Signal/noise

And I know that you know that I know that you show
Something is tearing up your mind. - Bob Dylan

Determining the correct signal-to-noise ratio of history - especially suppressed history - is virtually impossible. While we're still living it, it is impossible. Still, even if the exact ratio eludes us, we need to be serious about the process of seperating signal from noise. The signature mass casuality events of our age carry a lot of noise - most of it background and incidental, but some of it intentional and malicious - and if we aren't smart about what we do with the noise, we risk losing the signal.

Initially and properly following a crime, everything should get swept up as potential evidence. But everything should not stay there: there must be, subsequently, a filtering process to assess evidentiary value. The value of the evidence cannot be judged by gross weight alone: we don't make a case by indiscriminately throwing everything we have. That doesn't get us a serious hearing. That just sets people ducking.

For a small for instance of background noise from 9/11, I suggest "Atta's passport." First of all, of course, it wasn't Atta's, but rather Satam Al Suqami's. But four years after the event, it's still frequently misidentified by too many people who should know better. (Ed Asner made the mistake last year in his videotaped greeting to the 9/11 International Inquiries. I know - it's Ed Asner - but it started my experience of the inquiry on a bum foot, and set a tone that invited unchallenged assumptions.)

The recovery of the passport soon after the attacks set off early alarms for many that things were not as they seemed. And if news of the passport's recovery got people thinking that something wasn't right, then good: everything was wrong. But anomalous events, such as drilling passenger jets at excess speed into office towers, are going to generate anomalous results - results that have nothing to do with the planning of the crime or its cover-up. I've heard the passport sarcastically described as "miraculously unscathed," which it wasn't, and as "fluttering down," which it didn't. It was propelled, along with Suqami's remains and much debris from the impact of Flight 11, onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. Only those few who assert there no patsy hijackers at all aboard the airplanes need the passport to have been planted. And if the necessity of a hypothesis makes too many demands of this sort upon evidence, then that's good indication that the hypothesis should probably be abandoned.

(Much more suspicious, yet overshadowed by the passport in popular thought, was the alleged finding of an Arabic flight manual in Atta's rental car left at Logan airport. The convenience was reminiscent of the early framing of the narrative regarding Lee Harvey Oswald, and anticipated the discovery of Korans in cars nearby the Madrid bombings.)

An example of intentional noise may be Delmart Vreeland. Without rehashing the story, I think Vreeland was an unwitting agent of disinformation who was meant to serve a dual purpose. First, preemptively strike "outrageous conspiracy theories" by poisoning the well with the early word of a con artist. For the first few months following the attacks Vreeland's warning was the story, but Vreeland, the ONI asset, was also a criminal and a liar. To believe him was to discredit yourself. It was Vreeland that David Corn latched onto in his hatchet job on Michael Ruppert that did so much early damage to the reputation of 9/11 skepticism. In retrospect, it almost looks like it was supposed to be that way. Second, for those who went all the way with Vreeland, who were the sponsors of the attacks according to his sources? Why, Russia and Iraq, of course. US authorities were "out of the loop." Imagine that.

It's still early days for London, so it's even harder to tell signal from noise. Remember the Kingstar van across from the bus blast? One of Kingstar's clients "is AMEC, which was not only involved in the renovation of the attacked wing of the Pentagon on Sep11th, but also in the controlled removal of the rubble in DC and at Ground Zero, New York." Twenty-six year old Anthony Fatayi-Williams was one of those killed on the #30 bus. Fatay-Williams was a Nigerian-born exective of AMEC, which is also a rival of Halliburton's in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Signal or noise? I don't know. There may be no there there, but until we know for certain, or as certain as we can know anything here, there's no harm poking around and asking questions, so long as we're prepared to discard the line of inquiry if it comes to nothing. We need to be humble enough to sometimes back up the way we came, saying "I wouldn't go down there if I were you" to people we pass on the way, rather than bash our heads stubbornly against dead ends, shouting "After me!" There is, after all, a synchronicity to ordinary events, so we should admit that it is present in extraordinary events as well.

Now, the simultaneous wargames and simulations, on both 9/11 and 7/7 - this, so to speak, is a there, if there ever was one.