I remember that the day was the most beautiful fall day of the year. I went for a walk and remembered thinking how absolutely gorgeous it was. The sky was bright blue, not a cloud in the sky, and I was feeling fantastic! (NetRunner was at work and I was not working at that time.)

I do not remember exactly where I heard about the first plane. It might have been on Everquest chat, since I know I was playing it a lot back then. But it was somewhere online, so I went to turn on the small TV in the computer room.

The rest of the day I was just watching the TV, horrified, having phone calls back and forth to NetRunner who was still at work. My mom from Finland called, around the time the news said there was smoke coming from The Pentagon.

The rest of the day was just a blur.. I know I was crying and just couldn't believe that the towers actually fell. Ever since I was a kid I always wanted to visit NY and see the WTC. I had posters of them on my bedroom wall. I know I couldn't go on top, because I am more than terrified of heights, but I always wanted to see them up close. I had seen them from a distance while flying off NY. I though I'd visit NY with Net at some point.

Thank God Net was able to come home soon afterwards. I was seriously becomimg hysterical while watching all this alone..

I remember it vividly. I was at home in the UK, watching day time soap opera "Neighbours" on the BBC. As soon as it finished there was an announcement saying they were breaking away from regularly programming to join BBC News. As soon as they joined, it was live footage of one of the towers burning. Then while live, the second plane hit. That sent a huge shiver down my spine. I then sat in front of that TV for about 4 hours until my father came home from work.

Throughout those hours, the Pentagon got hit, the plane crashed in Pennsylvania, and both WTC towers came crashing down. There was footage of fighter jets patrolling over the cities, panic in the newsreaders, their interviewees and the public. Confusion, shock and disbelief everywhere.

It was a declaration of war, and it changed the world we live in today in an instant.

@marbles:

First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens.

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson, but I used the term conspiracy theory, not conspiracy. Conspiracy theory has a separate and more strongly suggestive definition (this one from Merriam-Webster): "a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators."

I openly acknowledge that the government of the United States has and does commit conspiracies, as you define the word. (You mentioned Operation Northwoods in a separate comment; a post on Letters of Note from few weeks ago may be of interest to you, too, if you haven't already seen it: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/08/possible-actions-to-provoke-harrass-or.html.) The actions described therein, and other such actions, I would aptly describe as conspiracies (were they to be enacted).

Definitions aside, my problem with posts like that of @blastido_factor is that most of their so-called conspiracies are easily debunked. They're old chestnuts. A few minutes' worth of Google searches can disprove them.

It may be helpful to distinguish between what I see as the two main "conspiracies" surrounding 9/11: (1) that 9/11 was, to put it briefly, an "inside job," and (2) that certain members of the government of the United States conspired to use the events of 9/11 as justification for a series of military actions (many of which are ongoing) against people and countries that were, in fact, uninvolved in the 9/11 attacks. The first I find no credible evidence for. The second I consider a more tenable position.


The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside?

Once again, much of what you mention can be attributed to poor communication between the FAA and the government agencies responsible for responding to the attacks (and, for that matter, between the various levels of government agencies). And again, this is one of the major criticism levied by the various 9/11 investigations. From page forty-five of the 9/11 Commission: "The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex, but they play out a simple theme. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet."

Furthermore, it seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes made by a lot of the conspiracy theorists who fall into the first cateory (see above) is that they judge the events of 9/11 in the context of post-9/11 security. National security, on every level, was entirely different before 9/11 than it is now. That's not to say that the possibility of this kind of attack wasn't considered within the intelligence community pre-9/11. We know that it was (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-knowledge_debate). But was anyone adequately prepared to handle it? No.

In any event, when's the last time you looked at a map of Washington, DC? If you look at a satellite photo, you'll notice that the runways at Ronald Reagan airport are, literally, only a few thousand feet away from the Pentagon. Was a no-fly zone in place over Washington by 9:37 AM? I honestly don't know. But it's misleading to suggest that planes don't routinely fly near the Pentagon. They do.


And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?

In truth, I don't know enough about ballistics to speak for how well a titanium engine would withstand an impact with a reinforced wall at hundreds of miles an hour. But, if you're suggesting that a plane never hit the building, here's a short list of what you're wilfully ignoring: the clipped light poles, the damage to the power generator, the smoke trails, the hundreds of witnesses, the deaths of everyone aboard Flight 77, and the DNA evidence confirming the identities of 184 of the Pentagon's 189 fatalities (64 of which were the passengers on Flight 77).

Regarding the debris: It's misleading to claim that only small amounts of debris were recovered. This from Allyn E. Kilsheimer, the first structural engineer on the scene: "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box ... I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts." In addition, there are countless photos of plane wreckage both inside and outside the building (http://www.google.com/search?q=pentagon+wreckage).


Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found?

You help prove my point with this one: "almost always located." Again, I'm no expert on the recovery of black boxes, but here's a point to consider: if the black boxes were within the rubble at the WTC site, you're looking to find four containers that (undamaged, nonetheless) are roughly the size of two-liter soda bottles amidst the rubble of two buildings, each with a footprint of 43,000 square feet and a height of 1,300 feet (for a combined volume of 111,000,000 cubic feet, or 3,100,000,000 liters). (You might want to check my math. And granted, that material was enormously compacted when the towers collapsed. But still, it's a large number. And it doesn't include any of the space below ground level or any of the other buildings that collapsed.) Add to that the fact that they could have been damaged beyond recognition by the collapse of the buildings and the subsequent fires. To me, that hardly seems worthy of conspiracy.


Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.

Here, finally, we find some common ground. I couldn't agree more. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more ardent critic of America's foreign policy.

>> ^marbles:
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is ...

>> ^aurens:

>> ^rougy:
"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.
It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.
It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.
Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.

Video from the Doubletree Hotel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeTdrQhqyc
Where do you get this idea that no one was allowed to study the evidence at any of the attack sites? What does that even mean? Are you objecting to the fact that civilians like you or I weren't allowed to walk up and start poking around in the rubble? And how can you possibly claim that none of the debris was closely inspected? How do you think one finds the body parts of human beings amongst that much rubble without closely inspecting the debris? 184 of 189 of the people who died in the attack at the Pentagon were positively identified by investigators. Yet you claim these investigators didn't exist?
"An obvious farce"? Really? Again, where is your evidence?


Thanks for taking the time to post the video you mentions. I personally found it to be worthless. It shows nothing. It also appears to have been tampered with.

Most of the evidence was summarily destroyed, which is why it's so easy for the people who buy the official 9/11 story to say "Where's the evidence?"

Forgive me for skipping the link, because I can't think of the right keywords for Google, but there was a fire inspector who was very angry at how the WTC cleanup was handled. He said that his team was not allowed to investigate the evidence, and that he was only shown partial examples of the building, offsite, after it had been sifted by the cleanup officials.

I'm done. I know I won't change your mind. Not even gonna try, really, but others will listen.

Whoever attacked America on 9/11 is still out there, and their arrogance will hang them yet.

From www.washingtonsblog.com:

... Dick Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement; this CNN article; and this essay.

In fact, 5 war games were scheduled for 9/11, including games that included the insertion of false radar blips onto air traffic contollers’ screens. Specifically, on the very morning of September 11th, five war games and terror drills were being conducted by several U.S. defense agencies, including one “live fly” exercise using REAL planes.

Then-Acting Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, admitted to 4 of the war games in congressional testimony — see transcript here or http://www.spiegltech.com/media/McKinney2.rm">video here (6 minutes and 12 seconds into the video).

Norad had run drills for several years of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, and “numerous types of civilian and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft”. In other words, drills using REAL AIRCRAFT simulating terrorist attacks crashing jets into buildings, including the twin towers, were run. See also http://www.mdw.army.mil/news/news_photos/Contingency_Planning_Photos.html">official military website showing 2000 military drill, using miniatures, involving a plane crashing into the Pentagon.

Indeed, a former Los Angeles police department investigator, whose newsletter is read by 45 members of congress, both the house and senate intelligence committees, and professors at more than 40 universities around the world, claims that he obtained an on-the-record confirmation from NORAD that on 9/11, NORAD and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack exercise which involved government-operated aircraft posing as hijacked airliners.

On September 11th, the government also happened to be running a simulation of a plane crashing into a building.

In addition, a December 9, 2001 Toronto Star article (pay-per-view; reprinted here), stated that “Operation Northern Vigilance is called off. Any simulated information, what’s known as an ‘inject,’ is purged from the screens”. This indicates that there were false radar blips inserted onto air traffic controllers’ screens as part of the war game exercises.

Moreover, there are indications that some of the major war games previously scheduled for October 2001 were moved up to September 11th by persons unknown.

Now here’s where it gets interesting … Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta testified to the 9/11 Commission:

“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President … the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!?”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDfdOwt2v3Y]

(this testimony is confirmed here and here).

So even if 9/11 wasn’t foreseeable before 9/11, it was foreseeable to Dick Cheney – who had been attacking democracy for nearly 40 years – as the plane was still 50 miles away from the Pentagon.

>> ^aurens:

There's an old Jewish proverb that runs something like this:

"A fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover."

Your stones, fortunately, aren't irrecoverable. I'll offer some counterpoints to a few of your claims, and I'll leave it up to you to fish for the truth about the others.
Kinda like a jet plane's black boxes aren't irrecoverable... no wait, they were. FBI: "None of the recording devices from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center were ever recovered." But this defies reason. Black boxes are almost always located after crashes, even if not in useable condition. Each jet had 2 recorders and none were found? Anonymous source at the NTSB: "Off the record, we had the boxes,"
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

I don't know what you mean by "produced,"He means if you have evidence that implicates a suspect of a crime, then you indict that person. You then find and arrest that person, charge them, and follow the rule of law. The FBI admits they have no "hard evidence" that OBL was behind the 9/11 attacks, yet he was immediately blamed for it. The Taliban offered extradition if we provided evidence and we refused. Instead we invaded Afghanistan and started waging war against the same people we trained and armed in the 80s, the same people Reagan called freedom fighters. Now we call them terrorists for defending their own sovereignty.
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

The North Tower was struck at 8:46 AM, the South Tower at 9:03 AM, and the Pentagon at 9:37 AM. By my math, the Pentagon was hit fifty-one minutes after the first plane hit the WTC and thirty-four minutes after the second plane hit. The 9/11 Commission estimated that the hijacking of Flight 11, the first plane to hit the WTC, began at 8:14 AM. It's misleading, in this context...
You're talking about the Department of Defense. The Pentagon is the most heavily guarded building in the world and somehow over an hour after 4 planes go off course/stop responding to FAA and start slamming into buildings, that somehow one is going to be able to fly into a no-fly zone unimpeded and crash into the Pentagon without help on the inside? Never mind the approach the pilot took makes no sense. If your target is the Pentagon, you can cause the most damage and most causalities by doing a nose down crash in the top. Instead the amateur pilot does a high precision 360 degree turn, descending 7,000 feet in the last 2 minutes to impact the Pentagon in the front, the only spot with reinforced steel. He spends an extra 2 and half minutes in the air exposed and ends up hitting the exact spot that has been reinforced and also where the bookkeeping and accountants were. Day before 9/11: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announces that the Pentagon has lost track of $2.3 TRILLION DOLLARS of military spending.
Conspiracy? I think so. (Bonus: WeAreChange confronts Rumsfeld)
>> ^aurens:

Three videos, not one, were released.
And at least 84 remain classified. Why?
And how did two giant titanium engines from a 757 disintegrate after hitting the Pentagon's wall? They were able to find the remains of all but one of the 64 passengers on board the flight, but only small amounts of debris from the plane?
Conspiracy? I think so.

>> ^aurens:

I don't fault you, or others like you, for wanting to "think twice" about the explanations given for certain of the events surrounding 9/11. I do fault you, though, for spending so little time on your second round of thinking, and for so carelessly tossing conspiracy theories to the wind.
First you need to acknowledge what a conspiracy is. When two or more people agree to commit a crime, fraud, or some other wrongful act, it is a conspiracy. Not in theory, but in reality. Grow up, it happens. If you spent anytime at all "thinking" or looking at the evidence, then you would recognize government lies for what they are. You don't have to know the truth to recognize a lie.

>> ^rougy:

"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.
It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.
It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.
Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.


Video from the Doubletree Hotel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeTdrQhqyc

Where do you get this idea that no one was allowed to study the evidence at any of the attack sites? What does that even mean? Are you objecting to the fact that civilians like you or I weren't allowed to walk up and start poking around in the rubble? And how can you possibly claim that none of the debris was closely inspected? How do you think one finds the body parts of human beings amongst that much rubble without closely inspecting the debris? 184 of 189 of the people who died in the attack at the Pentagon were positively identified by investigators. Yet you claim these investigators didn't exist?

"An obvious farce"? Really? Again, where is your evidence?

"Forensic" also means to closely study the evidence to better determine who committed the crime, something that was not allowed on any of the 9/11 attack sites.

It is possible to remove debris and still inspect it closely. That was not done for any of the WTC sites.

It would be nice to see a link of that Bingham FOI tape you mentioned. A retired military officer, a colonel I believe, questioned the plane theory on the simple fact that there were no wing marks on the Pentagon building. The official video tape released by the Pentagon is an obvious farce.

Whoever was behind 9/11 is still at large, and it wasn't Al Qaeda.

@blastido_factor:

There's an old Jewish proverb that runs something like this:

"A fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover."

Your stones, fortunately, aren't irrecoverable. I'll offer some counterpoints to a few of your claims, and I'll leave it up to you to fish for the truth about the others.


- The alleged masterminds of 9/11 have never been produced and never put to trial, despite having supposedly been captured in 2001/02

I don't know what you mean by "produced," but here's something I do know: I started a case in small claims court earlier this year (in New York City, nonetheless), and I was told I'd have to wait at least four months to appear before an arbitrator. (It's likely that I'll have to wait longer, if, for example, I opt to appear before a judge.) Simply put, trials take time. Given the complexities of a trial involving the masterminds and perpetrators of 9/11, ten years is hardly cause for conspiracy.


- Total failure of the air defense system. The Pentagon was struck One hour and Twenty minutes after the attacks began, yet there was no response from Andrews Air Force base, which is just 10 MILES away and supposed to be in charge of defending the capitol."

The North Tower was struck at 8:46 AM, the South Tower at 9:03 AM, and the Pentagon at 9:37 AM. By my math, the Pentagon was hit fifty-one minutes after the first plane hit the WTC and thirty-four minutes after the second plane hit. The 9/11 Commission estimated that the hijacking of Flight 11, the first plane to hit the WTC, began at 8:14 AM. It's misleading, in this context, to consider the hijacking of Flight 11 as the beginning of the attack (I assume this is what you meant); it wasn't until the second plane hit the WTC that the nature and the scale of the attacks became evident. Could the communication between the FAA and NORAD have been more prompt, and, thus, more effective? Yes. (Rightly so, this is one of the major criticisms lobbied against the agencies responsible for responding to the attacks.) Is the delay of thirty-four minutes cause for conspiracy, given the lack of precedence in handling such a coordinated attack and the confusion surrounding the events of the attack? No.


- The remains of the twin towers were quickly carried off and buried before any forensic investigations could be done.

Your use of the word forensic is categorically flawed. (The first and third definitions of forensic, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, are as follows: (1) "belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts of judicature or to public discussion and debate, and (3) "relating to or dealing with the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems.") NIST's reports are chock-full of forensic analyses; have a look for yourself: http://www.nist.gov/el/disasterstudies/wtc/index.cfm. Forensic investigations also led to the identification of a significant number of victims. According to Wikipedia: "Within a year, medical examiners had identified the remains of 33 victims who had been on board Flight 11. They identified two other Flight 11 victims, including the lead flight attendant Karen Martin, after body fragments were discovered near Ground Zero in 2006. In April 2007, examiners using newer DNA technology identified another Flight 11 victim. The remains of two hijackers, potentially from Flight 11, were also identified and removed from Memorial Park in Manhattan." The methods used to identify these victims (DNA testing, in many cases) were nothing if not forensic.

You're also neglecting the simple fact that the removal of debris was necessary from a health standpoint. Again, according to Wikipedia: "The thousands of tons of toxic debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers contained more than 2,500 contaminants, including known carcinogens. Subsequent debilitating illnesses among rescue and recovery workers are said to be linked to exposure to these carcinogens."


- Of all the cameras around the pentagon, including the security tapes taken from local gas stations, only one blurry clip was released.

Three videos, not one, were released. According to Wikipedia: "A nearby Citgo service station also had security cameras installed, but a video released on September 15, 2006, did not show the crash because the camera was pointed away from the crash site. The Doubletree Hotel, located nearby in Crystal City, Virginia, also had a security camera video, and on December 4, 2006, the FBI released the video in response to a freedom of information lawsuit filed by Scott Bingham. The footage is 'grainy and the focus is soft, but a rapidly growing tower of smoke is visible in the distance on the upper edge of the frame as the plane crashes into the building.'"


I don't fault you, or others like you, for wanting to "think twice" about the explanations given for certain of the events surrounding 9/11. I do fault you, though, for spending so little time on your second round of thinking, and for so carelessly tossing conspiracy theories to the wind.

"One Meridian Plaza is a 38-floor skyscraper in Philadelphia that suffered a severe fire on February 23, 1991. The fire started on the 22nd floor and raged for 18 hours, gutting eight floors and causing an estimated $100 million in direct property loss. 1 2 3 It was later described by Philadelphia officials as "the most significant fire in this century". "
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/fires.html


This clip is a pathetic little band-aid against the piles of "weird shit" about 9/11 that still to this day should make any intelligent person think twice.

Such as:

- The alleged masterminds of 9/11 have never been produced and never put to trial, despite having supposedly been captured in 2001/02

- Total failure of the air defense system. The Pentagon was struck One hour and Twenty minutes after the attacks began, yet there was no response from Andrews Air Force base, which is just 10 MILES away and supposed to be in charge of defending the capitol.

- The Bush / Bin Ladin / Saudi families connection was never fully explored or explained.

- According to two first responders, black boxes were found, but later "disappeared" and their existence denied by the 9/11 Commision Report.

- The multiple military wargames planned long in advance and held on the morning of September 11th included scenarios of a domestic air crisis, a plane crashing into a government building, and a large-scale emergency in New York. Some fucking co-incidence huh.

- Of all the cameras around the pentagon, including the security tapes taken from local gas stations, only one blurry clip was released.

- The remains of the twin towers were quickly carried off and buried before any forensic investigations could be done.

the list goes on....


9/11 Never Forget??

You're damn right I'll never forget. You can count on it.

I wonder about something else :
1. The person filming sure took insane risks filming this (can't even start to imagine the consequences if caught) when actually it doesn't really show much.
2. If I were the Chinese Gvt and I wanted to get the pentagon's panties in a bunch I could always "leak" some footage of an old fighter made-up to look like some new stealth fighter (think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank) Major cost-effectiveness...

When the government gave free land to railroad companies, we got fraud and theft of historic proportions. We also got the most extensive railroad system in the world.

When the government gave billions to NASA, contractors looted the treasury, but we also got to the moon.

Every year the pentagon wastes our money on $100 toilet seats, but we also get the security of knowing that no one can threaten our way of life by force.

If we want green energy fast (and yes, I know not everyone does), we have to spend a lot of money and accept that waste will happen. That doesn't mean we can't do more to limit waste and fraud. It means we shouldn't let them deter us from doing what it takes to meet our goal.

>> ^ant:

I am sure there are many medias we have not seen and heard. It's almost ten years!


No doubt. There is medias we will never hear or see. Even with the few NIST has been forced to recently release, some have been obviously edited and redacted.

There's probably hundreds of videos of the Pentagon attack that will never see the light of day. They were quickly rounded up "for public safety". They later released one video with 6 frames of the plane hitting.

>> ^marbles:

@cheerleaders for Western colonialism and imperialism
This is what you support:
http://videosift.com/video/Make-No-Mistake-NATO-committed-War-Cri
mes-in-Libya
Get ready for the occupation force in Libya, the advance on Syria, and maybe even a confrontation with Iran.
http://videosift.com/video/Military-Sources-Reveal-Ground-For
ce-Invasion-of-Libya
http://videosift.com/video/World-War-III-Defined-Wider-War-
Unfolding-in-Middle-East
This has been planned out for at least 10 years.
Gareth Porter: General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.


And meanwhile you lament the loss of monsters like Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad. Well done.

@cheerleaders for Western colonialism and imperialism

This is what you support:

http://videosift.com/video/Make-No-Mistake-NATO-committed-War-Crimes-in-Libya

Get ready for the occupation force in Libya, the advance on Syria, and maybe even a confrontation with Iran.
http://videosift.com/video/Military-Sources-Reveal-Ground-Force-Invasion-of-Libya
http://videosift.com/video/World-War-III-Defined-Wider-War-Unfolding-in-Middle-East

This has been planned out for at least 10 years.
Gareth Porter: General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia.