Did Flight 77 really crash into the Pentagon?

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Emergency Drills & Responses...

Last updated:  07/08/2010

Was it just a "bizarre coincidence" that the CIA and ultra-secret NRO had planned a simulated plane crash into one of its buildings on 9/11 and just 5 minutes before Pentagon would officially be hit?

John Fulton - Intelligence Networking & Analysis

On the morning of September 11^th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team at the CIA were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building.  Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day.

(Photo source:  National Law Enforcement & Security Institute)

Agency was to simulate plane crash on September 11.
"In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism — it was to be a simulated accident.
Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.
The agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport.
Adding to the coincidence, American Airlines Flight 77 — the Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon — took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes before the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground.
The National Reconnaissance Office operates many of the nation's spy satellites. It draws its personnel from the military and the CIA.
In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement says, "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day." -Boston Globe/AP (05/22/02)

► "The Reconnaissance Office is probably the most secretive of the intelligence agencies. It designs, builds and operates spy satellites that photograph and overhear what other countries are up to. Other intelligence agencies tell it where to point its eyes and ears and analyze what they pick up.
The office's very existence was not officially disclosed until 1992, and its huge new headquarters, designed to house some 3,000 employees and contractors, was not publicly disclosed until the Senate complaints this week. Its secret budget is buried, as is traditional, in Pentagon accounts whose purpose cannot be deciphered." - NY Times (08/10/94)

Was it also just a coincidence they also planned to have a generator emitting smoke at the scene, just like what happened at the Pentagon?

"Planned inputs included, at 9:30 a.m. a smoke generator was going to be started, to simulate the fire resulting from the crash." - History Commons Group (09/07/09)

NRO's 9/11 plane crash 'drill' manuscript

Is it just a coincidence that one of the fallen Pentagon clock's time stopped and the same time that the plane in the NRO drill was scheduled to crash at, or was that the real time the Pentagon incident happened?

See also:  NRO's 9/11 'mock' plane crash set for 9:32am, drill included a smoke generator!

Why did Gen. Richard Myers and the Bush Administration say they never thought about hijacked planes crashing into the Pentagon or any other building even though they practiced twice for a passenger aircraft accidentally crashing into the Pentagon 11 months earlier and NORAD was even going to specifically practice for a hijacked commercial jetliner crashing into the Pentagon five months earlier?

► Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates scenarios in preparing for emergencies

"The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard. Defense Protective Services Police seal the crash sight. Army medics, nurses and doctors scramble to organize aid. An Arlington Fire Department chief dispatches his equipment to the affected areas.
Don Abbott, of Command Emergency Response Training, walks over to the Pentagon and extinguishes the flames. The Pentagon was a model and the "plane crash" was a simulated one.
The Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, as the crash was called, was just one of several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room.
On Oct. 24, there was a mock terrorist incident at the Pentagon Metro stop and a construction accident to name just some of the scenarios that were practiced to better prepare local agencies for real incidents.
"The most important thing is who are the players?" Geiling said. "And what is their modus operandi?"
Brown thought the exercise was excellent preparation for any potential disasters.
"This is important so that we're better prepared," Brown said. "This is to work out the bugs. Hopefully it will never happen, but this way we're prepared."
"You get to see the people that we'll be dealing with and to think about the scenarios and what you would do," Sgt. Kelly Brown said. "It's a real good scenario and one that could happen easily."
A major player in the exercise was the Arlington Fire Department.
"Our role is fire and rescue," Battalion Chief R.W. Cornwell said. "We get to see how each other operates and the roles and responsibilities of each. You have to plan for this. Look at all the air traffic around here."
Burrell has coordinated these exercises for four years and he remarked that his team gets better each year.
Abbott, in his after action critique, reminded the participants that the actual disaster is only one-fifth of the incident and that the whole emergency would run for seven to 20 days and might involve as many as 17 agencies.
"The emergency to a certain extent is the easiest part," Abbott said. He reminded the group of the personal side of a disaster. "Families wanting to come to the crash site for closure."
In this particular crash there would have been 341 victims." -MDW (11/02/00)

► "Over the years, accidental aircraft crash landings into the Pentagon have occasionally been simulated.

Prior planning and training allowed responders to effect a large, multijurisdictional response. The ACFD routinely participates in Pentagon mass casualty tabletop exercises such as “Abbottsville” in May 2001, and full-scale exercises such as “Cloudy Office” in 1998.

DTHC participation in an Arlington County EMS tabletop exercise with Arlington County EMS in May 2001 helped response preparation for the Pentagon attack. The scenario in that tabletop exercise featured a commuter airplane crashing into the Pentagon. Additionally, Major Brown and other DTHC staff had recently conducted a detailed disaster plan review. The familiarity with its content helped adapt the DTHC disaster plan to this situation.

The DPS was able to draw on the experience of previous interaction with many of the responding agencies. The USSS, DC Metropolitan Police Department, Virginia State Police, ACPD, and MDW frequently work together when dignitaries visit the Pentagon. Area fire, rescue, medical, and law enforcement agencies regularly participate together in tabletop and full-scale exercises." -Arlington County After-Action Report

► "Five months before Sept. 11, 2001, the officers responsible for defending American airspace wanted to test their ability to prevent a hijacked airliner from being crashed into the Pentagon, but the scenario was rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as impractical, a Joint Chiefs spokesman confirmed yesterday.
The disclosure was made after a government watchdog group released a leaked e-mail from a former official at the North American Air Defense Command. In the message, the official told colleagues a week after the attacks that in April 2001 NORAD requested that war games run by the Joint Chiefs include an ''event having a terrorist group hijack a commercial airline . . . and fly it into the Pentagon."
Last night, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Commander Dan Hetlage confirmed the account, saying: ''That scenario was rejected because it would have become a whole exercise in and of itself. It wasn't looked on at the time as being practicable."
The NORAD proposal is the clearest sign yet that national security officials were worried before 9/11 about terrorists using hijacked airliners as missiles, despite testimony that senior leaders, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, didn't know of such concerns.
Officials at NORAD apparently were concerned. But the e-mail said, the US Pacific Command, which was overseeing the exercises simulating a war with North Korea, ''didn't want it because it would take attention away from their exercise objectives, and Joint Staff action officers rejected it as too unrealistic."
Peter Stockton, chief investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, said yesterday he was told by the source who provided the memo that a special forces officer attached to the NORAD command at the time had first proposed the Pentagon scenario be practiced.
Concerns that terrorists might use hijacked airliners as missiles dates back to the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, when jets were placed on patrol to guard against such a threat." -Boston Globe (4/14/04)

Is it just a coincidence that hours before the Pentagon was hit, Pentagon medic Matt Rosenberg was studying the new MASCAL medical emergency disaster plan which is based on the unlikely scenario of an airplane crashing into the Pentagon?

► "Matt Rosenberg was down on Corridor 8, a medic at the health clinic in the massive military headquarters, grateful for an uninterrupted hour in which he could study a new medical emergency disaster plan based on the unlikely scenario of an airplane crashing into the place.
Into the Pentagon's health clinic rushed a man screaming, "Evacuate now! Evacuate now!" This was not part of the disaster drill Matt Rosenberg had studied earlier that morning. He stopped a procedure on a patient in Minor Surgery Treatment Room 2 and started evacuating patients.
A naval officer rushed in and said a patient was in the courtyard where some people, confused and scared, had rushed to escape the collapsing inferno inside Corridor 5. Rosenberg, 26, dashed down a hallway, pushing through hundreds of people escaping the opposite direction, until he reached the courtyard, where he saw smoke billowing and people staggering out from the area that had been hit. He grabbed his radio and called back to the clinic. "You need to initiate MASCAL right now! We have mass casualties! I need medical assets to the courtyard!" -Star Tribune/Washington Post (9/21/01)

► Excerpts from an interview with Sergeant Matthew Rosenberg, a medic at the DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic.
"We had virtually completed our MASCAL plan. I was setting up training for medics, I was in the process of ordering new supplies, and trying to reinvent what we would do, how we would go about it. We still had the old MASCAL kits in place, and everything under the old guidance, and we were trying to take that a step beyond. Believe it or not, the day prior to the incident, I was just on the phone with the FBI, and we were talking ‘so who has command should this happen, who has the medical jurisdiction, who does this, who does that,’ and we talked about it and talked about it, and he helped me out a lot. And then the next day, during the incident, I actually found him. He was out there on the incident that day, and I made the joke, “You know, I used to have questions about all this, about who would have the command.” He would say, “You got any more questions?” I went, “Nope, not anymore.”
When I started seeing patients coming out of the building, I picked up my radio, and I called in, “This is Sergeant Rosenberg. You need to initiate the MASCAL plan now. We have multiple patients in the center courtyard, and I need medical assets in the courtyard immediately.” - Soldiers to the Rescue/Responding in the Pentagon [HTML]

► Excerpts from an interview with Staff Sergeant Keith Pernell, who was NCOIC of Nursing Services at the DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic.
Before September 11, we were actually working on the MASCAL. One of our major functions was to re-evaluate the plan.
On September 11, I was in my office and Sergeant Rosenberg came up and said, “Hey, Sergeant, come take a look at the TV, the World Trade Center, a plane ran through it.” I said, “No, no, I'm all right, I need to just finish this work up.”
I couldn't believe that a plane had crashed in there. When you visualize it, you say, “My God, did this really happen? I can't believe it.” - Soldiers to the Rescue/Responding in the Pentagon [HTML]

Was it just a coincidence that the MASCAL emergency equipment was out of their storage areas for an "inventory check" before the Pentagon was hit?

Excerpts from an interview with Major Lorie A. Brown, who was Chief Nurse of DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic.
"We did not feel a plane hit the building. Our lights didn’t flicker. We didn’t lose electricity or phones. Nothing. There was no physical impact for us. Probably the lack of physical impact is because the clinic is below ground and also built with new construction techniques; this new construction technique played a role in saving lives at the actual crash site. But we had no physical impact and it wasn’t until someone came running into the clinic and said, “You’ve got to get out.  You’ve got to get out. Something horrible has happened.”
We saw hundreds of people running down the corridor to the exit. Because the crash site was on the west side of the building the clinic was almost directly opposite, our corridor was a clear avenue for people to escape. As soon as I saw that, we initiated the MASCAL, [mass casualty plan] started galvanizing all of our assets and put our plan in action.
Having practiced over the past year our roles and worked our pieces, we knew our lanes of responsibility. I’m the chairperson for the DiLorenzo Action Response Team, DART; that is our MASCAL plan. For the past year, the DART team has been working on developing that plan, really creating a whole new plan. We sat down and met on numerous occasions with the Air Force clinic, civilian EMS, [Emergency Medical Services] Pentagon and DoD hierarchy, DPS and with the other civilian medical agencies. We worked through issues, what would happen in the event of a MASCAL, what each of our roles would be. We participated in several large tabletop exercises with these external bodies, to include FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and the others I just mentioned. We even did our own internal exercise where we made up the scenario of a plane crashing into the building. Though you can never be prepared for an event like this, I am sure all our preparations and exercise paid off.
We actually had our MASCAL equipment out of the storage areas because we were doing an inventory. So there were many pieces that just fell into place and worked so well on that day. It was just fortuitous. It was just amazing that way that things kind of happened the way they did. But like I said our planning truly made such a huge difference on that day. Our Commander had the foresight to focus on MASCAL prep and gave us the time and budget to really revamp our old MASCAL plan. I can’t say enough about how critical this was to our success." - Soldiers to the Rescue/Responding in the Pentagon [HTML]

What does it say when even a Pentagon rescuer says it was "eerie" how the MASCAL emergency plane crash plan he had been trained on twice before was "very similar to what actually happened" at the Pentagon on 9/11?

Excerpts from an interview with Lieutenant Colonel John Felicio, who was Deputy Commander for Administration of the DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic.
"As I was heading down the main corridor outside my office to the main lobby, I remember an NCO asking me if I had heard about the “private plane” that hit one of the World Trade Center Twin Towers. I told him I hadn’t and walked out to the main lobby and that's when I saw it on the TV. It wasn’t a private plane but a jet. At that time, I came back into my office and I put on my WIN TV on my office computer. As I continued to work, I saw that a second plane that had flown into the World Trade Center.
At that time, I got this uneasy feeling and walked over to Major Brown's office since she had clinical oversight of our Emergency Reaction Teams. My thought was to see about our preparedness for a MASCAL situation.
I then went out to the front of the clinic, which is basically where we normally marshal in MASCAL situations.
Meanwhile, I knew because of the two MASCAL exercises we previously did that Colonel Kaminski, our Chief of Ancillary Services, was responsible for being our Medical Liaison at the Emergency Operation Center (EOC) and that he should be en route to that location.
The saving grace to our efforts was the two MASCAL exercises we previously had conducted with the clinic leadership and staff. You know it was kind of eerie. The scenario we had for these MASCALS was very similar to what actually happened. Our scenario for both MASCALS was a plane flying into the Pentagon courtyard." - Soldiers to the Rescue/Responding in the Pentagon [HTML]

Was it just "sheer coincidence" that a large number of fire and medical service units were dispatched to a high-rise building fire near the Pentagon one minute before the attack and that the fire was already reported out by the time the first responder arrived which made most of the units available to help at the Pentagon?

Was it just a coincidence also that Engine 101 was nearby the Pentagon too at the time of the attack?

"By 8:30 a.m., training classes at the Arlington County Fire Training Academy were in full swing.

In Arlington County, Captain Steve McCoy and the crew of Engine 101 were en route to a training session in Crystal City, traveling north on Interstate 395. Their conversation about the World Trade Center attack was interrupted by the sight of a commercial airliner in steep descent, banking sharply to its right before disappearing beyond the horizon. At 9:38 a.m., shortly after American Airlines Flight #77 disappeared from sight, a tremendous explosion preceded a massive plume of smoke and fire. Unable to pinpoint the precise location, Captain McCoy immediately radioed the Arlington County Emergency Communications Center (ECC), reporting an airplane crash in the vicinity of the 14th Street Bridge or in Crystal City. Aware of the World Trade Center attack, Captain McCoy also advised that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should be notified, since this was a possible terrorist attack." -Arlington County After-Action Report

Was it just a coincidence that the Pentagon was staffed with extra emergency communications specialists the day of the attack?

"On the morning of September 11, seven emergency communications specialists, the minimum required staffing level, were on duty at the ECC, having commenced their shift at 7:00 a.m...On this particular morning, six additional staff members happened to be in the conference room attending a training class." -Arlington County After-Action Report

Was it just a "precautionary step" that the FBI had sent a team over to an airport near the Pentagon after Flight 77 was reported hijacked out of Dulles?

"...at the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) Arthur Eberhart was putting in motion the steps necessary to support New York City.

At about 9:20 a.m., the WFO Command Center was notified that American Airlines Flight #77 had been hijacked shortly after takeoff from Washington Dulles International Airport. SAC Eberhart dispatched a team of 50 agents to investigate the Dulles hijacking and provide additional security to prevent another. He sent a second team to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as a precautionary step." -Arlington County After-Action Report

How did so many important emergency personnel arrive at the Pentagon so fast after the crash?

To preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic.

Killtown • Flight 77

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