Dennis Cimino (with Jim Fetzer)
Among the most fascinating aspects of 9/11 research has been the on-going controversy over whether the absence of evidence that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon should or should not be publicized within the movement, especially by Jim Hoffman, who has published several articles maintaining that the physical evidence as well as the witness reports supports a Boeing 757 having hit the building. One of the more bizarre aspects of his defense of the "official account" of the Pentagon attack is to cite the Sandia test, in which an F-4 was strapped onto a rail car frame and run at around 500 mph into a nuclear-resistant concrete barrier. The plane blew apart into millions of tiny pieces, implying that that was what ought to have been expected of the Boeing 757 at the Pentagon. The building consists of 12 inches of concrete, 8 inches of brick, and a facade of 4 inches of limestone, which is a very porous stone. Even Major Gen. Albert Stubblebine, USAF (ret.), concluded that no Boeing 757 had hit the Pentagon for the obvious reason that he could discern no imprint of the wings on the building.
Stubblebine, of course, was the NSA's signals intelligence image analyst, but that has not deterred Jim Hoffman, who has also argued that discussing the Pentagon "might be a trap", since the Pentagon might release some of the more than 80 videos it possesses that would show "what really happened" as opposed to the five frames it has released, one of which shows the image of a small plane that is about half the size of a Boeing 757. Why anyone should take Hoffman seriously about any of this is beyond me, because, based upon my personal experience, he has gone out of his way to manipulate the 9/11 Truth community, even to the extent of creating an elaborate pretext to excuse Larry Silverstein from having made an obvious concession to the controlled demolition of WTC-7 with his "pull it" remark during an interview with PBS. He has had some effect, it would appear, since even David Ray Griffin, perhaps the leading expert on 9/11 in the world today, has avoided pushing the Pentagon front-and-center, where it properly belongs. As Dennis Cimino explains, the "official account" is a fantasy, where the American public would benefit from knowing that even the Pentagon attack was a fabrication and a fraud.
The Pentagon attack is a fantasy
DENNIS CIMINO
On September 11, 2001, we were told by the U.S. government that at 9:38 a.m. on that day, a Boeing 757 jetliner impacted the building at a speed of approximately 465 knots after executing a 330 degree turn for no apparent reason any sane person can think of, as the building is highly distinguishable from virtually any altitude above 2000 feet for several miles. The official story has the flight path just to the side of the west wing of the White House, which in any person’s estimation is a significantly more important target than is the building that houses the military managers who run the Military Industrial Complex. We were also told that nobody could have foreseen this type of attack, even though just a year earlier, a drill was held, and a nearly identical B-757 American Airlines plane was flown by Chuck Burlingame himself, as the Pentagon ran a preparedness drill to simulate such an attack.
Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, 24-26 October 2000
Unfortunately, many people in America are unaware that the Washington, D.C. area has Raytheon "Basic Point Defense" missile battery armament embedded on several building rooftops there, using Sea Sparrow air defense missiles, much in the same fashion that Moscow has a system that NATO code named ‘Yo Yo’ that maintains radar surveillance and provides protection to the Kremlin and other high value targets from military incursions. In other words, the Pentagon was protected not only by these missile batteries, but also had in place a number of adjacent fighter bases which provided a fairly high level of protection given the fact that the plane inbound to the Pentagon from the east was not supersonic as are the adjacent fighter jets based in the area, and therefore easily could have been intercepted and at the very least, temporarily deflected off course if not shot down, if need be, long before it reached the target on the building, known as ‘The Catchers Mit’ due to recent renovations which added several inches of KEVLAR armor to that face of the building to protect the occupants. For those of you who are not familiar with Kevlar armor and how it works, the only much more vastly superior but significantly more expensive armor is ceramic in nature and is often used jointly with Kevlar to protect personnel from high energy armor piercing rounds fired by tanks and other anti armor weapons such as are mounted on most military attack helicopters, for instance, such as the 30mm cannon and the infamous Obama well used ‘hellfire’ anti tank missile system.
In addition, there is a system, known as "Identification Friend or Foe" aka I.F.F., which uses a special MODE 4A feature that only military aircraft use, whereupon special encryption. Additionally, a mission specific MODEX aka SEDSCAF number for each plane is assigned and if it does not meet the PLAN OF THE DAY for the area, IT STILL IS NOT GOING TO PASS MODE 4A MUSTER. It would be shot down. No "if"s, no "and"s and no "but"s!!!!
The proper MODEX / SEDSCAF NUMBER is what enables an aircraft them to penetrate prohibited or military restricted airspace such as that which surrounds both the White House and the Pentagon, as well as a number of military installations around the globe. This feature is necessary to prevent the possible mis-identification of a civilian aircraft by military air defense personnel who man radar scopes in the Washington, D.C. area, 24/7, watching for unauthorized aircraft who do not have the proper MODE 4A response capability or code in use with their on board transponders. Only military aircraft have this Mode 4A capability, or what is often referred to as ‘crypto Beacon Video’ military ATC specialists.
The "hit point" on the ground floor In any case, the reason I mention this is that there are several echelons of protection which allegedly all summarily ‘failed’ us on Sept. 11th., 2001, and allowed an unidentified plane hurtling towards Washington, D.C.’s protected airspace, long after the First targets in New York had already been seriously damaged. To be honest, it is simply not possible for virtually every one of these systems to have been overcome by 19 guys wielding no more than box cutters. It took a lot of sabotage or unplugging on the ground to do that.
In any case, there was plenty of warning that an ‘unknown’ and presumed ‘hostile’ target was inbound to the Washington, D.C. area from the area around West Virginia to the east, and more than sufficient time existed to scramble fighters and or light off the Basic Point Missile Defense or BPDMS radar systems (AKA as N.S.S.M.S.) and missile defenses that are installed in rooftops there in the Washington, D.C. area since the mid 1980’s. Basic Point Defense uses a CW target illuminator radar to allow the semi-actively guided Sea Sparrow missile to radar home on reflected energy coming back from the target aircraft after the radar has locked onto the target. Though these are short range, they are so effective many high value targets in the Navy use this system, with it’s infamous MK-112 Fire Control radar system. It’s known that NATO’s Sea Sparrow was in place in the mid 1980’s in Washington, D.C. as point defense against air attack. It’s not unreasonable to assume that an updated version of N.S.S.M.S. / Mk 112/MK-115 would be there in September, 2001., by any stretch of the imagination. In all likelihood, it would be a version of the PAC-3 ‘Patriot’ Missile system, another Raytheon toy. One more point would like to make is that the White House, which this aircraft would breeze right past, had agents on the roof with shoulder fired STINGER MISSILES, and on this particular day, you can rest assured that with the unknown target hurtling toward Washington, D.C., those agents were on that roof with those STINGER MISSILES out of their cases and on their shoulders as they scanned the clear morning sky for the coming intruder plane. Why did they not fire at it?
So, on September 11, 2001, what took place was a plane that was not a scheduled air carrier flight, per the Bureau of Transportation Statistics or BTS database, departed Dulles International from a departure gate that does not match the coordinates transmitted by FDR data stored in the CPM provided by the N.T.S.B., flight data recorder records, on that non-scheduled American Airlines flight, aka ‘FLT 77’ per the government’s submission, where this flight allegedly left Dulles with a hijacker on board who was capable of flying a very sophisticated and complex airplane that even the average pilot in the F.A.A. pilot registry could probably not really fly with such precision. This plane took off, climbed to it’s cruise altitude, and then over W. Virginia, was hijacked in 3 minutes time, and then executed a ‘standard rate’ turn which no hijacker would have performed with such precision, and immediately turned inbound to the perfect heading that would take it directly to the Pentagon, even though for hijackers to do this, would have meant they would have had to know exactly where the aircraft was immediately -- and I do mean, IMMEDIATELY -- and then have the requisite knowledge of how to re-program the complicated FMS computers in the aircraft to display target area data to them, because as you might have guessed, they did not bring their own GPS system with them on the planes that would have given them immediate positional information as well as a much more immediate way of turning the plane onto a magnetic heading that would take it to Washington, D.C. from that nice precise standard rate turnaround in the skies over West Virginia. Impressed? I sure am, as would be many B-757 line captains who fly this airplane every day, especially with the level of complexity the FMS or Flight Management System on that airplane has, that has on at least one occasion, led to the crash and destruction of a similarly equipped American Airlines B-757 in the mountains just outside of Cali, Colombia just a few years before this.
What was more alarming that day is that during the ‘3’ minute hijacking interval, neither the cockpit door opened (reported via the Digital Flight Data Acquisition Unit or DFDAU as it is known as) and the autopilot did not disengage. Now imagine yourself being Captain Chuck Burlingame and his copilot, sitting in their seats, when these hijackers slid under the door crack on the floor and re-constituted themselves as full fledged box-cutter wielding terrorists, who then proceeded to cut the heads off these two airmen who’s job is to protect their aircraft and it’s passengers at all costs. Neither of these guys were 98 pound weaklings, yet in three minutes they had been incapacitated and were out of their seats without touching either the yokes or the rudders, which would have immediately DISENGAGED the aircraft’s autopilot system which was flying the machine at that time. The plane did not yaw, roll, pitch or otherwise change any flight parameter but remained perfectly on course, and for some reason, two minutes later the hijackers finally decided to turn OFF the transponder to make it a bit harder for ATC to be positively sure this plane was the same one they were watching before the hijacking took place. Now, one more thing you need to know is that for either of the flight crew to either push the talk button on the yokes or to change the transponder code to one that tells the ATC personnel monitoring the flight that they were in a ‘hijack’ situation, would have taken mere seconds to do. Yet, this was not done. And the autopilot did not disengage though it is presumed the two pilots would have resisted and fought for their very lives and at least kicked the rudder pedals and or moved the yokes. Yet they did not do any of these things. Merely holding the push to talk button and screaming whilst having one’s head cut off would have gotten someone’s attention, I do think. Too many ways the crew could send a duress message to the ATC en route centers, and not once was this attempted. Why? The best and most reasonable reason is that these were not hijacked planes at all, but planes flown by military personnel or crews who thought they were innocently participating in the drills. And as such, these would NOT have been passenger flights, as it is illegal to use passengers in military exercises under any circumstances, due to the risk involved. This is another clue that points to the fact that no hijacking took place in this aircraft at all, because had that been the case, they had plenty of time to use a duress system to alert ATC that they were under attack in that cockpit.
In any case, the precision turn executed and the immediate orientation onto the course to the Pentagon is kind of indicative of a professional pilot and not a hijacker being at the controls, because the crew who flew that plane knew precisely where the plane was when they turned directly onto a course which would then take them directly into the target, which that morning was the Pentagon. Given the fact that it is quite impossible for these freshly in the cockpit hijackers to know where the plane was when they took it over, and furthermore, to know the exact on course heading back to the Washington, D.C. area to attack the Pentagon, is again quite telling of who really was still at the controls of this plane. It surely was not a hijacker who just got into the cockpit a couple minutes ago, based on this immediate orientation and turn onto course to the target. This process would have taken several minutes. It did not take several minutes. It was immediate. Mighty clairvoyant airmen these guys were, and powerful too, to overcome the crew in three minutes time while ensuring the autopilot never disengaged even for a split second, nor had the cockpit door opened to let them in. (See cockpit door diagram below)
Then, later as they got closer in, they did something puzzling for a crew of neophyte hijackers. On their way down thru Flight Level 180, or 18 thousand feet, they magically, without having listened to the ATIS or automated terminal information service, broadcast from Dulles International Airport that morning, these guys somehow knew the barometric pressure reported on that automated broadcast though no controller passed that information to them, and they set that in the Kollsman window on BOTH of the cockpit altimiters simultaneously. That’s not only clairvoyant, that’s SYNCHRONIZED knob twisting going on there, by any pilot’s standards. Machine precision out of hijackers turning two knobs at the same time in perfect, instantaneous fashion, is extremely unlikely for these guys, yet that was exactly what took place when both the hijacker and his co-hijacker buddy, who must have gotten VERY lucky to pick those barometric pressure numbers for DCA that morning out of their asses, because they had no way of knowing them otherwise…as no radio in the cockpit was tuned to the ATIS frequency, as that is recorded in the FDR data and not reflected in the data the N.T.S.B. released from that plane’s Flight Data Recorder. Notwithstanding the absurdity of this kind of coordinated crew work, it really ranks as one of the most glaring issues of the morning because the crew could not have known those numbers they put into both altimeters via the Kollsman setting knobs that morning on their descent. They could NOT know them nor could they have so precisely guessed them.
And then they did something quite unusual. They were able to penetrate that highly protected airspace without the proper MODE 4A military I.F.F. response, and no communications with ATC of any kind, no clearance issued of any kind, and they flew a nice leisurely 330 degree turn after passing right past the White House, the more desirable high value target, than their intended Pentagon target could ever dream to be. After they completed the turn, they managed to accelerate the aircraft well beyond 150 knots faster than it could ever possibly fly at that altitude, even full throttle. They did this without touching the rudder pedals for even one moment after their hijacking of the plane several minutes earlier, too! Needless to say, to perform a coordinated turn as the N.T.S.B. flight data recorder data shows, they would have had to use rudder inputs, but they never touched the aircraft rudders once during their entire time in the cockpit after they slid under the crack below the cockpit door to gain entry. Was this because neither of them had legs? They walked onto the plane and did not require wheelchairs, so is it not a little strange or odd they never ever once touched the rudder pedals in that plane?
After careful analysis of the flight data recorder stuff provided to us by the N.T.S.B., in their recreation, we see the fact the rudders and the yoke were not moved nor did the autopilot disengage while the crew fought for their very lives in that cockpit. And, at no other time did the rudders ever get so much as a passing foot kick. At the very least, these guys would have probably inadvertently tested them a bit with their feet, yet they never touched them. And to do the nice 330 degree turn into the building, they would have absolutely NEEDED TO USE THE RUDDER to carry this out in what is called COORDINATED FLIGHT without slipping or skidding the plane in three dimensional space that morning. We know they flew a perfectly coordinated turn because the data the N.T.S.B. released to us shows us that. To do this, the rudders would have absolutely, beyond all reasonable doubt, been needed to accomplish this. No accomplished pilot could do that ‘flat footed’ with his or her feet not on the rudders. Impressive performance here, execution of coordinated high G turns without rudders used at all by the hijackers.
The government maintains that the radar track for this aircraft was ‘lost’ over a ‘radar hole’ that exists in the radar coverage map over W. VA., and that as they neither had radio contact with the crew, nor a valid Radar Beacon or IFF code sqwawk coming from the aircraft’s transponders when the track was lost going west, one has to ask how the track was lost and why it was impossible for the continuous tracking by at the very least, PRIMARY RADAR did not happen that morning.
Directly under this airplane’s wonderful fantasmagorical RADAR HOLE the track was lost over, was a long range, height finding military radar system known as FPS-117. This radar, mounted right on top of a ridge, was virtually directly underneath FLT-77 when the radar track was lost. This radar has a nominal range of 200 miles, and has the capability to be in ‘redcap’ or reduced capability mode without full power output of it’s transmitter, and still offer short range primary or skin paint track of aircraft flying within 80 nautical miles of it. This radar station was in operation on Sept. 11, 2001, and was not called out in any documentary evidence as being out of commission or off-line that morning, yet the government asserts that a ‘radar hole’ existed in it’s tracking or service volume area that morning, and nobody reported this long range height finder radar as either in low power final driver or ‘down’ for maintenance. How can this be? How can we have lost track of this target over W. Virginia that morning with a very powerful, very capable long range height finding air search radar below that did not need MODE C to get a rudimentary and somewhat less precise altitude resolution from it’s multi beam array scanning the skies there that morning? Very very good question.
[youtube daNr_TrBw6E]
In any case, as nobody really had ascertained that this plane was, in fact truly the same one that was tracked outbound into the approximate vicinity of this FPS-117 radar site, it is astonishing that virtually everyone in official channels automatically assumed this unidentified airplane which had no transponder replies, and had no communications with ATC of any kind, was still the one and the same airplane seen on radar going the other way. Based on this assumption, a whole lot of ATC specialists have been wrongly trained because their protocols prohibit making an assumption like this without specific NORDO or NO RADIO procedures that tell ATC that the crew has heard transmissions from the ground and has followed instructions issued so ATC can now state that this plane is in fact the one they lost radar track on and had lost communications with. Those protocols for identification of unknown air targets have been in place and used very successfully for many decades and yet they were ignored and this unknown track was decried as ‘FLT 77’ by everyone on the ground. Mighty convenient that a radar hole that should not have been there allowed this window of uncertainty to be there, and then a nonsensical non-standard supposition as to who the target indeed was, superseded tried and true protocols for target identification in lieu of two-way radio contact or transponder replies from the target. This is mighty smelly stuff here, regarding the radar hole and the assumption that this was still FLT-77 with no empirical evidence to support that assertion of any kind. In other words, NO air traffic control person has the right to make that assumption under any circumstances, but this was instantly done on Sept. 11, 2001 for some unknown or heretofore unknown reason that morning. Why?
An ATC specialist named Danielle O’Brien was watching this radar target track inbound at a high speed, and in her official statement about it, she cited not only the drastically higher speed inbound but an unusual degree of target maneuverability, more or less telling her colleague, another controller, that to her it looked too fast and maneuvered to abruptly to be a commercial airliner. In light of this, designating this plane as the one and the same which was NORDO and lost track on the outbound leg just before the infamous radar hole over W.VA, becomes even more questionably nonsensical to two experienced ATC personnel watching it fly into the Washington, D.C. class bravo restricted airspace that morning. In any case, this observation by Ms. O’Brien and her co-worker seems to at least on it’s face indicate that whatever aircraft that was on the inbound track certainly was much more maneuverable and significantly faster than a B-757, even as the official RADES 84 data contradicts her and her colleague. How can this be? Is it that the controllers were in fact ‘wrong’ and the later produced RADES 84 radar track data much more correct? Both of them cannot be correct. One is blatantly incorrect and intentional disinformation. But which one is telling us the truth? The same people who told us the radar hole existed over W. VA, on top of an operational long range 3-D height finding radar system?
In any case, the plane continues inbound, without interception. And by all indications, the manner in which the aircraft is being controlled tends to reflect skilled airmen at the controls and not neophytes who had difficulty controlling a Cessna 172 Skyhawk and were denied rental of one due to their inability to pass a pre-rental checkout for that. Is anyone seeing the big picture here yet? The took over the plane in a scant 3 minutes, without disturbing the asleep crew and pulled their slumbering inert bodies out of the seats and did not touch either the yokes or the rudders during the time they removed these snoozing crewmen who were so asleep at the wheel they didn’t even use any of the simple and very tried and true duress procedures to alert ATC they were being interfered with. Somehow I don’t think so.
In any case, the hijackers then descended, and flew right by the White House and a contingency of secret service agents who had to at that point been standing on the roof with the over the shoulder STINGER missiles at the ready, waiting for them to come into firing range. FLT 77 was indeed well inside STINGER firing range as it whipped past the White House on the way into the Pentagon that morning. Were those agents taking a nap? Or had they simply been told not to fire on this plane? I know that in 1987, the secret service crew who guards that building were armed with STINGER MISSILES because an ATC specialist warned me to not fly lower than 1,000 feet over that building on my way further north that evening or risk getting one up my, uh, tailpipe. So we know someone dropped that ball that morning, or did they get told to hold their fire?
And then the hijackers fly the oh so notoriously ridiculous 330 degree descending turn, which not only puts them at more risk for a shoot down, but makes no sense because their job was to fly that plane into the building. Why the turn? The couldn’t possibly not seen it as they whipped past the White House that morning. The skies were clear. There was no fog or cloud cover. Did someone get lost suddenly?
What we know from the FDR recreation the N.T.S.B. provided to us, is that this plane executed a very high speed descent at a vertical descent rate that was at the very least, 4,400 feet per minute, easily 3,000 feet per minute faster in the dive than normal landing aircraft typical do on their final approaches to a runway. This equated to a terminal velocity in the end of more than 150 knots beyond the never exceed speed for this aircraft at this altitude. Oh, I know, I have seen in the blogosphere the ‘hogwash, these planes fly at 585 miles an hour all day long’ said over and over again, so therefore this speed limit we cite clearly must be ‘wrong’ and not correct. Is it? The sad reality for those same people who cite this 585 miles an hour speed, is that this speed can only be achieved and maintained in less dense air, at very high altitudes. Down low, in very dense air with significantly higher drag coefficients applicable to the plane down so low, the plane’s cannot achieve these speeds. And the only limit is not just the drag limitation, but the fact that with the increase in speed in a banked turn, comes the increased force of gravity or ‘G’ forces. On September 11th., this aircraft pulled ‘6’ G’s on it’s turn into the building that day, at a speed more than 150 knots beyond it’s design limits at this altitude.
We know this because we called Boeing and asked them if these impossible speeds were even possible at these altitudes. Their answer, was a laughable; “Uh, no!” by their spokesperson. But to get back to the turn and the necessity of one when the building was clearly right in front of the hijackers faces as they descended, is anyone’s guess. But some of us surmise the turn was necessary because the imperative was not just to whack the building just anywhere, but to strike it in a particular location. That location, is known as the recently heavily reinforced and renovated ‘Catchers Mit’, and the portion of the building that was hit was filled with Navy comptroller’s office personnel who were tracking the missing 2.3 trillion dollars cited during hearings on Capitol Hill on the prior morning, held by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
We can only wonder at this point what the rationale was for circling and exposing this plane to shoot down, hence preventing it hitting it’s target. Nevertheless, the hijackers circled. But they did so in a fashion that absolutely flies in the fact that extremely unskilled and untrained pilots were at the controls. They executed this high speed turn and somehow managed not to lose control of this plane in a region of it’s control capabilities that would absolutely mandate that the pilot have exceptional flying skill to do this maneuver without losing control of this aircraft. Do you still believe that Hani Hanjour was in the cockpit flying this plane now? That is a stretch, in any reasonable persons estimation to still believe that, if we can trust ANY of the data the N.T.S.B. released to us from the FDR on that aircraft. But this was not the end of the superb airmanship exhibited by Hani that morning. He got better at it!
What is so much more impressive is that Hani flew the plane so low that he clipped ‘6’ light poles on the approach to the building at 460 plus knots, but when he did this, the leading edges of the wings did not shed a single piece, nor were the fuel tanks ruptured, which at that time were more or less full of highly flammable JET A fuel. We know ‘5’ of the six poles were sheared, yet no huge fireball explosions as wings were impacting the poles, and nary one piece of leading edge components such as the leading edge slats, were even damaged or left the plane. Now that is mighty impressive flying! That Florida instructor pilot who declared him to be incompetent and quite incapable of safely renting a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, surely had him pegged wrong, didn’t he? Didn’t he?
Anyway, what is even more phenomenal, is this aircraft was flown down in a region less than ½ wingspan from the ground, known to any experienced pilot as ‘ground effect’ region or zone. The importance of knowing this, is that no airplane at full throttle flown in ground effect, would want to continue to descend further. Matter of fact, at 465 knots, the plane would have, without full nose down pitch (which the flight data recorder shows was not the case) would have been required to overcome the ‘ground effect’ cushion and lift coefficient going on, and the plane would have had no choice but to climb. To force it into the building more or less at the base of the wall where it hit, on the ground floor level, the hijackers would have had to be using FULL NOSE DOWN PITCH to do this.
Not true, says the FDR data given to us by the N.T.S.B. No aircraft in GROUND EFFECT wants to descend further into it at high speed. They all want to climb and even with 10 or more degrees of commanded nose down pitch, a plane of that class would still want to climb out of ground effect due to a huge surplus of lift it was generating. Any pilot wants to challenge this, be my guest. Simply is not disputable here. It cannot be done. This particular aerodynamic fact is irrefutably the most damning road block to the whole cockamamie story about the final portion of this outrageous flight.
Interestingly, the N.T.S.B. gave us two sets of data. One set shows that the FL-180 reset took place per their recreation (and I will get to that again here in a second) and furthermore, the derivative data they provide to us shows that this reset did not take place at all, per the FDR data. How can this be? According to the N.T.S.B., the .csv or comma separated variable data was a derivative of the Crash Protected Memory file in the L-3 Model 2100 Flight Data Recorder on this airplane. Yet, this clearly is not the case at all.
