I've been reading some info recently on the explosion at the Pentagon on 9/11. I think Ron may have posted some info earlier. Here's a link to a lot of info:http://www.apfn.org/apfn/flight77.htm

I first read about doubts concerning the official version in the chapter on Flight 77 in Griffin's, The New Pearl Harbor.

One question that sticks out in my mind is why wasn't the plane shot down? Surely the Pentagon is protected with a highly sophisticated missile defense system. What wasn't the approaching plane fired at?
The other is, why is the hole in the Pentagon wall shown in the pictures before the building collapsed, so small. If it was a 757, I'd expect a much bigger hole.

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Not only is it a rumor, it's BS. The pentagon was NOT in the business of shooting down civilian aircraft at the time.

My brother was outside the Pentagon at the time of the attack and saw it with his own two eyes, unless you have a doctor in France that will discredit his eyesight (and many others) I'll take his word for it.

I bet you looked at that old BS email and said hmmmm very interesting. Did that come from a CBS account BTW.

Med Mech: I have no idea what e-mail you refer to. My thoughts were spurred from Griffin's book.

There's nothing in the photographs that looks like the impact of a 757 to me. I don't see any place where the wings and engines would have hit the building on the exterior. Griffin tackles the idea that the wings folded back as the nose hit. It doesn't make any sense, particularly with the weight of the engines on the wings. The wings would have continued forward as the nose slowed when it hit the building. When the planes hit the Towers, there was clear evidence of the wings penetrating the structure.
I suppose the picture of the large circular hole in the interior could be a result of an engine piercing the structure.

Griffin's book does refer to a standard procedure for aircraft to be scrambled if a scheduled flight deviated from its standard path.
I find it hard to believe that the Pentagon was not defended with a a missile system of some sort. It had also been known for a fairly long time that two planes had been flown into the Twin Towers as this plane approached the Pentagon.

I read the Snopes piece. It doesn't answer all the questions. At one point it states that there is a hole where the aircraft pierced the building but it is behind the water and smoke in the photograph. Perhaps, but they don't give any evidence to support that claim.

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The Pentagon was and is defended by a missle defense system the order was not yet givin to shoot down civilian airliners. again many people saw with the eyes that god gave them a 757.

Like you said before never underestimate the power of the internet.

Seems odd to me. Two hijacked planes already hit Twin Towers. Hijacked plane approaching a building defended with missiles. Plane is tracked for quite a few minutes. No action taken to defend the Pentagon.

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1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

What seems odd is that you refuse to acknowledge that real people that were actually there saw it in real life.

Maybe The Men in Black used the memory eraser and flashed programed some 11,000 people...yea that's it.

While the conspiracy theory is clearly BS, I think Kerry was asking why the pentagon was not defended when they had (albeit short) advanced warning. Could they not react quickly enough? If so, does anyone know why not?

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AFTER THE ATTACKS: SKY RULES; Pentagon Tracked Deadly Jet But Found No Way to Stop It
By MATTHEW L. WALD (NYT) 1064 words

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 -- During the hour or so that American Airlines Flight 77 was under the control of hijackers, up to the moment it struck the west side of the Pentagon, military officials in a command center on the east side of the building were urgently talking to law enforcement and air traffic control officials about what to do.

But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation's airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners' having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. Even if they had been there sooner, it is not clear what they would have done to thwart the attack.

The Federal Aviation Administration has officially refused to discuss its procedures or the sequence of events on Tuesday morning, saying these are part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's inquiry. But controllers in New England knew about 8:20 a.m. that American Airlines Flight 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had probably been hijacked. When the first news report was made at 8:48 a.m. that a plane might have hit the World Trade Center, they knew it was Flight 11. And within a few minutes more, controllers would have known that both United 175 (the second plane to hit the World Trade Center) and American 77 (which hit the Pentagon) had probably been hijacked.

Flight 77, which took off from Dulles International Airport outside Washington shortly after 8 a.m., stayed aloft until 9:45 a.m. and would have been visible on the F.A.A.'s radar system as it reversed course in the Midwest an hour later to fly back to Washington. The radars would have observed it even though its tracking beacon had been turned off.

By 9:25 a.m. the F.A.A., in consultation with the Pentagon, had taken the radical step of banning all takeoffs around the country, but fighters still had not been dispatched. At that same time, the government learned from Barbara Olson, a political commentator who was a passenger on Flight 77, that the plane had been hijacked. She twice called her husband, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, on her cellular phone to tell him what was happening.

Despite provisions for close communication between civilian and military traffic officials, and extensive procedures for security control over air traffic during attacks on the United States, it does not appear that anyone had contemplated the kind of emergency that was unfolding.

The procedures, first devised in the 1950's, cover how to send fighter planes to shadow a hijacked plane on its way, perhaps, to Cuba. They tell how to intercept a plane entering the nation's airspace through the air defense zone along the Atlantic Coast, but not what to do with kamikazes.

''There is no category of 'enemy airliners,' '' a recently retired F.A.A. official said. He and others said they could not recall any instance in which a military plane fired on a civilian one in the United States, though in 1983 a F-4 Phantom fighter that scrambled to intercept an unidentified target off Cherry Point, N.C., accidentally rammed it. That plane was a private twin-engine propeller plane on the way home from the Bahamas, carrying seven people.

The United States is signatory to a treaty that appears to bar using force against civilian airplanes. Congress has voted against letting the military shoot down suspected drug planes trying to cross into the United States. Whether those restrictions would apply to a plane showing clearly hostile intent has never been spelled out. An F.A.A. spokeswoman said earlier this week that there was a policy for shooting down civilian airliners but would not divulge it.

And shooting down a jet as large as a Boeing 757 or 767 raises other problems. One F.A.A. official said, ''If you keep it from hitting a government building, it's going to hit something else.'' That was clearly true for the planes that hit the World Trade Center, which flew over other parts of Manhattan, and the plane that hit the Pentagon, which flew over urbanized Northern Virginia.

John S. Carr, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers' union, said: ''Our system of unfettered access and freedom has limitations in terms of responding to a case like this. We've created a system for transportation, not defense.''

Today officials were trying to reconstruct that system. Ronald Reagan National Airport -- with approaches that are within a few hundred yards of the Pentagon and just seconds, at jet speeds, from the heart of Washington -- remains closed, ''temporarily and indefinitely.'' Private planes were allowed to resume flying at 4 p.m. today, but only under air traffic control.

Combat aircraft are patrolling the skies; an aircraft carrier is at sea off Washington and another off New York to provide air defense.

Military officials have offered vague descriptions in public about their procedures against airborne terrorists. In a confirmation hearing on Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Richard B. Myer of the Air Force, who has been nominated to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not know whether the F.A.A. had contacted the Pentagon about the hijackings.

''When it became clear what the threat was, we did scramble fighter aircraft, AWACS, radar aircraft and tanker aircraft to begin to establish orbits in case other aircraft showed up in the F.A.A. system that were hijacked,'' he said. He added that once the fighters were aloft, it was not necessary to use force.

In part, that was because American Airlines Flight 77 had already hit the Pentagon, and the hijacked flight from Newark, its target unknown, had crashed in Pennsylvania.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, said today that the Pentagon had been tracking that plane and could have shot it down if necessary; it crashed about 35 minutes after the Pentagon crash.

Air defense unprepared for attack, report says
By Alan Levin and Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Military and aviation officials reacted to the Sept. 11 hijackings through a fog of bad information and poor communication that caused serious lapses in the nation's defense, the commission investigating the attacks will report today.

The report offers the most in-depth look so far at how the nation's military command was so unprepared for attacks using aircraft as missiles that "the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen." (Related item: Sept. 11 attacks timeline)

Among the findings, according to a copy of the report obtained Wednesday by USA TODAY:

• NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, mistakenly sent jets assigned to guard the nation's capital to positions over the Atlantic Ocean.

• An order by Vice President Cheney to shoot down hijacked jets did not reach pilots for at least 30 minutes, long after United Airlines Flight 93, the last of the four hijacked jets, crashed in Pennsylvania. Had the passengers on Flight 93 not revolted against the terrorists, the jet probably would have reached Washington.

• The Federal Aviation Administration was slow to notify the military about the hijackings and to warn air traffic controllers around the country to be on guard for other hijacked jets.

• FAA controllers lost track of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, for 36 minutes because of a glitch in a radar system. It was hijacked hundreds of miles east of Washington, but controllers did not spot it on radar until it was only five minutes from the building.

A spokesman for NORAD declined to comment on the report. Spokesman Michael Kucharek said Gen. Ralph Eberhart, NORAD's commander, will address the report's findings before the commission today.

The FAA issued a statement defending its actions that day, saying its managers and controllers had acted valiantly to shut down the aviation system. The agency has improved cooperation with NORAD, it said. "None of us ever wants to see another September 11th, which is why the FAA is committed to doing everything in its power to prevent another similar attack," the statement said.

Officials at FAA have long insisted that they kept NORAD apprised on Sept. 11. Several FAA officials told USA TODAY in 2002 that military representatives participated in conference calls and sat in at the agency's headquarters as information about the flights was being discussed.

The commission's report stops short of saying that Flight 77 could have been shot down before it hit the Pentagon. Cheney did not issue an order to shoot down hijacked jets until well after Flight 77 crashed.

Much of the report paints a picture of widespread confusion. The FAA told NORAD at one point that American Airlines Flight 11 was headed toward Washington, and a commander ordered fighter jets to intercept it. Flight 11, the first jet to be hijacked, had already hit the World Trade Center in New York.

Cheney told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a recorded phone call that he'd given an order to shoot down three jets over Washington. "And it's my understanding that they've already taken a couple aircraft out," he told Rumsfeld.

Bare in mind that the same system was in place 9 years before 9-11.

Medmech, thanks for that. It seems like there was a communcations breakdown, at least, otherwise Cheney's orders to shoot the aircraft down may well have been carried out.

I wonder if all (large) aircraft could be fitted with a remote self-destruct device? The all that would be needed is the transmission of the code, at the right moment. The advantage of this is that it is instantaneous and could be done over the best area.

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Call me crazy, but I don't think it's a good idea to make it easier to shoot down or detonate airplanes full of civilians.

Also, who here thinks a few men with boxcutters could take down another airliner? I tend to think passengers will no longer sit still and hope for the best in a hijacking.

Certainly wouldn't call you crazy . . . we build them to stay up not be brought down in other than controlled situations. As to a few people with boxcutters . . . not too likely. Though lessons learned in life often dim as time passes, we still learn and remember survival basics. I believe this would be under the latter.

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You could be right about the self-destruct idea. How about remote control, then? A signal that makes the aircraft adopt a holding pattern?

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Anything that takes control from the pilot means somebody not on-scene has control. The thought of some screwball on the ground controlling an aircraft full of people is not reassuring. You'd have to have extraordinary decision-making at the lowest level possible to make it work. Say a 747 on approach at Dulles veers off course and its 30 seconds from Congress. Or Parliament or a chemical factory. Who's gonna make the decision about that moment?

Better to protect the pilot and let him/her do the job they train for.