That argument is something akin to a "texas sharpshooter" fallacy. When Dr Griffin released his list of lies by omission and commission in the "official account" I started to analyse them, and his arguments on this point were one of my more comprehensive responses. I'll post it here in full. I believe it completely demolishes the argument. Apologies in advance if not all of the links work; I did this some years ago.
The process I used was to first cite Griffin's claim, then identify the inherent contra-claims in his statement; for example if I say the sky is blue and you accuse me of a lie of commission you're inherently claiming the sky is NOT blue and if you accuse me of a lie of omission, whatever that omission is, is your inherent claim.
I then test the validity of his inherent claims, and use the conclusions from that to reject or accept his original claim.
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16. The omission of the fact that the west wing of the Pentagon would have been the least likely spot to be targeted by al-Qaeda terrorists, for several reasons (33-34).
Regarding the section of the Pentagon that was hit on 9/11, the Report states:
The report makes no indication that the section of the building that was hit was in any way unlikely to be hit.
In order to understand Griffin’s claim we first have to identify the “several reasons” he alludes to. From his book
Omissions and Distortions:
There are therefore a number of claims Dr Griffin is making regarding his claim.
a) The claim inherent in the allegation is that Al Qaeda terrorists intentionally targeted the West Wing of the Pentagon.
b) The claim inherent in the allegation is that Al Qaeda terrorists wanted to cause as much death and destruction as possible.
c) The claim inherent in the allegation is that Al Qaeda terrorists wanted to target top Pentagon officials.
d) The claim inherent in the allegation is that the West Wing of the Pentagon was being renovated at the time of the attacks and was not fully populated.
e) The claim inherent in the allegation is that the higher ranking officials at the Pentagon were not located in the West Wing.
f) The claim inherent in the allegation is that Al Qaeda would have known that the West Wing was being renovated and top ranking officials were not located there.
I will deal with these six claims in two sets of three. The first three claims collectively address Al Qaeda’s intentions in ramming an airliner into the Pentagon. Dr Griffin asserts that, in making this attack, Al Qaeda specifically wanted to hit the section that was in fact hit, that they wanted to inflict maximum damage, and that they wished to kill senior military staff.
Dr Griffin provides no reason for making this assertion. We must accept his word that he is familiar with the intentions of a terrorist network with regards to an attack that he does not even believe they carried out. The absurdity of such a notion is obvious. Dr Griffin claims (without evidence) that he knows what Al Qaeda’s aims were in relation to the 9/11 Attacks. Yet Dr Griffin
does not believe Al Qaeda even carried out the attacks.
There is no reason to believe Dr Griffin on his word – as we have already seen in this document he has a track record for dishonesty and falsehood. And we don’t need to believe his word. First, we should consider the general goals of a terrorist attack.
The precise definition of “terrorism” is an often debated topic. On 17 February 1995 the United Nations General Assembly, passed resolution 49/60 which defined terrorism as:
Further, in the November 2004 report entitled “In Larger Freedom”, the United Nations defined terrorism:
The European Union defines terrorism as identified criminal offences perpetrated against person or property which:
The United States has defined terrorism under the Federal Criminal Code. Chapter 113B of Part I of Title 18 of the United States Code defines terrorism and lists the crimes associated with terrorism. In Section 2331 of Chapter 113b, terrorism is defined as:
Terrorism is defined under United Kingdom law in the Terrorism Act 2000:
The primary feature of terrorism, which differs from other violent acts, is that the crime is directed not against the immediate victims of the act, but against the wider population – those that survive the attack. The purpose of a terrorist attack is not to kill or to damage, but to
intimidate.
This intention is confirmed in video tapes released by Al Qaeda after the attacks, such as a November 2004 recording featuring Osama Bin Laden:
The target of the attacks becomes symbolic – intended to intimidate and coerce the broader American population. The Pentagon has obvious symbolic value. It represents the entire US Armed Forces. Striking the Pentagon symbolically represents striking the very heart of US military power. The actual physical damage done to the building and its occupants is secondary. The power of the attack is simply in actually hitting the building.
We first have to confirm where AA77 actually did hit the Pentagon, as Dr Griffin’s reference to the “west wing” is vague and inaccurate. The Pentagon’s structure was unique:
The building was further divided into five sections referred to as “wedges” as this image demonstrates:
Image
This image gives an excellent visual depiction of where AA77 hit the building in relation to the five wedges. As we can see, the aircraft impacted near the meeting point between Wedge 1 and Wedge 2.
Image
An image from the official ASCE report into the performance of the Pentagon provides additional detail of the impact point and damage:
Image
The full ASCE Building Performance Study can be read
online (PDF):
Finally, evidence provided at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui provides details on the layout of the ground floor of the impact area:
Image
The yellow circles denote the location of building occupant remains while the blue circles denote the location of aircraft passenger remains.
Dr Griffin’s assertions rely on a logical fallacy. There’s absolutely nothing to indicate that Hani Hanjour explicitly intended to hit the particular section of the Pentagon that was struck. This is a logical fallacy known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy:
Dr Griffin is making an assertion that Al Qaeda did not fly AA77 into the Pentagon based on the fact that, had Al Qaeda done so, they would not have hit at the join between Wedge 1 and 2. Dr Griffin here makes the error of assuming Hani Hanjour would have struck the building
exactly where he wanted to hit it. This is an extraordinary claim, given only a few pages earlier in his book he claimed Hani Hanjour was such a poor pilot he could not have hit the Pentagon
at all.
Dr Griffin’s claims simply do not make any internal logical sense. We are expected to simultaneously believe that Hani Hanjour is
incapable of flying an airliner into the Pentagon, while also believing his flying capabilities are sufficient that he would hit the building
precisely where he intended to.
As we have previously seen, Dr Griffin is wrong on both assertions. Hani Hanjour
did have sufficient skill to hit the Pentagon, however there is no available evidence indicating that he aimed for a particular section of the building, and the evidence we have of his flying abilities suggests that even had he aimed for a specific section, there’s every possibility he would have missed and hit a different part of the structure.
There is a much more mundane explanation for why the Pentagon was struck between Wedge 1 and Wedge 2, and it’s plainly evident in an image of the structure:
Image
This image is orientated to the north. As we can see this side of the building faces west, and AA77 approached from the west, as per the flight summary from the NTSB:
Image
Simply put, Hani Hanjour flew AA77 into the first side of the building that presented itself to him. He didn’t pre-select a particular side, he didn’t go out of his way to hit that side; he simply saw the building and flew into it.
The fourth and fifth inherent claims Dr Griffin makes relate to the nature of the Pentagon itself, and the occupants of the section that was hit.
The most startling of Dr Griffin’s claims is that the section of the Pentagon that was hit was under renovation, was only partially occupied, and that most of those killed were contractors working on the renovations. Even in this claim he cannot keep his facts clear. He claims that this section would normally contain “several thousand” but that “thousands” would have been killed. Yet with the 800 he claims were present in the same area on 9/11, only 125 were killed.
According to the official Pentagon website:
This auction site further reveals:
From this we can conclude the Pentagon had about 25,000 people inside it, with about 2/3 of them being military personnel and the other 1/3 being civilian employees of the Defense Department.
The Washington Post hosts a website with photographs and a detailed biography of all of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Included are the 125 people who were killed at the Pentagon when AA77 struck.
Link
A scan over the occupation and biography of those killed at the Pentagon reveals that they were Defense Department employees, many of them military personnel, not contractors working on the renovation.
Further the website for the Pentagon Renovation Program has additional details about the timeline for renovating the building:
Of note is that the move-in of tenants began seven months before 9/11. This site also tells us that about 5,000 of the Pentagon’s 25,000 occupants worked in Wedge One which had a total area of 1,000,000 square feet.
The move-in of tenants was interrupted by the September 11 Attacks and resulted in sections of Wedge One and Wedge Two being demolished and rebuilt in a program called Project Phoenix.
The site also has details on the area affected by
Project Phoenix, for comparison.
A comparison of these figures suggests that the area of the Pentagon that was hit by AA77 was not unoccupied at all, but near full capacity. There were “several thousand” people in the impact zone, just as Dr Griffin asserts there would be if the floors were fully staffed. His 800 figure simply does not reflect reality.
[ED: I now believe the 800 figure derives from the number of people that were reported missing immediately after the attack, and bears no relationship to the total number of people within the impact area).
We’ve seen that Dr Griffin asserts Al Qaeda would have wanted to kill senior military commanders at the Pentagon. He also asserts that the senior officers were located on the opposite side of the building.
The highest ranked officer killed at the Pentagon on 9/11 was Lieutenant General Timothy J Maude, Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, US Army. Lieutenant General is an O-9 rank, and the second highest rank a peace time member of the United States Armed Forces can hold. Dr Griffin may be surprised to learn that higher ranking officers are actually exceedingly rare. US law strictly limits the number of commissioned officers of O-9 or O-10 grade:
As a result currently there are a total of only 39 active duty officers in the US armed forced who rank higher than Lieutenant General Maude.
They are listed, with their current commands,
here.
Of the 39 officers, only nine are located at the Pentagon (the members of the Joints Chiefs of Staff and the Commandant of the Marine Corps), the other thirty being stationed at the headquarters of their various commands around the world. In addition the Secretary of Defense has his office located in the Pentagon.
Locating the offices of these key officers inside the Pentagon is problematic. For obvious reasons such information is not publicly released, however we can learn a little from several articles. An article from Jane’s Security reveals that Dr Griffin’s assertion is right – key offices were located opposite the impact point of AA77:
We can learn more from the account of Esquire writer Thomas Barnett’s April 2005 interview with the Secretary of Defense.
Now we have the Secretary’s room number – 3E880. And we can work out what that means:
From this we can determine that the Secretary of Defense’s office is on the outside of the building, in the north east corner section. In order to hit this section of the building, Hani Hanjour would need to have flown a circuit around the entire building before lining up over the Lincoln Memorial and turning back towards the Pentagon. The location of these key offices near a corner makes hitting them even more difficult as the angle of the building walls increases the likelihood of the aircraft being deflected away from the intended target.
AA77 hit the lower two floors of the building, and everyone in levels 3 to 5 above the impact point survived. The Pentagon’s unique design prevented the upper floors collapsing immediately, saving hundreds of lives. The National Geographic TV series Seconds From Disaster covered the unique design in one of their episodes:
Video.
These facts make a suicide airliner crash a very poor choice of weapon for an assassination attempt, which is essentially what Dr Griffin is asserting. The spacious executive offices of the Pentagon offered nine high-profile targets, but they also minimised the total number of people who would be killed, in contrast with the more densely populated offices in the rest of the building. The Secretary of Defense is also a poor target for an assassination attempt. Despite eighteen attempts to assassinate US Presidents, there is no documented account of any assassination attempt on a US Secretary of Defense.
Dr Griffin’s assertions directly contradict each other – targeting the less densely occupied executive offices of the Pentagon necessitates reducing the amount of “death and destruction”. However Dr Griffin asserts that Al Qaeda wanted to maximise “death and destruction”.
Dr Griffin’s assertions also hinge on an assumption that Al Qaeda knew where the executive offices in the Pentagon were. This information is not readily available, and the sources I have found have all been post-9/11.
Finally, Al Qaeda could not have guaranteed those executive officers were even at the Pentagon at the time of the attacks, and indeed neither the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – General Henry Shelton – nor the Vice Chairman General Richard Myers were in the building at the time:
Al Qaeda have assassinated people in the past, and done so effectively. It is highly improbably they would waste such a valuable weapon as a fuel-laden airliner trying to assassinate senior military officials who might not even be in the Pentagon. Dr Griffin’s assertions simply do not stand up to any scrutiny.
a) The claim that Al Qaeda terrorists intentionally targeted the West Wing of the Pentagon is rejected.
b) The claim that Al Qaeda terrorists wanted to cause as much death and destruction as possible is rejected.
c) The claim that Al Qaeda terrorists wanted to target top Pentagon officials is rejected.
d) The claim that the West Wing of the Pentagon was being renovated at the time of the attacks and was not fully populated is conditionally rejected. Although Wedge One was still in the process of Tenant Move-in at the time of the attacks, the available data indicates the actual section that was hit was fully staffed and operational on the day.
e) The claim that the higher ranking officials at the Pentagon were not located in the West Wing is accepted.
f) The claim that Al Qaeda would have known that the West Wing was being renovated and top ranking officials were not located there is rejected.
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Hope that answers your questions.
