In a speech to US troops in Baghdad on Christmas Eve, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld made passing reference to the United Airlines flight 93 that crashed over Pennsylvania after being hijacked on September 11th, 2001. His remark that the plane was “shot down”, while not deemed worth more than passing mention by major media outlets, ignited a storm of speculation by independent journalists on the internet.
Silver-tongued devil that he is.
In a speech to US troops in Baghdad on Christmas Eve, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made passing reference to the United Airlines flight 93 that crashed over Pennsylvania after being hijacked on September 11th, 2001. His remark that the plane was “shot down," while not deemed worth more than passing mention by major media outlets, ignited a storm of speculation by independent journalists on the internet that the Secretary’s comments might have been a “Freudian slip”, a telling sign of cover-up in the official account of the 9/11 attacks. But was this speculation just foolish chatter in the chatrooms, or was it a sign of something else?
Highly controversial is the government’s reluctance four years later to offer something more concrete than opinions on how flight 93 went down. The list of unanswered questions is still long, but officials like Rumsfeld remain conspicuously insouciant and unconcerned with establishing the facts once and for all. Rumsfeld’s most recent attempt to ignore his own statements is yet another example of so much official dismissal to suggest that they wish the facts would just disappear and leave them in peace.
While news networks like CNN downplayed the Secretary’s remarks, citing the Pentagon sources who reassured them Rumsfeld had not changed his opinion that the plane crashed as the result of an onboard struggle between passengers and terrorists, the remarks got considerable attention on “indymedia” servers around the globe by serious journalists who—armed with the facts available—didn’t settle for reassurances.
Such a remarkably childlike reply by the DOD to Rumsfeld’s unique choice of words Christmas Eve wasn’t lost on the public at large. As if to say, “I don’t know Mom, some kids were playing and the lamp just broke,” Rumsfeld’s opinions do little to answer the charges that September 11 still raises legitimate questions, questions the government is reluctant to confront. The widespread interest in Rumsfeld’s unfortunate gaffe is a symptom of persistent doubts still surrounding UA 93’s tragic fate, and while the administration is happy to trumpet the heroism of the famed passenger rebellion appropriating slogans like Todd Beamer’s “let’s roll” for personal and political use, their attitudes do little to serve the facts or to place those facts in some kind of meaningful context.
The heroism of flight 93’s passengers is well deserving of recognition, but their memory still elicits demands for thoroughness and investigative rigor, something sorrowfully absent from every investigation to date. Even the much-lauded 9/11 Commission virtually ignored the most salient problems haunting the official timeline of the flight 93 crash. Will Rumsfeld’s slip-up lead to a revision of official history?
Indeed, the Department of Defense’s reassurances beg the question: Do Rumsfeld’s opinions need revising? Problems with UA93’s history stretch beyond the realm of mere opinion and include contradictions, both within the official telling and between the synoptic accounts of six eyewitnesses. The controversy over Rumsfeld’s language didn’t emerge overnight; it’s been growing in the unreasonable silence and the ablative attitudes of the administration for years like a great big public pressure-cooker. Incompetent official histories told by cagey leaders like Rumsfeld create an explosive mixture, and now Rumsfeld’s reaping the whirlwind.
To many, the thought that the administration might have been responsible for some of the deaths that day—especially the deaths of heroes—is too painful to be believed, so few Americans let the thought enter their minds. For those who do, the questions begin like an avalanche, and for all but the most top-secret subjects it’s remarkable how much journalists have pieced together despite the administration’s answer vacuum.
The deficiency of the official version according to Rumsfeld rests less on the answers it presents than on the questions it avoids asking, questions like: was flight 93 lost by accident, or was it deliberately shot down? How would that have been possible? Surely to answer we would have to first establish if it was possible to intercept UA 93 that day, or if there was simply not enough time to reach her. We would have to know if the fighter pilots had permission to open fire on UA 93 once they made contact, and in the absence of the pilots’ testimony and military ordinance receipts we would have to establish if there was an explosion on board UA 93, and whether it was the result of a bomb or some such device brought on board by the terrorists.
Let’s begin with the question of time: Did the F-16s have the ability to reach UA93? At 9:22 a.m. a sonic boom caused by a supersonic flight registered on earthquake monitoring equipment at an army facility in southern Pennsylvania sixty miles away from flight 93’s crash-site, indicating that an aircraft capable of super-sonic speeds—such as an F-16 fighter—was violating prohibitions against breaking the sound barrier and making a nuisance in the area. We know that the F-16s had orders to pursue flight 93 under emergency conditions by that time, so this isn’t all that exceptional. Six different witnesses reported sighting a “military-style aircraft” circling the crash site immediately after flight 93 hit the ground, testimony that the government refuses to corroborate or deny by providing evidence like official records and pilot debriefings. Nevertheless, the eyewitness accounts do lend much credibility to the claim that flight 93 was in fact intercepted before she crashed. Flight 93 didn’t go down until at least 10:06 a.m., so if the pilots hit their afterburners at 9:22 a.m. this would give them quite a head start.
Since UA 93 was still in the air when the sonic boom was registered, and the only other planes in the area were the F-16 fighters reportedly on route to intercept her, then it’s entirely reasonable to suggest that the sonic boom can only have been made by a fighter rapidly approaching striking distance of flight 93, not some other plane possibly in the area since every private and commercial flight had been or was in the process of being grounded. Besides, the only civilian aircraft capable of supersonic speeds—the Lear Jet—was no longer in use. Given these facts, the only logical conclusion is that the F-16s did in fact have time to reach her, and that they most likely did.
This raises further questions, questions like: what happened to flight 93 when she was intercepted? Did the F-16s shoot UA 93 down, or did she simply plummet into that Pennsylvania field because of events that transpired on board beyond the control of the fighter pilots? Some have raised the possibility that flight 93 was blown up, perhaps by a bomb smuggled on board by one of the hijackers, but that’s not part of the official story. The official history and Mr. Rumsfeld’s opinion both agree that the plane crashed because the crew was fighting with the terrorists. Even if this opinion proves correct, it seems rather odd to imagine the pilots of those F-16s just sitting on their hands while tailing a hijacked plane bound for Washington. Any imaginable scenario should have been rather tense, but Mr. Rumsfeld’s opinion doesn’t give us any details of how tense it really was, or why. Rumsfeld would rather just completely avoid telling the story of the fighter pilots that day, but aren’t they heroes too? Doesn’t their tale need to be told?
And what of the possibility that there was a bomb on board and that it somehow went off destroying flight 93, her passengers and all hands? At 9:58 a.m. passenger Todd Beamer ended his cell phone conversation with an emergency operator explaining that he and others on-board were planning to subdue a hijacker holding a bomb in the rear of the plane. The presence of explosive residue from an alleged bomb was never discovered or reported by the NTSB team that investigated the UA 93 crash site, ruling out the possibility of an onboard explosion. Furthermore, there was never any evidence other than a passenger phone call to suggest that there was an explosive device on board UA 93 in the first place.
Nevertheless, there was an explosion before flight 93 went down. This was the report of passenger Edward Felt during a later emergency call before all contact with UA 93 was lost. He reported that they experienced “an explosion” and that he could see “white smoke”. That flight 93 suffered such an explosion is corroborated by the sound of rushing wind on UA 93’s “black box” cabin voice recorder, which suggests that the plane was holed and the cabin depressurized.
Other evidence points to the fact that UA 93 suffered an explosion and subsequently disintegrated. The pattern and distribution of flight 93’s light debris, scattered in pieces “no larger than a carrier bag” over more than a mile combined with the realization that a badly damaged portion of the engine landed roughly 2,000 yards away are facts that point to the use of “air-to-air” heat-seeking weaponry—like the sidewinder missiles equipped on F-16s—according to experts who commented on the crash. That there was an explosion without the presence of a bomb on board combined with the fact that there were F-16s armed with heat-seeking missiles and permission to engage pursuing flight 93 points to the fighters as the likely culprit of flight 93’s destruction. Certainly, such an admission would be difficult to make for an administration whose top priority is making people feel safe and secure.
However, questions are like flies: they smell something good and won’t go away. In light of the current evidence, what about the F-16 fighters and the rules of engagement that day? Weren’t the pilots given orders to intercept flight 93 and try to force her down before attacking her and ending the lives of everyone on board? What exactly were their orders and who gave them? That’s been a very difficult question to answer ever since the attacks that September. The official story of who ordered what and how and to whom is riddled with the same gaps and inconsistencies making trouble for the timeline of every other event.
Between 9:56 a.m. and 10:06 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001 after receiving word at an undisclosed location that there was “a plane eighty miles out [and] there is a fighter in the area,” vice president Dick Cheney was asked for permission for the fighters to attack the airliner in question. He answered in the affirmative, saying simply and unequivocally “Yes.”
This report of the vice president’s orders raises questions in light of other facts. Did Cheney forward to the pilots the president’s orders to force flight 93 down before attacking it, as he explained on NBC’s “Meet the Press” a few days later? According to sources Cheney only gave permission for the F-16s to engage flight 93, but he did not specify to force flight 93 to land first. Nowhere is it available on record that this was what Cheney specifically said. The vice president has said that these were the pilots’ orders, but he has never been asked specifically what he said when he was giving those orders. The 9/11 Commission’s final report does not mention Cheney’s specific language when giving those orders. Did Cheney instruct the pilots to attempt to force flight 93 down before opening fire or not?
Vice president Cheney was asked a total of three times that morning if the F-16s indeed had permission to engage UA 93, and the record shows that the vice president only answered by saying “Yes” to each of the three requests. Apparently, Cheney did not specifically communicate any orders in any way directly to the pilots or to others in the chain of command other than to answer questions asked of him in the affirmative regarding the pilots’ permission to engage. This means that Cheney only ever said “Yes” when others asked, but those are hardly orders that express intent. If he said something else that day, why hasn’t he said it on the record? Why hasn’t he been questioned on the record like we do with anyone else who gives orders to members of the military to fire on our own civilians?
On the September 16th , 2001 edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press” Vice President Dick Cheney told Tom Russert about the administration’s policy regarding rules of engagement on September 11. When Russert asked if the government would shoot down a commercial aircraft heading for the Capitol, Cheney responded:
“Yes. The president made the decision … that if the plane would not divert … as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out. Now, people say, you know, that’s a
horrendous decision to make. Well, it is … are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board?
…It’s a presidential-level decision, and the president made, I think, exactly the right call…”
What Russert, quite understandably, failed to ask and what the vice president, quite inexplicably failed to mention during the course of that interview was whether or not this so-called “presidential-level” decision had been Cheney’s to forward to the pilots. He also failed to mention during the interview that the only record of his orders that day consisted of a series of three short answers to questions about the rules of engagement. Mr. Cheney failed to tell the journalist that he never mentioned forcing flight 93 to divert before opening fire on her.
Since no record of Cheney’s orders have been released to the public, and neither the vice president nor the pilots nor anyone else have gone on record to tell whether or not such an attempt was even made or how successful it was, no one can tell and no one has any recourse to ask, in light of such an attempt, whether or not the F-16s opened fire on flight 93, and if they did, did they hit or did they miss their target?
If the plane was 10 to 15 minutes from Washington, how much time did the fighters reasonably have to try to communicate with the hijacked airplane? Was it enough time to force the plane down, especially if the passengers were in open revolt against their hijackers? Was it enough time to determine who was in control of the cockpit? These and other very reasonable questions remain unanswered by the government even after the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. Again, we are left to seek comfort in the opinions of people like Donald Rumsfeld while we try to answer the questions for ourselves.
Still, despite doubts we know that somehow the orders existed at some point in the day—‘If the plane will not land then use force to shoot it down’—we just don’t know who gave them, who received them, or what was actually said with much certainty. If this was the case as Cheney explains it, then how exactly were the unarmed Langley pilots expected to attack flight 93? Their only option would have been to collide with the civilian aircraft. The 9/11 Commission report stated that the Langley pilots were unaware that their targets were civilian aircraft until after 10:25 a.m., long after the official time given for flight 93’s crash in Shanksville, PA.
It is certain that at least one F-16 pursued flight 93 on September 11th, but which group was the fighter from, the Langley squadron or the group guarding Washington D.C.? The F-16s patrolling Washington D.C. were the only fighters armed with weapons, and flight 93 went down ten minutes outside of the Capitol. There were no F-16s lost on September 11th, 2001. If flight 93 was downed by a fighter intercept, it would likely have been from the squadron over Washington D.C. as these were the only fighters available who could have downed the plane without resorting to suicide collisions.
Officially, we are told that flight 93 hit the ground a 10:03am, roughly fifteen minutes outside of Washington D.C. This time-frame is based in part on the evidence from the black box recording, that ends roughly one minute before the 10:03am. Nevertheless, without further information to corroborate this time frame, the choice seems arbitrary and unreliable.
In fact, the official time of 10:03am is contradicted outright by the army’s seismic data that places the crash at 10:06:05 am, nearly four minutes later. The Philadelphia Daily News did an investigation of this discrepancy between the army’s findings and the official time noting the complete lack of any decisive rationale or supporting evidence for the government’s timetable. This discrepancy has yet to be resolved and was missing from the 9/11 Commission’s report. What happened to the last three minutes on the voice recorder?
Taken together, these facts and discrepancies in official wisdom suggest the troubling but likely scenario that despite the efforts of UA 93’s passengers to subdue their captors, they never had the opportunity to consolidate control of the aircraft due to the untimely intervention of F-16 fighters with orders to shoot them down. Consideration of this plausible alternative scenario begs two relevant questions: Was flight 93 shot down on September 11th , 2001 and why did the 9/11 Commission fail to resolve the issues like the timetable discrepancy?
The world may never get a chance to answer definitively these questions or to understand with any reassurance why those handling the government on that ill-fated day in September have done everything in their power to offer the least amount of serious investigation. The world may never know why they seem to have infinite time and resources to devote to frustrating or stopping others from doing serious investigation of UA 93 on their own. Whatever the reasons, Rumsfeld’s little “misspeak” can just be added to the long list of troubling facts. Even if he knows what really happened to flight 93 he can’t talk about it, especially after so many chances to talk about it have been lost. To add anything to what they’ve already talked about this late in the game would be political suicide for Rumsfeld and every other member of the Bush administration.
And besides, the only people who still care are “geeks” and “conspiracy nuts” on the Internet, and the Department of Defense doesn’t have to lift a finger to swat them away—that’s what CNN does for them. Seriously folks, who pays attention to what transpires on the Internet anyway?
Well, you are reading this, aren’t you?
Highly controversial is the government’s reluctance four years later to offer something more concrete than opinions on how flight 93 went down. The list of unanswered questions is still long, but officials like Rumsfeld remain conspicuously insouciant and unconcerned with establishing the facts once and for all. Rumsfeld’s most recent attempt to ignore his own statements is yet another example of so much official dismissal to suggest that they wish the facts would just disappear and leave them in peace.
While news networks like CNN downplayed the Secretary’s remarks, citing the Pentagon sources who reassured them Rumsfeld had not changed his opinion that the plane crashed as the result of an onboard struggle between passengers and terrorists, the remarks got considerable attention on “indymedia” servers around the globe by serious journalists who—armed with the facts available—didn’t settle for reassurances.
Such a remarkably childlike reply by the DOD to Rumsfeld’s unique choice of words Christmas Eve wasn’t lost on the public at large. As if to say, “I don’t know Mom, some kids were playing and the lamp just broke,” Rumsfeld’s opinions do little to answer the charges that September 11 still raises legitimate questions, questions the government is reluctant to confront. The widespread interest in Rumsfeld’s unfortunate gaffe is a symptom of persistent doubts still surrounding UA 93’s tragic fate, and while the administration is happy to trumpet the heroism of the famed passenger rebellion appropriating slogans like Todd Beamer’s “let’s roll” for personal and political use, their attitudes do little to serve the facts or to place those facts in some kind of meaningful context.
The heroism of flight 93’s passengers is well deserving of recognition, but their memory still elicits demands for thoroughness and investigative rigor, something sorrowfully absent from every investigation to date. Even the much-lauded 9/11 Commission virtually ignored the most salient problems haunting the official timeline of the flight 93 crash. Will Rumsfeld’s slip-up lead to a revision of official history?
Indeed, the Department of Defense’s reassurances beg the question: Do Rumsfeld’s opinions need revising? Problems with UA93’s history stretch beyond the realm of mere opinion and include contradictions, both within the official telling and between the synoptic accounts of six eyewitnesses. The controversy over Rumsfeld’s language didn’t emerge overnight; it’s been growing in the unreasonable silence and the ablative attitudes of the administration for years like a great big public pressure-cooker. Incompetent official histories told by cagey leaders like Rumsfeld create an explosive mixture, and now Rumsfeld’s reaping the whirlwind.
To many, the thought that the administration might have been responsible for some of the deaths that day—especially the deaths of heroes—is too painful to be believed, so few Americans let the thought enter their minds. For those who do, the questions begin like an avalanche, and for all but the most top-secret subjects it’s remarkable how much journalists have pieced together despite the administration’s answer vacuum.
The deficiency of the official version according to Rumsfeld rests less on the answers it presents than on the questions it avoids asking, questions like: was flight 93 lost by accident, or was it deliberately shot down? How would that have been possible? Surely to answer we would have to first establish if it was possible to intercept UA 93 that day, or if there was simply not enough time to reach her. We would have to know if the fighter pilots had permission to open fire on UA 93 once they made contact, and in the absence of the pilots’ testimony and military ordinance receipts we would have to establish if there was an explosion on board UA 93, and whether it was the result of a bomb or some such device brought on board by the terrorists.
Let’s begin with the question of time: Did the F-16s have the ability to reach UA93? At 9:22 a.m. a sonic boom caused by a supersonic flight registered on earthquake monitoring equipment at an army facility in southern Pennsylvania sixty miles away from flight 93’s crash-site, indicating that an aircraft capable of super-sonic speeds—such as an F-16 fighter—was violating prohibitions against breaking the sound barrier and making a nuisance in the area. We know that the F-16s had orders to pursue flight 93 under emergency conditions by that time, so this isn’t all that exceptional. Six different witnesses reported sighting a “military-style aircraft” circling the crash site immediately after flight 93 hit the ground, testimony that the government refuses to corroborate or deny by providing evidence like official records and pilot debriefings. Nevertheless, the eyewitness accounts do lend much credibility to the claim that flight 93 was in fact intercepted before she crashed. Flight 93 didn’t go down until at least 10:06 a.m., so if the pilots hit their afterburners at 9:22 a.m. this would give them quite a head start.
Since UA 93 was still in the air when the sonic boom was registered, and the only other planes in the area were the F-16 fighters reportedly on route to intercept her, then it’s entirely reasonable to suggest that the sonic boom can only have been made by a fighter rapidly approaching striking distance of flight 93, not some other plane possibly in the area since every private and commercial flight had been or was in the process of being grounded. Besides, the only civilian aircraft capable of supersonic speeds—the Lear Jet—was no longer in use. Given these facts, the only logical conclusion is that the F-16s did in fact have time to reach her, and that they most likely did.
This raises further questions, questions like: what happened to flight 93 when she was intercepted? Did the F-16s shoot UA 93 down, or did she simply plummet into that Pennsylvania field because of events that transpired on board beyond the control of the fighter pilots? Some have raised the possibility that flight 93 was blown up, perhaps by a bomb smuggled on board by one of the hijackers, but that’s not part of the official story. The official history and Mr. Rumsfeld’s opinion both agree that the plane crashed because the crew was fighting with the terrorists. Even if this opinion proves correct, it seems rather odd to imagine the pilots of those F-16s just sitting on their hands while tailing a hijacked plane bound for Washington. Any imaginable scenario should have been rather tense, but Mr. Rumsfeld’s opinion doesn’t give us any details of how tense it really was, or why. Rumsfeld would rather just completely avoid telling the story of the fighter pilots that day, but aren’t they heroes too? Doesn’t their tale need to be told?
And what of the possibility that there was a bomb on board and that it somehow went off destroying flight 93, her passengers and all hands? At 9:58 a.m. passenger Todd Beamer ended his cell phone conversation with an emergency operator explaining that he and others on-board were planning to subdue a hijacker holding a bomb in the rear of the plane. The presence of explosive residue from an alleged bomb was never discovered or reported by the NTSB team that investigated the UA 93 crash site, ruling out the possibility of an onboard explosion. Furthermore, there was never any evidence other than a passenger phone call to suggest that there was an explosive device on board UA 93 in the first place.
Nevertheless, there was an explosion before flight 93 went down. This was the report of passenger Edward Felt during a later emergency call before all contact with UA 93 was lost. He reported that they experienced “an explosion” and that he could see “white smoke”. That flight 93 suffered such an explosion is corroborated by the sound of rushing wind on UA 93’s “black box” cabin voice recorder, which suggests that the plane was holed and the cabin depressurized.
Other evidence points to the fact that UA 93 suffered an explosion and subsequently disintegrated. The pattern and distribution of flight 93’s light debris, scattered in pieces “no larger than a carrier bag” over more than a mile combined with the realization that a badly damaged portion of the engine landed roughly 2,000 yards away are facts that point to the use of “air-to-air” heat-seeking weaponry—like the sidewinder missiles equipped on F-16s—according to experts who commented on the crash. That there was an explosion without the presence of a bomb on board combined with the fact that there were F-16s armed with heat-seeking missiles and permission to engage pursuing flight 93 points to the fighters as the likely culprit of flight 93’s destruction. Certainly, such an admission would be difficult to make for an administration whose top priority is making people feel safe and secure.
However, questions are like flies: they smell something good and won’t go away. In light of the current evidence, what about the F-16 fighters and the rules of engagement that day? Weren’t the pilots given orders to intercept flight 93 and try to force her down before attacking her and ending the lives of everyone on board? What exactly were their orders and who gave them? That’s been a very difficult question to answer ever since the attacks that September. The official story of who ordered what and how and to whom is riddled with the same gaps and inconsistencies making trouble for the timeline of every other event.
Between 9:56 a.m. and 10:06 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001 after receiving word at an undisclosed location that there was “a plane eighty miles out [and] there is a fighter in the area,” vice president Dick Cheney was asked for permission for the fighters to attack the airliner in question. He answered in the affirmative, saying simply and unequivocally “Yes.”
This report of the vice president’s orders raises questions in light of other facts. Did Cheney forward to the pilots the president’s orders to force flight 93 down before attacking it, as he explained on NBC’s “Meet the Press” a few days later? According to sources Cheney only gave permission for the F-16s to engage flight 93, but he did not specify to force flight 93 to land first. Nowhere is it available on record that this was what Cheney specifically said. The vice president has said that these were the pilots’ orders, but he has never been asked specifically what he said when he was giving those orders. The 9/11 Commission’s final report does not mention Cheney’s specific language when giving those orders. Did Cheney instruct the pilots to attempt to force flight 93 down before opening fire or not?
Vice president Cheney was asked a total of three times that morning if the F-16s indeed had permission to engage UA 93, and the record shows that the vice president only answered by saying “Yes” to each of the three requests. Apparently, Cheney did not specifically communicate any orders in any way directly to the pilots or to others in the chain of command other than to answer questions asked of him in the affirmative regarding the pilots’ permission to engage. This means that Cheney only ever said “Yes” when others asked, but those are hardly orders that express intent. If he said something else that day, why hasn’t he said it on the record? Why hasn’t he been questioned on the record like we do with anyone else who gives orders to members of the military to fire on our own civilians?
On the September 16th , 2001 edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press” Vice President Dick Cheney told Tom Russert about the administration’s policy regarding rules of engagement on September 11. When Russert asked if the government would shoot down a commercial aircraft heading for the Capitol, Cheney responded:
“Yes. The president made the decision … that if the plane would not divert … as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out. Now, people say, you know, that’s a
horrendous decision to make. Well, it is … are you going to, in fact, shoot it down, obviously, and kill all those Americans on board?
…It’s a presidential-level decision, and the president made, I think, exactly the right call…”
What Russert, quite understandably, failed to ask and what the vice president, quite inexplicably failed to mention during the course of that interview was whether or not this so-called “presidential-level” decision had been Cheney’s to forward to the pilots. He also failed to mention during the interview that the only record of his orders that day consisted of a series of three short answers to questions about the rules of engagement. Mr. Cheney failed to tell the journalist that he never mentioned forcing flight 93 to divert before opening fire on her.
Since no record of Cheney’s orders have been released to the public, and neither the vice president nor the pilots nor anyone else have gone on record to tell whether or not such an attempt was even made or how successful it was, no one can tell and no one has any recourse to ask, in light of such an attempt, whether or not the F-16s opened fire on flight 93, and if they did, did they hit or did they miss their target?
If the plane was 10 to 15 minutes from Washington, how much time did the fighters reasonably have to try to communicate with the hijacked airplane? Was it enough time to force the plane down, especially if the passengers were in open revolt against their hijackers? Was it enough time to determine who was in control of the cockpit? These and other very reasonable questions remain unanswered by the government even after the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. Again, we are left to seek comfort in the opinions of people like Donald Rumsfeld while we try to answer the questions for ourselves.
Still, despite doubts we know that somehow the orders existed at some point in the day—‘If the plane will not land then use force to shoot it down’—we just don’t know who gave them, who received them, or what was actually said with much certainty. If this was the case as Cheney explains it, then how exactly were the unarmed Langley pilots expected to attack flight 93? Their only option would have been to collide with the civilian aircraft. The 9/11 Commission report stated that the Langley pilots were unaware that their targets were civilian aircraft until after 10:25 a.m., long after the official time given for flight 93’s crash in Shanksville, PA.
It is certain that at least one F-16 pursued flight 93 on September 11th, but which group was the fighter from, the Langley squadron or the group guarding Washington D.C.? The F-16s patrolling Washington D.C. were the only fighters armed with weapons, and flight 93 went down ten minutes outside of the Capitol. There were no F-16s lost on September 11th, 2001. If flight 93 was downed by a fighter intercept, it would likely have been from the squadron over Washington D.C. as these were the only fighters available who could have downed the plane without resorting to suicide collisions.
Officially, we are told that flight 93 hit the ground a 10:03am, roughly fifteen minutes outside of Washington D.C. This time-frame is based in part on the evidence from the black box recording, that ends roughly one minute before the 10:03am. Nevertheless, without further information to corroborate this time frame, the choice seems arbitrary and unreliable.
In fact, the official time of 10:03am is contradicted outright by the army’s seismic data that places the crash at 10:06:05 am, nearly four minutes later. The Philadelphia Daily News did an investigation of this discrepancy between the army’s findings and the official time noting the complete lack of any decisive rationale or supporting evidence for the government’s timetable. This discrepancy has yet to be resolved and was missing from the 9/11 Commission’s report. What happened to the last three minutes on the voice recorder?
Taken together, these facts and discrepancies in official wisdom suggest the troubling but likely scenario that despite the efforts of UA 93’s passengers to subdue their captors, they never had the opportunity to consolidate control of the aircraft due to the untimely intervention of F-16 fighters with orders to shoot them down. Consideration of this plausible alternative scenario begs two relevant questions: Was flight 93 shot down on September 11th , 2001 and why did the 9/11 Commission fail to resolve the issues like the timetable discrepancy?
The world may never get a chance to answer definitively these questions or to understand with any reassurance why those handling the government on that ill-fated day in September have done everything in their power to offer the least amount of serious investigation. The world may never know why they seem to have infinite time and resources to devote to frustrating or stopping others from doing serious investigation of UA 93 on their own. Whatever the reasons, Rumsfeld’s little “misspeak” can just be added to the long list of troubling facts. Even if he knows what really happened to flight 93 he can’t talk about it, especially after so many chances to talk about it have been lost. To add anything to what they’ve already talked about this late in the game would be political suicide for Rumsfeld and every other member of the Bush administration.
And besides, the only people who still care are “geeks” and “conspiracy nuts” on the Internet, and the Department of Defense doesn’t have to lift a finger to swat them away—that’s what CNN does for them. Seriously folks, who pays attention to what transpires on the Internet anyway?
Well, you are reading this, aren’t you?
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