4. Maps
Now please
refer to Maps 1 and 2 and consider the proposition in
reverse.
Assume as a given the information that a civilian airliner
will be deliberately flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center
at 8.46 am on the morning of 11 September, 2001, hitting the tower head on
at 450 m.p.h. after flying in a straight line towards it, at a constant
height of about 1,200 feet, impacting at around floor 95 (15 or so from
the top of the tower) to contain the death toll to roughly 2,000*; we
need propaganda film of this event, showing the last seconds of the
plane's flight (just in case there are no eyewitnesses, in which case the
fire could have been caused by something inside the building) and allowing
a close-up of the damage to the building after impact, which means filming
from somewhere north of the tower.
* Can there be any other
explanation for the impact height? If the hijackers, as we are assured,
wanted to wreak maximum death, what conceivable reason could they have for
hitting the tower at a point that would allow the vast majority to
evacuate the building which is exactly what happened? Everyone above
the impact died and everyone below it didn't, for perfectly obvious,
predictable reasons, well known to every fire service in the world
mainly, that fire always burns upwards: why would that fact not have
occurred to people who wanted as many as possible to die? They were
brilliant enough to get the planes from Boston to New York, outsmarting
the entire US air defense system but why bother giving any thought to
where to hit the buildings, if and when they ever reached them? What
difference would it make? A difference of about 15,000 or, in
percentage terms, an 85% survival rate; to the hijackers, 85% failure.
Alternatively, and more credibly, to folk who only wanted about
2,000 the Pentagon's death actuaries, with their 1941 model giving a
rough idea of how many it takes to justify getting the USA into a major
war a 100% success.
Obviously, the film would have to be
disguised as "accidental," so a cover story has to be contrived, and a
suitable filming location chosen. This is no doubt exactly how the Naudet
film was organised by setting requirements, and trying to solve all the
problems involved in a brainstorming session like the one in the film
"Wag the Dog", about a fabricated war, ironically starring Robert De
Niro, who, even more ironically, was somehow persuaded to introduce the
original TV version of the Naudet film, lending it some much-needed
credibility, when he and his management should have known better.
Strangely, when the film was released on VHS and DVD, it included new
footage and 52 extra minutes of interviews, but De Niros contribution had
been completely removed: did he get wise?
MAP
1
Streets Buildings
1
West Broadway A AT&T Building (430')
2
Church Street B
Tribeca Grand Hotel (85')
3
Broadway C
Western Union Building (370')
4 Cortland
Avenue D AT&T "Long Lines" Building (551')
5
Lafayette Street E Tribeca Tower
(545')
6 Centre
Street F Jacob
K. Javits Federal Building
(587')
G
One World Trade Center (1,368')
MAP 2
Showing:
Approximate flight path of American Airlines
Flight 11
Time scale of last ten seconds of flight (1/8 of a mile a
second at 450 m.p.h.)
Jules Naudet's location between NE and SE corners
of Church/Lispenard intersection
12Ί angle between Naudet's position
and flight path as measured from One WTC
The vast majority of Manhattan's population
at any given time is either inside a building home, school, workplace,
etc or a vehicle car, bus, subway, etc. Of the small minority who are
outside on the street, on foot, most of those are moving towards a
destination. It would be virtually impossible to capture the impact either
from inside a building or vehicle, certainly a moving one, or while
walking, so the photographer has to be outside, on the street, stationary.
The most convenient pretext for being in a certain place, at a
certain time, is to use people who have to be at any place, at
any time one of the emergency services: firemen, for example. But
firemen don't normally carry cameras with them. Solution: have someone
else filming them, for a documentary. But the film couldn't be about a
fire, if we need to capture the plane: it would be too distracting and too
dangerous. The plane would only be audible and visible for about ten
seconds from any one point in the city from most places, with a sudden
increase in volume and visibility and then fading away again just as
suddenly it would only be at maximum volume for one or two seconds. Ten,
or even two, seconds of loud extraneous noise near the camera a truck
engine, a pneumatic drill could completely drown out the plane's
engines. What we really need is a silent emergency a gas leak, for
example.
Since we want to avoid filming the plane in motion, which
might blur the impact shot, we need an excuse for only filming the last
few seconds, preferably from behind the plane but not straight behind
it, because that would look too convenient; as would managing to grab a
camera, or start filming, just before the impact even if there was
enough time to do it. The best method is simply to have the plane hidden
from view temporarily plausible enough, in a city as full of tall
buildings as New York. Not that you need a tall building to hide a plane
or even the World Trade Center towers.
If they were the only
buildings in New York, and the rest of it was flat, it would be easily
possible to hide them from one person's view by having someone else
standing in the way an adult in front of a child, for example or, as
shown in the Naudet film (Picture 1a in Appendix 4), a fireman filmed from
a child's height. Or the camera's view could be blocked by having the lens
coated in dust as in other scenes from the Naudet film, as it happens.
Not to mention other filming hazards like lampposts, traffic lights, road
signs, tree branches, birds, etc all of them to be seen in the film. The
number of streets it might be possible to use for filming is extremely
limited, and for these purposes I would reduce it to the six north-south
streets shown in Map 1 in eastwards order, West Broadway, Church Street,
Broadway, Cortland Avenue, Lafayette Street and Centre Street.
Map 3 (Scale 1:4125)
JN:
Jules Naudet (position marked as red dot)
A-G: as Map 1; other
buildings mentioned in text (with heights)
H: SoHo Grand Hotel
(176')
I: Post Office (24')
J: NYPD First Division Headquarters
(45')
K: FDNY Ladder 8, 14 North Moore Street (35')
L: FDNY Engine
7/Ladder 1, 100 Duane Street (40')
M: Seven World Trade Center (570'
rebuilt 2005, 741')
N: Two World Trade Center (1,362')
In Map 3, all areas shaded blue show blind spots as in Map
1, areas from which it was impossible to see any of the World Trade Center
towers but these are only some of those areas. Virtually the
entire length of the west side of Church Street for example would be
shaded blue in a complete mapping. The significance of the red lines
leading from the Trade Center towers (G and N) up to the top right is that
if Naudet moves along Lispenard Street east or west over either of those
lines, he completely loses sight of both towers. The dot showing his
position, just off the pavement at the NE corner of the intersection, is
in the exact centre of the WTC's "window of visibility" just as the
towers are right in the centre of his impact shot, with an equal width of
sky on either side the two facts being linked. He could have been
standing anywhere at that crossroads: within those four corners, can it
credibly be pure chance that he was standing at the exact midpoint of the
WTC's visibility?
Map 4: A photographic version of Map 3,
with only the larger buildings and Naudet's position identified.