"The Devil's Horns"

Mikey Weinstein, who founded the advocacy group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation in response to the antisemitism and intolerance he found rampant in the military, posts some very interesting photographs at his web site. They are a small sampling of images that were taken down from a web site belonging to Frank and Sally Bussey, missionaries with Military Ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, who say they work in service with the chaplains at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. Their denuded pages can be found at archive.org.

Weinstein calls the evangelical and fundamentalist movement that arose over the past few decades, tantamount to a Christian Taliban. Serving in prominent positions throughout the military and in private, quasi-militaristic organizations like Eric Prince's Blackwater, they led the charge in the Bush Administration's Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

These group photographs memorialize 9-week Sunday school/Bible study classes offered by the Bussey's, which on their web page are unfortunately--and perhaps not unconsciously-- abbreviated as, "training cycle SS classes." One page in the archive is listed as, "Last SS class 28 October 04."

Weinstein was alarmed at the culture on display, where young soldiers in government-issued fatigues pose while often holding guns in one hand and Bibles in the other. Bussey says in a note to one picture, "This was the first week our recruits brought their rifles with them. This is training to always have your weapon with you. They also proudly display their Sword (Bible)."

The Bussey web site speaks directly to the "parent or loved one of a recruit in the 2-39 Basic Combat Training Battalion," suggesting, "you may see them and even download the pictures for printing." But it would appear the photographs were intended for a purpose larger than just family life.

Two group shots were not taken down off the Bussey's site. In them, no guns are on display, and only one Bible can be seen--a large black book held prominently by someone in the center of the group.

An investigative report MRFF issued says, "Because these photos are all clearly deliberately posed, there is no question that they were taken for the purpose of promoting the Military Ministry. Apparently, they're teaching the soldiers right off the bat in basic training that it's OK to violate the same regulation that the Pentagon Inspector General found the Christian Embassy officers guilty of violating."

That reference is to a promotional video made in the halls of the Pentagon in which numerous uniformed service members, including four generals, laud an outside Christian group, contrary to policy that prohibits it while in uniform.

But what Bussey calls "God's Basic Training," as we see it in two large-group images, also carry a coded reference so subtle that I found it chilling when I spotted it. Almost everybody is holding up camouflage-printed paperback Bibles as they smile for the camera. Quite deliberately, the group was organized around two very discrete hand signals held up amidst the crowd. Often interpreted as "the devil's horns," the ring and middle fingers are tucked under the palm. Both George and Laura Bush have been photographed flashing the sign, usually to friends or intimates.


Could it be an accident or a coincidence? Since we find paired hand signals of "the devil's horns" in the other group shot, I think not. There, they are differently disguised, and at first I could only spot one--held aloft by a tall young man in the back row. Many people hold guns, with only one young man in the center foreground holding up a small camouflaged Bible, which reduces it into a coded reference. It is paired, close behind him, with a young woman who also makes the hand signal.

In the last image, which appears to be just a small portion of a larger group photograph, there are many guns and many Bibles and many hand signals of "the devil's horns." Here we begin to really feel a menace.

To compose group shots like this marked with such subtly manipulated coded references does not indicate a game or light hearted amusement. Clearly, an elaborately contrived, powerful secret code is being transmitted.

One that is not benign either, in my opinion. In the MRFF report is a photograph of an office door in Fort Riley Kansas, where someone has made an odd choice and posted a picture of Ann Coulter, with her infamous quote delivered in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," and the date it was published, September 13, 2001.

September 13th was also the day that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson unleashed an equally infamous quote. They blamed 9-11 on gays, abortionists, the ACLU and the People for an American Way, and they generated a firestorm of criticism in response. Something always seemed very fishy to me about this pair, especially that morning. There was such a cool rationality to the way they unfolded the argument, with Robertson inviting Falwell onto his show that day with a hearty, "Jerry, I'm delighted to see you this morning!"

Coulter was made allowance for because she was said to be upset writing about her friend Barbara Olsen, who died--supposedly--on American Airlines Flight 77. But Coulter's sentiment does not ring true to my ear as upset, and the pairing of two blonds becomes a signal to match the pair of old preachers, as everyone tries on their new post-9-11 agendas. That these radical right-wing reactionaries were deliberate components of a planned new system, I have no doubt in my mind. But where that has left us, is another question entirely.

The Securities & Exchange Commission Burns

I can find only seven pictures on the web depicting fire in Building 7. All seven show fires on floor 11 and floor 12. Those were the two floors occupied by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. The fat lady is clearing her throat.


(Interestingly, I believe all seven images were taken by Steve Spak, a highly privileged hagiographer of the New York City Fire Department, who also took the only video showing the south side of the building, albeit, typically enveloped in smoke.)


That the photographic record of Building 7's demise was manipulated and censured I have no doubt. We were told that 9-11 was the most recorded media event in history. Set in the media capital of the nation, major conventions of accredited news photographers also just happened to be taking place close by.

No photographs exist, apparently, of the south side of WTC7 that are not completely obscured by smoke. Not a single image exists depicting fire on the south face of the building. Not a single image exists of the massive gash to the south face, supposedly caused by falling steel from WTC1. The NIST study, World Trade Center Investigation Status and First-Person Data Collection September 17, 2003, even asks plaintively that, "NIST continues to seek photos and videos from the south face of WTC7."

The fire department correctly determined mid-day on 9-11 that Building 7 was in danger of collapse, pulling back two blocks, even stopping work on the WTC1 rubble. Why no photographs exist from this position of retreat, which is variously described as having begun anywhere from two-and-a-half hours to one-half hour before the collapse, is unexplained.

One award-winning photographer who we can know was there is Thomas Franklin, who took a world-famous photo of firemen raising the American flag at ground zero. In an article he wrote for the May/June 2003 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, he said,

"Much of what happened to me on September 11 is a blur, but this moment I clearly remember: It was 4:45 p.m., and all the firemen and rescue workers were evacuating Ground Zero after word came that a third building -- WTC 7 -- was ready to fall. I had only a few frames left, and an entire day's worth of pictures to develop, so I prepared to head back to New Jersey."

What?! He is told a 47-story building is going to come down and he packs it up to go home?! The one moment he remembers is one of supreme professional dereliction and failure?! That he is so stupid as to readily admit this in a self-penned article in a professional journal makes his canned and sentimental flag-raising photograph even more obviously and hideously an example of the conspiracy between the media and their subjects. Too bad Mr. Franklin, you didn't take a picture of WTC7 before it--or as it--fell. You might have been really famous.

Good list's of eyewitness testimony concerning damage, fire and impending collapse can be found at the truther web sites 911Research.com, its affiliate, www.wtc7net, and in the Jones Report. But one of the most telling eyewitness reports is quoted in debunking911.com.
Told by Captain Chris Boyle, an 18-year veteran of Engine Co. 94, in the August 2002 issue of Firehouse Magazine, in WTC: This is Their Story, he says,

"We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped. And probably about 10 minutes after that, Visconti, he was on West Street, and I guess he had another report of further damage either in some basements and things like that, so Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that was abandoned."

What could basement damage possibly consist of other than the preliminary effects of controlled demolition? It is in these very subtle slips of the tongue that fire-department members reveal their complicity in a case of controlled demolition. One must wonder how deep the subterfuge really goes, in the face of such deceit about WTC7, regarding the larger mythologizing of company heroism, valor and sacrifice.

In addition to the questionable lack of photographic evidence, what handful of photographs we do have, along with the single Spak video, appear to have been heavily photoshopped to obscure the truth of the building's condition behind a veil of smoke. In all the images of the south face of Building 7, we are asked to believe the entire building is emitting smoke.


Most troubling to me, from an evidential perspective, is the criminal destruction, before study, of the steel from Building 7. In NIST NCSTAR 1-3B, the Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster: Steel Inventory and Identification report, "the volunteers of the Structural Engineers of New York," whose "countless hours were unselfishly spent in the recovery yards searching for these invaluable pieces that are an integral component of this investigation," said of the steel they studied that "[n]o pieces could be unambiguously identified as coming from WTC7," thus "[t]he lack of WTC 7 steel precludes tests on actual materials from the structure."

Over on the JREF forum a poster named lapman references the photo above by saying, "BTW The picture you posted shows fire on the 5th floor," but he is wrong. The 5th floor is a mechanical floor without windows. The lower floor on fire here even has a floor underneath it that is fully windowed. It is that floor, which we can reference as the 6th floor, meaning the fires we see are on the 7th and the 12th floors.

In fact, we needn't argue this point, since Appendex L Interim Report on Building 7, from June, 2004, even tells us the time:

• Around 3 p.m., fires were observed on Floors 7 and 12 along the north face. The fire on Floor 12 appeared to bypass the northeast corner and was first observed at a point approximately one third of the width from the northeast corner, and then spread both east and west across the north face.

[L]apman makes for a poor disinformation merchant when he proffers an easy-to-disprove lie in tandem with a link to an officious quote from Harvey L. Pittman, Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, from his testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives on September 26, 2001, which offers an unequivocal assurance:

"There also will not be any serious long-term impact on the Commission’s oversight of securities firms located in the New York area. The Commission’s records related to examinations of all securities firms are maintained electronically in a central database, and were unaffected by the tragedy. Electronic copies of examination reports and deficiency letters are maintained off-site for investment advisers, investment companies, broker-dealers and transfer agents. Records relating to open examinations will be reconstructed from records that exist at registrants’ offices and from other sources."

But that is not what was said outside the administration: New York Lawyer "Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive," said Max Berger of New York's Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. "This is a disaster for these cases."

And that's not all Mr. Pittman said. In addition to the wholesale revisions contained in the Patriot Act concerning our freedom and safety, Mr Pittman testified

"[T]he Commission for the first time invoked its emergency powers under Securities Exchange Act Section 12(k) and, on Friday September 14, issued several orders and an interpretive release to ease certain regulatory restrictions temporarily."

Like the Fed lowering interest rates, it seems markets like jolts to their liquidity best, so general tonics like, "facilitating the ability of public companies to repurchase their own shares," resulted. That, plus many other changes were made after 9-11.

So given the abuse to our civil liberties that 9-11 engendered, and the wholesale deceit which fabricated excuses for our nation to aggressively invade innocent sovereign nations in search of plunder, the century-old battle between the foxes of Wall Street and the content's of America's hen house seems minor.

Given the clear pattern of arson on the 11th and 12th floors of Building 7, the floors that housed the S&EC, I humbly say, I imagine that Mr. Pittman, like lapman, isn't telling us the truth.

This 16-minute film collects much, if not all of the video record of Building 7's fall, then presents it unadorned.

Force Protection

Why Building Seven was Pulled

All the Secret Service files tracking an unknown number of criminals were lost in the collapse of Building 7. The Secret Service agency files had not been backed up. In Arlington, the army "lost a significant amount of budget data."

Go here: FCW.COM

"The Secret Service lost its New York City office in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, but it was not the agency's first lesson in terrorism and backup and recovery — it also lost an office in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said Stephen Colo, deputy assistant director and CIO. What Sept. 11 taught the agency is that risk mitigation is essential. Without funding to implement the contingency plans, they are useless.

"You have to expend the funds to reduce the risk," Colo said. But the Secret Service hadn't received the money to back up its New York City office computers, so when the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the files and information that were stored there disappeared. This let an unknown number of criminals being tracked by the Secret Service go free, because the files for the investigations were completely lost."

Look at how carefully the first two sentences are constructed. It's clear that although the Secret Service had previously lost an office, they didn't learn the lesson, only to have it happen again. That repeating dynamic is even more assured under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security.

June 25th On edit: My bad! I wasn't evil enough!

See Alex Jone's interview with Barry Jennings here.

It wasn't so much the paperwork as it was each other! The bad secret service and CIA agents were murdering the good secret service and CIA guys. The police in the lobby were telling Jennings and another evacuee, "don't look at all the dead bodies!" This makes sense of the errant reports of side-arm armed menacing men and gunshot deaths!

I want all the redactions in the first-responder's oral histories undone! Quick, before the jihadists get away!

DOD to build virtual Pentagon
By Christopher J. Dorobek, Dan Caterinicchia And Diane Frank
Published on November 4, 2001

The Defense Department is developing plans for a "virtual Pentagon" that would enable its officials to continue to work even in the event of a large-scale attack on the Pentagon similar to the one Sept. 11, senior military information technology officials said last week. The plans, also referred to as the "distributed Pentagon," are a significant redesign of DOD's IT contingency plans, which proved to be inadequate when terrorists crashed a commercial aircraft into the building.

The attacks on the Pentagon and on the World Trade Center have given other agencies pause as well, as the once unthinkable has made them rethink plans they may never have expected to use. Sept. 11 "was a wake-up call [where people said], 'Oh, that could happen to my data,' " said Margaret Myers, DOD's acting deputy chief information officer. Among other problems, DOD realized its computing environment had numerous single points of failure — applications or databases that, if taken out, could not be recovered, and critical network links that, if down, could not be worked around.

The Army lost a significant amount of budget data, Myers said. The Navy, which lost about 70 percent of its Pentagon office space in the attack, lost some data, but had its backup data stored off-site. DOD's contingency plans made before the Year 2000 date change provided some valuable information, but did not go far enough, Myers said. "It helped in knowing where the critical paths were, and that was useful information," she said. But it did not address the issue of contingencies if the paths were destroyed altogether, she said.

The virtual Pentagon would create redundancies, with backup sites located away from the Pentagon. The primary and redundant systems would share a network, so critical information could be continually backed up. But the redundant systems would have their own network connections. If the primary network were destroyed, Pentagon officials could bring up this shadow network and continue working without disruption. The virtual Pentagon fits into DOD's larger plans to develop a network-centric environment, in which personnel have rapid access to the information they need, wherever they are. There will be few, if any, single points of vulnerability in a network-centric environment, DOD Chief Information Officer John Stenbit said in an Oct. 29 presentation at the Milcom conference in Vienna, Va.

DOD was sensitive to contingency planning and the need for a virtual Pentagon before Sept. 11, but "unfortunately sometimes you need a catastrophic event" to get the proper funding and other requirements through, said Robert Nabors, senior vice president for enterprise solutions at Electronic Data Systems Corp. Nabors, who was head of the Army's Communications-Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J., until he retired last month, was involved in the design of the Pentagon's IT modernization in 1994 and its deployment four years later. The effort will be costly because there are "big servers and big databases in the Pentagon that need to be replicated somewhere else [along with] the transmission lines to link them together.... But we're willing to pay now," he said.

Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege Jr., director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, said DISA already had backup emergency centers outside the Pentagon, through which "we were able to continue with operations." Raduege said his agency will continue to maintain and evolve its backup systems and is working closely with the Army, which is responsible for rebuilding the Pentagon. But DISA was better prepared than other agencies.

The Secret Service lost its New York City office in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, but it was not the agency's first lesson in terrorism and backup and recovery — it also lost an office in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said Stephen Colo, deputy assistant director and CIO. What Sept. 11 taught the agency is that risk mitigation is essential. Without funding to implement the contingency plans, they are useless. "You have to expend the funds to reduce the risk," Colo said. But the Secret Service hadn't received the money to back up its New York City office computers, so when the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the files and information that were stored there disappeared. This let an unknown number of criminals being tracked by the Secret Service go free, because the files for the investigations were completely lost.

Timothy Atkin, vice president and director of SRA International Inc.'s critical infrastructure protection program, said civilian and defense agencies are paying closer attention to their contingency plans following Sept. 11. But that's only part of the solution. Since the attacks, many agencies have realized that their IT contingency plans, generally developed by the CIO's office, are separate from the agency's continuity of operations plans, which focus on people and mission-essential functions. "One of the things they discovered is the importance of these things being integrated," Atkin said.

The Sept. 11 attacks were a learning experience for most agencies, even if they were not directly affected, according to officials speaking at a breakfast hosted last week by the Northern Virginia Technology Council. The Treasury Department learned that it needs more than one backup-and-recovery plan, especially for large departments. After the attacks, everyone was calling into the same backup site, and that location could not adequately handle the requests, said Deputy CIO Mayi Canales. At the Department of Health and Human Services, telecommunications is a prime concern. On Sept. 11, with wireless networks in the Washington, D.C., area virtually gridlocked, HHS found that the only way to communicate was through Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and Palm Inc. handheld computing devices, said Deputy CIO Brian Burns.

HHS is now making sure the redundancy and tools are in place to make communication possible everywhere, including via wireless devices, he said. The Commerce Department, meanwhile, is focusing more on the survivability of the services it provides, said Karen Hogan, acting deputy CIO. The department was making a push to centralize and consolidate its IT systems, but is now rethinking that strategy. Commerce also may add an immediate backup for the National Weather Service.

Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9-11

Scott Thewn, Agence France Presse

The new history, Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9-11, is to be released tomorrow. It was written by Rick Newman, a staff writer for U.S. News & World Report, and Patrick Creed, who is described as a volunteer firefighter and amateur historian, who is also an army reserve officer who was called to serve in Iraq and was injured there.

NPR's popular program, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, aired an interview with the authors last Wednesday morning. In honor of the books publication, I transcribed an approximately five-minute segment from the interview in which the authors discuss a problematic aspect of the attack story: the roof fires, which were not brought under control for nearly two days, and which damaged an extensive portion of Wedges 1 and 2 of the building.

This new blog will eventually become home to any blog materials relating to the roof fires that are currently organized in a scatter shot fashion elsewhere.

I don't think it is my imagination to say the mood of the interview changed when Ms Gross brought up the topic of the roof fires almost fifteen minutes in.

This is the way she broached the subject:

"On 9-11, after the Pentagon was attacked by the plane, the roof, part of the roof was on fire. What the firefighters didn’t know until they were told, was that if the fire on the roof spread much further it would basically put the whole Pentagon out of commission. Would you explain what the problem would have been?"

We don't learn who is speaking when, but both communicate in an identical measured and articulate style. One answers

"On the roof, initially the fire chiefs thought—that was a pretty minor problem, there wasn’t a significant structural issue, it was sort of separate from the rest of the building, it wasn’t going to get down and set offices on fire. They considered it a low priority issue, so they essentially made it a secondary effort. What they found out early the second day was, when a military officer approached the chiefs and said we have a problem. The fire is burning on the roof towards antennas and other critical uplinks so that we can communicate around the world. If those uplinks are destroyed the terrorists have won. We can’t communicate. The Pentagon is ineffective. And this was just a complete and total shock. The fire chiefs thought, Chief Plaughter, Chief Schwartz from the Arlington county fire department, they thought they pretty much had everything under control, and here you find, now we have to get up on this immense roof, with just, very difficult to traverse, and its on fire and we have to figure out ways to get ahead of the fire and stop it from spreading to these critical points."

Ms. Gross: So, what were the problems in dealing with the roof? Because there were similar problems that the fire fighters had with the blast proof windows.

"They couldn’t get the roof fire out—the firefighters are trained for, you know, they are trained to deal with roof fires on the tops of buildings, and they do all the time, on warehouses, on strip malls, things like that. Again, this just gets back to the unusual and unique, ah, way the Pentagon was constructed. So the roof is about a foot thick of concrete, with different layers of horse hair insulation, which nobody had ever heard of at the time, they didn’t even know that they used to use horse hair as an insulation, and they couldn’t get to the fire, so some part of the wooden structure was sort of sandwiched between a foot of concrete on the top [sic] and other material underneath it, so they just couldn’t get to this wood that was burning, and you would think, how did the fire get there, the fire got there because the jet fuel spewed everywhere, and the jet fuel just got into places, ah, where ordinary flames probably wouldn’t get, and in some areas it lit off right away, and in other areas it just sat there until an ember ignited it, or a gust of wind came and ignited it, and they just could not get to this layer of wood that was sandwiched between, basically concrete on both sides. The wood just kept burning [chuckle] very slowly around the building, all around the building, until it actually started to circle the building on the inner area. At that point, even if there had not been this sensitive stuff on the roof, the fire could then have then gone back down and caught other parts of the building on fire. So it’s just a very tricky problem, by the time they realized how serious it was, they put all the firefighters they could get up there, ladder trucks—they actually put port-a-potties up on top of the roof so they could kind of run this longer-range firefighting operation up there, than they had ever anticipated."

Ms. Gross: So, how did they get around the problem of the concrete?

Initially, there was power tools brought up, saws to cut through cement and concrete. Most of those broke, and the majority of labor was done by firefighters taking off their coats, and using sledgehammers, axes, to just brute-force pound through the concrete.

Lots of time they pounded through the concrete--they tried to do something called a trench cut, where, like cutting a break in a forest fire—so they could catch the fire and stop it before it spread any further. Well they would get to where they thought they were ahead of the fire, pound through the concrete with just incredible effort—you have to remember, it was a very nice day on September 11^th, September 12^th, bright sunny, this was difficult to work in—there’s smoke everywhere, they’re pounding through the concrete, they get through finally, make a small hole and look through, and the fire has already past that point. It‘s already beat them, and all that effort was for nothing. They have to grab their tools, run 50 feet further down the roof and try to get ahead of it again before it spreads past, so they can make that break and stop the advance of the fire. This happened many times. They did get power tools later on, but even after that, the vast majority of the effort was sledgehammers and sweat. (4:43) 19:07

I believe a deliberate obfuscation occurs when one of the gentlemen says:

"...part of the wooden structure was sort of sandwiched between a foot of concrete on the top [sic] and other material underneath it, so they just couldn’t get to this wood that was burning..."

The roof was made of foot-thick concrete, on top of which was a wooden form, to which the slate shingles were attached. The burly firemen had only to smash through the shingles to get to the fire.

From Acknowledgments, page 460:

"The 'Arlington County After-Action Report' for instance, provides a thorough overview of the incident at the Pentagon. But it was based on a trove of officer reports, internal memos, interview transcripts, and other documents from the Arlington County Fire Department that were either destroyed or misplaced afterward, and were unavailable to us."

Journalist Rick Newman (left) and firefighter Patrick Creed

One wonders why this pair wrote this book. The army alone has 22 military history detachments, plus 16 in the Army Reserve. When I posted the author's publicity photo on a message board recently along with what I thought was some rather obvious commentary about the pair's attractiveness, I was criticized for irrelevance, but I think not. Where did these two come from? Their credentials, appearance, manner of speaking, and utilization as co-authors tasked with explicating a controversial topic, all hint at backgrounds as undercover operatives.

Perhaps their shared world view goes even deeper than that. An imprinting onto their neuro-linguistic pathways of a truth that constitutes an alternate reality from the one I perceive. It would be so much easier to learn they were just paid to lie.

But I'm not going to think about their brains, in any case. Never having been initiated into the hunt by the men of my tribe, I'll await my pre-ordered copy, so I can search for the answers there. Till then, I have plenty to keep me busy.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Let's establish what the Pentagon roof is and what it is made of.

Found on the web is a wonderful personal reminiscence of a man, Stanley Nance Allan, who as a boy worked as a carpenter to build the Pentagon. Then in this bit of symmetry,

"Twenty-five years later, in 1967, guided by what only could be a mysterious flow of destiny, the architectural design of the Pentagon Metro Station became my responsibility as project manager at the Washington office of Harry Weese Associates."

Mr. Allan writes, "The repetition of the production techniques and the coordinated division of work perfected efficiencies as construction continued upward for each of the five floors and finally for the construction of the sloping concrete roof slabs."





In this FEMA image of the reconstruction is the gable roof over one of the corridors, where the new work will meet the old, and where we get a good glimpse of the thickness of the roof slab.



In a second FEMA image, we see the construction of the wooden base for mounting the decorative slate shingles, on top of the concrete slab, visible to the right.



In a thumbnail, we see the interior of the fifth story of the E-ring, with the underside of the cast-in-place, slab-and-beam roof visible.



This high-resolution aerial image shows the nature of the damage from the roof fire, which worked its way under the old heavy slates and into the wooden substructure, stuffed with horse-hair insulation we were told.

"Fire damage in the second story appeared most severe around the region of collapse and near the breach in the second-floor slab. Generally, the most obvious fire damage was between the fire walls to the north and south of the area directly damaged by the aircraft debris. (duh) The most severe fire damage occurred on the first and second floors.The team noted no impact damage above the second story.

"The subsequent fire fed by the aircraft fuel, the aircraft contents, and the building contents caused damage throughout a very large area of the first story, a significant area of the second, a small part of the third, and only in the stairwells above."

According to Lee Harvey Evey--

Traffic Conditions on the Roadways Surrounding the Pentagon on the Morning of September 11th, 2001

My recent skirmishes with Pinch Paisley of the Pentagon have left me standing two-oh. Questions over a "roll-up door" in the A-E Drive into the Navy Command Center that arose from a conflicting and incomplete record have been settled. Not only has the physical reality of blast damage through masonry walls been established, but in a record almost completely devoid of personal identifications and attributions, here we can make several.

An issue over buried defenses in a cloverleaf led to an elaborate disinformation campaign on the part of the Pentagon that must have set back the psychological warfare budget a pretty penny, but which has been seen as such and dismissed. Whatever new unknown technology these installations represent, the fact of their presence is revealed.

A third bone of contention between Pinch and I had to do with traffic around the Pentagon on the morning of September 11th. I said that not only were there traffic jams and road closures but that things got so bad traffic was moving the wrong way on I-395. Pinch agreed with me there were traffic jams and road closures but said traffic moving in the opposite lanes on I-395 was an urban myth, and he is right. I got that information from a single source--a private message board posting between Steve Riskus, a supposed eyewitness and photographer to events that morning, whose real name is Naval Chief Petty Officer James Schauer, and carvegrind, a CIA regional asset named Jamie Stapula.

But we were both wrong about the nature of the traffic jams. Some roads were shut down in preparation for the attack, like Route 27/Washington Blvd., giving us the conditions we see in some Riskus photographs, or traffic was moving normally, like into D.C. on the Shirley Highway, as we can see in the Doubletree Hotel Video.

But the traffic conditions from the time of the attack on were clearly manipulated to prevent an eyewitness by the public, and stage managed for the benefit of the media. I can't fathom what the original storyboard idea was regarding traffic on the roadways. Traffic was either moving or it wasn't. If shown stopped in shock and awe, it should then been seen as having been eventually cleared to make way for emergency vehicles.

Several photographers took pictures from elevated perches south of I-395. The most famous of these was Tom Horan, several of whose images went out on the AP wire. The image below shows a moment sometime shortly after the attack. Firefighters have responded but are not yet seen fighting the fire. To the left in the photograph we see four cars in a diagonal working as "pacer cars," in the westbound lanes of I-395. The traffic follows far behind them in a widely dispersed pattern.

We can know this traffic is stationary from several images and screen captures that show pedestrians casually walking or standing in the roadway.

My favorite image shows someone getting into their car trunk, and another bored observer looking away, with--my bête noire--his hand on his hip. How is emergency response traffic supposed to make their way through this?

In the following two professional photographs by Alex Wong from the identical, or nearly identical, vantage point we see the same widely dispersed pattern of traffic in the westbound lanes of I-395, and in one, we see completely empty eastbound lanes. There is no traffic control present at all. We can see that the FBI buses have already arrived, bringing with them the hundreds of agents who descended on the scene shortly after the attack, but we are left to imagine they made their way through this light midday traffic.


Even later in the day conditions were the same. In the following shot fire has traveled north in the Pentagon building and fireman are already on the roof tending to that blaze, but the same widely dispersed pattern of either stationary or moving traffic is seen, this time in both directions.

In this image by Martin H. Simon, cones have been placed in the roadway, and someone appears to be directing traffic away from the exit.

That the military and government controlled the roadways on the morning of September 11th there can be no doubt.

The shadow record of 9-11 is filled with frustrated first responders who were prevented from reaching the Pentagon to lend support. The terrible traffic conditions within the District of Columbia resulted from the wholesale closing of I-395. Those who were trying to escape D.C. and get to their homes were thrown under the bus by their own government in a time of supreme peril.

So Pinch old man. I'll give you this one since I was more wrong than you. Just don't accept any medals for it OK? There's nothing worse than a fake hero in my book and we have plenty of those.

Pinch Paisley's Truck Inspection Facility

When I once wrote that I thought I'd spotted buried missile defenses being built in the center of a clover leaf beside the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia in a photograph, I elicited a response from a Pinch Paisley, a military man who deigns to correct me occasionally in comments to my blog.

"Will you read what I freaking wrote?" He wrote. "That construction that was going on on the cloverleaf was for a construction access point and had a covered truck inspection facility built there. I know exactly where the remote delivery facility is on the north side. I would run by the entry to that section daily the summer of 2005. This west-side development was an additional facility to help out with the construction access on that side of the building. If you don't read what I write you'll never climb out of this morass of ignorance that is your world."

I hope he's not cross with me. Shortly thereafter, I'm not sure when exactly, I spotted an aerial view of the Pentagon that depicted what I already had a name for: Pinch's Delivery Facility, or PDF in military parlance. But it seemed odd (Yiddish accent to myself only: such a foundation!) Underneath what amounted to a Costco temporary boat shed...hmmm.

I had already found online some publicly sourced, high-resolution images of the base construction alone, so I was pretty sure that I hadn't endangered national security unduly. This very high-resolution image must have come from a government web site.

But I also found it in a version in the Corbis archives. So it had been...disseminated...as we say.

In another very high-resolution image I thought I was clever to have spotted the entrance to the remote delivery entrance, at the end of the lane from Pinch's remoter, remote, facility.

But it wasn't very interesting after all.

But what we are talking about was simply replacing access for the former exit off of Route 27 northbound into the RDF, which cut too closely to the actual building, and which was lost when the blast wall was built.

The following image left me feeling dizzy and very confused. It's amazing what certain lens can do with foreshortening.
But back to Pinch's pup tent (oops! sorry!) Nothing is adding up. The tight radii of the enclosing lane channelization isn't designed for trucks. What became of the entrance onto Route 27-northbound for the buses and cars who use this side of the Pentagon? Why would you have not designed access congruent with the ring road, separating out RDF traffic from traffic exiting onto Route 27? That pedestrian walkway is going to get people killed. Why all the wasted macadam under white cross hatchings?

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
I won't even get into the ramifications on the 9-11 Memorial. That already has to be the ugliest and most unpleasant memorial ever designed in the history of the world, which is a clear insight into the non-truth it wants us to remember. Obviously the designers never had to sit through a Craig Ranke/Aldo Marquis presentation videotaped at the nearby Citgo. If they had, they'd realize you can't hear yourself think for all the air traffic overhead. THAT part they'll get, for sure. Now sandwich this in between rushing traffic on Route 27 and the forbidding facade of the Pentagon, and that should make sitting on some cold bronze benches dangling over pools of water inviting, for the few weeks each spring and fall when it won't be too hot or cold to remember anything.

How magnificent anything made of sound-deadening glass by I.M. Pei would have been. A space at the center of the hurlyburly to experience silence. Look at the sky. Sit in chairs.

But no, you were too busy propelling the propaganda in straight lines like a cartoon POW!

By the way, I don't buy your truck delivery facility. I'm sticking with weapon installation. In fact, I think you placed another one north of the Pentagon, in a cloverleaf not yet built even.

But we've moved on past "missile battery," in any event. The physicists in the Pentagon's employ have obviously created much more interesting toys for warriors like Pinch to play with. Do you know what the buzz is in Judy Wood circles? Your directed energy weapons come with another new discovery-- an unlimited source of free energy. Now think about what a wonderful world of material abundance and blessings we'd have if we put that to work for us, instead of increasing power into the hands of a few.