I just got this email from a friend, who is admittedley a well of ignorance.
Could someone please just quickly confirm or deny this?
Here’s the email:
The more I read this over, the more stupid, and irrelevant it sounds (Why would 3 arab men be searching marshes 2 weeks prior? Could the guy have positively identified them as Arabs? especially since the hijackers took great pains to not appear arab. How could this guy identify what they were doing as “searching”? Is this a common place for people to be? Would the cops really put 6 undercover men on an area simply because there happened to be 3 arab guys hanging out? The ignorance goes on and on). But is there even a shred of truth to anything here, or is this completely pulled out of someone’s ass?
How does this supposed witness to suspicious Arabic people know that the cops put 6 undercovers in the area? If he knew about them then they’re hardly undercover are they?
For the debris on the runway, I read the wires for a living (newspaper copy editor) and not a shred of that has appeared.
As for the arabs, can’t prove a negative, but why 6 undercover agents? Why not just have the cops come out. And in these times, you think only 6 would be sent? Reporting Arab men near a runway would bring out a battalion plus the SWAT team.
Eh, Moe, it’s so poorly written that it just sounds like your friend is retailing something he heard from somebody. It doesn’t even sound like a well-organized UL, just a garbled version of stuff he thinks he heard, or knows.
And if you’ve ever worked in a marsh, you know that searching it in a suit would be a really good way to ruin a suit. (I’m assuming he means business suit)
[hijack :eek: …Ok, poor choice of words.]
If terrorists actually did this, wouldn’t they claim responsibility? How does a plane crash through mechanical error terrorize a nation into altering its foreign policy?
[/end poor choice of words]
First off, it’s a near certainty that if unauthorized people (arabic or not) were anywhere near the planes, it would have been publicized and the airport shut down.
Secondly, if there had been any information (true story or UL) out there about suspicious people (arabic or not) being involved, I would imagine that it would at least be mentioned on the snopes page discussing the crash.
You may have discovered a fledgling UL. Go ahead and send it to snopes. See if you can get mentioned.
Okay. Here is a map, showing JFK and where the plane crashed. It also shows a schematic of where the pieces were found. No pieces were found “on the runway”. There isn’t a scale of miles on the Beeb’s map, but I have a New York state gazeteer open on my lap here, and I’ve got a ruler and I’m not afraid to use it. JFK Airport is about 5 miles from where the plane crashed. The runway would have been 5 miles “back there”. And a CNN search for “587 pieces runway” returns 0 results. So it looks like that part is wrong.
JFK is surrounded on three sides (north, east, southeast) by residential areas, but the long straight southwest side faces directly out over the marshes and open water, in the direction Flight 587 was traveling when it went down. I am not counting living in the Queens neighborhoods of Neponsit or Belle Harbor, which is where the plane went down, as “close to JFK”. Generally, colloquially, living “close to” an airport means “in a neighborhood right next to it”.
Okay, so if the guy DID live “close to JFK” and he HAD looked out his window, he couldn’t have seen Arab men searching the marshes near where the plane went down, because the plane went down 5 miles away.
Here is a slightly different map. In order for him to have looked out his window and seen Arab men searching the marshes near where the plane went down, he would have had to live 5 miles away from JFK.
JFK Airport is about 5 miles from where the plane crashed. The runway would have been 5 miles “back there”. And a CNN search for “587 pieces runway” returns 0 results. So it looks like that part is wrong.