VIDEO REVIEW: PENTAGON STRIKE

First released for free viewing online in mid-2004, the Flash animation short Pentagon Strike (subtitled “what hit the Pentagon on 9/11?”) immediately made waves with its slickly-produced, strong-seeming argument that something other than a Boeing 757 was responsible for the attack on the Pentagon. It was created by Darren Williams, a 31 year-old British systems analyst and member Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s Cassiopaea.org. Williams e-mailed a copy of the video to Knight-Jadczyk, who posted a link on the group's Web site August 23. “Within 36 hours,” the Washington Post later reported, “Williams's site collapsed under the crush of tens of thousands of visitors. But there were others to fill the void […] Across thousands of sites, demand for the video was so great that some webmasters solicited donations to pay for the extra bandwidth.”

My younger brother first told me about this little mind bomb in late 2004. Until that point the whole no plane argument never did sound right to me, but he swore this video would change my mind. I finally watched it and was actually impressed, if still skeptical, and started my journey to sort the glittery from the gold regarding this part of the attack I’d previously ignored.

Eventually associated as well with the Quantum Future Group and the website Sings of the Times, Pentagon Strike is still available for viewing at the same site: http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/flash.htm if you haven’t seen it yet. It wouldn’t be entirely fair to call the video deliberate disinfo – Conspiatainment is a better word. It does give fair warning, opening with a screen reading in part “Critical Discernment suggested – knowledge and awareness recommended.” Of course they had a certain kind of “awareness” in mind, and knew few people at the time had much “knowledge” of the attack and would be well set-up to glean it from the video that’s done loading now…

It starts with brooding trip-hop music and a voiceover from Adolph Hitler, I believe, and text alerting us that despite the official story of the Pentagon attack, “in reality a Boeing 757 was never found.” What follows is a five-plus minute montage of still images and animated text in which circumstantial evidence like the seized videos of the attack is well-explained enough. The five stills from 2002 are analyzed incredulously, and a slew of eyewitness reports – or select snippets anyway – verifying all the tiring charges: small jet, missile, no plane parts, etc. Quoting the video’s backer Laura Knight-Jadczyk, the on-screen text reads “the very first descriptions - before the mind control machine had time to go into action” had described something “like a missile.” This was a clever way of indirectly misquoting Mike Walters (who said it was an AA jet that was flying like a missile and two other witnesses who thought it sounded like a missile).

As for the video’s physical evidence analysis – what I didn’t know then but can finally comment on – the punch-out hole analysis is better than average; they have it correctly placed and no talk of six walls. But otherwise it’s an unprecedented display of the Frustrating Fraud, all the machinations used before and repeated later. Williams again rehashes the Meyssan trick of showing a spray of fire foam while claiming to show the single small hole in the façade. Deceptive long shots of the lawn showing no debris are brandished, and only the smallest bits are shown up close – a supposedly exhaustive run-down that passed up, as usual, the telltale landing gear found inside the building. The unmarked Pentalawn and a brief golf animation are cleverly used to imply a specific 757 witness (Tim Timmerman) was lying about his whole story – just look at that lawn! The blue tarp smugglers were vaguely shown in the section on plane wreckage with a large question mark. The unburnt stool on the third floor is featured, as it was in IPS at about this same time, in questioning where the supposed 757-full of jet fuel went (answer: across the two floors beneath that – it never touched the third floor).

But such misleading “facts” are emotionally bolstered by a varied musical underpinning with well-timed highs and lows and long moments of suspense punctuated with dark techno/trip hop and screaming groove metal borrowed from the Dust Brothers (via Fight Club) and Marilyn Manson. This work clearly puts emotion above logic even as a computerized voice tells the viewer “you are now looking at the objective reality – please stay focused.” The video seems designed to snap the viewer dizzily from one point to the next, a torrent of images, “facts” and “quotes” that has worn down the skepticism defenses millions of average 9/11 Truthers and likely created thousands of new skeptics itself. After an open-minded six minute viewing experience, it would seem almost undeniable to many that anything but a Boeing 757 struck the temple.

These people know all about “mind control machines” going into action.

THE PENTAGON STRIKERS STRIKE BACK

JOE QUINN: BOOBY TRAP OR JUST A BOOB?
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / The Frustrating Fraud
January 17 2007

Here I’d like to pass on a fierce and heartfelt denunciation of Jim Hoffman's meddling with the no-757 theories I just ran across by some of my favorite, newly-identified Frustrating Fraudsters: the website Signs of the Times, producers and prime promoters of the 2004 Pentagon Strike video (previously I'd thought it was done by LetsRoll911). It's a bit old now I understand, but still relevant I think. I'm a historian at heart, so it's always relevant to me.

Anyway, Signs' Joe Quinn wrote up a point-by-point renunciation of Hoffman’s October 2004 piece “The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory: Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics,” which appeared soon after on Signs of the Times: “Hoffman seems to believe that the "no 757 at the Pentagon" crowd are disinfo artists. We found Hoffman's arguments […] to be based on anything but facts or reason. In fact, in making his case, Hoffman even resorts to using the same twisted logic employed by the Bush administration to justify the war on terror. […] it seems CoIntelPro is in full swing when it comes to the 9-11 Truth Movement.” Indeed, or something like it anyway, as Quinn's retort clearly illustrates.

"Mr Hoffman is correct in asserting that the idea that no 757 crashed at the Pentagon is the most divisive issue among 9/11 researchers," Quinn concedes. But "the divisiveness is a deliberate ploy by CoIntelPro agents to attempt to rob genuine 9/11 truth seekers of the singularly strongest piece of evidence pointing to US government complicity in the attacks,” that being the hard and provable fact that no 757 ever hit the Pentagon. Feel free to use the handy hyperlinks I've provided to examine some of Quinn's evidence for yourself. Among his most damning evidence, “Donald Rumsfeld himself has corroborated the “missile theory.” Indeed he seemed to do just this, just a month after 9/11 and just as Meyssan started his missile theorizing, and that’s red flag number one in the theory for me.

“For Hoffman to dismiss Meyssan's sterling investigative work in exposing the obvious holes in the official Pentagon story by citing that Meyssan understated the hole in the Pentagon facade is utterly disingenuous of Hoffman,” not to mention both irrelevant and wrong, Quinn asserts. “The fact is that the main impact hole at the Pentagon WAS 16 feet wide, and a close examination of the damage either side of that hole is NOT consistent with aircraft the size of a 757. […] There is nothing sloppy about the analysis of Meyssan or Holmgren. They, like so many others, can see clearly that the claim that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon is the weakest link in the official version of the events of 9/11.”

While mostly relying on the lack of airplane parts to imply no large plane, when Quinn does admit a plane part, it’s not the telltale landing gear but the wheel found in the A-E Drive. He concludes “the circular rim of the landing gear wheel that is presented as evidence by the US government is too small to be part of the landing gear of a Boeing 757, but bears a startling likeness to the rim of the wheel of the landing gear of a Global Hawk.” He didn't want to gloat or overstate his case by actually illustrating that point, so allow me.


Damn you Disinfo Jim Hoffman, if only you’d let the people see the careful no-757 arguments unhindered! Just look at that “strartling likeness!" Boeing 757 indeed. ANYTHING BUT!

“And here we get to the core of Hoffman's argument,” Quinn writes, “The idea that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon was seeded by the conspirators themselves in order to confuse the issue and keep conspiracy theorists divided.” Whether or not that’s true, the conspiracy theorists have done plenty good pushing the fraud all on their own. And here we also get to Quinn’s own driving issue. “Yet we notice that rather than refusing to succumb to such manipulation and cutting through the lies and sticking to the facts, Hoffman is adding his voice to the cacophony and loudly arguing against the core evidence which strongly suggests that Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon.” So he should stand down and quit being divisive; he should stick to the facts, like the Global Hawk wheel at the Pentagon, rather than criticizing others who’ve chosen to do so. By looking for disinfo among his honest compatriots, Hoffman was playing into the government’s game.

Of course the Signs people weren’t doing the same, because their story is different from the government’s and is backed by proof, like the clearly non-757 wheel, and the testimonies of several old military people with weird names. And the lack of airplane parts in the photos and e-mailed eyewitness testimonies they chose to pore over. And like all good truth warriors, they recognized their own importance and the reason they could not be the ones to back down. “The simple fact is that, if it were not for the initiative that we took in creating the "Pentagon Strike" Flash presentation, there would have been NO coverage of 9/11 "conspiracy theories" at all. Thanks to the efforts of Darren Williams, an estimated 300 million people around the world, most of them previously unaware of the truth of 9/11, have been given the opportunity to consider the truth of our reality and the people that control it." They are the only ones keeping the doors of perception open, so please Jim, just admit they're right and quit playing the Bushmob's game.

Source: Quinn, Joe. “Jim Hoffman - Booby Trap For 9/11 Truth Seekers.” Response to: The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory: Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics, by Jim Hoffman. November 15, 2004. Found at: http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/signs/hoffman_rebuttal.htm