Flight 93 'was shot down' claims book
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770
by ROWLAND MORGAN
12:27pm 19th August 2006
The heart-thumping moment came when when passengers on board one of the hijacked 9/11 jets fought back against the ruthless fanatics hellbent on crashing the plane into the heart of America.
Jumping out of their seats to a rallying cry of ‘Let’s roll!’, they charged towards the front of the Boeing 757 and began smashing down the cockpit door to reach the hijackers at the controls.
Amid the desperate commotion, the plane rolled violently from right to left and pitched up and down as the rogue pilots tried to throw the passengers beyond the door off balance. As the struggle continued, the cockpit voice recorder captured the hijackers urgently discussing whether to ditch the plane. ‘Is that it? Shall we finish it off?’ asked one of the fanatics.
‘No, not yet. When they all come, we finish it off,’ was the reply. Minutes later, at10.03am, with the same voices shouting in Arabic, ‘Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest,’ the plane headed down, banked hard right and rolled on to its back. It smashed into an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at its top speed of 580mph and exploded into a massive fireball.
Evidence suggests a sinister twist
The flames set nearby woods on fire as the impact sprayed body parts and other debris into the trees and up into the sky, to float to earth as far as eight miles away.
This, then, is the legend of United Airways Flight 93, one that has been vigorously promoted in a stream of books and films, most recently in the £9.6 million Hollywood movie United 93. It is the story of how 33 innocent passengers and seven crew gave their lives to save countless others as their plane flew kamikaze-style towards the White House or the Capitol in Washington.
To a nation still reeling from the attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon that same September morning, these were men and women every bit as heroic as those who had fought at the Alamo.
Yet my own exhaustive investigations have led me to conclude that the story of Flight 93 is far from being the straightforward account of supreme courage that the authorities would have us believe.
Instead, the real story is mired in cynical manipulation and warmongering propaganda. I am convinced there is evidence to suggest a wholly sinister twist to the tale that already holds pride of place in American folklore. For I believe that Flight 93 may well have been deliberately shot down as a means of stopping it from reaching its ultimate target — even at the expense of the 40 blameless people on board. It is a suspicion that was held even by the FBI, but was swept aside as a shaken America clung on to the official version of selfless sacrifice and raw patriotism.
Today, with the approach of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, some will still say that such speculation only serves to lend comfort to terrorists and does a disservice to the dead.
Others, however, will feel there are too many disquieting circumstances and unanswered questions to simply ignore.
But let us examine the evidence — so that you can come to your own conclusion. The massive impact caused the entire plane to disappear 30ft deep into the earth, telescoping down on itself and crushing everyone and everything inside the fuselage beyond recognition.
Why did the engines go missing?
However, the absence of any significant debris — including tailplane and wings — bewildered witnesses, relatives and, more importantly, some crash experts.
They found it hard to believe that an airliner up to 155ft long, with two engines each weighing more than six tons, could have penetrated the ground so completely as to utterly disappear. Had it, in reality, been blown to pieces in mid-air?
Certainly it is unclear how a single piece of fuselage the size of a dining room table could have been recovered from a marina in Indian Lake, a couple of miles away from the crash site — unless it fell from the sky during an aerial break-up.
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.
End Part I