September 11th 2001
A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon
by Peter Wakefield Sault
Copyright © Peter Wakefield Sault 2008-2009
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September 11th 2001
A Cruise Missile at The Pentagon
by Peter Wakefield Sault
Copyright © Peter Wakefield Sault 2008-2009
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Sections
Appendices
1. American Airlines Flight 77
It seems that the general reaction to any suggestion that the Pentagon was not struck by American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11th 2001 is to ask what else could possibly have happened to the missing Boeing 757 and those aboard it. Stronger reactions include the levelling of indignant accusations of “disrespecting the memory of the dead” and the suchlike at the Flight 77 skeptic. Such an appeal to emotion has come to be known as a ‘shut up!’ argument; those who dare challenge the official line are depicted as ghouls intent on hindering ‘closure’ for the families and friends of the supposed victims. The strangest allegation of all — “discrediting the 9/11 truth movement” — comes from people who claim to be intent on discovering and revealing the real truth about the events of that day. What is of interest here about such accusations is that they only ever get thrown around in the absence of hard facts upon which a solid case could rest. Their employment is actually a very good indication that their users have no real evidence to present in support of their beliefs.
While the question of the fate of AA Flight 77 is certainly a good one it is nevertheless not this author's present intention to address it here but only to show from the available evidence that what actually struck the Pentagon was a cruise missile. The reader must draw his or her own conclusions about the ramifications of this.
Partial transcript — “From my close up inspection there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon... ...The only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you could pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage — nothing like that anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon.” — Jamie McKintyre (CNN)
With regard to the plane or planes, David Ray Griffin puts it this way—
“...shortly after AA 77's transponder signal was lost, the flight was also lost to primary radar. So there was no "blip" until much later, when a high-speed primary target... ...is seen moving toward Washington.”*
The simple fact is that there was and is no way for anyone — including the official investigators — to know that the plane that got lost to radar, AA 77, was the same plane that got picked up by radar some time later heading towards Washington. We have only the word of the official investigators that they found an entire crashed Boeing 757, completely out of sight to the world including others in the Pentagon, inside the ‘D’ wing. As the reader will appreciate, that is at best a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs. Never has any physical evidence been presented at or to any commission or other official inquiry. As with all the video tapes from CCTV cameras surrounding the Pentagon, whose existence prior to their seizure by the FBI can at least be independently verified, this claimed evidence — allegedly including the remains of a crashed Boeing 757 — has been classified and removed to a secret storage facility.
This unsatisfactory state of affairs is the same throughout the whole saga of 9/11. At every turn we are expected to take the word of the official investigators — the FBI. At no time are we ever shown any physical evidence. In fact, one very recognizable characteristic of the official response to 9/11 is the immediacy with which forensic evidence was everywhere removed from crime scenes and destroyed or otherwise hidden from the public.
*David Ray Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory, Olive Branch Press, 2007, p.232
2. The Pentagon Security Videos
On May 16th 2006, the U.S. Department of Defence released two short video clips to Judicial Watch, claiming that these videos show AA Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon. What the DoD actually released to JW were MPEG digitizations of the video clips, at a very much degraded resolution of 320 × 240 pixels. As far as I am aware, JW has never been able to ascertain the original format, as recorded from the cameras, of the video clips. Moreover, anyone who claims he or she can see a Boeing 757 in these clips has either a very vivid imagination or an interest in spreading false beliefs through the power of suggestion.
There have been many attempts to ‘enhance’ frames from these video clips, some of which amount to outright forgery. Such attempts are at best fatuous and the reader must accept that the original images are as good as it gets. Throughout this piece I have employed high-quality JPEG reproductions of individual frames at their original resolution of 320 × 240 pixels, and this can be verified by comparison with JW's MPEG video clips. If the reader has difficulty making out small details in these images, then welcome to the club and beware of charlatans peddling ‘enhancements’. There is enough detail in the images at their supplied resolution to make a clear case for a cruise missile strike.
The best that can be offered here due to bandwidth considerations are WMV (Windows Media Video) renderings made from the Pentagon-supplied MPEGs.
3. Flight Characteristics
It is impossible that any kind of airplane, large or small, could have reached the position of the object shown entering the frame at right in the Pentagon security video without having gouged the ground at that point (see right-hand image above). It must be remembered that the object, whatever it may have been, had just dived or dropped at least 50 feet (15 metres) after crossing the highway to enter the field of vision already at ground level. As the whole world knows, there was not a mark on the Pentagon lawn after the event.
The reason it could not be an airplane is that airplanes swoop up and down, always pointing in the direction of flight, unlike cruise missiles which, because they are pilotless, can perform violent maneuvres known as ‘bump up/down’ wherein the attitude of the missile does not change while the missile changes its line of attack*. Cruise missiles are designed to hug the ground (or sea) at a height of 6 feet (2 metres) during their final approaches, employing radars and high-speed electronics to achieve this. The bump up/down maneuvre is shown in the following Boeing graphic:—
*A cruise missile is steered with one or more onboard devices known as ‘Control Moment Gyroscopes’ (CMGs). These control the direction that the missile points in, its attitude, and thereby its course. The wings, which swivel laterally in their entirety, can be used to cause a sudden rapid ascent or descent while the gyroscopes force the missile to maintain the same attitude. This is the maneuvre shown as “bump up/down” in the Boeing graphic.
4. The Alleged Tailfin
Some have claimed that while the object which struck the Pentagon was not a large commercial passenger jet, it was still an airplane. The usual candidate put forward is a smallish military jet airplane known as an ‘A3’. Among the evidence for this claim is a triangular shape which appears above the yellow barrier box in the Pentagon security video, as shown below in the right-hand image. To the right of the triangle can be seen what appears to be a trail of white smoke. Airplanes do not leave vapour trails below an altitude of 30,000 feet (9km). The smoke trail is dealt with in Section 5.
It is impossible that the triangular shape seen protruding above the yellow box in the Pentagon security video could be the tail fin of an airplane. For a start, no genuine airplane tail fin is pointed in that manner — all have an upper edge which is parallel to the principal axis and which is several feet long. Moreover, for an object travelling at, say, 500mph (800km/h), the fin would have moved about 12 feet in the duration of a single video frame (1/60th second exposure), hence would appear to be some 15 feet long. It must be remembered that the camera was static and was not tracking the object. At Mach 2 the fin would appear to be 40 feet long in any one frame of video. Whatever its appearance, it would not display a sharp point at the top such as we see in the Pentagon security video frame.
Assuming that the triangular apparition is not simply a trick of the light and smoke (see Section 6), which it could well be, there is an alternative explanation for it — it could be the upper half of a transonic shockwave. If this is the case then the object would have been reaching the transonic speed of about 750mph (1,200km/h) at the time that the video frame was captured.
5. The Smoke Trail
If it is indeed a smoke trail to the right of the ‘fin’, and it is hard to imagine it could be anything else, then it would be fair to assume that there is a similar, dense white smoke trail following the UFO.
Only a rocket motor produces a trail such as we see in the frames of the security videos. That automatically excludes any kind of airplane and also any kind of truck; any kind of vehicle, that is to say, that is not rocket-propelled. A cruise missile is propelled by a rocket motor, immediately after launch, while a solid fuel booster gets the missile up to the operating speed of its long-haul ramjet or turbofan engine. This phase of a cruise missile's flight sequence is identified by “URAP” in the Boeing graphic of a ground-launched missile. If it was indeed a cruise missile then it must have been released from a plane at a not very great distance from the Pentagon. There are many witnesses to a large plane passing low and nearby, the same witnesses frequently reporting hearing the sound of an explosion coming from the direction of the Pentagon following their sightings of the plane*, although there is only one known eyewitness to the actual impact, Mr. Mike Walter of ‘USA Today Live’.
Evidently those responsible for the release of the Pentagon security videos to Judicial Watch had assumed that, accompanied by repeated strong doses of suggestion, the billowing smoke trail of a rocket engine would be seen by one and all as the fuselage of a Boeing 757.
A cruise missile's solid fuel rocket booster burns for about a quarter of a minute. Assuming an average speed of 500mph (800km/h), then for the rocket motor to still be firing upon impact the missile would have had to be drop-launched from an airplane within two miles (3.2km) of the target. Tracking back from the impact position we find the perfect spot to release a cruise missile from a low-flying airplane with minimal chance of being seen doing it, less than two miles from the target — the Army and Navy Country Club, described on its website as “500 acres of rolling, wooded landscape”, comprising some 230 acres at Fairfax and 270 acres at Arlington (the latter shown below).
According to General Thomas E. White (now retired), Secretary of the Army from 2001 to April 2003, an airplane flew over the Army and Navy Country Club just before the Pentagon was struck.
“We had a breakfast in the secretary of defense's conference room, where we had all of the chairmen of the four oversight committees, and as that breakfast was breaking up, the first plane had hit the World Trade Tower. We all went on with the day's business. I had a speech to give up at the Army Navy Country Club. So I was up there when the plane that hit the Pentagon came right over the top of the Army Navy Club and bounced down the hill and hit the side of the Pentagon.” — Thomas E. White, interviewed on PBS August 12th 2004
Note that White does not say that he actually saw the airplane in question. Moreover, in military-speak, when an airplane hits a target that does not actually mean that the airplane has crashed. What we do have, however, is an airplane allegedly flying over the Army and Navy Country Club immediately before the Pentagon was struck — in exactly the right place to drop-launch a cruise missile.
Clearly the general likes his little golf-related ‘in’ jokes. No doubt the missile did look as if it was bouncing like a ball down the hill — an overall descent of some 200 feet — as it performed the ‘bump up/down’ maneuvre, so clearly illustrated in the Boeing graphic, during its 10-12 seconds of flight from the ANCC golf course to the Pentagon ‘hole in one’. Apparently the fact that the missile would still be under rocket-assisted power (‘URAP’) as it impacted the Pentagon was not considered, or was considered inconsequential. And so the ground-level approach and the smoke trail were captured by the Pentagon parking lot security cameras. The resulting video clips were subsequently released, accompanied by the suggestion that they showed Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon but instead of confirming the presence of Flight 77 they have, ironically, allowed us to identify the true nature of the intruder.
*Apologists for the ‘9/11 Commission Report’ invariably misrepresent witness statements, characterizing them as “hundreds of eyewitnesses to a plane hitting the Pentagon”. This is, of course, the employment of a non-sequitur to mislead the unwary, the reality being that all such witnesses firstly saw the large plane and then quite separately heard an explosion after the plane had moved out of their fields of vision. The fact is that, with the sole exception of Mr Walter, none of them actually saw anything hit the Pentagon for the very simple reason that none of them could see the Pentagon. Two others who claim to have witnessed an AA 757 hit the Pentagon were at that time Pentagon employees, hence their testimony must be set aside because of the distinct possibility of it being spurious. In other words, they would say whatever their employer ordered them to say; an employer that is not famous for telling the truth.
6. By The Light of A Rocket Motor
In addition to the voluminous amounts of dense smoke produced by a rocket motor, a dazzling light is emitted at the nozzle by the incandescent exhaust gases. Because the ‘UFO’ is flying towards the camera, into which the morning Sun is also shining, we cannot confirm the presence of the light of a rocket motor. Or can we?
Even with the nozzle turned away from the camera the radiated light of a rocket motor would still illuminate parts of the background behind the ‘UFO’. It is not easy to discern by visual inspection any difference between the illumination of the background in the frame in which the ‘UFO’ appears at far right and that of the frame immediately preceding it. There is, however, a technique for revealing even the most subtle changes of light level — image differencing. This can be performed with an image processing program such as GIMP by assigning the pre-‘UFO’ (A) and ‘UFO’ (B) frames to separate layers then applying a difference function to those same layers. The result of just such an operation is shown below.
With the difference image in hand, so to speak, it becomes a lot easier to spot the illuminated patches in Frame B and to see that they are indeed brighter than the same locations in Frame A.
While it is possible that the appearance of illumination could be a result of bloom on the camera lens, it is clear from the above image that the principal illumination corresponds to a vertical support and section of parapet of the raised Interstate 395 highway.
7. The Overflight and Lloyde England's Testimony
There are many witnesses to a large airplane flying very low in the direction of the Pentagon and crossing the highway that runs alongside the Pentagon Lawn. Since it is clear for many reasons that no large airplane impacted the Pentagon, the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that the reported airplane must have cleared the Pentagon, flying over it.
According to taxi driver Lloyde England's recent testimony, as delivered to Craig Ranke, firstly an airplane flew directly over his car towards the Pentagon, low enough to have struck down lightpoles a length of one of which pierced the windshield of Mr England's taxicab. Mr England told Mr Ranke that an explosion occurred after he had got out of his taxicab. After the plane had flown over, a silent stranger helped Mr England to remove the lightpole from his taxicab. It was, according to an earlier report from the Survivors' Fund Project, while they were removing the lightpole from the taxicab that they saw and heard an explosion at the Pentagon. This report is no longer online as the Survivors' Fund Project appears to have disappeared from the Internet but can still be viewed in the Web Archive[*]. Here is an excerpt:-
Lloyd, 69, began the morning of September 11, 2001 like most days, driving his taxi cab. A passenger in Rosslyn told him what had happened at the World Trade Center so he turned on his radio and headed home. As he approached the Navy Annex, he saw a plane flying dangerously low overhead. Simultaneously, the plane struck a light pole and the pole came crashing down onto the front of Lloyd’s taxi cab, destroying the windshield in front of his eyes. Glass was everywhere as he tried to stop the car. Another car stopped and the driver helped move the heavy pole off Lloyd’s car. As they were moving the pole, they heard a big boom and turned to see an explosion. The light pole fell on Lloyd and he struggled to get up from underneath, wondering what had happened.
The reader must bear in mind that the flight time from the highway to the Pentagon is about one second. Clearly then, if Mr England is correct about the sequence of events, the explosion could not have taken place at the same time that the airplane flew over the Pentagon. In fact, Mr England's narrative is borne out by the absence of an airplane's wingtip vortex in or near the smoke plume. If the reader has watched the whole of both parking lot video clips then he or she will already be aware that each contains a lengthy shot of the smoke plume. Compare that lazily drifting undisturbed smoke plume over the Pentagon with the smoke in the following video clip in which the effect of an airplane's wing vortex is clearly illustrated.
C-5A Wing Vortex Filmed at NASA Langley Research Center
For the Pentagon smoke plume to have been undisturbed by wing vortices, there must indeed have been a delay of several minutes between the passing of the airplane and the explosion which gave rise to it. Plenty of time for Mr England and his nameless knight errant to remove the lightpole from his taxicab. It would also explain why we see no airplane in the parking lot video clips. Mr England's testimony is further corroborated by the very real downed lightpoles and the matching damage to his taxicab, which corresponds exactly to his description of the position of the lightpole after it came to rest.
It would seem that Mr England is not entirely sure where exactly he was on the highway at the time and Craig Ranke makes great play of Mr England's recent claim to have been further north than obviously he was as shown in the many photographs of his taxicab. However, Mr England has been exposed over the years to a great deal of "north side flyover" testimony from Pentagon policemen and other US government employees which has been heavily promoted by Craig Ranke among others and could not avoid having been affected by this. Furthermore, Mr England received a grant to replace his taxicab from the federal 9/11 Survivors' Fund Project. It would be unusual for such a grant to be made unconditionally. Some of the "north side flyover" witnesses also claim to have seen the airplane hit the Pentagon, which is again contradicted by the physical evidence, hence diminishing their credibility. However, for Craig Ranke to accuse Mr England of deliberately lying about everything else on the basis that the damage and photos took place in a different location to that in which he now claims to have been is also for Mr Ranke to accuse all his own pet witnesses of lying and for exactly the same reason - in other words, the physical evidence in the form of downed lightpoles, absent credible airplane wreckage and parking lot videos contradicts their stories.
The purpose of downing the lightpoles would have been twofold. Firstly, the width of the swath could be argued to support the official story that a large airplane struck the Pentagon although this would be a non-sequitur since the width of the swath is evidence only that the swath itself was caused by a large airplane. Secondly, it removed hazards from the approach path of the incoming cruise missile.
*It would seem that the Survivors Fund Project webpage with Lloyde England's statement has mysteriously disappeared from the Web Archive too. A ZIP file containing the webpage can, however, be downloaded from here.
8. Mike Walter
Mr Walter described a large plane coming in as “an American Airlines jet” and an impacting object that looked to him like “a cruise missile with wings”. He subsequently claimed that he didn't really mean that it looked like a cruise missile. One can hardly criticize Mr. Walter for any lack of certainty in his memories of the event, which must have been truly shocking to behold, although he now claims to be certain that he saw an airplane hit the Pentagon. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask how many people would describe an 18-wheeler as looking like a sports car, even if it was ramming a building at the time. It is also fair to ask how Mr Walter failed to notice the dense white smoke trail that is clearly visible in the security videos, especially in view of the fact that his keen powers of observation enabled him in a split second to positively identify the large plane as an American Airlines jet. Before, that is, its transmogrification into a “cruise missile with wings”. It would of course be unjust to characterise Mr Walter as having been a plant; he was clearly shocked and scared out of his wits hence not the most reliable of witnesses. In his own words, his feelings at the time were of “sheer terror”.
Transcript — “I was sitting in the northbound on 27 in the traffic this morning it was, you know, typical rush-hour — it had ground to a standstill. And I looked off, I was you know, I looked out my window and I saw this plane, a jet, American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought "this doesn't add up, it's really low". And, and I saw it. It just went, I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.
“Huge explosion, great ball of fire, smoke started billowing out and then it was chaos on the highway as people either tried to move around the traffic and go down, either forward or backwards. We had a lady who was in front of me, who was backing up and screaming, "everybody go back, go back, they've hit the Pentagon". And it was just sheer terror.” — Mike Walter (USA Today Live)
9. Donald Rumsfeld
Mike Walter was not the only person to use the word ‘missile’ in describing the object that hit the Pentagon. On October 12th 2001 then U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave an interview to ‘Parade’ magazine.
Parade: “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: “There were lots of warnings. 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. 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.
“They [find a lot] and any number of terrorist efforts have been dissuaded, deterred or stopped by good intelligence gathering and good preventive work. 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 [the Pentagon] 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.”
The evidence of the statements of Mike Walter and Donald Rumsfeld does not seem so tenuous and the statements themselves are not so easily dismissed as metaphorical when viewed in the context of the flight characteristics of the ‘UFO’ and of the smoke trail that followed behind it. Both statements may well instead have been unintended slips of the tongue that reveal the true nature of the object.
That would not be Donald Rumsfeld's only slip of the tongue regarding 9/11...
10. The Damage to Lamp-Posts on The Highway
The slipstream of a cruise missile skimming the treetops at, say, 750mph (1,200km/h) would have dragged objects behind it and quite possibly have pulled down lamp-posts as it passed, leaving a trail of rubble strewn across the highway as it crossed low above the traffic. We also have a large airplane flying close and very low which was visible to Mr. Mike Walter through his car window immediately before the explosion at the Pentagon. This large airplane may well have struck lamp-posts in passing, as well as having had its own slipstream and powerful jet engines, all of which would have caused damage on the ground. This was possibly the selfsame airplane from which the cruise missile was launched.
Anyone doubting the great strength of airplane wings should look closely at the following photograph.
However, as shown in the video clip below, the damage to the lamp-posts is inconsistent with the flight path reconstructed by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) from the alleged Flight Data Recorder of Flight 77.
11. The Damage to The Pentagon
The initial damage to the Pentagon wall was inconsistent with the wall having been struck by an airplane of any size.
There is no way that any airplane could penetrate the hardened Pentagon wall, hence those who propose the ‘small-plane’ theory must — and do — introduce a small missile fired ahead of the small plane. So the small plane theorists are in actual fact missile theorists. However, a small (wing-borne) missile could not cause the damage seen and would barely penetrate the outer wall, let alone puncture three rings of the Pentagon leaving a round exit hole.
Above is a picture of the hole in the C-Ring (third ring inwards) of the Pentagon, that is to say in the sixth successive hardened (note the concrete inside the decorative brickwork) wall to be penetrated by some part of the impacting object. If that hole was caused by an engine of a Boeing 757 then where is the engine and where are the holes in any of the rings caused by the other engine? Most tellingly, there is no mention of this hole in the ‘9/11 Commission Report’.
A jet of water cloaked the entry hole for 12 minutes prior to the collapse of the wall
As pointed out by Carol Valentine in ‘Pentagon RESCUE? Open, Bloody, Questions’, firefighters do not use water on petroleum (gasoline, diesel, jetfuel etc.) fires since it floats on water and will continue to burn unhindered. Such fires must be fought with a special foam that drowns the fuel, denying it access to oxygen so extinguishing the flames.
12. The Alleged Airplane Wreckage
Before any discussion of the wreckage shown above can proceed, the reader must appreciate that we have clear evidence of a cruise missile in the ground-level approach and smoke trail shown in the security videos. Therefore it matters not which answer, if any, the reader chooses to the question of where the wreckage came from, for it will not affect the answer to the quite separate question of whether a cruise missile was involved in the strike. For this reason we need engage in only a perfunctory analysis of the wreckage.
There are only so many ways that the wreckage could have arrived on the Pentagon lawn:-
13. The Balance of Probabilities
One of the differences between the small plane plus small missile scenario and that of a cruise missile is that the former is excessively complicated, hence it carries a significantly greater risk of failure. Another difference is the far greater likelihood of a plane being spotted, whereas a cruise missile would be coming in at the level of the treetops and is relatively small (about 20 feet, or 6 metres, in length) with a very short wingspan by comparison.
The small plane theorists always omit any mention of a pilot. For a small plane to have been both pilotless and to have fired a small missile with precision timing would have required extensive modifications to have been made to the plane. A cruise missile, on the other hand, and especially a bunker-busting cruise missile, would have been doing precisely what it had been designed, built and proven to do. Where was the testing of the small plane and small missile carried out? How many tests would have had to be performed before the assembly could be got right? How many airplanes would have been destroyed in the testing? On what building would such tests have been performed? All this extensive development for a one-off operation seems highly unlikely. One has only to put oneself in the place of the plotters to see that the choice of cruise missile was a no-brainer.
Appendix I. The 9/11 Commission Report
With the recent announcement of Mr Larry Silverstein's filing of a $12.3 billion lawsuit against American Airlines and others for “allowing” the events of that day to take place, in addition to the $4.68 billion World Trade Center insurance payout already received by Mr Silverstein, it is clear that a considerable sum of money rides on the survival of the U.S. Government's official ‘9/11 Commission Report’.
Appendix II. Attempts to Discredit The Case for A Cruise Missile
A variety of websites contain attacks on the case for a cruise missile. Here, a representative sample will be analyzed.
‘Pentagon Missile Hoax’ by anonymous
This article is billed as “Pentagon missile hoax: the "no Boeing" claims are not "9/11 truth" they discredit and distract from proven evidence of complicity”. The anonymous author makes the following five claims in her introduction:—
[1] the fake debate between no plane and no complicity gets the Bush regime off the hook
[2] there is zero evidence for any of the "no plane" claims — hundreds of people saw Flight 77, none saw a cruise missile, Global Hawk robot plane, smaller plane or flying saucer piloted by giant lizards
[3] the physical evidence shows that a large twin engine jet hit the nearly empty part of the Pentagon, the "Black Boxes" were found, cleanup crews found remains of the passengers, the "hole was too small" claim was a hoax
[4] making 9/11 complicity dependent on the no-plane claim was a brilliant tactic to discredit the real evidence for people inside the Beltway, both for the majority who vote against Bush and the political / military elites (especially the military officers who saw the plane crash or the plane debris)
[5] the material on this page and all of the websites that are linked here should finally extinguish the "no plane" hoax — except for those who have staked their credibility on these claims and cannot admit a mistake, and those who intentionally promote the hoax. Every claim for the "no plane" hoaxes is refuted here or at a page linked from this page.
Here are the appropriate responses:—
1. This claim is entirely irrelevant to the matter in hand. However, to deal with its claims, firstly, there is no such debate let alone a “fake debate” that I am aware of so it is actually a spurious device that the author appears to have invented and, at that, one which hardly makes any sense. The purpose of this can only be to try to confuse the reader. Secondly, there is no connection whatsoever between the nature of the object that struck the Pentagon and whether or not G.W.Bush is in any way culpable for the strike. The author wisely does not even try to explain how a plane would constitute evidence of “complicity” while a cruise missile would not.
2. Nobody, let alone “hundreds of people”, could possibly have known whether or not the airplane she saw was Flight 77. As far as I am aware the only person to have identified American Airlines livery was Mr Mike Walter — but the paint job does not identify the flight number and does not even prove that it was an AA airplane. The rest of these “hundreds of people” appear to be as anonymous and untraceable as the author of this hit piece. If a cruise missile passed above you in the street, travelling at 750mph (1,200km/h), would you see it? How long did it take the UFO to get from above the cloverleaf to the Pentagon wall? Let us do a little calculation to find out: the distance is roughly 1,000 feet (300m) and 750mph is just about 1,100fps (340m/s), hence it would have taken the object about 0.9s to travel that far. How much can anyone see of a high-speed object in that time, especially a completely unexpected object with a completely unexpected destination? If you only heard it, then by the time you turned your head it would be gone. I recall glimpsing for just a second, or two at the most, in 1980, a fireball in the sky, from a London, England street. What I thought I saw was a giant burning rag tumbling end over end while falling quite slowly just a mile or two away from me, from an altitude of about 15°. It was later reported that a “meteorite” had fallen in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (presumably it had been tracked by air defense systems). It was broad daylight in London and there were crowds of people around me but to this day I appear to have been the only person who saw it — newspapers and TV reported no witnesses. The simple fact is that because no one reported seeing the Pentagon strike object and identifying it as a cruise missile does not mean that it was not there. The evidence of the smoke trail proves conclusively that it was a rocket no matter what anyone thought he saw. Witness evidence is notoriously unreliable.
3. The author asserts there is “physical evidence” which he does not identify, making it hard to discuss, let alone to refute. Nonetheless, since the evidence is not identified we can safely dismiss the claim that it exists as a ‘because-I-say-so’ argument, which is worthless. How could the author possibly know that any part of the Pentagon was “nearly empty”? Is he taking the word of a Pentagon spokesman — in other words a possible accessory after the fact to the murders by persons otherwise unknown that took place there? According to one suspect — the Pentagon itself (which cannot be excluded as a suspect simply because it is the Pentagon or the victim, in small part, of the attack) — some 125 Pentagon employees were killed, although there is no way of independently corroborating this number. Given that there were about 20,000 people in the building at the time of the strike, we will probably never know how many thousands of deaths are being covered up under the pretext of ‘national security’. As for the claim about the black boxes, the problem with this is that they were “found” by people who, again, may be either willing accomplices of the murderers or otherwise gullible dupes stumbling across planted evidence. Moreover, it would seem that the data in the flight recorders, however it got there and wherever they really came from, is incomplete and stops short several seconds before the impact. It is very easy to falsify the data in a black box and it was only the data that was released. No one outside the Pentagon has, to the best of my knowledge, ever actually seen the flight recorders. Finally, we get another bald assertion, this one patently absurd, yet again presented without any evidence beyond ‘because-I-say-so’, that the real entry hole is much bigger than the hole which is visible in photographs taken before the ‘collapse’ (probable demolition) of the wall.
4. If anyone can make any sense of the garbled statement that is bullet-point #4, I would be grateful for an explanation. Until then it is pure amphigory, perhaps designed to make the reader feel inadequate because he cannot understand the point the author appears to be trying to make, whatever it might be.
5. More groundless assertions compounded by ad-hominem attacks against anyone who dares to disagree with the author.
‘Is the 9/11 "Pentagon Hole" a Psyop to Distract from Real Questions?’ by Erik Larson
In this ‘hit piece’, missile denier Erik Larson presents himself as a card-carrying ‘9/11 truther’ leaping to the defense of the official “9/11 Truth Movement”. This is, he claims, mocked and discredited by suspicions of anything other than a 757 at the Pentagon. Nonetheless, the photographic evidence of a smoke trail speaks for itself, as does Mr Larson's silence on that very subject.
Mr Larson also claims that “9/11... ...came after years of warnings that Al Qaeda intended to hijack planes for missiles” but gives no source for this information. The origin of this claim would seem to be the Congressional Joint Inquiry, which first published its results on September 18th 2002, more than a year after 9/11. These results depend solely on testimony from members of the so-called ‘intelligence community’. The problem here is that the ‘intelligence community’ is itself implicated in the events of 9/11 and there is no independent corroborating evidence to support its claims. If the ‘intelligence community’ was a party in any way to the events of 9/11 then of course it would go out of its way to fabricate a false history in order to make it seem that it simply failed to do its job and then only through incompetence. Unless some independent corroborating evidence can be produced the Joint Inquiry's report is worthless, the ‘intelligence community’ having had a whole year to manufacture whatever excuses it needed to get itself off the hook (assuming that it had not itself been producing phony intelligence all along that could be wheeled out at the appropriate time). Moreover, even if corroborating evidence of loose foreknowledge on the part of the intelligence community can be produced, that does not prove that that is actually what happened on 9/11. Any claim that the existence of such plans means that must be what happened in the event is a non-sequitur, as the particular logical fallacy employed by Mr Larson in his article is known.
With regard to any suggestion that the Pentagon security videos might have been faked — a favorite of missile deniers (and raised in the completely unfaked comments section of the above article) — one has to ask why the Pentagon would manufacture false evidence that appears only to indicate treason on its own part.
‘The "Pod People" And The Plane That Crashed Into the Pentagon’ by Mike Rivero
Mike Rivero, a former NASA employee, owns and runs the widely-respected Internet newsfeed ‘What Really Happened’ from his hideaway on the paradise island of Hawaii. Through this medium and his pungent sense of humor he has acquired a high degree of credibility among connoisseurs of historical truth. It would be difficult to find fault with him except in this one respect: Mike Rivero is promoting a falsehood that cloaks high treason at the Pentagon. As with his protégé, Erik Larson (see above), he conspicuously ignores all evidence pointing to a cruise missile — the very same tactic adopted by the infamous 9/11 Commission in respect of #7 World Trade Center.
Why would a cruise missile at the Pentagon indicate high treason? Because had anyone else launched it there would have been genuine retaliatory action. However, to get away with it would involve imprinting horrific images into the minds of the public of some very real airplanes flying into other buildings in order to establish a pattern for all the events of that day — and what better candidates than #1 and #2 World Trade Center? And who else but a psy-ops military psychologist would know better how to manipulate the pattern-seeking nature of the human mind to his advantage?
The big question that arises from Mr Rivero's continued pushing of the official line in respect of the Pentagon strike is this:- Is he trying to lend credit to the official account of what happened at the Pentagon on 9/11 by associating it with stories of what is really, really happening in the world that every informed person knows to be true and that the old mass-media — newspapers, radio and television — invariably lie about, or is he trying to discredit the truth of what is really happening in the world by associating it with transparent nonsense?
Perhaps Mr Rivero's very own "Thought for the day" of December 11th 2008 explains all:-
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY!
"If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the credibility and the authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his enemy."-- A Psychological Warfare Casebook Operations Research Office Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (1958)
Clearly Mr Rivero knows exactly what he is doing, whatever it might be.
Appendix III. An Email from The Pentagon
I have been convinced since the day itself that the Pentagon was struck by a cruise missile. Hence I have always argued that position in Internet forums and have had no reason to change my mind. As a consequence in 2003 I received an email from someone claiming to be a Pentagon employee who wanted to make known what she had overheard but who was too frightened to step forward publicly herself. The machine on which I received that email was scrapped soon afterwards and so, due to the impossibility that exists for reasons known only to Microsoft of transferring bulk email files from one Windows computer to another, I no longer have either the email or the sender's address. While it was never my intention to lose it, its loss does make it easier to report the contents, as I can do so in the knowledge that no seizure of my present equipment could ever compromise the sender, whose name I can't even remember. I do, however, clearly recall the message. She was at work in the Pentagon that morning and, shortly after the impact, had overheard men she described as “FBI” making a decision to dynamite the Pentagon wall. It would seem that the wall collapsed soon after that. If they were trying to make it look more like an airplane crash then they really shouldn't have bothered since it still didn't look like one even after the wall had collapsed if only because all the main features of an airplane crash were still entirely absent from the scene. An alternative explanation is that it was intended to ensure the deaths of any survivors trapped in the original, pre-collapse rubble.
Appendix IV. “Missile” #3
Partial transcript — “There were many times, Miles, that you were afraid. You were worried. Especially when I was standing in front of the Pentagon that night seeing one of our fortresses pried open by a missile, er, airplane...” — Tim Roemer (9/11 Commissioner)
Appendix V. The Targets?
Carol Valentine's highly detailed, well-researched, incisive and bitterly humorous exposé of the sham rescue of trapped Pentagon employees is truly horrifying.
“According to the Washington Post, January 20, 2002, "The Last Watch," (front page, Style section), the entire chain of command of the super secret Chief of Naval Operations Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP) were killed in the September 11 attack on the Pentagon.” — Carol Valentine, ‘Pentagon RESCUE? Open, Bloody, Questions’
“In mid-August [2001], people boxed up their office files and family photos. Finally. The CNO-IP was moving to renovated offices in the Navy Command Center, on the first floor of the D-Ring, on the Pentagon's west side.
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“One hundred twenty-five Pentagon workers were killed that day. Forty-two died in the Navy Command Center. Seven served in the Intelligence Plot.” — Washington Post, January 20 2002
Appendix VI. Mirror Websites
This article is a work-in-progress. Please occasionally check for updates.
Mirrors of this article are available at the following web addresses—
Appendix VII. Other Websites of Interest
Please report broken links to 
Appendix VIII. Recommended Books
Some people try to dismiss Dr Griffin's opinions on the grounds that he is a theologian. Firstly, that in itself would not invalidate his opinions even if it was true. Secondly, I am not sure that it is an entirely accurate description; David Ray Griffin is a doctor of philosophy of religion and that makes him a philosopher before a theologian. Thirdly, there is no mention of any god or faith in his writings about 9/11 listed above (Dr Griffin has written a book about 9/11 and Christianity and many other books unconnected with 9/11 and probably to do with theology but I must confess to having read none of them). We have instead the most fearless and acutely rational discussion of the facts surrounding that day. Dr Griffin is without doubt the most courageous philosopher on the planet and the rest, with very few exceptions, should be hanging their heads in shame at their exposed collective cowardice and venality. Read Dr Griffin's lucid and relentless prosecution of the 9/11 criminals and weep, for they are still free, still in control of the USA and UK and still engaged in mass-murder of innocents and false-flag terrorism against the peoples of the world.
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Copyright © Peter Wakefield Sault 2008-2009
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