Do You Believe a Passenger Jet Hit the Pentagon on 9/11? These Men Say You've Been 'PentaConned!'
By NICK SCHOU Thursday, Aug 14 2008
OC Weekly
Those interviews made Mike Walter probably the most well-known eyewitness to what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11, which is why, a little more than five years later, in November 2006, he found himself hosting a barbecue for a group of eager young men who were making Loose Change, a documentary about the terrorist attacks. After getting a telephone call from a self-described 9/11 researcher named Russell Pickering, Walter invited Pickering and Dylan Avery, the film's director, to his house in Fairfax, Virginia.
They showed up with a couple of other people Walter had never spoken with: Craig Ranke, a fast talker with wild eyes, and Aldo Marquis, a heavyset guy who didn't talk much. The two said they were helping Avery and Pickering with research for their film. Walter chatted casually with the pair, and at one point, he realized that Ranke was surreptitiously tape-recording the conversation.
Although Pickering and Avery seemed relatively normal, Ranke and Marquis appeared to be on a mission to prove that the Pentagon plane crash never happened. They wouldn't listen to anything that contradicted this notion.
Ranke, a 39-year-old software engineer and part-time drummer for the reggae band the Stemz, has driven all the way from the condominium he shares with his girlfiend in San Juan Capistrano.
The 32-year-old Marquis, an amateur drummer and hip-hop MC who also digs reggae ("I find a similarity between what is said in the music and what it is I have done in regards to the Pentagon attack," he says) describes himself as "just a regular cat, hanging out with friends, family and my daughter," a framed photograph of whom beams down from above the mantelpiece.
Marquis never attended college. After graduating with honors from Carson High School, he went straight into sales and telemarketing. He is Ranke's co-worker twice over. As co-founders of the Citizen Investigation Team, they collaborate in their efforts to prove military deception about the Pentagon attack, but they also work together as software engineers in Mission Viejo.
Ranke and Marquis believe that many people they've run across, whether conspiracy theorists such as Pickering or "supposed" eyewitnesses to the Pentagon crash, are actually "deep-cover operatives" or "assets" tasked by the U.S. government to mislead the public and stymie their efforts to reveal the "truth." They say their phones have been tapped and believe that if they weren't able to place all their "research" on the Internet, unspecified government forces would have harmed them by now.
When he wasn't busy at his day job or drumming for the Stemz, Ranke's research led him to an online web forum hosted by Marquis' brother. Known as Humans Against New World Order, it dealt mostly with vote-fraud conspiracy theories. Occasionally, the group would get together in person—10 or 15 people at a house in Long Beach, for example—but mostly, members kept in contact via chat rooms. Eventually, Marquis says, the group enjoyed 8,000 regular commenters. "The whole point was to talk and inform people," he says. "But I was of the mindset that we had to do research, we had to have a focal point, something obviously related to 9/11 because that was the biggest thing for most of the people."
For Marquis, that focal point became the Pentagon crash. He began to collect as much information as he could find about the event while discussing his findings with other amateur researchers. He became particularly interested in photographs of airplane debris at the crash site. When another researcher insisted that one photograph supposedly showing part of a Boeing jet-engine casing actually showed debris from an A-3 Skywarrior—a strategic bomber—Marquis spent days surfing the web until he found an actual photograph of that particular Skywarrior part. It didn't look anything like the debris at the crash site.
"The dude was lying!" Ranke says.
Marquis e-mailed the other researcher and showed him what he'd found.
"He would e-mail me back—don't get caught in the minutiae," Marquis says. "Either the guy was an operative or an asset put out there to peddle this disinformation."
By this time, a French writer named Thierry Meyssan had written a book, Le Pentagate, claiming that a cruise missile caused the explosion at the Pentagon, not a passenger jet. In writing the book, Meyssan distorted quotes from eyewitnesses such as USA Today's Mike Walter to support his theory. Walter had stated in one interview that the plane looked like a "cruise missile with wings"; Meyssan abbreviated the quote so that it appeared Walter had actually stated that he saw a "cruise missile" hit the Pentagon.
Take the bizarre disclaimer at the end of the film: "Citizen Investigation Team is not directly accusing anyone specific [sic] featured in this presentation as being complicit in the crime," it says. "CIT does not call for an investigation into if 9/11 was an inside job. We call for hearings that must lead to indictments uncovering who the masterminds and complicit operatives really are."
"Among all these very dubious witnesses, there are six to seven USA Today editors and reporters in a quarter-mile stretch of highway at the most crucial point to see the alleged impact, the most controversial event in history," Marquis says, stretched back in his chair, beer in hand. Ranke, eager to voice his own suspicions, nods his head vigorously in agreement while simultaneously scrolling through myriad aerial photographs of the Pentagon on his laptop.
"You want me to cut to the chase?" Marquis interrupts. "He's an operative. One hundred percent, without a doubt. A deep-cover operative or asset."
http://www.ocweekly.com/2008-08-14/features/pentaconned/