The Eleventh Day

by Anthony Summers

  Though not struck by an airplane, Building 7 was catastrophically damaged by chunks of debris from the collapsing North Tower, caught fire, and burned all day. When it in turn fell, WTC 7 became the first known instance in the world of a tall, modern, steel-reinforced building brought down apparently as a result of fire.

  It was, The New York Times reported later, “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world”—had its collapse not been eclipsed by that of the Twin Towers themselves. The Times said engineers expected to spend months piecing together the “disturbing puzzle.” In the event, it took the NIST’s experts seven years.

  According to the NIST, in its 2008 report, WTC 7 was brought down by “fire-induced progressive collapse,” a chain of events technically unlike those in the Twin Towers, beginning with the failure of one key structural column. The NIST “found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.”

  There has long been witness testimony militating against the notion that the WTC 7 collapse was triggered by explosions. Fire Department interviewees recalled having anticipated the collapse of WTC 7 from early in the afternoon of September 11. Frank Fellini, a senior chief, said the building was a “major concern” because of the hit it took from the fall of the North Tower. “When it fell, it ripped steel out from between the third and sixth floors … We were concerned that the fires on several floors and the missing steel would result in the building collapsing. So for the next five or six hours we kept firefighters from working anywhere near that building.”

  “Early on,” Deputy Chief Peter Hayden said, “we saw a bulge in the southwest corner … a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors … by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.”

  Daniel Nigro, who succeeded as head of the department following the death of Chief Ganci, said he personally ordered a collapse zone cleared around the building three hours before the building tumbled, at 5:20 P.M.

  Conspiracy theories on the fate of WTC 7, Nigro wrote in 2007, “are without merit.”

  ON, THEN, to the idea that the Pentagon was hit not by American Flight 77 but by a missile. Food for that thought has been photographs taken after the initial explosion—and before the collapse of a major portion of the facade more than half an hour later. The pictures appear to doubters to show a hole, amidst the smoke, only some eighteen feet wide.

  A Boeing 757 like American’s Flight 77 has a wingspan of 124 feet 6 inches and a tail 44 feet 6 inches tall. “How could such a big airplane have created such a small hole?” asked Dr. Griffin. The missile theory, he thought, “fits the physical evidence much better.”

  The apparent size of the hole does at first glance seem odd. It seems curious, too, that photographs do not show sizable airplane debris scattered around outside the building. To draw conclusions from those visual oddities, however, is to ignore the mass of eyewitness testimony from people who saw a low-flying airliner roar toward the Pentagon. It is to reject a wealth of other evidence and to spurn the opinion of technical experts.

  As in New York, no formal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigation report was issued on the Pentagon crash, because the disaster was treated from the start as a crime scene. There could and probably should have been one, not least because—unlike the scene in the aftermath of the New York attacks—there was initially a crash site that air transport investigators could have examined. Both the remains of the airplane and rubble from the building collapse, however, were removed early on—the airplane debris reportedly to an FBI warehouse—for storage as evidence.

  The nearest thing to an investigative probe into the Pentagon strike is the 2003 report by a team from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Its title, “The Pentagon Building Performance Report,” reflects the group’s brief—to focus on the damage done to the nation’s defense headquarters. The seven-month probe, however, inevitably also involved close study of the crash itself, and the resulting report reflects absolutely no doubt that the catastrophe was caused by an airliner.

  To say otherwise, says Professor Mete Sozen, a member of the ASCE team, is “hogwash.” “To look at only the photograph of what some people see as the ‘small’ entry hole in the facade,” Sozen told the authors in 2010, “is to see only part of the reality. Much of the facade is obscured by smoke in the photos, and our work—judging by the locations of broken or heavily damaged columns in the wall—showed that the real damage consisted of a ragged series of holes stretching to a width of some ninety feet.”

  Why, then, do the photographs taken before the facade’s collapse not show more clearly the virtually wingtip-to-wingtip entry gashes seen when similar planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11?

  Another, long-ago, New York City plane crash may offer an insight. A plane that smashed into the Empire State Building in dense fog in 1945—a B-25 bomber with a sixty-five-foot wingspan—created a hole only twenty feet wide. The Empire State is a reinforced masonry structure, as is the Pentagon—which was built during World War II. The walls of both make substantial obstacles, more substantial than the relatively fragile glass and steel sides of the Twin Towers.

  Here is what the ASCE team’s Sozen, professor of structural engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, believes happened to the Boeing that smashed into the Pentagon:

  Think of the external shell of the plane as a sausage skin, and the function of the structural frame as being mainly to contain the internal pressure at altitude. The plane’s structure doesn’t have much strength. What creates the power generated on impact is what we call its “mass and velocity.” And much of the mass in the case of a Boeing 757–200 is in the fuel-filled wings.

  On September 11, the Boeing was reported to have approached the Pentagon flying very low, just a few feet off the ground, at some 530 mph. Eyewitnesses said the right engine hit a portable generator on the ground outside, the left engine a steam vault. Then the nose cone hit the limestone facade, and the facade’s columns cut into the fuselage. The right wingtip, which hit next, would have been cut by the columns. But when parts of the fuel-filled wing close to the fuselage impacted—given the speed at which it was traveling and its greater mass—it was the columns that would have been destroyed or badly damaged. The same series of events would have happened when the left wing impacted (though in reverse order because of the angle at which the plane hit the building). That is why the gash in the facade of the building was not as wide as the wingspan of the airplane.

  By the time the aircraft’s mass had penetrated the building—by about its own length—it had been transformed into a violent flow of small and large projectiles of solid and fluid that ricocheted off the internal parts of the building. The ensuing fire, we concluded, devoured the flammable part of the airplane’s debris inside the building. The Boeing’s tall tail and rudder assembly would have been shattered when it impacted with the edges of building slabs on the upper levels.

  That may seem a compelling, credible explanation of what befell Flight 77. The skeptics, however, have long made much of the supposed lack of debris at the crash site. Photographs published in “Pentagon 9/11,” the account of the day’s events by the Defense Department’s Historical Office, however, do depict some debris outside the building: mangled pieces of metal, one clearly marked “AA,” for American Airlines, another evidently a part of the fuselage bearing part of the airline’s livery, and smaller material—fragments rather than chunks.

  The ubiquitous Griffin has suggested that evidence may have been “planted.” Dr. Fetzer, cofounder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, went further and suggested how the planting may have been achieved. “Don’t be taken in,” he said. “Debris begins to show up on the completely clean lawn in short order, which might have been dropped from a C-130 … or placed there by men in suits who were photographed carrying debris with them.”

  Preposterous. Reports, and photographs taken before removal by the
FBI, reflect the finding of significant remains of the aircraft inside the building: seats, including one from the cockpit still attached to a piece of floor, cockpit circuitry, pieces of Rolls-Royce turbofan engines, landing gear, pieces of the nose gear, a wheel hub, a piece of the nose cone, a piece “the size of a refrigerator,” a tire. Some parts, reportedly, bore Boeing part numbers consistent with the airplane that crashed.

  Try telling Tamara “T” Carter that the debris at the Pentagon was planted. Carter, herself an American Airlines flight attendant, went to the scene two days later as a volunteer to serve refreshments to the cleanup crews. She has recalled seeing recognizable parts of a plane, the internal American upholstery with which she was familiar—and body parts. She and family members were also shown photographs of items that they might recognize, jewelry, clothing, and the like. “I’m here to tell you,” she said a year later, “that my friend’s arm with a bracelet exactly like this”—Carter held up a bracelet—“was found. We buried it in Washington, D.C.”

  The friend, a close friend, had been fellow flight attendant Renee May, who on 9/11 got through by phone from Flight 77 to alert authorities to the hijacking. To Carter, who knew all the crew members killed that day, the loss was personal. “I saw pieces of our American Airlines 757,” she said. “If anyone thinks the plane did not go in there, then what happened to all my friends and where did all those body parts come from? Every crew member’s body was found.”

  A random check supports this. Renee May’s ashes were divided between her parents, who scattered them on the sea off San Diego, and her fiancé on the East Coast. Fellow flight attendants, married couple Kenneth and Jennifer Lewis, were interred in Virginia. Another colleague, Michele Heidenberger, was buried in Maryland. Their captain, Charles Burlingame, lies in Arlington Cemetery.

  Such facts, in the view of the authors, render the claims voiced by the skeptics outrageous, cruel insults to the memory of the dead. Human remains were painstakingly collected and identified for all but five of Flight 77’s sixty-four passengers and crew, and for all of the 125 people killed at the Pentagon. Have the “no-planers” seen the horrific photographs of bodies and body parts at the Pentagon, as carbonized and petrified in death as the victims of the eruption that destroyed Pompeii? No retrieval of human remains was more poignant than that of one of the children on board.

  “A stillness fell over the recovery workers as a child’s pajamas were pulled from the debris,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel William Lee, a chaplain. A Barbie doll was pulled out next, followed by the foot of a child—probably part of the torn remains of eight-year-old Zoe Falkenberg, who had been traveling on the plane with her parents and little sister, Dana. Dana, aged three, was one of the five victims for whom remains were not identified.

  In light of such realities, Griffin’s musings—along with those of others, such as Professor Dewdney and a woman named Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who runs an Internet site called “The Cassiopaean Experiment”—might be thought to sink to the level of obscenity. The professor expressed doubt that “the bodies of the crew and passengers were really found in the Pentagon wreckage. “For all we know,” he opined, “human remains from two different sites could have been combined by FBI and military personnel.”

  So it goes, in the face of all the evidence. Griffin, Dewdney, and Knight-Jadczyk have insisted for years that phone calls reportedly made from the hijacked planes—including Flight 77—are fabrications. His research, Dewdney wrote, showed that technologically, “cell phone calls alleged to have been made by passengers were essentially impossible” in 2001.

  The suggestion is that the two conversations said to have been conducted from Flight 77—by flight attendant Renee May to her mother and by Barbara Olson to her husband, Theodore, the solicitor general—are official concoctions.

  The issue of whether it was possible to make cell phone calls from airliners at the time turns out to be irrelevant. Detailed AT&T records now available make it clear that Mrs. Olson and May used seatback phones, not cell phones.

  In a fatuous, callous account, Knight-Jadczyk suggests that Barbara Olson did not die on Flight 77, but may “have had a little plastic surgery and is waiting for Ted on that nice Caribbean island they have always wanted to retire to.”

  Theologian Griffin, who likes to write and talk about “voice transformers” and “voice morphing,” techniques of flawlessly imitating voices that he thinks may have been used by the authorities on 9/11, does not emerge as having any consideration for the bereaved. Theodore Olson’s account of having received calls from his wife on the morning of 9/11, he alleged, was only a claim.

  “Either Ted Olson lied or else he, like many other people that day, was fooled by fake calls.” The notion that the solicitor general told the truth, he said, “is based on the assumption that his wife Barbara Olson really died, and that he truly loved her.”

  The remains of Olson’s wife, Barbara, were found in the ruins of the Pentagon, scattered in three separate locations. “It took a long time to provide an identification,” her husband has said. “But finally they did release the remains of Barbara. And she’s buried up in Door County, Wisconsin … because she loved that place so much. And she’s there now.”

  Absent evidence for his claim about the Olson calls, Griffin resorted to innuendo. One “cannot ignore the fact,” he wrote, “that the information about Barbara came from Ted Olson, that he was working for the Bush-Cheney administration.” It is the notion on which Griffin and the rest harp over and over—in his words that there is “overwhelming” supporting evidence that 9/11 was “an inside job.” There was “a prima facie case for assuming that the Bush administration was involved.”

  THE SKEPTICS MAKE much of a document issued exactly a year before the attacks by the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing group that included men soon to hold senior posts in the Bush administration—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and George Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor of Florida.

  The paper, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” envisaged the removal of “regional aggressors” in the Middle East, and a continuing U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf—“unquestioned military pre-eminence.” Achieving such ambitions would be a lengthy process, the document noted, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

  The luminaries of the New American Century group, all now appointed to positions in the new administration, got their catalyzing event within eight months. In a diary entry on the night of the attacks, President Bush reportedly called 9/11 “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century.” Later, he would draw the parallel to 1941 in public. The catastrophe of September 11 did predispose the American public for great military initiatives abroad, wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq—to topple regional aggressor Saddam Hussein.

  The skeptics do not believe the September 11 attacks occurred by happenstance. They infer, rather, that those around Bush who yearned for “unquestioned military pre-eminence” must have been involved in 9/11. “Who benefits?” asked Griffin. “Who had the motive? Who had the means? Who had the opportunity? Certainly the U.S. government benefited immensely from 9/11 and cannot therefore be dropped from any rational list of suspect organizations.”

  MIHOP—Made It Happen On Purpose—adherents suggest that 9/11 was a false flag operation, a fabrication to justify foreign wars, and rattle off a string of supposed precedents. They cite U.S. provocation as having triggered the Mexican-American War of 1846, resulting in the acquisition of vast new territories from Texas to California. They point to the mysterious sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898. Though perhaps just a tragic accident, the sinking was used to justify the ensuing war with Spain—leading to U.S. dominance over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

  MIHOP disciples also recall the argument that the orthodox history of Pearl Harbor itself is incorrect, that—though President Franklin Roosevelt had prior intelligence of a coming attack—he took no p
reemptive action. Roosevelt’s motive? According to revisionist theory, he needed the day of Japanese “infamy” to ensure support for taking America into the war.

  MIHOP people cite, too, the Gulf of Tonkin incident during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Exposés have shown that the administration greatly exaggerated the facts about skirmishes in the gulf between North Vietnamese and U.S. ships in 1964. The inflated story was used, all the same, as pivotal justification for committing the United States to war in Vietnam.

  Those who think the false flag ploy may apply to 9/11 also pounced, within days of the attacks, on an authentic recent revelation. Documents made public just months earlier showed that, back in 1962, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had worked up plans to stage phony acts of terrorism—including the staged downing of a U.S. airliner—that could be blamed on Fidel Castro.

  The object, then, had been to provoke an American invasion of Cuba and—though the project never got beyond the planning stage—news of its existence led to fevered speculation among 9/11 skeptics. “We must wonder,” one Web theorist wrote, “if the inexplicable intelligence and defense failures [surrounding 9/11] claimed by U.S. government agencies are simply part of some elaborate cover story.”

  Wonder one may, but the authors have seen not a jot of evidence that anything like a false flag scenario was used on 9/11. Nor, after more than four years’ research, have we encountered a shred of real information indicating that the Bush administration was complicit in 9/11. Subjected to any serious probing, the suspicions raised by Professor Griffin and his fellow “truthers” simply vanish on the wind.

  The investigative writer David Corn, a longtime Washington editor of The Nation, was on many matters a harsh critic of the President and those around him. As a serious investigative writer who specialized in intelligence coverage, though, he had no time for the skeptics’ fancies. “I won’t argue,” he wrote six months after 9/11,