Info Item

Jun 23, 2009  
Humor: Lusitania Truthers Vindicated
— Jon Cole

The article "Lusitania's Secret Cargo" in the Jan/Feb 2009 Archaeology Magazine appears to have vindicated the Lusitania “Truthers”
.

The article states:


“The nearly century-old debate about whether the passenger liner Lusitania was transporting British war munitions when torpedoed by a German U-boat is over. Physical evidence of just such a cargo has been recovered from the wreck, which rests 12 miles off the Irish coast in 300 ft. of murky turbulent water.


 “Lusitania was sunk off County Cork on May 7, 1915. The attack killed 1,198 people, including 128 Americans and helped push the United States into WWI. Ever since the ship went down, there have been suspicions [by conspiracy theorists known as 'the Lusitania truthers' (ed.)] that the Lusitania was carrying live munitions. Under the rules of war, that would have made the liner a legitimate target, as the Germans maintained at the time. "The British government has always been evasive about the presence of munitions on Lusitania. Two cargo manifests were submitted; the second, filed after the Lusitania sailed indicated there were light munitions on board. Some believe the ship was carrying much more, however, and that the British Navy attempted to destroy the wreck in the 1950s to conceal its military cargo.”


 Now a team led by County Waterford-based diver Eoin McGarry, on behalf of Lusitania's American owner, Gregg Bemis, has recovered live ammunition from the wreck ... This past September, Bemis's team used a remotely operated vehicle to penetrate the wreck. They were able to clearly identify a vast amount of ammunition in an area of the Lusitania not believed to have carried cargo. The Remington .303 caliber bullets the team discovered on the ship had been used by the British Military during WWI. Ten of the bullets were brought to the surface.
“‘The charge that the Lusitania was carrying war materiel is valid,’ says Bemis. ‘She was a legitimate target for the German submarine.’”



However, the official explanation of events contradicts the conspiracy theorists, and is supported by a study conducted by the government agency, Government Incompetence of Scientific Technology (GIST), after a 90-plus-year, 125-billion-dollar investigation. While GIST acknowledges that “vast quantities” of .303 ammunition may have been found, authors of the GIST study flatly deny that the ammo was in the Lusitania’s hold prior to its sinking, or that it came from America, a neutral country at the time. Using sophisticated computer models, the details of which are classified, GIST scientists have clearly demonstrated that the Remington bullets found were merely random live rounds accidentally dropped by WWI soldiers in the battlefields of Europe. Those dropped bullets then washed into streams and rivers that eventually were carried into the ocean, where they coalesced into a tidy pile inside the ship's hold by a drifting phenomenon called "Tidal Expansion," without causing any harm to the adjacent cargo.

Moreover, in order for the "twoofers" allegations to be true, it has been suggested that to carry out a sophisticated American-British ammo transport operation, with all the buy/sell ordering paperwork, the manufacturing, the hauling to the shipyard, unloading, storage, then re-loading into the ship's hold all that ammunition, would have involved thousands of people. Of course some would have talked, and it would have been impossible for the US or British government to keep such a secret for so many years.

In addition, it's well known that the US and British governments would never even consider such a thing. As GIST lead investigator, Dr. Siam Blunder, has stated, "Why would they take a chance placing their own citizens in harm's way?" Dr. Blunder added that they also investigated the possibility of a terrorist German group planting the ammo in the cargo hold prior to the New York departure. However, it was dismissed as "an absurd insinuation," since American security forces were at the shipyards, making it impossible for anyone, let alone the terrorists, to obtain the necessary access to load the ammo undetected.

GIST senior engineer, Mr. Gross Johnson, continued, “If the ammunition was truly in the hold before the sinking, it would have fallen to the ocean bottom at almost free-flotsam speed, crushing the ammunition in the process. The fact that the divers found the ammunition intact and not crushed is definitive proof that the ammo simply eroded into the neat piles due to the naturally occurring 'Tidal Expansion' process.”

GIST held a public hearing on its preliminary findings, generously allowing the public almost three weeks to review and comment on its 347,911-page Executive Summary of the full report. The hearing was sparsely attended by only a few surviving truthers, and of course some “fair and balanced” media.

GIST was asked by one old truther about the probability of the ammunition packing itself into the wreckage of the Lusitania, in view of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Dr. Blunder responded that due to limited funding and only 92 years to conduct the investigation, GIST didn't have time to go into the actual transfer mechanism of the ammunition, as its prime focus was on the tidal vortices around the 79th link of the ship's anchor chain that triggered the “chain” reaction of tidal expansion.

As a result of the GIST findings, significant code changes and stiffer regulations for the storage, transport and ownership of ammunition by Americans are in the final stages of review.