Steve Riskus' Gallery - Warning: Loads Slowly

[Steve Gardner]

As a stand-alone photographic record of the damage caused to the Pentagon building - allegedly by Flight 77 - this is interesting enough. But couple this with the intrigue surrounding the identity of the photographer, and this stands out, particularly as one key debate surrounding the impact of Flight 77 concerns the 'official' flightpath, which Riskus' eyewitness testimony supports.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Steve Warren's blog entry entitled 'Steve Riskus Exposed as a Fraud' to whet your appetite.

I have it on good authority—my own—that the pseudonymous BCO board member who played a seminal reportage role in the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon, the man known familiarly to us as Steve Riskus, can confidently be identified as Naval Chief Petty Officer James Schauer, currently the leading Officer for Production at the Fleet Imaging Center Pacific, in Seattle, Washington.

The policy in effect in late 2001 regarding the registering of a domain name, required that the contact information be included in a public database known as WHOIS. The original Whois page for critical thrash listed a James Schauer, 5913 Highdale Cir, Alexandria, Virginia 22310 as the registrant. Schauer must not have been very happy with this availability, and the internet began to be modified.
I make an unavoidable connection with Schauer, the peripatetic naval officer.

[SNIP]

Although the name Steve Riskus was mocked early on as an obvious contrivance, everybody gave it a pass as a realname for some reason. Why? We understood it within its context, where names on boards like criticalthrash [Riskus' website], crewcial, trogdor, and vlv, were anonymous representations, like my favorites, tryviolence, or BiFurious, signaling as coded surrogates, more amusing as fill-ins perhaps than the real people.

Was it because of the following, where an excess of contact information overexposes him, and lulls us with his availability?

"I took these pictures seconds after I saw an American airlines 757 crash into pentagon. I was heading towards 395 on route 27 when the plane crossed my path
about 100ft ahead and crashed into the side of the pentagon.
Steve Riskus
[e-mail]
AIM: youthenraged
[phone] (nextel phone)
[phone] (work)
[phone] (home)"

We go to Whois.net to verify the famous smoking-gun date-fact--criticalthrash [Riskus' website] was set up on 09/10/01, the same date Rumsfeld announced $2.3 trillion in defense budgeting had been unaccountably spent--and we have our little "Ha! Ha!" moment, but apparently no one stopped to ask why the registry document had been purged of the personal contact information, which is the point of an official domain record.