A Fuzzy Video That Proves Nothing

Firefight is primarily about the heroic efforts of the fire-fighters at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. What is of interest to us is the authors’ description of the attack on the Pentagon. The authors, Patrick Creed and Rick Newman, write:

– The plane crossed Washington Boulevard, . .. . travelling more than 500 miles per hour and was less than 30 feet off the ground.

– the planes wings knocked over several light poles that line the road.

– As the Flight 77 flew nearly to ground level, its right wing sliced into a 750 kilowatt generator . . . The planes right engine ripped a hole in a fence near the generator . . . the left engine grazed the grass . . . Both wings began to break apart, hurling metal fragments into the air.

– The nose of the plane hit the facade, . . . about 14 feet above the ground, going 530 miles per hour.

– The airplanes tail, 45 feet tall, was still attached to the plane as it ploughed into the Pentagon.

– Along the outer wall, 21-inch-wide concrete columns, . . . stood every ten feet, . . . The impact of the plane knocked out eight of them completely, and severely damaged two others.

– The body of the hijacker who had been flying the plane ended up in the D Ring about 107 feet from the point of impact.

– The punch-out hole . . . was created by explosive energy.

In my article What really happened at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, published by The Wisdom Fund (twf.org), I debunk the theory that Flight 77, a Boeing 757, struck the Pentagon.
At the Dept. of Defence (DoD) News Briefing on September 12, 2001, the words “American Airlines,” “Flight 77,” “Boeing,” “Dulles,” and “passengers” were not mentioned.

Standing in front of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s senior Pentagon correspondent since November 1992, reported: 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. . . . It wasn’t till about 45 minutes later . . . that all of the floors collapsed.

Arlington County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher, incident commander at the Pentagon on September 11, corroborates Jamie McIntyre’s report. At the September 12, 2001, DoD briefing, when asked: “Is there anything left of the aircraft at all?” said: “there are some small pieces of aircraft … there’s no fuselage sections and that sort of thing.”

Victoria Clarke, Assistant Secretary of Defence for Public Affairs – “presenter” of the DoD briefing, did not contradict Chief Plaugher.

Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who from her fifth-floor, B-ring office at the Pentagon, witnessed “an unforgettable fireball, 20 to 30 feet in diameter,” was called for stretcher duty. She describes a strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner. This visible evidence or lack thereof may also have been apparent to the secretary of defence, who in an unfortunate slip of the tongue referred to the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon as a ‘missile’.

Barbara Honegger, military affairs journalist at the Naval Postgraduate School, writes that NORAD’s: Gen. Larry Arnold, revealed that he ordered one of his jets to fly down low over the Pentagon shortly after the attack that morning, and that his pilot reported back that there was no evidence that a plane had hit the building.

Similar scepticism among the fire-fighters is noted by Creed and Newman.

They write in Firefight, Denis Griffin . . . had been working in the aftermath of the attack all day, and seen wreckage that looked like it could be from an airplane, but there were so many wild stories going around that he wasn’t sure what to believe.

Two statements in the book by Creed and Newman are striking:

– FBI photographer Jennifer Combs (formerly Jennifer Farmer) went far out of her way to pull hundreds of photographs from archives and narrate all of them.

How did they get access to these photographs, when others have Freedom of Information Act requests pending for these photographs and Pentagon videos?

– Plaugher came by . . . We think its al Qaeda, he said, citing a villain many of them had never heard of.

What would cause Plaugher, Fire Chief of Arlington County, to make such a statement so soon after 9/11? Plaugher was the incident commander at the Pentagon on 9/11. He now serves as “a key member of the IAFC Terrorism Committee.”

It should be noted, that to this day, the only passenger lists made public have no Arab names on them, Bin Laden is not wanted for 9/11 at the FBIs Most Wanted, and the only evidence offered by the government to substantiate their claim of a Flight 77 having struck the Pentagon is a fuzzy video that proves nothing indeed the flight recorder data released by the government shows that a plane flew about 400 feet above the Pentagon.

[ENVER MASUD is an engineer, and founder of The Wisdom Fund]