THE PENTAGON PILOT'S PENCHANT FOR PARALLELISM

THE BURLINGAME SEAM
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
January 11 2007
edited 1/21

"One of the true ironies of this crash is that it was into the Pentagon, where he worked for many years as a naval reserve officer. The people that perished in that crash could very well have been friends and colleagues of his."
– Brad Burlingame, brother of the deceased Flight 77 pilot.

The Pentagon was not unprepared for a hijacked 757 strike – though there was no warning and thus no time to implement them, in fact a new set of procedures had apparently just been approved. This was based on the findings of a series of at least two drills. Beginning with a MASCAL in October 2000 that posited a small passenger plane crashing into the building’s courtyard, followed by a reported exercise in May based on a hijacked Boeing 757 crashing into the Pentagon as an “ersatz guided missile.” Strange but true, they prepared for the 9/11 scenario just months before it came crushingly true, at least according to two reputable Pentagon-connected news sources. But sadly due to the radar blind spot we’re told, there was never any awareness of the plane and no time to put the new plan into motion so it became useless, another part of the tragedy of un-preparedness we’d need to “set right” after the attacks.

According to numerous 9/11 Truthers, one of the prime movers in the formation of this new and failed plan was Navy Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame; Barbara Honegger specified as far back as late 2002 that Burlingame had “recently […] been part of a Task Force that drafted the Pentagon's emergency response plan on what to do in case a plane hit the building.” [1] Burlingame was also a pilot for American Airlines, who famously went on to be the very pilot assigned to Flight 77 – a Boeing 757 - before he lost control of it to the hijackers who crashed it into the Pentagon, fulfilling the terms of the second drill. If we think about this just a second, we see that this seems well beyond the realm of coincidence and “irony” as any official story that acknowledged all this would argue.

But there are problems with this construct, although it does seem more substantiated than the no-757 claims. The only “reputable” source I’ve seen indicating this is even worth considering is an early Washington Post piece stating that Burlingame had been “a Navy F-4 pilot and once worked on anti-terrorism strategies in the Pentagon.” [2] It would then be undeniably ironic – which is not always the same as relevant - that he should die in a terror attack on the Pentagon. Note that he worked in the Pentagon on countering terrorism in general, not countering or preparing for terrorist strikes against the Pentagon.

Loose Change, where I first heard of this seam, gives no source for his MASCAL involvement, but claims as evidence that Burlingame retired the Navy and went to work for American Airlines less than a year before the attack, or just after the drill. In actuality, he started flying for them in 1979, and retired from his reserve status in the Navy in 1996 to focus full-time on flying. [3] Another bitter irony! He was nearing retirement age at that job too, before his life stream was cut short one day from his 52nd birthday - September 12, 2001. (Later on and after a long battle, his special death earned him and his wife status to be buried at Arlington cemetery, normally reserved for service members who managed to live to 60.) [4]

The source Loose Change was citing seems to be Barbara Honegger, who sa Chic in on the plane preparations. It doesn’t help her tentative late 2002 case here that she then finds it “extremely likely, if not certain - that this 'task force' that Flight 77 pilot ‘Chick’ Burlingame was part of was the Cheney counterterrorism preparedness task force, and that the Pentagon plane pilot, therefore, directly knew and even worked with/for Cheney.” [5] That’s quite a leap, but the timing seems possible; he retired in 1996 and was allegedly involved with MASCAL in late 2000, possibly as a private-sector advisor. Cheney’s task force was created by President Bush in May 2001, to make the nation’s responses to a WMD attack “seamlessly integrated” under Cheney’s eye to “do the very best possible job of protecting our people from catastrophic harm.” [6] It had nothing to do with air defense, hijackings, or non-WMD terror threats as far as I've seen, but was directly headed by another recent Navy retiree and ace pilot, Admiral Steven Abbott. So Burlingame seems a likely candidate to come on board as well, but that he’d be working from the cockpit of a plane rather than an office at the White House seems a bit odd.

It’s hard to know if Burlingame was involved with this, shrouded as it is in secrecy. The effort’s staff director was in fact Col. John Fenzel III, director of Cheney’s energy task force, until then the prime model of Bush administration secrecy and apparent malevolence. But with unexplained certainty Loose Change has Burlingame in on MASCAL and Honegger has him in on Cheney's ‘effort’ with his questionable plane-into-Pentagon resumé. Though the clustering of coincidences here is stuning, especially when we factor in circumstantial cases like his only daughter dying in a suspicious apartment fire in Deember 2006, we're left with a tangled knot of unresolved mystery centered in the cockpit of a doomed airliner five years ago. If this Burlingame seam is indeed a scripted part of the master story, it would serve no practical purpose I can see in the event itself. But by making sure it was his plane that hit the Pentagon, as a follow-up psychological operation it could serve to draw attention via its oddities and suck energy into a seam that ultimately is probably irrelevant even though it seems a tempting window onto the true mechanics.

Or is this all just coincidence after all?

Sources:
[1], [5] Honegger, Barbara. "Feature: The U.S. Government, Not the Hijackers, 'Chose' the Date of the 9-11 Attacks"
Barbara Honegger. December 13 2002. http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/12-14-02/discussion.cgi.28.shtml
[2] September 11, 2001 By David Maraniss Washington Post. September 16 2001. Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15
[3] Loose Change. Second Edition. 4:07
[4] http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/cfburling3.htm
[6] Ruppert. Crossing the Rubicon. Page 412.
[9] Congressional Quarterly. April 15, 2004.Accessed August 5, 2005 at: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2004/congressionalquarterly041504.html