dbcooper41 wrote:does no one else think it is unusual that ...john blitch was still at the wtc site, yet he is shown as a participant in 2 groups as a saic/darpa employee.
Holy shit! Now you mention it - YES! I'm afraid this is not my area, and I have to admit I didn't even know who John Blitch was before checking him out (he didn't get much play in our press) but what you've found here is something that needs to be looked at by someone smarter than me.
the "lunchtime entertainment" was a presentation of the rescue robots at the wtc site. all the participants were linked to the so called rescue robots (in reality they were explosive ordinance disposal robots).
Is that a proven fact, or is that the angle you are looking at? Were the robots just multi-purpose, or are you suggesting that the robots were sent in not to locate corpses, but to dispose of any incriminating evidence that might be left behind - unexploded demolitions ordinance? Or am I reading you wrong?
Wired's article has John Blitch resigning from the Army at the Pentagon on 10 September 2001, and driving straight to Ground Zero in a pickup truck full of Tactical Mobile Robots, portraying it a bit like a wacky road movie... he was simultaneously summoning his friends and their robots from all over the country. It then says:
Over the next 11 days, the group's 17 robots squeezed into spaces too narrow for humans, dug through heaps of scalding rubble, and found seven bodies trapped beneath the mountains of twisted steel and shattered concrete. While that was only a tiny portion of the 252 victims recovered by rescue workers, the success triggered a deluge of fawning press ("AGILE IN A CRISIS, ROBOTS SHOW THEIR METTLE," announced The New York Times. "ROBOTS HELP WHERE HUMANS FEAR TO TREAD," echoed the Houston Chronicle). The publicity helped Blitch avoid a berating from his superiors for skirting regulations and passing off specious credentials (technically, he was retired).
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/robots.html
So, if he finished working at Ground Zero on September 22nd or 23rd, there's no reason he couldn't be at the Human-Robot Interaction Workshop on September 29th/30th. And since he had left the army to join up with SAIC, but went to the WTC instead, I suppose it's not that odd that he's listed on the invitation as an SAIC employee - although not turning up for your first day at work because you want to go do something else wouuld tend to cause problems in most jobs. Lucky for him, he became a hero.
But yeah... When they were setting up the workshop, and deciding who would be invited, how did they know John Blitch would be a person of particular interest? And how did they know in advance that he wouldn't be working out in Littleton, Colorado at the time of the Workshop, since that's where he was supposed to go prior to 9/11?
look at the invitation. when was it actually prepared? when was the darpa funding request submitted and granted?
in my line of work we might have called this an after action review, or a lessons learned review.
does no one else see this connection?
I get you - how can they plan an after-action review in advance of the action occurring, if no one knows that the "action" is on it's way.
Very interesting stuff, dbcoop. I want to learn more about all this, 'cos sadly I don't know much beyond what I just read at your links.