In Alexandria, seven miles south of the burning Pentagon, a doctor with years of experience working with radiation issues found elevated radiation levels on 9-11 of 35 to 52 counts per minute (cpm) using a "Radalert 50" Geiger counter. One week after 9-11, in Leesburg, 33 miles northwest of the Pentagon, soil readings taken in a residential neighborhood showed even higher readings of 75 to 83 cpm.
"That's pretty high," Cindy Folkers of the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) told AFP. Folkers said "7 to 12 cpm is normal background radiation inside the NIRS building, and that outdoor readings of between 12 to 20 cpm are normal in Chevy Chase, Md., outside Washington".
"The Radalert 50", Folkers said, "is primarily a gamma ray detector and detects only 7 percent of the beta radiation and even less of the alpha." This suggests that actual radiation levels may have been significantly higher than those detected by the doctor's Geiger counter.
"The question is, why?" Folkers said.
Why indeed ...
If the radiation came from the explosion and fire at the Pentagon, it most likely did not come from a Boeing 757, which is the type of aircraft that allegedly hit the building.
"Boeing has never used DU on either the 757 or the 767, and we no longer use it on the 747," Leslie M. Nichols, product spokesperson for Boeing's 767, told AFP. "Sometime ago, we switched to tungsten, because it is heavier, more readily available and more cost effective."
However, the cost effectiveness argument is debatable. A waste product of U.S. nuclear weapons and energy facilities, DU is reportedly provided by the Department of Energy to national and foreign armament companies free of charge.
DU is used in a wide variety of missiles in the U.S. arsenal as an armour penetrator. It is also used in the bunker-buster bombs and cruise missiles. Because no photographic evidence of a Boeing 757 hitting the Pentagon is available to the public, 9-11 skeptics and independent researchers claim something else, such as a missile, struck the Pentagon.
A white flash, not unlike those seen in videos of the planes as they struck the twin towers, occurs when a DU penetrator hits a target.
Photographs from the Pentagon reveal that large round holes were punched through six walls in the three outer rings. The outside wall is 24 inches thick with a six-inch limestone exterior, eight inches of brick and 10 inches of steel reinforced concrete; the other walls are 18 inches thick. The object that hit the Pentagon on 9-11 penetrated several feet of reinforced concrete, leaving holes with diameters between 11 and 16 feet ... more than likely a DU penetrator of some type ....
