Context and the 9/11 Conspiracies - Part 1: Planes vs. Buildings

*Updated*

` I must admit, the Truth Movement is pretty clever in their convolutions to make the government look responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks. To the lay people, many of their arguments may sound impressive and well-researched because their 'evidence' is very intricate, if utterly transparent.
` The September 11 conspiracy theorists have accomplished this illusion by wading through the Sea of Context, plucking out many hundreds of tiny little details, and then wedging them into awaiting slots in their own personal mental schemes.

` How did they manage this? The first stage of coming up with a conspiracy theory is having the conviction that you are correct, without a doubt.
` This relates to what I said in a previous post about how two people can have very different opinions about what is going on in a certain situation:

` Human beings are able to come up with any idea they like to explain any phenomenon they choose, so goes our abstract nature. The problem is, there can be many sensible-sounding explanations for the same thing; plus, these different explanations can contradict one another!

` Even more, it can be easy to 'prove' many of them right, because quite often we can find what we're looking for as evidence to support our ideas: As long as we ignore anything that goes against our idea, it is easy to convince ourselves that we are correct even when we may not be - and even when other ideas actually make more sense than our own!

` Virtually any idea can have as much support as one wants, as long as one ignores any contrary evidence. In this way, one can claim an idea is proven even when it's been proved wrong!
` Exciting, huh?
` So, in case you wish to make your own conspiracy theory, I will take you step-by-step through the process and show you many examples of how this has been done in the case of 9/11! Shall we?

Ground Zero

` When a building is hit by a plane, what happens? Well, it depends on what type of building and how fast the plane was moving. In this case, the events that happened after the planes struck the Twin Towers were not actually surprising to the buildings' structural officials - other than the fact that the towers remained standing for far longer than had been predicted!
` (Note: The conspiracy theorists have provided 'evidence' that they believed otherwise, but this is an illusion due to careful manipulation of the officials' words.)

` As I shall explain, nothing unusual (and thus suspicious) has actually been observed, much of which I will directly back up.
` So, if we are looking to make a building appear to be blown up by human means, we have to find similarities between the actual events and other events in which buildings are demolished with explosives, and then milk them for all they're worth - and then some.


` Let's look at what did happen at Ground Zero, and how that overlaps with the conspiracy theory:


` First off, a large passenger jet plows into the center of World Trade Center 1 (the North Tower), killing masses of people and turning it into a smoldering mess. Shortly afterward, a second plane smashes through the corner of WTC 2 (the South Tower) a little lower down than the level the North Tower was hit. This is an important point; I'll get back to that.

` The fire in the North Tower was estimated at between 1,000° and 1,800° F, which is hot enough to make the steel beams lose about 90% of their strength. While this temperature is still well below the 2,800° needed to melt the steel, these beams still would have eventually gone limp.
` This especially would have been true if the steel was utterly exposed to the heat - it appears it would have been because the weakly-attached, spray-on insulation would have been jarred out of place: While the buildings were designed with low-speed (150 mph) plane impacts in mind (as in the case of a pilot lost in the fog), high-speed plane impacts are another story.
` Even more devastating, temperature differences from one part of a beam to another would cause dramatic warping, which would have in addition pulled various attachment points and supports out of place.

` Furthermore, the buildings were of a somewhat unusual 'perimeter tube' design, having a 27x40 meter empty space in the middle - about 95% of the interior was an open area. [Eager, Thomas and Musso, Christopher. 2001. "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse: Science, Engineering and Speculation." JOM, 53(12), 8–11.] This unique, lightweight structure would inherently have exaggerated the problems of weakened steel:
` Joists were what connected the outer beams to the hollow core at each story, and it was these alone that provided a lot of the overall support for the weight of each floor. With the 1,000-or so-degree heat, the steel trusses would have eventually expanded at each end until they were too tall to support their floors at all.
` The collapsing floors are thought to have been enough to bow down the steel support columns toward the center of the buildings.
` When you think about it, collapse seems like the kind of thing that would happen next, doesn't it? But when you're convinced that it didn't play any significant role in the collapse of the buildings, you would instead file this bit of information away in your 'unimportant' drawer and find some more dramatic way of explaining it away.

` One way of doing this is to imply that one word means another word, so you can pretend that you're talking about the same thing as your detractors. In other words; be vague.
` David Heller did a good job of this in his popular article [2005, " Taking a Closer Look: Hard Science and the Collapse of the World Trade Center ." Garlic & Grass, Issue 6.]
` This should give one a good idea of how he does it:

The official story maintains that fires weakened the buildings.

` This first sentence is accurate; fires weakened the steel, causing it to twist and warp and lose its hold on the building supports.
` To further elaborate, the kind of steel used in those skyscrapers loses 50% of it strength at only 650° F, and as much as 90% of its strength at 1,800° F! [Eager, Thomas and Musso, Christopher. 2001. "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse: Science, Engineering and Speculation." JOM, 53(12), 8–11.]
` Now, watch as he transposes the meaning of the word 'weakened' onto the word 'melted' - which would indicate a liquid state:

Jet fuel supposedly burned so hot it began to melt the steel columns supporting the towers.

` Now, melting a steel beam requires heat up to 2,750°F; even at less than a quarter of the melting point, steel does turn red and can be bent when under enough pressure (such as the pressure of a slowly-collapsing building).

But steel-framed skyscrapers have never collapsed from fire, since they're built from steel that doesn't melt below 2750° Fahrenheit.

` Ah, but that's just a tricky technicality; in actuality, six steel-framed buildings had actually collapsed from fires while only these two have been skyscrapers. (Another one was WTC 7.) [Jesse Beitel and Nestor Iwankiw, "Historical Survey of Multistory Building Collapses Due To Fire" Fire Protection Engineering].
` Though steel-framed buildings generally don't collapse from fires, this is generally because sprinklers and fire retardant slows the blaze and firefighters are quickly able to put it out. McCormick Place of Chicago, which was not fire-resistant in itself, collapsed from an electrical fire in a half hour despite the efforts of firefighters.
` One more very important point; none of these other steel-framed buildings had suffered substantial damage by huge planes traveling at high velocities.
` Even so, this is Heller's way of making this seem like an isolated event, like there's something... funny going on! Adding that collapse must correspond to melting, rather than weakening, is simply misleading and irrelevant.

No fuel, not even jet fuel, which is really just refined kerosene, will burn hotter than 1500° Fahrenheit.

` In addition to lending importance to the word melting, here introduces a potential misuse of the word 'fuel': In this case, the jet fuel is the accelerant, like kerosene is when you pour it on some wood to start a bonfire. But the wood is the actual fuel, and it burns hotter than the kerosene.
` Office furniture, such as the furniture in the WTC offices, is known to burn at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit [Nominal Fires; One Stop Shop in Fire Engineering at University of Manchester], which is far hotter than what the steel would need to be weakened.
` (Note: Even the flames from a simple burning mattress heat up to over 2,200 degrees, which melts the steel springs ["Melted Steel; How Important?" The National Fire and Arson Report], though of course this is not the same type of steel.)

` While there is no conclusive proof of molten (i.e. liquid) steel at Ground Zero, there was nevertheless plenty of molten metal seen, and many of the steel beams which were visibly weakened, i.e. warped and glowing red.
` (Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists call them 'molten'. So when they say heavy machinery is handling molten steel - which would melt the heavy machinery itself and kill the operator - it obviously isn't.)

` I have also seen several photos showing warped steel perimeter columns (which had previously supported the floor trusses) uselessly sticking out from the buildings like broken guitar strings.
` To me, the idea that the buildings could have continued standing without a controlled explosion while a lot of the steel supports were wrenched out of place seems a bit far-fetched.

` Conspiracy theorist Steven Jones had a popular article about informal observations of flowing and pooled gray metal, claiming that it was actually steel - which is funny because steel turns from red to black as it cools. It seems more likely that this was something else, such as aluminum, which turns gray as it cools, and also melts at a much lower temperature.
` Whatever it was, no one can be sure of which gray metal it was because this cannot be determined by just looking: An eyewitness might naively say it was steel, because they know that the buildings were made of steel, but in reality not even an expert could determine what kind of metal it was unless some type of test - such as an atomic absorption spectrophotometry test - was performed. (This is why they are required in forensic investigations.)
` In other words, to claim that eyewitnesses - laymen or experts - know exactly what type of molten metal they are observing is ludicrous.

` Even if such a conspiracy proponent got through their head that melting and weakening are two distinct things, they would probably just file this in their 'unimportant' drawer and maintain that since all the other evidence supports their theory, it doesn't make a dent.

` What other evidence? Another allegation of the Truth Movement is that squibs - explosives used in controlled demolitions - can be seen in the videos as the buildings are collapsing.
` I will not contest that there are a few scattered sprays of debris flying horizontally from the buildings - which bear little resemblance to the fast-moving, organized lines of explosions made by squibs. In actuality, the mechanics of the buildings' collapse indicates a non-explosive cause:

` When you watch a controlled demolition, you can see the squibs going off in rapid succession from the first floor to the top, in all the major support points of the building. Just after that, the entire building - at the same time - free-falls to the ground.
` When you watch the World Trade Center towers falling, you cannot see any squib-like explosions going off at all prior to the building's collapse; nor do all the sections of either building collapse simultaneously. What you see is this:

` The parts of the buildings that were above the plane impact points begin falling first - meanwhile, the lower parts of the buildings are completely stationary until the top has collapsed upon them, subsequently causing supports and other structures on the floors below them to bend and burst like bubbles, blowing debris out the sides. [You can see for yourself in the PBS NOVA Documentary Why The Towers Fell.]
` In other words, the plumes of debris seen in the videos cannot be from squibs as they do not actually begin until after the buildings have begun to fall! They also do not move in any particular pattern other than what would be expected as a reaction to the building coming down. If they were controlled explosions, of course, they would have to go off before the collapse in order to cause it.

` Timing is everything in dealing with cause-and-effect!

` Instead, such plumes are clearly due to all of the immense pressure from the millions of tons of tower bending and popping, which is enough catapult chunks of concrete out of the windows!
` I could also add that, though conspiracy theorists claim the towers were at near-free-fall speed, the showers of debris fell a lot faster than the buildings themselves.
` Again, controlled demolitions do not collapse like this, though it is precisely what you could expect from such buildings that had been hit by airliners and went up in flames.
` Yes, one could argue that the buildings could be rigged to fall from above the impact points first, but it would be extremely difficult to predict beforehand just where the impact points would be!

` I probably should also note allegations that the towers were demolished via explosions going from the top down. This isn't really a good way to demolish a building, because it may explode or topple (especially with a plane embedded in it) more than it implodes.
` That's why demolitions teams only demolish buildings by removing the support from under each floor so it can fall straight down ('pancake'). In other words, the charges must be set in order from the bottom floor and move upwards.
` Buildings can 'pancake' from other causes, though, such as having enormous, growing weak spots - and having a hollow center doesn't hurt, either. This is consistent with the appearance that the partly intact tops of the buildings tired out the weak spots, starting a chain reaction that effectively blasted and crushed the parts below them.
` On further observations, looking at the South Tower (Building 2), you can clearly see that it did not fall straight down - as the North Tower had done - but indeed, the tower tilted toward the impact point and began 'pancaking' downward at an angle.
` This makes sense because the North Tower (Building 1) was hit between the 94th and 98th floors, the plane tearing through to the center of the building. The South Tower was then struck between the 78th and 84th floors, at an angle, which severely damaged the entire northeast corner. [2005. "9/11: Debunking the Myths." Popular Mechanics. March, 2005.]

` Therefore, when you compare the two towers, the South Tower sustained damage that was both lower down and less evenly distributed. The weakened point, therefore, had to support considerably more weight, which is why one could predict that it would be tilted and that it would have collapsed before the the other tower despite being struck afterward.
` Not surprisingly this is exactly what had happened.
` (I could also mention that the North Tower had four centimeters of fire insulation while the South Tower only had two, which couldn't have helped.)
` But what do the conspiracy theorists make of this? Well, since the South Tower was struck second but fell first, that is counterintuitive - that means that something weird must be going on!

` Addendum: Some have asserted to me that the firefighters on the scene insisted that there were bomb explosions, and that these were seen by people before and during the towers' collapse. This may be so; however, the firefighters who reported these explosions think they come from loud air pops from collapsing floors, fire hitting the jet fuel, and electrical panels or generators (of which there were a few in the WTC buildings).
` These types of explosions are seen in other fires, and they can resemble bomb explosions. But would that compel a conspiracy theorist to say that similar-looking explosions in other office building fires were caused by bombs as well?
` When quoting the firefighters, I might add, the conspiracy theorists have deleted just what it was that the firefighters thought the sounds were from, leaving their 'it was like a bomb' descriptions.

The Other Tower

` Of course, WTC building 7 also collapsed because, as it is often claimed by conspiracy theorists, there were other bombs there!
` On the website wtc7.net, one can see a typical claim: "fires were observed in Building 7 prior to its collapse, but they were isolated in small parts of the building, and were puny by comparison to other building fires."
` Revealingly, their one-sided argument seems to be intimately linked with their literally one-sided images of Building Seven! They only use the north-facing views, such as this one, note the smoke pouring up and out of the far (and non-visible) south side of the building.
` Most interestingly, I was amused to see this same photo on a conspiracy theorist website with a caption claiming that it was a view from the south!

` That's literally backwards!

` In fact, the only way that it could appear that this building was not extensively damaged would be if one did not see the south side (actual photo below - note, the sun is shining on this side of the building, which makes sense because this is the Northern Hemisphere).
` As is plain, the building was in fact missing the smoke-pouring side and was otherwise extensively ravaged by fire from top to bottom.
` Richard Banaciski, a firefighter who was working at the site, reports this very thing:

We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what's going on. So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn't look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. ["World Trade Center Task Force Interview: Richard Banaciski ." Interview conducted on December 6, 2001. Transcribed by Elisabeth F. Nason.]

` Does that look 'puny' to you? (Here's an even more revealing picture.) It should also be mentioned that the emergency response workers who were there noted that the lower south section of WTC7 looked as if it might collapse by 3pm - almost two and a half hours before it did collapse. [" World Trade Center Task Force Interview: Richard Banaciski ." Interview conducted on December 6, 2001. Transcribed by Elisabeth F. Nason.]
` In other words, their assessment was that the building was doomed, and doomed even sooner than it was in real life.

` Also, the authors of the aforementioned web site claim that in order to cause the pancaking of this building, that the falling debris would need to be symmetrical from both WTC1 and WTC2.
` Looking at actual footage, one can clearly see that the south wall of the building gave in first - it did not fall straight down! - which makes sense because that was the side that was burning and crumbling in.
` Like the south tower, the way the building fell was consistent with what we know about it and damage done to it by flying objects - in this case, debris that was catapulted from a building which had fallen down and slightly to the side. There are no real mysteries here - it collapsed in the path of least resistance!

` If one were to add on a planned demolition hypothesis, then how could one explain why the collapse began where the damage was most extensive? Did the conspirators know exactly where the debris would strike WTC 7?
` Indeed, the tower did not fall ' straight down into a convenient pile ' as alleged by creators of the documentary Loose Change. The rubble was 12 stories high, 150 meters across, and blocked!
` And what about the other buildings, the ones that remained standing long afterward? Were they laced with explosives just in case they were hit by debris as well?

` For further evidence to fuel the conspiracy, adherents are usually quick to mention that in a September 2002 PBS documentary called America Rebuilds, Larry Silverstein says:

I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it." And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse. ["America Rebuilds " PBS Home Video, ISBN 0-7806-4006-3.]

` The conspiracy theorists - such as Alex Jones at prisonplanet.com - will tell you that this is damning evidence of a confession that he gave the okay to detonate the building, because they assume that 'pull it' means to demolish the building.
` And why? To get insurance money - despite the fact that he lost billions of dollars!
` Apart from Jones, I have also been sent a clip from the documentary by an anonymous proponent that includes the demolition team shouting "pull" just before WTC 7 collapses, along with the comment that this proves the word pull means to detonate a controlled explosion.

` What's going on here?

` It turns out that these are two completely separate uses of the word 'pull' - one by firefighters and one by demolitions teams.

` First of all, let's look at the demolition team video: I took a few minutes to watch this segment of the documentary; first of all, Luis Menendez from the Department of Design and Construction describes how concerned he is about where the damaged Building 6 will fall. We also hear a man with a distinctive voice shouting; "We're about to pull building six!"
` This is where the conspiracy theorists' video cuts off. Crucially, about thirty seconds after this part, the man with the distinctive voice is then shown describing how they are attaching cables to Building 6 and are planning to pull it down with heavy machinery!
` This, they do - completely shattering the conspiracy accusation!
` But, as the conspiracy theorists have learned; if you only show part of the documentary that 'proves' your point, and not the one that completely disproves it, not many of your followers will question your evidence.

` Could the term 'pull it' also mean an explosion? According to this article, from the point of view of a demolitions expert:

'We have never, ever heard the term "pull it" being used to refer to explosive demolition of a building, and neither has any blast team we've spoken with. The term is used in conventional demolition circles, to describe the specific activity of attaching long cables to a pre-weakened building and maneuvering heavy equipment (excavators, bulldozers. etc.) to "pull" the frame of the structure onto its side for further dismantlement.'

` One might also ask; what about when firefighters say 'pull it'? As in the military, 'pulling it' refers to giving up and pulling out your group. Soldiers are 'pulled' as well as firefighters. (In fact, I was amused to see that the term is used to refer to men in footage used in the conspiracy documentary Loose Change.) So, if firefighters are being pulled, it's because they are expected to be crushed by the collapsing, burning building.
` For an example of the term, another first responder said that there were "tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they pulled us out." ["World Trade Center Task Force Interview: Richard Banaciski." Interview conducted on December 6, 2001. Transcribed by Elisabeth F. Nason.]
` So yes, it appears that Jones is taking this way out of context. On top of this, to clarify what Silverstein had meant, spokesperson Mr. Dara McQuillan said on September 9, 2005:

In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.

Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed. No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, "I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it." Mr. McQuillan has stated that by "it," Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building. [See " 9/11 Revealed? A New Book Repeats False Conspiracy Theories."]

` The 'story' that there had been many firefighters evacuating the tenants in the building, and that they worked there until shortly before the collapse occurred, is backed up in abundance. For another example, Daniel Nigrois said in a NYT interview:

The most important operational decision to be made that afternoon was [that] the collapse [of the WTC towers] had damaged 7 World Trade Center … It had very heavy fire on many floors and I ordered the evacuation of an area sufficient around to protect our members, so we had to give up some rescue operations that were going on at the time and back the people away far enough so that if 7 World Trade did collapse, we [wouldn't] lose any more people. We continued to operate on what we could from that distance and approximately an hour and a half after that order was [given], at 5:30 in the afternoon, World Trade Center collapsed completely. ["World Trade Center Task Force Interview: Daniel Nigrois ." Interview conducted on October 24, 2001.]

` Indeed, there is large agreement between McQuillan's response and the testimony of the firefighters, including facts such as firefighters being at the WTC 7 site, rescuing and evacuating people until late in the afternoon, that they predicted that collapse was imminent, and that they acted on this by pulling back and waiting for the building collapse at around 5:20 pm.

` If you are a conspiracy theorist, however, you might just ignore this because you are convinced that you are correct, and that maybe even if this is an accurate counterargument, possibly, it doesn't stop all the other evidence from being true.
` Right, like the melting steel and the 'puny' fires in Building 7.

` When I look at the Truth Movement's story about WTC 7, I find that it is full of gaping holes, much like the ones found on the buildings themselves, and so inevitably cannot stand up to scrutiny.
` Larry Silverstein could not have destroyed the WTC building for all of those reasons - plus the fact that his alleged confession was on a PBS special and therefore seen by millions seems a bit weird.
` Furthermore, he does not have any link with the U.S. government (besides being a landlord of government agencies), which are supposedly the real terrorists.

` What I'd like to see those conspiracy theorists explain is that if buildings 1 and 2 both needed to throw debris out to hit WTC 7, and then all three buildings need to be wired for demolition in order to collapse, why bother? Why not just blow the buildings up with bombs and then blame terrorists? (It's been done before.) Why would they need planes?
` On top of that, prepping a building for demolition takes a considerable amount of time - first, it needs to be partly gutted, and then extensively wired! And those were huge, 110 buildings, so that would take... what?
` The Landmark Building collapse - which is compared to the WTC collapses by conspiracy theorists - took four months just to wire up, and that was only thirty stories. So, probably over a year.
` So how could they Especially with all those people working there!
` How could nobody notice that? Or were they in on the secret? Maybe they're really still alive? It depends on which conspiracy theorist you ask. In any case, the baseless assumptions are wearying.

The Pentagon

` Many of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists also believe that the Pentagon was not struck by Flight 77 but a strategically-fired missile or even a bomb.
` Thierry Meyssan wrote in his book Pentagate, that the damage done to the Pentagon was too limited to have resulted from the crash of a Boeing 757. Loose Change claims that the damage was "a single hole, no more than 16 feet in diameter," totally without remains of an airplane.

` Such only appears this way from photos taken at certain angles.

` The 9/11 conspiracy theorists selectively use pictures taken at such a perspective that shows that the damage to the Pentagon looks small, and try to ignore pictures that show - more accurately - the full extent of the damage.
` And what do we see? There is indeed a large, gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon - larger in photos that haven't been cropped by conspiracy theorists. This is expected for the damage done by a high-speed fixed-wing aircraft smashing into nine feet of reinforced concrete. While the plane could slam through the wall, the wings would shear off like aluminum foil.
` (Interestingly, there are several photos of a smaller round hole in the side of a wall, said to be the outside wall by at least some conspiracy theorists. However, this wall is one of the fortress-like layers inside the building, and the 'official story' holds that the hole was made by the landing gear - a total misrepresentation of the data once again.)
` Aircraft wings are extremely delicate, one should note, and can only leave noticeable imprints in buildings that are softer than the Pentagon, especially if they have a lot of glass on the outside (like WTC 1 and 2). The only place an airplane can smash through nine feet of reinforced concrete and leave wing-prints is in the cartoons.
` Yet, this point is exactly what conspiracy theorists push as being evidence that it wasn't a plane. That's right; though wing-prints aren't realistic in this case, the fact that they aren't found is suddenly... well... suspicious!

` As for the alleged absence of airplane parts, numerous photos show that there are parts of an airplane in the wreckage! Parts that have clearly been fragmented and charred by plowing through nine feet of reinforced concrete at four hundred miles per hour or so. Their condition is fairly typical of plane wrecks in which the plane has hit a very solid object.
` For example, you can see the landing gear, the engine, curved chunks of fuselage - even a wheel hub, which is indeed among the wreckage (to the right of the man). Here is a piece of the wreckage strewn on the lawn - that is no missile!

` Said conspiracy theorists generally write these off as 'planted' plane wreckage or faked photos. And they will ignore anyone's eyewitness accounts such as the one from blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer, who was the first structural engineer at the crash site.
` He describes (in an article in Popular Mechanics) what he himself observed:

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. Okay?" [" 9/11: Debunking the Myths." Popular Mechanics. March, 2005.]

` Accounts such as these are not important for conspiracy proponents to consider since, because most of them disagree with the conspiracy point of view, they must be fictional.

` Another thing proponents claim is that CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre told Judy Woodruff that he couldn't see anything of a plane crash. When one believer informed me of this for the first time, I admit I was baffled and didn't know how to explain it.
` I later found that the answer is clear when you look at the transcript:

WOODRUFF: Jamie, Aaron was talking earlier — or one of our correspondence [?correspondants] was talking earlier — I think — actually, it was Bob Franken — with an eyewitness who said it appeared that that Boeing 757, the American jet, American Airline jet, landed short of the Pentagon.

Can you give us any better idea of how much of the plane actually impacted the building?

MCINTYRE: You know, it might have appeared that way, but from my close-up inspection, there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. The only site is the actual site [?side] of the building that's crashed in, and as I said, the only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you can pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage, nothing like that anywhere around, which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon and then caused the side to collapse. [Transcript.]

` Clearly he is explaining that the plane made it inside of the Pentagon, rather than crashing beside the Pentagon! On the other hand, there is an ambiguous sentence: "From my close-up inspection, there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon."
` If you take away the context, you can twist that sentence to mean that there was no plane debris anywhere, as opposed to the fact that he could not see evidence of the plane touching down 'anywhere outside of but nearby the Pentagon'.
` This is exactly the line my conspiracy theory-believing friend had been fed. As one can plainly see, it is a ridiculous and intentional misrepresentation of what really was said.

` Though I could write far more on the subject, I think it's time I gave it a rest. Part 2 of this post will deal with parts of the conspiracy theory that do not involve planes crashing into buildings.