Thanks for clearing this up and making boobspit look like a
total ass again, Jl.

Scotty


"jlrogers" wrote in message
m...
Big Plane, Small Holes
CLAIM: Two holes were visible in the Pentagon
immediately after the
attack: a 75-ft.-wide entry hole in the building's
exterior wall, and a
16-ft.-wide hole in Ring C, the Pentagon's middle ring.
Conspiracy theorists
claim both holes are far too small to have been made by a
Boeing 757. "How
does a plane 125 ft. wide and 155 ft. long fit into a hole
which is only 16
ft. across?" asks reopen911.org, a Web site "dedicated to
discovering the
bottom line truth to what really occurred on September 11,
2001."

The truth is of even less importance to French
author Thierry Meyssan,
whose baseless assertions are fodder for even mainstream
European and Middle
Eastern media. In his book The Big Lie, Meyssan concludes
that the Pentagon
was struck by a satellite-guided missile--part of an
elaborate U.S. military
coup. "This attack," he writes, "could only be committed
by United States
military personnel against other U.S. military personnel."

FACT: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the
Pentagon's exterior
wall, Ring E, it created a hole approximately 75 ft. wide,
according to the
ASCE Pentagon Building Performance Report. The exterior
facade collapsed
about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its
measurements of the
original hole on the number of first-floor support columns
that were
destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations confirmed the
findings.

Why wasn't the hole as wide as a 757's
124-ft.-10-in. wingspan? A
crashing jet doesn't punch a cartoon-like outline of
itself into a
reinforced concrete building, says ASCE team member Mete
Sozen, a professor
of structural engineering at Purdue University. In this
case, one wing hit
the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the
impact with the
Pentagon's load-bearing columns, explains Sozen, who
specializes in the
behavior of concrete buildings. What was left of the plane
flowed into the
structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass.
"If you expected
the entire wing to cut into the building," Sozen tells PM,
"it didn't
happen."

The tidy hole in Ring C was 12 ft. wide--not 16 ft.
ASCE concludes it
was made by the jet's landing gear, not by the fuselage.



Intact Windows
CLAIM: Many Pentagon windows remained in one
piece--even those just
above the point of impact from the Boeing 757 passenger
plane.
Pentagonstrike.co.uk, an online animation widely
circulated in the United
States and Europe, claims that photographs showing "intact
windows" directly
above the crash site prove "a missile" or "a craft much
smaller than a 757"
struck the Pentagon.

FACT: Some windows near the impact area did indeed
survive the crash.
But that's what the windows were supposed to do--they're
blast-resistant.

"A blast-resistant window must be designed to resist
a force
significantly higher than a hurricane that's hitting
instantaneously," says
Ken Hays, executive vice president of Masonry Arts, the
Bessemer, Ala.,
company that designed, manufactured and installed the
Pentagon windows. Some
were knocked out of the walls by the crash and the outer
ring's later
collapse. "They were not designed to receive wracking
seismic force," Hays
notes. "They were designed to take in inward pressure from
a blast event,
which apparently they did: [Before the collapse] the
blinds were still
stacked neatly behind the window glass."

Flight 77 Debris
CLAIM: Conspiracy theorists insist there was no
plane wreckage at the
Pentagon. "In reality, a Boeing 757 was never found,"
claims
pentagonstrike.co.uk, which asks the question, "What hit
the Pentagon on
9/11?"

FACT: Blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer was the first
structural
engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash and
helped coordinate the
emergency response. "It was absolutely a plane, and I'll
tell you why," says
Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers PC,
Washington, D.C. "I saw the
marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I
picked up parts of
the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my
hand the tail
section of the plane, and I found the black box."
Kilsheimer's eyewitness
account is backed up by photos of plane wreckage inside
and outside the
building. Kilsheimer adds: "I held parts of uniforms from
crew members in my
hands, including body parts. Okay?"



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