Marc Abshire .../... was working this morning when he felt the blast of the explosion at the Pentagon. His office is on the D ring, near the eighth corridor, he said. "It shot me back in my chair. There was a huge blast. I could feel the air shock wave of it. I didn't know exactly what it was. It didn't rumble. It was more of a direct smack."
.../... Inside the Pentagon, the blast lifted Beans off the floor as he crossed a huge open office toward his desk. "You heard this huge concussion, then the room filled with this real bright light, just like everything was encompassed within this bright light," said Beans. "As soon as I hit the floor, all the lights went out, there was a small fire starting to burn." His friends were not so lucky. Not far away on the same floor, Beans' once familiar world had turned into a terrifying maze as well. Opening a door to the outer E-ring corridor, Beans saw waves of fire rolling towards him like surf on a beach. Turning back, he groped slowly back across the room on hands and knees. The sprinkler came on and that kept the smoke and heat down."
Down the hall from Yates, Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell, 40, had been at his desk in Room 2E486 since 6:30 a.m. .../... Birdwell walked out to the men's room in corridor 4, a move that saved his life. He had just taken three or four steps out of the bathroom when the building was rocked. "Bomb!" the Gulf War vet immediately thought as he was knocked down."I was driving down Washington Boulevard (Route 27) along the side of the Pentagon when the aircraft crossed about 200 yards (should be more than 150 yards from the impact) in front of me and impacted the side of the building. There was an enormous fireball, followed about two seconds later by debris raining down. The car moved about a foot to the right when the shock wave hit. I had what must have been an emergency oxygen bottle from the airplane go flying down across the front of my Explorer and then a second piece of jagged metal come down on the right side of the car.
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."
Stars and Stripes reporter Lisa Burgess was walking on the Pentagon's innermost corridor, across the courtyard, when the incident happened. "I heard two loud booms - one large, one smaller, and the shock wave threw me against the wall," she said.
LTC Victor Correa's office .../... was in the path of the Boeing 757 that crashed into the Pentagon on a sunny fall morning. He was walking over to talk to a co-worker in the next cubicle when he was knocked down by the impact. "I saw a fireball come over my head," said Correa, an Active Guard Reservist now assigned to Joint Chiefs of Staff, J-5. "The fireball was coming like a wind-cloud of smoke trailing it. I also noticed to my right the windows going out and coming back in. The fireball came in and out quick - the speed of lightning. As it went back, it left a cloud of smoke and started dropping. At that time the fire system went up." Being knocked down turned out to be a life-saver. (…) "We thought it was some kind of explosion. That somehow someone got in here and planted bombs because we saw these holes."
"We had one guy who was standing, looking out the window and saw the plane when it was coming in. He was in front of one of the blast-resistant windows," says Kirlin President Wayne T. Day, who believes the window structure saved the man's life. According to Matt Hahr, Kirlin's senior project manager at the Pentagon, the employee "was thrown about 80 ft down the hall through the air. As he was traveling through the air, he says the ceiling was coming down from the concussion. He got thrown into a closet, the door slammed shut and the fireball went past him," recounts Hahr. "Jet fuel was on him and it irritated his eyes, but he didn't get burned. Then the fireball blew over and the sprinklers came on, and he was able to crawl out of the closet and get out of the building through the courtyard."
Gilah Goldsmith, personnel attorney at the Pentagon. When she got to her office sometime around 9, she phoned her daughter and heard "an incredible whomp noise." It didn't seem so unusual since her office is situated near a narrow area where trucks sometimes come by and hit the wall." Goldsmith was told to evacuate. "We saw a huge black cloud of smoke," she said, saying it smelled like cordite, or gun smoke.
Sheila Moody, in Room 472, heard a whoosh and a whistle and she wondered where all this air was coming from. Then a blast of fire that left as fast as it came. She looked down and saw her hands aflame, so she shook them.
Mr. Murphy and Major Joe D. Baker were having a discussion in
Mr. Murphy's office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon's outermost
ring, the E-Ring, overlooking the helo-pad. With CNN on a TV monitor
across the room, they stopped their discussion when the news of the
World Trade Center attacks came on. After watching awhile, Mr. Murphy
asked Mr. Robert D. Hogue, his Deputy Counsel, to check with their administrative
clerk, Corporal Timothy J. Garofola, on the current security status
of the Pentagon. Garofola had just received an e-mail from the security
manager to all Department of Defense employees that the threat condition
remained "normal." He passed this information to Hogue, who stepped
back into the doorway of Mr. Murphy's office to relay the message. At
that instant, a tremendous explosion with what Mr. Murphy said was a
noise "louder than any noise he had ever heard" shook the room.
Mr. Murphy, who had been standing with his back to the window, was knocked
entirely across the room, while Hogue was jolted into his office.
Garofola's desk literally rose straight up several inches then slammed
down. The airplane had crashed almost directly below Mr. Murphy's
offices. The floor buckled at the expansion joint that ran between
the two offices and created a discernible step up between the two rooms.
The air was filled with dust particles, and the ceiling tiles fell,
leaving the lights dangling from their electrical connections; the building
was crumbling.
Note : this expansion joint is located on pillar row 11 and
the floor buckling is the fracture line on which the building will
collapse 40 mn later, leaving one of the two quoted offices
open to the air, clearly visible on many pictures of the
Pentagon's damage. The plane slided into the building, passing
right in the middle of the section where the steel shoring portico
is visible on the picture.
"The plane exploded after it hit, the tail came off and it began burning immediately."
Note : the meaning of the word "it" in "it began burning" is unfortunately
unprecise. It could be "the plane", or "the tail" or just "various things".
"The airliner crashed between two and three hundred feet from my office in the Pentagon, just around a corner from where I work. .../... 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."
Danny Pfeilstucker is a commissioning agent for John J. Kirlin Inc. .../...
Around 9:30 a.m., Mr. Pfeilstucker and a co-worker
got orders to check a hot-water leak in a third-floor office on the
western side. After doing so, he stepped off an elevator on the second
floor in Corridor 4, ladder in hand. Suddenly the walls and the ceiling
began to collapse around him. The lights went out. "It went from light
to dark to orange to complete black," Mr. Pfeilstucker says. "It was
so dark I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face."Within seconds,
his left leg buckled. Unable to grab on to anything, he was thrust 70
feet down the corridor and into a tiny telephone closet halfway down
the hallway connecting E Ring and A Ring. All I know is that the blast
must have pushed open the steel door to the closet," says Mr.
Pfeilstucker, who had been 40 feet away from the plane's point of
impact. He remembers shutting the door and trying to stand up, not
understanding what had just happened. "I thought it was some sort of
a construction blast," Mr. Pfeilstucker says. "Or maybe there was a
helicopter accident." His hard hat and work goggles were blown away.
His ladder also had disappeared. (…) The fire sprinklers came on as
the temperature shot up.Then he smelled jet fuel and smoke. The putrid
odor was seeping into the closet."It was this odor that I can't describe,
but one that I'll never forget, that's for sure," Mr. Pfeilstucker
says. "It was so hard to breathe. I didn't think I was going to make
it out.
Note : the yellow arrow on the image is in "corridor 4", and shows
M. Pfeilstucker's move, starting near the elevators, towards ring A.
Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer, U.S. Navy (Retired) : "At exactly 0943, the entire command center exploded in a gigantic orange fireball, and I felt myself being slammed to the deck by a massive and thunderous shock wave. It felt to me as if the blast started at the outer wall, blowing me forward toward Commander Dunn's desk. I never lost consciousness, and though the entire space was pitch black, I sensed I was on fire."
"It wasn't like a rumble, it was just - boom," said Tom Van Leunen of the Navy Public Affairs Office. "It was shocking. .../... It immediately put you on your heels, in fact in my case, actually, it kind of knocked me down."
Security officer John Yates was picked up and hurled 30 feet. Sgt. Maj. Tony Rose, punched into a ceiling column, watched as the glass in the C Ring windows spidered into tiny cubes. The sound erupted a heartbeat later, a monstrous boom and crunch like a thousand file cabinets toppling at once. To demographer Betty Maxfield, the room seemed to freeze, intact, for a moment, then in slow motion the computers clicked off and the lights failed and a fireball rolled through the cubicle farm like a wave, with bulbous head and tapered tail, and as it passed, everything around it burst into flames. Cabinets overturned, partitions exploded, ceiling tiles burned and danced and fell with their metal frames. The air boiled.
Discussion
Some themes and observations in these witnesses accounts could hardly been explained in another way than a blast created by high explosives, probably an anti-bunker shaped charge:
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been in charge of writing a report on the Pentagon's damage. It can be downloaded in PDF format here .
This report clearly states that a Boeing 757 impacted the building around pillar 14 A, punched a hole in the front of the building, broke some columns, disintegrated into small pieces, and terminated in a "punch out" hole in the external wall of the C ring. Here is an extract of this report.
Most likely, the wings of the aircraft were severed as the aircraft penetrated the facade of the building. Even if portions of the wings remained intact after passing through the plane of the facade, the structural damage pattern indicates that the wings were severed before the aircraft penetrated more than a few dozen feet into the building. Ultimately, the path of the fuselage debris passed between columns 9C and 11D, which were separated by approximately 28 ft at a depth of approximately 65 ft along the aircraft’s path. Columns 9C and 11D were severely distorted but still in place: hence the wings clearly did not survive beyond this point.
At a depth of approximately 160 ft into the building, columns 3G, 3H, 3J, and 5J were damaged but still standing, although in the direct path of the fuselage. With a maximum spacing of less than 14 ft between pairs of these columns in a projection perpendicular to the path of the fuselage, it is highly unlikely that any significant portion of the fuselage could have retained structural integrity at this point in its travel. More likely, the fuselage was destroyed much earlier in its movement through the building. Therefore, the aircraft frame most certainly was destroyed before it had traveled a distance that approximately equaled the length of the aircraft.
The debris that traveled the farthest traveled approximately twice the length of the aircraft after entering the building. To come to rest at a point 310 ft from the area of impact at a speed of 780 ft/s, that debris experienced an average deceleration of approximately 30g.
This report is complete and detailed, except on some precise points on which it is silent. It includes many pictures, and an annex describing the damage on each of the damaged columns. I have copied/pasted some parts of this report below.
The various damage inside the building is explained in this report as the result of a crash of a Boeing 757. The "punch out" hole was made, according to the authorities, by the "nose of the plane" when exiting the external wall of the C ring. A lot of oddities, in the official version, and particularly in this report, show that this official version doesn't hold water, and that other hypotheses are necessary to explain the damage in the building.
The ASCE report contains the following diagram, showing the damage on the first floor of the Pentagon :
On this diagram, three lines have been drawn in purple :
The picture below shows some details from the outside of the above diagram of the damage at the entry point, around column 14 AA.
The impact point of the nose of the plane on the building is approximately between pillars 13 and 14. The first / second floor slab is totally destroyed : a "mezzanine" has been created. Note the pieces of concrete, still attached to the reinforcing rods, hanging from the slab in the 15-16 / AA-B pillars zone. It is hard to imagine how the impact could destroy this slab this way. As the wings folded, the two engines went closer to the plane's central axis (solid line). The port engine probably went inside the plane's belly and destroyed pillars 12 and 13. This engine was the nearest to the ground and impacted the low protection wall of the ventilation structure. It seems, looking at the picture and also by deduction from the internal building's damage, that the starboard engine entered the building between pillars 16 and 17, perhaps destroying them.
The picture below shows the zone of the E ring north of the expansion joint, where the building collapsed 40 mn after the crash.
Note the damage to the slab, the pieces of concrete hanging still attached by the reinforcing rods, around pillars 11 A and 11 B. Note that this damage cannot have been done by the building collapse, as reinforcing rods are never placed beetween two parts of such a building separated by an expansion joint. The slab and line of pillars at the south (the pillars are doubled on the 11 row) have disappeared in the building's collapse. The level of damage seems approximately the same as around pillar 15 A.
The two pictures below show columns 18 (left) and 19 (right), in the area of the first and second floors.
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The traces of the impact of the starboard wing is clearly visible, at the slab level. It nearly disconnected columns 18 and 19 from the concrete slab. What is very surprising is that column 18, at the first floor level, is leaning outwards. The foot of the column, not impacted, is not vertical. The top of the column, where only the reinforcing rods remain, has a typical "S" type curvature. It's likely that during the impact, the concrete had been damaged by the shock of the wing, perhaps the column bent inwards by the kinetic energy from the impact. After this impact, a shockwave occured from inside the building which bent this column outwards (West) and to the right (South), i.e. in the opposite direction of the plane's path of travel.
The destruction at the entry point, mainly the heavy damage created to the first floor ceiling slab and the deflection of the axis of column 18, bending outwards, account for what has already been deduced from image number 2 of the cctv (the white fireball) : the explosion of a bomb. This bomb was probably a shaped charge, with it's effects targeted towards an axis approximately same as the plane's axis. A shaped charge is designed to have a maximum of energy forced mostly in one direction. This would explain why the two cars (black van and white coupe) parked approximately 25 m from the explosion were not blown apart or set fire by this explosion. A witness, located probably at the same distance, on the other side - he said he saw the starboard wing fly over his head - stayed alive, though he was shocked and burnt.
The place where such a bomb would have exploded can be estimated, roughly, from the "equal damage" done to the first / second floor slab (yellow line) and from some shockwave effects (green arrows), on the sketch at right. |
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Another very interesting fact is the "upwards deflected slab." In the area centered around beam intersection 6 F, delimited by pillars E to G, 5 to 7, a cement slab on the ceiling of the first floor was deflected upwards. The pictures below show the zone of this evulsed slab : probably one of the more damaged inside the building.
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The annexes of the ASCE report describe the columns of this area this way :
This accounts for the impact of a very heavy, dense and resistant object. Being on the plane's impact axis, this damage proves that the plane contained a heavy mass which knifed through the building, bouncing off the ground level slab into the ceiling slab, then continuing forward beetween both slabs.
This second group of columns are column 1K North and its neighbour column 1K South. There has been localized damage on this zone, with pillar 1 K North bent and pillar 1 K South destroyed, but, curiously, the surrounding columns were not damaged. This also accounts for the impact of a small and resistant object. The column on the ground (1K south) seems to have suffered the maximum damage at mid height, where only the vertical reinforcing rods remain.
The hypothesis that the "punch out" hole in the external wall of the C ring into the "A-E drive" could have been done by "the nose of the plane" is completely stupid. The nose of a Boeing 757 is perhaps the weakest structure of the plane and, looking to the diagram, it is clear that the "nose" would have been stopped before the engines, at least by the last array of pillars that was crossed before this exit hole.
The picture below shows some details of the damage at the exit point (punch out) visible on the center.
The column on the left of the picture (5N wedge 2) is the last impacted pillar before the exit hole. It is severely damaged. The column on the right (3N wedge 2) is not impacted and is quasi intact.
This raises questions about the ASCE report, on which these two columns are painted in yellow. The legends on the ASCE damage diagram are :
Given the difference of aspect of these two columns, the fact that column 5N has been impacted, they should be plotted in different colors on the diagram : column 5N should be green (perhaps blue). It's even possible to ask if the "noni" sign on column 3N doesn't mean "non impacted"...
All this also accounts for the impact of a very heavy, dense and resistant object. It touched pillar 5N (wedge 2) and was deflected by it, exited through the external wall making the "punch out" hole. Out of it, in the AE Drive, remains of combustion could be found on the ground and also on the wall of the B ring (not destroyed).
Here is another diagram, drawn in the reverse direction (plane crashed at the lower right, "punch out" hole is at the higher left :
The two columns visible on the picture, (5N and 3N wedge 2), are on this diagram plotted in red, which means "damaged column".
Clearly, given what can be seen on the picture, column 5N has been severely damaged by the mass, which impacted it on it's side, before it exited the building through the hole. This damage appears to be mechanical but also thermal, as if it was done by an explosive. Note the two men in full decontamination clothes through the hole, near the wall of B ring.
The photo below is a close view of the right side of the "punch out" hole in the C ring wall.
The green arrow represents the direction of the shockwave which could be responsible for the fact that the grey bricks are damaged, on the wall's exterior surface, at a distance from the center of the hole much longer than the red bricks on the interior surface of the wall. This accounts for an explosion on the internal side of the wall, blowing outward spherically, i.e. in a direction roughly parallel to the wall's plane, up to these rows of grey bricks. If something like "the nose of the plane" or a debris flow had punched this hole, the edges would not have this look.
As a matter of fact, as mentionned in the ASCE report, the debris traveling on the second half of the path from entry point to "punch out" hole must be considered as a "flow" of aircraft debris, fuel, and other material (bricks, furniture, ...) collected all along the path. It seems impossible that such a flow of debris, sliding mainly at ground level on the slab of the first floor, could have made the nearly perfectly oval shaped "punch out" hole in the wall of ring C, the center of this hole being approximately at 5 feet (1.5 m) above ground level. There is also no reason for this flow to concentrate on the centerline of the trajectory, on the contrary it should have scattered and bounced all over the building's interior like a shotgun blast due to shocks against columns. The "punch out" hole has been made by a heavy object which impacted on it's center. Some fractions of a second later, a part of the flow of objects arrived to this hole position and exited through it to be found in AE drive, like for example a wheel rim.
Probably embarassed by this smoking gun, some "debunkers" web sites try to explain that this hole has been made by rescue teams to free people who were trapped inside, or even by these unfortunate people themselves. The "punch out" inscription would thus mean "Punched to let people out". This is a sad hoax. There is no report of such a rescue work, though such an action would have been widely commented. The photo at left below, extracted from the "After Action Report" of Arlington County firemen shows the hole before somebody wrote "Punch out" on the wall... Note that this picture, with the debris scattered across the hole, shows clearly that it couln't be an opening made by rescuers to free people trapped inside. Note also that there would have be no reason for such a hole to be digged with a perfectly oval shape, be it from inside or from outside the wall!
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But this picture of this hole, compared to the one at right, could also prove that somebody has a little enlarged the hole with a manual tool, or that the wall was washed with something like a high pressure water / sand cleaner: no trace of smoke is indeed visible on the picture at right. Who would have done that and why? I don't see another answer than "The FBI" and the reason could be that the smoke traces on the wall bricks were suspected of contamination and had to be removed.
There is another oddity in the ASCE report annex.
This third group of columns (circled by a yellow dotted line) are near the "punch out" hole. The only damage was noted to have been "made by the FBI" ! On the picture of the "punch out" hole and columns 5N, 3M, 3N shown above, only column 5N is highly damaged. Columns 3M and 3N seem to be intact. This picture would it have been shot after that column 5N was "damaged by the FBI," before they could do the same work on columns 3M and 3N ? And by the way, why would the FBI have damaged these columns, including one which is marked in red by a sign which could mean "non impacted" ? The more probable answer is that these columns were suspected to be contaminated at their surface and that the FBI wanted to make all traces of contaminants disappear. Oddly, the same operation was not done on columns around column 1K South.
An important questions arises from this problem of 3N-5N column damage : why, given the evident damage to column 5N, by thermal as well as kinetic energy, and the very good state of column 3N, are these two columns described in the same state in the ASCE damage report ? Would it be a trick to acredit the thesis of "the nose of the plane" responsible for the "punch out" hole in C ring wall ? Would it be due to some embarassement of the ASCE engineers who wrote the report : even if they are not specialists for uranium weapons effects on buildings, they have probably noticed the oddities in the damage that they had to analyse, including the damage "made by the FBI". The ASCE would thus be party, conscious or not, in covering-up the fact that there has been a dangerous contamination inside the building.
Leuren Moret wrote, in an article published on the web site "Centre for Research on Globalisation" :
DU [depleted uranium]is also used as ballast in commercial and military planes. On Sept. 11, a hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon. Dr. Janette Sherman, research associate with the Radiation and Public Health Project, had spoken a few days earlier at a Sept. 6 press conference in Hunters Point. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Sherman notified the Nuclear Information and Resource Service that she detected elevated levels of radiation in her home, located seven miles from the Pentagon. Dr. Sherman still had a gamma meter she had borrowed for her visit to Hunter’s Point. The EPA, the FBI, and other federal agencies, including HMRU (Hazardous Materials Response Units), USAR teams, the local fire department and the Virginia HAZMAT were notified, and an investigation began at the Pentagon.
A pile of rubble from the crash was found to be radioactive, but EPA official Bill Bellinger of the agency’s Region III Environmental Radiation Monitoring Office was unconcerned when contacted by Diane D’Arrigo from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Bellinger indicated that it was probably depleted uranium and mentioned that Americium 241could also be scattered around the crash site. He was convinced that depleted uranium is not radiologically toxic, but commented that it is more of a hazard when aerosolized.
Firefighters, Pentagon personnel, and communities nearby did breathe the smoke and ash from the fire. The agencies that are supposed to be protecting us are not. There was no follow-up investigation.
Leuren Moret reported later, in a terrific interview conducted by W. Leon Smith and Nathan Diebenow, from "ICONOCLAST", on May Monday 30th 2005 :
I’ll tell you what I did when 9/11 happened. I called all the doctors with Radiation And Public Health Project, and I said, "Get out of town, and don’t come back until it has rained three times." One lived 12 miles downwind from the Pentagon. She went out on her balcony with her geiger counter. I said, "Get that geiger counter out of your purse." We had just done a press conference in San Francisco, and I knew she had it in her purse. Well, the radiation levels were 8-10 times higher than background. We called the EPA, HAZMAT, FBI, and said, "Get all those emergency response workers suited up. They need to be protected." Two days after 9/11, the EPA radiation expert for that region called back and said, "Yup, the Pentagon crash rubble was radioactive, and we believe it’s depleted uranium, but we’re not worried about that. It’s only harmful if it’s inhaled." He said, "We’re worried about the lead solder in the plane." Well, you know what’s in Tomahawk missiles? They have depleted uranium warheads. The radioactive crash rubble contaminated with DU is evidence of a DU warhead.
This is meaningful for two reasons :
This text raises another question. Boeing admitted that the El Al B 747 that crashed near Amsterdam in Holland contained a DU counterweight. Boeing never gave the list of the plane models and series which contain a DU counterweight. The question could be asked of wether the B 757 of flight 77 contained a DU counterweight or not. If yes, the hypothese of a warhead loaded inside this crashed plane could be replaced by a "natural" explanation of all the damage inside the building being due to this counterweight. Shortly after having put on line this question, I got an email with :
No Depleted Uranium in Hijacked Jets Crashed in New York and Washington Other than with its 747 jets, Boeing never used depleted uranium counterweights in its 767 and 757 jets - the types involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to Boeing speaker Heinrich Grossbongardt. (SPIEGEL ONLINE, Sep 14, 2001)
Thus, according to the company's spokesman, the only planes with a DU counterweight would be the B 747s...
Given the context, the physical damage on the axis of the plane, the fact that the two engines must have been deflected in their course by the wing folding process and seem to have stopped their course after one half to two third of building width penetration, the fact that there is no witness account of engine debris in the A-E drive, the small size of this heavy mass running straight ahead on the plane's axis, the tremendous mechanical damage that deformed the slab, the completely destroyed columns on it's course, the thermal damage visible on column 5N, the radial shockwave from the center of the "punch out" hole attested by the damage on the bricks of the external C ring wall, the combustion remains in A-E drive, the decontamination process on columns near the "punch out" hole, the contamination of the atmosphere of Washington DC by radioactive elements after the crash, the best hypothese is that there was a depleted uranium mass in the crashed plane. This is called a "penetrator" and is used in anti-bunker bombs, both gravity and cruise missile type.
The hypothese of a complete bomb, a "broach" type, (see description, or this technical report,) inside the luggage compartment of the Boeing 757 which hit the pentagon, along with the DU penetrator effect, seems the more realistic explanation to :
It is not clear, reading the "advertisment" for these bombs that they contain depleted uranium : weapons manufacturers are discreet about the shit they put in their toys. Depleted uranium used in "penetrators" has two properties :
Uranium is used to destroy tanks, in "arrow shells", or in "anti bunker" bombs, with a proven success in short term destruction effects on the targets and long term destruction effects on the people [1] [2] [3] who are in contact with the remains (mostly uranium oxyde dust) afterwards.
The picture below shows the slab of the demolished zone, before reconstruction, the grid allowing to locate the pillars (yellow), the holes in the walls and the exhausted slab zone (red), the shockwaves (green) and the trajectory of the assumed DU penetrator (purple plain line), and it's projection on the ground (purple axis line). Two hypotheses are available for this trajectory, with the same projection on the horizontal plane but different paths in the vertical plane.
The following explosions and localized damage can be seen on this picture :
Some other facts could be reported, which could push towards the "DU penetrator" hypothesis, but they are less certain.
I discussed somehow with Eric Bart this DU penetrator hypothesis. Eric is convinced, also, that a 757-200 hit the Pentagon and that an explosion occured during the crash. He argues that it is a shaped charge, and that all the damage can be explained in this way. Though I respect his point of view, I disagree on this particular point.
The first damage, near the entry point could be due to a solid explosive, like a shaped charge explosion. The other damage, deeper inside the building up to the "punch out" hole, are more likely due to a depleted Uranium penetrator. The fact that the damage trajectory is deflected by pillars 1 K and 5 N shows that it cannot be the plasma influx of a shaped charge which did this, but that it is a solid mass which is deflected unpon impact with pillars.
But, whatever it is which made the damage deep inside the Pentagon, Eric and I agree on the fact that the plane contained a military charge (bomb) before taking off. Just a disagreement on the model...
The witness accounts, the damage inside the Pentagon and the available data about this crash, ASCE report and CCTV video frames, prove a conspiracy and a cover-up. The plane had been prepared with a military charge on board, and was used as a missile. The complexity of the approach trajectory, along with this "missile-like" use makes it probable that it was under electronic control, at least for the last part of the trajectory. This sophisticated attack scheme, with the use of the more recent high technologies, cannot be the product of "arab terrorists armed with box cutters". There seems to be some cover-up of some facts, at least by omission, in the ASCE report.