Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Mike the Mechanic?

I started a thread on this ealier on the JREF forum, but didn't want to make a blog post until I had done more research. In the tradition of Lauro Chavez and "Mike the EMT", the troofers have come up with yet another "whistleblower" this time an anonymous American Airlines mechanic who claims to have provided a page from a manual showing that airfones were not in place on AA 757s during the September 11th attacks. This document is used as the centerpiece for yet another article on the subject by David Ray Griffin, apparently retracting his previous retraction on the same subject, and Rob Balsamo.

The fact that airfones were removed from 757s is not under dispute, in fact I first pointed out that Airfones were being removed in February 2002 in my first post on this subject. While doing a little research today, I even found more news reports backing this up:

So the only relevant point of contention is, when the phones were removed. While there aren't (thus far) glaringly obvious Lauro Chavez/Jesse MacBeth signs of tampering, that is where the document gets suspicious.




















Note, several of these points have been brought up by JREF posters, so I don't claim these are all my original thoughts.

1. The date on the top for the software version (Jan 28/2007) coincidentally matches up with the date at the bottom (1/28/2001), leaving open the possibility that the last number was changed.

2. The date at the very top is blacked out. While it makes sense to black out personal information, why would you go to the trouble of blacking out the date, which is the most important piece of information in this document, unless you were trying to obscure something?

3. This document does not actually deal with the deactivation of the phones, those documents are mentioned as ECO F0878, F1463, and F1532, which conveniently were not found.

4. This document lays out the operation of the phones, which would seem pretty pointless if it were produced after the phones had been deactivated and\or removed.

5. The date in question "01/28/2001" is faded, and different in appearance than the entire rest of the document.

6. Right above the date, the word "Page", appears as "Pace" with the bottom of the letter "g" having been cut off for some reason, as if it were cut off during an editing operation.

None of this is definitive by any means, but considering this is based on anonymous sources channeled through people who will go to anything to promote their conspiracy theories, it is not credible thus far.

Labels: ,