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Hi Don,

I had read an email you had sent someone that was asking you about 9/11 and various insinuations of fakery from a video called September Clues. The website I read it on is no longer online and your information is gone. I was wondering, if you still had that email, could you please send me a copy of it? I found some of what you wrote very informative.

Thank you,
Jeffrey Hill

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Hi Jeffrey.

I think the attached document is the response you're referring to.

All the best,

Don Dahler

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Dear Mr. Soyland,

Thank you for informing me of your documentary. As you know, there have been hundreds of such projects produced and I am often included in them because of my reporting that terrible morning. More times than not, my words are taken out of context or twisted completely. I am by some accounts a CIA plant, by others I am also the voice of one Jim Friedl who called into a different station. Some fellow with more time on his hands than sense actually worked up a time-line on his website showing I was not on the air on ABC when Mr. Friedl (whoever he is) was. My friends and family find these strained efforts at logic humorous, except that they always remind us of the tragedy of September 11th and the thousands of lives lost that day, and the tens of thousands of lives lost in the subsequent wars triggered by those attacks.

I've made it a personal policy to never respond to these websites, films, and allegations because, frankly, I find the people behind them to be so radicalized as to be incapable of objectivity. They are usually fundamentalists of a higher level of superstition, and no reason or calm logic can dissuade them of their religious beliefs. I've watched them take part in debates with scientists and actual eyewitnesses to those events and they refuse to acknowledge any facts, choosing instead to discount everything that doesn't fit into their paranoid imaginings as lies perpetrated by the U.S. government on the world.

The only reason I'm responding to your message is because you sent one. Never before has any of the acolytes of the church of the 9/11 conspiracy bothered to try and contact me to ask what I think of their theories.

To be clear; I think you're wrong. But as a journalist I appreciate the effort and thought you've put into trying to discover the truth. Inquiry should never be avoided into anything, so long as the inquirer is willing to remain open-minded and accept that the original thesis might be wrong, as yours is.

So which are you? The open-minded seeker of truth? Or the fanatic so convinced he’s onto something he won’t listen to opposing views?

The simple fact is, there were thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses in New York and New Jersey that day who saw the airliners hit the towers and the towers fall from the top down, who saw these events with their own eyes, not on television. So your whole premise of a fantastical hoodwinking of the world through digital special effects is patently absurd and ignores testimony any court in the world would have to accept as incontrovertible. Or did the government manage to project digital images directly into their brains, perhaps? Come on. This is the biggest hole in these conspiracy theories. I and many other journalists have talked to many people who recount exactly what the TV pictures showed, are they (we) all agents of the government? Yes, some of the early accounts mentioned small planes, but as any first year law student learns, eyewitness accounts will vary and there will be some that disagree with the majority because of many factors, including perspective (the towers were very high and even large jets look small next to them), stress, influence by hearing other people speculate, past experiences including movies they’ve seen, etc.

You base much of your evidence (and your evidence is not fact, not proof, but only speculation – theories are not proofs) on curiosities of video and audio which could be easily explained by audio-visual experts had you made an effort to really find out why so many images and sounds differed. I’ve been a photographer/cameraman/editor and sound-recordist, in addition to writer and journalist, for almost thirty years now. I have a national EMMY for sound work I did on a wildlife film, and I’ve used almost every kind of video and film camera there is. I won’t go item by item to refute your work, but I’ll speak about some of the things you continuously belabor.

Video is an inexact medium. In 2001, most cameras weren’t digital, they were analog. They recorded information on magnetic tape of various sizes and speeds, and those images are then

interpreted by the video player. Everything from age of equipment to dust to how many times the tape is used affects the picture quality. Even live cameras will never look exactly the same, even with two of the same brand of camera set up next to each other. Trust me; studio engineers work tirelessly to get the cameras at least close enough in image characteristics to at least not be distracting to viewers. Consider now you have dozens of different kinds of cameras that day recording the attacks; the quality will differ widely between them all. The question of the “black edge” or the “masked edge” which so intrigues you is simply an anomaly of video. Zoom lenses record video which is not going to be perfect because of lens distortion, and video has never been fond of bright light and contrast as was experienced that day. The pixilated shifts you also obsess over, like when parts of a building visibly morays and then springs back to normal, is a characteristic of microwave transmission, which is how these images were beamed back to the stations. The video was transferred digitally over the airwaves, which is why there’s a digital effect, that tearing and shifting. As far as I can discern, you have no original footage in your video – it’s all recorded from other websites or are copies of on-air broadcasts, which degrades the quality of the video signal exponentially. Again, if you’d sought experts in this area instead of just using your imagination, you could’ve answered your own question.

You also spend a lot of time trying to show that differences in angles, etc., prove there were a number of badly made versions of the attacks created, but as I watched your accounts of this is was obvious these were simply different perspectives of the same scenes, and perspective can have a huge impact on how things appear. In the one scene where you insisted the cityscape disappeared it was clear the camera angle was slightly lower, thus eliminating the buildings. Keep in mind, this was shot with a long zoom lens so even the slightest adjustment of perspective is going to change the background radically, even if it changes the foreground minimally. Put a drinking straw to your eye and peer through it at something at eye-level, then lower your head even just an inch while focusing on the same item. The scene changes radically. No mystery there.

I did get a chuckle out of your PAT sequence and my only explanation for why the helicopter “appeared” to disappear in that one perspective is, again, the failure of degraded video to hold onto every visual element, especially in the high-contrast haze of that morning at great distances (and the sky was very hazy at the scene itself from the first few moments of the fire onward, even if crystal blue skies prevailed everywhere else).

Microphones are the same – they will sound different, especially with the many different kinds of commercial camera-mounted mikes out there. Some are unidirectional, some are omni directional. Most are very cheap if not attached to a professional-grade camera and thus vary greatly in which frequencies they are most attuned to pick up. In the scenes where you compare the loudness of the crash noise, sometimes buildings were between the mike and the crash, which would dilute the sound. Different cameras have different built-in sound filters, too, which will wash loud noises or specific tones, like bass, out.

Interestingly, a few moments after the second tower collapsed, I walked down Church Street toward the horrible scene of devastation, and as I did so, I passed a jet engine, still smoking, which had landed on a bus stop. Was that a marvel of video technology too? Or the body parts I witnessed amongst the dust of the enormous debris pile? Or the very real grief of the thousands of family members I met who will never see their loved ones again? Are they part of the vast conspiracy too?

Time and again as I watched your documentary, I kept marveling at how much meaning you gave the most meaningless things. I suppose if one were to obsessively explore a video of a cook making a meal one could come up with an endless number of strange and suspicious things, and then if one presented them with the passion, self-assuredness and, frankly, paranoia you do in your video, one could make it seem like a grand illusion was taking place!

Had the events of 9/11 occurred in a contained area, such as a lunar landing or a Vegas magic act, I could entertain the idea of fakery. But this happened on a stage writ large, with more eyewitnesses both on the ground and watching on television around the world than have witnessed any single event in the history of mankind. What they saw unfold in front of their eyes happened in the same exact moments whether they watched in person or in front of their television. This is the single most damning fact for your theory. You can’t simply wish that away because you’re intrigued by the prospect of a huge conspiracy and have noticed some oddities in the video clips you’ve poured over.

The attacks of 9/11 were conducted by a radicalized group of well-trained, devoted, albeit deluded individuals. Their journey to that moment in time has been thoroughly documented. The masterminds confessed and can be heard bragging on tape. But you and the other conspiracy theorists don’t believe any of that. You won’t believe anything I’ve said here. You won’t believe the empirical and well-reasoned item-by-item rebuttals to these ridiculous theories by independent scholars, journalists, investigators and publications which have access not only to worn-out video clips but the documents, forensic evidence and actual eyewitnesses themselves.. Because ultimately, you and the team of murderers who killed thousands of men, women, and children that day, many of whom, incidentally, were my neighbors, have one indisputable thing in common: you have tipped over the edge of reason into the world of superstition and illogic. They believed they were serving the cause of their God because some evil, hate-filled religious leader brainwashed them into thinking so. And you and others like you have latched onto this fetish and refuse to seriously consider anything other than your own religious beliefs that somehow a government which so consistently botches so many relatively simple endeavors, like making sense of a health care system or taxing its citizens in a fair and effective manner, could launch such an enormously, impossibly complex mission to dupe and murder its own people; a mission which would have to involve thousands of conspirators. None of whom has ever come forward.

You present your argument forcefully and passionately like an enthusiastic scientist revealing a new discovery, with intricate detail and thoughtful observations, but ultimately your entire case amounts to nothing more than a witch-doctor trying to explain a lunar eclipse to his acolytes by describing a gigantic turtle crawling across the sky.

Truthfully and sincerely,

Don Dahler