Pentagon Strike

slick propaganda for "no plane" hoax

Pentagon Strike is a film released in late summer 2004 that promotes the "no plane hit Pentagon" hoax

A video clip that was posted to numerous sites in late summer 2004 supposedly documents the "no plane" at the Pentagon claims. It was released shortly after "In Plane Site" -- but only focuses on the "no plane at Pentagon" hoax. It is probable that "Pentagon Strike" was the sequel to "Plane Site," since "Plane Site" had so many crackpot claims in it that it encountered considerable opposition in its effort to redefine 9/11. Pentagon Strike is focused solely on the "no plane at Pentagon" hoax, which unfortunately has been treated more seriously.

This film is slick propaganda that avoids most of the real evidence, flashes quickly from point to point, distracts the viewer with rock music (perhaps a type of "bait" to snare youthful web surfers?), and would not qualify as forensic evidence in any courtroom. It is a form of "disinfotainment."

Pentagon Strike is only a couple minutes long, and a couple megabytes in size - easily downloadable, even without high speed internet. It has been hosted on countless websites. Pentagon Strike has been much more effective at spreading disinformation than In Plane Site. The Washington Post's review of this film was very effective at discrediting 9/11 truth issues in the national capital area a month before the pseudo-election of 2004.

 

misrepresents eyewitness testimonies

Pentagon Strike superimposed quotes from eyewitnesses (some of them out of context) in a black stripe over a photo of the impact zone - the stripe obscures the view that shows the full extent of the damage caused by the plane.

"Pentagon Strike" implies that the eyewitnesses did not see American Airlines Flight 77. These eyewitness reports (from various media sources) were used selectively in this "film" to imply that they saw a missile - when the full quote clearly states they saw the plane.

Many people who had a good view of the plane were surprised that the aftermath did not leave large pieces of the plane (although many, many small pieces were scattered widely).

The RED TEXT shows the section that was used by Pentagon Strike.

 

“I was going up Interstate 395, up Washington Boulevard, listening to the radio, to the news, to WTOP, and from my left side, I don’t know whether I saw or heard it first -- this silver plane; I immediately recognized it as an American Airlines jet,” said the 25-year-old O’Keefe, managing editor of Influence, an American Lawyer Media publication about lobbying. “It came swooping in over the highway, over my left shoulder, straight across where my car was heading. I’d just heard them saying on the radio that National Airport was closing, and I thought, ‘That’s not going to make it to National Airport.’ And then I realized where I was, and that it was going to hit the Pentagon. There was a burst of orange flame that shot out that I could see through the highway overpass. Then it was just black. Just black thick smoke. The eeriest thing about it, was that it was like you were watching a movie. There was no huge explosion, no huge rumbling on ground, it just went ‘pfff.’ It wasn’t what I would have expected for a plane that was not much more than a football field away from me.The first thing I did was pull over onto the shoulder, and when I got out of the car I saw another plane flying over my head, and it scared ...me, because I knew there had been two planes that hit the World Trade Center. And I started jogging up the ramp to get as far away as possible. Then the plane -- it looked like a C-130 cargo plane -- started turning away from the Pentagon, it did a complete turnaround.
- John O'Keefe

"I was right underneath the plane." "I heard a plane. I saw it. I saw debris flying. I guess it was hitting light poles," said Milburn. "It was like a WHOOOSH whoosh, then there was fire and smoke, then I heard a second explosion."
- Kirk Milburn

Michael DiPaula 41, project coordinator Pentagon Renovation Team - He left a meeting in the Pentagon just minutes before the crash, looking for an electrician who didn't show, in a construction trailer less than 75 feet away. "Suddenly, an airplane roared into view, nearly shearing the roof off the trailer before slamming into the E ring. 'It sounded like a missile,' DiPaula recalls . . . Buried in debris and covered with airplane fuel, he was briefly listed by authorities as missing, but eventually crawled from the flaming debris and the shroud of black smoke unscathed.
http://www.sunspot.net/search/bal-archive-1990.htmlstory

As I came up along the Pentagon I saw helicopters. That's not strange. It's the Pentagon. Then I saw the plane. There were only a few cars on the road, we all stopped. I know I wanted to believe that plane was making a low descent into National Airport, but it was nearly on the road. And it was headed straight for the building. It made no sense. The pilot didn't seem to be planning to pull up anytime soon. It was there. A huge jet. Then it was gone. A massive hole in the side of the Pentagon gushed smoke. The noise was beyond description. ... I called my boss. I had no memory of how to work my cellphone. I hit redial and his number came up. "Something hit the Pentagon. It must have been a helicopter." I knew that wasn't true, but I heard myself say it. I heard myself believe it, if only for a minute. "Buildings don't eat planes. That plane, it just vanished. There should have been parts on the ground. It should have rained parts on my car. The airplane didn't crash. Where are the parts?" That's the conversation I had with myself on the way to work. It made sense this morning. I swear that it did. ... There seems to be no footage of the crash, only the site. The gash in the building looks so small on TV. The massiveness of the structure lost in the tight shots of the fire. There was a plane. It didn't go over the building. It went into the building. I want them to find it whole, wedged between floors or something. I know that isn't going to happen, but right now I pretend. I want to see footage of the crash. I want to make it make sense. I want to know why there's this gap in my memory, this gap that makes it seem as though the plane simply became invisible and banked up at the very last minute, but I don't think that's going to happen.
- "skarlet"

I was at a complete stop on the road in front of the helipad at the Pentagon; what I had thought would be a shortcut was as slow as the other routes I had taken that morning. I looked idly out my window to the left -- and saw a plane flying so low I said, “holy cow, that plane is going to hit my car” (not my actual words). The car shook as the plane flew over. It was so close that I could read the numbers under the wing. And then the plane crashed. My mind could not comprehend what had happened. Where did the plane go? For some reason I expected it to bounce off the Pentagon wall in pieces. But there was no plane visible, only huge billows of smoke and torrents of fire.
-- Christine Peterson

 

misrepresents the physical evidence

lots of photos and background information at
www.oilempire.us/pentagon-hole.html
and
www.oilempire.us/pentagon-photos.html


www.questionsquestions.net/blog/041116walter.html
Jimmy Walter (reopen911.org): A sugar daddy with poison pills

... the ground-level entry area (where the walls were missing and support columns were missing or severely damaged and severed) was about 90 feet wide. Only the second floor area of the hole was small. Both In Plane Site and the Pentagon Strike web movie disingenuously use selective photos in which the 90-foot ground level hole is hidden behind smoke & water being sprayed by a firetruck, and it isn't even mentioned. But note that not all Pentagon no-757 advocates hide the real proportions of the hole in this way, which makes this misprepresentation even more egregious.

there IS wreckage, not on the lawn (another example of deceptive, selective choice of photographs) but all over the South parking lot and part of the Heliport (easily visible in the photos taken by Steve Riskus), which were in fact closer to the impact point than the area of lawn that is shown (severe telephoto foreshortening illusion makes the lawn area look close to the building). Sure, one might attempt to debate whether the existing debris field is consistent with an airliner impact, but not acknowledging its existence at all (or the existence of the ground-level 90 foot entry hole) as is the case with In Plane Site and Pentagon Strike, only serves to make 911 skeptics look like conniving liars.

 

Washington Post - October 2004
used "Pentagon Strike" to discredit 9/11 truth

note how this article "sandwiches" mention of David Ray Griffin's book in-between discussions of alien abduction and communication with beings in other dimensions - a great way to discredit "New Pearl Harbor" a month before the Kerry/Bush "election" - note also that the Post implied that the "no plane" claim was the only issue mentioned in New Pearl Harbor - when it was only a small part of the book (the rest of the book is excellent and highly recommended)

A website that critiques the "casseopeia" group is
www.cassiopaeacult.com/who-are-the-cassiopaeans/

 

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13059-2004Oct6.htmlD
Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet
By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page B01

Working from his home office in a small town in England, Darren Williams spent four weeks this summer making a short but startling video that raises novel questions about the 2001 attack on the Pentagon.
The video, "9/11: Pentagon Strike," suggests that it was not American Airlines Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon, but a missile or a small plane.
With rock music as a backdrop, the video offers flashes of photographs taken shortly after impact, interspersed with witness accounts. The pictures seem incompatible with damage caused by a jumbo jet, and no one mentions seeing one. Red arrows point to unbroken windows in the burning building.
Firefighters stand outside a perfectly round hole in a Pentagon wall where the Boeing 757 punched through; it is less than 20 feet in diameter.
Propelled by word of mouth, Internet search engines and e-mail, the video has been downloaded by millions of people around the world.
American history is rife with conspiracy theories. Extremists have fed rumors of secret plots by Masons, bankers, Catholics and Communists. But now urban legends have become cyberlegends, and suspicions speed their way globally not over months and weeks but within days and hours on the Web.
"The dissemination is almost immediate," said Doug Thomas, a University of Southern California communications professor who teaches classes on technology and subgroups. "It's not just one Web site saying, 'Hey, look at this.' It's 10,000 people sending e-mails to 10 friends, and then they send it on."
The Pentagon video could be a case study. Williams created a Web site for the video, www.pentagonstrike.co.uk. Then he e-mailed a copy to Laura Knight-Jadczyk, an American author living in France whose books include one on alien abduction. Williams, 31, a systems analyst, belongs to an online group hosted by Knight-Jadczyk that blends discussions of science, politics and the paranormal.
On Aug. 23, Knight-Jadczyk posted a link to the video on the group's Web site, www.Cassiopaea.org. Within 36 hours, Williams's site collapsed under the crush of tens of thousands of visitors. But there were others to fill the void.
In Texas, a former casino worker who downloaded the video began drawing almost 700,000 visitors a day to his libertarian site. In Louisiana, a young Navy specialist put the video on his personal Web page, usually visited by a few friends and relatives; suddenly, the site was inundated by more than 20,000 hits. In Alberta, traffic to a cabdriver's site shot up more than sixfold after he supplied a link to the video.
Across thousands of sites, demand for the video was so great that some webmasters solicited donations to pay for the extra bandwidth.
"Pentagon Strike" is just the latest and flashiest example of a growing number of Web sites, books and videos contending that something other than a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon. Most make their case through the selective use of photographs and eyewitness accounts reported during the confusion of the first hours after the attack. They say they don't know what really happened to American Airlines Flight 77 and don't offer other explanations. The doubters say they are just asking questions that have not been answered satisfactorily.
The ready and growing audience for conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been particularly galling to those who worked on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the bipartisan panel known as the 9/11 commission.
"We discussed the theories," said Philip D. Zelikow, the commission's executive director. "When we wrote the report, we were also careful not to answer all the theories. It's like playing Whack-A-Mole. You're never going to whack them all. They satisfy a deep need in the people who create them. What we tried to do instead was to affirmatively tell what was true and tell it adding a lot of critical details that we knew would help dispel concerns."
Conspiracy theories are common after traumatic events. Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University who has written books on the culture of conspiracies, said contradictory and inconclusive eyewitness accounts often leave room for different interpretations of events.
"Conspiracy theories are one way to make sense of what happened and regain a sense of control," Barkun said. "Of course, they're usually wrong, but they're psychologically reassuring. Because what they say is that everything is connected, nothing happens by accident, and that there is some kind of order in the world, even if it's produced by evil forces. I think psychologically, it's in a way consoling to a lot of people."
The belief that the government is lying about the Sept. 11 attacks is coming from both the right and the left. Experts say more than suspicion of the Bush administration is at work.
"It seems that since the end of the Cold War, the enemy is the United States government, the enemy is within," said Rick Ross, whose Ross Institute of New Jersey monitors cults and other controversial groups, many of which see manipulative forces working behind the scenes. "Instead of projecting conspiracy theories out, it's become internalized."
Zelikow, for example, lacks credibility with many who question the work of the 9/11 commission because he wrote a book with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. He believes that it is futile to discuss evidence with people convinced of a conspiracy.
"The hardcore conspiracy theorists are totally committed," Zelikow said. "They'd have to repudiate much of their life identity in order not to accept some of that stuff. That's not our worry. Our worry is when things become infectious, as happened with the [John F. Kennedy] assassination. Then this stuff can be deeply corrosive to public understanding. You can get where the bacteria can sicken the larger body."

David Ray Griffin considers himself an unlikely recruit to what is called the "9/11 Truth Movement." The retired theologian, who taught religion for three decades at Claremont School of Theology, initially dismissed the notion that it was not an airliner that hit the Pentagon. But after visiting several Internet sites raising questions about the attack, he ended up writing a book. "The New Pearl Harbor," published in the spring, argues that a Boeing 757 would have caused far more damage and left more wreckage strewn around the Pentagon.
"There are reasons why people doubt the official story," he said. "There are photographs taken, and there is no Boeing in sight."

Suspicions formed as the Pentagon still smoldered.
For 2 1/2 years, the attack on the Pentagon has been discussed and researched by members of Knight-Jadczyk's online group, the Quantum Future School.
The group's talks formed the basis for articles in which Knight-Jadczyk argues that after the attack on the World Trade Center, eyewitnesses at the Pentagon were predisposed to see a large airliner. She believes that the Pentagon was attacked by a smaller plane and that members of the Bush administration were somehow complicit because it was beneficial for war-profiteers and Israel.
Interviewed by telephone from what she said is a 17-bedroom castle outside Toulouse, where she lives with her Polish physicist husband and five children, Knight-Jadczyk acknowledged that her group is considered "fringe."Knight-Jadczyk, 52, a Florida native, has been a psychic and a channeler.
She is now involved in experiments in what she calls "superluminal communication," which she described as involving "time loops" that would enable people to communicate with their former selves.
Knight-Jadczyk said she never imagined anyone outside her group would ever view "Pentagon Strike."
"The fact everybody's been sending it to his brother and his cousin, almost frenetically, reflects the fact that there is a deep unease," she said.
"They don't come out and say it. They don't want to be accused of being with terrorists, anti-American or anti-patriotic. But they still feel something's wrong."
Bret Dean of Fort Worth said he considers it "baloney" to question whether a plane hit the Pentagon. But he also believes that the government ignored warning of the attacks.
After posting a link to the video on his libertarian site, www.freedomunderground.org, Dean recorded more than 8 million hits. At least one came from inside the Defense Department, he said.
"I don't think the video is an instigator," said Dean, 45, a former casino worker. "It's a symptom. A lot of people don't trust the government's explanation because the government's classified all the information."
Asked if there were unreleased photographs of the attack that would convince the doubters, Zelikow, of the 9/11 commission, said, "No." "The question of whether American 77 hit the Pentagon is indisputable," Zelikow said. "One reason you tend to doubt conspiracy theories when you've worked in government is because you know government is not nearly competent enough to carry off elaborate theories. It's a banal explanation, but imagine how efficient it would need to be."