The Pentagon Attack Papers
by Barbara Honegger
Published in the 9/11 Expose Book THE TERROR CONSPIRACY, by Jim Marrs
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Barbara Honegger, M.S. is Senior Military Affairs Journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School (1995-present), the Navy’s advanced science, technology and national security affairs university. This research, as all of Honegger’s research and publications on September 11, are solely in her capacity as a concerned private citizen and do not imply official endorsement. Honegger served as Special Assistant to the Assistant to the President and White House Policy Analyst (1981-83); was the pioneering Irangate author and whistleblower on the October Surprise (October Surprise, Tudor, 1989; and Iran-Contra expose documentary film "Cover-Up"); and was called as a researcher / witness at both the October 23, 2004, and August 27, 2005, Los Angeles Citizens 9/11 Grand Jury hearings held at Patriotic Hall in Los Angeles, Calif. Much of the information and analysis contained in this evidence summary was presented at the L.A. Citizens Grand Jury hearings and at the 9/11 Emergency Truth Convergence conference held at American University in Washington, D.C. in July, 2005.
The San Francisco Chronicle commemorated the 100th anniversary of The Great Earthquake of 1906 with a series of front-page articles headed by a single icon -- a charred clock frozen at 5: 12 am, the exact moment "The Big One" hit. [1] A century after that devastating event, the stopped clock serves as both the ultimate evidence and the symbol that "captures it all."
Again, almost 100 years later, clocks frozen in time at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001 both "capture it all" and are the ultimate evidence that shatters the "Official Lie" of what happened that terrible morning.
The Pentagon was first attacked at 9:32 am, much earlier than the 9/11 Commission and official cover story claim. (In this summary of evidence, the more precise time of 9:31:40 am is "rounded up" for ease of reference.)
The Pentagon and mainstream media first reported 9:43 as the time of alleged Flight 77 impact (some reports, presumably taken from official sources, were as late as 9:48 and 9:47). Over time, the time given by officials for the claimed outside impact on the building has been moved earlier and earlier, down to 9:37 (as of the time of this writing), but has never come close to the actual time of the first violent event at the Pentagon -- 9:32. Clearly, if the official story that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 were true, Flight 77 could not have been the source of massive damage to the west side of the building a minimum of five minutes earlier at 9:32.
Converging Lines of Proof of a 9:32 Violent Event at the Pentagon on September 11, well before the Official Story says anything hit the building:
Multiple standard-issue, battery-operated wall clocks on the walls of the area of the Pentagon attacked on 9/11 -- including one in the heliport just outside the west face -- were stopped between 9:31 and 9:32-1/2 by a violent event, almost certainly a bomb or bombs inside the building and/or in a truck or construction trailer parked right outside the west face. The first Associated Press report, in fact, stated that the Pentagon had been damaged by a "booby trapped truck." The Navy posted the stopped heliport clock on an official website and another of the stopped clocks is in the 9/11 display at the Smithsonian Institution. These are just some of the west section Pentagon clocks that stopped between 9:31 and 9:32-1/2 on September 11.
April Gallop, an Army employee with a Top Secret clearance, was at her desk in the Army administrative offices in the west section of the Pentagon on 9/11, the area of the building most heavily destroyed, when what she said sounded and felt "like a bomb" went off. "Being in the Army with the training I had, I know what a bomb sounds and acts like, especially the aftermath, and it sounded and acted like a bomb. There was no plane or plane parts inside the building, and no smell of jet fuel." Ms. Gallop has given two hours of under-oath videotaped testimony to the author [2A] in which she states that the explosion went off at the precise instant she hit the 'power on' button on her computer in the Army administrative area, to which she had just returned that morning after months of pregnancy and childbirth leave, and that the explosion stopped her wrist watch, which also stopped at just after 9:30 a.m. [2B] She has kept the stopped wrist watch in a safe deposit box as evidence of the exact moment of the initial explosion.
The FAA's [Federal Aviation Administration] timeline document "Executive Summary-Chronology of a Multiple Hijacking Crisis -- September 11, 2001" reads: "0932: ATC (Air Traffic Control) AEA reports aircraft crashes into west side of Pentagon." [3] The time is the critical fact here, not the claimed cause.
Denmark's soon-to-be Foreign Minister Per Stig MoIler was in a building in Washington, D.C. on 9/11 from which he looked out, heard an explosion and saw the smoke first rise from the Pentagon. He immediately looked at his watch, which read 9:32 am. He gave radio interviews in Denmark the next morning in which he stated that the Pentagon had been attacked at 9:32.4
On August 27, 2002, then White House Counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave the Secretary of the Navy lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in which Gonzales explicitly and clearly states that "The Pentagon was attacked at 9:32". A tape of this segment of his talk was played at the 9/11 Emergency Truth Convergence at American University in Washington, D.C. in July 2005, and is on the public record.
The Pentagon was attacked by bomb(s) at or around 9:32 am, possibly followed by an impact from an airborne object significantly smaller than Flight 77, a Boeing 757.
We have already seen that Army employee April Gallop, whose watch was stopped by the violent event at the Pentagon shortly after 9:30, says that her military training and experience led her to immediately determine the source of the initial explosion was a bomb.
I have interviewed an Army auditor from Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, who was on temporary duty assignment at the Pentagon before, on and after 9/11. He was in the Army financial management spaces only minutes before the Pentagon explosion on the morning of 9/11. He had just returned to his temporary office on the ground floor of the adjacent south side of the Pentagon by the cafeteria when he heard an explosion and felt the building shake. Immediately afterwards, he said, hundreds of panicked Pentagon personnel ran by him down the corridor just outside his office and out the South Entrance, yelling "Bombs!" and "A bomb went off!" The witness has requested that his name not be used in this summary, but is willing to testify to a grand jury or independent official investigation.
This Army financial management/audit area is part of, or contiguous to, the Army personnel offices, which was one of two main west section offices heavily destroyed in the Pentagon attack, the other being the Naval Command Center. The day before 9/11, September 10, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld held a press conference at which he acknowledged that the Pentagon was "missing" -- could not account for and needed to "find" -- $2.3 Trillion dollars (other reports said $2.6 Trillion). Were the auditors who could "follow the money," and the computers whose data could help them do it, intentionally targeted? It is worth noting that the Pentagon's top financial officer at the time, Dov Zakheim, who also acknowledged the "missing" trillions, had a company that specializes in aircraft remote- control technology. As remnants found in the Pentagon wreckage have been identified as the front-hub assembly of the front compressor of a JT8D turbojet engine used in the A-3 Sky Warrior jet fighter, [5] and as Air Force A-3 Sky Warriors -- normally piloted planes -- were secretly retrofitted to be remote-controlled drones and fitted with missiles in a highly compartmented operation at an airport near Ft. Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport in Colorado in the months before 9/11, [6] the question further arises as to whether Pentagon auditors and their computerized data were intentionally targeted on 9/11.
The Ft. Monmouth Army auditor and his two colleagues were also eyewitnesses to multiple teams of bomb- sniffing dogs and their K-9 handlers in camouflage uniform at the Pentagon metro station just outside the Pentagon at approximately 7:30 am on 9/11. He said that K-9 bomb squads had not been at the Pentagon metro stop before 9/11, or since, but only that day. Since K-9 dog squads don't usually search for airliners, but bombs, a bomb attack was clearly anticipated. Ms. Gallop said she also saw the bomb sniffing K-9 teams that morning, from the top of the Pentagon metro stop looking down.
Survivor eyewitnesses from inside the west section of the Pentagon reported that the blast caused its windows first to expand outwards, and then inwards. [7]
Multiple witnesses said they smelled cordite after the initial explosion at the Pentagon, an explosive which has a distinct and very different smell from that of burning jet fuel. [8] And as we have already noted, Ms. Gallop said there was no smell of jet fuel inside the most damaged section of the building shortly after the first violent event that stopped her watch there shortly after 9:30.
Even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told Sam Donaldson in an ABC News interview shortly after 9/11 that he first thought a bomb had gone off in the building. Donaldson: "What did you think it was?" Rumsfeld: " A bomb? I had no idea..."
It is important to note that bomb explosion(s) at 9:32 am on the ground floor of the west section of the Pentagon are not inconsistent with there having also been a later, or even near-simultaneous, impact by some airborne object -- a piloted plane, unmanned drone, or missile -- into the same or nearby section of the building, which may have been the cause of the collapse of the west wall section approximately 20 minutes after the initial violent event. Indeed, if a heat-seeking missile hit the building after the bomb(s) went off, the heat from the explosion(s) would become the target for the missile. Recall that the A-3 Sky Warrior planes were retrofitted shortly before 9/11, not only enabling them to be remotely controlled but also fitted with missiles. The round- shaped exit hole in the inner wall of the "C" Ring is evidence that a missile or a piloted or pilotless remote-controlled plane significantly smaller than Flight 77 also struck the building subsequent to bombs going off and penetrated the inside of the third ring, as bomb detonations would not have resulted in such a near-symmetrical round-shaped opening.
I have interviewed the then Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations on 9/11, Robert Andrews -- the top civilian official in charge of special operations under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld -- a former Green Beret whose office was on the second floor of the south section of the Pentagon, adjacent to the west section. While drawing the path that he took that morning on a sketch of the Pentagon, he revealed the following:
Immediately after the second World Trade Center attack of 9:03 am, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld left his office on the Potomac side of the Pentagon and went (merely) across the hall on the same floor to his Executive Support Center (ESC), which is set up for teleconferencing. There, he joined the teleconference of top government officials run by Richard Clarke out of the White House Situation Room media room. Clarke, in his book Against All Enemies, confirms that Rumsfeld was among the first officials on this teleconference shortly after the second WTC tower was hit. Clarke's account and Andrews' confirmation of it are completely at odds with the official cover story and the 9/11 Commission, which claim that no one could locate Secretary Rumsfeld until approximately 10:30 am when he walked into the National Military Command Center (NMCC). The fact that Rumsfeld, the military's top civilian official, was on Clarke's teleconference with the top official of the FAA, Director Jane Garvey, also puts the complete lie to the official cover story that Air Force interceptors weren't scrambled in time because the military and FAA "couldn't talk each other" on 9/11. The top-most officials of the Pentagon and FAA were talking to one another constantly on Clarke's teleconference from as early as 9: 15. This taped Clarke teleconference is the "Butterfield tape" of 9/11. [During the 1970s Watergate scandal, secretly-made tapes of President Nixon's Oval Office conversations revealed by Alexander Butterfield were the "smoking guns" which forced Nixon to resign or face certain impeachment and trial in the Senate.]
Immediately after the second WTC tower was struck at 9:03 am, Andrews and his aide left his office and ran as fast as they could down to the Secretary of Defense's West section Counterterrorism Center (CTC), arriving at approximately 9:10. While he and his aide were in the CTC, a violent event caused the ceiling tiles to fall off the ceiling and smoke to pour into the room. Andrews immediately looked at his watch, which read approximately 9:35 am but which was set fast to ensure timely arrival at meetings, so the actual time was closer to 9:32. He and his aide then immediately evacuated the CTC with the goal of joining Rumsfeld in his Executive Support Center (ESC) across the hall from Rumsfeld's main office. He said that Rumsfeld was already on the White House teleconference when they arrived. En route to Rumsfeld's ESC, Andrews said when he and his aide entered the corridor on the inside ring of the west section, "we had to walk over dead bodies" to get to the inner courtyard. (Note: This is two rings further in towards the center from the inner most hole made by whatever allegedly impacted the Pentagon that morning.)
Once in the inner courtyard, Andrews and his aide ran as fast as they could to Rumsfeld's Executive Support Center, where he joined Rumsfeld as his special operations/counterterrorism adviser during Clarke's White House teleconference. Andrews also said that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke with President Bush while in the Pentagon Executive Support Center. Whether this was via the teleconference or by phone or other means was not stated. The fact that Rumsfeld personally communicated with Bush on 9/11 while Rumsfeld was in his Pentagon ESC was published on an official DoD web site. [9]
I have written communications from a former U.S. military helicopter pilot and current executive director of one of the US's premier aviation societies who personally knows and communicates regularly with the highest-ranking first responders at the WTC on 9/11, that the New York City Fire Department -- presumably its Fire Chief, who reported to then mayor Rudolph Giuliani -- ordered the doors to the roofs of the WTC towers locked, which blocked the only avenue of escape for victims above the plane impact floors, ensuring their horrific deaths; that at least one of the two New York Police Department helicopters seen hovering near the burning towers on television footage that morning, and probably both, was equipped with a winch and jump seat designed for the rescue of victims and in fact was the same helicopter and crew that had rescued victims from the burning WTC 1 in 1993, and that these Police Department helicopters were ordered by the Fire Department not to try to rescue victims from the towers, even though there were heliports on the roofs and the winch and jump seat could have been dropped outside the windows on the sides of the towers where victims were waiting to be rescued; and that the Fire Department also explicitly refused the help of large numbers of military helicopters, whose pilots spontaneously converged on the New York area only to be ordered to wait at a nearby base. [9A]
WTC janitor William "Willy" Rodriguez, the last non-emergency response person to leave the WTC alive on 9/11, has testified that he was in the first basement level of the WTC when an immense explosion went off below him in the yet-deeper subbasement level(s) of the building a few seconds before the plane hit the tower high above. [10] As Robert Andrews revealed that the west side basement level of the Pentagon was damaged at approximately 9:32 am and as we know that the cause of the 9:32 Pentagon attack was not an impact event but explosives, there are thus eye and ear witness reports of bombs going off in both the Pentagon and the WTC underground level(s) before both buildings were hit by anything from the outside.
As no "outside" terrorist, al Qaeda or otherwise, could have had access to either the Pentagon or the sustained advance access needed to pre-place explosives inside the WTC, only domestic insiders could have pre-placed the explosives in both the Pentagon and the WTC. Further, because the WTC1 deep-basement explosions(s) experienced by Willy Rodriguez happened before the tower was hit by a plane; as any incoming plane not controlled by the same party that triggered the sub-basement detonation(s) could have veered off from the building at the last second, ruining the plane-impact-as-cover-story for the later building collapse; and as the sub- asement explosions were necessary for the actual later collapse of the buildings by controlled demolition, the same domestic U.S. insiders had to have controlled both the sub-basement detonations and the incoming plane(s). Thus, even if al Qaeda hijackers were on the incoming planes, they were not in final control of the impact of the planes into the buildings, which had to have been 100 percent guaranteed by domestic U.S. insider controllers to ensure that, once the WTC1 sub-basement explosions went off, the plane did not veer off and miss the building and ruin the plane-impact-and-fires cover story for the building collapse. This fact is critical, as it may take jurisdiction for the mass murders at the WTC out of the hands from the Bush Administration's FBI, which oversees crimes committed in the air, as a cogent legal argument can be made that the real crime of controlling the plane into the towers was committed on the ground, in a terrestrial bldg. or vehicle, where its true controllers almost certainly resided. If so, this would place the crime of the WTC mass murders squarely with the State of New York, as murder is a State crime and multiple/mass murders are the sum of individual State crimes. Because the controllers of the timing of the basement level explosives had to have also been the controllers of the final approach of the planes, and the former was arguably, and provably with legal discovery and subpoena power, on the ground and not in the air, a Manhattan grand jury can be given the case and pull jurisdiction for the Bush-Cheney Reichstag Fire out of their federal hands.
Because the real modus operandi at the Pentagon and WTC are so similar, it is logical to deduce that the same domestic-US terrorists were responsible for pre-placing and detonating the bombs -- both inside the WTC and inside the Pentagon. That is, a single group of US-domestic conspirators -- not al Qaeda or any other outside terrorists -- must have planned both the WTC and Pentagon attacks and controlled both the approaching planes and the inside-the-building explosions in real time on 9/11.
In addition to the already legion evidence that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon -- i.e. the small hole in the west side of the Pentagon being not nearly large enough for the plane's fuselage, let alone wing width; no damage to the lawn where Flight 77 allegedly struck and skidded before hitting the building; wrecked plane parts at the site identified as being from an A-3 Sky Warrior, a far smaller plane than that of Flight 77, a Boeing 757; Pentagon requests to TV media on the morning of 9/11 not to take up-close images, etc. -- there is also official evidence that Flight 77 did not hit the building:
In the Air Force's own account of the events of 9/11, Air War Over America, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) general who finally ordered interceptor jets scrambled on 9/11, although too late, Gen. Larry Arnold, revealed that he ordered one of his jets to fly down low over the Pentagon shortly after the attack there that morning, and that this pilot reported back that there was no evidence that a plane had hit the building. This fighter jet -- not Flight 77 -- is almost certainly the plane seen on the Dulles airport Air Traffic Controller's screen making a steep, high-speed 270 to 330-degree descent before disappearing from the radar. [When a plane flies low enough to go undetected, usually at or below 500 feet, it is said to be flying "under the radar." Note: The Pilotsfor911 truth website and their "Pandora's Black Box" video have determined from official data released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that the true altitude/height of the plane represented by the blip was 476 feet -- way too high to have hit the Pentagon at all, let alone the ground floor, but, significantly, in just the height range to been seen by controllers to have just gone off radar and be said to have crashed. Military pilots -- like the one sent by Gen. Arnold on 9/11 to report on the Pentagon's damage -- are trained to fly at approx. 500 feet above ground in order to evade radar detection. In fact, when the Air Traffic Controller responsible for the plane and her colleagues watched the extremely difficult 330-degree maneuver (originally claimed to be a 270-degree maneuver, since updated) on her screen, they were certain that the plane whose blip they were watching perform this extremely difficult feat was a US military aircraft, and said so at the time. It almost certainly was.
Thus, the likely reason the Pentagon has refused to lower the current official time for "Flight 77" impact, 9:37, to 9:32 am -- the actual time of the first explosions there -- is that they decided to pretend the blip represented by Arnold's surveillance jet approaching just before 9:37 was "Flight 77." As the official cover story claims that the alleged 9:37 impact was the only Pentagon attack that morning, yet by the time Arnold's surveillance jet arrived on the scene the violent event had already happened, the Pentagon cannot acknowledge the earlier 9:32 time without revealing an attack on the building prior to the alleged impact.
It is significant that the The 9/11 Commission Report ignores the testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to its own commission and did this only for the testimony of Secretary Mineta. The clear reason for this blatant and targeted censorship is that Mineta's eyewitness testimony is extremely dangerous to the official cover story. The portion of Mineta's testimony that is particularly dangerous is his claim that Vice President Cheney, in charge in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) beneath the White House since before Mineta arrived in the PEOC at 9:20, insisted to an incredulous "young man" that "the orders (given earlier by Cheney to this same individual) still stand" when the man told Cheney that the presumed plane they had been tracking as a blip on a screen was 50, then 30, and finally just 10 miles from Washington -- orders which could only have been not to shoot down the plane. Otherwise there would have been no reason for the agent to ask Cheney if they "still" stood, despite the plane's being almost upon the capital where Cheney himself was. This is critical because of the timing that can be inferred from Mineta's testimony: As Mineta arrived at the PEOC at 9:20 am, and as Mineta estimated the "still stand?" interaction between Cheney and the agent happened 5 to 6 minutes after that, or about 9:25, it can be inferred based on the officially given speed of the plane represented by the blip of 540 mph that whatever that fast-approaching blip represented, it arrived in the vicinity of the Pentagon at approximately 9:32 -- nowhere close to the original official cover story time of 9:43, or even the six-minute-earlier time the Pentagon finally settled on for an alleged impact time of 9:37.
All of this also happened at 9:32:
• After an inexplicable delay during which they knew that both WTC towers were under attack, the Secret Service suddenly acts as if the attacks are "real," rushing President Bush out of the library at the Florida school where he had been reading to children.
• The firefighters are suddenly ordered out of WTC l.
• The New York Stock Exchange is ordered closed.
• The takeover of Flight 93 begins with the stabbing of a flight attendant and one of the alleged hijackers announcing that there is a bomb on board, picked up by flight controllers.
Other relevant interviews:
I interviewed the famous "lone taxi driver" whose cab is the only car visible still parked on I-395 above the Pentagon lawn looking down at the west face after the other cars have left the freeway. This taxi can be seen in overhead photos taken on the morning of 9/11 and viewable on the Internet. The driver said his was the last car allowed onto that section of I-395 before police put up a barricade and that he decided not to immediately leave the scene like the others "because I realized this was history and I wanted to see for myself." He stated that he saw no evidence of a plane having impacted the building nor any visible plane pieces on the lawn at the time he arrived, which was after the first violent event in the building, as black smoke was streaming up and to the right from inside- he-building fires. The taxi cab driver drew a diagram of what he saw that morning while overlooking the Pentagon's west face from I-395.
I interviewed a Navy public affairs officer assigned to the Naval Command Center, one of the two major Pentagon west section areas destroyed on 9/11, the other being the Army Financial Management/Audit area as mentioned earlier. This officer was not in the building that morning but was quickly assigned as the deputy public affairs officer at the underground "back-up Pentagon" location in Pennsylvania close to the Maryland border, Site R. This eyewitness Navy officer inside Site R said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and later Vice President Cheney were flown to the Site R underground bunker in response to Richard Clarke's officially declaring "Continuity of Government/Continuity of Operations" (COGlCOOP) on the morning of 9/11. This is confirmed in Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, in which he reports that Rumsfeld chose Wolfowitz to be the designated COG/COOP official at Site R in his stead. Perhaps significantly, Site R and Camp David are not far from the crash site of Flight 93. Details about Site R, on and after 9/11, are also in James Bamford's book, A Pretext for War.
On February 4, 2004, I interviewed Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, Commander of NORAD on 9/11. To my knowledge, Gen. Eberhart has granted no other interview since the events of September 11. Before asking questions, I gave Gen. Eberhart copies of all the mainstream press articles published as of that date on the subject of the confusion of his NORAD Northeast Sector (NEADS) personnel who were running NORAD's "Vigilant Guardian/Vigilant Warrior" emergency response war game exercises that morning. As of the date of the interview, therefore, the then head of NORAD was made aware of the initial confusion by his own NEADS "game" players on 9/11 between incoming exercise reports and incoming reports of the actual hijacks.
I first asked Gen. Eberhart if there was any connection between NORAD's "Vigilant Guardian/Vigilant Warrior" exercise being run on 9/11 and the plane-crashing-into-tower emergency response exercise simultaneously being held at National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) headquarters outside Washington, D.C. [12/firstcite] He replied, "No." I was surprised at this, as a large portion of NRO personnel are from his own agency, the Air Force. I asked for reconfirmation, to which he again said, "No." Laying the ground for the next question, I mentioned that NEADS' "game" director Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins had said that she was confused as to whether initial reports of the hijacked planes on the morning of 9/11 were "real world" or "part of the game." This, I said, showed that the NORAD exercises that morning had to have been on a hijack scenario at least similar to the actual attacks, as otherwise there would have been no grounds for confusion. After considering this for a moment, Gen. Eberhart refused to answer any further questions and abruptly ended the interview.