Mike Walter, un témoin direct de l'attentat sur le Pentagone le 11 septembre racontait à CNN juste après l'explosion: "It was like a cruise missile with wings, went right there and slammed into the Pentagon". Mike Walter n'a pas vu un avion de ligne ce jour là, mais bien un missile, probablement un "Global Hawk" maquillé en avion civil aux couleurs d'AA, sauf que la version officielle indique que c'était un Boeing d'American Airlines qui avait percuté le Pentagone, certes sans que ça ne soit jamais prouvé, ni qu'on en retrouve la moindre trace exploitable.
lire le papier de CNN

Firefighters were still battling a fire on the west side of the 29-acre, 6 million-square-foot building late Tuesday, more than 12 hours after the crash. Washington hospitals reported 71 people injured, some severely, and another 100 to 800 were still listed as missing and possibly dead late Tuesday.

Despite the serious damage caused by the attack, the headquarters of the U.S. military will reopen Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said.

"The Pentagon is functioning. It will be in business tomorrow," Rumsfeld said late Tuesday from a Pentagon briefing room.
An American Airlines flight from Washington to Los Angeles crashed into the Pentagon with 64 passengers and crew aboard. The fuel-laden jet, which had just taken off from Washington's Dulles Airport, set the world's largest office building ablaze and forced thousands of employees to evacuate.

The attack occurred shortly after two other commercial jetliners were hijacked and flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. A fourth plane that was hijacked crashed in a wooded area in Pennsylvania.

octobre 2001 Un mois après le 11 septembre 2001, Donald Rumsfeld parlait d’un missile qui a frappé le pentagone

Rumsfeld: There were lots of warnings. The intelligence information that we get, it sometimes runs into the hundreds of alerts or pieces of intelligence a week. One looks at the worldwide, it's thousands. And the task is to sort through it and see what youcan find. And as you find things, the law enforcement officials who have the responsibility to deal with that type of thing -- the FBI at the federal level, and although it is not, it's an investigative service as opposed to a police force, it's not a federal police force, as you know. But the state and local law enforcement officials have the responsibility for dealing with those kinds of issues. They [find a lot] and any number of terrorist efforts have been dissuaded, deterred or stopped by good intelligence gathering and good preventive work. It is a truth that a terrorist can attack any time, any place, using any technique and it's physically impossible to defend at every time and every place against every conceivable technique. Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center. The only way to deal with this problem is by taking the battle to the terrorists, wherever they are, and dealing with them.

Donald Rumsfeld a dit :