Posted on 06/29/2002 10:42:42 AM PDT by Paul Atreides
If, hypothetically, the plane took a missle in an engine as the passengers were in a melee with the hijackers, would that make the passengers' actions any less heroic? Personally I don't think the plane was shot down. More likely it broke up in the air as a result of either overly violent maneuvering over the safe maneuvering limits or as a result of hitting Mach 1 in a powered dive. Regardless of whether it was crashed by a passenger, crashed by a hijacker, or shot down, however, the passengers' efforts' heroism remains.
Personally, I certainly do not think it makes them any less heroic, I just think the evidence points to it being shot down(justifiably).
Were you there?
Have you EVER watched a breaking news story unfold on TV? Ever sat in front of a newswire as breaking news is unfolding? I have, because I've worked in the newsrooms of both a news channel and a wire service. The initial information is almost always WRONG. On a story the size of 9/11, the true story is refined slowly over a period of days or weeks, as the crap is sorted out from the facts. (Or do you really believe the State Department was bombed on 9/11 too? After all, it was reported!!!)
In short, the story from "several weeks later" is always more reliable than the "so-and-so said that..." pseudoreporting and tinfoil BS that's tossed around as the events are actually occurring, when nobody has the time of manpower to track down what's truth and what's merely empty rumormongering.
And again, for the 50,000th time, it's establish fact that Bush gave the go-ahead to shoot down any planes that appeared to be hijacked. And he had a 90% approval rating anyway. It's beyond obvious that the public was more than ready to accept having a passenger jet shot down. So what's the point of lying about it?!?!!?!? Why are people seeing conspiracies when every person in the nation is IN ON IT?!!??!
What is more egregious than a president giving an order to shoot down a domestic flight with passengers (if at all true, an unfortunate but necessary call), is the charge by Mr. Fertik that the hijackers were not at all responsible for the deaths of passengers and crew aboard Flight 93.
Typical Democrat, never blame the perpetrator of the crime.
Maybe you should bother to go back in the archives from over a year ago when the DNC connection was proven through Freeper research, instead of tossing around insults like a pathetic little boy.
Why does it matter? Break the sound barrier in a 757/767 and it will crash, regardless of its age. The stresses on the airframe at mach 1 are far beyond those experienced at 900fps. No matter how well built it may be, a plane which is not designed to survive the sound barrier, won't.
1. The plane crashed due to the actions of the people inside the plane. This could include actions by either the terrorists or the passengers.
2. The plane was shot down. On 9-11-01, there were very few choices available to solve the airliner / cruise missile situation. One was ground all planes now. This was done. The Second was splash all planes not responding to the order to terminate flight ASAP. When you examine that the airplanes, which hit the World Trade Towers, killed 2,800 people, there is a possible that a decision was made, one that would be very difficult for an US President. Basically time was running out on Flight 93.
Now that we have logically looked at the two possible causes of the termination of Flight 93, I have a question Mr. Clinton.
Please explain the ‘rush’ to capture the people in Waco. They were not going anywhere, they were of no harm to anyone except trained law enforcement offices and US military. So I ask Mr. Clinton, why the rush to kill Americans when there were other choices and time was not critical.
Eyewitnesses saw the missle, and eyewitnesses saw another plane in Pennsylvania. Why believe one and not the other?
The heroic British GOVERNMENT caused civilian deaths by smuggling munintions on the Lusitania and firebombing Dresden , and you are proud of such acts ? Of course the vile Nazi and Tojo regimes had to be stopped, but far better to bomb targets of military value. Roosevelt , Stalin , Hitler, Tojo and Churchill may all be having a Polsdamned conference.
You and others are ignoring tha stage-setting for the crimes big and small. Our gov'ts have disarmed the people in order to more easily control us and so left us vulnerable to the smaller wolves as well. And a gov't which breaks the rules in order to enforce the rules is not worthy of respect.
Technically, this is an accurate statement. Control implies the hijackers were completely expelled from the cockpit, which isn't known. There's massive evidence they removed control from the hijackers.
Mark Bingham uses an Airfone to call his mother, Alice Hoglan, who is still asleep at her brother’s home in Saratoga, Calif., having been up late the night before caring for triplets. “Mom, this is Mark Bingham,” he tells her, so rattled he uses his last name. Bingham describes the situation for his mother, a United Airlines flight attendant. The call lasts about three minutes. Twice during the call, says Alice, “Mark was distracted. There was a five-second pause. I heard people speaking. There was murmuring, nothing loud.” She theorizes that Mark was talking to the other men, and planning to fight back. “We’re going to do something. I know I’m not going to get out of this.”
— TODD BEAMER
At around the same time, Todd Beamer is telling the operator that the men plan “to jump” the hijacker in the back, claiming to have a bomb. “We’re going to do something,” Beamer tells operator Lisa Jefferson. “I know I’m not going to get out of this.” He asks Jefferson to recite the Lord’s Prayer with him. The last words Jefferson hears are “Are you ready guys? Let’s roll.”
It’s unclear when, in all of the telephony, Glick, Beamer, Bingham, Burnett and Nacke hatched their plot. It is also unclear if they attacked just once, or twice, first taking out the hijacker claiming to have the bomb, then storming the cockpit. Crucial evidence, NEWSWEEK has learned, may come from yet another phone call made by a passenger. Elizabeth Wainio, 27, was speaking to her stepmother in Maryland. Another passenger, she explains, had loaned her a cell phone and told her to call her family. “I have to go,” Wainio says, cutting the call short. “They’re about to storm the cockpit” referring to her fellow passengers.
Calls from Glick, Burnett, Beamer and Bingham offer the most compelling evidence of an onboard rebellion. FBI investigators say they've found nothing to contradict such a scenario. And others could have been involved.
There was Andrew Garcia, 62, of Portola Valley, Calif., returning from a meeting. His family got a call, they think from him, but only one word, "Dorothy," his wife's name, was heard before the line went dead. The Garcias think he would have joined any insurrection.
There was also Richard Guadagno, 38, a refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from Eureka, Calif., who had federal law-enforcement training. His colleagues believe he would have been involved.
Glick called a little more than an hour into the flight. The Internet company executive, 31, had been scheduled to leave home in West Milford, N.J., the day before. At 7:30, before boarding, he called his wife, Lyz, who was staying with her parents in New York's Catskill Mountains. His father-in-law said she was still asleep.
His second call was far more urgent: "There's bad men on the plane, let me talk to Lyz," Glick told his father-in-law, Richard Makely.
For 20 minutes, as the jet streaked across western Pennsylvania, Lyz and Jeremy, former high school sweethearts with a 12-week-old daughter, talked for the last time.
She stayed calm. He wanted to know if what he'd heard from another passenger who was calling home, that the Trade Center towers had been hit, was true. She reluctantly told him it was.
"He knew something very bad was going to happen," Lyz told NBC's Dateline. "What he needed to know was what was going to happen. Were they going to blow the plane up, or was it going to crash into something, because that made all the difference."
Glick, a 6-foot-1, 220-pound judo champion, said he and others were formulating a plan, hashing over whether passengers should rush the hijackers. He asked Lyz what he should do. "I finally just decided: 'Honey, you need to go for it.' "
The hijackers had already stabbed one person to death. Jeremy told Lyz to stay on the line. The jet was no more than 30 minutes from Washington.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Beamer, 32, an Oracle executive from Hightstown, N.J., learned from the GTE supervisor, Lisa Jefferson, about the other hijackings. He told her that two hijackers had locked themselves into the cockpit.
Beamer told Jefferson he and others were going to "jump on" the hijacker with the bomb, who was guarding the passengers in the rear. He mentioned Glick by name.
Jefferson heard shouts and commotion, and then Beamer asked her to pray with him. They recited the 23rd Psalm. He made Jefferson promise to call his wife, Lisa, due with their third child in January, then dropped the phone. Jefferson heard Beamer say, "Let's roll." Silence followed.
Burnett was on the phone to his wife, Deena, four times. The first time he assured her he was OK but asked her to call authorities. She dialed 911, and a dispatcher put her through to the FBI.
An executive at a Pleasanton, Calif., medical products company, Burnett, 38, was by all accounts a man capable of taking matters into his own hands. "He is absolutely the kind of person you not only would think might be involved but you would expect to be involved," says his boss, Keith Grossman. "And be shocked if he wasn't."
When Burnett called back, his wife told him about the World Trade Center attacks. On his third call, they discussed whether a bomb was aboard. Burnett thought the hijackers were bluffing.
In his last call, the 6-foot-2 former high school quarterback, said, "We're getting ready to do something."
"Who?" Deena asked.
"A group of us," he said. "We're going to do something."
The first terrestrial phone to ring was answered by Deena Burnett, wife of the man sitting next to Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett. 'Are you okay?' she asked. 'No,' replied Tom, 'we've been hijacked. They've knifed a guy; there's a bomb on board; tell the authorities, Deena.'
Bingham's call was to his mother was strangely formal: 'This is Mark Bingham,' her son said. Then only: 'I love you,' and he hung up.
Such behaviour may seem strange, but not to Bingham's friend and former employer Holland Carney, who sees in his economy of language the first indications of revolt aboard UA 93. 'If I know Mark, he would not have said anything about what he intended to do. I remember him coming to work one day with a huge black eye. I asked what had happened, and he said two guys had jumped him and he had fought them off. I said that was dangerous - better to give them the money - but he would have none of it. That would have been him on the plane. He was not someone afraid to act.'
Burnett made a second call, by which time Deena was watching the World Trade Centre collapse on television. Burnett fired a fusillade of questions: 'Are they commercial places?'
Jeremy Glick learnt the same news from his wife, Lyz, in upstate New York. 'Is that where we're going too?' he asked her. 'Unlikely,' said Lyz, 'there's nothing left to crash into.'
Todd Beamer's call to airphone operator Lisa Jefferson was, she says, a turning point in her life. 'I will play it over and over in my mind,' she says.
The FBI was on the other line, offering guidance. 'I asked his name and he told me. And at that point his voice went up a little bit because he said: "We're going down, we're turning round. Oh I don't know, Jesus, please help us."'
The two chatted about Beamer's family; his sons Drew and David. 'Then he said: "My wife is expecting," so we talked.' They discovered Jefferson and his wife shared the same Christian name. The conversation went from the sublime to the practical: 'He wanted me to recite the Lord's Prayer with him.' Then came the Psalm, with - according to Jefferson -- a number of other passengers now joining in, as though for a last rite.
'Lisa! Lisa!' shouted Beamer. 'I'm still here, Todd,' Jefferson said, 'I'll be here as long as you are.'
'From that point,' she says now, 'he said he was going to have to go out on faith because they were talking about jumping the guy with the bomb. He was still holding the phone, but he was not talking to me, he was talking to someone else and I could tell he had turned away. And he said: "You ready. Okay, let's roll."'
'We're all running to first class,' said flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw, implying the rebellion had begun in Bingham's compartment.
Between rows 30 and 34, the revolt had brewed along with a pot of boiling water, which Bradshaw was planning to splash into a hijacker's face.
The hijackers had chosen their flight badly: Glick was a 6'1" judo champion; Bingham was a rugby player; Burnett had been a college quarterback. Among the other passengers, Louis Nacke was a weightlifter and William Cashman a former paratrooper. The manual advising pilots to be careful and appease hijackers was about to be ripped up, along with the history of hijacking.
No one will ever know how the plan to attack the terrorists was hatched, except for an indication to The Observer from an analyst of the recorder that the scuffle began not at the back of the plane but at the front - where Bingham was sitting. 'He was one of those who would have said: "This is ridiculous, let's kick their asses,"' Carney says
There was talk of 'rushing the hijackers' - Glick, in a third call, asked Lyz if she thought it a good idea. She said she did. Deena Burnett disagreed. 'Tom, sit down,' she said. 'Don't draw attention to yourself.' 'If they're going to run this plane into the ground,' retorted her husband, 'we're going to do something.'
From 9.57, the cockpit recorder picks up the sounds of fighting in an aircraft losing control at 30,000 feet - the crash of trolleys, dishes being hurled and smashed. The terrorists scream at each other to hold the door against what is obviously a siege from the cabin. A passenger cries: 'Let's get them!' and there is more screaming, then an apparent breach. 'Give it to me!' shouts a passenger, apparently about to seize the controls.
EXCERPTED FROM THREE NEWSPAPER ARTICLES
So what's the point of lying about it?!?!!?!? Why are people seeing conspiracies when every person in the nation is IN ON IT?!!??!
The point is that there would be people who would make this a huge issue for Bush. Just look at this article! Think about DU, Begalla, Carville and the otehr ilk. They would be calling Bush a murderer for ever. There are millions of idiots who would not have seen it as justifiable. Look at the anti-american stuff we have seen since.
The cell phone calls were a godsend, like I said. Why admit a shootdown, even though most people would understand it was justifiable, when you can simply skip that scenario all together with this sensational story? It would make no sense to "rock the boat". They knew that after 9/11, they would most likely not have to shoot down a plane, because they were already rounding up the known terrorists that they had let in with visas. They knew no terrosist could ever again hijack a plane with a box cutter. And no arab looking person could get on one without intense scrutiny. There was no reason to tell the truth. None whatsoever.
And that is different from Republicans.....how?
Let's see -- shoot down the pplane? Or let it continue on to DC and kill Lord knows how many....If it was shot down, then it was justified, period.
I'm tired of the Monday morning quarterbacking by the left and by handwringers who want to find a way to blame GW for 9/11.
He gets to make the difficult decisions. That's why he was elected. Get over it.
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