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.