This book is a MUST READ. Of course it is old now and the 911 inside job has uncovered a much deeper level of a criminal empire. BUT IT IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT for us to have an understanding of the ways that our democracy is undermined by the ILLEGITEMATE OWNERS of this world. The book is freely availabe from zmag.org website. Blogspot adaptation by u2rh2.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
ANTI CHOMSKY - finally!!!
Chomsky is right on the button so often, it is his dilligence and hard work on the fact coupled with just plain common sense that makes it a PATH TO FOLLOW.
In other words: make the effort and read to elighten yourself, but never loose the moral base, common sense!
Of course being a linguist will help in the speed of DECONSTRUCTION (of the lies of the powerful) and help in the TRANSMISSION of your thoughts, but just being informed ... will do.
Chomsky is often 100%. But he is human, too. For example he does not comprehend the 9/11 inside job or the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK (CIA jobs).
well, that's ALL the critique that ever stuck IMHO.
The faurisson affair and other attempts to smear Chomsky have all failed, and only propagandists pull them out of the drawer these days.
Here is a new one... lets see:
The Left at War Michael Bérubé. New York Univ., $29.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-8147-9984-0
Fresh off the 2008 election and anticipating an ascendancy of leftist thought and political success, Bérubé (Rhetorical Occasions), cultural studies and literature professor at Pennsylvania State University, provides robust intellectual arguments for how to reshape leftist thought into a powerful, constructive and measurably successful political philosophy.and how to mitigate the damage caused by the .Manichean. left: notably Chomsky and other members of the hard left whom he disparagingly describes as ready to sympathize with .any 'anti-imperialist' who comes along to challenge the Western powers, from Milosevic to Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.. He provides an assessment of Chomsky's appeal and a balanced critique of Chomsky's failings, juxtaposing him with Stuart Hall, who brings what Bérubé believes is the necessary nuance to leftist thinking. Bérubé forthrightly identifies himself as a social democratic leftist, and his effort not only identifies left-wing excesses and elevates its more viable and strategically sound currents, but puts critical thinking back into vogue on both sides of the political spectrum. (Nov.)
THE ROVING EYE The president is in the trunk By Pepe Escobar
An historical irony has placed little Honduras at the eye of the volcano in both the United Nations General Assembly in New York and the Group of 20 (G-20) meeting in Pittsburgh this week - even though United States corporate media would rather focus on Libyan Muammar Gaddafi and the tribulations of his traveling tent. [1]
As much as the 2008 financial crisis exposed the economic fallacy of US-propelled neo-liberalism, the June 28 oligarch-directed military coup in Honduras has exposed the fallacy of the
Barack Obama administration's pledge to uphold democratic values around the world. Stolen elections in Afghanistan? We don't like it, but ... Military coup in Honduras? We don't like it, but ...
What passes for official US policy at the G-20 consists of telling big exporting powers such as China, Germany and Japan to engage in an orgy of consumption (as the US used to) while vaguely promising the US will finally boost savings. Fat chance.
As for Honduras, this is now the Obama administration's hour of truth: will it finally come clean and follow world opinion - also expressed by the UN, the European Union and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) - in condemning and isolating the coup plotters?
The stick, or deafening silence Deposed, rightful Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has been to Washington no less than six times since the coup. Not once was he allowed to meet Obama. Then, this past Monday morning, Zelaya showed up at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras' capital, after a spectacular run that started in Nicaragua, involved a flight to El Salvador on a plane offered by Venezuela, and a 15-hour odyssey across the border to Honduras on foot and by car, evading myriad checkpoints manned by local intelligence - which is, crucially, funded, trained and maintained by the Pentagon. Zelaya was smuggled into the Brazilian Embassy in the trunk of car.
Zelaya may have had help from Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, under the umbrella of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA). But now the strategic game-changer has been to shift the attention towards Brazil - and that means under the UNASUR.
Whether Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva knew it before hand or only at the last minute (as the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs insists) is irrelevant. It was not the US that called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week; it was Brazil.
Lula forcefully demanded the restoration of democracy in Honduras in his speech at the UN General Assembly - with strong applause from the plenary. Obama's speech came right after Lula's. Not a word on Honduras. Obama spoke of a "new era of engagement" or at best an "inter-connected world" - while Lula spoke about the emergence of a real multilateral world; its subtext means the hyperpower does not have the monopoly anymore, be it on the word, the stick, or deafening silence.
Obama even stressed the US "can't fix it alone" - as if the war in Afghanistan and confrontation with Iran were global, and not only US, obsessions. (By the way: Lula met Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad face-to-face for over an hour on the sidelines of the UN assembly. He later said that as much as Brazil had the right to develop its own peaceful nuclear program, so did Iran).
By Obama's own admission, the US can't fix Honduras alone, but at least it could have emitted the right signals, delegitimizing the coup politically, militarily, economically and diplomatically from the beginning.
So far, the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) has engaged in a pantomime negotiated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias which calls for Zelaya's return as president, coup plotters integrated into the government, and amnesty for everybody, including installed coup President Roberto Micheletti.
This is ludicrous. It's as if in the (failed) George W Bush administration-supported 2002 coup against Chavez in Venezuela, the plotters would have been allowed to stay as his ministers.
Only the minimal Honduran oligarchy and the media they control support the coup. They have no social base. A communique by the National Front Against the Coup stresses that some businessmen and military who initially supported the plotters are now leaving the country. The coup plotters - emboldened by force, as if this was Latin America in the 1970s all over again - reverted to, what else, mass repression, a state of siege and tear-gassing everyone in sight.
What the majority of the people in Honduras want is their rightful president back in power and a constituent assembly, for which they are campaigning all around the country. Zelaya's own counter-coup has been to risk his life and install a government in exile - but not in exile, inside his own country - the ultimate nightmare of any dictatorship. For the coup plotters, there are only two endgames: unleash state terrorism or get out of Dodge and beg for asylum in Panama.
The Pentagon power play Washington's glaring ambiguity is easily attributed to the ongoing, fierce internal war in the US. The true US supporters of the coup in Honduras are US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) and the State Department. But even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been forced to back down. On Monday, she finally was forced to admit "the remainder of President Zelaya's term [is] to be respected".
Crucially, Obama has to know how the ambiguous US stance on Honduras is a dagger pointing to his heart. It leaves his lofty promise of a new relationship between the US and Latin America in tatters. Worse still, it unveils how helpless he is facing his - in theory - subordinates at the Pentagon and the State Department, no to mention vast reactionary forces across the US for whom multilateralism means a surrender to "socialism" and to America's enemies.
As American political activist, author and lecturer Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Central America is still traumatized by the "Reaganesque terror" of the 1980s. In a wider context in Latin America, the US used to exert control either by hardcore violence, direct or indirect, or by applying an economic stranglehold. This belongs to the past - as much as coup lovers in the Pentagon may regret it.
Coups, anyway, are far from gone. The Bush administration tried (and failed) in Venezuela in 2002; now Washington engages in subversion/propaganda via an extensive media network and National Endowment for Democracy-style support for the disgruntled local oligarchies. In Haiti, both France and the US got rid of the government and sent the president to South Africa. Honduras is a more complex case. The International Monetary Fund has just approved an enormous loan to Honduras - which will cover for the lack of direct US "assistance".
Most of all, the US role in Honduras is a Pentagon-playing-the-New Great Game matter. The coup is intimately linked to ongoing remilitarization of Latin America - from the reactivation of the dormant Fourth Fleet to the installation of seven new military bases in Colombia. (See US's 'arc of instability' just gets bigger, September 3, Asia Times Online.)
In pure Pentagonese, Honduras under Zelaya fell under the good old Cold War domino theory. The government had to go because it was linked to ALBA, which means Nicaragua and, above all, Venezuela. Chavez is playing a high stakes New Great Game - he just bought US$2 billion in weapons from Russia at a time when Moscow wants access to the Orinoco oil wealth, and he is also doing energy megadeals with China. The Pentagonese response is an array of bases in Colombia to monitor him. Now Zelaya's move to the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa introduces an even juicier element.
Last December, Brazil struck a strategic military partnership with France - involving a multibillion-dollar purchase of submarines, helicopters and jet fighters - with full technology transfer included. Lula is privileging the French over Boeing - and obviously the US industrial-military complex is not amused. Brazil projects power independently from the US and France in South America. This is all about multilateralism in action - of the kind reactionary forces in the US simply abhor.
Brazil is a key G-20 member at the Pittsburgh summit - the largest economy in Latin America, swinging its way towards great power status, and still a key ally and trading partner of the US. Brazil may not solve the crisis in Honduras. But Lula - whom Obama immensely respects - may convince him it's time to finally come clean, and side with the people of Honduras.
This might do wonders for Obama's global credibility - especially now that he has seemingly backed down on his demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem. (See Netanyahu and Obama: Who's fooling who?, Asia Times Online, September 24)
Were Obama not to make his move, the impression would remain that if he can't even control his own reactionary/militarist backyard in Washington, not to mention Latin America, how will he face up to Russia and China on the global stage?
Note 1. Known for pitching a large Bedouin tent on his trips abroad, Gaddafi this time pitched it on famous US entrepreneur Donald Trump's 86 hectare (213 acre) estate in Bedford, a town about 50 kilometers north of New York, after New York police turned down his request to erect it in Central Park.
AMAZINGLY candid! Must read (between the lines!)!!!!
US interest in an unstable Pakistan
Syed M Tariq Pirzada
Is Pakistan acceptable to US as an economic, and military power? Does the US global strategy clash with a stronger Pakistan. Why is the US opposed to a nuclear Islamabad. Is Pakistan ignoring the threats posed by the Indo-US strategic partnership. Neither it began with 9/ 11, nor has it ended thereafter. At the most, as it, quite certainly, seems to be, the US global interest goes no further than granting Pakistan, a very limited space, for it.s bare minimum survival on the map. History has a reminder that instead of opening it.s markets, the luring assistance i.e. limited aid, and low interest loans, have long been Washington.s ploy to consume Pakistan , sometimes, as part of cold war years bulwark against communism, and, sometimes, as the frontline warrior, which it is today in the endless war on terror.
With the US led markets purposely denied, the economic reverses, that Pakistan experienced under the failed civil and military leaderships, ceaselessly continue under the banner of economic mismanagement, lost markets, mounting debts, trimmed sovereignty, and threatened national security. The talk of access to US-led markets makes headlines only to be ditched by the dream aid- packages, offered, every other decade, to the successive Pak-regimes.
The strategy to ensure a debilitated Pakistan is yielding multiple political, financial, military, and strategic dividends for the US- led endeavor as follows : Political dividends: There seems no lapse in US- assessment, that, despite the fact that Pakistan is the sixth largest part of the world population, a nuclear power, and the biggest Muslim nation between South Asia, and the Atlantic, it will stay under leaderships that would allow US coercion to, unrestrictedly, dictate, and manage every thing from it.s security and, foreign policy, to it.s regime-change and political settlements, all of which have, over the years, grown to encompass a lot more, including , in particular, it.s ideological, educational, and social reconstruction. To solidify these gains, the US-established diplomatic pressure-bridge between Washington and Islamabad, keeps bringing in , besides the permanent Holbrooke factor, hordes after hordes of towering US Senators, Congressmen, higher officials representing the CIA, FBI, National Intelligence, CENTCOM , ,and above all, the Pentagon.s top brass, including, Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, the regular US top gun to Islamabad, in addition, of course, to the Uncle Sam.s resident overseer, the US ambassador in the capital. What is, indeed, to the nation, a humiliating US intrusiveness , and a diplomatic terrorization, is, somehow, to the . victimized. US, just another maneuver to fortify the exhausted Islamabad.s focus on it.s war, leaving it, thereby, without the crucial assets of time, energy, and, resources, for it.s normal state-management.
Had the US-administration deployed as many as 150 thousand troops in Afghanistan, as it did in Iraq, the people, and the exchequer in Washington would have found themselves immeasurably bleeding in, and around the Hindukush from the early moments of war. But the rewarding Bush-threats , then, to Pakistan, the unwavering Musharraf co-operation over the years, and the US- guided regime in today.s Islamabad have, all, not only contributed before, but, are still, through the new faces, contributing, to what may be called a stunningly cost-effective US Afghan- war .
With just over 700 hundred US troops( roughly 80 per annum) lost in 8 years, the cost of the US- Afghan war( about an average of10 to 12 billion dollars per annum (with salaries etc included about $ 21 billion) until right before the recent new deployments), as opposed to the cost of the US-Iraq war( an estimated average of120 billion per annum, plus nearly 5000 dead), makes it highly affordable with the result that there is hardly , any serious public demand, or debate within the United States, for it.s troops-withdrawal, or for an end to the Afghan war.
The key to the low- cost US-war: over hundred thousand Pak- troops deployment along the Afghan border,( the equivalent of which could cost the US about a staggering 70 to 80 billion per annum) again, in return for as little as billion dollar a year , which, even with the promised conditional assistance of $1.5 billion, turns the US war, in fact, into a free Western crusade. Thus, with the help of Pak-regimes, both past and present, the prolonged US war in Afghanistan, that is choking Pak-economy, is hardly, any more than a minor military discomfort easily bearable for decades to come if the future US administrations so opt to continue.
The occupation of Afghanistan offers a wide array of strategic opportunities to the US, which include, but, are not limited to, the following: With it.s growing military might, and operations along the Pak- Afghan border, the US remains ideally located to exercise maximum containment-pressure over any further weaponization, or needed expansion within Pakistan.s limited nuclear program..
Also, based on the alleged possibility that some how Pakistan.s nuclear weapons, or, materials, could one day fall in to the hands of Alqaeda, or, the extremists, any US contingency plans, to, preemptively, seize or destroy, small Pak- nuclear arsenal, despite the difficulties involved, may never be ruled out. Again, amid growing silence, the question is, whether Pakistan has, failed, under US pressure, to respond, this time, to the mega threat posed by the Indian navy.s nuclear build-up.the launch of it.s Pak-specific first atomic submarine, SSBN, Arihant. in the Indian ocean? Don.t let, finances, or misjudgment deprive Pakistan of long range, sea- born strategic retaliatory strike capability, which, along with land based nuclear assets, would, certainly, operate to deter any future western adventurism against our otherwise routinely threatened republic.
The US is making it.s presence felt with an intense demand that Pakistan shift it.s convetional concentration from India to the US anti-terror war. Some of the Pak- troops deployments, away from the Indo- Pak border to the Afghan border , testify to the leadership.s capitulation. US defense secretary, Robert Gates, has, pointed, as late as Sep 10, to the need for such a change. Also, in the wake of Bush anti-terror-doctrine , the termination of Pak- support for the Kashmiris freedom, became even a greater fiasco in that New Delhi, the US strategic partner, quickly surged, and remains, to date, as the .unchallenged. occupier of Kashmir due to the US- forced exclusion of Pakistan from this sensitive issue, ironically, in an imposed war which it continues to fight, but, only to see, in so doing, the J&K. it.s supreme national interest. lost, for now, to India.
The US-backed huge expansion of India.s economic, political, and military influence in Afghanistan.a direct source of active interference, both, in the NWFP, and Balochistan. has already given NewDelhi a strong foothold, coupled with a strategic advantage effectively eliminating Pakistan from it.s historically secure backyard, which bears close similarity to the US-steered exclusion of Pakistan from the issue of Kashmir. The unchecked Indianization of Afghanistan, that goes on under the umbrella of US war on terror, could eventually witness, not only permanent Indian military presence near Pakistan.s Western borders, but, also divide and cripple, needles to say, it.s already fragile defenses in the east against India.
Thus the picture is clear that the US has vested interest in an economically unstable and militarily vulnerable Pakistan. An Islamic Republic whose economic and military strength must always remain so abridged as to prevent it from ever acquiring a major power status and from ever playing a major power role in the Indian ocean region and beyond
Noam Chomsky: The push to militarise Latin America
Noam Chomsky 19 September 2009
The United States was founded as an "infant empire", in the words of George Washington. From the earliest days, control over the hemisphere was a critical goal.
Latin America has retained its primacy in US global planning. If the US cannot control Latin America, it cannot expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world", observed then-president Richard Nixon's National Security Council in 1971, when Washington was considering the overthrow of Salvador Allende.s elected left-wing government in Chile.
Recently the hemisphere problem has intensified. South America has moved toward integration, a prerequisite for independence; has broadened international ties; and has addressed internal disorders . foremost, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanised minority over a sea of misery and suffering.
The problem came to a head a year ago in Bolivia, South America.s poorest country. In 2005, the indigenous majority elected a president from its own ranks, Evo Morales.
In August 2008, after Morales. victory in a recall referendum, the opposition of US-backed elites turned violent. This led to the massacre of as many as 30 government supporters.
In response, the newly-formed Union of South American Republics (Unasur), involving all South American countries, called a summit meeting. Participants declared "their full and firm support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales, whose mandate was ratified by a big majority".
Morales said: "For the first time in South America.s history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems, without the presence of the United States."
Another example: Ecuador.s President Rafael Correa has vowed to end Washington.s use of the Manta military base, the last such base open to the US in South America.
In July, the US and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the US to use seven military bases in Colombia.
The official purpose is to counter narcotics trafficking and terrorism, "but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations" told the Associated Press on July 15 "that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations".
The agreement provides Colombia with privileged access to US military supplies. Colombia had already become the leading recipient of US military aid (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category).
Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. The correlation between US aid and human rights violations has long been noted.
AP cited an April document of the US Air Mobility Command, which proposed that the Palanquero base in Colombia could become a "cooperative security location".
From Palanquero, "nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 (military transport) without refueling", the document said.
This could form part of "a global en route strategy", which "helps achieve the regional engagement strategy and assists with the mobility routing to Africa".
On August 28, Unasur met in Bariloche, Argentina, to consider the US military bases in Colombia.
After intense debate, the final declaration stressed that South America must be kept as "a land of peace", and that foreign military forces must not threaten the sovereignty or integrity of any nation of the region. And it instructed the South American Defense Council to investigate the Air Mobility Command document.
The bases. official purpose did not escape criticism.
Morales said he saw US soldiers accompanying Bolivian troops who fired at members of his coca growers union. "So now we.re narco-terrorists", he said.
"When they couldn.t call us communists anymore, they called us subversives, and then traffickers, and since the September 11 attacks, terrorists."
The ultimate responsibility for Latin America.s violence lay with US consumers of illegal drugs, Morales said. "If Unasur sent troops to the United States to control consumption, would they accept it? Impossible."
That the US justification for its drug programs abroad is even regarded as worthy of discussion is yet another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality.
Last February, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy issued its analysis of the US "war on drugs". The commission, led by former Latin American presidents Fernando Cardoso (Brazil), Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico), and Cesar Gaviria (Colombia), concluded that the drug war had been a complete failure. It urged a drastic change of policy, away from forceful measures at home and abroad, and toward much less costly and more effective measures . prevention and treatment.
The commission report, like earlier studies and the historical record, had no detectable impact. The non-response reinforces the natural conclusion that the "drug war" . like the "war on crime" and "the war on terror" . is pursued for reasons other than the announced goals, which are revealed by the consequences.
During the past decade, the US has increased military aid and training of Latin American officers in light infantry tactics to combat "radical populism" . a concept that, in the Latin American context, sends shivers up the spine.
Military training is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon, eliminating human rights and democracy provisions formerly under congressional supervision . always weak but at least a deterrent to some of the worst abuses.
The US Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950, was reactivated in 2008, shortly after Colombia.s invasion of Ecuador. It has responsibility for the Caribbean, Central and South America, and surrounding waters.
Militarisation of South America aligns with much broader designs.
In Iraq, information is virtually nil about the fate of the huge US military bases there, so they presumably remain for force projection. The cost of the immense city-with-in-a-city embassy in Baghdad is set to rise to US$1.8 billion a year.
The Obama administration is also building mega-embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The US and Britain are demanding that the US military base in Diego Garcia be exempted from the planned African nuclear-weapons-free-zone. US bases are off-limits in similar zoning efforts in the Pacific.
In short, moves toward "a world of peace" do not fall within the "change you can believe in", to borrow US President Barack Obama.s campaign slogan.
[Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on US foreign policy. This article is reprinted from In These Times.]
From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #811 23 September 2009.
The crisis that became Black September began when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine simultaneously hijacked four planes belonging to Western airlines, landed them at the same Jordanian airfield and held the hundreds of passengers hostage - among them Israelis with dual citizenship.
The Americans were worried not only by Hussein's weakness in imposing his sovereignty on Yasser Arafat and his rivals in other fedayeen (guerrilla) organizations, but also about the passengers' lives and the evacuation of other American citizens who found themselves caught up in the battles in Amman.
In his conversations with his military adjutant, Alexander Haig, Kissinger groused about the behavior of Rogers ("that son of a bitch of a field marshal") and his aide for Middle East affairs Joseph Sisco, who eventually became Kissinger's own advisor on the same area of the world: "That son of a bitch will be on the phone to the secretary within two seconds," Kissinger warned Haig.
A typical maneuver of Kissinger's was to converse with Rabin and to instruct him on what to say (and what not to say) to Sisco. Kissinger withheld bits of information from Rabin. Twice, for example, he did not reveal to him that Nixon was present in his office and listening to their phone conversation. Here is a sampling of statements from those days:
Sisco to Kissinger: "Rabin also said that we no longer have to worry, because it is dark and he did not know any Arab who would fight at night."
Kissinger to Sisco: "Secretary Rogers and I have talked to the president. He still has a bias for using U.S. planes rather than Israeli planes if Iraqis or Syrians move into Jordan, but he is more receptive to a counterargument than he was yesterday."
Sisco: "He [Rogers] too wonders, however, why Americans are not better than Israelis. He has reached the same conclusion about the president's bias in favor of American air."
Kissinger: "It is not a question of who is better, the questions are: (1) who has the better reason for doing it - foreign intervention for the U.S. as opposed to a national security issue for the Israelis; (2) who can sustain it better there; (3) who has the deterrent force behind an initial strike. If things continue as they are, however, it may not be necessary.
"On military actions, the president has ordered the Kennedy to the Mediterranean, on the understanding that the third carrier would be rotated out in November if the situation quiets. He wants some beefing up of the Sixth Fleet, as well as a demonstration that we can do so."
Deputy secretary of defense David Packard: "There isn't anything we can do in the U.S. without its leaking. It might be possible to do something with troops in Germany."
Kissinger: "How fast could U.S. troops get there from Europe?"
Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "From 40 to 48 hours."
Kissinger: "From the U.S.?"
Moorer: "From Europe. The flight time from Europe is seven and a half hours in a C-130 and four and a half hours in a C-141, so the troops would arrive rested. Flying time from the U.S. would be eighteen and a half and fourteen and a half hours, respectively. This is from a non-alert status. If the forces used were from the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, they would have to be staged either through Greece or Incirlik [in Turkey]."
Sisco: "Or through the British base on Cyprus. I don't think we could get approval for staging either through Greece or Turkey."
Here Kissinger says that the president is not keen to use Israeli forces, and Moorer notes that the cease-fire (on the Suez Canal) would "go out the window" if Israeli forces are deployed. Sisco says that the first preference would be to put Jordanian forces into the field, the second American, and the third Israeli.
Kissinger: "In the present situation in Jordan, the peace initiative doesn't have a prayer. We can't ask the Israelis to negotiate a border arrangement with a government that isn't in control of its country."
Moorer: "By using the 82nd Airborne, we would then have four brigades: one brigade from Europe and a division from the U.S. We should look carefully at the second phase, however - examine our staying power, which is limited. We may be faced with the possibility of Syria and Iraq mounting an attack on Lebanon and Jordan."
Lt. Gen. Melvin Zais, director of operations: "The first company could be there in 20 hours, with the rest of the brigade following."
Kissinger: "Could one company survive?"
Zais: "We would make this judgment at the time. Someone has to go in first."
Kissinger: "Could we look at the possibility of ginning up some exercise to keep the brigade on alert?"
Zais: "One problem is that the European brigade is a dual-purpose brigade, with both an airborne and a ground capability. The minute you start packing parachutes and readying planes you have given a signal."
Kissinger: "If we do not get the fedayeen in Jordan under control, the peace initiative will go by the board. Israel has to have a government to deal with that can fulfill its obligations. The president's instincts are to crush the fedayeen now. Although he may reconsider, we must make sure such a move doesn't fail because we didn't have a good plan. Could we sustain an action to prop up Hussein? How long would we have to stay?"
Moorer: "We have a plan to mount such an operation. The question would be if it should spread. Given our Vietnam requirements, we might be in some difficultly with ammunition and other things. We always have to consider the next possible step."
Kissinger: "Could we count on the Iraqis and Syrians becoming involved?"
Moorer: "It would be prudent to do so."
Kissinger: "Then what?"
Moorer: "We would put the four brigades into Jordan to handle the situation."
Central Intelligence Agency director Richard Helms: "Would that mean we had no strategic reserve left in the U.S.? That scares the hell out of me."
Moorer: "That's right. That would be everything we've got."
Zais: "There is no other existing unit in the U.S. We would have to reforge a unit to go to Europe to replace the brigade. Also, the 82nd is not in great shape. It is C-2, meaning it is at about 85 percent personnel strength."
Kissinger: "How would the battle develop?"
Sisco: "We would land at the airport, and move out, I assume assisting the Jordanian army, to clean out the city. We assume the Jordanian army could establish and sustain certain positions. The Iraqis are outside the city. If both Iraq and Syria should move, I can't believe Israel would stand idly by. This would mean, basically, a U.S.-Israeli operation to sustain Hussein against the Palestinians, Iraqis and Syrians. The whole Arab world would have to come out in support of Iraq and Syria."
Kissinger: "Suppose the king moves against the fedayeen without U.S. support. Would the Iraqis intervene?"
Sisco: "If they did, the Israelis would intervene, at Jordanian request, with ground forces."
Kissinger: "That would finish the king."
Sisco: "Yes, but better Israeli forces than U.S. forces. The Israelis and Jordanians have already talked about this."
Moorer: "We could always give Jordan air support from our [aircraft] carriers." (Later, Moorer expresses the concern that in air battles with the Syrians, the American pilots would be liable to lead their enemies to their aircraft carriers, which would be attacked from the air.)
Kissinger: "I assume if Israel moved in support of Hussein, it would be with our approval."
Sisco: "At least our tacit approval. We could never convince anyone that it was done without our approval."
Kissinger: "But if the Soviets or Egyptians prepare a move, we should be in a position to keep the Soviets out."
Sisco: "And we should be prepared to supply Israel with considerable additional wherewithal, since Israel would be expending materiel very rapidly."
Helms: "Anything involving four brigades would be out politically."
Kissinger: "That is why Israeli forces are preferable. The missing ingredient would be enough U.S. show of force to keep the Soviets and Egyptians out."
Helms: "How big would that have to be?"
Sisco: "I don't think the Egyptians would intervene. We would have to provide the ring so far as the Russians were concerned, however. Also, Israel would need more to sustain itself against the Iraqis in a Jordan situation."
Kissinger: "Do we have a package that could serve this purpose? Could we pick one of the existing alternative packages?"
Sisco: "We could adapt one to suit the purpose - probably by including more planes and bombs ... On the Egyptian side, the Egyptians would probably move some of the SAMs closer to the [Suez] Canal. Also, Russian pilots would likely become more involved. The Israeli tactic would probably be to keep the Canal area as quiet as possible. Nasser would have to step up his campaign against Israel in some way - probably by small, showy raids."
Helms: "He might undertake a bombardment of the Bar Lev line."
Asked whether he thought the Jordanian army could handle the fedayeen by itself, Helms replied: "Yes, if they will do it. They don't need help to handle the fedayeen."
Sisco: "In these circumstances, the fedayeen in Lebanon would feel they had to act. Without outside intervention, however, the Lebanese army could do reasonably well against the fedayeen. Lebanon would want additional military equipment, however - at least armored personnel carriers."
Kissinger: "We may be forced when this crisis is over, to address the question of crushing the fedayeen."
Sisco: "A political settlement is still the best tool in terms of the fedayeen. A substantial portion of the Palestinians still prefer a political to a military solution. It might alter our attitude, however, as to the realistic elements of a settlement. For years we have told the Israelis that the Allon plan is a non-starter. We might look at it again in the light of changed circumstances."
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This year, without even waiting for the 40th anniversary of the events, the American administration has declassified a collection of fascinating transcripts of discussions, telegrams and phone conversations.
Do you see the hole that the boeing made? Windows intact?
911 Reason why 9/11 was (probably) an inside job.
PART I: 3 towers, 2 jets
Never before or after 9/11 have steel-framed skyscrapers collapsed due to fire.
In February 2005, the 32-storey Windsor Building in the financial district of Madrid, Spain was completely engulfed by flames for 20 consecutive hours. I repeat: 20 consecutive hours. The structure did not collapse. In fact, after the fire was finally extinguished, a huge construction crane was seen perched on the roof of the building as raw testimony to the practical indestructibility of steel as a construction material.
Now compare the fire in Madrid that burned continuously for 20 hours, without compromising the structure, to two relatively low-temperature fires inside the formidably constructed WTC buildings. As the investigators would have us believe, those fires caused both structures to disappear, in mirror-image collapses, into their own footprints in less than one hour.
On October 18, 2004, an inferno gutted the top 20 floors of the 50-storey Parque Central Tower in Caracas, Venezuela. The fire burned for 17 consecutive hours, but the steel structure did not collapse.
By contrast, the fires burning inside of the World Trade Center buildings were textbook examples of oxygen-starved fires, visible by the dark gray smoke that emitted from both structures. Indeed, very few flames were visible at all. Furthermore, many tenants of the stricken buildings were able to walk down the emergency steps past the point of impact where the planes had struck.
Brian Clark, a South Tower survivor, was working in his office at Euro Brokers Inc. when, at 9:03am, United Airlines 175 crashed into the 78th Floor. Euro Brokers’ office was situated on the 84th floor, 6 storeys above the impact of the jetliner. Yet Clark, together with other fellow employees, managed to escape from the South Tower, walking down the building’s inside stairwell and past the point of impact.
“When I looked down there, I didn’t see flames,” Clark said in an interview for the film Zero. “We decided to go as far as we could until we would be stopped by flames. When we came to the 78th floor (the point of impact), there were flames licking up the other side of the wall… It wasn’t a roaring inferno. I sensed that the flames were maybe starved for oxygen right there. We kept going, and when we got to the 74th floor… normal conditions: the lights were on, and there was fresh air coming up from below.”
Another indication that the WTC fires were far below the temperatures needed for a catastrophic collapse was evident by the tragic image of office workers who were filmed standing inside the gaping mouth of the airplanes’ point of entry, desperately waiting to be rescued. Indeed, much of the jet fuel that both airplanes were carrying was immediately blown out of the buildings upon impact in magnificent orange fireballs.
Kevin Ryan is a former engineer from Underwriters Laboratory (UL), a highly reputable company that was subcontracted to test the hypothesis of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as to how the WTC towers collapsed. Ryan and his colleagues used model replicas of the WTC towers to test the ability of the structures to remain standing in the event of a fire.
“We did test the floor models in August 2004,” Ryan said, “and those tests disproved the primary theory behind the collapse of the buildings.”
“The floor models didn’t collapse in the tests,” Ryan said, “and these (models) were in furnaces in much hotter temperatures, for a longer period of time (as compared with the temperature and endurance of the fires on 9-11). Yet, they still did not collapse.”
According to Ryan, in order for NIST to get the results they were looking for, they “manipulated the test parameters. They doubled one thing, and cut something else in half. They doubled the time their computer model exposed the columns to fire – 90 minutes, as opposed to 50 minutes.”
Eventually, NIST was forced to substitute the “pancake theory” (which wrongly hypothesized that the combined force of the upper floors began a domino effect downward) for the “inward bowing theory,” which argues that the floors and walls of the WTC buildings buckled to the point where they could no longer support the weight of the structure – an equally implausible explanation for the collapses, given the low temperatures inside the structures.
Ryan was fired from his job with Underwriters Laboratory one week after he challenged the results of the NIST report, the US government’s official version of the reasons for the WTC collapses.
It is important to remember that the WTC was specifically designed to withstand the impact of not one, but several airplanes crashing into it, as well as powerful winds that the architects understood would regularly pummel the structure.
The inner “core” of the World Trade Center towers, a mixture of steel and concrete that housed the elevator shafts and stairwells, can best be described as formidable. This inner supporting section, which measured an area of 87 by 135 feet (27 by 41 m), was composed of 47 steel columns packed in cement that ran the entire length of the structures. If left untouched, the towers were constructed to “outlive the pyramids,” as one engineer told me.
“We designed the buildings to resist the impact of one or more airliners,” said Frank De Martini, WTC construction manager.
Free-fall collapse time of the structures
One of the most perplexing aspects about the collapse of the WTC structures is that they tumbled to the ground in almost free-fall time. Researchers say this is a physical impossibility.
“One of the things that particularly struck me was the incredible speed in which the towers came down,” said Paolo Marini, a metallurgy researcher at the Italian Center for Materials Development.
“There was something truly inexplicable about the speed of the collapse. If we drop a weight from a height of around 400 meters, which was the height of the towers, the time it would take to reach the ground… would take approximately 9 seconds.”
“The impact (of the airliner) was about two-thirds of the way up the tower,” Marini continued. “But even if the section above collapsed suddenly due to the structure giving way, and even considering that the impact of the section above was enormous, and therefore somewhat weakened the resistance of the structure below, it’s clear that, due to the resistance of the undamaged part below, this tower should not have fallen at such a speed. But it fell as if there was nothing below it.”
David Chandler, a member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, has created a video presentation that blows a gaping in hole in the official version of events.
Chandler focuses on the top 32 meters (equivalent to eight floors) of World Trade Center I, also known as the North Tower, which collapses and drops on top of the massive undamaged section below. It has been argued that the downward force of the upper section onto the lower section was what brought down the entire building into a mountain of dust and rubble.
Chandler tracks the rate of fall of the upper 32 meters at 64 per cent of free fall speed. In other words, once the upper structure begins to fall, the upward resistive force (that is, the undamaged section below) must be only 36 per cent of the weight of the falling section of the building, i.e. the difference in percentage (if the math seems fuzzy to some readers, you may want to find Chandler's visual models, which are easily accessible over the Internet).
“So far, so good,” says Chandler, who has a knack for making physics sound simple. “But… Newton’s Third Law says that interaction between objects work both ways. The forces that two objects exert on each other are always equal and opposite. If the upward force acting on the falling block is 36 percent of the weight of the falling block, the downward force exerted by the falling block must be exactly the same: 36 percent of the weight of the falling block.”
“In other words,” Chandlers continues, “the top section of the building is exerting less force on the lower, stronger, undamaged structure than it would if it were simply sitting motionless.”
Chandler’s scientific conclusion: “The top section of the building, whatever its condition, cannot possibly be destroying the lower section of the building. The destruction of the building must be caused by something else.”
To summarize: Even if we accept the official explanation that fires from the jet fuel weakened the steel girders to the point that made the upper section collapse on to the bottom section, the freefall speed that is clear for all to see cannot have happened by itself; something else must have been destroying the lower floors at the same time that the upper “block” was coming down. The force of the smaller 8-storey section of building above was not significant enough to bring down the entire North and South Towers as it allegedly did.
The inexplicable (and ignored) collapse of WTC 7
If the destruction of the World Trade Center’s North and South towers was nothing more than magicians pulling fluffy white rabbits out of silk black hats, World Trade Center 7 is where the cards tumbled out of their sleeves, revealing the invisible strings that brought this great illusion to life.
The horrifying images of two commercial jets slamming into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center largely dominate our memories of 9/11. Yet many people forget about, or never heard of, World Trade Center 7, which was a 47-storey, 200-meter-high skyscraper that was never hit by a jet, yet crumpled to the ground like a house of cards a full 7 hours after the collapse of the North Tower. So let us reiterate: there were three destroyed skyscrapers on 9/11, but just two commercial jets.
And just like the first two towers, WTC 7 dropped at almost free-fall speed. Although this building was damaged by falling debris from the collapse of WTC North tower (a large gash was visible on the building’s exposed side), and was on fire in isolated sections for several hours, the extent of the physical damage seems entirely inconsistent with the final catastrophic result.
An increasing number of researchers are arriving at the conclusion that Building 7, like the towers, was brought down with thermitic material. Indeed, at the base of the WTC 7 towers, as was the case with the North and South towers, the presence of molten metal in large quantities was found. But more on that "theory" later.
David Chandler, a humble physics teacher armed with nothing more than inexpensive software and a zero budget, provided a far more realistic analysis of the collapse of the WTC 7 building than NIST did with its multimillion-dollar government budget.
Basically, Chandler accuses NIST of not only doing a “sloppy job” in its analysis of the collapse of WTC 7, but goes so far as calling it “beyond incompetence; it is a… blatant lie.”
“NIST’s method tells us nothing about the nature of the motion itself,” says the physicist. “They merely assume uniform acceleration over a time interval in which it is clear that the acceleration is not uniform. Mislabeling their assumption to be constant speed indicates sloppy work. But asserting uniform acceleration for an interval where the building sits nearly motionless for several seconds and then drops for several seconds in free fall is beyond incompetence, it is a… blatant lie.”
“The average acceleration is a meaningless quantity,” Chandler explains. “It is the instantaneous acceleration that is significant because the acceleration at any moment is an indication of the forces at work. To measure and publish a meaningless average acceleration, when sufficient data and a multimillion dollar budget are available… constitutes either gross incompetence or an attempt to obfuscate the issue.”
But even if we accept the official version, which says that WTC 7 was “compromised by falling debris” from the North and South Towers, as Popular Mechanics mechanically argued, how is it possible that the building came down in “elegant” (as one demolition expert put it to me) controlled-demolition fashion?
Demolishing a building is a veritable science that requires the precise placement of explosive charges at carefully selected points so that the targeted structure drops into its own footprint without damaging any other buildings in the vicinity. This is exactly what WTC 7, as well as the monstrous North and South towers, politely did with tremendous respect for their surroundings.
Having a large building drop in textbook fashion without the assistance of professionals must be to demolitionists what a monkey that sat down to a typewriter and hammered out perfect Shakespeare in a fortnight would be to literary agents. In other words, highly unlikely.
Compounding the mystery behind the inexplicable collapse of the 47-storey WTC 7 building, which housed Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, this major event (the collapse) is never mentioned once in the government’s 9/11 Commission report.
If anybody holds out hope that somebody someday will analyze the steel columns from the collapse for evidence of explosives, better not hold your breath: the wreckage was quickly whisked out of the United States to Asia where it was melted down. Indeed, we are probably buying Chinese-made toys made out of WTC evidence without even knowing it. Thus, NIST’s threadbare investigative efforts have been compared to “conducting an autopsy without the corpse.”
“Anyone serious about solving a crime,” comments Chandler, “knows the importance of physical evidence. Yet here (at Ground Zero), the crime scene has been scrubbed, the evidence destroyed, and the investigation delayed for years.”
“Destroying a crime scene is itself a criminal act,” Chandler concludes. “Destroying the steel has absolutely no justification except to cover up the cause of the collapse.”
The presence of molten metal
According to numerous witnesses, molten metal was clearly visible on the salvaged steel girders, as well as at Ground Zero. These claims are supported by video footage of the burning towers on 9/11, which clearly shows images of white-hot metal oozing out of the towers like volcanic lava shortly before catastrophic collapse occurs.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, there were many reports of “pools of molten metal” in the remains of the World Trade Center. In fact, the presence of these intensely hot pockets hampered the cleanup efforts until December 20 – over three months after the collapses!
“As of 21 days after the attack,” said Leslie Robertson, structural engineer responsible for the design of the WTC, speaking at the National Conference of Structural Engineers on Oct. 5, 2001, “the fires were still burning and the molten steel was still running.”
“The fires got very intense down there,” Richard Riggs, a debris removal specialist, told the History Channel. “It was actually melted beams, molten steel that was being dug up.”
Ken Holden, who was involved with the organizing of demolition, excavation and debris removal operations at Ground Zero told the 9/11 Investigative Committee, “Underground, it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the sides of the walls from the (WTC) buildings.”
To the uninitiated in the murky field of chemistry, such phenomena (intensely burning fires that continue to burn for weeks and months) may seem somehow plausible given the extent of the damage at Ground Zero. But for (some) trained chemists and engineers, such physical phenomena are nothing short of a scientific impossibility without some degree of human trifling. Why? Because steel must be heated to 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit before it will melt, simple as that. Not even the planet Venus gets that hot. Yet researchers are practically unanimous in their belief that the temperatures inside of the buildings never got above 800 degrees.
So what was responsible for slicing through the steel columns like a hot knife through butter?
One of the unforgettable images of 9/11 was the amount of white soot that covered everything, making the stunned survivors resemble a menagerie of lost ghosts walking down the streets of New York City in the middle of a snowstorm.
Thousands of pounds of this dust clogged every nook and cranny of the Big Apple for weeks. And for the residents of New York, who were forced to cope with tiny mountains of white ash throughout their downtown apartments, this dust became a morbid keepsake, a grim souvenir of the day that shook the world. New Yorkers scooped up the fine powder and saved it, not knowing how important this act would turn out to be, because what researchers discovered in that dust has proven to be the single most disturbing discovery to date about 9/11.
The devil is in… the dust
“At the microscopic level, if you examine the granular structure of the steel, one can detect the presence of an element that is not normally present,” said Marini. “And it is there in substantial qualities. It is sulfur.”
Professor Steven Jones, a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, after examining samples of the dust collected from residents (from different locations around the city), provided the shocking reason for the high levels of sulfur found in the steel beams: the existence of thermite, a powerful material that is often employed in detonations.
“We are quite certain where this molten metal comes from,” the physicist explained in the documentary film Zero. “It comes from a material called thermite, which is made up of aluminum powder, iron oxide and sulfur.”
According to Jones, “the presence of thermite in the dust samples implies that someone had to place the thermite near the steel columns in order to cut through them.”
In other words, Jones is describing what is commonly known as a controlled demolition.
In addition to thermite, Jones said that his team detected large amounts of barium in the dust particles as well.
“This is very interesting,” he said, “because barium nitrate and sulfur are part of the military patent on what is known as thermate (thermite with sulfur and barium nitrate added). Barium is a very toxic metal, so one would not expect it to be present in the large concentrations that we see.”
In several of the available photos from Ground Zero, some of the protruding steel columns that survived the collapse have straight downward cuts that seem to lend credence to Jones’s chilling theory.
Danish scientists confirm presence of nano-thermite
In a separate study, Neils Harrit from the University of Copenhagen, together with eight of his fellow colleagues, provides conclusive evidence for the prevalence of explosive material in dust samples from 9/11.
The study (entitled “Active Thermite Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”), draws the conclusion that “the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nano-technology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.”
During an interview with RT in July, Harrit said he also believed that “conventional explosives were used in abundance” in the collapse of the buildings.
“We suggested… to the National Institute of Standards and Technology that they should look for traces of explosives and they have refused to do so every time,” said Harrit. “They have not investigated it.”
The simple question must be: why? After all, 9/11 represented the largest crime scene in modern history; should not all of the possibilities be thoroughly examined? Why is NIST not interested in knowing if explosives were used in combination with the suicide missions of the hijackers? After all, is it not plausible that the terrorists rigged the building with explosives just in case the airliners missed, or failed, to bring down their targets? Rigging a building with explosives, although certainly no simple feat, would not have been any more challenging than hijacking four aircraft with worse than amateur pilots suddenly in charge of navigating the aircraft.
Moreover, conventional explosives were tried once before. It could not have escaped NIST’s attention that on February 26, 1993, a 1,500 lb (680 kg) bomb was detonated in the underground garage section of the North Tower. The terrorists had anticipated that the force of the bomb would topple the North Tower onto the South Tower. The crude attempt failed, of course, but given the testimony of hundreds of witnesses who reported feeling explosions below the buildings during the attacks of 9/11, it seems incredible, and even suspicious, that this angle was never explored by the government agency.
Harrit then goes on to discuss the presence of molten iron in the collapse site.
“The thermite reaction produced molten iron. Now the molten iron was pouring out of one of the towers. Molten iron was in pools in the rubble after 9/11. For weeks and months the surface temperature was 735 degrees after three days of showers. It took them three months to put out the fire, which was declared officially extinguished on December 20. Now this is some kind of fire. This was a witch’s brew of nano-thermite chemistry for three months!”
Meanwhile, eyewitness accounts of pre-crash explosions inside of the buildings seems to lend credence to the theory that nano-thermite, perhaps, mixed with other explosives, may have been used to bring down both structures.
“It turns out that literally dozens of firefighters and emergency medical workers had given testimony that they had heard one, two, three, seven, eight, some said 10 explosions going off in the building,” said Professor David Ray Griffin, the author of "9-11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions."
“Some of the people inside the buildings reported that they were banged around, knocked downstairs by explosions. Other people testified to seeing flashes. And many of them said: ‘It looked just like on TV when we see them bring down buildings with explosions.’”
RT asked Professor Niels Harrit in an exclusive interview (in fact, his first for an English-language media syndicate) what motivated him to research the collapse of the WTC buildings.
“I accidentally saw Building 7,” Harrit began. “And for those who do not know this… there were two airliners, but there were three skyscrapers (that were destroyed). Most people associate the World Trade Center with the twin towers… but Building 7 was a huge building, close to 200 meters high, 47 stories, with a footprint the size of a soccer field. And it came down 20 minutes after 5 in the afternoon; this was 7 hours after the North tower had collapsed.
“I saw this accidentally, and I said, ‘What is this?' “This is World Trade Center 7,' I was told. 'What?!'
“And it’s going down completely symmetrically, in 6.5 seconds,” says Harrit, gesticulating with his hands to demonstrate the movement. “It’s going down – zoop! And as a scientist, you are trained to watch your environment in an analytical fashion. You are always thinking ‘how does this happen, how does this happen.’ And this, I just could not understand it.
“It took me weeks actually to digest this… But once you have realized this, there is no way back. So you can either speak out, or you can live in shame. And from then on, I got more and more interested, and I found that the evidence for controlled demolition is overwhelming… '"
Andrews Air Force Base is a mere 10 miles away from the Pentagon, yet 1 hour and 20 minutes after the attacks began not a single fighter jet had been activated to intercept American Airlines Flight 77.
Consider the following: On October 25, 1999, a tiny Learjet 35 departed from Orlando, Florida that was carrying Payne Stewart, a professional American golfer. About 14 minutes after departing from the airport, the control tower lost contact with his plane. So the air-traffic controllers, following rigid protocol regarding lost aircraft, immediately notified the US Air Force.
According to FAA official transcripts, “At 9:52 a U.S. Air Force F-16 from the 40th Flight Test Squadron at the Englin Air Force was vectored toward the aircraft.”
At 9:54 – just two minutes after the command to intercept had been ordered – the fighter jet had already spotted Payne Stewart's wayward aircraft.
The pilot of the F-16 reported that both engines on the plane were working, but the cockpit windows were covered with condensation or frost, a sign that the cabin had depressurized without the necessary oxygen reserves. Things looked very bad for the occupants of the aircraft.
Both the Learjet and the F-16 were now over the state of Illinois, many miles from the departing point. The F-16 from Englin stopped pursuing the Learjet and landed at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois for refueling and probably a cigarette.
F-16
At this point, two Oklahoma F-16s (Codenamed, TULSA 13) were then vectored to intercept the “accident airplane” by the Minneapolis ARTCC (Air Route Traffic Control Center). Neither pilots of those two planes, which flew within meters of the disabled aircraft, noticed anything mechanically wrong with the tiny aircraft. But still the pilot of the Learjet did not respond.
Minutes later, the TULSA 13 jets handed off the plane to two F-16s stationed in North Dakota (Codenamed, NODAK 32). One of the pilots from this new sortie reported, “We’ve got two visuals on it… the cockpit window is iced over and there’s no displacement in any of the control surfaces…”
Twenty minutes later, one of the jets from the NODAK 32 team remained to the west of the Learjet, while the TULSA 13 F-16 followed the Learjet down.
“The target is descending and he is doing multiple aileron rolls, looks like he is out of control,” the TULSA 13 pilot radioed back to his command station. “It’s soon to impact the ground he is in a descending spiral.”
The plane crashes and all of the passengers, who probably died long before the plane had hit the ground, were killed.
Compare: On Sept. 11 at 9:37 a.m., one hour and twenty minutes after the hijackings were reported, American Airlines Flight 77 slams into the west wall of the Pentagon without ever being followed, intercepted or shot down by US fighter jets.
How does NORAD account for the fact that five (5) state-of-the-art F-16 fighter jets, activated from various air force bases, trailed a tiny wayward Learjet halfway across the United States, yet failed to vector a single aircraft to inspect four commercial jets that were carrying hundreds of passengers across many miles of heavily populated, strategically sensitive territory? It does not compute.
Despite possessing highly sophisticated aircraft that can fly faster than the speed of sound (2,400 km per hour), and shoot down targets from many miles away, the U.S. Air Force opted not to activate a single fighter jet to intercept, tag, or at least investigate, four lumbering commercial jets that had wandered off their courses for periods ranging from 20 to 90 minutes.
“Anytime an airliner goes off course,” says Robert Bowman, a pilot and decorated Vietnam veteran, “or loses radio communication, or loses its transponder signal – anytime any one of those three things happen, the aircraft is supposed to be intercepted.”
“On 9/11, all three of those things happen,” continues Bowman in the film Zero, “and still there was no intercept. Those planes flew for 20 minutes to an hour-and-a-half without ever being intercepted.”
But there was no shortage of fighter jets available, we must assume, since there are sixteen (16) Air Force bases located in the northeast of the United States. So why weren’t the large, slow-moving Boeing jets intercepted?
The official version of the story says that NORAD was notified too late; in other words, the air traffic controllers were not on the ball on 9/11. This argument seems equally implausible. John Judge, a 9/11 investigator for former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, said that 9/11 was the first time in the year 2001 that an air emergency went ignored.
“Sixty-seven times in that year, 2001,” says Judge, “there had been air emergencies. They can get a plane up in 6 to 10 minutes, and scrambled 67 times that year in air emergencies, but there was not an instance where an air emergency went ignored for long periods of time – until 9/11.”
One good explanation for the eerily empty skies over New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 9/11 had a lot to do with a bizarre memorandum (entitled “Aircraft Piracy and Destruction of Derelict Airborne Objects”) that former Vice President Dick Cheney rammed through the Defense Department on June 1, 2001, exactly three months before 9/11.
Despite warnings from intelligence-collecting agencies that a terrorist strike was becoming an increasing threat (a presidential brief, for example, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” landed on George W. Bush’s desk from the FBI on August 6 that makes direct mention of the Al-Qaeda leader wanting to “hijack a US aircraft to… gain release of US-held extremists”), Cheney inexplicably relieves NORAD of its long-standing responsibility to intercept and shoot down hijacked airplanes that pose a major threat on the ground.
In other words, the U.S. generals had their hands tied on 9/11, and could not even scramble jets without a direct order from the Pentagon. That command, of course, never came.
It should be no surprise as to who failed to pick up the telephone at the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11. Yes, Donald Rumsfeld. Where was he? Strangely, nobody could find him. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission report states that the Defense Secretary “was untraceable until 10:30a.m.”
Eventually, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was caught on film shortly after the crash of Flight 77, assisting with the rescue efforts on the lawn of the Pentagon. Although this humanly gesture must be commended, it seems to be completely at odds with Rumsfeld’s most critical job duty, which was to give clearance for NORAD to shoot down or intercept hijacked aircraft according to Cheney’s updated (and short-lived) memorandum mentioned above.
On the lawn of the Pentagon, tending to the wounded was not the right place for the Defense Secretary who should have been sitting near the phone, coordinating our national defenses. And how did Rumsfeld know for certain that another plane might not drop out of the sky, indeed as had been wildly rumored? Wouldn’t his expertise and command have been much more helpful inside of the Pentagon?
Or maybe the absence of any aircraft in America’s skies besides hijacked ones had something to do with a secret exercise that was based upon “the fiction” of a hijacked plane crashing into a building. When did that military exercise occur? Yes, on the very morning of Sept. 11.
“In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence,” reports the Associated Press exactly one year after 9/11, “one US intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings"
“Officials at the… National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency’s headquarters…,” the AP article revealed.
Is what follows just another coincidence? You be the judge: The National Reconnaissance Office, which operates many of the nation’s spy satellites, sits just four miles away from Washington’s Dulles International Airport. And it was from Dulles Airport where American Airlines Flight 77 – the Boeing 757 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon – departed at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, fifty minutes before the crash exercise at the intelligence agency was scheduled to begin.
If there was a better way to obfuscate the already high level of pandemonium that existed on Sept. 11 than to plan a terrorist hijacking exercise similar to the “real-world” one in progress, I personally cannot imagine it. Indeed, precious minutes were wasted as the agency and the air traffic controllers debated if it was the exercise they were witnessing on their radar screens, or “the real thing.”
Alright, so one of the most elite air forces in the world allowed a large, lumbering commercial jet to strike one of the world’s best protected military installations in the world. Fine, mistakes happen, even impossible mistakes, we could say with a shrug. But what about the batteries of surface-to-air missiles that reportedly surround the Pentagon? Surely the Pentagon’s defense ring would have intercepted American Airlines Flight 77 (Thierry Meyssan, the French journalist who caused a sensation with his book entitled “9/11: The Big Lie,” stated that the Pentagon is protected by “five missile batteries.” Some commentators refute that claim, saying there are no such batteries on the grounds of the Pentagon. Meyssan, however, defends his source of information: “The presence of these anti-missile batteries was testified to me by French officers to whom they were shown during an official visit to the Pentagon. This was later confirmed to me by a Saudi officer”).
April Gallop, a US Army administrative specialist, was working inside the Pentagon on 9/11. In response to a question presented by George Washington’s blog, Gallop responded that the real question is, “what is the probability or likelihood that no anti-aircraft defense, warning alarms or additional security mechanism functioned on that particular day?”
Gallop has since retired from the Pentagon due to her injuries sustained on 9/11.
Missing-in-action video camera footage
Although we may never know for sure if the Pentagon is surrounded with a surface-to-air missile defense system, we do know that the building employs a small contingency of video cameras – 85 to be exact – that dutifully capture every conceivable angle of the hallowed grounds. And according to a senior journalist from the US Department of Defense, the FBI collected all of the footage from these cameras shortly after the attacks.
“The FBI was immediately at the scene and took the surveillance tapes and confiscated 85 videotapes,” said Barbara Honegger, a senior journalist with the Department of Defense (DoD).
Although collecting the videos may be considered “routine intelligence gathering,” failing to share the footage with your fellow citizens for no apparent reason seems a bit odd, if not outright scandalous. But in yet another inexplicable move, that is exactly what the FBI did. Not until 2006 did the Department of Defense (DoD) back down to freedom of information requests, handing over four tapes from their stash of 85 available. Isn’t that being a bit stingy with the vintage video collection? Beggars can’t be choosers, apparently.
Pentagon on fire after terrorist attack, September 11, 2001 (Photo by Dennis Whitehead)
Anyways, two of the tapes released by the DoD show only a vague plume of smoke in the distance and so are of absolutely no use to researchers. The remaining two tapes, taken from the Pentagon’s parking lot entrance, show what appears to be the tip of some sort of approaching vehicle – and that is all – before a huge fireball is seen erupting against the wall of the building. Nothing remotely resembling a Boeing 757, or even the smallest airplane for that matter, is evident in the released video clip.
“Quite frankly, there’s not enough in those photographs to tell exactly what it was,” says Captain Russ Wittemberg, a pilot with 30 years experience in military and civilian aviation. “But you can tell what it wasn’t. It didn’t have the size… If it was a real 757-200 it would be much bigger than the vehicle we do see in the picture.”
The Pentagon explained that the lack of an airplane in the video clip was due to the speed of the aircraft; the lumbering commercial aircraft somehow managed to squeeze its formidbel proportions right between the frames of the video! Yes, the Boeing 757-200 was just too tiny a target, it seems, to have been captured on those sophisticated surveillance cameras.
According to an affidavit by Jacqueline Maguire, Special Agent Counterterrorism Division of the FBI, “fifty-six (56) of these videotapes did not show either the Pentagon building, the Pentagon crash site, or the impact of Flight 77 into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.”
Maguire goes on to explain that “I personally viewed the remaining twenty-nine (29) videotapes.” Yet she concluded that there was “nothing of interest” for the public to gain from having access to those tapes.
Again, we are reduced to asking more silly “why” questions, which should have been provided from the beginning: If the Pentagon perimeter was ringed with security cameras, why were approximately three-fourths of the devices not aimed at the building itself? And if they were aimed away from the complex, as alleged, how could a Boeing 757-200 commercial jet fail to get captured by all of the video cameras? Finally, why did Maguire “personally view” just 29 of the available 85 tapes? Why did she not have privilege to all of them? Certainly she must have been curious. And if it was not Maguire who viewed the other 56 tapes, who did view them?
Boeing 757s (and amateur pilots) cannot perform acrobatic maneuvers
Perhaps the reason that the Pentagon’s army of video cameras failed to catch any sign of a commercial jet was because the hulking Boeing 757 was up in the air performing graceful acrobatic maneuvers before its final descent and crash. At least this is what the official version of the Pentagon crash would have us believe.
Before plowing into the Pentagon building, the Boeing 757 seems to have performed a death defying 270-degree turn at the speed of approximately 88 kilometers per hour, official data says. Experienced flight personnel, however, say “no way.”
“That is a really difficult maneuver,” commented Robin Hordon, a flight controller for 11 years at Boston Center. “And what I will say to you is that an experienced pilot with thousands of hours probably would have to take between 10 and 20 attempts… before they would be able to pull off that maneuver.”
Boeing 757
“A 757 is not designed to do that,” Hordon continued. “The 757 is designed to be a cruise ship in the sky. It’s not acrobatic. So you just can’t do that with one of those big airplanes.”
“The speed, the maneuverability, the way that it turned,” commented Danielle O’Brien, air traffic controller from Dulles airport, “we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.”
Then there is the assertion that the aircraft was flying at 6 meters above the ground at 580 kilometers per hour for one kilometer before hitting its target.
“The story is Flight 77 was going 530 miles per hour, 460 knots… it can’t go that fast down that low,” says Wittemberg. “The air is too dense at such low altitudes.”
“I challenge any pilot,” says Nila Sagadevan, a pilot and aeronautical engineer, “give him a Boeing 757 and tell him to do 400 knots 20 feet above the ground for half a mile. You can’t do it. It’s aerodynamically impossible.”
So given the extreme unlikelihood that even a seasoned pilot would be able to pull off such a maneuver, how could Hani Hanjour, who could not even negotiate a tiny Cessna 172, be the man who performed these next-to-impossible flying maneuvers before zeroing in on the Pentagon.
“I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon,” said one of Hanjour’s past flight instructors in an interview with The New York Times. “He could not fly at all.”
“His instructor described him as a terrible pilot,” admitted the 9/11 Commission report, quoting an FBI memorandum. Another flight instructor went so far as to call Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Al-Omari, the alleged hijackers of Flight 11, “dumb and dumber in an airplane.”
“For a guy to just jump into the cockpit and fly like an ace is impossible,” says Wittenberg, in an interview with Lewis News. “There is not one chance in a thousand.”
The ex-commercial pilot then recalled that when he made the jump from Boeing’s 727 to the much more sophisticated 737’s and then on to the 767’s it took him “considerable time” to feel comfortable with the changes.
So it is little wonder that the 9/11 commission report says that “the President (George W. Bush) was struck by the apparent sophistication of the operation and some of the piloting, especially Hanjour’s high-speed dive into the Pentagon.”
Yes, almost unbelievable.
Disappearance of Flight 77 after hitting the Pentagon
Whenever an airplane crashes, we are only too familiar with grim television news reports that show close-up footage of physical wreckage, including engines, seats, luggage, and wheel assemblies. But this is the truly inexplicable thing about the crash of Flight 77 into the Pentagon: there is practically no sign of a wrecked aircraft after the crash. All that remains of Flight 77 is about a dozen small pieces, most of which can be lifted by hand.
On September 9, 1994, US Air Flight 427 crashed into a wooded area outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to data retrieved from the plane’s black box, the plane went into a vertical roll at a height of 3,600 feet just after the captain announced an emergency. Witnesses at the scene told investigators that the plane “dove into the ground at full speed.”
Despite slamming into the ground at a great speed and distance and exploding, large remains of the aircraft were nevertheless discovered over a wide area.
“The largest part of the plane… believed to be the tail,” reported the EmergencyNet news Service. “Bits of baggage, shredded parts of the plane, and severed limbs are reportedly strewn over a large area.”
Compare this routine crash scene with that reported (once) by a CNN anchor from his “close-up inspection” at the Pentagon:
“From my close-up inspection, there’s no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon,” he commented live from the scene. “The only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you can pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, a fuselage, nothing like that anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon.”
There was also a firsthand report from a fighter pilot who was ordered by Major General Larry Arnold, the commander of NORAD, the agency that is charged with protecting the airspace over North America.
According to Honegger, the senior journalist with the U.S. Department of Defense, the pilot made an overpass of the crash zone and reported back to command center that “there was no evidence, zero evidence, of an impact of a plane at the Pentagon.”
As questions over the whereabouts of the mysteriously disappearing aircraft began to mount, the Department of the Defense began to support the theory that Flight 77 simply “vaporized” due to the speed that it was traveling.
So, in addition to being forced to accept the new science that steel buildings collapse due to fire, we are also expected to swallow yet another “unprecedented event” that happened on that truly mysterious morning of September 11: all those practically indestructible components of an aircraft – engines, landing gear, tail and wings – just vaporized into thin air.
The engines of a Boeing 757-200 are about 9 feet long and composed of titanium, the strongest of metals that resists melting even at 3,000 degrees Celsius. So why was there no evidence of these engines against the wall of the Pentagon? The two big holes that we would expect to see are not there. There should have been a line of complete destruction before the collapse of the building’s external wall. It’s simply not there. Instead, where the wings of the aircraft should have struck the building, in cooperation with the mighty engines, there are unbroken windows clearly visible.
Only a small hole, 16 foot (5 meters) in diameter, was visible in the side of the Pentagon 45 minutes before the wall collapsed. Certainly, a Boeing 757-200, which weighs over 100 tons, carries a much larger footprint.
Boeing 757’s are 150 feet long. The engines of these monster aircraft are 9 feet long. The landing gear also contains huge metal components, made of titanium, that are virtually indestructible. How can 60 tons of airplane vanish into thin air with barely a trace?
“There’s no indication of the wings hitting anything at the Pentagon,” says Capt. Russ Wittemberg, a 30-year veteran of military and civilian aviation.
“Perhaps at a certain moment,” quipped Dario Fo, a Nobel Prize winner, “the airplane somehow closed up its wings, just as dragon flies do, and the plane entered the hole!”
“I look at the hole in the Pentagon,” said Maj. General Albert Stubblebine, whose former job was to measure pieces of Soviet equipment taken from photographs during the Cold War, “and I look at the size of the airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon, and the plane does not fit in that hole.”
Stubblebine then asked, with no lack of emotion: “So what did hit the Pentagon? What’s going on?”
Whatever it was that hit the Pentagon on 9/11, it slammed through 6 massive walls before leaving a nearly perfect circular exit hole deep inside the military complex that measured approximately 12 feet across. In other words, nothing remotely resembling an airplane.
“With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site,” concludes Col. George Nelson, an aircraft accident investigator with the US Air Force, “any unbiased, rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon.”
Not a single individual lost their job following the worst terrorist attacks to strike the United States; in fact, the military personnel directly responsible for protecting America's skies all received promotions shortly after 9/11.
Defense Secretary: "and the missile to damage this building"
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was interviewed on 12 October 2001 by Lyric Wallwork Winik (yes, that's her real name), a columnist for Parade, the magazine that comes in many Sunday newspapers across the US. Although Parade is one of the most mainstream magazines imaginable (think People meets the Saturday Evening Post), Winik blindsided Rumsfeld with a question that few reporters/interviewers have the guts to ask:
"This is a question that's been asked by many Americans, but especially by the widows of September 11th. How were we so asleep at the switch? How did a war targeting civilians arrive on our homeland with seemingly no warning?"
Rumsfeld is apparently shaken by this young reporter's forthrightness. First, he admits what few else dare:
"There were lots of warnings."
Immediately after this sentence, though, the Secretary starts to qualify it. He subtly plays the "we didn't connect the dots" card:
"The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the worldwide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what you can find."
Although he doesn't directly say it, it would seem that Rumsfeld is insinuating that the poor, understaffed, shoestring intelligence and defense establishments can't put together intelligence in a timely manner.
Now things get really bizarre. After admitting that there were plenty of warnings, he says it was up to the FBI and especially state and local law enforcement to deal with the imminent terrorist attack:
"And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing -- the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues."
To sum up Rumsfeld's explanation: 1) The warnings were there; 2) the Defense Department and the intelligence community couldn't figure them out; but anyway 3) it was up to the FBI, state law enforcement, and local police to uncover and prevent the worst terrorist attack in US history.
And here's something to kick around. Still answering this question, Rumsfeld goes on to make a strange statement:
"It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filled with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center. The only way to deal with this problem is by taking the battle to the terrorists, wherever they are, and dealing with them."
"Missile"? What missile would that be? Did he let something slip? Or was this just a gaffe? A bad choice of words? A transcription error? Until we know for sure, it deserves scrutiny.
The article based on this interesting interview was "We Have to Defend Our Way of Life" by Lyric Wallwork Winik in Parade, 18 Nov 2001. The only part of the above exchange to be included is this:
To Rumsfeld, the Sept. 11 attacks did not come as a complete surprise. "There were lots of warnings," he says bluntly.
"The only way to deal with this problem," he continues, "is by taking the battle to the terrorists and dealing with them."
Now, it is pretty bold for Parade to quote him about the warnings. Of course, the magazine then skips Rumsfeld's subsequent shifting of blame and use of the word "missile," jumping right to the innocuous final sentence of the exchange.
So now we can look at the evidence for Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon.
The government said it did. After all, Flight 77 turned around and headed east toward Washington DC.
Some observers said they thought it was an American Airlines flight.
DNA identified the bodies of all but one victim...the government said.
The Bush Administration was just connecting the dots, perhaps? Flight 77 did disappear from the radar screen after turning back toward Washington, DC and then "something" hit the Pentagon. Was it Flight 77? The discontinuity in the tracking leaves a huge hole in the evidence. Another problem is the trajectory in the video clip of the plane/missile hitting the Pentagon. According to several researchers, including JP Desmoulins, there is no way that any plane OR missile could fit below the cover of the yellow box. They would have to be flying below the surface. Clearly the video is faked. The plane/missile would have to come in at a much higher trajectory. Besides, there are also missing frames to the sequence because there is something that should not be seen lest the ruse be laid bare.
Some observers said they thought it had the markings of American Airlines but some said it was a small aircraft, others a missile or jetfighter. "It was like a cruise missile with wings, went right there and slammed into the Pentagon," Mike Walter, an eyewitness, told CNN.-CNN.COM, "Up to 800 possibly dead at Pentagon", September 12, 2001
Steve Patterson, 43, said he was watching television reports of the World Trade Center being hit when he saw a silver commuter jet fly past the window of his 14th-floor apartment in Pentagon City. The plane was about 150 yards away, approaching from the west about 20 feet off the ground, Patterson said. He said the plane, which sounded like the high-pitched squeal of a fighter jet, flew over Arlington cemetery so low that he thought it was going to land on I-395. He said it was flying so fast that he couldn't read any writing on the side. The plane, which appeared to hold about eight to 12 people, headed straight for the Pentagon but was flying as if coming in for a landing on a nonexistent runway, Patterson said. Eyewitness described a small jet aircraft seating a maximum of 12 passengers and crew, NOT an airliner, flying "like a fighter jet" at high speed below treetop level. -News reports reposted on WhatReallyHappened.com
Some observers noted a high pitched scream from the "something" that hit the Pentagon. The sound of a large Boeing 757 in flight is a lower pitch, easily distinguishable from a jumbo jet. Here's an engine part that was photographed. It's the type of rotor that may be used in smaller jet engines, not in a Boeing 757 engine. However, it could be from the auxiliary power unit that drives the generators for a Boeing 757 while on the ground. For more discussion of this CLICK HERE and HERE.
DNA is an organic molecule that is very fragile, easily destroyed by high temperatures. Not finding the large metallic pieces that would indicate a Boeing 757, the government explained that they were burned up in the intense blaze that consumed the aircraft. Then how does human tissue survive when 600 lb metal engines cannot? Can't have it both ways. So how trustworthy can thegovernment evidence be?
Contrasting the results of the DNA analysis of victims at the World Trade Center with that of victims of the Pentagon crash Xymphora reported August 16, 2003:
The New York City medical examiner's office, using DNA analysis, has managed to identify slightly more than half of the 2,792 people killed in the attack on the WTC towers, and it is feared that the remains of as many as 1,000 victims may never be identified. Given the fire and collapse of the two towers, this is not surprising. What is surprising is the contrast between the DNA identification process in New York and the DNA identification process that took place with respect to the victims of the Pentagon crash. Again, there was an horrific crash and a terrible fire, but authorities report that they identified remains of 184 (or here) people who were aboard Flight 77 or inside the Pentagon, including those of the five hijackers, but could not match the other remains with any of five people who were also known to be on the flight. In fact, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology claims to have identified the remains of all but one of the passengers on Flight 77. If they achieve their goals, the New York investigators hope to achieve a 65% rate of identification. That is in a situation where many bodies were found intact as many of the victims died due to the collapse of the buildings and not due to fire. Identifying 184 out of 189 Pentagon victims is a 97% success rate in a case where we are to believe that heat was sufficient to vaporize the fuselage and engines of the plane, a vaporization needed to explain the almost complete absence of wreckage left behind of the plane, but not degrade the DNA of the passengers inside the plane. How do we reconcile a 50% rate of identification in New York, or 65% if they achieve their goals, with a 97% identification rate in Washington, especially where much of the DNA obtained in Washington had to be obtained from the area where the fuselage surrounding the passengers was before it was vaporized by the heat? Then let's look at some evidence.
The entry point was very tiny, especially just after it happened. Later, firemen brought the facade down and the hole looked bigger. Judging from the windows the entry point for this event would be approximately triple the width of the Pentagon windows. Through this hole the Bush Administration wishes for us to think that a Boeing 757 penetrated the Pentagon. You can imagine the magician that could do this trick. To make it easier look at the graphic below showing a 757 in scale with the Pentagon.
Remember, the 757 must fit into a hole the width of three windows, not the gaping hole from the later activities of the firemen. Note also that no damage to the building occurred at the points where the wings would have struck the outer wall....at over 400 mph. (A 737 would fit the damage profile better.) The fuel tanks would have increased the momentum of the wings creating a hammer-like blow to the facade. No evidence of that. Then how did all that aircraft squeeze into the relatively small hole in the Pentagon shown above? Some hypothesize that the wings became crushed against the side of the fuselage and followed it into the hole. That still doesn't explain why no damage to the exterior of the Pentagon at the point of hypothetical wing impact. Besides, the fuel tanks inside the wings should have burst and most of the fuel exploded outside the building as the plane was extruded through that small hole. Once the tanks are ruptured in the extrusion, the fuel would be squeezed out. But no problem...Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, "...and the missile to damage this building..."
But let's hang in there for a bit and examine some of the other "evidence." There were a few bits of debris on the lawn that looked like they might be part of the skin of an American Airlines plane. One piece was quite near to a pickup truck which can be used for a comparison of dimensions. The letters on the debris would correspond with those on an American airliner except for one little detail. It is 1/2 to 1/3 the size. No match. Nice try.
The "something" that hit the Pentagon slammed through six walls before it left an exit hole approximately twelve feet across. Can you imagine something in an aluminum aircraft that could remain intact through six walls, multiple pillars and leave an exit wound so small. It can't be one of the engines because there is only one hole and the exit hole is consistent with the trajectory of the fuselage, not an outboard turbine. Besides, this is too near the opening and an engine would not have burned up in a fire in the open courtyard. The nose cone of the 757 is made of a very hard carbon compound that could not be expected to survive crashing through all that structure and still have enough momentum to blast a twelve foot hole in the heavy wall in the Pentagon. It's starting to seem as though Secretary Rumsfeld might be right!
About the only photographic evidence of the moment of impact that remains available to the public is a very short segment in which only one frame shows some kind of object just before it hits the Pentagon. It was taken from a surveillance camera at a service station near the Pentagon. Just above the middle orange pylon can be seen a light-colored horizontal object, the heliport and above that a dark gray horizontal object. Above the yellow cabinet to its right might be imagined a tail. But just so you can see the lie without being hit across the forehead with a 2 X 4, you'll notice the date stamp in the lower left hand corner. Oops! Also, you will notice the shadow of the cabinet in the center has been sharpened up a bit with a border. You have probably noticed that shadows don't usually come with a darkened border. Much more of the analysis of the photos from this camera is available at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/english.html and he'll show you some of the other tricks played with this video shown on CNN and authenticated by the Pentagon.
However, we do not believe the "whistle blower" theory of the origin of these images. On the contrary, we believe that the controversy and bickering over these images is exactly what the government intended, and that the images were released through spurious semi-official channels, with the explicit intent of fraudulently supporting the missile theory. If this is correct, then the tailfin and exhaust plume have been added by an unknown artist. Furthermore (and even more importantly) images of the 757, which (we agree with Eastman) must have overflown the Pentagon, have been deliberately erased. We emphasize that we have no direct evidence that the security video frames have been fraudulently altered in this way; however, they are inconsistent with the rest of our web of evidence -- in fact if they are genuine, they would disprove our theory that no aircraft of any kind struck the Pentagon. However, if the rest of our argument is valid, we have no choice but to denounce these security videos as fraudulent.
So then what kind of aircraft would do the job? Here is a photo showing what a Tomahawk cruise missile did to the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1998. More on this from Xymphora. In June 2001, NORAD conducted a military exercise in Florida called 'Amalgam Virgo', a simulation of a cruise missile attack against an American military base. It was NORAD that inexplicably failed to stop any of the September 11 attacks. Well, following Secretary Rumsfeld's lead let's look at what kind of missile would enter by such a small hole, penetrate 6 walls and several intervening columns to create a nice round exit hole. There are several variations of the cruise missile, one of which would carry a hollow charge to blast the entry hole and a "depleted" uranium charge to explode inside the target.
"BROACH technology is innovative in that rather than simply using mass and speed to penetrate targets, as with conventional warheads, approximately 1/3 of the mass of the warhead is used for a large shaped charge. This "Augmenting Charge" detonates first, cleaving the target with a high speed plasma jet. A "Follow Through Bomb" then penetrates and detonates inside the target structure." See http://defence-data.com/paris99/pagep31.htm
The AGM-86D Block II program is the Precision Strike variant of CALCM. It incorporates a penetrating warhead, updated state of the art, near-precision, GPS guidance, and a modified terminal area flight profile to maximize the effectiveness of the warhead. The penetrating warhead is augmented with two forward shape charges. To maximize the warheads effectiveness against hardened targets, the Block II will maneuver and dive onto its target in a near vertical orientation. The updated guidance system will increase the systems lethality by obtaining a less than 5 meter CEP. The Precision Strike variant of CALCM was successfully demonstrated in December 1996. A CALCM modified with a new precision GPS implementation flew for 4.5 hours, performed a newly developed steep terminal dive, and impacted the target within 2.5 meters of the aim point. The demonstration clearly showed that CALCM is capable of delivering it's warhead with precision accuracy from extremely long standoff ranges.
The BROACH multi-warhead system, also under evaluation for the the Joint Stand-off Weapon (JSOW), achieves its results by combining an initial penetrator charge (warhead) with a secondary follow-through bomb, supported by multi-event hard target fuzing. The outcome is a warhead and fuse combination that provides for the defeat of hardened targets more than twice that achievable for equivalent single penetrating warhead types, at an equivalent weight and velocity. See http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/bomber/calcm.htm Other facts indicate the presence of a hollow charge (or broach) bomb: - plasma on photo of explosion - white initial fireball - punched out hole at 84 m from entry point in C ring wall - a lady's body was found in the pentagon, sitting on her desk, her arms before her face as to protect. Seems to be a death provoked by an electrical shock like the one produced by strong plasma jets of hollow charges. (Thanks to JP Desmoulins communication.).
Another possible aircraft is an Global Hawk outfitted with a Broach hollow charge. At 350 kts it would be easy to confuse a missile laden Global Hawk with a passenger aircraft. The Mobile Microwave Landing System (MMLS), designated AN/TRN-45, is a portable, ground-based microwave transmitter that provides a mobile, precision approach and landing capability for MLS equipped aircraft.
Which part of a 757 did this wing section come from? It seems to have a remarkably similar profile to that of Global Hawk. Wing debris in the Pentagon matches the profile of a Global Hawk. Other debris photographed at the Pentagon seem to match Global Hawk parts and materials.
Runway 15 of Reagan International Airport is on the opposite of the Pentagon and lines up quite accurately with the trajectory of whatever hit the Pentagon. More images and information at http://membres.lycos.fr/applemacintosh/pentagon.htm
Very interesting here, beyond its capacity to penetrate heavy fortification is its capability to be guided by remote to obtain an accurate navigation trajectory beyond the capability of Hani Hanjour who had never flown a large aircraft before and who had failed to convince instructors at an airport that he had the skills to land a Cessna 172 he wished to rent.. Also very interesting is the navigational ability, as of '97, of the CALCM to drop into a steep dive on its target. If, four years later, the cruise missile navigation technology has been modified to pull out into level flight to strike at ground level, then this would fit the parameters of the air strike on the Pentagon. One witness described a plane at several thousand feet making a combined dive and 270° turn to come to street level. That certainly is not a typical maneuver for a Boeing 757 and certainly not within the capability of the alleged pilot, Hani Hanjour. But it might be within the capability of the CALCM 88
The lawn on the west side of the Pentagon was not damaged by the crash or the blast. See the lawn at the Pentagon after a 100-ton Boeing 757 plows into the Pentagon. Not a scrape, not even a singe. Several witnesses observed that the aircraft had hit the ground and then crashed into the Pentagon. Perhaps this grass is GMO http://www.koolpages.com/killtown911/pentalawn2000.html So why did they cover it with several feet of sand later? If there was a "depleted" uranium warhead used, it would leave a deadly blowback trail of fine radioactive dust that would cause many health problems for the firemen, the reconstruction crews and the workers at the Pentagon. To stabilize the situation, sand would provide a barrier that would keep the radioactive dust in place. A clue that will begin to show up almost immediately would be health problems of the firemen and their families.
First responders were not wearing decontamination clothing and masks until later. Absent any warnings about the dust on their clothing and boots, they probably carried a lot home with them to settle into the carpet and furnishings. Over time, the dust will begin to produce symptoms similar to Gulf War Syndrome. Or perhaps they were just bringing in very heavy equipment for the excavation of the mess. I am looking for an updated photo of the lawn on the west side of the Pentagon. Is it paved or grass?
In "Decoys and the Pentagon Attack" at http://www.physics911.org/911/index.php/articles/18 Dick Eastman several aircraft involved in a carefully choreographed maneuver as "distractions in a mass-murder psy-op conducted by top leaders in the White House, the Pentagon, the FAA, the FBI and the CIA."
Aerial Distraction #1 -- From the west came the C-130 following behind the Boeing and over flying the crash, actually going through the column of smoke, just 30 seconds after the the explosion -- supplying a "plausible-deniability" answer any who might later claim to have seen more than one plane at the crash or to have seen a large plane over fly the crash.
Want a BIG distraction in the sky? The C-130 is the very best choice they could have made. However, big as it was, think how few witnesses or news reporters mentioned the C-130 over flying the Pentagon crash site just 30 seconds after the attack!
Aerial Distraction #2 -- In the east, a four-engine large jet doing dives over the Capitol Building in restricted airspace leading up to and immediately before the moment of the the crash drawing all eyes to that quarter and away from the vicinity from which the real killer jet, flying only six feet above the landscape and at more than 700 mph, would sneak up upon the Pentagon.
Many thought that this was the airliner that hit the Pentagon -- all witnesses who spoke of a steep dive may have only seen this aircraft
...Joe Vialls found the ...BBC video tape of this same plane while in the same dive that he had recorded on September 11 -- except that Joe believed the BBC that this was the real plane, and used this clip from the broadcast to "disprove" the small-plane thesis. But, as investigators immediately pointed out this is a four engine plane and the wings are swept back too far and the root of the wing is far too close to the cockpit for this to be a Boeing 757. BUT IT DID MAKE A HIGHLY EFFECTIVE DISTRACTION WHILE DIVING OVER THE CAPITOL AFTER EVERYONE WAS AWARE OF THE WTC ATTACKS EARLIER THAT MORNING.
And each of these three distractions did their part in concealing the approach and identity of the real killer jet. The F-16 which fired a missile ahead of its own crash into the Pentagon.
Discussing September 11 in his recent book, My Jihad: The True Story of an American Mujahid's Amazing Journey from Usama Bin Laden's Training Camps to Counterterrorism with the FBI and CIA (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2002 by Aukai Collins says on p. 248,
"I was very mistrustful about the fact that Usama Bin Laden's name was mentioned literally hours after the attack. When I combined this with the fact the FBI had no apparent desire to accept what I brought to the table, I became very skeptical about anything anybody said about what happened, or who did it. I thought back to when I was still working for them and we had the opportunity to enter Bin Laden's camp. Something just hadn't smelled right. There were also the details I knew personally about Hani Hanjour, one of the 'hanky-panky' hijackers on the Pentagon flight. He wasn't even moderately religious, let alone fanatically religious. And I knew for a fact that he wasn't part of Al Qaeda or any other Islamic organization; he couldn't even spell jihad in Arabic."
We are supposed to believe that this 'hanky-panky Arab' was so full of commitment to jihad that he piloted Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11. In addition of witnesses telling that Hanjour didn't have the requisite skills to handle a Cessna much less a "heavy" such as a Boeing 757, Stanley and Russell note that "a high-speed attack directed at the first floor of the Pentagon would have been difficult to carry out accurately because of turbulence and ground-effect...". Leaving aside the fact that Hani Hanjour wasn't nearly skilled enough to have piloted that plane into the Pentagon, he also clearly wasn't anywhere close to being pious enough to give up his life for a religious cause. He fails the test as a Mujahideen.
Stanley and Russell suggest that leaving the results to the imponderable variables of real world physics might have lead them to hedge their gamble with a missile at the Pentagon and demolition at the World Trade Center.
On Sept.13-14 the FBI explained that "Flight 77" did not fly to New York, but had hit the Pentagon instead. Then they also changed the time from 9:30 to 9:43 (or 9:45).
Obviously the factual and correct "Pentagon time" 9:30 - is very important !
Several Eyewitnesses confirmed that they saw "Smoke from Pentagon" at circa 9:30. The FBI´s claim that Flight 77 had crashed into the Pentagon at 9:45 was made to "link" the Pentagon Attack to the flight path of "Flight 77." On Sept. 11, the Danish Foreign Minister Mr. Per Stig Møller was in Washington, and was therefore interviewed by "Denmarks Radio" DR "P3" early in the morning at circa 7:30 on Sept.12. And he explained that he had seen a big cloud of "FIRE" and "SMOKE" from the Pentagon at circa. 9:32 (local time) excerpt from http://www.bombsinsidewtc.dk
Then there is the large plane identified by some eyewitnesses as a C-130 flying above the plane/missile before it struck the Pentagon.
'HORRIFIC' IMAGE STILL HAUNTS SURRY WOMAN DISASTER VIEWED FROM ARLINGTON Daily Press; Newport News; Sep 14, 2001; TERRY SCANLON Daily Press;
Abstract: Her brother, [Keith Wheelhouse], of Virginia Beach, spotted the planes first. The second plane looked similar to a C- 130 transport plane, he said. He believes it flew directly above the American Airlines jet, as if to prevent two planes from appearing on radar while at the same time guiding the jet toward the Pentagon.
Wheelhouse's account of a second plane is unlike everything else that has been reported about the attack. Some initial reports on television said a second airliner might be headed for the Pentagon, but authorities later dismissed that. A Norfolk-based FBI agent interviewed Wheelhouse Wednesday evening.
A possible explanation for the second plane could be a plane landing at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport. The Pentagon is between the cemetery and the airport. But Wheelhouse insists he was not confused by other air traffic.
HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN SAYS SHE, TOO, SAW PLANE FOLLOWING JET THAT HIT PENTAGON Daily Press; Newport News; Sep 15, 2001; TERRY SCANLON Daily Press;
Abstract: Kelly Knowles, a First Colonial High School alumnus who now lives in an apartment a few miles from the Pentagon, said some sort of plane followed the doomed American Airlines jet toward the Pentagon, then veered away after the explosion.
At the same time, [Keith Wheelhouse] and his sister, Pam Young, who lives in Surry, were preparing to leave a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, which is less than a mile from the Pentagon, when they watched the jet approach and slam into the Pentagon. Both of them, as well as at least one other person at the funeral, insist that there was another plane flying near the hijacked jet.
The Pentagon denied that any C-130 was near the flight path of "Flight 77" until one month later. http://www.the-movement.com observes: "Over a month later Pentagon officials finally decided to deliver a convenient story that the mystery plane WAS in fact a C-130 that flew out of Andrews Air force base and just happened to see flight 77 on its way to destruction. It followed the plane on a request from air traffic control. If this is true, surely you'd think that a fighter from the same base could have intercepted the plane instead of having to ask a C-130 that just happened to be in the area to have a look?
C-130 CREW SAW PENTAGON STRIKE, OFFICIAL CONFIRMS Daily Press; Newport News; Oct 17, 2001; TERRY SCANLON and DAVID LERMAN Daily Press;
Abstract: [Keith Wheelhouse] and at least two other witnesses to the Pentagon attack were troubled that Pentagon spokesmen had until now said they were unaware of a C-130 being in the area at the time.
In the days immediately following the Sept. 11 hijackings, the Pentagon had no knowledge of the C-130's encounter, because all reports were classified by the Air National Guard, ...
An article originally from the New York Times gives a similar explanation of what the c-130 was doing there.
At 9:36 a.m., National Airport, which was on Flight 77's flight path, asked a military C-130 cargo plane, taking off on a scheduled flight from Andrews Air Force Base - in Maryland, on the other side of the District of Columbia - to intercept and identify the fast-moving target. The crew of the C-130 said it was a Boeing 757, moving low and fast.
Again http://www.the-movement.com observes: "All of this certainly adds a lot of fuel to the popular theories that the planes were being flown by remote control, especially now we have evidence to suggest that an unknown plane or flying object has been sighted at the WTC, flight 93 and now at the Pentagon."
A group of military and civilian US pilots, under the chairmanship of Colonel Donn de Grand, after deliberating non-stop for 72 hours, has concluded that the flight crews of the four passenger airliners, involved in the September 11th tragedy, had no control over their aircraft.
In a detailed press communiqué the inquiry stated: "The so-called terrorist attack was in fact a superbly executed military operation carried out against the USA, requiring the utmost professional military skill in command, communications and control. It was flawless in timing, in the choice of selected aircraft to be used as guided missiles and in the coordinated delivery of those missiles to their pre-selected targets."
The report seriously questions whether or not the suspect hijackers, supposedly trained on Cessna light aircraft, could have located a target dead-on 200 miles from take off point. It further throws into doubt their ability to master the intricacies of the instrument flight rules (IFR) in the 45 minutes from take off to the point of impact. Colonel de Grand said that it would be impossible for novices to have taken control of the four aircraft and orchestrated such a terrible act requiring military precision of the highest order.
A member of the inquiry team, a US Air Force officer who flew over 100 sorties during the Vietnam war, told the press conference: "Those birds (commercial airliners) either had a crack fighter pilot in the left seat, or they were being manoeuvred by remote control."
In evidence given to the enquiry, Captain Kent Hill (retd.) of the US Air Force, and friend of Chic Burlingame, the pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, stated that the US had on several occasions flown an unmanned aircraft, similar in size to a Boeing 737, across the Pacific from Edwards Air Force base in California to South Australia. According to Hill it had flown on a pre programmed flight path under the control of a pilot in an outside station.
Hill also quoted Bob Ayling, former British Airways boss, in an interview given to the London Economist on September 20th, 2001. Ayling admitted that it was now possible to control an aircraft in flight from either the ground or in the air. This was confirmed by expert witnesses at the inquiry who testified that airliners could be controlled by electro-magnetic pulse or radio frequency instrumentation from command and control platforms based either in the air or at ground level.
Finally, although it is only circumstantial evidence, the behavior of the US Government in swooping in quickly to took all surveillance videos and not ever releasing this information seems highly suspicious. The only reasonable explanation is that these silent witnesses to the attack on the Pentagon might have shown what really happened and that would not coincide with the Official Conspiracy Theory.
It's not yet a slam dunk. Except for a few anomalies such as a landing strut and a gear from a rotary actuator of a wing slat, much of the evidence points toward other types of aircraft other than the Boeing 757. Both of these artifacts could have been planted, may not have been photographed in the debris, or the person who identified the Boeing 757 piece could have been a disinformationist. It's so hard to be sure. One can only look at the evidence available and draw provisional interpretations. Some of the evidence for a missile, specifically a cruise missile, cannot be easily refuted or questioned. You must decide if the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, lied about the missile, or lied that an American Airlines Boeing 757 slammed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. I think he slipped and admitted it was a missile. When telling lies, it is so easy to forget which is the fact and which is the lie. The truth will out nevertheless and we, the People, must often read between the lines, or, more accurately, read between the lies.
Stumble It!
By contrast, the fires burning inside of the World Trade Center buildings were textbook examples of oxygen-starved fires, visible by the dark gray smoke that emitted from both structures. Indeed, very few flames were visible at all. Furthermore, many tenants of the stricken buildings were able to walk down the emergency steps past the point of impact where the planes had struck.
“There was something truly inexplicable about the speed of the collapse. If we drop a weight from a height of around 400 meters, which was the height of the towers, the time it would take to reach the ground… would take approximately 9 seconds.”
And just like the first two towers, WTC 7 dropped at almost free-fall speed. Although this building was damaged by falling debris from the collapse of WTC North tower (a large gash was visible on the building’s exposed side), and was on fire in isolated sections for several hours, the extent of the physical damage seems entirely inconsistent with the final catastrophic result.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, there were many reports of “pools of molten metal” in the remains of the World Trade Center. In fact, the presence of these intensely hot pockets hampered the cleanup efforts until December 20 – over three months after the collapses!
The study (entitled “Active Thermite Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”), draws the conclusion that “the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nano-technology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.”
But there was no shortage of fighter jets available, we must assume, since there are sixteen (16) Air Force bases located in the northeast of the United States. So why weren’t the large, slow-moving Boeing jets intercepted?
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was interviewed on 12 October 2001 by Lyric Wallwork Winik (yes, that's her real name), a columnist for Parade, the magazine that comes in many Sunday newspapers across the US. Although Parade is one of the most mainstream magazines imaginable (think People meets the Saturday Evening Post), Winik blindsided Rumsfeld with a question that few reporters/interviewers have the guts to ask:
The "something" that hit the Pentagon slammed through six walls before it left an exit hole approximately twelve feet across. Can you imagine something in an aluminum aircraft that could remain intact through six walls, multiple pillars and leave an exit wound so small. It can't be one of the engines because there is only one hole and the exit hole is consistent with the trajectory of the fuselage, not an outboard turbine. Besides, this is too near the opening and an engine would not have burned up in a fire in the open courtyard. The nose cone of the 757 is made of a very hard carbon compound that could not be expected to survive crashing through all that structure and still have enough momentum to blast a twelve foot hole in the heavy wall in the Pentagon. It's starting to seem as though Secretary Rumsfeld might be right!
crews and the workers at the Pentagon. To stabilize the situation, sand would provide a barrier that would keep the radioactive dust in place. A clue that will begin to show up almost immediately would be health problems of the firemen and their families.
