Fidel Castro accused the U.S. government Wednesday of deceiving Americans about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and suggested a weapons projectile, not a plane, slammed into the Pentagon.
In one of the rambling newspaper columns he writes regularly since he became ill, the Cuban leader also claimed that “today, we know that the public was deliberately misinformed.”
“An analysis of the impact of planes similar to those against the [World Trade Center] towers, following accidental plane crashes in densely populated cities, concludes that no plane crashed against the Pentagon and that only a projectile could have created the geometrically round hole that the alleged plane created,” Castro said in the Granma column.
“No passenger that perished there has turned up, either,” Castro continued in a commentary titled “The Empire and Its Lies.” “We were deceived, as were the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.”
Castro hasn’t been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006, but he maintains a presence through occasional writings called “Reflections.”
In 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded that an Al Qaeda plot orchestrated the two commercial airplane attacks against the World Trade Center and a single commercial plane attack against the Pentagon.
Castro also said in his column that the Cuban government saved the life of President Ronald Reagan in 1984 by alerting U.S. officials to an assassination plot in North Carolina, The Associated Press reported. He did not say how Cuba obtained the information.
Newsom Summerlin, a special agent with the FBI in Charlotte, said late Wednesday that he had no immediate information pertaining to Castro’s claim.
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mjmartinez@tribune.com
