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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Mary Bomar's fraudulent investigation

In April 2006, Park Service Director Mary Bomar ordered an internal investigation into claims that the planned Flight 93 Memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque, built abound a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. Bomar's investigation was a total fraud, concluding, for instance, that it isn't possible to calculate the orientation of the crescent because the site-plan has not been geo-referenced. (Page 2, PP2 of September 2006 summary report. Page 1 here.)

In fact, the original Crescent of Embrace site-plan was drawn on a topo map that the Memorial Project provided to all participants in the design competition. A topo map is the epitome of a geo-referenced map. North marked on a topo map is true north, which is the only piece of information needed to calculate the orientation of the crescent. Just connect the tips of the crescent, form the perpendicular bisector, and calculate how many degrees it points from north (53.4).

Also known are the crash-site coordinates, which is all that is needed to calculate the direction to Mecca (55.2° clockwise from north). All of this is trivially easy to verify. Just use the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com to get a graphic of the direction to Mecca from the crash site and place it over the crescent site plan:

Giant crescent pointst to Mecca
Somerset PA is ten miles from the crash-site. The "qibla" is the direction to Mecca. Red lines show the orientation of the crescent. The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca. (Click for larger image.)


A request for oversight

Because it is the director's office that has been covering up the Mecca-orientation of the crescent, oversight can only come from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne himself. Several people sent letters to Secretary Kempthorne two weeks ago, showing how the giant Mecca-oriented crescent remains completely intact in the so called redesign. But Mr. Kempthorne also needs to know that he is getting bad information from his subordinates in the Park Service. Thus a request for all readers of this post: if you have a minute, please copy and paste this entire post into an email for Secretary Kempthorne.

We don't need for the secretary to understand all the terrorist memorializing features in the design, or the numerous proofs of intent that architect Paul Murdoch included so that his accomplishment will be undeniable once it is a fait accompli. It is enough that he be concerned about features that can be readily interpreted as terrorist memorializing, whether they are intended or not. As Congressman Tancredo put it: we need "a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism."

But even getting to the most basic facts about what is in the present design requires getting past Mary Bomar’s fraudulent report, which tries to pretend that there is nothing that can even be interpreted as untoward.


Mary Bomar's intellectually dishonest "experts"

In addition to claiming that topo maps are not geo referenced, Mary Bomar's internal investigation cites a small number of academic experts, all of whom spout nothing but the most absurd non sequiturs. One is Dr. Daniel Griffith, professor of "geo-spatial information" at the University of Texas. About Alec Rawls' analysis of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Dr. Griffith writes:
... Mr. Rawls’s arithmetic calculations appear to be correct ... [but] ... just because calculations are correct does not make the resulting numbers meaningful.
Dr. Griffith’s point, it seems, is that the mere fact of Mecca orientation does not imply intent. Who said it did? The way Murdoch proves intent is by repeating his Mecca orientations (scroll down to the last section here). But intent is not the only thing that matters. Even without terrorist memorializing intent, it is inappropriate to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the crash site.


Bomar expert #2

Dr. Kevin Jaques, specialist in Islamic sharia law from the University of Indiana, acknowledges that the Mecca-oriented crescent is similar to the mihrab around which every mosque is built, but says:
...just because something is ‘similar to’ something else does not make it the 'same'.
Yes, well, similar--very, very similar--is exactly the problem.

Like Daniel Griffith, Mr. Jaques is trying to make hay of the fact that Mecca orientation does not by itself imply intent. So what? Intentional or not, it is unacceptable for the central feature of the Flight 93 memorial to be a geometric match for the central feature of a mosque. Jaques is pretending that the questions he raises about intent somehow make the facts irrelevant.

Professor Jaques also dismisses the likeness between the Mecca-oriented crescent and a traditional Islamic mihrab by noting that lots of religious structures have prayer-direction indicators, not just mosques:
The biggest hole in [Rawls’] argument is that all of the elements he points to are common architectural features that one would find in a church or synagogue. The mihrab originated in pre-Islamic buildings and can be found in temples, churches, and synagogues around the Mediterranean.
This is logic? Because Christian churches are often oriented to the east, that somehow makes it okay to build the Flight 93 memorial around a half-mile wide Mecca oriented crescent? If this is “the biggest hole in [Rawls’] argument,” then there are no holes in Rawls’ argument.


Project spokesmen know the truth, and are lying about it

Memorial Project spokesmen have followed the lead of these academic frauds, using doubts about intent as a pretext for denying the facts. Asked about Rawls’ Mecca orientation claim, Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, denied it:
Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”
In fact, Patrick White is fully aware of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. At the Memorial Project's public meeting in July he argued that the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be "disrespectful to Islam."

Joanne Hanley has done the same:
"Alec Rawls bases all of his conclusions on faulty assumptions," said Joanne Hanley, the superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial. "In addition, the facts are twisted and people are misquoted, all to serve his intended purpose."
But she too has admitted the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, telling Mr. Rawls in a 2006 conference call that she wasn't concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the crescent because: "It isn't exact. That's one we talked about. It has to be exact." (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, page 145.)

These are your subordinates Mr. Kempthorne. Please do not let them get away with this fraud. Congressman Tancredo is demanding answers from Director Bomar and many of us are hoping that you will do the same. There is not much time. Construction on Paul Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque is about to begin.

Sincerely,

[Your name]


UPDATE: I originally included another snippet in the above letter, but I think it reads better without it. In the Daniel Griffith section, I had included a second example of Griffith's astounding dishonesty:
Dr. Griffith is telling every reporter who will listen that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca. "Anything can point toward Mecca," he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, "because the earth is round." One billion Muslims face Mecca five times a day to pray, and Griffith pretends there is no such thing as facing Mecca!

Of course he knows better. The first thing that Griffith’s report does is calculate the direction to Mecca:
I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to Mecca of roughly 55.20°.

Comments:
Thank you Eric for your tireless efforts at following every step of this travesty.

OT, I just thought I'd mention that I have posted copies of your Crescent of Betrayl poster at local grocer bulletin boards and have linked to it (and your site) on a variety of blogs. I also have the poster hanging on my wall by my laptop. As I glanced at it today, I noticed something I overlooked in the past and struck me as odd. Since you mention the topographic nature of the material provided to the contestants - I wonder if the outline conforms to anything specific. Why? The outline of the memorial site suspiciously looks very similar to the outline of a map of Israel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Israel_districts_numbered.png
 
Oy,PIMF. . . Eric = Alec. Sorry, I was multi-tasking by trying to post while getting lunch for my son. Honest.
 
Thanks for putting up the poster. Anyone can download the PDF file and get it printed up. It prints out high resolution (in color) and gives a great view of what is going on in the memorial.

If you look at the poster closely, you can see that the plot of land is determined basically by pushing out to the closest roads in several directions, so any likeness to Israel is just a coincidence.
 
FYI . . .Amazon contacted me again about another delay in delivery of your book - expected release in March 2008.

I'm curious about the delays.

I know the book is available online - but there are folks I would loan this book to that are not computer users.

Thanks again for the replies.
 
The delays in getting the book out are entirely my doing. The story keeps unfolding and I am still trying to figure out how to finalize it. We might get pushed back to spring. No later than that. With presidential candidate Tancredo weighing in, we have a chance to bring real attention to this story be turning it into a campaign issue, and it might take that kind of exposure to stop this abomination, so we can't miss that opportunity. We won't we waiting much longer before we cut the story off.

As you note, most of the story is in the Director's Cut edition of the book that is available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com. Feel free to print out the PDFs, staple them and loan or give them out.
 
Wow. You are truly ignorant in so many ways, least of which is your understanding of the term 'georeferenced'. May you have a short, meaningless career. You are already on your way, it seems.
 
Typical left wing scum, pretending that I am misusing the term georeferenced, but can't say HOW I am misusing the term, because I am not. This is what the left does: they troll around the blogosphere dripping snotty disinformation like a snail trail. It is part of Axlerod's "astroturfing" strategy.

Hey scumbag, next time leave your name. The main reason for leaving comments like yours up is to expose the moral trash that is the left in this country. You aren't embarassed to have your name attached to your disinformation are you? Man up, s#¡+head.
 
Really helpful data, thank you for the post.
 
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