San Antonio College Library

This episode of the U.S. Army's The Big Picture television series gives viewers the ABCs of a year of crisis in Asia, Berlin, and Cuba. Narrated by Pentagon reporter Peter Hackes, this stirring, 30-minute color video from the National Archives and Records Administration tells how our Armed Forces meet every challenge and how Communism's guerrilla wars are now being combated by counterinsurgency, a major development of the year. Viewers will see President...

Overview: On the morning of 11 September 2001, Middle Eastern terrorists hijacked four passenger airliners along the east coast of the United States, one of which they flew into the Pentagon. The crash, ensuing fire, and smoke killed 125 military personnel, Department of Defense civilians, and contractors in the Pentagon in addition to those on the plane. For hundreds of the building's occupants, the period after the crash was a struggle to help themselves...

The response and subsequent performance of federal, state, and especially local agencies, in particular their coordination and cooperation with each other and with Pentagon authorities, provide lessons for dealing with other large-scale emergencies in the future. Material used in this study was distilled from more than 1,300 interviews, relying on the corroborative testimony of two or more witnesses wherever possible.

In this book, Carroll advances a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. He marshals a trove of often chilling evidence, recounting how "the Building" and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called "a disastrous rise of misplaced power"--The unprecedented bombing of...