But a bigger mystery is why the
engines went missing.
Considering their weight, they should
have plunged deep into the earth along with the rest of
the airliner.
Yet they weren’t in the crater and
only a one-ton segment of an engine was ever recovered,
again more than a mile from the crash site. The FBI
said, unconvincingly, that it had ‘bounced’ there.
The FBI also claimed metal fragments
found up to eight miles away could have been carried
there by the wind, even though the breeze was very
light.
Witnesses said nothing was left at
the crash site, yet the FBI belatedly claimed to have
made two sensational discoveries — a red bandana and a
passport allegedly belonging to the hijackers.
Very conveniently, these turned up as
prosecution evidence earlier this year at the trial of
Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled 20th hijacker and only
terrorist to be convicted over the 9/11 atrocities.
If flight 93 was shot down, there
must have been a fighter jet in the skies to unleash a
guided missile.
The U.S. government has admitted that
two F-15s were flying above New York City before 9am on
September 11 and three F-16s were patrolling over
Washington by 9.40am. They could have reached
Shanksville in minutes.
According to investigative writer
David Ray Griffin, several witnesses saw two F-16s
tailing Flight 93 minutes before it went down.
Twelve eyewitnesses state
seeing another jet nearby.
They claim they saw an F-16 move
closer in and fire what were probably two Sidewinder
missiles, one of them catching at least one of the
Boeing’s huge engines, after which the ‘plane dropped
like a stone’.
Someone else ‘heard a loud bang’ and
saw the airliner plummet. A Vietnam War veteran said he
‘heard a missile’, a sound he knew well. It is debatable
how seriously we should take these reports. But there
are numerous and highly credible witness accounts of a
mysterious white jet being seen after Flight 93 went
down.
Jim Brant, owner of the Indian Lake
marina where debris was found, said he heard the roar of
jet engines overhead, then saw a fireball rise into the
air. He looked up and noticed a white plane circling the
wreckage. ‘It reminded me of a fighter jet,’ he said.
Another resident, Tom Spinelli, said:
‘I saw the white plane. It was flying around all over
the place like it was looking for something. I saw it
before and after the crash.’
He said it had high tail wings and no
markings on it. John Feegle, another witness, said: ‘It
didn’t look like a commercial plane. It had a real goofy
tail on it, like a high tail. It circled around, and it
was gone.’
Dennis Decker and his friend Rick
Chaney were also close to the impact site. ‘As soon as
we looked up we saw a mid-sized jet flying low and
fast,’ said Decker.
‘It appeared to make a loop or part
of a circle, and then it turned fast and headed out.’
Decker and Chaney described the jet as white with no
markings. Decker added: ‘It was a jet plane, and it had
to be flying real close when that 757 went down. If I
was the FBI, I’d find out who was driving that plane.’
A total of 12 eyewitnesses are on
record as having seen the white jet. One witness, Susan
McElwain, complained that the FBI told her there was no
plane and did not note down her account.
However, amid the growing furore over
the sightings, the FBI was forced to offer an
explanation, which again many found unconvincing.
It claimed the jet was a passing
civilian Fairchild Falcon 20 that was asked to descend
to 5,000ft some minutes after the crash to give
co-ordinates for the site. The plane and pilot have
never been produced or identified.
The military’s role in 9/11
is a mystery.
One commentator pointed out: ‘The
reason why this seems so implausible is that, first, by
10.06am on September 11, all non-military aircraft in
U.S. airspace had received orders more than half an hour
earlier to land at the nearest airport.
‘Second, such was the density of
emergency phone calls from people on the ground in the
Shanksville area as to the location of the crash site,
that aerial co-ordinates would have been completely
unnecessary.
‘Third, with F-16s supposedly in the
vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a
time when no one knew for sure whether there might be
any more hijacked aircraft still in the sky, the
military would ask a civilian aircraft that just
happened to be in the area for help.’
The military’s role in 9/11 is
shrouded in confusion, ambiguity and inconsistency.
A news report on September 20, 2001,
said: ‘America’s defence establishment has disclosed
that it ordered its fighter jets to intercept all the
passenger aircraft hijacked in last week’s attacks on
New York and Washington.’
The report also stated that military
intelligence was aware of the hijackings before any of
the aircraft had hit their targets.
Three years later, however, the
military said it hadn’t heard about Flight 93 until
after the plane had crashed — a line accepted by the
official 9/11 Commission, which published its findings
in July 2004.
The official inquiry said the Federal
Aviation Authority — responsible for the security and
safety of U.S. civilian aviation — had been incompetent
in failing to alert the U.S. Air Force.
But the FAA had already acted quickly
in ordering more than 4,000 aircraft to land at the
nearest airstrip to avoid any more hijacks. And the
military would have learned of Flight 93’s hijack via
teleconferences set up by the FAA, the White House and
the U.S. Defence Department as events began to unfold on
September 11. Richard Clarke, who ran the White House
video conference, stated that at 9.27am, the FAA
informed both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
General Richard Myers, Chief of Defence Staff, of a
number of ‘potential hijacks’ including ‘United 93 over
Pennsylvania’. Therefore, more than 25 minutes before
Flight 93 went down, both Rumsfeld and Myers knew all
about it. No wonder the military’s claim to have learned
about Flight 93 only after it crashed is dismissed by
many as a bare-faced lie.
The FBI was in charge of the
investigation.
In other air crashes, information
from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice
recorder — the black box recorders — were dealt with in
an open manner, with crash investigators from the
National Transportation Safety Board discussing the
progress of their inquiries with reporters. But in the
case of Flight 93, the Transportation Safety Board was
not in charge of the investigation — the FBI was.
The black box recorders were
reportedly found buried 25ft deep inside the crater. But
a threeminute discrepancy in the crash time led to
suspicions of foul play.
Seismic records, consolidated from
four seismology stations in the region, originally
pegged the impact time at 10.06am. It was only later
that the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission decreed that
the correct impact time to have been at 10.03am.
But Terry Wallace, who heads the
Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory and is considered
the leading expert on the seismology of man-made events,
was puzzled.
He complained: ‘The seismic signals
are consistent with impact at 10.06am and five seconds
plus or minus two seconds. I don’t know where the 10.03
time comes from.’ So there were two crash times.
Sceptics note that a lot could happen
in three minutes — minutes that could be removed from
the end of a flight-deck recording to delete evidence of
an attack by U.S. jets.
The FBI kept the contents of the
voice recorder secret until it was forced by bereaved
relatives to play the tape under heavy security at a
hotel in April 2002.
The family members later reported
they heard sounds of an on-board struggle beginning at
9.58am, with a final ‘rushing sound’ at 10.03am, when
the tape fell silent. Could the ‘rushing sound’ have
been made by the plane being holed? And what of the
moment when the plane hit the ground?
‘There is no sound of the impact,’
said Kenneth Nacke, whose brother Lou had been on Flight
93. There is a further twist. In 2006, when the judge at
the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui ordered a transcript of
the cockpit voice recorder, it ended with the sound of
the hijackers shouting praises to Allah.
Just where had those praises been in
2002 when the tape was first played to relatives? For
many, their sudden appearance confirmed suspicions of
tape tampering.
At first, the FBI was keen to show it
was keeping an open mind over the fate of Flight 93.
Within days of the crash, Reuters
reported from Shanksville: ‘Federal investigators said
they could not rule out the possibility that the United
Airlines jetliner that crashed in rural western
Pennsylvania during this week’s attacks on New York and
the Pentagon was shot down.’ ‘We have not ruled out
that,’ FBI agent Bill Crowley told a news conference
when asked about reports that a U.S. fighter jet may
have fired on the hijacked Boeing 757. ‘We haven’t ruled
out anything yet.’
Why did Crowley later retract his
statement — and on the same day as the U.S. Air Force
issued its official denial of any involvement?
At the crux of the legend of Flight
93 are the phones calls passengers are said to have made
to their loved ones after the hijackers took control.
These are said to have alerted the
passengers to the fact that they were victims of no
ordinary hijacking, but a co-ordinated mission by
fanatics to strike at the heart of America in New York
and Washington. At the same time, a number of passengers
allegedly told relatives of their resolve to fight back.
Interestingly, phone contact from passengers on the two
hijacked planes that hit the Twin Towers and a third jet
which crashed into the Pentagon that same morning was
scarce to non-existent.
Yet officially there were 35 calls
made among the 40 passengers and crew on Flight 93, with
callers using either mobile phones or GTE Airfones
fitted into the backs of the aircraft seats.
The use of mobile phones is suspect
anyway because telecommunications experts say that —
given the technology of 2001 — calls at an altitude of
six miles could have only occurred by fluke at best.
Just as baffling, the FBI insisted there were 13 mobile
phone calls — of which there were no billing records —
yet reduced this number to just two at the trial this
year of Zacarias Moussaoui when the evidence risked
being exposed to the harsh light of law.
Why had the FBI failed to put the
record straight over the previous four-and-a-half years?
One answer is that it suited the
heroism legend to keep silent as the Pentagon banged the
drum for war in Iraq.
Mrs Beamer only learned of
her husband’s final call four days later.
The 9/11 Commission claimed that five
of the calls described the intent of the passengers and
crew to revolt against the hijackers. One caller, the
Commission said, ended her message with the words:
‘Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go.
Bye.’ But all this begs the question: why did the
hijackers allow such a free-for-all of phone calls as
they attempted to terrify their hostages?
After all, the hijackers would have
realised that experts would have been able to locate the
lost aircraft if people were using their mobles.
The most intriguing of the calls is
the one said to have been made by Flight 93’s most
famous passenger Todd Beamer, whose ‘Let’s roll!’ phrase
became a byword for the victims’ heroism and patriotism.
Beamer’s call was said to have been
taken by a telephone supervisor working for the Verizon
Corporation, owners of GTE Airfones, the gadgets on the
airplane seats.
At the time, Verizon had a contract
worth £750million for installing a high-security
telecoms package across U.S. government departments,
including the Pentagon.
One of its supervisors, Lisa
Jefferson, an evangelical Christian like Beamer himself,
retains a vivid recollection of her 15-minute
conversation with him.
After discovering that she shared her
first name with Beamer’s wife, they apparently talked
about his two little boys and the new baby on the way,
Beamer’s fear that he might not make it home, and his
faith.
Faced with the awful prospect of
dying on board Flight 93, Beamer supposedly recited the
Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 with Mrs Jefferson. He also
asked her to promise to call his wife. Mrs Jefferson
received a Verizon Excellence Award from her bosses for
her handling of the call. To some this may have seemed
inappropriate.
She had not taken a recording of it,
contrary to convention. She had not gone through the
routine questions in her distress-call manual. She had
not connected this agitated man to his wife waiting
anxiously at home. Nor had she informed his wife
subsequently of the call as promised.
Mrs Beamer only learned of her
husband’s final call four days later, when a
representative of United Airlines got in touch.
She says the United Airlines
representative told her: ‘The FBI had been keeping the
information private until they’ve had the opportunity to
review the material. But now they’ve released it, I have
a written summary of the call.’
But later Mrs Beamer learned that the
FBI had not kept the call so secret after all. Her
husband’s boss at his computer company had already spun
the story of Beamer the hero aboard Flight 93 before
anyone else knew of his phone call.
As for Lisa Jefferson’s evidence, it
was single-sourced, unsubstantiated hearsay of which
there was no record. For spooks inside a sprawling
empire of wires like Verizon, rigging up a phone call to
Lisa Jefferson’s headset would have been simple.
‘Let’s roll!’ became the war
on terror’s recruitment slogan.
She had no idea what Beamer’s voice
sounded like, and she would never hear it again to judge
whether he had actually been speaking to her. This year,
Lisa Jefferson published a book entitled Called — the
story of seeing ‘her life transformed, simply by
answering Todd Beamer’s call’.
The blurb added: ‘Jefferson sends a
stirring challenge to all of us whether it comes during
quiet obscurity or international adversity, we must be
prepared to answer God’s call.’
Evangelical Christians throughout
America rallied to that call. But one puzzle remains:
Todd Beamer’s wife later said she had never before heard
of his reciting the Lord’s Prayer in pressure
situations. Nor, she added, was Psalm 23 something he
often recited.
Todd Beamer's ‘Let’s roll!’ phrase
became the war on terror’s recruitment slogan.
President Bush had launched the
legend in a speech on September 20, 2001 as he declared
his unprecedented ‘war on terror’. Beamer’s story of
selfless patriotism, according to the President, was a
‘defining moment’ in American history. Alongside
President Bush on this occasion was Todd Beamer’s wife
Lisa.
Nobody, of course, would begrudge Mrs
Beamer her celebrity, given her tragic circumstances.
But her presence undoubtedly helped President Bush’s
cause.
The President again invoked her
evangelical Christian husband’s courage in another
speech a month later.
‘We will no doubt face new
challenges,’ said the man widely regarded as having
taken office fully intending to attack Iraq. ‘But we
have our marching orders. My fellow Americans… let’s
roll!’
Such a phrase couldn’t fail to chime
with the President’s gung-ho admirers — nor with the 40
million evangelical Christians in the so-called ‘red’
states where the Bush regime had its most fervent
support.
Later U.S. Navy personnel would spell
out the words 9/11 LET’S ROLL by forming themselves on
the deck of a warship bound for Iraq.
Lisa Beamer, always a staunch ally of
the White House and its war on terror, had herself
photographed unveiling a ‘Let’s Roll’ logo on the side
of a U.S. Air Force F-16.
She even sought to have ‘Let’s Roll’
trademarked and signed a six-figure book deal which,
along with her seven-figure compensation cheque, made
her a rich woman. And in August 2002, just in time for
the first 9/11 anniversary, she published her memoir
entitled — predictably — Let’s Roll!
The front cover showed the author
with the Stars and Stripes and the publisher issued a
staggering one million copies in hardback.
Secrecy is the first instinct
of any war.
Truly, the Let’s Roll slogan had
become a call to arms — just at a time the White House
needed it most.
Bush administration not admit its
guilt? It could surely have argued that the poor souls
lost in the airliner were a tragic but necessary
sacrifice in order to prevent horror and destruction on
a larger scale in at the Capitol Washington.
Air Force scrambles had been frequent
enough in the past. One report said there had been 129
within the U.S. during 2000.
But secrecy is the first instinct of
any war department, especially amid reports flooding in
of a passenger revolt on the plane.
Any admission of a shooting down must
have been ruled out politically because those brave
passengers just might have retrieved the controls from
fanatical hijackers.
For the U.S. military to have
snatched victory from their grasp was unthinkable.
There are countless theories and
areas of evidence to examine. There is even a theory
that the plane could have blown up because of a bomb on
board.
Air traffic controllers on the ground
reportedly heard an anonymous voice in the cockpit
announce: ‘Ladies and gentleman. Here is the captain.
Please sit down and keep remaining sitting. We have a
bomb on board. So sit.’
But if Flight 93 had been blown up by
a bomb at cruising altitude, its debris area would have
covered at least 20 miles, as in the Lockerbie crash.
The 9/11 Commission speculated that
the rogue pilot jolted the plane violently in the
minutes before the impact to disrupt a passenger revolt.
This in turn led to claims that he
might have succeeded in tearing a wing off, or otherwise
wrecking the aircraft in mid-air, causing it to crash.
Boeing has refused to discuss this
possibility. Such movements, however, could easily have
been caused by the pilot attempting to avoid an
approaching heatseeking missile homing in on its
engines.
EYEWITNESS reports differed from the
official story. Along the plane’s route, people
confirmed that the Boeing came in from the north-west,
but they said it was not nose-diving. Instead it was
flying low.
Bob Blair and Linda Shepley saw the
plane when it dropped to 2,500ft. Rodney Peterson and
Brandon Leventry noticed it at 2,000ft. Terry Butler saw
it at about 500ft. Eric Peterson saw the plane at ‘maybe
300ft’.
Lee Purbaugh, a scrap metal worker,
was the closest. He told reporters: ‘I heard this real
loud noise coming over my head. I looked up and it was
Flight 93, barely 50ft above me.
‘It was coming down at 45 degrees and
rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped
and it just crashed into the ground. There was this big
fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.’
Purbaugh’s account was perhaps the
nearest of all the witness testimony to the official
version of the story. Except for one important element.
Not once did Purbaugh mention the
plane being upside down, as the 9/11 Commission, the FBI
and the Pentagon all maintained it was.
With such a huge airplane roaring
over his head, he could hardly have failed to notice
which way up it was.
To some, this cast doubt on the
credibility of his reported evidence. To others, it was
merely another piece of the Flight 93 jigsaw that failed
to fit.
• ADAPTED from Flight 93: What Really
Happened On The Heroic 9/11 ‘Let’s Roll’ Flight by
Rowland Morgan, published by Constable & Robinson on
August 24 at £7.99. © Rowland Morgan 2006 To order a
copy (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.
Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=401315&in_page_id=1770
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