"unlike everything else that has been reported"
- Daily Press The statements of the witnessess, the FAA administrator, the Pentagon employees, and the C-130 pilot, condensed into the following compendium of industrial-strength extracts, were not selected because they are the most frequently ignored testimonies (which they are); but because they are mutually-compatible, non-contradictory, and convergent on a highly-plausible explanation of flights 77 and 93 that was already published in July of 2001 by James Hatfield: [...] According to counter-terrorism experts quoted in Germany's largest newspaper, [Bin Laden's] attack on Dubya might be a James Bond-like aerial strike in the form of remote-controlled airplanes packed with plastic explosives.
James Hatfield, July 3, 2001 |
Concordant also with the vast majority of Pentagon witness reports (including those lacking a C-130) and with the apparent rarity of debris in high-resolution post-impact images, this remote-controlled and explosives-packed hypothesis was, for me, "like a domino effect"---a really bad day for planes near Steve. 77 | C-130 Disaster Viewed From Arlington
Daily Press; Newport News; Sep 14, 2001; TERRY SCANLON Daily Press;
(Abstract):
[Pam Young's] brother, [Keith Wheelhouse], of Virginia Beach, spotted the planes first.
The second plane looked similar to a C-130 transport plane, [Keith Wheelhouse] said. He believes it flew directly above the American Airlines jet, as if to prevent two planes from appearing on radar - while at the same time - guiding the jet toward the Pentagon.
Wheelhouse's account of a second plane is unlike everything else that has been reported about the attack. Some initial reports on television said a second airliner might be headed for the Pentagon, but authorities later dismissed that. A Norfolk-based FBI agent interviewed Wheelhouse Wednesday evening.
A possible explanation for the second plane could be a plane landing at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport. The Pentagon is between the cemetery and the airport. But Wheelhouse insists he was not confused by other air traffic. Daily Press, September 14, 2001Hampton Roads Woman Says She Too, Saw Plane Following Jet That Hit Pentagon
Daily Press; Newport News; Sep 15, 2001; TERRY SCANLON Daily Press;
[Abstract]:
Kelly Knowles, a First Colonial High School alumnus who now lives in an apartment a few miles from the Pentagon, said some sort of plane followed the doomed American Airlines jet toward the Pentagon, then veered away after the explosion. At the same time, [Keith Wheelhouse] and his sister, Pam Young, who lives in Surry, were preparing to leave a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, which is less than a mile from the Pentagon, when they watched the jet approach and slam into the Pentagon. Both of them, as well as at least one other person at the funeral, insist that there was another plane flying near the hijacked jet.
Daily Press, September 15, 2001 Northern Virginia resident John O'Keefe was one of the many commuters who witnessed the attack on the Pentagon. [...] "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.
New York Lawyer, September 12, 2001 USAToday.com Editor Joel Sucherman saw it all: an American Airlines jetliner fly left to right across his field of vision as he commuted to work Tuesday morning.
[...] Off to the west, Sucherman saw another plane climb steeply and make a sharp turn. "I thought, 'Is this thing coming around to make a second attack? If there is another explosion, we're toast.'"
e-Week, September 13, 2001 [Scott P. Cook's] office is located on the fifth floor of the Portals building, at 1280 Maryland Avenue SW, Washington DC. It's the southernmost building at the end of 14th Street, right at the Tidal Basin and Maine Avenue.[...] As we watched the black plume gather strength, less than a minute after the explosion, we saw an odd sight that no one else has yet commented on. Directly in back of the plume, which would place it almost due west from our office, a four-engine propeller plane, which Ray later said resembled a C-130, started a steep decent [sic] towards the Pentagon.
Cloth Monkey [last updated November 1, 2001] Albert Hemphill: Within moments there was a very loud bang, which seemed to come from the direction of Henderson Hall. At least, all the heads turned towards Henderson. It is possible that this was a secondary explosion from the Pentagon or possibly an F-16 going supersonic. [...] The only large fixed wing aircraft to appear was a gray C-130, which appeared to be a Navy electronic warfare aircraft, he seemed to survey the area and depart in on a westerly heading. - Our Net Family [undated]
On a Metro train to National Airport, Allen Cleveland looked out the window to see a jet heading down toward the Pentagon. "I thought, 'There's no landing strip on that side of the subway tracks,' " he said. Before he could process that thought, he saw "a huge mushroom cloud. The lady next to me was in absolute hysterics."
Washingtonpost.com, September 12, 2001 |
Soon after the crash (Within 30 seconds of the crash) I witnessed a military cargo plane (Possibly a C-130) fly over the crash site and circle the mushroom cloud. My brother inlaw also witnessed the same plane following the jet while he was on the HOV lanes in Springfield. He said that he saw a jetliner flying low over the tree tops near Seminary RD in Springfield, VA. and soon afterwards a military plane was seen flying right behind it. I think this was also a reason for the false threat of another plane about to crash which caused rescuers to have to evacuate for a short time after the initial crash. I have done my research onthis and according to time magazine it took 24 minutes before Norad was supposedly notified about this particuliar jet and fighters were scrambling to intercept at that time. Isn't it odd how there is Not a single mention of this aircraft in ANY of the articles written about this crash? Also if you had not noticed... There is not a single picture or live footage of the actual jet prior to its crash at the Pentagon. Nor is there any of the one that crashed in Pennsylvania. But if Anyone who rides the metro-rail knows, there are plenty of Video cameras all around National airport at the parking Garages and the high level security buildings found all around Crystal city. (3 of which I have personally found pointed directly towards crystal city which would have given a great line of site shot of that jet prior to the crash as well as any other plane which might have been following it. I personally believe that the government new full well that this was about to happen and they are hiding something a lot bigger than they are willing to let out. I was interviewed at Washingtonpost.com and gave them my full story, but they did not print it as I have told you [see inset]. I also find it interesting that one of the planes engines in the pennsylvania crash was supposedly found 5 miles prior to the crash site (This information I'm unsure of). The only thing that I'm aware of that might cause that would be a heat seeking missle. A weapon which I am pretty familiar with form Ord.training. I'm not saying that the government new exactly what was about to happen, but I do believe that they are definitely hiding something here. Many of my friends in intelligence have said the same. I work in a Gov. building in DC., but my heart is right there with you and your team. I hope you and those who served with you are doing well. Take care. Allen Cleveland [NLA - undated copy per Eric Bart witness-comp .] Another Arlington [Cemetery] worker who declined to be interviewed in front of the media told a story that the military historians had not heard in the 244 interviews they had conducted through last week. The man said a mysterious second plane was circling the area when the first one attacked the Pentagon.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 12, 2001
Military Headquarters:
"We didn't know because our subordinates kept it secret from us
- it was classified!"
(October17th Surprise) C-130 Crew Saw Pentagon Strike, Official Confirms
Daily Press; Newport News; Oct 17, 2001; TERRY SCANLON and DAVID LERMAN Daily Press;
[Abstract]:
[Keith Wheelhouse] and at least two other witnesses to the Pentagon attack were troubled that Pentagon spokesmen had until now said they were unaware of a C-130 being in the area at the time. In the days immediately following the Sept. 11 hijackings, the Pentagon had no knowledge of the C-130's encounter, because all reports were classified by the Air National Guard, [!] [Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan] said. Daily Press, October 17, 2001 At 9.36 the national airport [Dulles] instructs a military C130 (Golfer 06) that has just departed Andrews air force base to intercept the flight and identify it. At 9.38 AA77 crashes into the south-west side of the Pentagon. The Guardian, Wednesday October 17, 2001 ... every morning at 9.30 they would have the message phone call - and it would involve the White House office of global communications, the pentagon press office, a media adviser, the people at central command, and sometimes the people in the State Deptartment - and their notion for that day was to coordinate the message. And after that they would talk to the Brits, so the message in London matched the message in Washington.
- Sam Gardiner, retired Air Force Colonel
(discussing Iraq war propaganda in the Danny Schechter documentary WMD, 2004)
Explosives Evident A personnel attorney at the Pentagon, [Gilah] Goldsmith was riding a shuttle bus to work on Tuesday, Sept. 11, when she learned of the attack on the World Trade Center. [...] "We saw a huge black cloud of smoke," she said, saying it smelled like cordite or gun smoke.
Jewish Bulletin News, September 21, 2001 WASHINGTON, D.C. --- The airliner crashed between two and three hundred feet from my office in the Pentagon, just around a corner from where I [Don Perkal] work.
I'm the deputy General Counsel, Washington Headquarters Services, Office of the Secretary of Defense. A slightly different calibration and I have no doubt I wouldn't be sending this to you. My colleagues felt the impact, which reminded them of an earthquake. People shouted in the corridor outside that a bomb had gone off upstairs on the main concourse in the building. No alarms sounded. I walked to my office, shut down my computer, and headed out. Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere."
Timothy McSweeney's, September 19, 2001
John Bowman, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and a contractor, was in his office in Corridor Two near the main entrance to the south parking lot. "Everything was calm,' Bowman said. "Most people knew it was a bomb. Everyone evacuated smartly. We have a good sprinkling of military people who have been shot at."
dcmilitary.com, September 14, 2001
Did Not CaptureHotel employees sat watching the film in shock and horror several times before the FBI confiscated the video as part of its investigation. It may be the only available video of the attack. The Pentagon has told broadcast news reporters that its security cameras did not capture the crash.
Gertzfile, September 21, 2001 (NLA) Velasquez says the gas station's security cameras are close enough to the Pentagon to have recorded the moment of impact. "I've never seen what the pictures looked like," he said. "The FBI was here within minutes and took the film." National Geographic, December 11, 2001 (NLA) CNN's Jamie MacIntyre: "witnesses told me the day this happened that the plane -American Airlines Flight 77 - came in extremely low, but I'm not sure I realized how low it was until I saw these sequence of pictures that CNN obtained from....uhhhh.....that were taken by a Pentagon security camera."
CNN, report and "sequence", March, 2002
A Lazy Holding Pattern? C-130 witness, Scott P. Cook:
"It was a 757 out of Dulles, which had come up the river in back of our building, turned sharply over the Capitol, ran past the White House and the Washington Monument, up the river to Rosslyn, then dropped to treetop level and ran down Washington Boulevard to the Pentagon." (op. cit.) C-130 witness, Allen Cleveland:
My brother inlaw also witnessed the same [C-130] following the jet while he was on the HOV lanes in Springfield. He said that he saw a jetliner flying low over the tree tops near Seminary RD in Springfield, VA. and soon afterwards a military plane was seen flying right behind it. (op. cit.) Tom Hovis (ref)
Being a former transport type (60's era) I cannot understand how that plane hit where it did giving the direction the aircraft was taking at the time. As most know, the Pentagon lies at the bottom of two hills from the west with the east side being next to the river at 14th street bridge. One hill is at the Navy Annex and the other is Arlington Cemetery. The plane came up I-395 also known as Shirley Hwy. (most likely used as a reference point.) The plane had been seen making a lazy pattern in the no fly zone over the White House and US Cap. Why the plane did not hit incoming traffic coming down the river from the north to Reagan Nat'l. is beyond me. Strangely, no one at the Reagan Tower noticed the aircraft. Andrews AFB radar should have also picked up the aircraft I would think. Nevertheless, the aircraft went southwest near Springfield and then veered left over Arlington and then put the nose down coming over Ft Myer picking off trees and light poles near the helicopter pad next to building. | 93 | Business jet, military cargo plane were in area of hijacked United Flight 93
By Bill Heltzel and Tom Gibb Two other airplanes were flying near the hijacked United Airlines jet when it crashed in Somerset County, but neither had anything to do with the airliner's fate, the FBI said yesterday. In fact, one of the planes, a Fairchild Falcon 20 business jet, was directed to the crash site to help rescuers. The request for the jet to fly low and obtain the coordinates for the crash explains reports by people in the vicinity who said a white or silver jet flew by moments after the crash.
A C-130 military cargo plane was also within 25 miles of the passenger jet when it crashed, FBI spokesman Bill Crowley said yesterday, but was not diverted.
Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001 Unanswered questions: The mystery of Flight 93
Independent.co.uk, August 13, 2002
The fate of United Airlines Flight 93 ... holds no mystery for Lee Purbaugh. He saw what happened with his own eyes. He was the only person present in the field where, at 10.06am, the aircraft hit the ground.
"There was an incredibly loud rumbling sound and there it was, right there, right above my head --- maybe 50ft up," [-] "It was only a split second but it looked like it was moving in slow motion, like it took forever. I saw it rock from side to side then, suddenly, it dipped and dived, nose first, with a huge explosion, into the ground. I knew immediately that no one could possibly have survived."
[...] Some conspiracy theorists will say that the plane was shot down by a missile, perhaps a heat-seeking missile that honed in on one of the plane's engines - a theory possibly substantiated by the 2,000yd flight of the 1,000lb engine part, but arguably refuted by consistent eye-witness accounts, including Lee Purbaugh's, that when last sighted the plane was not emitting smoke.
Others might say, as they have done about a TWA flight that fell to the sea in 1996 after taking off from New York, that the plane was a victim of electromagnetic interference. In the case of the TWA flight, the argument, put forward in a series of exhaustive articles written in the New York Review of Books by the Harvard academic Elaine Scarry, is that it happened accidentally. However, as Scarry's articles relate, documentation abounds showing that the Air Force and the Pentagon have conducted extensive research on "electronic warfare applications" with the possible capacity intentionally to disrupt the mechanisms of an aeroplane in such a way as to provoke, for example, an uncontrollable dive. Scarry also reports that US Customs aircraft are already equipped with such weaponry; as are some C-130 Air Force transport planes. The FBI has stated that, apart from the enigmatic Falcon business jet, there was a C-130 military cargo plane within 25 miles of the passenger jet when it crashed. According to the Scarry findings, in 1995 the Air Force installed "electronic suites" in at least 28 of its C-130s - capable, among other things, of emitting lethal jamming signals. | THE C-130 DOMINO EFFECT | | At 9:25, [Jane] Garvey [FAA], in an historic and admirable step, and almost certainly after getting an okay from the White House, initiated a national ground stop, which forbids takeoffs and requires planes in the air to get down as soon as reasonable. The order...applied to virtually every single kind of machine that can takeoff - civilian, military, [and] law enforcement.
Time, September 14, 2001 |
Lt. Col. Steve O'Brien started his day at the controls of a Minnesota [Air] National Guard C-130 cargo plane. He and his crew were heading back to the Twin Cities after moving military supplies around the Caribbean. About 9:30 a.m., O'Brien throttled the lumbering plane down a runway at Andrews Air Force Base, just southeast of the District of Columbia."When we took off, we headed north and west and had a beautiful view of the Mall," he said. "I noticed this airplane up and to the left of us, at 10 o'clock. He was descending to our altitude, four miles away or so. That's awful close, so I was surprised he wasn't calling out to us. "It was like coming up to an intersection. When air traffic control asked me if we had him in sight, I told him that was an understatement - by then, he had pretty much filled our windscreen. Then he made a pretty aggressive turn so he was moving right in front of us, a mile and a half, two miles away. I said we had him in sight, then the controller asked me what kind of plane it was. "That caught us up, because normally they have all that information. The controller didn't seem to know anything." O'Brien reported that the plane was either a 757 or 767 and its silver fuselage meant it was probably an American Airlines jet. "They told us to turn and follow that aircraft - in 20-plus years of flying, I've never been asked to do something like that. With all of the East Coast haze, I had a hard time picking him out. "The next thing I saw was the fireball. It was huge. I told Washington the airplane has impacted the ground. Shook everyone up pretty good. I told them the approximate location was close to the Potomac. I figured he'd had some in-flight emergency and was trying to get back on the ground to Washington National. Suddenly, I could see the outline of the Pentagon. It was horrible. I told Washington this thing has impacted the west side of the Pentagon." O'Brien asked the controller whether he should set up a low orbit around the building but was told to get out of the area as quickly as possible. "I took the plane once through the plume of smoke and thought if this was a terrorist attack, it probably wasn't a good idea to be flying through that plume." [!!] He flew west, not exactly sure where he was supposed to land. [!] Somewhere over western Pennsylvania, O'Brien looked down at a blackened, smoldering field. "I hoped it was just a tire fire or something, but when I checked with Cleveland center, he told me he'd just lost a guy off the scope pretty close to where we saw it. By then, we were able to patch in AM radio, so we heard about all the planes. It was like a domino effect - a really bad day for airplanes."
Minnesota Star-Tribune, September 11, 2002 |
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