AIRLINER THAT HIT PENTAGON WAS GROUND INTO BOOK-SIZED PIECES: AUTHOR

By Peter Duveen

PETER'S NEW YORK, July 20, 2008--The absence of sizable pieces of aircraft debris after the alleged collision of an airliner with the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 was due to the strong masonry with which the Pentagon was constructed and the high speed of the aircraft, an author of a new book on the subject contends.

Patrick Creed, co-author with Rick Newman of "Firefight", which details the rescue efforts in the aftermath of fires in the Pentagon building on 9-11, said the absence of large pieces of aircraft debris was due to the fact that the airliner alleged to have caused the damage and fires in the building was traveling "500 miles per hour hitting a masonry building."

"The majority of the wreckage was inside the building," Creed explained, noting that most of the other wreckage was "the size of a book and smaller," and "didn't look much like plane debris." Creed also noted that in many airliner disasters, there is an attempt by the pilot save the plane, a scenario that he said would not have been followed by suicidal hijackers.

Creed made his remarks at an appearance with co-author Newman at Borders Books and Music in Fairfax, Virginia on June 4, soon after their book was released. A video recording of the event was televised by the cable news network C-SPAN today.

Newman explained how evidence was gathered that enabled government investigators to identify the passengers and hijackers. Newman said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) developed a "remarkably detailed diagram" that showed where each passenger was after the alleged crash.

Newman presented the FBI's argument of the whereabouts of the hijackers' bodies, saying that the "majority of the victims...ended up further into the building," while those of the hijackers were closer to the outside of the Pentagon. He said much of the material on the FBI's investigation was released to the pubic after the trial of alleged "terrorist" Zacarias Moussaoui.

Newman went into some detail regarding the recovery of the "black boxes"--reinforced containers containing flight data and cockpit voice recordings--from the aircraft debris in response to a question from the audience.

"The hunt for the black boxes was pretty important," he said. "Those black boxes could have told them a lot."

Newman said the black boxes, actually orange in color, were both recovered on September 14, three days after 9-11. Newman said a worker was taking what they thought was a piece of garbage over to a trash bin, when they were stopped by FBI agents, who wanted to take a closer look. The debris was identified as the badly damaged "black box," and led to the search for and recovery of the flight data recorder nearby, Newman said.

"The voice recorder was destroyed," and as a result investigators "were not able to reconstruct" what happened among the alleged hijackers, passengers and crew, Newman said. The data recorder was, however, preserved well enough to "reconstruct with good detail" information about the flight.

Some of Creed's and Newman's remarks were in response to a polite but persistent questioner who asked first about the current whereabouts of the aircraft wreckage and followed up with other questions. Creed ducked a question regarding the size of body parts that could survive the impact that left plane debris no larger than the size of a book, citing the sensibilities of the families of victims and of eyewitnesses that were in the audience.

Toward the end of their presentation, the duo asked those in the audience who were present at the Pentagon on 9-11, whether or not they believed an aircraft collided with the Pentagon on that day. It was in response to that question that some of the issues were raised about the wreckage of the alleged aircraft.

The U.S. government contends that 19 men of Middle Eastern extraction hijacked three airliners on September 11 and managed to guide them with uncanny accuracy over hundreds of miles into each of the twin towers of World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia. The government claims that a fourth airliner was also hijacked but went down in a rural field in Pennsylvania.

Critics of the government's version are many and varied, but the more robust of them contend that the government staged the entire 9-11 episode to use as the pretext to mount a campaign of military conquest in the oil-rich Middle East, and on the domestic front, to concentrate power in the military and executive branch of government at the expense of the average citizen by pushing through Congress so-called “anti-terrorist” measures that thwart constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

A freedom of information act filing to release serial numbers and other information that would positively link wreckage at the Pentagon with the commercial airliner alleged to have crashed into the building is currently being challenged by the government.

The event upon which this article is based may be viewed in its entirety at http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=9531&SectionName=&PlayMedia=No.

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Original article with photos and corrections may be found at http://www.petersnewyork.com/Pentagon911.htm.