The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [46]
Because the attacks began in New York, because they killed so many people, and because the Twin Towers were iconic, the strike on Washington, D.C., has tended to take second place in the public mind. The crash at the Pentagon has also preoccupied the skeptics, though, and appearances suggest they are in impressive company.
Colonel George Nelson, U.S. Air Force (retired), a former aircraft accident investigator, commercial pilot, and airframe mechanic, said that—on the evidence as he saw it in 2006—“any unbiased rational investigator” would conclude no Boeing 757 was involved in either the crash at the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Latas, aerospace engineer, airline captain, and former president of an Air Force accident board, found discrepancies between the Flight Data Recorder information on Flight 77 and the 9/11 Commission’s account.
Former Army Captain Daniel Davis, who served with Air Defense Command before becoming a senior manager at General Electric Turbine [jet] Engine Division, declared himself puzzled by the seeming lack of substantial airplane wreckage at the Pentagon. “Where,” he wanted to know, “are all of those engines?”
Former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who was at the Pentagon when it was hit on 9/11, later went public with a lengthy essay expressing her suspicions. “There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact,” she wrote. “There was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner.… It was, however, exactly what one would expect if a missile had struck the Pentagon.”
From French author Thierry Meyssan to Lieutenant Colonel Kwiatkowski, that is the notion that has proved durable among the doubters. The Pentagon was hit not by an airliner but by a missile.
The perceived Pentagon mysteries have given the skeptics free rein. A group calling itself Citizen Investigation Team claimed in 2010 to have “proof” that “the plane that was seen flying low over Arlington on 9/11/01 did not in fact hit the Pentagon.” Rather, it pulled up and flew over it at the last moment—all part, the authors would have us believe, of a “skilfully executed deception.”
Only a tiny community of believers, perhaps, credit such bizarre hypotheses So influential have the skeptics proven, however, above all but not only thanks to the Internet, that many people are at least somewhat hooked.
The authors’ contacts during the more than four years of work on this book—including both professional and social conversations with hundreds of people—seemed to confirm that many citizens, and not only young people, doubt that they have been given the full picture of what occurred on 9/11.
Such widespread doubt demands corroboration based on solid evidence—or rebuttal.
ELEVEN
THERE HAVE BEEN THREE MAIN OFFICIAL REPORTS ON THE NEW YORK collapses. First, the World Trade Center Building Performance Study, compiled in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and other bodies. Second, there was the far more thorough—248 pages coupled to forty-two companion reports—2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). There is also the institute’s eighty-eight-page report on the collapse of Trade Center Building 7, issued in 2008.
More than two hundred technical specialists, eighty-five from NIST and the others from the private sector and the academic world, worked on the institute’s report on the Trade Center. Its conclusion as to why the towers collapsed in essence differed from FEMA’s earlier finding only in the detail of its analysis.
The impact of the planes, NIST’s experts said, severed steel support columns and dislodged fireproofing—a vital factor—and started fires that reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius. The intense heat had the effect of weakening floors to the point where they sagged and pulled inward until outer columns—on