Martian

The_Jazz beat me to your car analogy, so let's take a look at this. It is fascinating technology and the article mentions it's application in live football highlighting the line of scrimmage. A similar technique is used in hockey, creating a 'halo' around the puck to make it more visible. Fox has been doing it for years.

Which is fascinating. And it is true that a single piece of video footage is no longer incontrovertible proof any more than a single photograph is. A savvy viewer is right to question what he sees.

However, this has nothing to do with the attacks of September 11th. While such video editing finesse could throw the news coverage of the event into doubt, it does not discredit eyewitness accounts of aircraft striking the towers, nor the debris that was later found. Thus, if one is going to assert that video trickery was employed, one must assume one of two positions.

1) That there were no aircraft. This in no way deals with the above issues; in order to explain eyewitness accounts, amateur video footage and physical evidence of the aircraft, one must resort to theories so implausible as to be ludicrous. I would therefore argue that this position is untenable.

2) That the aircraft striking the towers were edited to appear to be a different type. One could potentially make a case for this argument; eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and may well be unable to tell a Boeing 767 from a Cessna 172. Further, once the planes struck and were subsequently disintegrated, it would border impossible for the layman to make any sort of qualified statement as to exactly what type of craft was used. The issue here, however, is twofold. First, it violates the principle of parsimony. This does not discredit the hypothesis in and of itself, but it does inform a bias towards simpler explanations, if any are available. Further, it raises a question of motive. If we assume for the sake of expediting the discussion that the United States government did have reason to crash two aircraft into one of it's major symbolic landmarks, we would still have to answer the question of why they would go to the trouble of manipulating the images. The two planes that were allegedly used in the attacks did exist; they had tail numbers, itineraries, flight schedules, rosters and manifests. The two planes no longer exist and do not now have any of these things. If we assume that the government made these craft disappear to lend a degree of authenticity to the ruse, why wouldn't they just fly them into the towers? Why go to all the extra trouble? Thus, I would argue that scenario two is also highly implausible to the degree of being untenable so long as a simpler solution exists. Conveniently enough, we have a simpler solution in the official story.

It's important to note that something being possible doesn't necessarily mean that it's likely to have occurred. The footage could have been edited, as the technology exists. It's still a bit of a leap to assume that the footage was edited.

__________________
I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said

- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame