches the honesty of the rest.

The photo at top resembles the point of view in two famous images taken by Will Morris, who I'm sure made a great deal more motivating money off his. Frazza's shot captures the only image of mayhem which also includes a prospect of a neighboring commercial building, which for some reason downgrades the whole context of the disaster into the mundane. Please note the blind facade facing the Pentagon--those are not windows, just a pattern of faux fenistration. Also, singularly depicted, is a truer showing of the depth between the Pentagon building and the construction trailer and cable spools, all the other work being deliberately foreshortened. I don't know what the relevance of these points are, I just note them as thoughts for research.

The firemen are depicted as always--standing around doing nothing, but Frazza gets a sharper focus on their lack of focus.

He even catches one of them going inside for a pee.

And in a photo which should disgust us, as it opens our eyes and sets off alarm bells, Frazza captures the same group of men shown in Hillary Smith Garrison's dramatic image of military rescuers standing in the maw of a fiery hell. One man, who wears a backpack, is seen in both, along with several other images from that period. In Frazza's shot, apparently a "before moment," the backpack guy is seen talking with someone who has broken out in full laugher, as others look distractedly on, or away, or at one another, or at the camera, focused anywhere but at the galvanizing event which shocked the world. They stand poised, arms crossed, or hands on their hips, waiting for direction.

Chain chain chain....chain of fools...

FBI agents form a human chain looking for crash debris behind the Pentagon.

Frazza takes a group of three images of "FBI" agents forming "human chains" looking for evidence of a plane crash on the ground. Viewed independently, and certainly when seen together as a group, these images show the agency of the FBI engaged in an artificial staged response, anonymously mugging for the ground's benefit, without finding anything evidential it appears, at all. They send a subconscious message of hopelessness. In one shot Frazza even catches the buses that brought hundreds of these backbenchers onto the scene within a half hour after the battle had ended.





Ron Sachs tops with a photograph of a bus with the word "NOT" in its display sign.




To Luke Frazza! We can tell one another apart now and you made the cut. Sorry I took so long to say Welcome!