Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 82: The Pentagon

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

i just want to reiterate i don't give a shit if bush did 9/11, the buildings fell down because planes hit them, and if you could think bush put bombs in the towers and put a missile in the pentagon why even bother socialist organizing when the US state can pull off something like that flawlessly??? THIS IS THE SPOT WHERE I AM SUPPOSED TO LINK TO TEXAS ABORTION FUNDS will fill in shortly but if you give them money and send us receipts we will give you bonus episodes in perpetuity (send them to us on twitter or e-mail) Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

Oh, probably more tasteful until after 9 11 passes anyway. And then, well, too bad, you're going to be tasteful. Well, which because our manager is a tyrant. Yes. So in fact, we are here for a respectful, sensitive podcast. She is very good at her job. Yeah. Now we've gone commercial. We're being we're being censored by our own employees, which is exactly.

I will say it's not in the slides, but today begins today or yesterday began the trial of the September 11 hijackers down in Guantanamo. And of course, we're going to be found guilty, but they shouldn't be because they were tortured for information. This whole thing has been a farce. So I know it's it's it's not in the slides because I was too lazy to put it in. But this country's sense of justice for what happened on 9 11

is that of a broken country with dumbass ideas. And there's no there's not any sense of justice anyway, but torturing people and then getting some sort of kangaroo court conviction isn't my idea of a functioning system. But that's how the system was designed to function in the first place. So yeah, the world is fucking terrible. Who gives a shit next slide? Well, I mean, obviously, we should we should we should start this episode

respectfully, I would like to say, please all rise for the national anthem. Oh, it's what's in my head. All right. Okay. Well, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnack. I'm the person who's talking right now. Anyway, now that we've weeded out everyone without a sense of humor, let's go.

No, no, they're going to stick around. For my pronouns are he and him. Got your ass. Alice, call for Kelly, she and her. You didn't say Liam. Yeah, Liam. Oh, Liam. It didn't seem appropriate.

It's a somber occasion. You already we already we already blew that. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. And for those of us who are going to leave mad replies in the comments, your government failed you and we're not the ones to get mad at. We didn't crash the fucking plane into the Pentagon. I was about to say, yeah.

We also we also didn't do some looming tower shit. So yes, I implore you to read that fucking book. Oh, my God, yes. I don't know what that is. It's it's a book. And now it's a film or TV series. It's a TV series. Yeah, about how the FBI and the CIA both kind of knew that 9-11

was going to happen or something very like 9-11. Yeah, and like due to sort of that, like instinctive bureaucratic hostility, they both refused to share any useful information with each other and in fact, actively hindered each other. And then 9-11. Yeah. Well, that among other things is something we may explore later in this episode. Our subject today is the Pentagon.

But first, we have to do the goddamn news. Wow, someone stretched this photo. Yeah, I don't like having the like white space either side of it. All right. So the claims there are changing. The climate does appear to be changing. This is OK. So yeah, Hurricane Ida ripped through the East Coast.

Having ripped through New Orleans. It just continued to be an extremely strong storm over land. Yeah, just over land. We should point that out. Here's a picture of I-676 in Philly. You'll notice that it is. In case the widening works. I was about to say, yeah, it's reversible by barge now.

The ever given has blocked I-676. Yeah, it's interesting to be the guy who took the photo for the goddamn news. I will say not in Philadelphia. I don't believe Philadelphia had any fatalities. I'm sure someone would correct me if I'm wrong, but in our... Well, that guy who dived into the flood water, he's gonna die. That guy's dead. That guy's dead.

He doesn't know it. He might be walking around talking. No, no, he is. He is. He is well this way. Deceased. Probably want to probably want to get a tetanus boaster shot at least. Maybe a couple of them, really.

I think it's a course of like six shots to get the... I don't know. I only got one booster. Oh, okay. Yeah. I hit my head that gave me a tetanus booster, but I will say that as our resident social justice monkey, yeah, people drowned in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Four people, I believe drowned.

Some people, Rosna, used to live with their house was flooded out and all their shit is destroyed. Yes. And of course, New York City was destroyed. New York City was destroyed, as we know from the wreckage of the live show. I will say like, yeah, it's all climate change. I know people can talk about that tweet about climate change is watching disasters from someone else's cell phone until you're the one holding the cell phone.

This shit is pretty fucking scary. And people drowned in basement apartments in New York. There's something really haunting. Someone published about two guys trying to get their roommate out, realizing he wasn't with them and all they could do was listen to his dying screams. Yeah. We live in a profoundly unjust world. I'm really fucking tired of it.

The city of New York has announced that they're going to fix this by giving people who they believe to be living in basement apartments, targeted notifications on their phones. Oh, great. Cool. Oh, my God. Wow. Really fucking.

That's the whole plan, by the way. Neoliberalism is a rotten fucking thing. So yeah, it's all tight. Everything's great. Parasite was a documentary. Right. You are simply paralyzed to do nothing while capitalism destroys the very ground beneath you and then you're expected to bend over and say, thank you, Mr.

Bezos, aren't you wonderful? And idiots on Twitter will criticize you for having a joke with your dad. You know, I fucking hate this place. It's not, it's not good. Yeah, it's not good. I believe it would be a prudent decision at this time to try and avoid living in a basement apartment, if possible. Well, that's the thing.

Nobody lives in one of those things by choice. I mean, it's New York City. It's our advice. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. We hope your landlord has a nice time. Yeah, invite your landlord to have a nice time and then live in their apartment, which is probably much nicer.

Also, not that electoralism matters, but you can be as you can scream in these people's fucking faces. They work for you. Get real hostile. Throw some eggs at some people. Just follow them around screaming and chanting. Make their daily existence miserable. If we're going to go down, they should come down with us.

Speaking of electoralism doesn't matter. Oh, yeah. Robby wins illegal now. Yes. At about the same time that Mexico legalized abortion because of riots, which goes to show you that riots work. It's state bill eight. Is it state bill eight or state bill three?

Yeah, state bill three is the voting restrictions. Oh, great. I love, I love that I can't tell the bad thing photo should have a nice time. Yeah, so it's now not only is it illegal to to terminate a pregnancy medically in Texas after like basically any time at all. It's like six weeks, which is by that point. Most people don't know that they're pregnant, but also the state is now empowering that like the outline.

Yeah, anybody, like even somebody who lives outside of Texas can now bring a private suit against anybody or any organization that like in any way facilitates an abortion happening. I will say people have been apparently cramming the hose. The tip line was Shrek porn. Yeah, good. The Nazi host, their web host is a company called Epic who often hosts, I believe hosted like Daily Stormer.

Yeah, literally led by a guy called Rob monster. Like that's his actual name. He has no, he's decided to no longer host the rat website. And if you're at some point, if you're too gruesome for the Nazis, yeah, maybe reconsider, especially this guy back here in the hat. I want to punch him. It's just like this fucking tableau of humanity here. Yeah, I do say the worst image I can think of the reason they're all doing

this with their hands is because it's called the heartbeat. Yes, because like essentially like that's the point at which there is a fetal heartbeat that's detectable in the fucking clump of cells. I hope all every single person in this photo has a nice time and is not. You know, I'm just going to say you can bleep it out. Yeah, leaving the axe part, I think. Yeah, I dude, I'm not in the fucking mood today. Obviously, I don't think any of us are today's not been a good day.

Yeah, yeah. Personally, well, the good news is that President President Biden has exercised strong leadership on this issue by kicking it to the curb. Yeah, the curb. Yeah, the curb. Yeah, it's essentially it's a massive for the Supreme Court. If they decide to get around to it, which they have by allowing it to go through and wait for the challenges.

Exactly. You know, it's it's really annoying how like the Democrats basically refuse to take any kind of offensive stance on this is entirely so they can so they can raise money, dude. It is. The Democratic Party exists only as a machine to generate weepy fund raising emails that's like our hearts are broken. Give us 60 dollars.

Yeah, you know, it's it's the Republicans are are at least good at what they do. They just ram shit. I mean, you have a majority. I don't know if you're if you're if you're a Chuck Schumer. What you do is you go into Joe Manchin's office and you hold a 38 to his head and you say, wouldn't you like to pass the pro act, Joe? And he says, yes, sir, I would. Yeah, it's like Roe versus Wade for the Democrats seems to be like an instrument

used for party discipline rather than anything they want to like make any progress, because if you wanted to change it, you would have to do some things that would not be decorous. You would have to do things like immediately fire the Senate parliamentarian or campaign on like, I'm going to add 26 Supreme Court justices. They're all going to have pink hair. Yes. And they're all going to like make they're going to write their pronouns

into the beginning of all of their their rulings. Yes. Oh, they're all going to wear broaches. They're going to wear special broaches for when they disagree. Put me on the Supreme Court. I finally come around, but I put my dad on the Supreme Court. You know, I do want to talk about is this ventriloquist doll come to life behind the Jeb Clune?

You got to see what I'm talking about, which Adam left. I say I say you see this guy next to the woman in the yellow pants suit. Oh, sure enough. Yeah, I try not to make fun of people based on their looks because look at me. But like, holy shit, dude, get out of the sun. You, you, you need to wear a big floppy hat everywhere you go. And maybe maybe go back to the crib. I'm a big fan of cowboy hat guy like wearing wearing my stats

and to the heartbeat bill signing. Have a nice time. Whatever, dude. Uh huh. Life is exhausting. Life is pain. Nothing good happens anymore. We are a decaying empire.

And one day we will collapse into the sea and we'll all be better for it. The good news is it's relatively safe and relatively easy to get yourself abort a fast and pills and do your own abortion in a way that is unprovable by the state of Texas or anywhere. There is there is a piece that you can Google about that. And I guess we can link that in the description also and speaking of links in the description. Yes.

We're also going to put some links in for donating to Texas abortion funds, which this bill is an attempt to like club to death with vexatious lawsuits. And if you donate to them and then email us the receipt at wtyppodatgmail.com you get the bonus episodes like forever, which is the best deal we can give you at least. Yeah. Um, solidarity with the people of Texas who need healthcare, not solidarity

with these people who should all possible. Yeah. Looking like a good way to fill a ditch. This photo. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Neal them over.

No, Roz. It has not been a good day. Yeah. I'm going to have to edit this out. I'm going to have to edit this out. This is going to this segment is going to sound like I think they should have a nice time. Yeah.

I I listen by my fucking anger has to go somewhere. I try to be nice, respectful to the people in my life because I love them very much. It's hard to deal with depression and anxiety. And in my case, it gets an effective disorder and I love the people of my life very much. And so my unrelenting uncontrollable rage goes out to the people in this photo who I hope are one day knelt over a ditch and shot.

Yeah. You're like, um, you're like a white hat hacker. You're like using your powers for good. Yeah. I and stay pissed off at these people. They're not your friends. You don't know shit to fascists and it's not. It's not going to stick like one way or the other.

And I don't mean I don't I don't mean that in the rely on the Supreme Court, trust the process kind of way. I just mean like it is an essentially unenforceable law. Like if like people need abortions, they're going to get abortions. It's just a question of how hard do you make it? Yeah, how much the state kind of fumbles around embarrassing itself trying to prevent them. People have always had people have always gotten abortions.

People have always needed to not be pregnant. Yeah, people have always had trouble having children. People pregnancies have always gone wrong. We are not a perfect species. People need access to abortion for a myriad of reasons. It's none of the state's goddamn business while you need one. Yeah, it's no one's business, but your own possibly your doctors. And if your doctor says, oh, I can't do that, you should make him

have a nice time. Yeah, and you should get you should get a second doctor. And yes, to the second doctor. Hopefully the second doctors is better at his job. But a lot of people are a universal jobs program digging these ditches. Yeah. Well, that's that's why that's my Green New Deal is a lot of ditch diggers. What makes the grass grow, Liam?

Oh, it's the blood of fascists. That's right. We're watering the Tree of Liberty with the blood of the entire state of Texas. Sorry, boys. I'm sorry, Justin. We just needed to get that. Well, I mean, just think if you voted Democrat, this wouldn't have happened. Oh, wait.

I live in a swing state. Motherfucker, I can justify anything. She's electable. If you fucking vote for her. Oh, listen, I threw up in my trash can. I voted for Hillary Clinton, and then I did self-flagellation for the next 12 hours as opposed to doing what I actually do to which just pass out drunk. Yeah.

Although if you're in Texas, electoralism works because then you can get shit like this past. Yes. Maybe maybe the problem is the people you're running. But she is electable for her. What we need to do is to refashion the Democratic Party into a sort of like scorched earth, culture, war organization, but from the opposite side, one that is willing to use every evil, dirty, low-down trick possible in order to get

its agenda passed, whether that's like a, you know, a long, decades-long sleeper campaign of a long march through the federal courts or whether that's pure in transigence in Congress. And that should have started about 25 years ago. You people are going to get universal healthcare whether you like it or not. You are going to, you are going to go to the free doctor whether or not you want to.

In conclusion, resurrect Huey Long and give him a Gundam. Yes. Huey Long Supreme Court would have legalized abortion in 1937, but also 81 justices 81 justices all surnamed Long. Yeah. But God, we have a taste. I do declare. All right.

That was, yeah, let's go. Let's just, let's just get through it. Let's, let's just get through it. So I thought it'd be fun maybe to talk about the Pentagon history and some of the predecessor buildings to the Pentagon. Oh, check out this wedding cake. Oh, yeah. Oh, oh, oh, look at it.

It's second empire. Do you like that shit, Roz? Do you like that shit? Yeah. You remember that week on Twitter where everything was made of cake? I feel like this is the guy in the foreground. Looks like he's standing like he's an army guy standing on a pedestal. He's like those green army guys.

He's a traffic cop. He's a traffic cop. Yeah. Why is the pedestal only like an inch tall? Because no one's driving that fast because we had to like humiliate traffic cops to keep them in their place. It was a different time. Oh, bring that back.

That's the only thing we can bring back from this era. That's my point, I guess. This is the state war and Navy building, right? And this was the early combination state department building, war department building, Navy department building. Yes, I quite like it. I really I am a sucker for second empire. No.

Yeah, it looks like the it looks like the Lego sets of like towns that you could never quite afford when you're a kid. I was an only child, so I could afford them. But Mark. Your counsels are having too much money. Oh, we're all apparently all of us are. Mark Twain called this the ugliest building in America. Mark and he was wrong.

This was the early headquarters of the American military sort of immediately post civil war. It was commissioned by Ulysses S. Grant that was built from 1871 to 1888, right? Oh, you could you could plan a genocide from this building and they did. Yes. It's a big dumb second empire type building. It was the world's largest office building when it was finished.

And this is going to be a theme had five hundred and sixty six rooms, ten acres of floor space, right? And over the next 40 years and especially during World War One, the intended tenants outgrew the building as the American Imperial War machine, you know, the great Satan America, outgrew it, right? Yeah, more guns, more ammunition, more boots, more beans, more bureaucrats. More than a baby. Yeah, that's right.

So during World War One, right? FDR, who was the Franklin Delano Roosevelt, obviously, the assistant secretary of the Navy put forth the idea of since we're so space constrained, we should build some temporary buildings for military administration, right? And this led to the erection of the main Navy and munitions buildings, right? Small aside, it is very funny to me that people think that FDR had like

advanced knowledge of Pearl Harbor and let it happen. He didn't when when you consider how much of a fucking simp he was for the Navy, a thing that I approve of a great deal. But like, like, not only was the assistant secretary of it pretty much by choice, like that was his job that he wanted. He used anchors away as his campaign song and shit. Like he wanted to have been an admiral. And so he I guess let Pearl Harbor happen anyway.

Now that said, we did let the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians happen. That's true. We had cracked their code and knew exactly what they were doing. For more, please see the lion's blood by Donkeys episode on the battle of the Aleutian Islands. But literally no one, no, no one lives there. Or at least on many of the islands Japanese invaded. Obviously some native peoples do live there.

God bless them. Yeah, we knew it was going. We just wanted to stick them there for a while. So FDR's idea was these buildings going to be cheap. They were going to be made of wood so that they'd be and they were going to be really ugly. He wanted really ugly buildings. The idea being everyone got his wish.

Holy shit. Everyone would want them torn down immediately after the war. The Drexel solution. And the smart, what he wanted was to have them on the White House front lawn. Right. I do kind of like that idea. Just being like, yeah, fuck you.

That just came out. You guys like the YouTube. You love this shit. So he got one of those things. The buildings were ugly. But I don't see the wood. Yeah. No, they were made of concrete and they put them on the National Mall.

Right. So these were the total floor space of these. I mean, and I'm just talking about the munitions building and the Navy building, right, which are these two guys. There were a whole host of other temporary buildings built as well. You can see everything here is just temporary buildings. Right. You know, these these buildings were some of the largest temporary

buildings ever constructed. There was twice the floor space of the state war Navy building. Right. And after World War One, they couldn't quite shrink down the military administration to what it was before. Right. Oh, that's weird. Yeah, it's almost like it's like a rat shit.

It only goes in one direction. Yes. So the buildings stayed up. And in fact, in World War Two, they were expanded. But there were plans afoot for a more permanent building since while these temporary buildings were particularly solid temporary buildings, they all started having major issues after only a few decades, right?

I do remember a story about these buildings in World War Two, which is in the early days of the OSS. Bill Donovan used to train agents by having them like try to plant dummy bombs on or in these buildings. Apparently, this was extremely easy to do. So this is what we like to call radical architectural criticism. So, you know, go up there with this. But this bomb just says, I don't appreciate this form or the use

of materials. I think this building's a little monotonous. You should really try and break up the break up the massing and then you just detonate the bomb. We're going to talk about that later. Well, this is true. Now, one of the things about these buildings is, you know, they they survived World War Two and then they stayed up until

I think 1970 was when finally they started they were falling apart so badly that Nixon was like, OK, yeah, we're going to tear these things down. And they had to buy a whole bunch of office space. I think in Crystal City, which is across the river in order to fit the people who wouldn't who still didn't fit into what was supposed to be the end, the last building they would have to build for the DOD, right?

Which was the Pentagon. So the whole process of expanding federal bureaucracy out into Maryland and Virginia to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy house. That's right. The bureaucracy will expand to the space. It is allowed. Yeah, we all we all played sit for us.

There's a lot of things that a modern state needs that require a bunch of like office buildings in like Suitsville or Beltsville with a bunch of like antennas on the roof. Yes. Don't worry about it. I my favorite, although they're not they're not good to do the is the NSA exit at the NSA exit at Fort Meade. Roz took a picture of a lens and captioned a secret government

shenanigans next right. Do not look. Yeah, it just says it just says this exit the NSA. Yeah. And it's like the exit. So I have one of those two. Yeah, the CIA has an exit. You're not supposed to use either.

We'll look at. Yeah, I think my my my favorite transparent op in that sort of area is there's a there's a catering company that like nominally delivers food to schools and stuff in that area that doesn't deliver to any schools has a bunch of silvered out windows unmarked white vans going in and out all the time and a massive satcom and turn on the roof and I'm just like nice. I know that's actually a catering company.

You know that right? Yeah, it's actually no Alice. I was like dammit. I'm stuck in a fucking like puzzle palace here. I do like the idea of of them being like, yeah, no, we're actually that we're actually the caters. We don't do anything except cater to other intelligence agencies. I mean, it makes sense.

Someone would have to do it. The Pentagon North Parking Exit is actually a frequently used commuter shortcut between Washington Boulevard and the Richmond Highway. No stealing. There used to be a Burger King in the basement of the Pentagon. Or am I thinking of something else? There still is. Oh, thank God.

They couldn't take that from us. God dammit. Yes. So we replaced the catastrophically ugly pair of buildings with the five sided. Atastrophically ugly building. So this the Pentagon was, you know, it's supposed to be this is it. This is the big building we need.

This is all we need is truly enormous, right? Five stories above ground, two stories below ground, 150 acres of floor space, right? Currently houses about 23,000 employees. I think more when it was built though. And these are all got out to Crystal City and all that shit. Yeah. This was built on the site of Hoover Airfield in Arlington, Virginia,

as well as built on the site of a black neighborhood called Hills Bottom, right? You know, because you got to get some racism in there. But you can't build anything in America without doing some racism. Yeah, exactly. Inherent speaking of racism. It was also designed to be a segregated facility. Because this is this is this is the one the one fact that everybody

knows about the Pentagon is that it has twice as many bathrooms as it needs to because it was built with segregated bathrooms. Hey, exactly. But Eisenhower actually refused to enforce the segregation. He gave he gave an order saying don't just don't don't do it. Just just don't do it. Come on. It's kind of federal government that, you know, you like occasion.

Yeah, but you're just like, oh, fuck you. Additional additional a fun piece of racism here is this highway right here. This is the Jefferson Davis Highway. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this was not renamed until like a couple years ago, I think. Virginia just stuck it right up there at the border with the district. You know, despite the union, I guess. So message.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, we have got what's the what's the big base in North Carolina? Fort Bragg. We have Fort Hood, you know, yeah, because those men were heroes or whatever fucking thing. Also, while I'm at it, the statue of General Lee came down. Trump is mad about this. Trump is very mad about it.

Which just makes it all the sweeter. I you know what? I will say I saw he was he's going to comment on a boxing match, which is our counter program because that boxing match is on 9 11. I someone find me a way to pirate that stream. Oh, yeah, that's going to be an American event. You know, yeah. So this building was built with five concentric rings of offices ring A

through ring E, right? You know, it's different rings of offices because it's an old building built before air conditioning. So all the offices were designed to have cross ventilation. I do have a question. Yes. Why was it not built as a skyscraper? Because this was the forties skyscrapers like the Empire State Building

and shit was up by then. Do we know like because the I was some it was as part of the Lafont plan, I believe there was a sort of a concerted effort here to avoid ruining views of, you know, all the various monuments on the mall. Okay. I mean, it was not subject obviously to the height limit in the district, but you know, right? Well, that's why I was asking if you're building in Virginia, you're not

subject to the height limit. Yeah. I think it's just you have the space, right? That's why I was like, it makes it also look a bit less vulnerable, a bit more imposing, a bit more force of vacation-ish, I guess. Cause it does look like a star fort, which I had was part of the of the thinking. Okay.

Yeah. I think it was it was originally designed as a Pentagon because it was supposed to go slightly north of here at a site called what's it? Arlington Farms, which was a temporary GI housing, which was built on top of Robert E. Lee's plantation and Arlington Farms. But they wound up moving itself because Hoover airfield was, I guess, cheaper, had better access, and they could also demolish a black neighborhood, which is, you know, something you always want to do for a big construction

project, right? It's like a fringe benefit if you're a, you know, a DOD planner. And this, this building has, you know, the center courtyard here is called ground zero because that's where everyone thinks the bomb is going to hit. Military humor. I actually, I know another example of this, which is the one of the sort of like the first Soviet or post Soviet post first Russian attache to to the shape like Allied headquarters Europe when he left left a farewell gift

of like planting a couple of, I think it was like beach trees, popular trees in the courtyard. And this was a very elaborate pun because a poplar in Russian is the the code name for one of their ICBMs. So finally, he finally got to put a couple in the place where they were going to go. There was, there was, man, that's, that's commitment to the bit. We like to see that.

There was some debate in Soviet intelligence, if I'm not mistaken, about what exactly was in the center of the courtyard because there was a little building there that they always saw high ranking generals and military personnel going to. And they thought it was some kind of, I don't know, there's some kind of secret entrance to like an underground facility or something there. Well, it was a hot dog stand. That that that main sort of central park bit also like has a special status in

military law in terms of like when you're allowed to wear fucking hats outdoors and shit, it's like an exceptional case because the military is very normal. Going to the hot dog stand counts as an exceptional case. Yeah. Yeah. Good. America number one.

I think it's like you might not have to like salute people or something. This building was built for sort of really easy highway access. You can see all these cloverleafs here, right, from the various freeways gone through. You may also notice a series of ramps leading into the building, right? That is, of course, because the original design for the Pentagon had a very large bus station in the basement, right? And this was not just for serving the building itself.

It was a big truck bus transfer station. It still is to this day. It's just not in the basement anymore. They had to move it out of the basement, not just for security reasons, but because there was no ventilation. Yeah. So it sort of filled with smoke pretty quickly. They tried ventilating the smoke for a while.

Eventually, I think like in the seventies, they just moved the bus station out right around when Metro came through, I think, or maybe slightly before, because this does also now have a Metro station, which is also a major transfer point. So, and this building broke ground funnily enough on September 11th, 1941. Happy anniversary. Yes. Yeah.

Wow. Not happy, I suppose. You may be interested to know that the former factory of the Pentagon is something that other countries have since sought to imitate. Yes. The current military junta of Egypt is hard at work. As part of their general plan to build a new capital city apart from Cairo, they're building the octagon.

Oh, my God. They've gone up. They have gone up and you can see concept drawings where it's like a big, it looks like it's about to fire a laser out of the middle. It's a series of concentric octagons built in sort of like pseudo-phoronic style. So it's had some architectural impact, let's say. Every time that they, every time a new, too big for its britches, military dictatorship starts off, they're going to build up building with like one more side until

it's basically a circle. Yeah. Join me in the command center that looks like a fucking D-20. Yeah. This is our 128 gun. We ran out of names. Yeah. I think it goes up to like, I have no idea what it goes up to.

You can probably like bash something together out of the Latin pretty quickly. You can do like Sesca Quipa hexagon or whatever. All right. Let's go with that. Yeah. There have been not too many like major security incidents at the Pentagon until what we're going to talk about today. You know, famously, you know, back in, back during the Vietnam War, October 21st, 1967,

35,000 people came to protest the Vietnam War here. They tried to levitate it. They did try to levitate. What? They tried to levitate the Pentagon. Oh, it didn't work? Yeah. Yeah.

My dad was there. Yeah, that's good. That's our job. My dad was there. They levitated it. They turned it one face clockwise and then they put it back down. Yeah. No, you know, how are the people?

Good thing the building was so symmetric or there'd be some family. There'd be some structural damage from that. It's totally fine, but everybody's really irritated because that office is in a different wing now. Yeah. Yeah. I like the view. They got to shuffle everyone around the building now.

You know, this is where this famous photo of George Harris here putting the flowers and the rifles, right? Fun fact, George Harris also a drag queen performed under the stage name Hibiscus started a gay performance group called the cockettes, right? They would drop acid and sing show tunes. Dude's rock. Mom. But one of the things about the Pentagon is because it's so remote from the city and

sort of has a hostile location, right? There's not a huge number of demonstrations which occur here, right? Yeah. It's out of town. A guy did set himself on fire on the steps outside Robert McNamara's office once to process the Vietnam War. There's a bit about it in the documentary Fog of War, which is a series of interviews with McNamara where psychopath that he is, he's just like, oh man, don't like that.

And then just got back to work. I know in 1972, the weather underground bombed a women's room. Yeah. In the Pentagon. The weather underground. Hey. Hey. I have mixed feelings, all right?

Because like half the weather underground actions are like, yeah, we like, I don't know, I robbed a wages van and shot two security guards and four more cops in order to fund an act of terrorism. And then the act of terrorism is we blew up a toilet. Bring the war home, Alice. Like Chesa Boudin's dad got fucking just got parole, I think, for a weather underground thing for being the driver in one of those wages van robberies. But on the other hand, you know, blowing up a toilet.

Yeah. All your toilets is funny. Yeah, that is true. It's kind of funny. All right. So anyway, that's some background on the building. Now I have to talk about some background on Al Qaeda. I've heard of these guys.

Yeah. Yeah. Not too popular anymore. Everyone sort of moved on to ISIS now. But I understand. Old heads now. Old heads now. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm into that kind of terrorism you probably haven't heard of. Before ISIS was cool. I was in the muhajideen. Al Qaeda, as you said, means the base. Whereas Daesh means the cringe. Yes. So there have been a lot of like. I'm not actually calling Al Qaeda base.

Thank you. Yeah. Just as you do not, it turns out, have to hand it to Al Qaeda. Nobody actually knows where that name comes from, by the way. Like there's a bunch of different. Yeah, there's a bunch of different theories because like the word is, as far as I know, as ambiguous almost in Arabic as it is in English. So there have been suggestions that it refers to like a database, but also like a foundational

base because bin Laden's deal was sort of like you would bring him a terrorist plot ready made and he would like supply the training and the funding and the shit. Like nobody actually knows for certain. Bunch of guys in his office trying to like pitch terrorists. Pretty much. Trying to pitch a screen. He was pretty much like a terrorist venture capitalist. But yeah, it's a curiously like, um, unreligious, unideological name for a group, the base.

Yeah. I mean, if you're fundamentalist, could it be I don't know too much about Wahhabism, but is that like, you know, sort of a rough transliteration of fun, like fundamental. To me, I haven't heard anything like that. It could be. But I certainly don't know. No, I don't. I don't.

I don't think of it for myself as like a religiously charged term at all. So I don't like these new. I don't like these new hip hop style terrorists like I used to say. I like these lunch pail terrorists. You need to go back to Al Qaeda. They got good fundamentals. They got hustle. They don't have grind.

You know, you don't see that in these new boys. They're all about the flash. What happened? What happened to, you know, the good old days? We simply blow up an embassy. I don't like to see that with beheadings. You know, Liam, Liam, I, I, I see these new Daesh guys. They just put out videos.

All they do is they put out videos. I've never seen, I've never seen anything even approaching like a 9-11 style attack. No, no, no. They're just glory boys. Just more glory boys. So remember how at the beginning of this, we said, I remember he was trying to get us to be sensitive. I think we're doing a great job.

Let's talk about Operation Cyclone. And sorry. There's been a lot of big brain takes in the press recently, right? About, you know, how, no, we actually didn't fund Al Qaeda or the Taliban, right? And this is true in a really pedantic sense, right? It's a terminological inexactitude. We funded in particular, like a network of Gulf financiers. And we also funded a cross-border operation led by a guy called Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Because he was seen as very sort of pliable. And incidentally, that guy's kid now currently the interior minister of the new Emirate of Afghanistan. Actually, my pedantry was more that we did totally fund the Taliban. It just didn't happen to always be the Mujahideen. It used to be a bunch of Pakistanis. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That's just that my problem is more that just they're not the same organization.

Yeah, we did fund them. I'm playing both sides. So it was come out on top in order to like fuck with the Soviets. 1946 to right the second. We funded the Northern Alliance. We, you know, we funded Massoud probably as much as we should have done. We funded Dustin probably more than we should have done. We funded also, but we also funded the Haqqani network.

So there was an incident in Syria a few years ago where I believe NSA backed rebels were fighting CIA backed rebels. Oh, classic, classic move. And I mean, the thing about about Jalaluddin Haqqani, who very, very interesting guy, it was like as part of his deal of being the most internationally connected Mujahide, he was the first one to call for foreign fighters to come and do Jihad in Afghanistan. And that's what caused the first influx of largely Arab fighters to, you know, go and fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. And that's the sort of like ethnic base, if you like, of what would become al-Qaeda.

Right. I before anyone gets mad at me and say that I am part of the CIA and the comments again. No, I'm just as critical of US foreign policy as you are. I just don't trust your sources all that much. Yeah, you can't, you can't be out. You can't be out here relying on the fucking Grey Zone. Okay. Yeah. Sorry about it.

That was that was the publication in question. Yes. Okay. So for reference, this is in the context of the Soviet Afghan war, right? You know, we're funneling money to the Mujahideen. Which by the way, since I didn't get enough of people telling me I was being too critical of the Soviet Union on the Romani episode, was a series of inexcusable war crimes. Yes. Definitely for more, check out the Lions Lid by Donkeys episodes about the Soviet Afghan war.

Doing, doing, doing shit before Rosalus got there. Doing shit that made me lie look like preschool. Yes. So we've sort of funneled billions of dollars, as Alice said, through various sources, one of which is through the Pakistani intelligence service, right? The ISI. The ISI, Inner Services Intelligence. This was Operation Cyclone.

We were funding them from like 1979 to 1989. There's some limited funding afterwards. You know, the idea is to give the Soviets major headaches, especially in the countryside, right? These Mujahideen. Yeah, just bleed them white. These Mujahideen are a diverse, you know, fractured set of militia groups. But the main thing they had in common, they didn't like the Soviets. They wanted Islamic government, right?

And the funding for this is not just all through the USA. You know, there's from private individuals. It's from a couple other governments. But there was also this guy named Osama bin Laden, right? And there was this guy named Osama bin Laden. This is the sort of like important gray zone thing is that if you want to say the U.S. government paid Osama bin Laden directly, that might be the case. But as far as I know, no one can prove it.

Because part of Operation Cyclone was to set up a highly persistent, a cephalous, deniable network of funding and organization through the Gulf states, which included a bunch of guys like Osama bin Laden. And the point of it was that you couldn't like, if you were to say the KGB, you couldn't easily cut off the funding to the guys who were shooting down MI-24s. Because, you know, there's just like, they don't all know each other and there's a bunch of them and they're all sort of spread out and nobody knows who all is getting whose money. Yes.

You know, bin Laden was from, you know, a wealthy family. The bin Laden's who to this day, control basically all the contracting in the Middle East, right? Saudi bin Laden group is a big contractor and they build everything, right? You know, bin Laden does a bunch of stuff in the Soviet Afghan war. He funnels money to Mujahideen groups. He helps set up training camps. He pays for some people to come to those training camps. Sometime in the late 1980s, he sets up his own training camp.

And, you know, he's like training fighters there, right? Yeah, but he's a venture capitalist, essentially. He's a facilitator. You bring stuff to him and he makes it happen. Exactly. And at this point, everyone's, you know, kind of, you know, they're anti-Soviet. They're not anti-USA yet, right? Yeah.

You know, the Mujahideen sort of kicked the Soviets out, right? The Taliban comes to power, right? They're also funded by Pakistan, of course. Of course. Of course, you know. But, you know, bin Laden comes back to Saudi Arabia with a lot of power and prestige and everything sort of hunky-dory until relatively hunky-dory until the first Gulf War, right? Right.

Oh, yeah. This was the big breaking point. Because, like, bin Laden had had theological differences with the Saudis before, particularly the sort of, like, court, like, theologist of the Saudi government, a guy called Ibn bin Baz. Yeah. But during the Gulf War, the U.S. stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, like Christian and Jewish troops.

Who brought religious symbols with them, which was another big point for bin Laden. It's like you can't fucking bring a Bible to Saudi Arabia or a Torah. It's also a very strong Third Amendment supporter. And, like, in order to wage war against, as much as Saddam Hussein was like a sort of, to bin Laden, a sort of, like, degenerate Barthas, kind of secularist, another Arab country, another Muslim country, as part of, like, sort of an imperial project. Yeah. So, hmm.

Saddam had, hey, this is Justin in post-production. I just want to let you know that I meant bin Laden here. Back to the show. Saddam had, like, offered, like, his Mujahideen fighters to help defend Saudi Arabia. And King Fad was like, nah, give me the Americans. I want the Americans. Yeah. It's like, sort of, that combination of being, like, personally insulted and also, like,

theologically insulted and also, like, thinking that the House of Sound and their clerics are corrupt and morally degenerous and repulsive is not, let's say, it's not an unpopular opinion. This is true. I think it is. So when bin Laden and people like him went, okay, well, these people are just, you know, useful idiots for the Americans, they're corrupt and they're awful and un-Islamic, that's not something which a lot of people would have raised an eyebrow to at the time.

And he's publicly critical of the Saudi regime, and eventually he gets kicked out of Saudi Arabia, right? And he winds up going to Afghanistan with some of his, like, closest followers and then later to Sudan, right? Yeah, which is where Robert Fisk writes the article, Anti-Soviet Warrior, puts his army on the road to peace about him. Right. I forgot to put that picture in here somewhere.

He gets, he winds up getting stripped of a Saudi citizenship and his family cuts off his allowance, which was $7 million a year. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And he winds up in Sudan as sort of a thorn in the side of the Sudanese government because he's like, you know, trying to, you know, he's bored, he has nothing to do, he's out of money.

He's trying to set up some terrorist training camps because, you know, what else am I going to do? Right? Yeah, stick with what I know. You gotta get the camp fees. Yeah, exactly. Is there a fee structure for terrorist training camp? I think you have to, like, pay the counselors, maybe you get, like, a camp crush on one of

the other fighters. I'm not quite certain how these things were funded at this point with Bin Laden running out of money. Nobody really is. It's an interesting moment. I mean, the safe answer is probably some more of that sort of cyclone network of funding that is, like, broadly sympathetic to him and, like, thinks that he's been wronged by the Saudis.

But nobody actually knows. Well, he winds up getting kicked out of Sudan and he's sent to Afghanistan, right? You know, I mean... Sent to or goes voluntarily. Oh, he goes voluntarily to Afghanistan. Or... Yeah, because by this point, the Tilebs have won the Afghan Civil War. Yeah.

Right. That, like, Kabul has been bombarded into submission. Masoud is still, like, holding out in the punch, Shiba, who cares about him. And so they have an Islamic Emirate and he's welcomed more or less with open arms. Yeah. And in the meantime, of course, during this period where Saddam is, excuse me, Bin Laden is bopping back and forth, the USA still had a residual force in Saudi Arabia. And of course, Saudi Arabia and government is cozying up to the US for and more, which,

you know, sort of makes Bin Laden even more red, mad and nude about the United States. Red, red, red. Yeah. It's a particular sort of territorialist thing that not just, like, Mecca or Medina, but like the whole Arabian Peninsula is sacred territory and they are just spoiling it. Which is weird, because he never got mad about American Arabian oil company before, you know. I mean... That's convenient how you have these revelations, isn't it?

Yes, the Saudis have been pretty cozy with the United States for a long time now. You get mad about this. Yeah. So... I love how that works. He's sort of increasingly mad. He issues a fatwa, right, where he declares war on the United States in 1996, right? Fuck you too, guy.

Yeah. He also does some, you know, sort of casual terrorism in Yemen and Egypt, right? And the Yemeni one, that was sort of in the service of destroying Soviet-influenced groups that were trying to take control and set up a stable government there, right? You know, they try to assassinate, I believe, what's his face? Was it Hasnab al-Bark? No. The Egyptian president at the time.

No, it was the other guy. I suppose it could have been. It was... Oh, wouldn't it be? No. Hey, this is Justin in post-production here. Just wanted to let you know that it was, in fact, Hasnab al-Bark. All right, back to the show.

The names on the top of my tongue, I just cannot remember. I know, right? So... Anyway. He does the USS Cole bombing. Yes. And he blew up a bunch of U.S. embassies in 1998, right? There was also, more importantly, his involvement in something called the Bojinka plot, which

was something that a guy who, like, brought to him, like, through Ramsey Yusuf and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, there was this plot to, like, simultaneously blow up, like, a dozen airliners in flight, just over the U.S. And that didn't come off, obviously, but that was, like... It moves from this idea of, like, oh, okay, we can, like, this knowledge sort of disseminates of, like, airplanes are extremely vulnerable, because until now, if you, like, put a bomb on a plane, it just blows up easy. If you hijack a plane, everybody expects you to say, all right, take me to Cuba or take

me to Algeria or take me to Lebanon. You get everybody off the plane, you blow it up on the tarmac, nobody cares. And so this idea of, like, using an airliner as a weapon in itself sort of, like, germinates during the 90s. Yeah. And it's surprising no one thought of that before, but I guess, you know, planes were in Cuba. You know who did?

Tom Clancy. Oh, yes. The most interesting and least examined figure of American, like, military psychosis wrote a book called, I think, Debt of Honor, which is about the U.S. going back to war with Japan at the end of which a Japanese airliner pilot flies an airline, like a 747, into the capital during the State of the Union address. Good lord. So it's in thrillers at this point.

Say, you know, Bin Laden was just sitting at the airport reading the Tom Clancy paperback and he's like, oh, I could learn a thing or two. Yeah. But like at this point in sort of the long 90s when everybody's like, oh, this is the end of history or whatever, you have this extremely sort of foreshadowing moment where Bin Laden is sort of like the scarlet fucking Pimpernel at this point, he's just fucking around in Africa for the most part, just kind of like doing shit. Like, you know, there's a plot here, a plot there.

Sometimes they come off, sometimes they don't, you know, but he's working is the thing. He's grinding, you know, he's on the ground. When he's, you know, after, you know, at this point, Al Qaeda blows up the embassies in 1998, the United States finally retaliated against the guy, right? They blew up some of his training camps, which they knew about. They also blew up a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which they thought was producing chemical weapons. It wasn't.

But no, it was actually producing about half of all the medicine in Sudan. So another proud day for US intelligence. I know. I know. Another proud day for US power. You know, and this is sort of the least this one was in a hospital who says that we do. I'm the people who are like interested in this sort of political Islam, right? He sort of gains more power and prestige, right?

Everybody loves a winner. I know. All right. And he's like racking up these relatively small wins, but he's putting them on the board anyway. Yeah. So, you know, and of course, US intelligence starts monitoring them a little more closely to the point where like around 1998, the CIA told Bill Clinton, hey, Al Qaeda is going

to hijack some planes and fly them into buildings. Yeah. And they didn't really do anything about that. No. Yeah. No, no, they did not. And then Clinton leaves office, Bush comes into office, history is still ended. Yes.

And these sort of memos, this is the looming tower, but essentially is like memos passed back and forth between the FBI and the CIA and like various other three lesser agencies. And the point that it comes to is that Bush should get, I think it's like actually in the president's daily briefing, the headline is Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US. And yeah, no, that also goes like, if not unread, unregarded. Yeah. I think there was also like a bunch of people using an excuse like, well, this is outside of our jurisdiction.

We can't forward this to relevant agency, blah, blah, blah, get tied up in legal crap, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that's part of it is the willful, basically, I don't know, willful ignorance is the term, but like choosing whatever, choosing not to do your job is. Yeah. And like, especially at this point, especially pre-911, the CIA is not yet the organization that it would become of like, sort of like zero dark 30 guys.

It's sort of this shirt and tie Mormon freak shows who have spent the entire Cold War smearing nerve gas on people's door handles. And so they don't want to fucking tell the FBI anything, particularly anything that implicates either their own sources or their own activities, whether that's like the foundation of this sort of network of finances or like having used it for operational purposes in the interim. Yeah. In the meantime, the FBI is also highly unfamiliar with arresting anyone for like terrorism who

they didn't personally radicalize. Yeah, we've also had, I forgot to mention this because I should have done because I mentioned Ramsey Youssef. We've also had the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 at this point. That's another one of those sort of like successes that like is a sort of it reflects better on ultimately on Bin Laden, but also Halajik Mohamed. And so that's, you know, that sort of sets the plan for like, not only are we going to like maybe use airliners as weapons, but we're also going to like attack symbolic like landmark

high impact targets within the United States. Yes. So here's a guy found a guy who found a guy wish the FBI had. Yes. Alas and Alak. Right. So this is Hany Salah Hassan, Henshore. I don't I don't I assume.

Absolutely. None of that. Or else I wouldn't have done any better. He was from Saudi Arabia and he was a failed airline pilot, right? He had applied unsuccessfully for airline jobs at Saudi Arabian Airlines, which is now called Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s, the airline turned him down. They suggested he go to the United States to obtain a commercial pilots license there, which he did.

Yeah. Well, that's an actual question. Why us? It's more it's more prestigious. Like I think the thing is this is not just coming to Saudi Arabia or Arab countries, but like a lot of the 9-11 hijackers are sort of like upper middle class fail sons, right, like this is like succeed at like things like engineering or medicine or whatever. And being an airline pilot for your country's like flag carriers,

absolutely a job in that mode. It's not actually about like wanting to fly or whatever. It's like it's a secure prestige. Exactly. Exactly. It's a good job. It's like a job that somebody ideally with connections can like get you. And then you just like, you know, you have sort of a career for life off of this. Oh, in less, in less, you're a wildly incompetent pilot.

That's bad to say. Yeah, you figure this guy maybe could have worked his way up through like a regional airline, but he doesn't do that, right? You can fly for one of those airlines that later merged into Delta. Like, I don't know, I forget what like the Appalachian Airlines was, but it's like northeast or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The airline turned him down, but they said, go to USA, get a commercial pilot's

license, come back here, maybe we'll hire you, right? So he he tries this in 1995, right? Over the next several years, he sort of bounced between several flight schools. He actually did receive an FAA commercial pilot certificate in 1999. And after that, he came back to Saudi Arabia and was again turned down by the airline. Yeah. And up until this point, you feel bad for the guy. Like, yeah, he's just he's not a good pilot. And it's like he's been he's been set on this course, but by, you know,

in particular, a society that's pretty much like, oh, we just decide what we think your career should be. Yes. And he's just he can't fucking do it. And you know, you feel a little bit bad. Yeah. And like in his frustration, he of course turns to Islamism, right? Of course, starts reading religious texts, listening to cassette tapes of various radical imams, right? You know, he's reading zines.

He's listening to podcasts. Yeah. And again, like pretty much all of the 9-11 hijackers are like this. Like, see, I jarred a little bit older, but like most of the others are just kind of like fail sons, basically. Yeah. And so he told his family was going to go look for work in the United Arab Emirates. But probably actually went to go to an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Right. Yeah.

Insanely easy to do at this point. Well, yeah, you know, it seems like they just, you know, they're just processing people at the door, you know, just show up, tell them what your skills are. You're for the terrorism camp. Like bear in mind at this point, the Taliban are the internationally recognized governments of Afghanistan. So nobody's like able to really stop doing about letting guys in or hosting terrorist training camps for that matter.

But also nobody's tracking this shit. This is all like, you know, worked out after the fact. Yeah, it's it's kind of like I didn't know it got this bad. My God. So all right, he's an al-Qaeda guy now. Right. And about September 2000, Henshaw arrives in the United States. He meets his fellow hijackers who are

now a full husband and Khaled al-Mithaa. Thank you. Mithaa. Anyway. Thanks, ours. Yeah, they're both Saudi Arabian, right? And they sort of bop around the United States for a while. They go to San Diego. They go to Mesa, Arizona.

They go to Patterson, New Jersey, Balls Church, Virginia. Right. And Jor is like studying. Well, I don't know, right? Oh, the 9-Eleven hijackers in America is like a fascinating period of time. I put this I put this in the notes later. But I think it was Sayajara, who, like with a couple of others, went to get self-defense training from a Florida martial artist called Bert

Rodriguez, like they just they just had some really fucking weird times. Spent a lot of money on strippers and alcohol. I'm imagining like a buddy comedy about. Yeah, I felt really guilty thinking about that. Yeah, that's what I want to know. You want to you want to feel weird, Bert Rodriguez wrote a book about how to create, I think it's called like create courage and the cover is 9-Eleven, which is weird for a guy who accidentally trained some of the 9-Eleven hijackers.

Listen, I you know, you got to market yourself. You do what you got to do. Right. You got to look at this guy, Bert Rodriguez. He looks like a sort of a bold Danny Trajo. He can he can truly look at that and say, yes, I helped with that. Teamwork makes the dream work. Yes. And our boy, Han Jor, was studying it like half a dozen flight academies in this time.

He never completes more than a few simulator sessions at any one place, though. Now, notably, one of those was at Essex County Airport from an academy called Caldwell Flight Academy. Oh, my bad, guys. Sorry. Hey. Listen, when you said he didn't want to know how to land, I thought he would just like I think he just had anxiety.

I mean, I get the feeling this guy actually probably did know how to land the plane. Now, yeah, I think he's actually the best trained or at least most trained pilot of any of the hijackers and we'll see that in a second. So they also they also go to strength training at Gold's Gym, which I thought was funny, because that's also where my dad goes. They got another two guys who were also both Saudis. They come in late, you know, into like this buddy comedy film, right?

And they go to they go to Dulles Airport on the morning of September 11th, right? Yeah, actually, the other two guys kind of show how how extensively the whole thing was planned, which is you had like they were divided up into teams. It was a group of 20 hijackers divided up into teams per flight. And then you would have essentially like two or three guys who would be eight like seizing the cockpit and would be like flying the plane. And then the other guys who joined them later were just like large dudes. They were there for crowd control.

So it's like, you know, and I don't know, it sort of speaks to quite involved planning, not necessarily even by Bin Laden, but by, you know, maybe Mohamed after maybe Halish and Mohamed, I don't know. Yeah, so so they all they all go to Dulles Airport on the morning of September 11th, right? And they all get stopped at security and put through secondary screening. But they let them through. That's like, oh, but that was designed to make us safer. Oh, I can't believe it didn't work.

They all had they all had utility knives on them, which security found. But that was perfectly legal to carry on the plane back then. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So they get on American Airlines Flight seventy seven, which was a Boeing seven fifty seven destined for Los Angeles, right? OK. And this was a relatively empty flight. It was fifty eight passengers and crew when the plane would usually have,

if it were full, it would have one hundred and eighty eight passengers, right? They took off headed west and just about around Parkersburg, West Virginia, right? Just past that, the hijacking occurs, right? Right. Now, unlike Flight ninety three, where we have shitloads of information about it for some reason, which was all used for Jingo as propaganda for years afterwards, right? There were there were only like two phone calls made from Flight seventy seven. There was a flight attendant who said everyone had been hurt into the back of the plane by hijackers and Barbara Olson, who called her husband, who was US

solicitor general Theodore Olson, who said the plane was hijacked and the hijackers had box cutters and she was cut off mid call, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's probably why you have fewer phone calls. It's like the more they're like strict, more aggressive crowd control. Better flight ninety three. I think they just like had them stay in their seats, right? Which, you know, led to them losing control of the plane.

That's a big, yeah. Not to interrupt the solemnity of the move, but I have to use a bathroom. I'll be right back. OK, I am also going to take the opportunity to use the bathroom then. Oh, no. Oh, no, fuck. OK. Well, I did. OK, I'm helming this by my own. Excellent. I'm going to talk about the two reasons

why a nine eleven like attack cannot happen again. Reason number one, reinforced cockpit doors were not a thing at this point. It was just like a regular door. You could break it down very easily. Reason number two, people had different expectations of what a hijacking was, like I said earlier at this point, like on September 11th, if you are on a plane that gets hijacked, the way you expect that experience to go is you are now in a hostage situation,

right? And like they fly the plane somewhere and either they get what they want to go and then they let you go or, you know, like maybe they kill you. Or they like land the plane somewhere and then try to like either negotiate for your release and the plane gets like stormed or whatever. But you're not expecting like this is an instant death sentence. And like, you know, I have to do anything I can to prevent it. Whereas now that mindset's totally changed. And you get that thing of like people who are like disturbed or whatever will like,

I don't know, make a grab for a cockpit door. They can't possibly open the end. Oh, I'm just talking about how you can't hijack a plane anymore. Right. Because like, OK, you can't get into the cockpit anyway. But if you try, the entirety of the plane will like sit on you and you might die of positional asphyxia. If you don't, then the plane lands somewhere and you get the most arrested

anyone's ever been. But it wasn't like that then. Right. We were talking about that in the country music episode, the sort of how since 9-11, there's just been the sort of slow, long 20 years psychosis. Yeah. That's why flight 93 is different is because like it was it was exceptional in that way, because like at least some of the passengers there sort of understood that to be a life or death type situation rather than let's, you know,

stay calm and see how this plays out. I'm back. Hi. Hello. OK. So this this hijacking actually occurred slightly after the first plane flight 11 and hit the World Trade Center. Right. But the hijackers turned off the transponder almost immediately, right,

which prevented the plane from being easily tracked. Right. I always wouldn't have mattered the extent to like the shambles, which like Norad was at this point. Oh, it gets worse. So after they turn the transponder off, that's when they turn the plane around. Right. So and they set the autopilot for Washington, D.C. So actually, they I guess they make it out to E.

And then they from there, they engage autopilot. Right. Yeah. So meanwhile, at ground control in Indianapolis, which had been tracking this plane before, they don't know anything's happened yet. Right. Other than this plane has dropped off the radar, they haven't heard that 9-11 is happening. Right.

Yeah. And there there isn't really a response for this. Like you can scramble fighter jets, which is like eventually done. But like it there isn't sort of a protocol in place that's like, oh, this is like a plane that has been hijacked and therefore you're going to shoot it down or whatever. They assume the plane had crashed, right? And they started alerting local law enforcement. Hey, be on the lookout for a plane crash site somewhere around here.

Right. Sure. And it wasn't until so the hijacking started at eight fifty four. The Indianapolis Control Center didn't know about 9-11 until 9-21. Oh, wow. Yeah. So the first plane hits the towers of what 843, 848, 854, 854. Thank you. So they they tried to relay information to other control centers about Flight 77, which it disappeared, right?

And somehow it wound up being the Boston Control Center who coordinated with the Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD, right? And they got Flight 77 confused with Flight 11, which had already crashed into the World Trade Center, right? Yeah. And that again is like part of the planning was part of the planning of like the budget and plot to to a certain extent as you try and like saturate people with too much information to process at once. Yes. Like it doesn't make sense for this to be something that happens to

multiple planes almost simultaneously. Yeah. So so needs, right, is Northeast Air Defense Sector. They started searching for another plane headed towards Washington, D.C. And they were looking for it in New Jersey. Right. Oh, meanwhile, Flight 77 was flying through the National Radio Quiet Zone. Of course it was.

Yes. Which has a bunch of radio telescopes, right? It's a big area in Virginia and West Virginia and a little bit of Maryland. Radio transmissions are restricted, right? And there's some they got some secret squirrel military shit. But they just weren't looking for planes here, right? They only had a little bit of time to look for it. So the needs actually scrambled the fighters

pretty soon after they found out this was going on around 923 to go intercept Flight 11 or Flight 77, which they thought was Flight 11, right? Over Baltimore. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So doing great. Flight 77 wasn't detected again until it was almost at Dulles Airport at like 932, right? Oh, fuck, OK. So it needs learns that Flight 77 had been hijacked right around this time

sort of by accident. They find out Flight 77 exists. I think I think someone got in contact from the Indianapolis FAA Control Center and mentioned Flight 77 and they're like, Flight 77, we haven't heard about a Flight 77. What's going on? That's the one that got hijacked. What have you been doing?

Go cults. Yeah. Yes, they're deploying the fighters to go bring the cults back to Baltimore. Well, listen to my dad happy. Air traffic control at both Dulles and National Airport also had detected the flight at this point. They asked the crew of a C-130H, which had just left, I think, one of the air bases in the area to get a visual on the unidentified airplane. And the pilot of that plane said,

well, it sure looks like an American Airlines 757. Thanks, guy. Yeah. Appreciate your budget. All right. So now we have to talk about the turn. Oh, boy. Yeah. Smoking on that shit that made Honeyhunter pull off a perfect 330 degree turn and descend 2,200 feet.

I was about to say this is this is a hell of an aerial maneuver right here. Right. And this is definitely one of the things that tends to fuel the conspiracy theories. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, this is not not the world's easiest maneuver right here. I, for one, think it was a fluke. Yeah, you only need to get lucky once. Yeah, this is the thing, right? Like, something sometimes things do just come off, right?

They just work and also Honeyhunter was also like, OK, every flight school he went to was like, he's a terrible pilot. But as far as I know, he was also the like longest and most flight trained of any of the hijackers. Yeah. And this was also like, you have to bear in mind, this was like his big event. This was his masterdom as far as he was concerned. And so, like, if ever there was a time to, like, get it right for him, it would have been this one.

This wasn't something that he was idly doing. So, yeah, it came good as it were. And this is one of the. So, you know, at 929, Hanjo turns off, he turns off the autopilot to begin to maneuver to, you know, whack into the pentagon. Right. He banks hard to the right. He goes through a 330 degree turn,

you know, right around here, right, right centered on Cameron Run Park right over here, which is this weird municipal water park in Alexandria. It's kind of cool that it's like a municipal water park as opposed to a private operation, at least I think it's not not very common. Anyway, he descends 2,200 feet through this curve. He comes down low over I 395. He advances the throttle to maximum. He clips some telephone poles and he smashes the plane into the pentagon.

Right. Yeah. Which, and again, that's another thing that people like to make a lot of. Because he hits it like dead on like almost horizontally. Right. And the idea is that like the pentagon is a like a low building and like it was over a grass lawn and he should have like either come in too low or like come in too high and missed it. To which it's a five story building.

Like, OK, seeing it from the air or whatever, sure. But like he lined himself up for it. He does kind of he does kind of not hit it like the optimal point. I mean, he sort of hits like the ground a couple feet in front of it. Yeah. And he's like it's like with the telephone poles. Like if he hit stuff before, he's still going to hit the building because it's a whole airliner. One of the wings, I believe, hits the ground right before the fuselage plunges

into the granite facade and the only footage of this is from like a gas station camera, which gets about three frames of it. Yeah, it's like one shot every second. And again, that makes a lot of people or at least made a lot of people. It made your roommate who smoked too much weed in like 2005. Make you watch a bunch of really great forces change and go, yo, that that looks like a missile to me, dude. You can see the fins there or whatever.

Yeah. As this point, the C1 30H pilot we mentioned before, Radio's National Airport Tower to say, looks like the plane crashed into the Pentagon, sir. That's fucking that's why we pay a butt. And meanwhile, the interceptors were looking for Flight 11 in New Jersey. Flight 11, which is at this point, melting through the fucking sky lobby of the North Tower.

Yes, exactly. So they they they kind of fucked this one up. Now, yeah, kind of dropped the ball on this one, guys, if I'm honest. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. They got they got Amy McGrath out there to shoot down 93. So, you know, one out of four ain't bad. Now, one of the things we talked about last year on our annual 9-11 episode, we talked about the World Trade Centers and on the World Trade Centers,

you would see a large you saw a large like impact that was vaguely plane shaped. Right. You know, there's big holes where the wings impacted the building. You don't see this on the Pentagon, right? So we got to ask, you know, what happened here, right? Now, he he shared one of the wings off on the lawn, which stops you from getting the perfect Looney Tunes silhouette. This is true.

But, you know, the World Trade Center is clad in, you know, many exceptionally slim columns right on the exterior, you know, lots of light aluminum facade panels. The Pentagon is a conventional, heavy reinforced, concrete frame building overbuilt 1940s style with big, heavy limestone panels on the exterior. This in and of itself is not enough to prevent the Looney Tunes style plane outline, though, right? But this area had just been renovated, right?

The renovation started after the Oklahoma City bombing in order to prevent, you know, a similar thing from happening where the whole facade is ripped off, right? Same thing by all new federal buildings and US embassies abroad have a shitload of setback, like you'll see a bunch of like heavy concrete planters or like overt barriers, but also it's across, you know, like a hundred and fifty foot lawn away from you. But because this section was also near the helipad, it was actually designed to withstand, you know, a helicopter impact, right? So this renovation, which had started in 1993 and which was due to finish up in five

days after 9-11, right, involved reinforcing the facade of the Pentagon, this side of the Pentagon, really, with a very, very aggressive blast resistant facade system. It was two feet thick, right? It included a layer of, you know, a grid of steel beams for blast resistance and a Kevlar layer, right? Sort of similar to if you're ever doing like blasting rock in a occupied area, you put down a heavy Kevlar blanket in order to prevent the blast from,

you know, releasing debris into the atmosphere or, you know, all that sort of stuff. They basically had blast resistant, you know, Kevlar blankets in the entire facade system here. And of course, this is the kind of thing that also drives conspiracy theorists, well, because it's like, oh, so he just happened to attack the one part of the building that was like not going to do any huge structural damage to it or whatever. It's like, yeah, actually. Yeah, that makes sense when I'm trying to do a false flag is I'm going to try and not do very much damage.

So, you know, the windows were also blast resistant. They were like two inch thick safety glass, right? You'd see a lot of them remained intact. You know, Andrew did great with that turn, but he picked a really bad spot to attack the building, right? You know, on the parts of the plane that did penetrate the facade were like the fuselage and the engines, right? But if you think of that about this in terms of like the cross section and material,

it hits the building, right? You know, the fuselage goes in the building and starts disintegrating. And as it disintegrates, it's imparting more energy into the building, which is causing more destruction. So the future fuselage can penetrate through the wings, the tail, you know, these other what's the word? Appendages of the plane. Flight surfaces.

Flight surfaces, you know, they just sort of hit the front of the building and they disintegrate, right? But it also helps that the wings are full of fuel, which just explodes immediately. This is true. I imagine that was probably the fire was not so severe to start out with just because all that jet fuel just boom immediately, right? Yeah, and it's not like the World Trade Center where it like is sort of like cast suddenly through the whole like footprint of the building. Like it's mostly sort of hits the outside.

It sort of splashes back down on fire. Yeah, you know, most of the plane debris that was recovered was from the tail section of the plane. I think somehow the nose cone was also recovered. And then some bits and bobs we'll talk about later. And, you know, one of the side effects of this was because of this reinforcement, a lot of people will be able to get out of these offices very quick. Yeah, I think it only killed like a few people on impacts directly.

Yeah, it was like a hundred hundred hundred eighty eight total, I think. Yeah, one hundred eighty four total. Yeah. And this this photo is from just around twenty three thousand people work here. Yeah, assuming it's at capacity. This this this photo is from around 30 minutes after impact, actually. You know, firefighters got on scene really quickly. You can see up here, the the cornice up here is starting to sag.

This is right around when they pulled all the firefighters out. The building collapsed shortly after they pulled all the firefighters out. Initially, you know, workers in the building started pulling people out of the building. A lot of people could get out under their own power. You know, and but the fire department shoot everyone away once once they showed up there because, you know, we have rescue training, right? Right.

So the impact was at. What is it? 934 ish, I want to say. Yeah. The building collapsed at 1010, right? And that's 36 minutes, 36 minutes. Yeah. And only at that point did the upper floors catch fire. Wow.

Yeah, it's really fucking isolated. Very, very well built building. You couldn't have picked a worse building to try and attack with a plane. So, you know, the one thing that did happen at this point, the roof was held up with big wooden support beams. So the roof caught fire and started spreading along the building. They actually had to control that by doing fire breaks.

They couldn't they couldn't really define us the finest firefighting technique of the century. Yes, we know. And the fire wasn't fully contained until 6 p.m. the following day. Wow. Yeah. This is where you can sort of see those those big, big Kevlar panels, right?

You can see some of the big beams there. You can see how the the building is sort of fallen down, but it's draped like a curtain. Now, right? The facade is surprisingly intact for what's happened to it. So this this killed about a hundred. This killed 188 people, including, of course, everyone on Flight 77. Mm hmm. If you believe things you read on Twitter, it like perfectly took out all of the

DoD's records of operations, cyclone or whatever, which it didn't. Probably not. Also, some guys would still just know about it. Like, yeah, I was about to say, yeah. That's the thing with these is that like they don't need like more than a memo. Destroyed and destroyed a bunch of art and books because it hit the the US Army's library. That's a shame. Oops. Yeah, they lost a couple of like big oil paintings.

And the plane mostly did damage to the outer E wing, right? Which is where all the generals are. It did penetrate slightly into the C wing or as far as the C wing, right? At this point, they're trying to do recovery. They found the important pieces of the plane, you know, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder recorder. The flight data recorder was good. The cockpit voice recorder had fused into a solid block of plastic.

Oh, shit. They also found one of the hijackers driver's licenses in the parking lot. Again, another classic move that like gets people very, very weird is like the FBI just found a couple of passports on the street outside the World Trade Center. They found a driver's license here. It's like stuff happens. It's to play. It's it's right.

Yeah, they presumably found a lot of other shit that they're not all cataloging. But that this is just one of the things that happens when you throw an airline as worse than people into a Cuisinart, essentially. Yeah, I was that one of the one of the weird ones was I think they found they found a piece of one of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center, like a big piece, like an aileron or something in like 2011, 2012, maybe later than that, it had fallen between a pair of buildings which had eight inches of space between them.

Huh. Yeah, that's a job. No, it just it has that air of like like history that happens with like huge events. Right. Same with the JSC assassination. We're like if you take any any sort of event, there's always going to be a bunch of insane seeming coincidences about anything because that's just like how life works. There's always a shitload of like variables and some of them are going to line up, but because it feels like portentous, right?

You assign more meaning to these things than perhaps they have. Yes. And so the idea of sort of creating order out of nothing because I think people can't handle the idea that not that things just happen. You know what I mean? But sometimes stuff just goes on. Obviously, this wasn't random chance. It's a very well planned operation to be on.

It contains a lot of random elements just because everything does like where that guy's driver's license ends up. Right. Absolutely. Here's some of that. Here's some of the recovery operation afterwards. You can see a big part of the buildings come down. It's the E ring, the D way. The hot dog was OK.

Oh, yeah, I didn't make it that far. I only made it as far as we went. They replaced the hot dog hut. Throw an anti-aircraft battery on top of it. In 2000 and in 2006, they replaced the hot dog hut. What's there now? Another hot dog hut. Thank God. OK, thank God.

And a new eating facility is as how the the Air Force described it at the time. We're all God's children at the hot dog hut. Yeah. Incidentally, if you want to get really like I emoji about this, the old hot dog stand had a big carved wooden owl on top of it, which they they actually kept and placed on the new hot dog stand. So just if you wanted to get a little bit of like Bohemian Grove vibes. You can see here, this is the whole the plane poked when it came out the other

side of the sea wing, right, which is kind of tiny and pathetic. Yeah, it's kind of like pieces out in that courtyard. Yeah, exactly. In an interior courtyard, even, you know, kind of kind of like, well, you try hell of a well built building. Yes, it's it's very, very heavily built building. Now, in 2001, when this has occurred, they were trying to eventually do a comprehensive renovation on it because

as well built as it was structurally, every building system was failing. Oh, OK. The heat, the lights, the electricity, not the asbestos. The asbestos was working great. The asbestos was working great. It was full of asbestos at this point. Yeah, building was absolutely chock full of asbestos. Everyone who was doing work on this building in the recovery effort

all got exposed to shitloads of asbestos. So, you know, it's it was it was not. Like other parts of 9-11, not great for your health to be working on the recovery effort. Yeah. You can see here's one of the shredded piece of plane they recovered. You know, because again, this this plane just disintegrated on impact. There was not a sea from American. Yeah, it's probably came off the tail or something.

Hmm. Or no, the tail of American Airlines plan just says on it. So I guess that's a fun side of like, yeah, from the side now. And you can see sort of a diagram of how this hit the first floor, right? Like a shotgun blast. Yes, exactly. Just straight through. Well, every one of these circles is where they recovered a body. Hmm.

Or I think maybe some of them are casualties and not bodies, but I'm not sure which ones. You know, one of the big conspiracies is, you know, I went through the Defense Intelligence Agency offices, right? You can see it just sort of clipped it on the side. Now, perfectly taking out the filing cabinet in which a single minimal folder was locked up, in which was written Bush did 9-11, like 9-10. That's that's pretty good accuracy that that that that that that Hanjo got that from, you know, he started that run in West Virginia and hit that filing cabinet.

Also, they could just start redoing the conspiracies on September 12th. Yeah, good point. Yeah, got to move to a different office. Yeah, exactly. So this this whole section, this whole section here basically collapsed, you know, and they they had to trash that part of the building. Hmm. And yeah, they they started rebuilding like instantly.

Oh, the fucking. Let's let's roll. Countdown, count counter here. Yeah, they gave the contract to the people who had just finished doing the renovation to rebuild that whole section of the Pentagon. So they're behind it. Yeah, generate more business. One more business. Yeah.

Yeah, Faqina up here, I assume, is Italian for Saudi bin Laden group. Investigate as best as removal contractors. Yes, in like DC and over. Yeah, so after after, you know, the dust had settled, they cleared everything out. You know, they they had to rebuild this part of the Pentagon, right? It took exactly one year, right? The renovated section opened September 11th, 2002, right? I was going to ask what the countdown was.

Yeah, they they they they got they can get things done fast when they want to. Right. Yeah. This was followed by like a complete gut renovation of the rest of the Pentagon, lots of security improvements. They moved the the Richmond Highway and they they wound up having to buy out essentially all the office space in Crystal City to move the Pentagon people into while while they renovated this. Right.

Including running the Pentagon's internal systems under the ground into the Crystal City office buildings temporarily. Which is genuinely fairly impressive. Yes. Yeah. Just a guy with a backhoe just digging the big pipe for the imperialism run. So yeah, exactly. You got to have it is the thing. So, you know, this was and once they finished the renovation, I think like

10, 15 years later, of course, they vacated Crystal City, which, you know, then knowing that because so much office space was suddenly vacant, you know, it became the cheapest place to rent an office in the Washington, D.C. era. And, you know, small domino United States occupies or adds forces to Saudi Arabia. Large domino Amazon relocates to Crystal City. Well, like the good news is that post 9-11, having successfully pinned it on Saddam Hussein, a guy who bin Laden hated,

the the United States managed to vastly expand its security apparatus, which meant that there are a lot of new, you know, arms of that security and intelligence apparatus that needed housing, such as Amazon.com. Yeah. And then there was and they put up a couple big DeFarben, a defense building since then in the area. There's this one absolute monstrosity, right? By Interstate 395, I remember watching go up when I was when I was in high school and I was like, Jesus Christ, this is the biggest, tallest building I've ever seen.

I mean, it was like 17 stories, but it was massive. Isn't the the NRO out there to the satellite guys? I think they're they're in like Chantilly. Chantilly, right? Yeah. This was Shirleyville, if I recall correctly. Well, just massive expansion of security stayed out here and it's just, you know, led to more and more construction of Department of Defense and Department of Department of Defense related buildings

ever since and the Pentagon, weird how this stuff never gets smaller. Exactly. And it's a ratchet. But the good news is the Pentagon is as best as free now. I'm good. Yeah. It's important to have a healthy war machine. So. Now we have to get to the part that everyone's been waiting for,

the conspiracy theories. You know, there's lots of like conspiracy theories about like 9-11 that are popular in a lot of leftist circles, right? And, you know, there's sort of the vaguely plausible stuff like, you know, you talk interesting stuff like, well, or sure, we're a lot of airline stock shorts right before 9-11. Or yeah, that's on the like more plausible end is like a bunch of bunch of guys, a bunch of finance guys in the Middle East could have had advanced knowledge.

Interesting. Yeah, that sounds about right to me. Yeah. It's like, yeah, like a Saudi guy's cousin's cousin got like a wink and a nod. Yeah, sure. They're doing some insider trading on terrorism. Yeah, yeah, to like stuff that is coincidental, but seems incriminating like the Northeast air defense sector doing a fucking like preparedness drill that day. Yeah, so they had to like all fucking good.

It did. Yeah. So like all the phone calls between anybody is like, yeah, is this real or is this like an exercise? No, no, it's real or or, you know, Amy McGrath shooting down Flight 93. You know, and then there's like the deliberate intelligence failure stuff, which, you know, I was like, well, did did Bush really do 9-11? Was Clinton involved in doing 9-11, right? No, he just took advantage of the situation.

Yeah, there is there is one thing which is that the most popular conspiracy theory and the most successful conspiracy theory about 9-11, because it is a conspiracy theory, is that Iraq was involved in the planning or execution of 9-11. That is a good point, yes, but because that was a conspiracy theory that was advanced by the president and by members of Congress, that's not a conspiracy theory. That was like a very serious narrative that everyone needed to take seriously. Yes, a very good point.

And then there's like the conspiracies that, you know, I think are harmful, which because they're not correct. And I think that that they're depressing, right? And that stuff like Bush put bombs in the towers. And of course, the fucking missile conspiracy, right? Yo, have you seen this extremely grainy three frames of footage? Because they should look like a missile to me, right? Does that look like a tip, bro?

You know, I'm going to say this. Those three, those three frames contain neither a missile nor a plane, right? So OK, inconclusive. It's just a really big Bert Moss, man. So a lot of people still think that, you know, rather than a guy flying the plane into the building, right, there was a much, much more complex and insidious plan involving the plane being disappeared into some kind of black site. And then I don't know, they go and shoot all the passengers and crew.

And then the military flew a missile into the building, right? Yeah, which seems a lot more difficult to me. It seems like that doesn't feel like it's worth the effort. Yeah. And this is sort of because of the aforementioned lack of damage to the facade, the small hole in the building and the lack of plane debris in all the pictures, right? And of course, the security footage doesn't really clearly show any kind of vehicle, right? It's like, why would why would you have this attack that's very ineffective against

like a military target and then one sort of very, very effective against civilian targets? And it's like, well, because nobody has actually flown an airliner into a building before this on purpose. Yes. And so nobody really knew how it works or if it would like work well. Another another popular theory is that the military flew like a drone into the building, right? You know, drones that good then again and again. Drones that good now. Yeah, they also made a plane disappear with all its passengers, but they also

struck they killed they killed the solicitor general's wife. Yeah. Because and then they put fake plane debris in the building, you know, as opposed to just flying the plane to the building. That's right. And the people on the the Jefferson Davis freeway or whatever who saw the plane go over them. I believe that was Washington Boulevard. Jeff Davis Parkway was on the other side of the building. Yeah. Well, like anybody who saw the plane come in.

Yeah, they're the CIA and anecdotally, my my Cub Scout, Den leader at the time, was in the Pentagon when this happened. And he didn't do 9 11. Yeah, he he was on the other side of the building and didn't know anything had happened for 30 minutes. It's a big building. It's a big building. Yeah, it's a big building. You know, obviously, I don't think you can fully refute the conspiracy theory

by talking about it, right? People are going to believe what they believe, right? Right. I think it is worth noting the lack of explosion damage in the building that would arise from a missile hitting it, right? Right. You would expect that facade rather than staying largely intact, right? The missile goes in the building and explodes and then the facade falls outwards. Yeah, because that's what it's designed to do.

And also, like, if it's the US government doing this, then they know what the fucking building is like. Right. This is true. So that's one of the things that really bothers me. It's sort of anecdotally, is this almost like gospel on part of the left? That it was like an inside job. Yeah. And if you sort of believe

more or less the official narrative, you're like a mark. And no, man, it was just terrorists doing terrorist stuff. The United States government then took advantage of to launch two wars and increase the size of the surveillance state and military state, which they were going to do anyway, maybe just a little slower. Yeah, I think one of the depressing things about this is, you know, if you believe ideas like, you know, there was a missile, Bush put bombs in the towers, right? There's sort of this incredible state

capacity that the United States has in order to, like, coordinate such a thing, which involves thousands and thousands of people who aren't all CIA agents, right? Right. So they're just going to work. Yeah. And keep it a secret somehow, right? But also not that secret because you and your friends know about it and a guy with a silenced pistol hasn't killed you yet. Exactly. And I think if there's any kind of like 9-11 was an inside job

conspiracy that's like plausible, right? It would have to involve like 12 people at most, right? One of whom is bin Laden and two of whom are Dick Cheney and H.W. Bush. Yeah, they got them in the room and they were like, yeah, for old times sake. Yeah, you want to do 9-11? Bin Laden is like, what's 9-11? Oh, you'll know. Well, the important news is that we did compromise.

Some have been laden to a permanent end. So justice has been done at only the small cost of 20 years of war in Afghanistan and also invading and occupying Iraq for no real reason. Yes, yeah. We're doing America. But I don't know if this is like, you know, people want to make this, you know, a part of a false flag strategy, attention, you know, domestic gladio thing. I just don't think so.

I think this is just something the state took advantage of rather than something the state orchestrated intentionally. I mean, they did kind of orchestrated unintentionally. But yes. Yeah, that's that's what I have to say about the conspiracy theories. I just don't think I just don't think they're plausible and I don't think they're necessary to like understand state power or like the military industrial complex, it's just not it's just it's too it's too big.

It's too like it's exciting and interesting evil as opposed to banal evil, which is the usual kind. Yeah, well, like the depressing thing and the thing that really gets me is that like, OK, if 9-Eleven had never happened or like if it had been thwarted, right? Say, say, I don't know, you go back in a time machine and you tip off the FBI and the FBI believe you and all 20 guys get arrested at the airport, right? The thing that really depresses me is that like had 9-Eleven not happened or had it not succeeded, I think the United States would have invaded Iraq anyway.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I believe so. W wanted a war and one of the things actually this is another I'm just settling my grievances here is that, oh, the war was for oil. It's like it's actually a lot less complicated than that. W wanted a war. There's a man ruled by his ego who saw a guy that quote, tried to kill my daddy and and just he was going to get a war one way or the other.

I mean, the Pentagon makes there's memos and shit that make that very clear. Like, that's the one thing that you actually can be very reductive about is like, no, they they invaded Iraq because they wanted to. They knew that they were lying to do it. But, you know, they wanted to do it. So they did. Yep. What are we going to talk about for the third 9-Eleven episode? In 9-Eleven, twenty twenty two, building seven, building seven, building seven.

Oh. It gets worse every time you say that, man. Why do you have that big phone finger that says building seven? So someone did you get that? Someone make one of those and send it to me. No. Oh, Ross, I have so many gifts from the PO box for you the next time I see you, baby boy, I'm tired of this shit all of it in my room.

So you're going to get some of it. Now we have a cat package. Yes. All right. Yes, I got to some of your dress. All right. So if that's everything we got. That's it. I think we I think we we never forget it. Never, never, never forget that the Pentagon suffered

partial damage on 9-Eleven. That's right. And obviously, a lot of people were killed as well. Mm hmm. Yeah. Tell you what, aside from flying an airliner full of like normal people into it, it's a hell of a lot more of a justifiable target than anything else that Al Qaeda did on 9-Eleven and also a lot of things that the U.S. destroyed in the war since.

Yes. It was kind of a military target, at least. Well, not kind of a military target, definitely a military target. Anyway, so we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Hello. I like this picture. Yes. Well, in Rod, we trust.

Yes, in Rod, we trust. Back when I studied physics at my old university, the physics department, as well as nearby institutes, had a number of issues that would fit here perfectly, though a lot of them were not exactly engineering problems. Now, this is a story mostly from older generations of students, right? We had an old professor emeritus who was an accomplished nuclear physicist

that used to be a professor to the oldest other professors at the time, right? And was much more lively than any of them, right? We considered his continued existence to be a piece of anecdotal evidence of radiation or mesis, right? That's the theory that low doses of radiation are actually good for you. Right. Back when he was retiring from teaching students near the end of his final teaching block, he collapsed due to a lung

problem that was taken to the hospital where they x-rayed him to maybe figure out a cause due to the result of the x-ray being unbelievable. The technicians checked their machine and tried again. Then they dismantled the machine, checked it, saw that it should work and then try it again. After the third time, they finally confronted him. We have a problem with the machine, they said. You appear to be transparent. He replied, oh, I forgot the cesium.

Then he pulled a pellet of cesium out of his shirt pocket. Oh, it's fine. It's fine, I'm just sort of safe keeping this glass of water. This is my emotional support, right? Turns out the machine was blinded by all the gamma rays coming from the cesium source. Sorry, was your professor fucking anatomical? What the fuck?

I gained immunity to large doses of radiation. You're exposing myself to large amounts of small doses of radiation. Note to the viewers at home, do not do this. Please do not try this. This man is a trained physicist. Yo, do you think the guy's lung problem could have been related to carrying some cesium in his jacket pocket? No, cesium is making him more powerful.

Just just the nutty professor persona, except he's just carrying radiation sources with him constantly. I know, I know in my heart that the jacket pocket that contains that cesium is in like a tweed suit coat. Yes, it's got the elbow patches too. Yes. Roz has the same one, actually. You'll see it at the next live show.

I mean, yeah, yes, exactly. It does have one after this. The radiation cleanup effort started in his office. Good. I forgot there's like six guys in hazmat suits coming. What do you mean, leave it inside the led light container? I hate when I'm coming back to my office and I open the door and there's a hazmat crew in there.

Oh, hey, doc. The hazmat crew arrives and opens the door to the office. The fucking demon core is in there. Yeah, you're just like, I don't know, you're just walking down the corridor to your office and there's a bunch of guys in hazmat suits and you're like, hey. And they're like, hey. There you're you're you're you're walking you're walking down towards the office one day and just a burst of Cherenkov radiation comes out the sides of the

cracks in the door. Good Lord, what is happening in there? I don't worry about it. That's normal. Now, when the new building for the physics mall. Yeah, when the new building for the physics department was constructed, his approach to nuclear safety was well known to everyone. So appropriate measures were taken.

So guess what they surrounded his office with? No, lead lead lead that steel that they get off of battleships. No. Yeah. Fuck, what's like good sheep shielding like like rubber or something? Nope. If you guessed lead, you would be wrong and you wouldn't be the first to try that guess. But the answer was teaching assistants.

You stupid rubes. That's that's a good that's a good professor right there. Thank you, wacky radiation, man. Well, that was safety third. All right, our next episode will be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Oh, we're keeping the bid up. It's not a bit, not a bit. It already was last week, last week.

Listen, become a Patriots, you know what the hell we're talking about. So you're not mad at us by this point. The bonus episode on the museum is coming. It's been really hard to write. We're really sorry. We are hoping to get that out. We will get that out this month. I am hoping that when Alice comes back, we can knock out her other motorsports episode.

Please keep giving us money. Yeah, but you may get between two and three bonus episodes out this month just to make up for lost time. Yeah. We will try to pump them out. Do we still have an Alice? Good question. Did Alice drop out? Alice, Alice.

All right, Alice is disappeared. That's Roz. Alice is dead and we are. There's a problem. Yes. Yeah, commercials. When's the next Frank coming? It's coming. OK.

I swear to God. OK. I just have been having issues. I'm just going to leak it. I'll leak it. I swear to God, I'll leak it. You have to come over here and steal the file from me. Oh, no, because I'm never at your house.

That's a good point. Well, you have to figure out how to render it, too. I can probably learn. OK, good luck. Thank you. We're going to call it at the episode. Yeah, listen to Kill James Bond. Listen to Lions Live by Donkeys.

Watch Do Not Eat's videos. RIP Alice. Do 9-11 RIP Alice. Do not do 9-11. Do not do 9-11. Our official stance on this podcast is 9-11 is not something you should do. Yeah, also not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes people act in bad faith to take advantage of situations.

I recommend against getting involved in political Islam. Yeah, also don't do that. Secularism is good. Wahhabism bad. Yeah, we have to say that. That says new train, good car, bad is secularism, good, Wahhabism, bad. All right. All right, I'm calling it.

That was the episode. All right, bye everybody. Good night, everybody.