Dave "Strawman" Rogers

Since Steve Wright left the debate in shame at having been caught out in a series of provable lies, Dave Rogers on JREF is about the only one left willing to attempt debate on the 9/11 video composites. Having been banned from JREF more than a year ago, I was using a sock-puppet "Steven Lupo Grossi" to post. JREF have now banned Steven. 

Here's Dave Rogers' latest, a typical mish-mosh of selective attributes mixed with strawman fabrications. My comments are in between. 

There's two minor points that strike me about Ace's scenario, that may be a bit of a sticking point. One of them has been mentioned here, but the other has only just occurred to me.

His claim, in so far as I can reconstruct a coherent claim from the rather backward way he arranges his arguments, is that:

Originally the composited video was not originally supposed to show any debris emerging from the face of WTC2 opposite the impact face.

Rogers means none of the composites were supposed to show the nose of the airplane emerging from the back of the tower, the way Chopper 5 did.

In order to make it easier to remove the composited image at the right moment the airliner footage was slowed down to quarter-speed after it passed the expected location of the right hand side of the tower.

That's basically right. You wouldn't want to just have the airplane suddenly disappear or suddenly stop. You could easily make the airplane layer do that, of course. But you wouldn't know precisely when (which video frame) the airplane was going to disappear across the edge of the tower. In compositing, it is standard practice to have extra frames of video on both ends of an inserted shot. These are known as "handles".

In the test shots, the position of the towers could be known, and you would figure to be able to duplicate that within about 20 pixels accuracy or so. Beginning where you figured the airplane would be hidden, you would have the airplane motion slow down, appearing to decelerate, then stop before exiting the tower.  This would give you a much greater margin of error. If any of the "deceleration" occurred while the tail of the plane was still visible, that would be explained according to Newton's laws. As it turned out, no such deceleration was observed.

Someone didn't press the stop button quickly enough, so the nose of the airliner was seen emerging from the left hand side of the tower on the Chopper 5 footage.

Evidently the towers were a bit further to the right than planned in the test shot. There is no deceleration measured on entry, and the nose of the airplane image pops out the back side of the mask, now going much slower.

The signal on both Chopper 5 and Chopper 7 footage was quickly interrupted so as to hide the absence of any emerging debris from Chopper 7.

No, the Chopper 7 footage appears uninterrupted, and I've explained this repeatedly to Dave, and he can easily view this himself. Besides the Chopper 5 blackout, there is a blackout in CNN's live coverage, which was carrying a feed from Chopper 7, but dissolving from that into a different camera shot at the time.

I've never said they were "hiding the absence of any emerging debris". Chopper 5 was trying to hide the fact that they let the nose of the airplane slip out the back. Other channels were prepared to switch to different feeds, and/or go to black to hide any possible errors. CNN did both.

All remaining videotapes showing the far side of WTC2 from the impact were hurriedly retouched to show debris emerging from the point where the nose of the airplane on the composited video was seen.

Some of the subsequent videos simply had that part edited out. 

The 2nd and 3rd generation videos came out in the days and weeks following 9/11. They are inconsistent with one another. 2nd generation shots like Gamma Press show an airplane nose coming out. After it was discovered there was no exit hole, 3rd generation videos like Naudet show dust.

Point number one is one of causality. The Chopper 7 video was interrupted before the debris emerged, and therefore before the operator error (in Ace's theory) that resulted in the apparent emergence of the nose of the airliner. How did the operator who interrupted the Chopper 7 feed know that the compositing of the Chopper 5 feed was about to be interrupted too late? 

Strwaman, already answered.

Which feed was actually showing live as Flight 175 hit the tower?

None of them. No live shot showed an airplane hitting anything. How many times must I repeat this?

If it was only Chopper 5, there was no need to show Chopper 7, just hold it back and release it a few days later suitably doctored. If it was only Chopper 7, there was even less need to show Chopper 5; just cut off a few frames earlier, leaving no need to alter all the other videos. And if it was both on different stations, then Ace's theory requires a violation of causality. There is no possible scenario for the coincidence between the cutoffs of Chopper 5 and Chopper 7 feed interruptions that makes a shred of sense, other than just that is was a coincidence.

Chopper 5 and Chopper 7 were the two live shots. They planned to show them both, and there was no way to "hold them back".

Point number two is that the slowed videotape hypothesis makes no sense.It's not video tape, it's digital video.I've already touched on this, in that slowing down the airliner after it passes the tower edge is a stupid way to try to make it easier to stop the compositing at the right moment. 

Given the need for handles, and a desire to simulate some slowing of the airplane on entry, it was the best solution.

The big question, though, is: What was supposed to happen, and how does it make sense in this scenario? 

Answered.

Was the video feed supposed to switch abruptly back to a genuine live feed? Unlikely, because the sky would abruptly chance colour. 

I think Dave meant, "the sky would abruptly change colour". And no it would not. Where the hell does he get that idea? The airplane layer is done playing, and the live camera shot is still there. We have two layers of the camera shot, one with the sky transparent, one normal. It is impossible to distinguish between that and the underlying shot.

Was the airplane video supposed to freeze-frame when the airplane had passed behind the tower? 

Answered. It was supposed to slow down and stop/disappear.

If so, why not simply do so in advance, using a video which simply replicated all the frames after the airliner had passed the tower edge with a single frame in which the airliner was hidden? 

Answered. 

It would have been trivially simple to construct such a video - or, nearly as simply, to construct one where the airliner is clipped off the images along a line down the centre of the tower - leaving no possibility of the error Ace claims occurred. 

That is not possible. It is not possible to know in real-time where the center of the tower is. That would require motion tracking the tower in real time. 

Yet, instead of making up a suitable video ahead of time, Ace wants us to believe that the conspirators let all their plans stand or fall on the ability of one technician to press the right button within a second or so of the right moment, and that the conspiracy is revealed because he forgot to do it.

Having finished his setting up his  strawman, Rogers proceeds to attack it. 

It's a classic piece of conspiracist logic. The planners had to be at the same time devilishly clever enough to understand that hundreds of thousands of people would honestly believe they'd seen a real plane hit WTC2 because they were told on TV that they must have seen it, technically able enough to perform a feat of real-time video compositing far beyond anything that had ever even been attempted before, and yet stupid enough to leave the split-second timing required to Joe Schmoe down in the video suite, who forgot to press the big red button at exactly the right moment.

No, I'm quite sure they left the timing to Joe Schmoe in the helicopter, and that would be Kai Simonsen on Chopper 5. 

Funnily enough, the parts where the conspirators are required to be fiendishly clever are always the parts the conspiracist can simply handwave away. And yet it turns out that the parts where the conspiracist needs a detailed explanation of the sequence of events are always the parts where the conspirators are required to be unable to formulate a coherent plan. Almost as if the fault were not in the hypothetical conspirators, but in the people formulating the hypotheses.

Dave

I have detailed the plan that must have been implemented. The fact that Dave Rogers needs to so completely misstate it, speaks volumes.