United 93 took off from Newark Airport at 8:42 after a 40-minute delay. It left the ground just as the hijacking of United 175 out of Boston was becoming known to the FAA. The airplane headed west, and its hijacking became known at 9:36. At this point United 93 turned off its transponder and headed back towards the east. Again, the moment the transponder channel ceased to operate is the likely moment when Global Hawk or some other system of remote control assumed control of the aircraft.
Around this time, Bush and Cheney were discussing the need to authorize shoot-downs of civilian airliners by the pilots in the Combat Air Patrols the Air Force was now straining to deploy. Clarke told the teleconference of key agencies: "Three decisions. One, the President has ordered the use of force against aircraft deemed to be hostile. Two, the White House is also requesting fighter escort of Air Force One. Three, and this applies to all agencies, we are initiating COG. Please activate your alternate command center and move staff to them immediately." (Bamford 200466) COG was continuity in government, the centerpiece of the long-standing machinery for emergency rule from bunker complexes which had been developed over the years, including with the help of figures like Oliver North and Buster Horton. Clarke spoke at around 9:55 AM.
Soon after, the authorization to open fire on hijacked aircraft that refused to obey the instructions of interceptor jets passed down the chain of command. Bamford, with access to interviews with 9/11 insiders, portrays this moment: "Sitting in the glassed-in Battle Cab of NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Operations Center [NEADS] at Rome, New York, Air Force Colonel Robert Marr received the call. Then he sen1: out word to air traffic controllers to instruct fighter pilots to destroy the United jetliner and any other threatening passenger plane. 'United Airlines flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington DC,' said Marr. Maj. Daniel Nash, the F-15 pilot from Cape Cod, heard the message while patrolling over Manhattan. 'The New York controller did come over the radio and say if we have another hijacked plane we're going to have to shoot it down,' he said. 'From where we were sitting, you could see there were people dying and it had to stop. So if that's what it's going to take, that was our job. We would have done it." (Bamford 2004 66)
So what was the U.S. air defense posture over southern Pennsylvania at about 10 a.m. -- 74 minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and about a half-hour after air traffic controllers and United started to suspect that Flight 93 had been hijacked? The 9/11 commission claimed that NORAD pilots never got a shoot-down order in time to impact the course of United 93: "The Vice President was mistaken in his belief that shootdown authorization had been passed to the pilots flying at NORAD's direction." (44) According to the commission, the first fighters to operate under a shootdown order were fighters of the 133th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard, operating from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and responding to a direct appeal from the Secret Service. The first of these fighters, the 9/11 commission says, took off at 10:38, and then established a Combat Air Patrol over the capital by 10:45. At 9:55, the Page 237 Secret Service ordered all pilots to defend the White House at all costs. Around this time also, Cheney had his ambiguous exchanges with the "young man" who kept asking him whether his orders stood as a plane approached Washington DC. The young man told Cheney that Air Force fighters were close to the hijacked plane.
CBS reported before 10:06 -- just as the flight of United 93 was ending -- that two F-16s were on the tail of United 93. (AP, September 13,2001; Nashua Telegraph, September 13, 2001) Some time later, an Air Traffic Controller working for the FAA, ignoring the blanket ban imposed on public statements by government officials with inside knowledge of the 9/11 events, said that an F- 6 had closely followed United 93, even making 360 degree turns to stay in close range of the airliner. The federal flight controller said the F- 16 was "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet. "He must have seen the whole thing," an unnamed aviation official said. (Independent, August 13, 2002; CBS News)
According to a Reuters report dated September 13, 2001 the FBI was at that point refusing to rule out that Flight 93 was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet before it crashed in Pennsylvania. Citing indications that this plane was indeed shot down, this report stated: "Pennsylvania state police officials said on Thursday [September 13] debris from the plane had been found up to 8 miles away [from the crash site] in a residential community where local media have quoted residents as speaking of a second plane in the area and burning debris falling from the sky." Finding debris so far from the crash site indicates that the aircraft was disintegrating well before it hit the ground, as would be the case if it had been shot down. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on September 12 that among debris found miles from the crash site were "clothing, books, papers and what appeared to be human remains."
Shortly after the crash, rumors began circulating in the local community that United 93 had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet, but had no authoritative confirmation. The news desk at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was contacted September 22 by the Idaho Observer. The editor confirmed the news release and stood by the information contained in it. The editor also said that, although the FBI later changed its story, "The FBI confirmed to us that the debris came from that airliner!" (The Idaho Observer, October 2001)
Rumsfeld, the FBI, and NORAD soon united on a common line: United 93 had not been shot down. The Bush administration was transparently eager to avoid the opprobrium of having shot down a commercial airliner carrying American citizens; this would have exposed the regime as impotent to defend the lives of its own citizens, but able to kill some of those citizens to protect top oligarchs in the White House and other Washington buildings. This would have led to an outcry from the victims' families far beyond anything that was in fact observed.
The other complicating factor was that United 93 appeared to have been the scene of a partially successful US citizens' counterattack against the shadowy enemy, on a day which otherwise offered only stories of US incompetence, bungling, and abject defeat. This was the version of events which was developed around a cell phone call made around 9:45 EDT by United 93 passenger Todd Beamer to Lisa Jefferson of the GTE Airfone Customer Care Center in Oakbrook, Illinois near Chicago. This call lasted slightly more than 15 minutes, according to published accounts. It was towards the end of this conversation that Todd Beamer told Lisa Jefferson that he and a group of other passengers had decided to storm the cockpit and overpower the hijackers. Todd asked Lisa to recite the Lord's prayer with him, and then he pronounced the famous words: "Let's roll!" (Beamer 216) "Let's roll!" became the symbol of the resistance of the American people against terrorist fanatics and murderers.
Todd Beamer had been on the phone with Lisa Jefferson, and not with his own wife, Lisa Beamer. According to her account, Jefferson had offered to put the call through to Lisa Beamer, but Todd had, strangely enough, declined. It was from Ms. Jefferson that Mrs. Beamer obtained the story which made her husband and herself famous. Ms. Beamer soon appeared on Good Morning America, Primetime, NBC Dateline, CNN's Larry King Live, and other television programs. She was then invited to attend Bush's address to the joint session of Congress, where she sat next to Joyce Rumsfeld, the wife of the Pentagon boss. Early in his speech, Bush intoned:
In the normal course of events, presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people. We have seen it in the courage of passengers who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground. Passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer. And would you please help me to welcome his wife, Lisa Beamer, here tonight?"
As Ms. Beamer retells it, "The room erupted in applause The entire Congress of the United States of America rose to its feet in one motion, so almost instinctively, I rose as well. The Congress applauded and applauded, and it was the most humbling experience of my life to know that they were applauding me, in an indirect effort to express their appreciation to Todd and the other heroes aboard Flight 93. I was overwhelmed." (Beamer 247-248)
With that, the reality of United 93 had been eclipsed by the propaganda needs of the Bush machine. The "Let's roll!" story originally had the passengers breaking into the cockpit and struggling for the controls with the hijackers, resulting in the crash. Later, during 2003, the FBI backed away from this story and fell back on a second version which described the hijackers deciding to crash the plane into the ground as passengers were about to force their way into the cockpit. The FBI has never let the general public have a transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder, which apparently survived. The FBI has played that CVR tape to a gathering of the United 93 victims' families, but only after swearing them to secrecy. Finally, small portions of the tape were played during the 9/1 1 commission hearings in the spring of 2004.
The official story has evolved over time. As CNN noted just before the release of the 9/11 commission report in late July 2004: "In the weeks and months after the attacks, there were reports that officials believed passengers had overtaken the plane, forcing it to crash in the field in Pennsylvania. However, last year, officials began backing away from that theory. [The 9/11 commission report] gives no indication that passengers ever broke through the cockpit door, but it makes clear that passengers' actions thwarted the plans of the terrorists." ( http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/07/22/91 ... index.html )
The "Let's roll!" story, despite some doubts about the technical feasibility of the in-flight cell phone call to Lisa Jefferson, may be real. It certainly does appear that the passengers were about to take back the plane. It also appears that Global Hawk, or whatever the system of remote control was which was supposed to take control of United 93, had malfunctioned in the case of this flight. The pilot and co-pilot had reportedly been killed, but on board United 93 were Donald F. Greene, who was an experienced pilot of an amphibious, single-engined, four-seater private plane, which he used to fly from his home near Greenwich, Connecticut to northern Maine. There was also Andrew Garcia, a former Air Traffic Controller with the California National Guard. (Longman 182) These two, with much assistance from Air Traffic Controllers and other personnel, might well have been able to land the aircraft. But this would have posed immense problems for the entire official 9/11 story. An aircraft safely landed meant, in all probability, living hijackers who could have been interrogated. What would their cover story have been? What would they have revealed about their own intentions and their own understanding of what they were doing? Would their testimony have exploded the official version? And what if there simply were no hijackers on board? The official version would fall to the ground. It was a risk that the terrorist controllers could not afford to run. And then again, there was the aircraft. Would a forensic examination have revealed the presence of Global Hawk, defective or otherwise, or of some other remote control guidance system? Would the FBI have succeeded in destroying this evidence as well? Despite the prolific capabilities of the FBI in destroying evidence, this might have been beyond their powers. These considerations point, along with abundant physical evidence and a large portion of the eyewitness accounts, towards the conclusion that United 93 was shot down to destroy evidence and silence suspects and witnesses forever.
UA93 was identified as a hijack at 9:16 AM. At 9:24, NORAD ordered three F-16s from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to scramble. They were airborne at 9:30. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz confirmed a few days later on TV that "we were already tracking that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania." At 9:35 AM, three F-16s were ordered to "protect the White House at all costs" when it turned towards the capital. At 10:06 AM. it crashed at Shanksville, just minutes' flying time from Washington at full throttle.
Based on the plane's easterly course, the official consensus view was that Flight 93 was headed toward Washington for a strike on the White House or the Capitol. The 9/11 commission has endorsed this notion. But in 2002, the London Times, quoting U.S. intelligence sources and noting the plane's low altitude and erratic course, suggested that the real target might have been a nearby nuclear power plant. The Three Mile Island plant, near Harrisburg, was about than 10 or 15 minutes' flying time away. An attack on a nuclear reactor might have caused severe disruptions, although it should also be stressed that the protective shell of a US nuclear reactor is designed to protect the vessel by resisting the impact of a crashing airliner. Oliver North told Fox News that he thought Flight 93 was headed towards Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, where the national emergency military command center is located.
At approximately 9:58 AM, roughly eight minutes before impact, a 911 emergency dispatcher in neighboring Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, took a call from a distraught passenger, Edward Felt, who said he had locked himself in the bathroom of Flight 93, and reported that the plane had been hijacked. The caller said there had been an explosion aboard the plane and that he could see white smoke. Authorities have never been able to explain this report, and the 911 tape itself was immediately confiscated by the inevitable FBI. In addition, the supervisor who took the call has been gagged by the FBI. The FBI evidently has not made the full recording of this call public, despite their evident desire to discredit this report. Cell phone calls from the passengers all stopped about 9:58 AM -- roughly the same time that the caller to 911 in Westmoreland County stated there had been an explosion. The plane didn't come down until 10;06 -- leaving an 8-minute gap of unexplained flying time, and thus a great mystery. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001)
PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
The former mine where the plane crashed is composed of very soft soil, and searchers said that much of the wreckage was found buried 20-25 feet below the large crater. But despite that, there was also widely scattered debris in the immediate vicinity and also some much farther away. Considerable debris washed up more than two miles away at Indian Lake, and a canceled check and brokerage statement from the plane was found in a deep valley some eight miles away later that week.
The official version insists the plane exploded on impact, yet a one-ton section of the engine was found over a mile away and other light debris was found scattered over eight miles away. This account is confirmed by a number of media accounts. Some of the details may vary -- at least one version has a half-ton piece of jet engine being found over a mile away -- but most accounts converge on concentrations of debris two, three, and eight miles away. Needless to say, this indicates that the end of United 93 was caused by an explosion within the aircraft or a missile -- almost certainly fired by the US Force pursuant to an order from Bush and Cheney -- rather than a crash provoked by an altercation between passengers and hijackers in the cockpit, or as a result of a desperate decision by the hijackers to dive the plane into the ground because they feared that the seizure of the cockpit by passengers was imminent. The FBI has tried to account for the widely scattered debris by citing the wind. As we read in Jere Longman's rendering of the official version: "Debris was found as far as eight miles from the crash of flight 93, in a southeast direction, but this airborne material had traveled from the crater in the direction of the prevailing wind." But this only makes sense if the plane had broken up in mid-air, which is exactly the conclusion which the FBI was seeking to disprove. While the FBI has asserted the plane was largely obliterated by the roughly 500 mph impact, they also conceded that an engine -- or at least a 1,000-pound fragment of one -- was found "a considerable distance" from the main impact crater. That information further buttresses the shoot-down theory, since a heat-seeking, air-to-air Sidewinder missile from an F-16 would likely have impacted one of the Boeing 757's two large engines.
The mayor of Shanksville, Ernie Stull, changed his story several times after giving interviews to reporters and investigators. (Wisnewski 2003 197-198; Spiegel, September 8, 2003) But one of his first comments after the demise of United 93 was that he knew of two people who had heard a missile. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) The presence of debris at Indian Lake, between 1.5 and 2 miles away, also supports the theory that there had been a mid-air explosion of some kind before United 93 hit the ground. Debris rained down on the lake; this is almost impossible to account for if the plane had actually been intact when it hit the ground. "It was mainly mail, bits of in-flight magazine and scraps of seat cloth," according to witness Tom Spinelli." The authorities say it was blown here by the wind. " But there was only a 10 mile per hour breeze and you were a mile and a half away?" Light debris was also found eight miles away in New Baltimore. The FBI said the impact bounced it there. But the few pieces of surviving fuselage, in the words of local coroner Wallace Miller, were "no bigger than a carry-on bag."
EYEWITNESSES
Laura Temyer, who lives in Hooversville, several miles north of the crash site, was hanging some wash on the line outside when she heard an airplane pass overhead. That struck her as unusual since she had just heard on TV that all flights had been ordered grounded.
She told the Philadelphia Daily News: "I heard like a boom and the engine sounded funny. I heard two more booms -- and then I did not hear anything." Temyer's explanation for what she heard is this: "I think the plane was shot down." Temyer told a reporter she had twice told her story to the FBI. She also insists that people she knows in state law enforcement agreed with her story, namely that the plane was shot down and that decompression sucked objects from the aircraft, which would account for the wide debris field.
Nevin Lambert, a neighbor, had a different account. According to him, the plane seemed to be fully, or largely, intact. "I didn't see no smoke, nothing," said, this elderly farmer, who witnessed the crash from his side yard less than a half-mile away. Lambert added that he also later found a couple of pieces of debris, one, a piece of metal, less than 12 inches across, with some insulation attached. A caller to the Howard Stern Radio Show related the story of how he saw Flight 93 in flames while it was in the air and also saw two other aircraft circling it. (Howard Stern Show, April 21 2004)
OTHER AIRCRAFT
A minimum of six witnesses claimed to have seen a small military-type plane in the vicinity shortly before UA93 crashed. Some-spoke of a mysterious white jet which they had observed in the vicinity. The FBI stubbornly denied the presence of any other aircraft. The London Daily Mirror wondered later whether "in the moments before the airliner piled into the black, spongey earth at 575 miles per hour did an American fighter pilot have to do the unthinkable and shoot down a US civil airliner?"
Susan McElwain, 51, who lived two miles from the crash site, told a British reporter that she had seen a white aircraft pass directly over her head. 'It came right over me, I reckon just 40 or 50ft above my mini-van," she said. "It was so low I ducked instinctively. It was traveling real fast, but hardly made any sound. Then it disappeared behind some trees. A few seconds later I heard this great explosion and saw this fireball rise up over the trees, so I figured the jet had crashed. The ground really shook. So I dialed 911 and told them what happened. I'd heard nothing about the other attacks and it was only when I got home and saw the TV that I realized it wasn't the white jet, but Flight 93. I didn't think much more about it until the authorities started to say there had been no other plane. The plane I saw was heading right to the point where Flight 93 crashed and must have been there at the very moment it came down. There's no way I imagined this plane -- it was so low it was virtually on top of me. It was white with no markings but it was definitely military, it just had that look. It had two rear engines, a big fin on the back like a spoiler on the back of a car and with two upright fins at the side. I haven't found one like it on the internet. It definitely wasn't one of those executive jets. The FBI came and talked to me and said there was no plane around. Then they changed their story and tried to say it was a plane taking pictures of the crash 3,000 feet up. But I saw it and it was there before the crash and it was 40 feet above my head. They did not want my story -- nobody here did." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)
Ms. McElwain, a special education teacher, refused to accept the official version of what she saw, in part because of a conversation she had several hours after the fact with the wife of friend of the family who is in the Air Force. According to McElwain, that friend "said her husband had called her that morning and said 'I can't talk, but we've just shot a plane down."' "I presumed they meant Flight 93.1 have no doubt those brave people on board tried to do something, but I don't believe what happened on the plane brought it down. If they shot it down, or something else happened, everyone, especially the victims' families, have a right to know." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)
Lee Purbaugh, aged 32, was the sole person to see the final seconds of Flight 93 as it descended on the former strip-mining land at precisely 10.06 AM -- and he also saw the white jet. He was at his job at the Rollock Inc. scrapyard on a ridge overlooking the point of impact, less than half a mile away. "I heard this real loud noise coming over my head," he told a journalist of the London Daily Mirror. "I looked up and it was Flight 93, barely 50 feet above me. It was coming down in a 45 degree 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." Lee Purbaugh also saw the mysterious other plane; "Yes, there was another plane. I didn't get a good look but it was white and it circled the area about twice and then it flew off over the horizon."
Tom Spinelli, 28, was working at India Lake Marina, a mile and a half away. "I saw the white plane," he reported. "It was flying around all over the place like it was looking for something. I saw it before and after the crash."
At 9:22 AM a sonic boom, almost certainly caused by supersonic f1ight, was registered up by a seismic monitoring station in southern Pennsylvania, 60 miles from Shanksville. (London Daily Mirror, 2002)
Kathy Blades, who was in her small summer cottage with her son about a quarter-mile from the impact site, also reported seeing a white aircraft. Blades and her son ran outside after they heard the crash and saw the jet, which according to them had sleek back wings [sic] and an angled cockpit, race overhead. "My son said, 'I think we're under attack!"' Blades remembered.
A few days after the crash, the FBI tried to provide a plausible explanation for this embarrassing and mysterious white jet which the various witnesses had identified. The FBI now claimed that a private Falcon 20 jet bound for nearby Johnstown was in the vicinity and was asked by authorities to descend and help survey the crash site. But the authorities failed to provide the identity of the owner of the jet, and also could not justify why it was still flying some 40 minutes after the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered all planes to land at the nearest airport. "I think it was shot down," was the opinion of Dennis Mock, who did not see United 93 come down, but who lived closest to the crash site, immediately to the west of the crater. "That's what people around here think," he added. (London Daily Mirror, 2002)
Even though United 93 had supposedly been flying at an altitude of less than 10,000 feet, there was no tail section, no jet engines, no large sections of fuselage in view anywhere near the impact crater. This can be compared to the crash scene at Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Here a Boeing 747 was destroyed by a bomb at an altitude of 30,000 feet. One whole side of the forward part of the plane and many other pieces were clearly identifiable as coming from a large commercial airliner. If there were a plane in Shanksville, it appeared to have disappeared into the ground -- as in the case of the Valujet which had crashed into the Everglades swamp in 1994. But the Pennsylvania countryside was not the Everglades. Here is the depiction of the last moments of United 93 from former New York Times reporter Jere Longman's Among the Heroes, probably the most sustained attempt to present the official version of this flight:
Traveling at 575 miles per hour, the 757 had inverted and hit the spongy earth at a 45-degree angle, tunneling toward a limestone reef at the edge of a reclaimed strip mine. Because the plane crashed upside down, the engines and stowed landing gear thrust upward and forward. The ground became littered with the fractured underbelly of the plane, electronics, shredded wiring. The cockpit and first class shattered like the point of a pencil, and remnants sprayed into a line of hemlock pine trees. The fuselage accordioned on itself more than thirty feet into the porous, backfilled ground. It was as if a marble had been dropped into water. (Longman 215)
Longman is not interested in the shootdown hypothesis, nor does he wonder much about the presence of other aircraft in the area. But Longman must also deal with the amazement of the local emergency workers, who found that they were not dealing with a normal crash site. Here is Longman's reconstruction of what one rescuer saw as he approached the crash site:
As he approached the scene, adrenaline thoughts raced through [the rescuer's] head. What are we going to see? Is there going to be a fire in the fuselage? Will people be trapped? He jumped out of his truck and noticed small fires in different places, but he could not see the plane.
Where is it?
He was sure a commercial airliner had crashed, but he saw only small broken pieces. A 757 is composed of six hundred twenty-six thousand parts, fastened by six hundred thousand bolts and rivets, connected with sixty miles of wire. That's all that he could see now, fragmented parts and rivets and wires, a catastrophic uncoiling. Other firemen and townspeople at the scene had the same quizzical looks. Metal and plastic and paper were everywhere, in the trees, on the ground, a shirt, a shoe, underwear, a backless seat sitting in its aluminum track, a remnant of seat cushion smoking on the roof of a nearby cabin. The pine trees were peppered with shrapnel. King saw the pushed-up earth and crater that measured thirty feet or more in diameter, and he knew it had been the point of impact. He sent a crew to hose down the smoldering debris, but still he did not realize what had plunged into the disturbed ground. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think half the plane was down there," King said.
Maybe it wasn't a commercial airliner.
The rumors started. There were two hundred people on the plane, four hundred. There were no passengers, only mail. Bewilderment prevailed. No one knew anything for certain. King sent his men into the woods to search for the fuselage, and they kept coming back and telling him, 'Rick. There's nothing.' (Longman 215-216)
Longman struggles to account for the pulverized state of the aircraft, which is simply not consistent with the crash of an airplane which had not already broken up in mid-air:
In the hours after the crash, Pennsylvania state troopers said that they had seen no piece of the plane larger than a phone book. Later, an eight-by-seven foot section of the fuselage containing several windows would be found. It was about the size of the hood of a car. A piece of one engine, weighing a thousand pounds, landed more than a hundred yards from the crater, apparently jettisoned upward in a tremendous arc. The cockpit data recorder, one of the so-called black boxes, would be excavated fifteen feet into the crater and the cockpit voice recorder at twenty-five feet. Ash and paper, a canceled check, a charred brokerage statement, traveled eight miles from the crash on a prevailing wind. Brush fires would spark up in the woods for more than a week. Where were the people? Where were the bodies? (Longman 215-216)
Notice that Longman slyly diverges from the eyewitness accounts in attempting to locate the jet engine wreckage much closer to the impact crater -- 100 yards instead of about a mile. But Longman cannot avoid the extraordinary pulverization of the plane: "'You couldn't take a step without stepping on some part of that aircraft," said Craig of the FBI ... two weeks before Christmas, rivets and wires littered the field as if someone had spilled a plane-building kit. Ninety- five percent of the airplane had been recovered, the FBI said, but thousands of splintered pieces lay about in the field." (Longman 262)
There was also the gruesome detail that the human remains collected were not commensurate with the number of passengers. "The collective weight of the forty-four people aboard the plane was seven thousand five hundred pounds, the coroner said. Only six hundred pounds of remains were discovered ...." (Longman 260) According to a reporter: "the largest piece of human tissue found was a section of spine eight inches long." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)
The FBI was adamant that there was no evidence of explosives of any kind having been used. All of this led to speculation not only that United 93 had been shot down by the US Force, but that the plane had been destroyed -- pulverized in mid-air -- by a futuristic weapon based on new physical principles. Wallace Miller, the coroner, commented that he believed the plane had not been shot down, "unless there is some new technology we don't know about." (Longman 264) According to Longman, there was a military aircraft, a Lockheed Hercules C-130 transport plane, about 17 miles away. Such a plane could easily have carried a powerful airborne chemical laser, and this type of directed energy weapon based on new physical principles might have accounted for the physical effects actually observed on the scene.
The FBI was not curious to find out what had actually happened. Coroner Wallace Miller and Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic anthropologist from Mercyhurst College in Erie PA, had proposed a detailed analysis of the crash site; they wanted to divide the area up into a grid with 60-foot squares. Distribution patterns would have cast light on how the plane struck the ground. The FBI, true to form, refused to allow this investigation. To justify this, they invented a soap opera theory that the investigation was designed to reveal in an invidious fashion who had stormed the cockpit and who had not. According to the FBI: "There was no mystery to solve about the plane. Everyone knew what happened with the plane." (Longman 262) But precisely what is well-known is least understood, as Hegel might have argued.
As of early September 2004, the FBI, which assumed control of the accident investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board, continues to refuse to make public the complete data from either of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. The pretext is, as always, the exigencies of the alleged war on terrorism. It is worth recalling that in the case of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in November 2001, NTSB officials had made public detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder within less than 36 hours. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001; London Daily Mirror, 2002)
Before departing, the FBI made sure that the crime scene was rendered totally opaque. The crater was filled in with dirt, to be followed by a layer of topsoil. The scorched trees were cut down and shredded into mulch. The FBI was gone two weeks after the crash. (Longman 258) More evidence had gone into the FBI's black hole in a molehill. Still, relatives of the victims had persistent questions for the FBI. Bob Craig of the FBI's evidence gathering team tried to convince them of the official account: "Turn the picture of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on its side, and, for all intents and purposes, the face of the building is the strip mine in Shanksville. Look at the fireball in the picture. That's what happened." (Longman 260) According to Longman, "conspiracy theorists continued to assert that the plane was shot down, but evidence indicated otherwise."
The FBI later announced that the cockpit voice recorder had been recovered. The FBI at first kept the tape secret, but then agreed to let the bereaved families hear it. The tape was played at Princeton, New Jersey on April 18, 2002. Before they could hear the tape, the families had to sign a special waiver agreeing not to sue the government about any issue arising from the tape. They were forbidden to record the tape, or to take notes. Later, note taking was allowed. The FBI claimed that these procedures were necessary to prevent any damage to the prosecution of Zacarias Moussawi. The families listened through headphones while an FBI transcript was projected on a screen. Some family members later said that the tape raised more questions than it had answered. (Longman 270)
The tragedy of United Airlines flight 93 ended at 10:06 AM Eastern Daylight Time. This was a full 110 minutes, one hour and fifty minutes, after the hijack of United flight 11 from Boston. The US air defense system, usually a well-oiled machine, had failed utterly and completely. Had the air defense system compounded its own failure by shooting down United 93 to prevent the interrogation of hijackers, and the inspection of an aircraft that might have been equipped with Global Hawk? Had the air defense system in this last phase performed the same function as Jack Ruby in the Kennedy assassination -- the elimination of patsies whose testimony might have been fatal to the myth which the leakers and the media were busily constructing even before the tragedy of United 93 was complete?