Friday, November 20, 2009

Peter Turnley and David Turnley: Photographer Twins at Ground Zero

It is becoming more evident that all the photographers who took the image record of the attacks on September 11th, 2001, in New York City and in Arlington, Virginia, were key co-conspirators to a plot---an inside job undertaken and covered up by secretive members of intelligence agencies working for a worldwide elite.

Whether professional, free-lance or amateur, every image released to the public bears hallmarks of in-authenticity, which we can begin to recognize in the dawning light of reason and truth.

For instance, understanding that an approximately 200-to-300-foot-tall central section of the South Tower's core columns stood for 31 hours after the buildings disintegrated Tuesday morning, damns any image taken of the vicinity during that time frame which lacks this 15, to 20-story element. (See yesterday's blog.)

All the images were filtered through a central office for vetting. Some passed muster after errant details were obscured by photoshopping smoke effects---or fire hoses endlessly spraying WhiteOut into the Pentagon. Any authorial distinction was discouraged, or edited out, although some people were hand-picked for special fame and fortune. This obscuring of meaningful detail further homogenized the work product into a witless gruel, which didn't do its intended job of telling us a believable story---but instead, the story has became about what was not told.

It would be a startling coincidence for such a broad cross-section of news journalists to have produced an image record nearly completely lacking in personal identification, using the standard news journalism photo captions. Instead, those captions were utilized for a repetitive drumbeat about suicidal Arab hi-jackers, with their preferred method of crashing big Boeing's.

Apparently, 9/11 was viewed conceptually as so traumatic an event that editorial boards, on down to gumshoe reporters, uniformly decided to forgo this normal operating procedure as unnecessary journalisticly to sell the story.

So far I have only found two shots from the 11th and 12th, which carry any identification. Both were published in the New York Times. In one, taken in Brooklyn by Suzanne DeChillo, a distraught young woman, Sharnise Wingate, "who witnessed the second plane flying into the tower," is depicted after the first collapse. A motive here is clear, if not her sightline.

In another image, taken by Andrea Mohin, a dazed and bloody Joseph Sylvester walks homeward across the Brooklyn Bridge. This illustrates that any photograph primarily focusing on one or two such individuals should likewise have carried their identification.



Interestingly, naming names wasn't a problem in the dozens of images showing Palestinian women and children celebrating the attacks in the West Bank and Gaza by firing guns and throwing candy in the air. This story-line went circling the globe by Tuesday, September 11th, at 10:15 a.m.

The failure to gather names and report on them is especially glaring in the images of grieving family members attending memorial services. The international news photographer Peter Turnley's images are marred by this inherent disrespect---calling someone "the wife of a slain fireman" is a generality when a specific is called for---especially when she is seen delivering a solitary John-John salute to her husband that only she can spot. No, make that especially when getting an arm assist by an unseen woman handler!

In the context of the "vicsim" research currently underway at the Reality Shack forum, categorizing a cast of characters simply as "mourners," does not legitimize and authenticate the reality of an established and individuated life. Nor does using the lump category, "funeral for a fireman killed on September 11th," suffice to do honor to anyone "real"---but that may be the point.






The very successful photojournalist Peter Turnley, (his twin brother is an equally successful one,) made an interesting professional contribution during 9/11. His 9/11 story is told mainly in an article Seeing the Horror Part II, at The Digital Journalist (Part I is good too.)

In a nut shell,
"I discreetly made my way through a makeshift morgue and triage center for injured victims that was established in a Brooks Brother's store at 1 Liberty Plaza, and found a dark stairway leading upstairs. I went up and found an empty floor of racks of clothes all covered by two inches of dust, and in front of me was a wall of blown out windows, looking over the destruction of ground zero. I found a small office that seemed discreet enough that I wouldn't be in anyone's way or be found there. I sat down to spend the whole night until 7:00am, mostly by myself, looking out and photographing the incredible scene in front of me. I will always remember the unique and surreal feelings of solitude and intimacy I felt with this scene that long night. Around 3:00am, I began to feel very cold and walked into the Brooks Brothers display room and borrowed a cashmere overcoat covered with two inches of dust. I carefully put it back in the morning before leaving."
If you examine the 30 images attributed to him in Peter Turnley's Photo Gallery, only eleven were taken at Ground Zero on the first evening and the morning of the 12th. Six of those are rather obvious efforts at fire department hagiography---depicting glum firemen posed sitting around, or just standing there looking blank. But Turnley does his part in constructing this bogus emotional narrative when he captions some images, "Firemen exhausted after an all-night search for victims. September 12."

Three images appear to have been taken from his elevated hide-away in Brooks Brothers. If so, in the first image we are then looking west, with 116 Liberty Street in the upper left-hand corner. The pile from stricken Building 4 should be in the cleaned-up foreground. The following image, labeled "Ground Zero -- Night of September 11, 2001" should have the towering stalactite remains of Building Two rising up in the background, but it doesn't.
These two images are clearly of the same buff-colored building at 116 Liberty Street. Directly beside the building should be the New York fire department headquarters of Ladder 10 & Engine 10, with it's bright red equipment door. The two images would appear to me to be mutually exclusive.
Taken in the morning of September 12th, well before five p.m. that Wednesday, of what we may presume to be the South Tower remains.
Having this number of "rescue workers" clambering over "the pile" at this point in time is at odds with the narrative of having the precarious remains of the Tower Two remaining standing.

But it is in the following three images that Peter Turnley reveals himself unwittingly. They are of some of the myriad displays put up throughout New York City of "missing persons" posters seeking information about relatives lost at the Trade Center.



It was over at the Reality Shack forum recently that someone had the presence of mind to question this street-art phenomena as being an illegitimate and synthetic ploy for sympathy and validation by the plotters themselves.

If you stop to think about it, the whole idea of a spontaneous, organic missing-persons poster-posting movement arising after 9/11, and covering available city wall surfaces with photocopied pleas for help and information is absolutely absurd. I certainly bought it at the time. I was only familiar with the display put up at the Armory on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street, because I stayed in an apartment nearby. That made sense since the armory was serving as a drop-in center serving the families.

But trying to put yourself in the mindset of a distraught family member living out in Queens---if your victim worked at the Trade Center and didn't come home that evening, would you really think it logical to paper Manhattan with a poorly reproduced image and your telephone number? I could understand it as a therapy for grief perhaps.

But then, in a brilliant synergy of divine intervention, I saw an image taken by Peter's brother, David Turnley. It is of a shuttered-up restaurant somewhere in the Village entirely papered over in fliers. Can you image that each of these fliers was put up by a separate individual working over time? Of course not! This appears exactly similar to the low-brow mini-memorials stocked with cut-out angels, teddy bears, American flags, and child-scribbled messages of hope and revenge. It is entirely a made-up construct. Why would one victim's family follow other victim's families to this location? What's the value in the mass display? If this was legit, why wouldn't a poster stick to telephone kiosks?

This image pleases me immensely. To see the fabricators of a narrative element so badly overplaying their hand, provides for some confirmation that this visual manipulation was not real. It also results in what I would call near-art.

Following are some images that reveal a bit of Peter Turnley's apoplectic political and racial biases.

Hamas Militants Gaza 1993

Peter Turnley at the West Bank 1993

Jew Praying on the West Bank 1993
"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservatives, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history."
-Ari Shavit Ha'aretz News Service (Israel) April 5, 2003


Below is some bibliography. Most interesting, is Peter Turnley's authorship of a stunning series of photos taken of the Iraqi "Highway to Hell," or "Mile of Death," a murderous "turkey shoot" on Iraqis retreating from Kuwait on a single ribbon of road that was utterly vulnerable to American bombers and fighters in 1993. While Turnley would appear to have been a good guy for getting the images out into the public record somehow, I think his delay of over a decade marks him as an establishment insider---how else to account for his access in the first place? This would make him a peace-loving liberal poseur hiding his longtime agency death-cult connections, and that would account for his splendid career advancements. Always in the right place at the right time---right Peter?

PeterTurnley.com His professional page.

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

Peter Turnley photographs the Highway to Hell

Peter Turnley - The Unseen Gulf War

Highway of Death American War Crime Gulf War
by EuroYank On Tuesday, February 24, 2009 At 1:20 AM

Photojournalism and Foreign Affairs By David D. Perlmutter January 27, 2005
Foreign Policy Research Institute

In the Perlmutter link above:
"...in My American Journey, Secretary of State Colin Powell explained his reasons for advising an end to hostilities in the 1991 Gulf War. Saddam had ordered his forces to withdraw from Kuwait, and their escape route out of Kuwait City had turned into a shooting gallery for U.S. fliers. Reporters began referring to this road as the Highway of Death. “The television coverage,” Powell wrote, “was starting to make it look as if we were engaged in slaughter for slaughter’s sake.”

1 comment:

  1. Greetings,

    I am the young woman in the first photo, Sharnise Wingate. I was standing in Brooklyn Heights on Grace Court. This was my view: http://img1.blockshopper.com/story_images/20003/3758/d53abe8c87f3e863a72959e5e82119ed.jpg.

    ReplyDelete