Flight 175. Conclusions

So by July the Reader's Ombudsman was obliged to explain to La Vanguardia readers that investigative journalism is not free to speculate, that it can only report on facts. So, digital analysis of the photographic evidence demonstrates that something strange had been strapped on under the plane that hit the South Tower, but not what it was. (The Ombudsman pages are well worth the read, if only for the light they cast on the journalistic process. The second article, in particular, how the humble citizen can have an effect on this process, is a real eye-opener.)

Basically, this is your proverbial "Hot Potato" and a newspaper with a hundred-year-old tradition like La Vanguardia ain't gonna get burnt. Fortunately we're a website.

So what can we deduce from these pictures?

It is impossible to tell from the photographs what these odd objects contained, but it is possible to get an idea of how much they weighed.

So, applying the "Is it bigger than a Bread Box?" principle, we get that the odd objects attached to the fuselage weighed more than 120,000 lbs and less than 200,000 lbs.

Now, you don't strap on 120,000 pounds of goodies in one morning. It would have required several weeks of preparation (767s are not equipped with "hard points", the structures on military planes where fuel tanks and armaments may be attached). And Mohammad Atta, et al, were never near this bird. We know because within 24 hours of the attacks the FBI had tracked the hijackers every move and there's no mention of them hanging around abandoned airfields tinkering with old 767s.

No, this would have required a lot of organisation: an extra 767 that the authorities had lost track of; an abandoned airfield that no one was using; and a small fleet of trucks to carry those large tubes, pretty conspicuous rolling down the Interstate. All hidden away from prying eyes, for weeks. A lot of manpower and well beyond the derring-do of our loser Saudi playboy friends.

So, who flew the planes?

Certainly, hooking up a guidance system to GPS (Global Positioning System) would be a simple affair. The result would be a plane slamming straight into the Towers like a guided missile, a bit like Flight 11 that morning. (Some even go as far as claiming that it was a guided missile, and it's true that the wings seem surprisingly short for a commercial airliner.)

Flight 175 with its sharp turn just before it hits the South Tower is another matter. This manoeuvre would have required visual contact, i.e. a TV camera relaying back to an off-board remote pilot. Fanciful? We've seen that the Aries Flying Lab has successfully taken off and landed unmanned. Now, you don't land on a commercial airfield without visual contact -maybe Global Hawk does, but it's a military vehicle. However, the Aries project is being developed for commercial use, so the technology exists (see Remote piloting: Solution or disaster-in-the-making? [USA Today, 10/02/2001]). Certainly Robert Ayling, former boss of British Airways, believes it exists.

As for the banking manoeuvre itself, perhaps it was necessary as a last-minute correction, after all it's a tricky job flying at 500 m.p.h. plus. But to me it all smells of detective fiction, in fact I'm surprised by the obvious questions that all the investigative commissions haven't asked (See: Unanswered questions - Demanding answers). It's clear that these people have never read an Agatha Christie in their lives. To me the outrageous banking manoeuvre was like something out of a Fu Man Chu novel. There's a clever hand behind this for sure, but the brain behind the clever hand is too vain to conceal itself, especially with the TV cameras rolling. That's how Fu Man Chu always gets caught out.

Unlike the La Vanguardia articles, of course, this is all speculation. I could be wrong. It would be easy to show that the planes that left Logan airport on the morning of September 11 were the same ones that crashed into the Towers by going back to the radar records of that day. Sure, the transponders were switched off, but they would still show up as an unidentified blip. Run an algorithm to show up only unidentified blips, and voilá, you'd only see four blips, wouldn't you? Unfortunately the FAA seems to have trouble in making these available.

So what's all this got to do with me, here in Timbuktu?

And this New World Order is already up and running. We were sold the Iraq war on the basis of WMD, terrorist links and the need to bring democracy to the Middle East. We were sold a false bill of goods. Never mind, the pretext was "irrelevant" in any case.

There is nothing "New" in this New World Order. This is going back to a feudal world of warlords with no rules. Which was fine for the 15th century when you could happily go about whacking people with a cudgel, but in the 21st century, with its "advances" in mechanised warfare, chemical weaponry, biological agents and badly stored nuclear waste, this would be Collective Suicide. (The latest news from Bagdad talks of radioactive levels 2,000 times greater than maximum allowed levels, no doubt due to the generalised use of depleted uranium.)

We've all been here before and the world decided not to go down this path. After World War I, the "Great War" or the "War to End All Wars", it was decided that mechanisation had made war such a threat to human existence that it had become necessary to establish a set of international tools for doing things. First the League of Nations -- defunct --, then the United Nations, World Bank, IMF, and with them international treaties: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ABM Treaty, Test Ban Treaties, Kyoto, etc.

Admittedly, these first faltering steps in international law leave much to be desired. Instead of improving on them, though, George Bush is now dismantling a broad range of consensually accepted international precepts. This would take us back to the eve of the Great War of 1914-18, but with weapons that are a million times more deadly.

9/11 was merely Act 1, Scene 1 in a tale of Perpetual War.

These are dangerous times and they affect every man, woman and child on the planet.