Limited hangouts: Kevin Ryan, A&E911 and the Journal of 9/11 Studies

by Jim Fetzer (with Dennis Cimino)

“Ryan’s book … confirm(s) my impression that Steve Jones, Kevin Ryan and Richard Gage are the core of a limited hang-out designed to contain the breadth and depth of 9/11 research”–Jim Fetzer
Another NineteenIn my critique of Richard Gage on C-SPAN, I faulted him especially for offering an answer to the question of HOW that was provably false–the myth of explosive nanothermite.
I also faulted A&E911 for its failure to address the WHO and the WHY, which are ingredients that are essential to constructing a narrative about 9/11 for the American public.
There are going to be those who respond that I have overlooked Kevin Ryan’s recent book, Another Ninteen (2013) and, on that basis, claim that it proves I am wrong.
But the meaning and implications of Ryan’s book, including its own subtitle,“Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects”, instead confirm my impression that Steve Jones, Kevin Ryan and Richard Gage are the core of a limited hang-out designed to contain the breadth and depth of 9/11 research.
As the author’s bio explainsKevin Ryan is co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies and a whistleblower from Underwriters Laboratories. He has contributed to many books and scientific articles on the subject of 9/11, and has made presentations around the U.S. and Canada. He has appeared on National Public Radio, Air America Radio, Pacifica Radio, C-SPAN Book TV, Free Speech TV, and Colorado Public Television. His views are taken seriously by a large percent of the 9/11 Truth community. The question is whether they ought to be.

The original nineteen

Wikipedia summarizes the official account, where “the hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men affiliated with al-Qaeda, and 15 of the 19 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. The others were from the United Arab Emirates (2), Egyptand Lebanon. The hijackers were organized into four teams, each led by a pilot-trained hijacker with four ‘muscle hijackers’ who were trained to help subdue the pilots, passengers, and crew”. Their images have been widely published in many places, even though their identities have never been confirmed:
Their names were released by the FBI on 27 September 2001, by the FBI Director, Robert Mueller, allegedly based upon the passenger manifests. But that claim is indefensible on multiple grounds, including that, as David Ray Griffin has observed in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005), page 23, no Arab name appears on the manifests published by CNN and the airlines have refused to release the originals. Efforts to explain this away are transparently contrived, suggesting, for example, that they were “victims lists” rather than “passenger lists”, when the airlines would only have known who was aboard their planes, not their roles.
The names almost certainly originated with the Mossad since, as Wayne Madsen has reported, the Mossad was running the “hijackers” to make sure their whereabouts were known and to lay a trail of evidence implicating them in the crimes of 9/11. Moreover, since a half-dozen or more of the alleged “hijackers” turned up alive and well–but scared out of their minds–the following day, as Griffin also observes (pages 19-23), claims about any “suicide hijackers” are dubious unless they could survive their own death and then appear the following day! 

 The “other” nineteen

Since the “original” nineteen are clearly fabrications (where the evidence suggests that none of those aircraft actually crashed on 9/11), it would be a good thing if Kevin Ryan were to point us in the direction of the real perps who brought us 9/11. It could not have been Osama bin Laden, no matter how many times it may benefit an administration to revive a man who died on 15 December 2001 for the sake of promoting a political agenda. Thus, David Chandler, who publishes in the Journal of 9/11 Studies, offers this concise summary overview:
Kevin Ryan's ANOTHER NINETEENWhile I am not disputing that many of those Ryan names appear to have played key roles on 9/11, especially in the Pentagon (to make sure that there would be no military response by attempting to intercept the four “hijacked” airlines), there is a conspicuous absence of those who arranged for the transfer of the World Trade Center into private hands for the first time since it was opened in 1970–where the events of 9/11 would take place just six weeks later–and of those “managing” the hijackers, which means that he excludes some of the other most important players. But Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are among the most important few.
A mountain of evidence substantiates that 9/11 was a national security event, which involved collusion between the CIA, the Neo-Cons in the Pentagon and the Mossad. Given the crucial role of the Mossad in looking after the “original nineteen”,Kevin Ryan seems to be oblivious to the role of Israel in 9/11. Many military/intel experts have observed there were only two agencies in the world capable of pulling this off: the CIA and the Mossad, which were collaborating in this instance. The indications of complicity by American Zionists and other agents of Israel is simply overwhelming, but you would not know that from Kevin Ryan’s book on “another nineteen”.

The Kevin Ryan “Paradox”

Adam Syed has published a fascinating study of (what he refers to as) “the Kevin Ryan paradox”, namely: the stance that the way to show the 9/11 official story is false is by accepting as much of it as possible as true. Right off the bat, it should be apparent that something is wrong. After all, if The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) or NIST has anything right, then it would be indefensible to claim that its true claims are untrue. What he seems to be implying is that, in any case where there is room for doubt, the benefit should go to the government account.
The Kevin Ryan Paradox
That ignores the difference between accepting a conclusionrejecting a conclusion and leaving it in suspense (by neither accepting it as true nor rejecting it as false). What could be more obvious? Moreover, it is essential to do your own research in order to be in the position to appraise what you are being told in a document such as The 9/11 Commission Report(2004). For an appropriate parallel, consider The Warren Commission Report (1964) of 40 years earlier.  Lee Harvey Oswald was not only not “the lone assassin” but wasn’t even a shooter!
As Syed reports, Ryan says he favors this strategy for the sake of “simplicity” and to avoid “adding unnecessary complications.” The problem is that he often achieves just the opposite – adding complications and muddying the waters. My first tinge of alarm came upon reading the book’s introduction: “For simplicity, this alternative conspiracy should accept as much of the official account as possible, including that the alleged hijackers were on the planes.” This is extremely disturbing and is an excuse to beg serious questions about 9/11.

Problems with the Planes

Syed continues, “This is not the book’s only such passage. On the first page of Chapter 10, which deals with the Pentagon portion of 9/11, he says: “Considering means, motive and opportunity might allow us to propose a possible insider conspiracy while maintaining much of the official account as well.” But the evidence is all against the hijackers being real, the planes having been commandeered or even having actually crashed. Consider some of the most important research on these questions, which Ryan attempts to finesse:
(1) Elias Davidsson has demonstrated that the government has never been able to show that any of the alleged hijackers was aboard any of those planes in “There is no evidence that Muslims committed the crime of 9/11”;
(2) A.K. Dewdney has established that then-available cell phones were useless above 2,000′ altitude and speeds over 200 mph: the towers transmitted horizontally and could not relay the messages rapidly enough;
(3) Dewdney and David Ray Griffin have demonstrated that all of the phone calls allegedly made from the 9/11 aircraft were fabricated or faked, where none of them was authentic: “Phone Calls from the 9/11 Airliners”;
(4) Col. George Nelson, USAF (ret.), has observed that, of the millions of uniquely identifiable component parts of those four airplanes, the government has yet to produce even one: “Impossible to Prove a Falsehood True”;
(5) Leslie Raphael has demonstrated that, for the “French film crew” to have been in the right position to film the first strike, a hundred improbable factors had to have converged:  “Jules Naudet’s 9/11 Film was Staged”;
(6) Killtown, among other, has shown the virtual absence of any proof that Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville,
where Pilots for 9/11 Truth have established it was over Champaign-Urbana, IL, after it had allegedly crashed;
Indeed, since Bureau of Transportation Statistics records show that Flight 11 (North Tower) and Flight 93 (the Pentagon) were not even scheduled that day, how could planes that were not in the air have crashed on 9/11? and how could planes that crashed on 9/11 have still be in the air four years later? Ryan is not only begging the question by taking for granted the answer to crucial questions about 9/11 but has ignored a mountain of proof that his position is wholly and hopelessly untenable because it has already been proven to be false. 

The box that didn’t squawk

Adam Syed has done a masterful job of debunking Kevin Ryan’s position, including, for example, the issue of precisely why, if real hijackers really were aboard those planes, none of the pilots had signaled that their planes were in the process of being commandeered by hijackers, for which there are well-established procedures. Here is his critique of how he attempts to explain the inexplicable by adding complications and muddying the water:
Some 9/11 researchers, particularly David Ray Griffin, have provided strong cumulative evidence that there were no hijackers on the alleged planes.  One example that shows Griffin to be superior to Ryan as an analyst of evidence involves the issue of “hijack codes,” namely, the code that a pilot would “squawk” back to the FAA in the event of an actual hijacking.
In his New Pearl Harbor Revisited, Griffin addresses this issue.  He quotes a passage from the 9/11 Commission Report that says: “FAA… assumed that the aircraft pilot would notify the controller via radio or by “squawking” a transponder code of “7500” – the universal code for a hijack in progress.”
Griffin then goes on to explain how all four planes did not squawk the hijack code.  He then alludes to a famous Sherlock Holmes mystery story, “Silver Blaze,” in which a famous racehorse disappeared the night before a big race.  Holmes disputed a police investigator’s belief that an outside intruder had stolen the horse: the guard dog never barked during the night.  Had an outside intruder stolen the horse, the dog would have barked.
Griffin then concludes: “Just as the intruder theory was disproved by the dog that didn’t bark, the hijacker theory is disproved by the pilots who didn’t squawk.” (NPHR, p. 178)  (It is important to remember that while I am isolating this issue of the hijack codes, it is just one of many pieces of evidence presented in Griffin’s research which points to a “no hijacker” scenario.)
So how does Kevin Ryan address this same issue?  Looking at the index of Another Nineteen, we find one mention of the hijack codes on page 125. On this page, the issue is mentioned in the context of a list of facts as to why NORAD commander Ralph Eberhart should be a prime suspect for 9/11 culpability:
8. For whatever reasons, Eberhart also gave false information about the NORAD response to others.  General Richard Meyers, acting CJCS that morning, said that Eberhart told him there were “several hijack codes in the system.” Yet none of the four planes had squawked the hijack code on 9/11 and therefore it is not clear how such codes could have been in the system.
While Griffin’s analysis makes perfect logical sense (and in so doing, achieves the kind of “simplicity” that Ryan professes to desire), Ryan’s analysis muddies the waters and leaves the readers scratching their heads in confusion.
Ryan’s analysis seems to hinge on the idea that real hijackings were taking place, and that of course the hapless pilots would indeed have squawked the codes if only they were in the system.
While Ryan stated at the book’s outset that we should accept that “the alleged hijackers” were on the planes, passages like the above go further, and promote the idea that these Middle Eastern men were conducting a genuine terrorist hijacking.  (Without stating it explicitly, Ryan’s analysis seems to insinuate that the hijack codes might have been disabled or removed from the four flights in question so that the hijackings could be successful; in other words, a “LIHOP” [let it happen on purpose] scenario, whereby US officials took steps to allow a terrorist hijacking to take place.)
As Syed observes, Kevin Ryan’s scenario is not only confusing in attributing far more sophistication to the purported hijackers than anyone would suppose they deserve (in light of their modest experience with piloting aircraft) but implies that they gained access to the planes (including those that were not scheduled that day) and that they successfully hijacked them and caused them to crash, in spite of a mountain of proof to the contrary.

The Journal of 9/11 Studies

Kevin Ryan is also co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, as I have previously observed. But the journal has published a series of studies that support the conclusion that the Pentagon was hit by a large aircraft, which of course is supposed to be Flight 77 (even though BTS records initially showed that neither it nor Flight 11 were scheduled to fly that day). Here is a sample of articles from the Journal, including several on the Pentagon:
Sampler from Journal of 9:11 Studies
What are we to make of this? Here we have several on the discovery of those red-and-grey chips that are said to be nanothermite, which cannot possibly explain how the Twin Towers were blown apart in every direction but appear to function as a massive distraction to keep the 9/11 Truth community from asking, “What was used to blow them apart?”, where it won’t do to claim, “They never said that only nanothermite was involved!” If the heaving lifting was done by other sources of massive energy, what were they? For that, they have no answer.
The Pentagon is an excellent test case of the authenticity of the professed commitment of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, whose subtitle is “Truth matters”.  But when it comes to the Pentagon, there appears to be very little truth in the Journal of 9/11 Studies.  The “official account” is neither aerodynamically nor physically possible, as I have explained many places, but that has not inhibited the Journal of 9/11 Studies from publishing articles that support it. Here I take just one example from the three about the Pentagon included in the sampler above:
(1) In What Hit the Pentagon? Misinformation and its Effect on the Credibility of 9/11 Truth Dr. Frank Legge talks about “the hit point” but he does not include any photographs that display it, for the obvious reason that it makes the theory that a 100-ton airliner with a 125′ wingspan and a tail standing 40′ above the ground hit there look ridiculous. Notice the clear, green and unblemished lawn, which displays neither wings nor tail nor bodies nor seats nor luggage. Not even the engines, virtually indestructible, were recovered from the Pentagon:
Hit point (but not in Legge's paper)
(2) In Flight AA77 on 9/11: New FDR Analysis Supports the Official Flight Path Leading to Impact with the Pentagon, Frank Legge and Warren Stutt support the theory that a Boeing 757 struck a series of lamp posts en route to “the hit point” (above). But the effect of a plane flying over 500 mph hitting a stationary lamp post would be the same as the effect of a lamp post flying over 500 mph hitting a stationary plane: it would have ripped the wing open, the fuel would have burst into flame, and the plane would have careened on fire across the lawn:
(3) In The Pentagon Attack: Problems with Theories Alternative to Large Plane Impact, Dr. John D. Wyndham offers his summary of the evidence in this case, which does not take into account that virtually all the witness testimony appears to be fabricated and that no alleged “evidence” can overcome the laws of aerodynamics and of physics, which means that the official account cannot possibly be true, no matter how many articles Journal of 9/11 Studies might publish to the contrary. No competent “peer review” process could have endorsed them.
Wyndham's summary of the evidence
The alleged “witnesses” at the Pentagon–more than 80 in number–are fascinating subjects of analysis on their own, where Mike Sparks, who has an extensive background in military and defense matters, and I went through the list and appraised their credibility. The overwhelming majority were either not in the position to have seen what they claim to have seen or offered testimony that was either too vague or too ambiguous to be of forensic value.  And how can Wyndham remotely reasonably dismiss the very significant findings of CIT? Unbelievable!
It took six hours for Mike and me to cover them all on 4 January, 18 January, and 1 February 2010 as follows:
Pentagon Witnesses, Part 1: 
Pentagon Witnesses, Part 2: 
Pentagon Witnesses, Part 3: 

On capturing the public’s attention

Suppose that, instead of talking about a non-explosive incendiary that emits bright light and high temperatures but has virtually no explosive force, Richard Gage had explained that, on 9/11, Israel nuked New York; or that the evidence confirmsthat no plane crashed in Shanksville or hit the Pentagon; and that, what was shown on television across the nation wasimages of planes hitting the North and South Tower, which were performing feats that no real plane could perform? Or that 9/11 was brought to us by the CIA, Neo-Cons and the Mossad?
One of the most surprising discoveries in relation to those three Pentagon studies is that Frank Legge actually includes a photograph of the most interesting piece of debris, which actually came from a Boeing 757. But the crash in this case occurred in Buga, Columbia, which some refer to as Cali. The plane hit the side of a mountain and passed through jungle terrain, during which it was ripped from the fuselage and entangled a piece of vine. I have published about this many times,but this journal’s authors apparently only read each other’s articles :
Legge's devine
What can be said about Richard Gage, A&E911 and the Journal of 9/11 Studies? Even on C-SPAN, Richard Gage is promoting a false theory about explosive nanothermite, which has been indefensible at least since 2011 when T. Mark Hightower and I began publishing about it. A&E911, in its documentary, “Explosive Evidence”, strikes the same note, where they allow for the use of “other explosives” but have shown no inclination to pursue them, perhaps because they appear to have been micro or mini nukes, which might excite the attention of the public.
So they do a poor job with respect to the question, “HOW was it done?” In relation to the questions of WHO and WHY, which Gage and A&E911 tend to eschew altogether, Kevin Ryan has published, Another Nineteen (2013), which invited attention to some worthy suspects. But he does not explain that 9/11 was brought to us with the compliments of the CIA, the Neo-Cons and the Mossad. It is difficult to avoid the inference that all is not well with respect to 9/11 Truth, because its ostensive leaders do not seem to be aggressively pursuing truth.
The Pentagon serves as an appropriate litmus test. Dennis Cimino and I have published a number of articles on what did and did not happen there (some as early as 2009), where proof that no Boeing 757 hit the building is abundant and compelling. While I am not surprised when the BBC produces a documentary that supports the “official account” of the Pentagon, it simply astounds me that the Journal of 9/11 Truth publishes articles that could have come from the government itself.  Truth does matter, but we are not getting truth from any of these sources, who, I regret to say, appear to have an agenda that diverges substantially from advancing 9/11 Truth.
Dennis Cimino has extensive engineering and support experience with military electronics, predominantly US Navy Combat Systems, was the Navy’s top EMI troubleshooter before he went to work for Raytheon in the 1980s. [NOTE: This is one in a series of articles being republished since veterans today.com deleted them in a dispute with its Senior Editor, Gordon Duff, about which I have since written several articles.]
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