The Pentagon incident, reported Wednesday in The Washington Post and The New York Times, came to light after a 2½-year-old e-mail message was made public on Tuesday by the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, a nonprofit watchdog group. 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York using hijacked airliners and whether the government could have done more to prevent the strikes that killed about 3,000 people. But the focus of the exercise was command continuity, and it was decided that there was enough already built in,” said Larry Di Rita, a spokesman for the Defense Department.ĭi Rita spoke as an independent commission continued its hearings into the Sept. “They needed a scenario under which the Pentagon became inoperable. Defense officials said that several scenarios under which military command had to be moved from the Pentagon were rejected and that the suggestion involving a possible foreign commercial airliner strike not only appeared unrealistic but could have taken over the whole exercise.