Part 3
The Strike on the Pentagon: One of the debates about this attack is whether the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines Flight 77, as the official account says, or by a military aircraft. Either story, however, implies that the attack was, at least partly, an inside job.
If we assume that the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77, we must ask how this could have occurred. The Pentagon is surely the best defended building on the planet, for three reasons. First, it is only a few miles from Andrews Air Force Base, which has at least three squadrons that keep fighter jets on alert at all times to protect the nation’s capital. To be sure, part of the official story is that Andrews was not keeping any fighters on alert at that time. But as I argued in my critique of The 9/11 Commission Report, that claim is wholly implausible.31
Second, the US military has the best radar systems in the world. One of its systems, it has bragged, “does not miss anything occurring in North American airspace.” This system is also said to be capable of monitoring a great number of targets simultaneously, as would be necessary in the case of a massive missile attack.32 Given that capability, the official story, according to which Flight 77 flew toward the Pentagon undetected for 40 minutes, is absurd, especially at a time when the Pentagon knew the country was under attack. Any unauthorized airplane coming towards the Pentagon would have been detected and intercepted long before it got close.
Third, the Pentagon is ringed by anti-missile batteries, which are programmed to destroy any aircraft entering the Pentagon’s airspace, except for any aircraft with a US military transponder.33 If, by some fluke, Flight 77 had entered the Pentagon’s airspace, it could have escaped being shot down only if officials in the Pentagon had deactivated its anti-aircraft defenses.
So, even if we accept the official story, according to which the Pentagon was hit by Flight 77 under the control of al Qaeda hijackers, we must conclude that the attack succeeded only because the Pentagon wanted it to succeed.
There are, furthermore, many reasons to reject the official story. First, the alleged pilot, Hani Hanjour, was a terrible pilot, who could not possibly have flown the trajectory allegedly taken by Flight 77. Second, this aircraft hit the Pentagon’s west wing, which for many reasons would have been the least likely spot for alien terrorists to target: Hitting the west wing would have required a very difficult maneuver; this wing was being renovated, so it contained very few people, and many of them were civilians working on the renovation; the renovation involved reinforcement, so that a strike on the west wing caused much less damage than would have a strike on any other part of the Pentagon; and Rumsfeld and all the top brass, whom terrorists surely would have wanted to kill, were in the east wing, as far removed from the west wing as possible. A third problem with the official story is the fact that the initial damage caused to the west wing was far too minimal to have been caused by the impact of a Boeing 757. A fourth problem is that photographs and eyewitnesses in the immediate aftermath failed to provide any unambiguous evidence of the remains of a Boeing 757. Fifth, the fact that the aircraft was not shot down by the Pentagon’s anti-aircraft defense system suggests that it was an aircraft of the US military. Sixth, there are videos that would show whether what struck the Pentagon was really a Boeing 757, but the FBI confiscated these videos right after the strike and, since then, authorities have refused to release them.34
So, whether we accept or reject the claim that the Pentagon was struck by Flight 77, the evidence indicates that the attack was, at least partly, an inside job.
The Collapse of the WTC Buildings: We can conclude the same thing about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Why? Because the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7 had to have been examples of controlled demolition, brought about by thousands of explosives placed throughout each of the buildings. No foreign terrorists could have obtained the kind of access to the buildings that would have been required.
One reason for concluding that these three buildings were brought down by explosives is the very fact that they did collapse. High-rise steel-frame buildings have never---before or after 9/11---been caused to collapse by fire, even when, as in the Philadelphia fire of 1991 and the Madrid fire of February 2005, the fires were much larger, much hotter, and much longer-lasting than the fires in the Twin Towers and Building 7.
The second reason is the specific nature of the collapses, each feature of which points to explosives. For example, the buildings collapsed straight down, and at virtually free-fall speed, as in controlled demolitions, and then the rubble smoldered for months. With regard to the Twin Towers in particular, many people in the buildings said that they heard or felt explosions; virtually all the concrete of these enormous structures was pulverized into very fine dust (try dropping a piece of concrete from a great height; it will merely break into small pieces, not turn into very fine dust particles); much of this dust, along with pieces of steel and aluminum, was blown out horizontally several hundred feet; most of the steel beams and columns came down in sections about 30-feet long, conveniently ready to be loaded on trucks; and pools of molten steel were found beneath the rubble. These and still more effects point to the existence of very powerful, precisely placed explosives.35
The third fact supporting the theory of controlled demolition is evidence of a deliberate cover-up. If the buildings’ steel beams and columns had indeed been broken by explosives, an examination of the steel would have revealed this fact. However, although it is normally a federal offence to remove evidence from a crime scene, the steel was quickly loaded on trucks and put on ships headed for Asia.36
I will mention one more sign of a deliberate cover-up. Insofar as there is an official theory as to why the towers collapsed, it is the “pancake” theory, according to which the floors above the destruction caused by the airplanes collapsed to the floor below, which then started a chain reaction. This theory does not even begin to explain the actual nature of the collapses, such as the fact that they occurred at virtually free-fall speed. But even if the pancake theory were otherwise remotely plausible, it would not explain what happened to the 47 massive steel columns that constituted the weight-bearing core of each tower. They should have still been sticking up many hundreds of feet in the air (just like the spindle of the old-fashioned phonograph player, when the records pancaked). The 9/11 Commission Report avoided this problem, incredibly, by simply denying the existence of these columns. After saying, falsely, that most of the weight of each tower was born by the steel columns in its exterior walls, this supposedly authoritative report said: “The interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft, in which elevators and stairwells were grouped.”37 Such a desperate lie is a sure sign of a deliberate cover-up.
In any case, when we look at all these features of the collapses, the idea that they could have caused by the impact of the airplanes plus the resulting fires is ridiculous. This is even clearer with regard to Building 7, which was not hit by an airplane. Its collapse remains so impossible to explain, except as controlled demolition, that The 9/11 Commission Report did not even mention it--as if there were nothing remarkable about the fact that for the first time in history, fire alone was said to have caused the sudden collapse of a high-rise steel-frame building (an event that would have been even more remarkable given the fact that the building had fires on only a few floors).38
In sum, the collapses and the cover-up--like the strike on the Pentagon, the military’s failure to prevent the attacks, and its changing stories--show that the attacks must have been planned and executed by our own political and military leaders.
The same conclusion can be inferred from the behavior of the Secret Service agents with the president that morning.
The Behavior of the Secret Service: As everyone who saw Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 knows, President Bush was in a second-grade classroom in Florida when he was informed about the second strike on the World Trade Center. This report left no doubt that the country was suffering a terrorist attack. And yet the president simply sat there. Many people have asked why he did not spring into action, assuming his role as commander-in-chief.
But the real question, which Michael Moore mentions in passing, is why the Secret Service did not immediately rush him away from the school to a safe place. Bush’s location had been highly publicized. And if the attacks were a complete surprise, executed solely by foreign terrorists, the Secret Service agents would have had no idea how many planes had been hijacked. They would have had to assume that the president himself might be one of the targets. For all they would have known, a hijacked airliner might have been headed towards the school at that very minute, ready to crash into it. And yet these agents, who are highly trained to respond instantly in such situations, allowed the president to remain in the classroom another 10 minutes. They then allowed him to deliver his regularly scheduled TV address, giving any suicide hijackers and even wider window of opportunity. This behavior makes sense only if the head of the Secret Service detail knew that the planned attacks did not include an attack on the president. And how could this be known for certain unless the attacks were being carried out by people within our own government?
Although many more examples could be given, these four are sufficient to suggest that there is no escape from the frightening conclusion that 9/11 was engineered by members of the Bush administration and its Pentagon. As to why they would do this, at least part of the answer is clear from the way in which they have used 9/11: to advance the American empire. Immediately after 9/11, in fact, members of the Bush administration repeatedly referred to the attacks as an opportunity—-in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, an opportunity “to refashion the world.”39 Seeing this connection between 9/11 and US imperial ambitions can be a stimulus to face up fully to the awful truth about the American empire. |
