Chapter 13: Evidence of Explosives at the Pentagon

Introduction

This chapter presents compelling evidence that the central fact of the Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001, is the same as at the World Trade Center: inside-the-building explosives, which no foreign terrorists could have had the access to plant, making the official narrative of what happened on 9/11 impossible. Physical evidence and eyewitness testimony converge to show that internal as well as external explosions went off just after 9:30 a.m., when the official narrative claims Flight 77 was still miles from Washington and did not approach the building until 9:37:46, and that these primary explosions went off at locations far removed from the official story “plane penetration path” in Wedge One. They occurred in Wedge Two and in the innermost rings well beyond the alleged C Ring “exit” hole.

The FBI knows that explosives are central to the actual 9/11 plot

The FBI’s code names for terrorist investigations known to have been carried out by means of bombs or explosives end in BOM[B] — for example, the acronym for its Oklahoma City bombing investigation is OKBOM.³²⁰ It is therefore highly significant that the official FBI code name for the investigation of the September 11 attacks is PENTTBOM, which stands for Pentagon Twin Towers Bombing. In this acronym, the abbreviation for Pentagon comes first, followed by that for the Twin Towers, with the notable absence of an abbreviation for Pennsylvania. Robert Mueller, who was FBI director on 9/11, confirmed this to Time magazine: “The [FBI’s] SIOC [Strategic Intelligence Operations Center] filled to capacity on 9/11 and remained that way through PENTTBOM, the FBI’s cryptonym for ‘Pentagon,’ ‘Twin Towers’ and ‘Bombing’,” reconfirming Newsweek’s report in the immediate wake of the attacks.³²¹ Despite the clear inference that the 9/11 investigation, the largest in the agency’s history,³²² was focused on bombs or explosives, FBI briefers lied to the “Jersey Girls” when they asked why the investigation was called PENTTBOM. They were told it was because “all the FBI’s investigations [code names] end in BOM.”³²³ This is provably false: even the acronym for the agency’s investigation of the 9/11-related anthrax attacks is AMERITHRAX, not AMERIBOM. The truth is, the entire U.S. government knows why the investigation of the September 11 attacks was called PENTTBOM, has from the very beginning, and has made a conscious decision to keep the American people, including more than 6,000 victims’ family members, not only in the dark but actively deceived about what really happened to cause the mass murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.

Reports of primary explosions throughout the chain of command

As detailed by Professor Graeme MacQueen at the Toronto Hearings, more than 100 firefighters, first responders and other eye- and ear-witnesses heard and felt explosions inside the WTC Towers in New York City, including at least two dozen reporting massive basement-level explosions in WTC 1 before the first plane hit more than ninety floors above. Similarly, Pentagon eye- and ear-witnesses gave testimonies to Department of Defense historians and to the mainstream media that they experienced massive explosions at the Pentagon, some more than five minutes before Flight 77 is said by the official story to have come anywhere near the building.

Only minutes before the attack on his own building, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who was in his office in a section of the Pentagon opposite the alleged impact point, “predicted” that there would be “another event” in addition to the two that had then already taken place in New York City,³²⁴ and shortly after the attacks told Sam Donaldson of ABC News that his first thought in the wake of the attack was that a bomb had gone off. When Donaldson asked, “What did you think it was?” Rumsfeld replied, “A bomb?”

The 9/11 Commission staff report on its interview with Navy Capt. Charles Joseph “Joe” Leidig, acting deputy director of operations for the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center on 9/11, notes, “He [Leidig] had no awareness of AA77 coming back to Washington. His first awareness was a call from the SECDEF’s [Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s] three-star aide who asked if he felt the explosion in the building, and asked Leidig to investigate whether it might be a terrorist attack.”³²⁵

Many other military officers and enlisted personnel inside the building also experienced and reported explosions. Lt. Nancy McKeown, who was in the Naval Command Center on the first floor of the second-in D Ring, said, “It sounded like a series of explosions going off…It sounded like a series of bombs exploding, similar to like firecrackers when you light them and you just get a series going off.” This is almost identical language to the firefighters’ descriptions of preplaced explosives going off in the World Trade Center towers in New York City on 9/11. McKeown yelled “Bomb!” when she heard and felt a major explosion, after which tiles fell from the ceiling.³²⁶ Lt. Col. Thurman, who was on the second floor of the same D Ring, said, “To me, it didn’t seem like a plane. To me, it seemed like it was a bomb. Being in the military, I have been around grenade, artillery explosions. It was a two-part explosion to me. It seemed like there was a percussion blast that blew me kind of backwards in my cubicle to the side. And then it seemed as if a massive explosion went off at the same time.” Army Lt. Col. Victor Correa, who was on the second floor in the Army Personnel area just above the alleged impact point, said, “We thought it was some kind of explosion, that somehow someone got in here and planted bombs because we saw these holes.”³²⁷ John Yates, a security manager for the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs who was in the same area as Correa just above the alleged impact point, said, “There was no noise. I mean, I did not hear a plane. Just suddenly the room just exploded, and I was blown through the air.”³²⁸ Even a local mayor who was at the Pentagon that morning had a similar experience, reported by the Frederick (Maryland) News-Post. Thurmont Mayor Marty Burns “was leaning against an office doorway when an explosion rocked the Pentagon…Pentagon employees assumed it was a bomb… ‘Where’s the next bomb?’ Burns and his Pentagon colleagues wondered. Even outside the building, Burns saw no indication that a plane had caused the damage.”³²⁹ Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell, who had just come out of a restroom off Corridor 4 in the vicinity of the B Ring, said, “I heard the sound of a very loud explosion. In my number of years in the artillery community, I hadn’t heard anything that loud. I thought it was a bomb.”³³⁰ And standing outside the Navy Annex about three football fields’ distance from the building, witness Terry Morin recalled, “I saw the flash and subsequent fireball rise approximately 200 feet above the Pentagon. There was a large explosion noise and the low frequency sound echo that comes with this type of sound. Associated with that was the increase in air pressure, momentarily, like a small gust of wind. For those formerly in the military, it sounded like a 2,000-pound bomb going off…”³³¹ Though this report is from a pilot who had just experienced a large plane fly overhead and to his right along the south side of the Annex, he nevertheless described what the official story alleges to have been an impact, which he could not see, with bomb-related references.

I conducted an interview with Ft. Monmouth Army financial auditor Michael Nielsen, who was on temporary duty assignment at the Pentagon before and on 9/11. He was in the Army financial management area, soon to be among the most destroyed by the attack, only minutes before the Pentagon explosion on the morning of 9/11. He had just returned to his temporary duty office on the ground floor near the building’s cafeteria when he heard and felt a massive explosion. Immediately afterwards, he said, hundreds of Pentagon personnel ran by him down the corridor and out the exit, yelling “Bombs!” “A bomb went off!” and “It was a bomb!”

Even Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. chain of command, experienced what he thought was the residue of explosives. On page 434 of his biography Without Hesitation, Gen. Shelton noted that upon his arrival at the Pentagon he was struck by an overpowering smell of cordite, or gun smoke, a substance used in bombs that has a distinct and very different odor from burning jet fuel. “The smell of cordite was overwhelming,” he said. Pentagon worker Don Perkal told MSNBC, “People shouted in the corridor outside that a bomb had gone off. Even before stepping outside, I could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere.”³³² Department of Defense attorney Gilah Goldsmith reported that immediately after hearing “an incredible whomp noise,” she “saw a huge black cloud of smoke” that “smelled like cordite or gun smoke.”³³³

Army witness April Gallop, who experienced a massive explosion as she pressed the ‘on’ button on her computer in Room 1E517 in Wedge Two off Corridor 5, more than 100 feet north of the official story alleged impact point, also smelled cordite and thought that it was a bomb. “Being in the Army with the training I had, I know what a bomb sounds and acts like, especially the aftermath,” and it sounded and acted “like a bomb,” Gallop told me in an under-oath videotaped interview.³³⁴ She also restated this in her court filing and in a videotaped interview with former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura for a TruTV episode on the Pentagon attack aired December 17, 2010.³³⁵ The force of the explosion or the impact of debris falling on her stopped her wrist watch at or just after 9:30,³³⁶ almost 8 minutes before the official story says Flight 77 came anywhere near the building. Cordite produces a strong detonation shock wave but is cool burning, which would explain why Gallop could experience a major explosion and yet remain unburned (see Fig. 13-1).

Fig. 13-1. Army survivor April Gallop rests on the Pentagon lawn after having lost one of her shoes while escaping the destruction from an explosion that went off near her desk in Wedge 2 at just after 9:30. The official story claims that she exited through the entrance point of a plane and through a raging inferno consuming over 11,000 gallons of remaining jet fuel, yet Gallop was unburned, including on the bottoms of her feet. Her infant son is being held by the man kneeling at the left.

In sworn videotaped testimony I submitted as evidence in these Hearings, Gallop stated that there was no jet fuel and no fire on the floor as she walked out. “I had no jet fuel on me…I didn’t smell any jet fuel…I didn’t see any airplane seats. I didn’t see any plane parts…I didn’t see anything that would give me any idea that there was a plane [in the building],” she said under oath. As the explosion at or near her desk in Wedge Two was many minutes before and many dozens of feet from the alleged impact point in Wedge One, they wouldn’t, however, have been expected. The only fires Gallop said she did see were “flames coming out of the computers” on desks around the perimeter of the large Army administrative area in the outer E Ring where she worked. In her original interview with an Army historian soon after the attack, Gallop said that her computer “blew.” This was also experienced by other workers closer to the official alleged impact point further south in Wedge 1. As everything went black, witness Tracy Webb, whose office in 2E477 was on the second floor of the outer E ring off Corridor 4 effectively above the alleged impact point, also saw her “computer burst into flames.”³³⁷

Pentagon wall clocks and April Gallop’s wristwatch were stopped by primary explosions 5 to 8 minutes before the official story says Flight 77 approached the building

Multiple, independently set electric or battery-operated wall clocks in areas of the Pentagon that sustained major damage — including one outside in the heliport fire house off the west wall — were stopped by explosions shortly after 9:30, when the plane the official story claims was Flight 77 was still miles from the area. The Navy, whose Naval Command Center was destroyed by an explosion, immediately posted a photo of one of these wall clocks, stopped at 9:31:40 (right clock in Fig. 13-2) on an official Department of Defense website. The heliport firehouse clock, stopped at 9:32:30, is in the official 9/11 exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (left clock in Fig. 13-2).³³⁸ The photo caption on its website states that “the blast” from the Pentagon attack “knocked the heliport clock from the wall, freezing it at 9:32.”

Fig. 13-2. Some of the west section Pentagon wall clocks stopped shortly after 9:30 on Sept. 11, consistent with the early media reports.

Clearly, if a major violent event caused the destruction at the Pentagon shortly after 9:30, the official story that Flight 77 struck the building at 9:37:46 cannot be the whole or even the most important part of what really happened at the nation’s military command center on 9/11.

Early press and media reports of the Pentagon attack time were correct

Before the Bush-Cheney administration settled on the official story that the Pentagon was attacked at 9:37:46 — almost 9:38 — mainstream press reports on the time of the attack were accurate:

about 9:30 — Reuters, reported 3:57 p.m. on 9/11/01

about 9:30 — USA Today, reported 6:11 a.m. on 9/12/01

about 9:30 — New York Times, reported on 9/12/01

shortly after 9:30 — U.S. News and World Report, reported on 9/12/01

Preplaced explosives may have triggered the E Ring collapse

Because they contain no definitive evidence of a plane approach prior to the appearance of a fireball, the ‘five frames’ videotapes from the two security cameras outside the west wall are clear evidence only for an explosion either in or outside the wall, and there is evidence that the later collapse of a portion of the outside E Ring may also have been due to explosives. The contractor American Petrography Services was hired to do an “autopsy” on the concrete from the structural support columns in the alleged plane penetration path, including those supporting the outside wall. APS found temperatures so high and “concentrated for [such] a long period of time” in the portion of the building which later collapsed, that some of the concrete “turned to mush.”³³⁹ The samples “that came from columns near the crash site” also had “a reddish hue and tints of bright orange…that could be seen with the naked eye” due to the presence of iron. This section of the building experienced “the most extreme conditions” that the president of the company had ever seen, and though its analysis proposed that “the red and orange colors came from tiny amounts of iron in the rock that were oxidized in extreme heat,” the iron could instead have been due to intense heat generated by superthermitic reactions on the columns, similar to those known to have occurred at the WTC, which produce molten iron at temperatures exceeding 4000 degrees F. This temperature is more than sufficient to cut through the steel reinforcement inside the columns that collapsed approximately 20 minutes after the attack, as well as to turn their concrete to “mush,” whereas the far lower temperature of a quickly-burning jet-fuel-initiated office fire of approximately 500 degrees F³⁴⁰ is not.

Shaped charge explosives created the alleged C Ring “exit” hole

After studying photos of the alleged “exit” hole in the inner wall of the C Ring, such as in Fig. 13-3 below, shaped charge explosives expert Michael Meyer concluded that the round, clean-edged hole not only could not have been made by a plane or plane parts, but has the exact signature of being created by shaped charge explosives. “It is physically impossible for the C Ring wall to have failed in a neat, clean circle like that [due to kinetic impact from a plane or plane parts],” Meyer emphatically stated.JJJ

Fig, 13-3. Earliest known photo, by a DoD photographer, of the near-perfectly-round 9- to 12foot diameter alleged “exit” hole in the inner wall of the middle C Ring.

As for claims that any part of the debris seen in these photos was from a plane, Terry Mitchell of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Audio/Visual Division, who was given early access to the A–E Drive between the C and B Rings into which the hole opens, showed a photo like the one in Figure 13-3 to the media at the Pentagon’s September 15 news briefing and clearly explained: “This is a hole in [the C Ring] — there was a punch out. They suspect that this was where a part of the aircraft came through this hole, al-though I didn’t see any evidence of the aircraft down there…This pile here is all Pentagon metal. None of that is aircraft whatsoever. As you can see, they’ve punched a hole in here. This was punched by the rescue workers to clean it out.” Reporters asked, “We’re trying to figure out how it came into the building” and how far it penetrated,³⁴¹ which Mitchell evaded answering. The circled and crossed “V” spray-painted on both sides of the hole after it was made is, in fact, the international triage marking symbol for “confirmed dead Victims removed.”³⁴² The fact that a data file was downloaded from the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) four hours before the official story says the FDR was allegedly found just inside this C Ring hole³⁴³ and that the only data fields that could have definitively identified the black box as having come from the plane that flew as Flight 77 on 9/11, or not, were intentionally “zeroed out”³⁴⁴ suggests that this most important piece of “wreckage” was manipulated and then planted to make it appear that part of a plane had penetrated to the C Ring. This was almost certainly done by the agency in charge of all evidence at the Pentagon – the FBI — the same FBI whose September 11 investigation code name is PENTTBOM.

Some researchers have suggested that the C Ring “exit” hole could have been created by a quasi-liquid “slurry” of unburned jet fuel, wreckage and debris moving through the alleged “plane penetration path,” but this is physically impossible. In addition to former NASA Dryden Research Division Director of Research Engineering Dwain Deets having shown that all possible paths between the alleged E Ring “impact” point and alleged C Ring “exit” hole had steel-reinforced columns still standing, such a “slurry” would had to have reconstituted and refocused itself after being progressively shredded and dispersed from impacting multiple intervening columns, finally forming itself into a perfectly-focused cone of energy capable of exploding a near-perfectly-round hole in the inner C Ring wall.

The Pentagon itself initially said there were three “exit” holes, not one

The Pentagon originally claimed that there were three, not just one, “exit holes” on the inside of the C Ring. This is shown by Fig. 13-4, a graphic based on information from Pentagon sources published in The Washington Post shortly after the attacks.

Fig. 13-4. Aerial photograph with overlays based on Pentagon sources showing three C Ring “exit” holes denoted by three dots labeled 1, 2 and 3 at the right of the picture. These are the precise locations of the three openings in the C Ring wall with black soot above them in in Fig. 14-5, the official Pentagon aerial photo of that same portion of the C Ring wall taken shortly after the attack.
Fig. 13-5. Official Department of Defense aerial photo of the west section of the Pentagon following the collapse of a section of the outer E Ring (top center) showing three openings in the C Ring wall in the identical positions as the dots labeled 1, 2 and 3 representing three “exit holes” in the aerial photo with graphic overlays in Fig. 13-4. The “exit” hole furthest to the right/north, to which the official story later claimed the landing gear of Flight 77 penetrated at its furthest point into the building, has significantly less blackening from fire and smoke above it than the two further to the left/south.

Although the left and middle openings in Figure 13-5 were not artificially created like the one on the right which the official story later claimed to be the sole “exit” hole — they are a roll-up door and a door — the point is not that just one of the three is a new and artificial wall breach, but that the Pentagon itself initially referred to all three as “exit holes,” clearly putting them in the same category as personnel exit/entry locations, as was explicitly stated by DoD’s own spokesman Terry Mitchell at the September 15 press briefing. And because it is unlikely for any single impactor — whether a plane, a drone or a missile — to be the cause of three exit holes, this is strong evidence that, at the time the Pentagon gave this information to the Post, the official story that a plane caused the northernmost “exit” hole had not yet been consolidated.

Fire and Destruction in the Innermost A and B Rings Far Beyond the C Ring “Exit” Hole

Compelling evidence against the official story that a plane caused all of the internal damage at the Pentagon is that there was fire and destruction in the innermost B and A Rings — one and two rings further in towards the center courtyard than the alleged C Ring “exit” hole that was allegedly the furthest penetration point of any part of a plane.

I interviewed the then Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations on 9/11, Robert Andrews, a former Green Beret and the top civilian official then in charge of special operations under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In this position, Andrews oversaw the Special Operations Command, one of whose operations was the Al Qaeda-tracking-and-data-mining “Able Danger” group which identified three of the four alleged 9/11 hijacker cells more than a year before the attacks and was ordered shut down shortly after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld took office. Andrews related the following: Immediately after the second WTC attack of 9:03, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld left his office on the Potomac side of the Pentagon and went across the hall to his Executive Support Center (ESC)³⁴⁵ which was set up for teleconferencing. The first Department of Defense statement released just before 10:00 a.m. EDT on 9/11 stated that Rumsfeld was “directing the response” from his “command center in the Pentagon,^”346 which was the ESC. From the ESC, Rumsfeld then joined the secure video teleconference of top government officials convened by National Security Council counter-terrorism ‘czar’ Richard Clarke out of the White House Situation Room media room. Clarke, in his book Against All Enemies, confirmed that Rumsfeld was among the first officials to come on to this teleconference.

Clarke’s account and Robert Andrews’ confirmation of it are thus completely at odds with the official story and the 9/11 Commission Report, which claim that no one could “locate” Rumsfeld until approximately 10:30 a.m. when he suddenly appeared in the National Military Command Center. Also, the fact that Rumsfeld, the military’s top civilian official, was on the White House teleconference with the top official of the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA Director Jane Garvey, also calls into question the claim that NORAD fighters weren’t scrambled in time to intercept the second/WTC2, third/Pentagon and fourth/Pennsylvania planes because the military and FAA had difficulty communicating: the top-most officials of the Pentagon and the FAA were talking to each another almost continuously for hours while Rumsfeld was in the ESC as well as being videotaped on Clarke’s teleconference, a record which the Bush-Cheney administration refused to make public and which was withheld even from the 9/11 Commission. This videotape is thus “The Butterfield Tape” of September 11 and must be declassified and released to a new independent investigation. (During the Watergate scandal, a secretly-recorded tape of President Nixon’s Oval Office conversations revealed by Alexander Butterfield became the “smoking gun” which forced Nixon to resign rather than face impeachment in the House and trial by the Senate.)

According to Andrews, immediately after the second WTC tower was struck at 9:03, he and an aide left his office and ran down to Rumsfeld’s west section Counterterrorism Center (CTC). While they were in the CTC, a sudden violent event caused the ceiling tiles to fall and smoke to pour into the room. Andrews immediately looked at his watch, which read c. 9:35 but which was set fast to ensure timely arrival at meetings, so the actual time was closer to 9:32. He and the aide then immediately left the CTC to join Secretary Rumsfeld in his Executive Support Center across the hall from his main office. En route to the ESC, Andrews said that when he and his aide entered the corridor on the innermost A ring of the west section, “we had to walk over dead bodies” to get to the central courtyard. This is in the A Ring, two rings further in towards the center from the alleged “exit” hole in the C Ring which the official story says was the furthest any part of the plane or damage from it penetrated.

Once in the Pentagon’s inner courtyard, Andrews and his aide ran to Rumsfeld’s Executive Support Center, where he joined the Secretary as his special operations/counterterrorism adviser during Clarke’s White House video teleconference. When they arrived, he was already on the teleconference,³⁴⁷ and while there, Andrews said Rumsfeld spoke with President Bush. Whether this was via Clarke’s teleconference or by phone or other means was not stated. The fact that Rumsfeld personally spoke with Bush while he was in his Pentagon ESC was published on an official DoD website, of the Naval Postgraduate School.

In addition to the deaths, and by inference violent events that caused them, that occurred on the inside of the innermost A Ring, there also was massive damage and fire on the inside of the B Ring. This, again, is one ring further in towards the center court-yard from the official story alleged plane “exit” hole on the inside of the C Ring. The day after 9/11, The Washington Post reported “the attack destroyed at least four of the five ‘rings’ that spiral around the massive office building…A 38-year-old Marine major…said he and dozens of his colleagues rushed to the area in the Pentagon that appeared most heavily damaged — the B Ring between the 4^th and 5^th corridors.” The major said that the B Ring area “was decimated” and “that heat and fire, it could eat you alive in three seconds.” In his interview with the Army’s Center of Military History, Lt. Col. Victor Correa, who was in Room 2C450 in the middle C Ring at the time of the attack, said he saw “the windows in the B Ring go out and come in – like the pressure, the blast made the windows go out,”³⁴⁸ consistent with a massive internal explosion inside the B Ring. Also, members of the Pentagon Rescue Team told the Washington Post that “When we got into the building, we started to feel the heat right away, and as we walked deeper down the hallways, it got hotter and hotter. It was just fire everywhere. Not so much smoke, but just fire all around us. You couldn’t see the plane, just debris everywhere you looked.”³⁴⁹

It is physically impossible for any impactor that allegedly penetrated only to the middle C Ring as the official story holds, to cause massive damage, fire and deaths in the two rings further in. And no foreign terrorist — Al Qaeda or otherwise — could have had the access to plant explosives anywhere inside the Pentagon, regardless of the ring.

Evidence that some of the inside explosives were targeted

Once it is realized that the real story at the Pentagon — as at WTC 1, 2 and 7 in New York City — is inside explosives, the possibility that specific offices or functions were targeted not only becomes possible, it becomes likely. No foreign terrorist would have chosen the hardest-to-hit place on the Pentagon — just above the ground on the only wedge that had just been hardened, that was the least populated and presented the greatest obstacle course including a hill, highway signs, light poles, a tall antenna, a chain-link fence and six-foot-high spools — as a target. Outside terrorists would have chosen the surest, simplest, fastest dive straight into the roof over the “highest value” targets — the offices of the Secretary of Defense and top ranking military brass on the opposite side of the building. It therefore had to have been, rather, the perceived necessity by insiders of taking out one or more functions located on the first floor of the Pentagon’s west side that was the real reason for both the explosives placed in those areas and the requirement to create the appearance of a plane impact on such a “mission impossible” target to account for the damage.

The two Pentagon areas with by far the most physical destruction and fatalities were the Army administrative area on the first floor of the outer E Ring, and the Naval Command Center on the first floor of the second-in D Ring and third-in C Ring, and there is evidence that both areas were, indeed, targeted by inside explosives. Pentagon sources even said so to The Washington Post immediately after the attacks.

The Naval Command Center

Shortly after the attacks, The Washington Post published the graphic in Fig. 13-6 entitled “The Targeted Ones” sourced to the “U.S. Navy, Navy personnel and Department of Defense” showing the Naval Command Center (NCC) as an internal target of the Pentagon attack,³⁵⁰ all of whose offices were beyond the point in the E Ring beyond which the Pentagon Building Performance Report said the plane’s fuselage did not penetrate. The Center’s functional divisions are detailed in the office layout blow-up at the top, in which the “intel cell” — the Naval Intelligence cell — in the right corner is designated by ‘8’ in the legend:JJJ

Fig. 13-6. Graphic of “The Targeted Ones” in the Pentagon’s Naval Command Center, based on information obtained from Navy and Defense Dept. sources and published in The Washington Post.

The Naval Command Center was the second-most-destroyed area of the Pentagon on 9/11, after the Army personnel and administrative area, which is addressed below. Center personnel had recently moved to their new offices on the first floor of the D and C Rings. The NCC was the only military-service command center in the targeted west wedge; the other service command centers, for the Air Force and Army, as well as the National Military Command Center and offices of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff, were all in untargeted wedges.

Significantly, in the report on its investigation of the damage to the building — the Pentagon Building Performance Report — the American Society of Civil Engineers states that the sole upward-thrust section of the second-floor floor slab in the alleged “plane penetration path” was likely due to an “independent” explosion, not impact and fire, as the official story claims an impactor penetrated essentially level and fire would have at the most collapsed the floor downwards: “The explosion, suggested by the raised [second-] floor section, might represent an independent explosion.” This second-floor concrete slab that was thrust upwards by a major force is, not surprisingly, above the first-floor Naval Command Center that experienced a massive and reportedly targeted explosion.

The official story codified in the 9/11 Commission Report and repeated by most of the main-stream media holds that all but one of the military personnel present in the Naval Command Center on the morning of September 11 died in the attack and that the alleged sole survivor was Lt. Kevin Shaeffer.³⁵¹ One possibility as to why it was targeted is what Shaeffer told the quarterly magazine CHIPS: “The Navy Command [Center] would have been able to prove what hit the World Trade Center if we had not been hit” by the explosion.³⁵² Notably, had it not been targeted, the NCC also could have ordered Navy fighters to intercept any errant planes that it determined NORAD was not responding to in a timely manner, which on 9/11 was all of them.

That something extremely important and apparently highly threatening to Bush-Cheney administration higher-ups was being pursued by the Naval Command Center’s intel cell is underscored by yet another cover-up — of the real number of NCC personnel killed there in the attacks. The official story holds that 42 of 43 military personnel who were in the Pentagon’s Naval Command Center on September 11 died,³⁵³ with Lt. Kevin Shaeffer being the sole survivor. But I was told something quite different by the military officer in command of the Navy Anti-Terrorism Division in the NCC on 9/11, Coast Guard Reserve Rear Adm. Jeffrey Hathaway.³⁵⁴ After the USS Cole was attacked in Aden Harbor, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000, Hathaway was put in charge of Navy counterterrorism force protection, for which he had been assigned to the NCC before September 11. Admiral Hathaway said that Shaeffer was not the only survivor, but that “the majority of the 18- to 19-person intelligence cell who were in a hardened room inside the Naval Command Center also survived” [emphasis added] the explosion. Whether the minority of the “18 to 19” who did not survive included the seven members of the super-secret Chief of Naval Operations-Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP) is unclear. In any case, what is clear is that there was a decision by the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration to hide the fact that there were more survivors of the attack on the Naval Command Center than just Kevin Shaeffer, who they were, what they knew and what they were doing that caused them to be targeted.

The Army Financial Audit Area

The Army’s administrative, personnel and financial management/audit offices were the most heavily damaged areas with the greatest number of casualties. Nearly three dozen of the 125 Pentagon victims were auditors, accountants and budget analysts, all or almost all of whom worked in the Army area. The day before 9/11, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had publicly announced that the Pentagon was “missing” $2.3 Trillion dollars.³⁵ [???] Some reports gave the amount as $2.6 Trillion. To put this number in perspective, after more than a decade, the total cost of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is, according to some reports, approximately this same amount. The question naturally arises, were the auditors in the Army area who were trying to “follow the money” — and the computers that were helping them do it — intentionally targeted by the inside explosives at the Pentagon on September 11? I was the first to suggest this possible nexus, in The Pentagon Attack Papers published in The Terror Conspiracy by Jim Marrs.³⁵⁵ Recall also that the only fires seen by April Gallop, who told a conference audience that her office was not far from the Army auditors, were those coming out of computers. Michael Nielsen, the Army financial auditor I interviewed, said that the auditors’ computers could indeed have been targeted and that their records were, in any case, destroyed.

Similar to the heavily damaged Army financial management/audit area, there is also reported reason to suspect that the Naval Command Center’s intelligence cell was targeted because it was looking into what could have become grounds for a financial scandal with potential major geopolitical implications. A recent analysis claims that the NCC intel cell was investigating $240 Billion in secret securities that had been illegally used to sabotage the Soviet Union’s economy during the Cold War, that these securities were to become redeemable the day after the attacks, and that some of the financial entities involved in the covert securities had their offices and related records in the World Trade Center Towers.³⁵⁶ Given this context, it may prove important that Phillip Zelikow — a former member of President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council, a close colleague of and co-author with President George W. Bush’s NSC Director Condolezza Rice, an expert in the creation and maintenance of “Myths of State” and the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, which codified the “New Pearl Harbor” State Myth — headed the Harvard study that used the CIA’s own documents to “exonerate” the agency of charges that the Bush Sr./Team B faction politicized and fixed “intelligence” on the Soviet Union around covert Cold War policy decisions. As one of the most secret policy decisions, if this nexus were true, would have been the use of billions to sabotage the Soviet Union, Zelikow and George Bush Sr. would have shared a special interest in seeing that documents on this most sensitive of covert operations reportedly investigated by the Naval Command Center be destroyed. Zelikow also defended the “Myth of State” that the original Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack in an Amazon.com review of Robert Stinnett’s ground-breaking book Day of Deceit, in which Stinnett exposed President Roosevelt’s provocation of Japan and setting up of Navy ships at Pearl Harbor as “sitting ducks” to ensure a “successful” attack.

In addition to the potential strategic and financial motives, there is yet another reason that the Naval Command Center’s intelligence cell and adjacent damaged Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) offices may have been internally targeted: their likely participation in Able Danger, the pre-9/11 Special Operations Command data mining and analysis team that had identified two of the three “Al Qaeda” cells and four of the lead hijackers allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, including ‘ringleader’ Mohammed Atta, and which Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld shut down in late January 2001 immediately after taking command of the Pentagon, perhaps not wanting the future hijackers to be tracked.

Naval Command Center survivor Kevin Shaeffer’s testimony is also strong evidence that the NCC explosion was a primary event, unrelated to any possible plane impact. He insisted that the massive orange fireball that destroyed the Center, which Lt. Cmdr. Tarantino described as “a bombed out office space,”³⁵⁷ happened “at precisely 9:43.” As the official story claims that a plane impacted at 9:37:46, over five minutes before, and that whatever allegedly penetrated through to the C Ring did so in less than one second, or by 9:37:47, even if the official story were true Flight 77 could not have been the source of the Naval Command Center explosion and destruction at 9:43. The time difference between the first explosion, which we now know to have been at 9:32:30, stopping the heliport clock, and the NCC explosion at 9:43 makes it likely that the “second huge explosion” heard and felt by renovation team member Terry Cohen, which she said was “about 15 minutes later” than the first,³⁵⁸ was the one which almost killed Shaeffer and was also the second explosion reported by Gallop. Still another primary explosion, which occurred at about 10:10, was reported live by local television.³⁵⁹

The Pentagon attack is central to the 9/11 plot

Though the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City were more spectacular, it is the attack on the Pentagon, the nation’s most iconic military facility, that most fully turned the 9/11 attacks into the “New Pearl Harbor” called for by the Project for the New American Century one year earlier. It was the Pentagon attack that ensured that the Bush-Cheney administration could use the combined attacks as a pretext for being “at war”; for establishing the first-ever U.S. mainland combatant command, NORTHCOM; for rolling out its entire global domination agenda; and for creating and consolidating the domestic surveillance state. Alone, the attacks on the World Trade Center could have been credibly argued to be “a bigger World Trade Center ‘93” or “a bigger Oklahoma City,” both of which had been addressed by the civilian courts. The Pentagon attack is thus the core of the real 9/11 plot, without which George W. Bush could not have become the “war president” he wanted to be before gaining office; without which the pretext for “preemptive” wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond would not have existed; without which Vice President Cheney could not have realized his long-sought goal of concentrating power in a “unitary executive” with near-absolute authority over defense and foreign policy;³⁶⁰ and without which Bush could not have credibly invoked his Article II commander-in-chief military powers to justify every violation of the Constitution and U.S. and international law in the wake of the attacks.

Because the “New Pearl Harbor” — the Pentagon — had to be successfully attacked, such a critical pretext for endless war could not be left to foreign terrorists. It had to be planned and, most importantly, controlled and executed by the very insider cabal who then used it to roll out their entire global domination and domestic surveillance agenda. Foreign terrorists could never have come up with a plot so perfectly resonant with the original Pearl Harbor deep within the American psyche: an expertly scripted kamikaze attack by suicide pilots using planes as weapons, only this time to attack buildings instead of ships. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and the other “9/11 Five” awaiting “trial” in Guantanamo at most planned a 9/11-like attack, but they are not the real terrorists. The real terrorists are insiders who are still at large and must be brought to justice through a new, truly independent 9/11 investigation.

Endnotes

320. “The official [FBI] investigation, known as ‘OKBOMB’…,” Wikipedia, Oklahoma City Bombing entry, paragraph 3, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKBomb.
321. “The Terrorist Hunter,” Time magazine, May 9, 2011, p. 27; and “Bush: ‘We’re at War,’” Newsweek, Sept. 24, 2001, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/linkscopy/GWBwereAtWar.html.
322. “9/11 Investigation: PENTTBOM,” FBI website, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/9-11-investigation.
323. Communication with the author by Monica Gabrielle. In her videotaped testimony to the Toronto Hearings, another Jersey Girl, Lori van Auken, mentioned that other FBI briefers told the Jersey Girls that the agency’s code name for the 9/11 investigation ends in BOM[B] because the plot included planes being used as bombs.
324. “Pentagon Attack Came Minutes After Rumsfeld Predicted ‘There Will Be Another Event,’” by Robert Burns, Associated Press, Sept. 11, 2001, 5:58 p.m. EDT.
325. 9/11 Commission staff report on Team 8 interview with Navy Capt. Charles Joseph Leidig, http://cryptome.org/nara/dod/dod-04-0429.pdf.
326. Pentagon 9/11, Alfred Goldberg et al., Washington, D.C., Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007, p. 31.
327. Army Lt. Col. Victor Correa entry, compilation of witness accounts by Eric Bart, http://web.archive.org/web/20040501101751/http://eric-bart.net/iwpb/witness.html.
328. “9/11 Pentagon Victims Recall Their Journey of Survival,” by Christie Vanover, INCOM, Fort Riley Post, Sept. 5, 2002, http://www.army.mil/article/27202.
329. Frederick (Md.) News-Post, Sept. 7, 2011.
330. Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell interview excerpt in Then Came the Fire: Personal Accounts from the Pentagon—11 September 2001, by Stephen J. Lofgren, General Editor, Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2011, pp. 72-73, http://www.scribd.com/doc/65563423/THEN-CAME-THE-FIRE-PERSONAL-ACCOUNTS-FROM-THE-PENTAGON-11-SEPTEMBER-2001.
331. Terry Morin quote, “9/11 and the Pentagon Attack: What Eyewitnesses Described,” No. 640, Arabesque, April 2 2007, http://arabesque911.blogspot.com/2007/04/911-and-pentagon-attack-what.html.
332. “The Works of Humankind: A Dispatch by Don Perkal,” http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/09/19perkal.html; and http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/evidence/witnesses/explosive.html.
333. Gilah Goldsmith quote, compilation of witness accounts by Eric Bart, http://web.archive.org/web/20040501101751/http://eric-bart.net/iwpb/witness.html.
334. Two-hour videotaped under-oath testimony interview of April Gallop by the author, Irvine, Calif., March 2007, submitted in evidence to these Toronto Hearings, to Prof. Graeme MacQueen. This testimony formed a basis for a lawsuit Gallop brought against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then Acting Chmn. of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, and Vice President Dick Cheney. See also video of keynote Gallop’s keynote address to Freedom Law Center conference, March 2007, Irvine, CA, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U5hOyZlrcY&feature=gv.
335. TruTV, “Conspiracy Theory” episode on the Pentagon attack with Jesse Ventura, aired Dec. 17, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrZ14NRbT-s.
336. In the Q&As following her keynote address to the Freedom Law Center conference (see Note 15), April Gallop states, “I know my watch stopped at 9:30. The watch that I had on stopped at 9:30,” at 30:31–31:13 min. in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U5hOyZlrcY&feature=gv.
337. September 11: An Oral History, by Dean E. Murphy, New York, Doubleday, 2002, p. 212.
338. The photo on the right of a Navy/Marine Corps wall clock stopped at 9:31:40 was posted on an official Navy web site http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=2480Pentagonclock_BBC. The electric Skillcraft wall clock on the left stopped at 9:32:30 is from the Pentagon helipad firehouse outside the west wall and is in the official 9/11 exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/record.asp?ID=19. Heliport firefighters Alan Wallace and Mark Skipper raced out of the way of an incoming white plane with two horizontal stripes on its fuselage that exploded into a fireball at or near the heliport, stopping the heliport clock at 9:32:30. This plane is the source of what one witness called “millions” of pieces of small confetti-like wreckage in the vicinity of the helipad 100 feet and more north of the official story alleged impact point, and cannot be Flight 77, as the fuselage of American Airlines planes are a silvery polished aluminum, not white.
339. “’Concrete Autopsy’ Helps Strengthen Pentagon,” by Kerry Hall, National Geographic Today, July 9, 2002, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/07/0709_020708_TVpentagon.html.
340. “It is impossible that jet fuel [fires] raised the temperature of this floor more than 495 degrees F.,” “Jet Fuel: How Hot Did It Heat the World Trade Center?” http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/how-hot.htm.
341. Department of Defense News Briefing, Sept. 15, 2001, segment with Terry Mitchell of ASDPA audio visual, defenselink.mil/news/Sep2001/t09152001_t915evey.html; reported with commentary in Pentagate by Thierry Meyssan, Carnot Publishing, p. 18.
342. Jacqueline Augustino, FEMA photos, http://www.photolibrary.fema.gov/photolibrary/photo_details.do?id=4958.
343. “Pentagon 9/11 Flight ‘Black Box’ Data File Created Before Actual ‘Black Box’ was Recovered,” http://911blogger.com/news/2008-05-18/pentagon-911-flight-black-box-data-file-created-actual-black-box-was-recovered, by Aidan Monaghan.
344. “Flight Data Expert [Dennis Cimino] Confirmation: No Evidence Linking FDR Data to American 77,” Pilots for 9/11 Truth, http://pilotsfor911truth.org/Dennis-Cimino-AA77-FDR.html. See also the presentation by Cimino at the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings, 2012, video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmGi5YeQ_Bw.
345. Author’s interview of Sept. 4, 2004, with former Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Robert Andrews, and article based on this interview published on the website of the Naval Postgraduate School (no longer online), “Special Operations Policy Expert and Veteran Robert Andrews Gives Distinguished Guest Lectures at NPS.” See also author’s California Jurat with Affiant Statement signed by Barbara Honegger and Notary Public Kelly Harlow of Monterey, Calif., May 25, 2011, which has been provided to the Toronto Hearing Panelists and organizers.
346. Transcript of the first Pentagon press briefing of Sept. 11, 2001, c. 10:00 a.m., subsequently removed from the Department of Defense website. In 9/11: The Big Lie, p. 13 footnote 1, Thierry Meyssan notes that as of 2002, it could be accessed via the Yale University website at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/sept_11/dod_brief03.htm.
347. Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11, by Patrick Creed and Rick Newman, Presidio Press, pp. 276–277, 2008, also reported that Rumsfeld went to a conference room in the Executive Support Center where he joined a secure video teleconference with Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials.
348. Lt. Col. Victor Correa interview excerpt in Then Came the Fire: Personal Accounts from the Pentagon – 11 September 2001, by Stephen J. Lofgren, General Editor, Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2011, p. 64, http://www.scribd.com/doc/65563423/THEN-CAME-THE-FIRE-PERSONAL-ACCOUNTS-FROM-THE-PENTAGON-11-SEPTEMBER-2001.
349. WashingtonPost.com, Sept. 11, 2001.
350. “The Targeted Ones”, The Washington Post, from U.S. Navy, Navy personnel and Depot. Defense sources, http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_j1WCY4T_2yI/SSJjfSvi0LI/AAAAAAAAEzI/OS7hJJYawTY/s1600-h/PENTAG~1.GIF. There is precedent for the government targeting its own intelligence personnel in a terrorist attack. Following the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Pan American Airlines sued the U.S. government claiming federal authorities knew intelligence officers were on board, had prior knowledge of the impending attack, and had not attempted to prevent it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103.
351. “Survivor of Pentagon Attack Has Positive Attitude,” by Sarah Zablotsky, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 11, 2006, http://www.post-gazette.com/neigh_south/20030611s19kevin0611p6.asp.
352. CHIPS magazine, Spring/June 2003 issue.
353. “The Last Watch,” by Richard Leiby, The Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2002.
354. Rear Admiral Jeffrey Hathaway bio information, History Commons, http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=complete_911_timeline_3229#complete_911_timeline_3229.
355. “The Pentagon Attack Papers,” by Barbara Honegger, appendix to The Terror Conspiracy (first ed.) and The Terror Conspiracy Revisited (second ed.), by Jim Marrs; more recent online edition at www.sd911truth.org.
356. E.P. Heidner, “Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/9442970/Collateral-Damage-US-Covert-Operations-and-the-Terrorist-Attacks-on-September-11-200128062008 or http://www.wanttoknow.info/911/Collateral-Damage-911-black_eagle_fund_trust.pdf.
357. Pentagon 9/11, Alfred Goldberg, et al., Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007, p. 119, ISBN 978-0-16-078328-9.
358. Interview with Pentagon renovation construction worker Terry Cohen, NBC Channel 4 News, Sept. 11, 2001, http://letsrollforums.com/miltary-testimony-huge-explosion-t19067.html, scroll to third video screen.
359. “Local Washington DC Affiliate Captures 2nd Powerful Pentagon Explosion on 9/11,” video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ykfKS8Rbls. The anchor asks the reporter on site at the Pentagon if she saw anything overhead that could have been the cause of the second explosion, and she answers no, making it clear that it was an internal explosion.
360. Cheney made this reference that the presidency should be imperial and have the powers of a monarchy in the dissenting minority report he commissioned as ranking House Republican on the Congressional Joint House-Senate Iran-Contra Committee that was published along with the majority report. It referred to his Nixonian opinion that the Reagan-Bush Sr. Administration’s sending of arms to the Nicaraguan Contras in direct violation of federal law, the Boland Amendment, should not be considered illegal because the President had authorized it and because the president has the final word in everything relating to foreign policy. When asked by a reporter in 2005 to explain his expansive views about presidential power, Cheney replied, “…go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-contra committee.”