Sunday, May 04, 2008

"Pentagon 9/11," published by the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2007 as part of the Defense Studies Series

is the most serious attempt yet made to tell the official story of the attack. Published as a quality softcover, it is slick, like advertising. Although footnoted, indexed, and with a bibliography, it reads more as a neuro-linguistically challenged soap opera than an historical synthesis. The writing sounds besieged. A preface acknowledges the trouble with the truth they encounter. Topping its list of problems, "the most difficult was to establish an exact timeline for 11 September." Since crashing a jetliner into a fortress wasn't distinctively singular enough to prevent a 30 minute spread in the reported time of the strike, and since the Arlington County After-Action Report got the time of the building collapse wrong by 18 minutes, I can see their point.

It can not have been easy walking the thin line of official narrative that it does. The events in Arlington on September 11th took place in one of the most highly secured environments in America. All access and oversight to the area was restricted and controlled. Essentially, it was a private matter, which was then regurgitated through a media lens to become part of the collective experience known as 9-11.

Proving such a synthetic, second-hand reality is as difficult as disproving a negative. The story of 9-11 is now more about the story of the story, and how it unfolded. Inconvenient facts just don't go away in the internet age. New facts must be judged in the context of how they emerge and the response they elicit. Coming at a point when authorities still haven't released technical reports related to the destruction of Building 7, the attempt at writing a definitive history of the Pentagon attack is premature. The record is full of anomalous, inconsistent or inconvenient details that don't want pinning down yet

To me the attack on the Pentagon was a billion-dollar arson scam. It was the foundational crime that led to all the other crimes of the new American century--such as outrageous invasions, and endless war on "terror." Pentagon 9/11 functions then as a cover up and can be used as evidence to prove such.

Lets start with an example, the graphics in Pentagon 9/11 that illustrate the extent of the damage to the building from impact, fire, smoke and water. On page 81, is a first-floor plan illustrating the damage from the attack.



And on page 88, is an illustration of the second-floor plan of the Pentagon overlaid with the exact same pattern of damage.



According to these graphics, the entirety of Wedges 1 and 2 suffered damage in the attack. However, that information--along with the color scheme used to express it--was lifted straight out of a handout distributed at a DoD press conference on September 13, 2001, labeled, "Real Estate & Facilities Initial Damage Assessment."



I stress the word initial-- meaning preliminary--which should never be the basis for any considered draft of history, especially when the historians ignore several subsequent official reports that speak directly to the matter. We'll have to judge for ourselves the politics of these various reports. Since none of them touch on the issues I discuss here, they all are employed in some degree as enemies of the truth. Still, there are facts to the matter, unlike the greatly exaggerated stories of martyrdom and suffering, and their corollary's, the equally imagined tales of rescue and heroism, the bricks-and-mortar narrative has some grounding in physics. It is more than just the bad acting found in the record, and it has been a sham from the start.

One fire-science and engineering report was undertaken by Hughes Associates. It can be found online in an undated PDF titled "Review of 9/11 Pentagon Scenario from the Fire Fighter's, Fire Marshal's, and Fire Engineer's Perspectives." It was put together by associates Eric Rosenbaum and Sean P. Hunt, assisted by someone from the Department of Homeland Security named Diane Pitts. It appears to have been undertaken as an effort to tie up a few loose strings left by the extensive Arlington County After-Action Report. I can't imagine who commissioned it, but they didn't pay much.

The graphics published in the Hughes report illustrate damage to the building from the attack that is fundamentally at odds with the assessments found in Pentagon 9/11, where blanket claims of extensive building damage are made without supporting evidence. I would estimate the difference between the two reports as expressing a factor of a full decimal point--200,000 square feet of damage in one, verses 2 million square feet of damage in the other.

You'll have to do the math for yourself.

Hughes Associates includes a second graphic indicating extremely minor damage to the upper three floors in renovated Wedge 1. The extensive smoke and water damage indicated in Wedge 2 is inexplicable, as two firewalls would have impeded its progress--however, it is a wash, as Wedge 2 was scheduled for an upcoming renovation anyway.



But even the findings in the Hughes Associates' review were surpassed in the more comprehensive Arlington County After-Action Report, exacerbating the discrepancy with the DoD's POV contained in Pentagon 9/11. In a little-discussed appendix titled, "Pentagon Penetration Damage Diagrams," we find high-quality damage-assessment illustrations that are credited to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Evidence Recovery Team. All five floors are broken down individually, which allows us to glean a wealth of information not available elsewhere. For instance, a firewall on the second floor kept fire damage from spreading into Wedge 2.

Why were such barriers not in place between the wedges on other floors? Why do both of the other reports indicate fire damage to the second floor of Wedge 2? These are the sorts of questions not even asked, let alone answered, anywhere in the official record.











In the appendix diagrams all of the space on the 4rth and 5th floors between Corridor 4 and the line separating Wedge 1 and 2, (the area immediately targeted in the attack) is noted as being "NA," which I believe stands for "Not Assigned." The same area on the 3rd floor is marked as "AR," which might stand for "Army/Reserved." In any event, these areas lack the specific tenancy notations we see elsewhere on the diagram.

My suspicion is: that when they said Wedge 1 wasn't fully occupied yet, they meant this target area specifically--the three outer rings between Corridors 4 and 4.5. This should make the tenets who were relocated there--the Navy Command Center and the army personnel and accounting offices--feel even more targeted. And how unlucky of Hani Hanjor to execute such a precision move into the only fortified and empty part of the Pentagon?

The seven fatalities that occurred in the offices of the Defense Intelligence Agency represent some sort of special category of wrongful death in my opinion. They should have been safe behind masonry firewalls in Wedge 2. Perhaps they were piggy-backed onto the plot by Jewish elements hostile to DIA monitoring of Israeli spying within the Pentagon. That would explain the "punch out" hole into those offices. I should think it was just that: punched out to open a rescue route for the DIA staffers inside.

The renovations to Corridor 4 provided a fully up-to-code firewall protection for the remainder of the renovated areas. To the north, the fires should have been contained by the intrinsic barrier which separates Wedge 1 from Wedge 2.

The wedges were originally constructed as independent, stand alone masonry buildings-they didn't share any mechanical services, like pipes or ducts. Any passageways between the two would have been sealed up as a consequence of the ongoing renovations, if for no other reason. Understanding how the fire behaved in these building conditions is a proper purpose of these studies. The severe fire conditions seen out the third-story windows of Wedge 2 on the afternoon of September 1th, are inexplicable in the extreme.

In some cases, bullet-proof glass melted into puddles and it is unclear if the fire was coming from inside or outside of the building. How such hot fires could be allowed to develop given the relative ease in accessing this portion of the building, coupled with the enormous resources on hand to suppress it--is another mystery.

Likewise, the roof fires which sprang up in the middle of the night--on top of the poured concrete roof mind you--are even more inexplicable. Supposedly fed by only a thin layer of wood sandwiched between concrete and slate, these gave off bright "rocket's red glare" effects--a shock and awe which looks more likely to have resulted from high-powered incendiaries or pyrotechnics to me. We have the photographs and can let the grand jury decide.


The book Pentagon 9/11 makes a mention of the roof fires, but the Hughes' review appears specifically designed to address the issue, which was only mentioned in passing in the Arlington County report. They come to the wrong conclusion of course, making a big point about the need for fire breaks within this decorative element, but without ever asking how the fire got up there in the first place.

(From Pentagon 9/11)

And Pentagon 9/11 loves its roof damage! They just don't want you to know the damage was cosmetic.


Not only were these impossible-to-believe roof fires staged for a DoD public-relations benefit of maximum catastrophic value (the better to get you to invade foreign nations, my dear,) they also served the corrupt agendas of the incestuous Pentagon renovation contractors--sticking it to the American taxpayer to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. In the aftermath of 9-11, Congress even authorized an extra $300 million just to accelerate the time table of the renovation!

Since 9-11, many of us self-identify as being defined by the shock and dismay we felt that day, and the transformation which followed as we set out to find meaning in the events. The compilers of this history don't even seem real to me themselves. In their publicity photograph they look like unhappy wax dolls. They can't hide the endless strings of absurdities and contradictions that make up the official narrative; their "history" has no internal logic to hold it together. It has no meaning and it is in this way that I can tell us apart.
high-resolution image Sarandis Papadopoulos, Diane Putney, Nancy Berlage, who along with Alfred Goldberg and Rebecca Welch, are the historians whose names are attached to this book.

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