American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [90]
I’ve got questions about the attack on the Pentagon also. Getting back to Charles Lewis and what he heard that morning on the walkie-talkies out at LAX: The security guards referred to a “missile” having hit the Pentagon. “I was kinda puzzled,” Lewis says, “because by the time the airport had been evacuated and I got home, the missile that had hit the Pentagon had mysteriously changed to being another plane. I couldn’t figure that out, because I didn’t take the FBI or the LA World Airport Police to be putting on a pageant for me.”12
Of course, officially it was American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the ground floor at 9:37 AM. Only a section of the Pentagon that had been reinforced to withstand a terrorist attack was hit. Anywhere else, the damage and the casualties would have been much worse.13 Left behind by a plane 100-some feet wide was a hole 16 feet deep, but no evidence to accompany it, which is something that former air force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg says he’d never seen happen. Captain Wittenberg also says that jet engines do not leave a trail of white smoke, as was seen at the Pentagon. “We don’t know what it was, but you can tell what it wasn’t,” according to Wittenberg. And he believes it wasn’t a 757 aircraft.14
Another doubter is Major General Albert Stubblebine, retired Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, who was responsible for the army’s strategic intelligence sources worldwide. “I have had a lot of experience looking at photographs,” Stubblebine says. “I don’t know exactly what hit it [the Pentagon], but I do know from the photographs I have analyzed, it was not an airplane. For one thing, if you look at the hole that was made in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there should have been wing marks on the side [of the building]. One person counteracted my theory and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got it all wrong, the airplane came across, one wing hit the ground and broke off.’ Which is possible, but if I understand airplanes correctly, most of them have two wings. So there should have been a mark for the second one.”15 Stubblebine also believes the Twin Towers were brought down by a controlled demolition.
“How could a Boeing 757, with its engines extending beneath its wings, have struck the Pentagon so low without damaging the lawn and destroying the large cable spools on the ground in front of the damaged area?” asks 9/11 expert David Ray Griffin, a California professor and the author of eight books exploring the contradictions of the official 9/11 story. Griffin also cites the observation of Karen Kwiatkowski, then an air force lieutenant colonel employed at the Pentagon, who saw “no airplane metal or cargo debris.”16
Here’s what troubled me: the law was immediately and completely broken there. They had military personnel out on the lawn cleaning everything up, before an investigator ever arrived. Those hasty cleanups now seem to be Standard Operating Procedure when it comes to assassinations and events like 9/11, don’t they. Whenever there’s a plane crash, things are strewn about. So where are the seats, the luggage? The wings, vertical stabilizers, and engines were never fully recovered. A number of parts to a 757 are pretty much indestructible, but not a single piece has ever been positively identified as originating with Flight 77. The Department of Justice has admitted to having 85 videos, but they’ve refused a Freedom of Information Act request to release them.
Another expert we communicated with is Colonel George Nelson, who