The Possibility That Nobody Died on 9/11

The notion of 'thousands of victims' was crucial to generate universal public outrage. However, having 3000 angry families breathing down their necks was never part of the perps' demented plan. Our ongoing analyses and investigations suggest that NO one died on 9/11.
hoi.polloi
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The Possibility That Nobody Died on 9/11

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POSSIBILITY THAT NOBODY DIED ON 9/11

Many places besides this forum are discussing the possibility that the victim numbers of the "al Qaeda" acts are greatly inflated (not to mention the numbers supposedly in any kind of organization the government refers to as "extremist Muslim terrorists"). The public response to the war on terror has been mildly successful for the war-mongers at best. Yet, there is enough padding given to them by obedient serfs that don't check the hand full of bullies making a killing off of killing people, to allow their illegal and evil wars to go through. In the public, civil liberties are continually advancing against the government's twisted idea of flourishing through bloodshed; increasingly, people are refusing to have the radiation-heavy full body scans at airports, including a pilot who became famous overnight for telling the groping inspector "if you touch my junk [genitalia], I'll have you arrested" and then being threatened unfairly with a government fine for refusing the private inspectors who never caught any fictional "al Qaeda" characters anyway. Bless that man for making a stand! We should all be doing the same when are given opportunities to make a peaceful statement for freedom. If we did, there would be even less reason than they say there is now for sending troops and bombs into foreign countries.

Forsooth, before it was accepted that there may have been no "passenger-filled airplanes" cruising smoothly into steel skyscrapers in 2001, many had already discussed the possibility that no such thing divebombed into the Pentagon or a Pennsylvania field, and rightly pointed out that there hasn't been any evidence for such things. The number of crying "family members" or grave-side photos or whatever else that was presented as evidence of deaths did nothing to sway such people from arguing with facts - there simply was not evidence of an airplane crash in either case - who were these "family members" and "friends" mourning? The possibility that these pictures were fake was left hanging in the air like an invisible monolith - and had to be squashed by the government to prevent their entire story from breaking down.

Alex Jones - who had been sent in to manage the public perception of the "Waco" incident - was called again to save the government's ass. The official government answer - you read me correctly, official government answer - to the "are all these pictures, public appearances and radio interviews fake?" question was answered when "alternative" theorists were sent in by the government to stop people from questioning whether their government had the power to control so much media. "Alternative" theorists included Michael Moore, Alex Jones and Dylan Avery and their mission was to give people a convoluted explanation for passengers (of the unproven airplanes) being landed elsewhere and killed. This is what caused people to explain it that way - despite all lack of evidence. At last they had relief from the possibility of total government control of the media - an excuse for the "family" and "friend" photos and media showcases shown as evidence of the government's stories of 3,000 American deaths to be somehow real. How Americans love to have their Hollywood-linked heartstrings pulled!

Still, the existence of airplanes was and is problematic, and became moreso as these "alternative" theorists softly herded people away from the possibility of fewer passenger deaths into the realm of accepting all four "crashed airplane" stories of 9/11 and finally into the completely herded and government controlled "Tea Party" created as a pro-oligarchy pro-plutocratic non-democratic Laissez-faire capitalistic extremist party that essentially created this whole "War/Security-Profiteers More Equal Than Others" problem in the first place.

Strangely, and we can only assume this is because of the power of imagery to control our perceptions, the people who remained unconvinced of the slime-licking Ron Paul-pumping Alex Jones and his pundit parade, and who remained steadfast on the fact that no planes ever crashed at the Pentagon or Shanksville, still believed that two passenger airplanes did crash into the World Trade Center in New York City - and that the dramatic lack of witness testimony - even compared to Pentagon or Shanksville - for such an event was somehow explicable because of lack of visibility for most people. Despite the suggestion that this would leave most people out of the "live witness" story and placed in the "television witness" story, they believed their own story-telling about "millions of eye-witnesses" somehow holding water. Millions of television watchers, radio listeners, "smells of death"-smellers (you ever been to New York? It smells of death pretty much 24/7) and running crowds does not millions of eye-witnesses make. Indeed, the entire elaborate stories people were inventing to coincide with their "witness to television" testimony smelled more of War of the Worlds confusion than a record of reality.

Consider too that the staged acts at Pentagon and Shanksville had more than a convincing number of witnesses of airplane strikes. They even had witnesses of bombers, UAVs and a host of other stories prepared to shield the original from outside doubt. It didn't make the airplane crashes there any more credible - in fact it lent weight to the desperation with which the government was treating the story - willing to employ the news media to constantly push it through invented testimony, plug it into any sort of common conspiracy theory that will grab people's attentions and hire experts to explain the "unlikely but true" physics. Yet, here, in the amazing case of New York City where millions of people live and more millions visit on a daily basis, with nothing but a few hundred people claiming to have seen something - and a something that doesn't even coincide with the official story - we are not to assume that the witnesses essentially serve as the government's method of sneaking in a "passenger airplane" through the vast unlikelihood of such an event going unnoticed by a city with millions of inhabitants?

Finally, when those who doubted the entire story, and increasingly witnessed the government's vast empire of media trumpeting nation-wide about an "evil Muslim" attack, asked questions about the corrupt business interests involved in the World Trade Center, and wondered whether anybody died there at all, the people who doubted two or four fake airplane crashes said, "STOP". That's too far. Let's just stop with two or four fake airplanes. Despite the complexity of media stories the government invented to try to "prove" the obviously fake airplane crashes of the Pentagon and Shanksville, despite the incredible gullibility of a city that found itself served a relatively negligible amount of witnesses endorsing even the idea of something colliding with one or more of the World Trade Center towers, when it comes to lying about the number of people in a closed, obsolete, redundant block of useless real estate who died during all the fictional "airplane crash" exercises, then it's simply going too far.

Think about it; the easiest number of deaths to fake, inflate or deflate at will, are the ones that simply must have been real?

There are no passenger load manifests for a building (and there weren't any for the four "airplanes" either but that's another incredibly ridiculous story), there is no government oversight of people exiting or entering a building using some kind of traceable paperwork. (And I personally don't think there needs to be though the security profiteers might disagree!) There could really have been any number of people physically inside the buildings from 0 to 20,000 or more.

Why have any?

If you are going to fake airplane crashes with fictional airplanes with doubtful tail numbers and insider-trading airline companies, if you are going to hire your emergency pundits Michael Moore and Alex Jones to admit where your vast story went wrong in several areas just to preserve the tiny bit of the story that most Americans believe and try to tow them back into line, if you are going to have an infamously wealthy series of contractors bidding on the buildings such as Peter Munk and Larry Silverstein, and your own cousin Marvin Bush owns the security company that walks freely around the entire complex - why would you have anybody die at all? You wouldn't. Especially if you could temporarily fake a certain number of deaths that might be slightly believable for the number of agents and media stories you have to produce to manage them as formerly existing personnages.

You don't have to keep them alive. You just have to keep their stories alive - and the entire war on terror is justified for the patriotic Americans who leaped into action to fend off the invading hoards of saber-rattling Muslims. (Even if Americans had to be the ones flying across an ocean and two seas just to invade the area of the "looming invaders").

The entire story is a sad joke that actually, thankfully, fewer Americans fell for than the government would have liked. Now let's make it clear to those who still endorse the government's errant secret dealings with Israel, Saudi Arabia, NGOs and black ops contractors that they were wrong about "3,000 American innocents killed" for whatever conspiracy theory reason purported by the media or its "alternative" ilk -- and move on, together, with the world, in apologizing to its citizenry for such bogus hokum being shoved down our throats to keep the war-profiteers in action.



RETURNING CONTRIBUTORS: PICK A VICSIM TO ADOPT

To celebrate the opening of the new forum, please select a story about the 3,000 to 6,000 vicsims (simulated victims) purported to have existed, and re-post about your favorite fake story that you personally found the most compelling in all this mess. You can have already covered the Vicsim if you want, we just want researchers to post about a favorite story of counterfeiting human beings that they found compelling and/or amusing. It can be the SSN problems, Flip-Flopped pictures - or a favorite fake person or event. Let's have fun exposing this nightmare as the fiction it is!
simonshack
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Unread post by simonshack »

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Please go to this page for a concise overview of the VICSIM issue:
THE MEMORIAL SCAMS: http://www.septemberclues.org/vicsims_ ... alyses.htm

For an in-depth analysis of the VICSIM issue, please read the full 80-page pdf by Hoi Polloi:
THE VICSIM REPORT: http://www.septemberclues.org/vicsims.htm


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Here's a short brief compilation of obvious pictorial scams to be found in the various 9/11 memorials:


THE HUG-ME CLONES "Hug me! It makes me so much realer!"


ImageImage
Howard Kestenbaum

ImageImage
Christopher Santora

ImageImage
Edward Joseph Mardovich

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Amy O'Doherty - (Voices of September vs Cantor Fitzgerald Memorials)

ImageImage
Michelle Scarpitta

ImageImage
Teresa Marianne Simone

Image

Image


You MUST ask yourself this simple question: Why are so many photos of "9/11 victims" so blatantly photoshopped?
If you don't ask yourself that question, I won't apologize for saying that you are in total denial... Not a good thing to be in.



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UPDATE:

THE DEFINITIVE HUG-ME-CLONES COLLECTION : http://septclues.com/VICSIMS/AAA_HugMeC ... ETE_01.jpg
simonshack
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MORPHING SOFTWARE FLAWS

I find it interesting to detect the flaws and limits of the primitive morphing software used to craft the vicsim portraits. It would appear one of the major deficiencies of their software were what we may call 'symmetry distortion' - when performing "3D" rotations and such, in order to obtain 2 "different portraits" out of a given template. This often affected, notably, the ratio between L/R eye-shape and size. Here are a few examples - (but there are, of course, many more):

"THOMAS GALVIN"
ImageImage
sources: http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/me ... /1898.html
http://www.legacy.com/sept11/story.aspx?personid=96026

"JEFFREY GOLDFLAM"
Image Image
sources : http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/mcall/ ... pid=129422
http://www.cantorfamilies.com/goldflam-jeffrey/

Both were allegedly employed at Cantor Fitgerald.

GALVIN : When his head rotates to his right, his RIGHT eye 'inflates'.
GOLDFLAM : When his head rotates to his right, his LEFT eye 'inflates'.

But wait: Are you kidding me? Are Galvin and Goldflam really supposed to be two different 9/11 victims?
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Another notable problem was their photo manipulation software's poor flexibility in handling lighting conditions. In fact, lighting adjustments/alterations were often simply ignored altogether, the forging crew retaining identical lighting for 2 totally different "snapshots". This made for absurd pairs of portraits such as these: [NOTE: If you have HTTP blocking service, linked pictures to the official Voices of September site may not appear]

BRAD VAN HOORN
Image Image
source: http://livingmemorial.voicesofseptember ... hoorn-brad

The odds of these 2 very peculiar lighting/shadings perhaps being coincidental/ pure happenstance ? Forget about it. And that's not even considering that the shots are virtually identical in all aspects - but for Brad's wardrobe...

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So no wonder that - in frustration over their crappy morphing machines - the forging crew sometimes simply slapped a hat on top of a given head template to obtain - abracadabra - 2 "different" portraits of a given vicsim... What lazy dogs! :lol:

FIREFIGHTER FREDERICK ILL
ImageImage
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/me ... /2245.html
http://www.voicesofseptember11.org/dev/ ... 1259231463


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We may only imagine the current despair of the compilers of the official, final memorials such as "VOICES OF SEPT11" as they bump into the more dreadful vicsim portraits in their old database. It's rather amusing to detect the tiny tricks they do - in a last, desperate attempt to 'fix' the most alarming horrors. For instance, the edgy "hatchback head" of this man was all-too-creepy, so "VOICES" has simply cropped it ever so slightly to 'smooth it out'... :P


RICKNAUTH JAGGERNAUTH
(original portrait)__(cropped portrait for National Memorial use)
ImageImage


Original portrait on the FRED og FRIHED memorial: http://terror.fredogfrihed.dk/New%20Yor ... 1101-5.htm
Cropped portrait on the VOICES memorial: http://www.voicesofseptember11.org/dev/ ... =925015058


But an even cruder way of "fixing" the ghastly vicsim portraits is just to blur them into "pixel soup".
Look what VOICES OF SEPT11 have done with the elephant-eared "EDWARD J. MARTINEZ". There is absolutely NO reason why the official memorial for the $1billion NATIONAL MUSEUM should have badly cropped & downgraded .jpg versions of the 9/11 victims - if not for motives of deliberate obfuscation:

FRED OG FRIHED MEMORIAL________VOICES OF SEPT11 MEMORIAL
-----------------------------"Edward Martinez"------------------------------
Image______________Image

FRED OG FRIHED MEMORIAL________VOICES OF SEPT11 MEMORIAL
-----------------------------"Barbara Keating"------------------------------
Image______________Image

FRED OG FRIHED MEMORIAL________VOICES OF SEPT11 MEMORIAL
-----------------------------"Anna Laverty"------------------------------
Image______________Image

FRED OG FRIHED MEMORIAL________VOICES OF SEPT11 MEMORIAL
-----------------------------"Virginia Jablonski"------------------------------
Image______________Image
simonshack
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MISSING IN FICTION
The all-too-frequent-fliers of a planeless plan


by Simon Shack - August 2010

Image"So Real"

No planes crashed on 9/11. No hijackings took place and there were no hijackers. No planes also means that no passengers were flying inside them. No people flew to their death out of the empty WTC towers - since empty buildings do not contain people. Yet, we all fell for the computer imagery aired on TV. Planes? Fliers? No. The only real fliers of that day turned up elsewhere - in the tens of thousands - plastered on the walls of Manhattan.

On the evening of 9/11 all around “Ground Zero”, candle vigils were being held for the “thousands of casualties” while clusters of fliers appeared all over the city walls: xeroxed portraits of men and women with big “MISSING” headings. A typical flier would read: “MISSING: My husband John Brown, height (so and so) hair (so and so) eyes (so and so) and a contact number. Lower Manhattan was literally blanketed with those Xerox copies - an allegedly "spontaneous effort by family members to trace their lost loved ones". The world was left silently watching, sharing the human grief. This was no time to ponder over the possible purpose of those flimsy fliers pleading for help to recover lost loved ones - much as one might do for errant cats and dogs.

Image"Everybody Tells A Story"

Naturally, those intensely emotional hours allowed no space for rational - and much less - cynical thought. To most people, at the time, these fliers covering the city walls seemed like the most natural thing in the world. But this was civilized New York City - not some barren beachfront washed away by a tsunami. What sort of results were these fliers supposed to achieve? Were they the carriers of some desperate, irrational hope? Wait - perhaps a widow's expectation was to receive a call from some sharp-eyed NYC shopkeeper...“Hello ma’am, an errant gentleman that looks like your missing husband just walked into my grocery-store in a daze. He’s covered in dust and looks hungry. Come over and pick him up!“

So what was the deal with those fliers? What sort of collective phenomena would have caused hundreds of families to reach for downtown Manhattan, on the evening of the tragedy, to plaster the city with “MISSING” fliers? If we are to have a rational discourse about this matter, we must first tackle one basic, elementary question: is THIS what people usually do after losing a loved one - in the aftermath of building collapses, earthquakes or any other such calamities? No. To stick fliers around the town is something you might (possibly) do when a stray kid is feared abducted, kidnapped or on the run. Even in such circumstances, families will prefer to rely on the authorities - not on flimsy fliers showing your telephone number. That's what people do when their pets have gone astray.

This issue merits serious consideration and needs to be resolved once and for all: we cannot keep on pretending that it was all part of the natural order of things. Let’s face it, the whole idea of these “MISSING” fliers is preposterous in the extreme. It was one thing to swallow the “spontaneous” nature of this bizarre, collective behavior in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It is another to accept it as such today. So do we have any lead to follow as to finding out who might have been behind this manifestly staged operation?

Image "A New Comedy Series"

It would seem so. And - lo and behold! - it leads us straight to the website of Steven Rosenbaum - the founder of Camera Planet and self-anointed "CURATOR" of all the 9/11 amateur videos. It so happens that his friend and fellow 'curator' Louis Nevaer, apparently, saved 5200 of those fliers from destruction just in time before the rains set in a few days later. But before we get to know Dr. Nevaer, let me first introduce you to Steven Rosenbaum - and his huge 9/11 video collection - that he purportedly acquired by putting up ads and fliers all around NYC...

http://thecameraplanetarchive.magnify.net/

Image STEVEN ROSENBAUM (founder of "Camera Planet")

As the story goes, in the aftermath of 9/11, Rosenbaum put up posters and fliers in NYC and placed an ad in The Village Voice “urgently requesting images that captured the attack, its aftermath and the mood of the city”. That effort seems to have worked out nicely. His 1,700 video clips of 9/11 constitute, he says, “the largest archive of my now dormant television production company, CameraPlanet”. His website tells us that seventy-six people contributed to these “500 hours of videos” (!!!), which are owned by Mr. Rosenbaum and his wife, Pamela Yoder. Mr. Rosenbaum happily boasts that two appraisers have valued his archive in excess of $1 million. In fact, he explains, he is working out an agreement with Bank of America, the company's primary lender. He wants to structure a deal with a donor that would keep the collection from being sold piecemeal, repay his company's debt of more than $500,000 and make the videos available to researchers, filmmakers and the public.

But Mr. Rosenbaum hastens to point out: "It's not about money. This collection is about five years of my life. We don't have the resources to make it available to researchers and other documentarians, and we are very selective in giving approval to use our video." Too bad. Mr. Rosenbaum apparently cares about documentarians and researchers; he just doesn’t have the “resources” to lend them his videos. What a crying shame. Inexplicably, his website mentions nothing about the history of the videos themselves. Not a single author of the 1,700 clips is cited anywhere. It appears that “the Best Documented Catastrophe in History” has a little problem; no one has a clue about who documented the unique, defining piece of history which Mr. Rosenbaum keeps in his custody.

We also learn from Mr. Rosenbaum’s website that his company, BNN TV, employs over 80 people and occupies five floors of a Fifth Avenue building in Manhattan. The proud slogan of his company is “BNN TV Changes the Way Stories Are Told”. His clients include CNN, CBS News, MSNBC, HBO and Court TV. His state-of-the-art video studio was among the first to adopt the advanced “Avid Media Composer nonlinear editing system”. Here’s an extract of Mr. Rosenbaum’s biography:

“Steve Rosenbaum is passionate about telling authentic visual stories. Raised in a family of storytellers (his mother was a writer; his uncle a White House correspondent), Rosenbaum was a filmmaker and magician before he began his career as an intern in an edit room at CBS News over 20 years ago. It was in this rarefied news environment that Rosenbaum discovered an unexpected gap between visual storytellers and the tools needed to produce a broadcast news story.”

In the light of this, one may legitimately suspect that ALL the available, so-called "amateur" footage of 9/11 originated from Mr. Rosenbaum - and may well have been crafted / digitally animated by his technologically advanced Camera Planet film studios. To be sure, and for the historical record, as I started researching / analyzing the 9/11 imagery back in 2005/2006, virtually every single "amateur" video I could find featured the "Camera Planet" watermark - as if all those clips (allegedly shot by various amateur videographers) were CP's private property or, in other words, as if CP owned the copyrights of them all ! Over time, this CP watermark disappeared from the "new", higher-resolution videos being released year after year (yes, we're asked to believe that people keep their 9/11 videos hidden in a drawer for years on end...). However, those "new" and sharper videos have turned out to be - in most instances - just re-rendered versions of the very same old (and blurry) Camera Planet material which I'd long become familiar with.

ImageImage LOUIS NEVAER- the flier collector

But let's return to the "MISSING" fliers stuck all over Manhattan. Rosenbaum's Camera Planet website also mentions this different and curious 9/11 collection. Its curator, Dr. Nevaer, apparently collected 5,200 of those “MISSING” fliers which covered the walls of New York City in the aftermath of the disaster. He then neatly restored them, framed them and took them on tour... an 18-month travelling exhibition around the world ! Here is Dr. Nevaer’s story, as narrated on the Camera Planet website:

“Dr.Louis Nevaer is also seeking a home for his collection. He is curator of an archive that contains 5,200 missing-persons fliers and related artifacts from the days after the attack in Lower Manhattan. An exhibition derived from it, "Missing: Last Seen at the World Trade Center," travelled for 18 months to 17 American cities, to Mexico City and Milan."These fliers were going to be discarded as litter, and if we didn't save them, then they'd be lost," Dr. Nevaer said. The flier collection has been catalogued and stored in climate-controlled warehouses in New York and Miami, "and we're negotiating with several museums," he said."We won't permit it to go to any institution that charges admission," Dr. Nevaer said. That rules out the 9/11 National Memorial & Museum planned for ground zero.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/nyreg ... ref=slogin&


What Dr. Nevaer fails to tell us is that his “flier-tour” was prematurely cancelled, after being repeatedly slashed by critics for its tackiness and bad taste. Dr. Nevaer is apparently an expert on Hispanic immigration in the US - and is rumored to have been a CIA informer. It would seem like an odd, sentimental hobby for such a character to arrange exhibits of “climate-controlled” xerox copies... On the website listing the venues of Dr. Nevaer’s bizarre, travelling exhibition. we may read:
The Fliers in New York For New Yorkers the fliers were a constant and powerful reminder of their lost neighbors. Although only 500-700 families could get to New York to create fliers, approximately 90,000 were hung. These fliers covered walls, lampposts, subway stops and phone booths all over the city. It was nearly impossible to go about life without encountering them.”
We can only marvel over Dr. Nevaer’s acuteness. Did he come to that “90,000” figure by estimating the city areas covered by the fliers? Did he ask each of the 700 families how many they had xeroxed? Did he stroll around Manhattan, counting them one by one? Or could he possibly have had any role in the gigantic "MISSING" fliers propaganda operation? In any case, the man who plausibly created the hypnotic 9/11 "amateur videos" and the man who plausibly directed the "MISSING" flier mass-hypnosis are no strangers to each other.

ImageImage

9/11 was but a foul skullduggery played out by a gang of quack magicians with friends in - very - high places. The ploy was as vile as can be: to distort reality using the full clout of the mass media. It aimed to convey the perception of loss: the loss of planes, the loss of lives, the loss of freedoms. On LIVE TV, animated imagery replaced the real-life events of the morning; a handful of frames simulating a digital airplane exploding in a digital tower sufficed to convey 'the loss of planes'. The 'loss of lives' was stage-managed in the streets for public consumption - and the stage was Manhattan itself. Behind a smokey stage curtain, a redundant building complex was bombed to oblivion - and went missing in action. People and planes went missing on fliers - or, if you will, missing in fiction.

ImageThe Black Boxes Treasure Hunt "Flier" :rolleyes:







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Just in case it gets removed one day, here's the full transcript of this must-read New York Times article:

The 500 Hours of 9/11

by Glenn Collins - New York Times, May 30, 2006

Image

A brown fedora rests abandoned in ground zero dust: owner's fate, unknown. In images shot from space, a plume of smoke rises miles above the World Trade Center. Two workers cling to a scaffold that dangles from an office building beneath the inferno. A handheld video camera, pointing at a north tower in flames, shakily veers to show the second hijacked jet striking the other tower

Those images, captured largely by amateurs, are moments from more than 500 hours of videos and films, the largest collection of raw visual data from what historians say is the best-documented catastrophe in history. About 1,700 clips from the collection have attracted more than a million hits in the three months since they were put on Google Video.

The 7,000-gigabyte archive was assembled by Steven Rosenbaum, a Manhattan-based documentary producer. In the days after the terrorist attacks, he put up posters and fliers and placed an ad in The Village Voice urgently requesting images that captured the attack, its aftermath and the mood of the city.

Image
Steven Rosenbaum and wife Pamela Yoder

Now his collection is the largest asset of his dormant television production company, CameraPlanet, and Mr. Rosenbaum is working out an agreement with the Bank of America, the company's primary lender. He wants to structure a deal with a donor, buyer or partner that would keep the collection from being sold piecemeal, would repay the company's debt of more than $500,000 and would make the videos available to researchers, filmmakers and the public.

As the fifth anniversary of the attack approaches, Mr. Rosenbaum is hardly alone among 9/11 collectors in struggling with financing, and with the need to find a permanent home for a repository and provide greater access to it.

Beyond at least 260 major private and institutional collections, an estimated 100,000 people have squirreled away 9/11 materials. They range from video and document collections to flags, badges, roadside shrines, electronic archives of trade center blogs and even compilations of conspiracy theory materials.

As yet, the logical repository for ground zero materials, the planned World Trade Center memorial and museum, has no place to store them, and it faces a budgetary and leadership crisis as well.

Beyond that, seeming to profit from 9/11 is still taboo. David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's in Manhattan, said his auction house has not been offered Sept. 11 collections to sell.

"Things from that day should be unsalable," he said, "and anything that is ghoulish is beyond the pale."

Among all the archives, Mr. Rosenbaum's video collection may be unique in that it can be sampled by anyone with access to the Web, at http://www.911archive.net/Google .

It is "an extraordinary compilation of perspectives, a very important archive to keep together," said Jan Seidler Ramirez, chief curator of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

Mr. Rosenbaum, 42, said that two appraisers had valued his archive in excess of $1 million.

"This collection is about five years of my life," Mr. Rosenbaum said. "It's not about money. We don't have the resources to make it available to researchers and other documentarians, and we are very selective in giving approval to use our video."

Mr. Rosenbaum's Google video clips are low-resolution teasers of longer sequences, and some have been encoded so that they cannot be downloaded, allowing Mr. Rosenbaum alone to approve uses of the full high-resolution images.

Seventy-six people contributed to the collection, which is owned by Mr. Rosenbaum and his business partner and wife, Pamela Yoder.

The archive's value is greatly enhanced, they say, by videotaped interviews with those who provided their pictures, "because in 40 years everyone who shot this video will be gone, and we think the circumstances are as important as the videos," Ms. Yoder said.

A few of the clips have been used in documentaries, including a film produced and directed by Mr. Rosenbaum, "Seven Days in September." In a review in 2002, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it "an almost unbearably powerful documentary."

When another director of documentaries, Ric Burns, made a film about the trade center, he was also allowed to use some of Mr. Rosenbaum's images.

Archives like this, Mr. Burns said, are tremendous assets. "What is lying in wait for historians of the future is daunting," he said. "How do you keep the videotapes and the digital computer archives of 300 million Americans, preserve them, sort them and evaluate them? What are the criteria? There aren't enough real-time years to sort it all."

Mr. Rosenbaum's collection may one day be used by historians as a template for coping with huge sets of historical data.

"We'd like to work with the collection to develop the kind of software that can be useful to search historical data," said Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is director of the Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science there.

In the past, historians often had to sift through meager records. "Scholars of the future will have an overwhelming task coping with e-mails, videos, newscasts, radio broadcasts and written accounts generated by historically important events like 9/11," Dr. Burton said.

If financing can be found, Dr. Burton and scientists at Urbana-Champaign, a leading supercomputing center, would like to work with Mr. Rosenbaum's collection "to store it, preserve it and develop the kind of software that can be useful to search this data," he said, "to develop tools that can take e-mails, newscasts and videos, index them and search them by topic and time, so they can be evaluated." Mr. Rosenbaum hopes to make this possible by turning the collection over to an advisory board that would determine access, but that plan hinges on a deal with the bank, which said it does not comment on its customers.

Dozens of others, like Louis E. V. Nevaer, are also seeking homes for their collections. He is curator of an archive that contains 5,200 missing-persons fliers and related artifacts from the days after the attack in Lower Manhattan. An exhibition derived from it, "Missing: Last Seen at the World Trade Center," traveled for 18 months to 17 American cities, and to Mexico City and Milan.

"These fliers were going to be discarded as litter, and if we didn't save them, then they'd be lost," Dr. Nevaer said. The flier collection has been catalogued and stored in climate-controlled warehouses in New York and Miami, "and we're negotiating with several museums," he said. "We won't permit it to go to any institution that charges admission," Dr. Nevaer said. That rules out the 9/11 museum planned for ground zero.

Other spontaneous collections are housed by institutions and government agencies. For example, more than 100 artifacts are located in the Jersey City police headquarters of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The items were donated in an outpouring of sympathy for families of the 37 Port Authority officers who died. They include handmade quilts, needlepoint messages, signed flags flown in Afghanistan in honor of the lost, cards from schoolchildren and a framed painting of Sirius, the bomb-sniffing golden Labrador retriever who died in the attack.

"These are all treasured possessions, and we'd like to keep them together," said Barbara Mahon, a retired detective who helps oversee the collection. "It may take some time, but we're going to find the right place for them."

The exact number of such collections is unknown, but "there must be more than 100,000 people of one sort or another who have these materials," said Althea Bernheim, a professional archivist who has been developing a database of major ones for the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, which has resources for collectors at http://www.nycarchivists.org/surveyintro.html.

So far, the Roundtable has identified more than 260 major repositories in a program financed by New York State's Documentary Heritage Program. Some archives have thousands of artifacts and documents. Others are limited to just a few souvenirs of the trade center that were snatched — or rescued — from chaos. One collector "got a big letter T from one of the trade center towers," Ms. Bernheim said.

"There are individuals everywhere who have a few things and are wondering, 'Where do I store it and how do I preserve it?' " she said. "But with the fifth anniversary approaching, the danger is that a lot of materials will be discarded. People need their office space back." Dr. Ramirez, the memorial foundation's curator, agreed that the anniversary — "a natural demarcation point" — is creating a sense of greater urgency.

The foundation has received more than 50 offers of donations of major collections and has a responsibility to act as a clearinghouse, she said. "Some are looking to organize their collections, and some are ready to move on and want to deposit their collections," she said. "Many may be financially unable to support them anymore."

But the ground zero museum has yet to be built, costs are far greater than expected, fund-raising has lagged and the president of the memorial foundation, Gretchen Dykstra, resigned on Friday. "We have to think carefully about the nature of the materials we take responsibility for — the cost of housing, maintaining and cataloguing them," Dr. Ramirez said.

She added that she was working to join with other institutions — including the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York and the New York State Museum in Albany — in a consortium to protect trade center materials in existing repositories.

Somebody has to protect them, said Mr. Rosenbaum, the keeper of the video archive, because it could take years "before we can comprehend the importance of all these collections." He added: "They contain things that we don't know, right now, that we need to know. We don't know why these things need to be preserved. But we know they need to be."

In future, as collectors lose interest or die off, more and more ground zero materials are expected to become available — or to be put into the trash. Ms. Bernheim said she is worried that valuable materials may be discarded. But she said: "Though only a few years ago it would have been blasphemy to say so, not everything needs to be saved. The question is, who gets to decide?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/nyreg ... ref=slogin&
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