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‘Explosion at the Pentagon’
September 11, 2015 | by DOUG THOMPSON - A CHB Opinion



I was working in the District of Columbia on September 11, 2001, when the note on my Blackberry said simply: “Explosion at the Pentagon.”

Loading my cameras into the passenger seat of my Jeep Wrangler, which had the top down because of the warm weather on that day, I headed across the Potomac River to cover the story.

But the 14th Street Bridge was closed and I could see smoke coming out of the area of the Pentagon. I headed over to the vicinity of the Washington Navy Yard to cross the river and take an alternate route.

At a stoplight, waiting to go up the ramp to the bridge, I saw heavier than normal activity at the Navy Yard. Marines wielding M-16s had the gate locked down. I pulled up one of my camera and shot some photos before the light changed and headed up the ramp. It took nearly 45 minutes to reach the Pentagon.

I parked alongside Columbia Pike, grabbed my cameras and bag and started up the rise to get a good view of the Pentagon where smoke and flames emerged from a large hole in the side of the building near the structure’s helipad.

A man sat on the ground, crying. He said he saw a large commercial jet fly low over the road, knock down a light pole down onto a taxicab and crash into the Pentagon. I wrote down his name, took some photos of him and climbed up to a good spot on top of the rise to start shooting the madness of the scene.

At that time, I did not know two other commercial jets had flown into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, I did not know another jet, headed for Washington, would crash in Pennsylvania because of brave actions of passengers who wanted to stop the madness.

Larry Dowling of Reuters also shot from the ridge. Our employers sent over runners with extra batteries and compact flash cards. This was the early days of digital newspaper photography and we both used Nikon D1 cameras.

I photographed the damage, Pentagon employees running from the building — many helping others — and firefighters and rescue workers. I photographed part of a landing gear on the ground just in front of the massive gap in the the huge building.

Another photographer stopped shooting and asked: “What the hell is that smell?”

It was the odors of aviation fuel and burning flesh, something I had smelled before at another time, another place and something I had hoped I would never smell again.

At one point, a Pentagon police officer told us to leave and find shelter. Another plane was reported heading to Washington with intentions unknown. He also told us about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center,

After working through the day and most of the night, another photographer relieved me and I headed home to our condo in Arlington for a few hours of sleep. I found a card in the door from special agent John Ryan of the Naval Investigative Service with a request that I all him the next day.

At first I laughed and thought it was a joke. John (Jack) Ryan was the lead character of Tom Clancy’s novels about the CIA.

After a couple of hours of sleep and with several cups of coffee in me, I called the number on the card. It was the NIS office at the Navy Yard and Special Agent Ryan did exist.

“I have some questions,” he said. “Were you, by any chance, in the vicinity of the Washington Navy Yard on 11 September?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And what was your purpose there?”

“I was at a stop light before heading across the river en route to the Pentagon.”

“Did you do anything else while waiting in your vehicle?”

“Yes, I took some photos of the Marines locking down the Navy Yard.”

“What was your purpose for taking those photographs.”

“It is what I do for a living,” I said. “There was something going on. I did not know what at the time but it appeared important.”

“Is there anyway I can confirm this?”

I told him that he could check the media lists with government agencies. I had press credentials for several. I also suggested he check the photos in the day’s papers.

I heard him turn the pages of a newspaper.

“Yes,” he said, “I see some of your photos here. Were you at any other military installations on that day?”

I tried not to laugh.

“Yes,” I said, “I was at the Pentagon.”

“And what was your purpose there?”

Again, a stifled laugh,

“There was a big hole in the side of the building and there was smoke and fire visible.”

“Thank you.”

He asked for my date of birth and my Social Security number and said he would contact me again if he needed anything else. He never called again.

Later that day I was back at the Pentagon and related the story for another photographer.

“Something tells me that the world as we know it will change,” he said.

It already had.

It is amazing how raw and exposed I feel every anniversary of the tragedy, and every time I hear or read someone's personal account of that day. I was thousands of miles away, and yet my experience was so immediate and visceral that I have a hard time separating my feelings. I happened to have turned on the news that morning and was watching as the initial reports came in. I knew almost immediately that it was bigger than they indicated. As I was watching, the second plane hit the second Tower, and I realized this was an attack.

I did not go into work, or at least not for hours, and I made sure all my military gear was in order, as I assumed I'd be called up. (The actual call didn't come for months, although many of my compatriots were called within days - mostly for airport security and forensic details.). I didn't know for weeks that I'd lost three friendly acquaintances in the attack, two in NY and one at the Pentagon. That made it very personal.

It's been 14 years, yet it still has an emotional impact. The other thing that provokes a visceral response for me is anyone raising a conspiracy claim that the government was involved. I am usually pretty calm, but that one pushes my buttons, and I have to temper my response. (Okay, and one other thing: anyone claiming political advantage from the tragedy.)

It was shortly after 6:00 am, when I saw the news, and watched the second plane strike the other tower. I went to my dad's computer store with my kids and we all watched the news, saw the Pentagon burning and heard about the plane crashing in Pennsylvania. Everywhere we went, you could see the raw shock on people's faces. My husband's grandparents said it was like Pearl Harbor all over again. I agree. It is still a raw wound.

I was still restarting my production work, so still part time.
My fallback gig was racking and stacking servers, satellite installs and IT cable infrastructure and I was working in the Turtle Creek section of downtown Dallas on a condo construction project, hard hat, tool belt and a lot of CAT5e and coax cable.
It sure beat laying brick or working at the pallet factory in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
We were on the twentieth floor which didn't even have walls yet.
The news came over the radio and within two minutes time almost everyone was on the edge of the building, nervously scanning the skies.
No one had a clue yet if this was limited to NYC and DC or if all the major cities were targets.

Within the hour the entire job was shut down and everyone was sent home.
The site was shut down for ten days and most of us went looking for work elsewhere, and very few wanted to be sitting ducks up on a half finished 30 story building.
I wound up traveling around the country upgrading data comm at TSA offices at two dozen major airports thanks to a hurried post-9/11 push to move airports out of the dial-up and FAX era and into T1 connections.
What I learned about data security at TSA offices (or lack of it) is something that I don't like knowing at all. They threw money at the problem but didn't devote diddly to protecting their networks from intrusion and to this day I wonder if they ever had second thoughts and corrected the issue.
For all the scandals about airport security, the one that nags me the most is the one very few have ever even thought about and it has the potential to stir up the most trouble.
Our soft underbelly is, to my knowledge, still very much exposed when it comes to air travel safety but some mid level desk jockey signed off on it so officially, the problem doesn't exist, and it will not exist unless the day comes when someone exploits the built in weaknesses in the system.
High security data infrastructure carries a very specific set of specifications.
If you visit General Dynamics, Lockheed or any number of defense contractors, you will immediately understand what it takes to access the numerous parts of the IT architecture and you will quickly understand how carefully our best defense secrets are guarded, at least at the hardware level. For example, General Dynamics offices are, for the most part, complete Faraday cages and their buildings are built to withstand catastrophic attacks. No radio signals in or out, all wires completely safeguarded and impenetrable, and ALL IT contractors are not only vetted and background checked but watched like a hawk for even something as inconsequential as changing out an ethernet cable at a design workstation.

Then when you visit an airport, that's when you notice that absolutely none of those safeguards exist, even at the chokepoints and nerve centers of our transportation security systems and furthermore, that's when you notice that we've unzipped our fly and we're just standing there with a great big sign advertising our vulnerabilities.

I got my old nickname "Checkerboard Strangler" because a guard at Lockheed was checking my vehicle as I waited in line with the rest of the crew, looking under my car with a wheeled mirror, staring at my driver's license. There he stood in his guard shack, scowling at my identification, with his AR-15 assault rifle strapped to his back.

"Boy, you look JUST LIKE a terrorist with that beard and all that body hair, don't he Chuck?"

"He looks like a serial killer!" (laughter)

"What the rest of the crew call ya?"

"They call me Shrek."

"I think y'all oughta call him Checkerboard Strangler."

"I could start a blues band with a name like that."

The fact is, on this fourteenth anniversary of the worst domestic attack in our country's history, a real checkerboard strangler might be lifting a ceiling tile somewhere and learning just how easy it is to invite himself to dinner.

We're still on the menu.

We had had a pretty long night at a friend's party. Let's just say the booze ran copiously. My then girlfriend and I were out to the world when the phone rang at 8 something. The answering machine clicked on and, in a haze, I heard the voice of the friend whose house we had been at that night saying "Wake up! We're under attack..."
My first thought was that something had happened to her. I dragged out of bed.
My girlfriend's apartment was in Brooklyn with an unobstructed view across the river to the towers. As I walked to the living room the window, which had no curtains, opened on to a scene I thought was impossible. There was smoke rising from the first tower.
After waking her up we both went downstairs to the front of the building where a lot of other folks were all gathered.
It was then that the second plane hit the second tower.
Amid gasps and cries the only word that I could think of was DISBELIEF.

I watched the second tower get hit on television, but it must have been so disturbing to see it within live eye shot.

There are no words to describe it... Really
When I was an undergrad I saw them building the WTC from the ground up.

I have never seen anything that devastating-and I hope that I never will.

A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.
[...]
Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.

Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup