The speed, the maneuverability, the way he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.
-- Danielle O'Brien
The official version and the 9/11 commission report claim that it was American 77, a hijacked Boeing 757, which struck the side of the Pentagon. In the case of the Pentagon, the official version is perhaps at its most vulnerable: the impact hole in the side of the building is far too small to have been created by a Boeing 757, and there is almost no recognizable aircraft debris. Beyond these insuperable problems with the physical evidence, the reports of eyewitnesses, while contradictory, show that many thought they had seen a flying object much smaller than a Boeing 757. Some spoke of a missile, and at least one of the smell of high explosives in the air.
Perhaps because of these grave difficulties, it was the Pentagon chapter of the official 9/11 story which came under attack soonest. The timely exposure of the absurdities of the official story was largely due to the clarity and the courage of Thierry Meyssan of the Reseau Voltaire in Paris, who used his web site to demystify what had happened. Meyssan's success in making telling points on the internet and on French national television even motivated Le Monde, the leading French center- left newspaper, to attempt a grotesque and degrading defense of the US official account in February and March 2002. Quelle honte! Three days before Meyssan's pioneering book L'effroyable imposture (The Big Lie) was published, the FBI gave CNN a meager five frames from a surveillance video camera located at a gas station near the Pentagon which purported to show how the Pentagon was hit -- although these images proved nothing of value to shore up the official version. The pictures were reported in the Washington Post of March 7, 2002, and televised on March 8, 2002, certainly not by coincidence.
The defenders of the official story can point to a number of eyewitnesses who claim to have seen something like a Boeing 757 on its way to impact the Pentagon wall. But one problem is that many of these witnesses are military officers, Pentagon contractors, or federal government employees. This gives them all a very evident conflict of interest as witnesses, and renders their testimony a priori suspect. The other problem is that the Pentagon was hit much later in the morning than the World Trade Center. The Pentagon was in fact struck at 9:43 AM, that is to say about one hour and 29 minutes after American 11 had gone off course and entered the hijacked category at 8: 15 AM. The irony is that it had been an open secret for almost a full hour that American 77 was a potential threat to the capital; American 77 had gone off course at 8:46. The local cable television news outlet, Newschannel 8, had been telling its viewers of an imminent threat for many minutes before the actual impact at the Pentagon. We should also recall that Andrews Air Force Base, with its two combat-ready fighter wings, was only 11 miles from the Pentagon -- just a few minutes' flying time away. Nevertheless, the Air Force proved incapable of getting their assets airborne in time to prevent what could easily have been a decapitation attack on the national capital. It was a record of indescribable ineptitude, which was itself only a cover for active complicity by some key officers in the attack and its geostrategic goals.
Since eyewitnesses who work for the military must be eliminated from consideration, and since so much of the traffic on the roads around the Pentagon owe their daily bread to the US federal government, eyewitness accounts must be relegated to a subordinate position. It is always good forensic practice to accord primacy to the irrefutable physical evidence, as against the testimony of witnesses. In this case, it is indispensable.
The southwest face of the Pentagon was undergoing renovation, and it was therefore more sparsely populated than any other part of the building. The section that was impacted was scheduled to house the command center of the US Navy. The Navy top brass was not present that day. In fact, it is notable that no top-level civilian officials or military officers were killed in the attack. Many of the dead were construction workers and low-level Defense Department employees. The oligarchy, in short, did not pay a serious price for the strike against the Pentagon. The flying object, whatever it was, could have most easily hit the Pentagon from above, in a vertical dive-bombing run. But the flying object went out of its way to hit the empty quarter of the building. As CBS News reported on September 12,2001, "Radar shows that Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes." (Hoffman 6) In addition to multiplying the difficulties, this maneuver also meant that the attacking craft was in the air and exposed to fighter interceptors for an additional two minutes, and that in the most sensitive and presumably well-guarded air space in the world. It is hard to see why real hijackers, intent only on striking the heart of imperialism or of the infidels, would not have hit the eastern part of the building, where they might have been able to number Rumsfeld and other top officials and officers among their victims.
THE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
In the case of the alleged crash of American 77 into the Pentagon, the official version runs up against insuperable physical problems. In short, the flying object which hit the Pentagon cannot have been American 77. American 77 was a Boeing 757-200, a type of aircraft which is 155 feet long and which has wingspan of 125 feet. When the landing gear are retracted in flight, the plane measures 18 feet from the bottom of its engine to the top of its fuselage. The height of the plane from the bottom of the engines to the top of the tail is 45 feet. The fuselage is 13 feet in diameter.
The original impact punched a hole estimated by Marrs as between 15 and 20 feet wide, and by Meyssan as between 15 and 18 feet wide -- barely wide enough for the fuselage of a 757. Above the impact hole is an intact wall which is not more than 25 feet above the ground, some 20 feet too low to accommodate the tail. The flying object that collided with the Pentagon could not have been a Boeing 757-200.
Each of the five faces of the Pentagon is 280 meters long. The central physical problem of the official version is that, even after the collapse of the building facade on either side of the original small impact hole, the collapsed section of wall measures only 19 meters, in contrast to the plane's 38 meter wing span. Even after the fire had collapsed the section of wall, the hole was only half as wide as it needed to be. This problem was made worse by the fact that, according to the Pentagon and press accounts, the alleged plane came in almost perfectly level, but at an oblique angle of about 45 degrees with the southwest facade of the building. This angle of attack would have increase the stretch of wall impacted by the plane and its wings to some 177 feet.
Given that the position of the impact hole was so close to the ground, attention naturally turned to the Pentagon lawn between the building and a multi-lane highway that passes nearby. Strikingly, the Penta-lawn (as it came to be called) was totally pristine and untouched. It looked like the most perfect putting green at an opulent country club. One or two lamp posts had been knocked down, but others were intact. Of the few vehicles parked near the lawn, one or two had burst into flames, but the others were intact. Everything indicated a flying object much smaller than a 757.
OBSTACLES IN THE FLIGHT PATH
In order to fulfill the specifications of the official version, it must be assumed that American 77 flew across the Penta-lawn at well below treetop level -- the plane must be thought of as skimming along just inches above the ground. The flight path is known with some precision because a number of lamp posts were knocked down. But there were other, more serious obstacles: American 77 had to fly across a construction site which was surrounded by a chain link fence. There was a generator located about where the right engine of the plane would have passed. There were also large spools of cable or wire. The fence, the generator, and the spools present serious difficulties for the official version. The jet engines of a Boeing 757 are about 10 feet in diameter, and the engine assemblies extend 5 feet below the fuselage.
NO COMMERCIAL AIRLINER DEBRIS
Another great anomaly of the Pentagon crash scene is the total absence, with only one very suspicious exception, of identifiable aircraft debris. The Pentagon was unable to show any jet engines, any landing gear, and tail section, any wing fragments, any sections of fuselage, any seats, any bodies, any luggage. The small metal fragments which were shown to the press were about enough to fill a small washbasin. Where was the plane?
After the fact, a search line of about 20 men in uniform appeared on the Penta-lawn in front of the impact zone. Men wearing white shirts and ties also appeared on the lawn and carefully gathered up various fragments of debris that had been scattered there. If this had indeed been the scene of an airplane crash, the National Transportation Safety Board should have gone into action, securing important pieces of evidence and holding all other agencies at bay under the threat of felony prosecution. But at the Pentagon there was no sign of the NTSB. After a while a group of military men in uniform carried away what appeared to be a large container wrapped in a tarpaulin with something large but not excessively heavy inside.
Since the Pentagon is located in Arlington County, Virginia, it was the Arlington County Fire Department which had the primary responsibility for fighting the Pentagon fire. The Arlington County Fire Chief was Ed Plaugher. The Arlington County firefighters were not allowed to approach the immediate impact site; they fought the fire at a distance, from the outside lawn and inside the Pentagon. They were kept away from the place where the airliner was supposed to be by a special Urban Search and Rescue Team from FEMA.
Even so, Ed Plaugher's testimony is valuable. Plaugher was allowed to speak at a Pentagon press conference held on September 12, and run by Victoria Clarke, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and thus the chief Pentagon spokeswoman. Chief Plaugher was unable to answer some very basic, common-sense questions about what is alleged by the government to have occurred at the Pentagon. Here is an excerpt:
Reporter: Is there anything left of the aircraft at all?
Plaugher: First of all, the question about the aircraft, there are some small pieces of aircraft visible from the interior during this fire-fighting operation I'm talking about, but not large sections. In other words, there's no fuselage sections and that sort of thing. [...]
Reporter: Chief, there are small pieces of the plane virtually all over, out over the highway, tiny pieces. Would you say the plane exploded, virtually exploded on impact due to the fuel or ...?
Plaugher: You know, I'd rather not comment on that. We have a lot of eyewitnesses that can give you better information about what actually happened with the aircraft as it approached. So we don't know. I don't know. [ ...]
Reporter: Where is the jet fuel? Just. ..?
Plaugher: We have what we believe is a puddle right there that the ... what we believe is to be the nose of the aircraft. (The Big Lie 23)
The unique piece of apparent aircraft wreckage associated with the Pentagon crash was found on the Penta-lawn. This fragment matched the color scheme of American Airlines, and seemed to bear a part of the letter "n." A consensus of analysts assembled by Jim Hoffman tends to view this fragment as belonging to the starboard forward portion of the fuselage of a Boeing 757. There is no sign of fire damage, no soot, no black coating as would be typical of a jet fuel fire. The fact that this lone piece of evidence turned up in such utter isolation increases the natural suspicion that it was simply planted as part of an effort to shore up the credibility of the Pentagon's claim that a commercial airliner had hit the building.
COVERUP
The overall impression of a rather maladroit coverup is increased by the behavior of the FBI at and around the crime scene. First, all available video tape from surveillance cameras which might have captured the flying object was confiscated with the speed of lightning. This included video tape from the gas station that was directly under the flight path of the object, and from another gas station a hundred yards or so to the west. It also included video tape from a camera maintained by the Sheraton Washington Hotel. It included every business in the area. The FBI has never released these tapes, and they were not made public by the 9/11 commission. All that has been released has been a few frames from the surveillance camera of one of the gas stations, heavily edited to remove the frame or frames which might have showed the actual flying object itself. The contents of the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder have never been released, under the claim that they were rendered inoperable by the fire. Initially, the FBI claimed that it was assembling the pieces of wreckage or at least inventorying them, but no more was ever heard about any such effort.
EYEWITNESSES
We now cite several eyewitness reports, frankly focusing on those which contradict the official version. FAA air traffic controllers assigned to Dulles Airport, near Washington in northern Virginia, picked up a flying object coming towards Washington DC at high speed. "The first Dulles controller noticed the fast-moving plane at 9:25 AM. Moments later, controllers sounded an alert that an aircraft appeared to be heading directly toward the White House." (Washington Post, November 3, 2001)
Danielle O'Brien, an air traffic controller at Dulles Airport, said in all interview with ABC News that she and her colleagues had observed the radar blip approaching the Pentagon as it carried out this remarkable maneuver. Here is what she later said they all concluded at that time: "The speed, the maneuverability, the way he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane." (ABC News, October 24,2001) This reflects the CBS report we have already examined, according to which "Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two and a half minutes." (Hoffman 6)
Army Captain Lincoln Liebner claimed that he had distinctly seen an American Airlines airliner coming towards the Pentagon at high speed and at a low altitude. (Marrs 29) But Army captains are not likely to undercut the official version; they are under military discipline, and therefore not their own men.
Steve Patterson told a reporter: "The airplane seemed to be able to hold between eight and twelve persons." (Washington Post, September 11, 2001)
Tom Seibert: "We heard something that made the sound of a missile, then we heard a powerful boom." (Washington Post, September 11, 2001)
Mike Walter told CNN: "A plane, a plane from American Airlines. I thought, 'That's not right, it's really low.' And I saw it. I mean, it was like a cruise missile with wings." (Marrs 29)
April Gallop, a Pentagon employee, was working at her job on the morning of 9/11. She was getting ready to take her son to his day care when the impact occurred. "I thought it was a bomb," she recounted later. "I was buried in rubble and my first thought was for my son. I crawled around until I found his stroller. It was all crumpled up into a ball and I was very afraid. But then I heard his voice and I managed to locate him. We crawled out through a hole in the side of the building. Outside they were treating survivors on the grassy lawn. But all the ambulances had left, so a man who was near the scene stepped up, put us in his private car, and drove us to the hospital. The images are burned into my brain."
While in the hospital, Gallop received a series of visits from men in suits, presumably FBI agents. "They never identified themselves or even said which agency they worked for. But I know they were not newsmen because I learned that the Pentagon told news reporters not to cover survivors' stories or they would not get any more stories out of there. The men who visited all said they couldn't tell me what to say, they only wanted to make suggestions. But then they told me what to do, which was to take the [victim compensation fund] money and shut up. They also kept insisting that a plane hit the building. They repeated this over and over. But I was there and I never saw a plane or even debris from a plane. I figure the plane story is there to brainwash people." (Marrs 26)
Christine Peterson; "My mind could not comprehend what happened. Where did the plane go? ... But there was no plane visible, only huge billows of smoke and torrents of fire." (911research.wtc7.net)
DeChiaro: "My brain could not resolve the fact that it was a plane because it only seemed like a small hole in the building. No tail. No wings. No nothing." (911research.wtc7.net)
Moran: "I saw the flash and subsequent fireball rise approximately 200 feet above the Pentagon. There was a large explosion noise and the low frequency sound echo that comes with this type of sound. Associated with that was the increase in air pressure, momentarily, like a small gust of wind. For those formerly in the military, it sounded like a 2000lb bomb going off 1/2 mile in front of you." (911research.wtc7.net)
Perkal: "Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere." (911research.wtc7.net)
Joel Sucherman thought that he had seen an American Airlines plane, "But whoever was flying the plane made no attempt to change direction. It was coming in at a high rate of speed, but not at a steep angle -- almost like a heat-seeking missile was locked on its target and staying dead on course." ("Journalist Witnesses Pentagon Crash," eWeek, September 13, 2001)
Dick Cheney later recalled how he had first learned of the attack on the Pentagon: "The first reports on the Pentagon attack suggested a helicopter and then a private jet." (Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2001)
Later, in an interview with Parade Magazine, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld himself also referred to the object which hit the Pentagon as a "missile." (Marrs 29) Was this a Freudian slip by the loquacious defense chief?
The lead pilot of the interceptor group sent from Langley AFB said later: "I reverted to the Russian threat .... I'm thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You look down and you see the Pentagon burning and I thought the bastards snuck one by us .... [Y]ou couldn't see any airplanes, and no one told us anything." (9/11 commission 45) This pilot is in effect reporting that the damage he observed at the Pentagon was compatible with a cruise missile explosion. His explicit citing of a cruise missile should not be neglected.
What then is the origin of the claim that the Pentagon was hit by a Boeing 757, and specifically by American 77? During the first 9/11 official press conference by the Defense Department, Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Craig Quigley was unable to offer any specifics about what he was at that time calling an "allegedly hijacked commercial aircraft." (Defense Link Dod, 11 September 2001) During the course of the afternoon, the new party line that American 77 had hit the Pentagon was spread by anonymous military leakers. According to the Los Angeles Times of 9/11, officials "speaking under the condition of anonymity" had briefed journalists that the flying object which had crashed into the Pentagon was American 77.
THE FIVE BELATED FRAMES OF MARCH 2002
The only available photographic evidence for the events at the Pentagon emerged on March 6, 2002, when five US news organizations were able to obtain a limited number of frames from a security camera in a Pentagon parking lot somewhat to the west of the point of impact. (Washington Post, March 7, 2002)
One frame showed a bright, orange-colored fireball, but there was no sign of an American Airlines jet. The Washington Post thought it saw a small, blurry white object. Whatever is shown in this frame has a tail that is at most half as tall as the Pentagon facade, but the tail of a real Boeing 757 would be almost as tall as the Pentagon itself, and possibly taller, depending on how close to the ground it was flying. American Airlines, furthermore, has always preferred to keep the fuselages of its planes gleaming silver, not white. The frames also show a thin trail of white smoke left behind by the flying machine. This should not be confused with the condensation trails which are left behind by planes flying in the extremely cold air of the higher altitudes. Apart from a slight darkening, jets flying near the ground leave very little trail of any kind behind them. As Gerhard Wisnewski points out, "Such a smoke trail does not speak at all for the presence of a jet, but for a rocket." (Wisnewski 154)
Thierry Meyssan's Pentagate contained an authoritative assessment of the explosion at the Pentagon, taking into account what was seen on the selected and censored frames of video tape released by the FBI after many months. This study was contributed by Colonel Pierre-Henri Bunel. Bunel, a French artilleryman and graduate of the world-famous Ecole Militaire of St. Cyr, the French equivalent of West Point and Sandhurst, was a battlefield damage assessment officer who served in the first Gulf War of 1991. One of Bunel's fundamental points is a discussion of the different types of explosions. His focus is the speed of the shock wave which each type of explosion produces:
Explosive materials are divided into two groups, according to their progressiveness [i.e., the speed of propagation of their shock wave].
Explosives produce a shock wave whose speed of propagation is superior to a value of about six thousand feet per second. One says that they "detonate." Explosive materials whose shock wave speed is lower than that do not detonate. They deflagrate. This is the case, for example, of gunpowder or hydrocarbons.
Jet fuel, which is similar to kerosene, does not possess the high explosive power of cordite or other materials used for making bombs and conventional missile warheads. The most jet fuel can manage is deflagration; it is not powerful enough to generate a detonation. The frames of the Pentagon being hit show a fireball which is a white- ot, brilliant fireball attaining some 130 feet in height, thus indicating a powerful detonation, most likely caused by high explosives of some type. Compare this to the jet fuel explosion involving the South Tower of the World Trade Center, where a cloud of jet fuel went from yellow to orange to black as the fuel was consumed. The evidence again suggests that a large commercial airliner was not involved, but rather some form of missile.
This argument is supported by the white vapor or exhaust trail of the flying object as shown on the Pentagon's own video frames. This is not the exhaust of fan jets running on kerosene fuel, since this exhaust trail would be darker if it were visible at all so close to the ground. (Pentagate 67 ff.)
So much for the exhaust trail and fireball observed at the outer facade of the Pentagon. Another issue posed by the Pentagon events is the ability of the flying object to penetrate several rings of the large building's structure. Bunel reminds us here of the bunker- busting bombs used during the Gulf War of 1991, and much improved since. Bunel notes that "for certain very hard fortifications, one even finds that there are multi-charged weapons. The first charges fracture the concrete, while the later one or ones penetrate and detonate. In general, anti-concrete charges are hollow charges. The jet of energy and melted materials penetrates the fortification and spreads quantities of hot materials inside which are propelled by a column of energy which pierces the walls like a punch. The great heat produced by the detonation of the hollow charge sets fire to everything that is combustible inside." (Pentagate 71 )
Colonel Bunel discusses the flight patterns of cruise missiles, which generally have a launch phase, a cruise phase, and an acceleration phase as they are approaching the target, so that they attain their maximum speed just before impact. He also points out that cruise missiles also carry out an end-course correction in order to impact the target at precisely the point and angle of attack desired. According to Bunel, "that is why it so often happens that the missile ends its cruising flight with a tight turn that allows it to adopt the right alignment. A witness might observe that the missile reduces its engine power before throttling back up." (Pentagate 72) This would account for the spectacular 270 degree turn carried out by the flying object that hit the Pentagon, while descending 7,000 feet in two minutes. It is far more plausible that this extremely demanding maneuver was carried out by the computerized, pre-programmed guidance system of a cruise missile, than that it was due to the dubious flying skills of the notorious bungler, Hani Hanjour.
Bunel also points out that the firemen shown fighting the Pentagon fire in the available photographs are not using foam, as they would for a jet-fuel fire, but a water-based mixture. They are using water hoses, not foam cannons. There is some evidence of foam, but this appears to be limited to one or two vehicles on the Pentagon lawn that burst into flames as the flying object hit; their gasoline fuel tanks were what required the foam, and not the larger fire in the Pentagon building itself.
Bunel examines the pictures published by the Department of Defense as allegedly showing the maximum penetration of the flying object that hit the Pentagon, which managed to punch a hole 7 feet in diameter in the inner wall of the third ring in from the outside facade.
The appearance of the perforation in the wall certainly resembles the effects of anti- concrete hollow charges that I have been able to observe on a number of battlefields. These weapons are characterized by their "jet" ... this jet pierces concrete through many feet of thickness. It could thus pierce five thick walls of the building without any problem. Five walls out of six because the facade was already perforated by the delivery system itself. (Pentagate 84)
Based on these considerations, and with special reference to his analysis of the photo of the inner wall of the third ring, Colonel Bunel offers the following hypothesis:
This photo, and the effects described in the official version, lead me therefore to think that the detonation that struck the building was that of a high-powered hollow charge used to destroy hardened buildings and carried by an aerial vehicle, a missile. (Pentagate 85-86)
WHY NO AIR DEFENSE OF THE PENTAGON?
In 2001, the Pentagon should have been one of the best-defended points on earth. Nevertheless, it was hit by a flying object carrying a warhead at 9:43 AM, one hour and twenty-nine minutes after American 11 had been hijacked. For the official version, this remains an acute embarrassment and an insoluble mystery. It is widely reported, and even more widely assumed, that the Pentagon was equipped with powerful batteries of surface to air missiles. This is virtually impossible to confirm, since the details of defense dispositions are all strictly classified. The hypothesis of a cruise missile fired off by a military unit in support of the 9/11 putsch helps solve problems here as well. Military aircraft of all types, including cruise missiles, are equipped with a friend-foe indicator which allows the US side to distinguish its own (and allied) air assets from hostile objects. If it was indeed a US cruise missile which hit the Pentagon, then it is likely that such a cruise missile would have carried a friend-foe indicator signaling that it was a military asset of the US side. This feature may well have helped to neutralize or defeat the Pentagon's air defense system: the incoming object may have been perceived as a friendly one. But there may be further complications.
In testimony to the 9/11 commission, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta recounted what he had seen in the White House Bunker. Mineta had arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center soon after the South Tower had been hit. Mineta testified:
During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand! Have you heard anything to the contrary? Well at the time, I didn't know what all that meant. ...[That was the] flight that came into the Pentagon." (Marrs 30)
To the question of whether the orders being referred to involved shooting down the incoming flying object, Mineta replied:
Well, I don't know that specifically. I do know that the [interceptor] airplanes were scrambled from Langley or from Norfolk, the Norfolk area, and so I did not know about the order specifically other than to listening to that other conversation .... Subsequently, I found that out.
This exchange poses a number of important issues. It has been interpreted as the repeated confirmation of an order to shoot down wayward aircraft that refused to respond to orders. If these conversations actually happened, and if Cheney had indeed issued the order to "take out" planes that did not respond to orders from air traffic controllers, then we must wonder why the aircraft approaching the Pentagon was not in fact shot down. Since that did not happen, it may be that the unstated terms of Cheney's exchanges with the "young man" were based on something else. Was the premise here in fact the elusive stand-down order which in the opinion of some would have been necessary to cripple US air defense to the extent that occurred on September 11? If this is so, then what was being repeatedly confirmed here was an order not to shoot down the incoming flight. This latter interpretation is perfectly possible, based on the literal text of what Mineta says he heard.