The Independent - U.K.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:
THE MYSTERY OF FLIGHT 93

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=323958

John Carlin reports from Shanksville,
Pennsylvania.  13 August 2002
 

We all know the inspiring story of Flight 93, of the heroic passengers
who forced the hijacked plane to the ground, sacrificing themselves to
save the lives of others. The only trouble is: it may simply not be true.

The fate of United Airlines Flight 93, the last of the four hijacked planes to
go down in the United States on 11 September, holds no mystery for Lee
Purbaugh. He saw what happened with his own eyes. He was the only
person present in the field where, at 10.06am, the aircraft hit the ground.

"There was an incredibly loud rumbling sound and there it was, right there,
right above my head – maybe 50ft up," says Purbaugh, who works at a
scrapyard overlooking the crash site. "It was only a split second but it
looked like it was moving in slow motion, like it took forever. I saw it rock
from side to side then, suddenly, it dipped and dived, nose first, with a huge
explosion, into the ground. I knew immediately that no one could possibly
have survived."

Apart from, here and there, a finger, a toe or a tooth, all that remained of the
44 souls aboard, churned into the soil or hanging from the branches of
nearby trees, were small pieces of tissue and bone. The plane was also
pulverised, reduced to tiny fragments of metal. Wally Miller, the local
coroner in what used to be a forgotten corner of rural Pennsylvania, was the
man charged by law with collecting the human remains and establishing the
causes of death. "I issued the death certificates," says Miller, who is also
the local undertaker. "I put down 'murdered' for the 40 passengers and
crew; 'suicide' for the four terrorists."

But Miller, who worked closely with the FBI during the 13 days that they
investigated the crash site, admits that, in the end, he cannot prove what
happened; he can only infer it. Neither he nor anybody else knows what
exactly caused Flight 93 to go down and, as Miller puts it, "bring the world's
troubles crashing down on our doorstep". Or, if there are people who do
know, they are not telling.

The shortage of available facts did not prevent the creation of an instant
legend – a legend that the US government and the US media were pleased
to propagate, and that the American public have been eager, for the most
part, to accept as fact. The legend goes like this: the passengers on the
hijacked United flight, alerted on their mobile phones to the news of the
other three hijacked planes, decide that if they are not going to save
themselves at least they will do the patriotic thing and spare the lives of
those who are the terrorists' intended targets; so they charge down the
aisle, storm the cockpit, where a terrorist is at the controls, and, in the
ensuing struggle, force the plane down.

President George Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the head of the
FBI Robert Mueller, and numerous other senior government officials who
have saluted the "heroes" of Flight 93, have consistently, and repeatedly,
advanced this version of events. So have the big national newspapers and
all the big national television stations. The New York Times, normally a
model of legalistic precision, published this extraordinarily woolly sentence
on 22 September upon learning, from unnamed "official" sources, that the
plane's cockpit voice-recorder had registered "a desperate and wild
struggle" aboard. "And while it [the recorder] did not provide a clear or
complete picture," The New York Times read, "it seemed certain that there
was a chaotic confrontation that apparently led to the crash of the jet."

Vanity Fair magazine, going on little more information than was available to
The New York Times, went ahead and published a highly detailed story on
Flight 93, which, the magazine said, "may be remembered as one of the
greatest tales of heroism ever told". Vanity Fair did recognise, though, that
any suggestions as to what actually happened to force the plane down had
to be, by necessity, "pure conjecture".

Two months later, Newsweek got hold of what it was told was a partial
transcript of the voice-recorder and, upon that basis, narrated the story of
"the Heroes of Flight 93" in even more vivid, drum-rolling, Hollywoodesque
detail than Vanity Fair had done. The passengers were "citizen soldiers... who
rose up, like their forefathers, to defy tyranny", intoned Newsweek. "In daring
and dying, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 found victory for us all."

The transcript that Newsweek obtained did indicate that fighting had taken
place aboard, curses had been uttered, prayers raised up both to the
Muslim and the Christian god. But for all the drama of the story, Newsweek
did not draw attention to the fact that, in truth, they were guessing as to how
or why the plane had crashed; that they did not know whether the
passengers had even made it into the cockpit; that they had no clue what
happened during Flight 93's decisive, desperate last eight minutes.

Which is not to assert that the "hero" story is untrue, or even implausible.
Maybe the legend does indeed correspond perfectly to the facts. And
certainly, based on the records of telephone calls made from the plane,
there is no disputing that a number of the passengers did indeed intend to
carry out actions of great courage. But what those actions actually turned
out to be is not known – or known only to a small group of people with a
clear picture of what happened in the skies over Shanksville on the morning
of 11 September, people in the US military who tracked the plane's last
moments as well as people familiar with, but unwilling to reveal, the full
contents of the material gleaned from the cockpit voice- recorder, which
was retrieved in perfect working order after the crash.

The absence of official information has led to lively and often well-informed
debate in the unofficial medium of the internet (see www.flight93crash.com)
But there are also a number of individuals in the aviation industry convinced
that there do exist other plausible interpretations of what actually happened.
Because there are, most certainly, a number of important unanswered
questions – questions based on evidence, as well as on a manifest
absence of candour on the part of the authorities – which the national
US media, typically so sceptical and inquisitive, have shown a curious
reluctance to ask.

The alternative theories, both of which have been denied by the US military
and the FBI, are a) that Flight 93 was brought down by a US government
plane; and b) that a bomb went off aboard (passengers had said in phone
calls that one of the hijackers had what appeared to be a bomb strapped to
him). If doubts remain despite the denials, if conspiracy theories flourish, it
is in large part because of the authorities' failure to address head-on
questions centring on the following four conundrums.

1. The wide displacement of the plane's debris, one explanation for which
might be an explosion of some sort aboard prior to the crash. Letters –
Flight 93 was carrying 7,500 pounds of mail to California – and other papers
from the plane were found eight miles (13km) away from the scene of the
crash. A sector of one engine weighing one ton was found 2,000 yards
away. This was the single heaviest piece recovered from the crash, and the
biggest, apart from a piece of fuselage the size of a dining-room table. The
rest of the plane, consistent with an impact calculated to have occurred at
500mph, disintegrated into pieces no bigger than two inches long. Other
remains of the plane were found two miles away near a town called Indian
Lake. All of these facts, widely disseminated, were confirmed by the coroner
Wally Miller.

2. The location of US Air Force jets, which might or might not have been
close enough to fire a missile at the hijacked plane. Live news media
reports on the morning of 11 September conflict with a number of official
statements issued later. What the government acknowledges is that the
first fighters with the mission to intercept took off at 8.52am; that another
set of fighters took off from Andrews Air Force base near Washington at
9.35am – precisely the time that Flight 93 turned almost 180 degrees off
course towards Washington and the hijacker pilot was heard by air-traffic
controllers to say that there was "a bomb aboard". Flight 93, whose
menacing trajectory was made known by the broadcast media almost
immediately, did not go down for another 31 minutes. Apart from the logical
conclusion that at least one Air Force F-16 – 125 miles away in Washington
at 9.40am, meaning 10 minutes away from Flight 93 (or less if it flew at
supersonic speed) – should have reached the fourth of the "flying bombs"
well before 10.06am, there is this evidence from a federal flight controller
published a few days later in a newspaper in New Hampshire: that an F-16
had been "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet and "must have seen
the whole thing". Also, there was one brief report on CBS television before
the crash that two F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Vice-President Dick
Cheney acknowledged five days later that President Bush had authorised
the Air Force pilots to shoot down hijacked commercial aircraft.

3. One telephone call from the doomed plane whose contents do not
entirely tally with the hero legend and which is accordingly omitted in the
Independence Day-type dramas favoured by the US media. The Associated
Press news service reported on 11 September that eight minutes before the
crash, a frantic male passenger called the 911 emergency number. He told
the operator, named Glen Cramer, that he had locked himself inside one of
the plane's toilets. Cramer told the AP, in a report that was widely broadcast
on 11 September, that the passenger had spoken for one minute. "We're
being hijacked, we're being hijacked!" the man screamed down his mobile
phone. "We confirmed that with him several times," Cramer said, "and we
asked him to repeat what he said. He was very distraught. He said he
believed the plane was going down. He did hear some sort of an explosion
and saw white smoke coming from the plane, but he didn't know where.
And then we lost contact with him."

According to the information that has been made known, this was the last
of the various phone calls made from the aeroplane. No more calls were
received from the plane in the eight minutes that remained after the man in
the toilet said that he had heard an explosion.

4. Eyewitness accounts of a "mystery plane" that flew low over the Flight 93
crash site shortly after impact. Lee Purbaugh is one of at least half a dozen
named individuals who have reported seeing a second plane flying low and
in erratic patterns, not much above treetop level, over the crash site within
minutes of the United flight crashing. They describe the plane as a small,
white jet with rear engines and no discernible markings. Purbaugh, who
served three years in the US Navy, said he did not believe it was a military
plane. If it indeed was not, one suggestion made in the internet discussion
groups is that US Customs uses planes with these characteristics to
interdict aerial drug shipments. Either way, the presence of the mystery
jet remains a puzzle.

How has the US government and its various agencies responded
to doubts raised by the above questions? In the following ways:

1. The paper debris eight miles away, the FBI says, was wafted away by a
10mph wind; the jet-engine part flew 2,000 yards on account of the savage
force of the plane's impact with the ground. The FBI conclusion: "Nothing
was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground intact."
Aviation experts I have contacted are very doubtful about this. One expert
expresses astonishment at the notion that the letters and other papers
would have remained airborne for almost one hour before falling to earth.

2. The Air Force jets were on their way but failed to make it on time,
according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
Fighters did finally approach Flight 93, he acknowledges, "moments" before
it crashed, but did not shoot it down. Which begs the question why they
were unable to arrive sooner to intercept an aircraft that clearly had terrorists
aboard and that was flying straight for Washington more than one hour after
another United Airlines plane had crashed into the second World Trade
Centre tower. The report in the New Hampshire newspaper, and the one on
CBS, have not been explained, and the air-traffic controllers in Cleveland
who tracked the last minutes of Flight 93 on radar have been forbidden by
the authorities to speak publicly about what they saw on their screens.

3. Neither the FBI nor anyone else in authority has explained the reported
911 phone call from the plane toilet, even though it appears to be the last of
the phone calls made from the plane and even though it conveys the far
from insignificant claim that there was an explosion on board. The FBI has
confiscated the tape of the conversation and the operator Glen Cramer has
received orders not to speak to the media any more.

4. The explanation furnished by the FBI for the mystery plane, whose
existence it initially denied, serves less to reassure than to reinforce
suspicions that a cover-up of sorts is under way, that the government is
manipulating the truth in a manner it considers to be palatable to the
broader US public. The FBI has said, on the record, that the plane was a
civilian business jet, a Falcon, that had been flying within 20 miles of Flight
93 and was asked by the authorities to descend from 37,000ft to 5,000ft to
survey and transmit the co-ordinates of the crash site "for responding
emergency crews". The reason, as numerous people have observed, why
this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.06am on 11 September, all
non-military aircraft in US airspace had received loud and clear orders more
than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport; second, such was the
density of 911 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; and, third, with F-16s supposedly in the
vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a time of tremendous
national uncertainty 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.

Most suspicious of all, perhaps, has been the failure of the FBI or
anybody else to identify the pilot or the passengers of the purported
Falcon, and their own failure to come forward and identify themselves.

There was one other plane, a single-engine Piper, in the air as Flight 93
headed to its doom. The pilot, Bill Wright, said that he was three miles away
and so close he could see the United markings on the plane. Suddenly he
received orders to get away from the hijacked plane and to land immediately.
"That's one of the first things that went through my mind when they told us
to get as far away from it as fast as we could," Wright later told a Pittsburgh
TV station, "that either they were expecting it to blow up or they were going
to shoot it down – but that's pure speculation."

Everything is speculation – that is the problem with the story of Flight 93.
And unless the US government reveals more of what it knows, provides a
detailed account of the last 10 minutes in the life of Flight 93 and the 44
people who were aboard, there will not only be scope but sound reasons for
the conspiracy theorists to continue to speculate as to what really happened
in those last few minutes before the plane plunged into the earth; to cast
doubts on the soft-focus legend that the traumatised American public has
seized upon so gratefully.

Some conspiracy theorists will say that the plane was shot down by a
missile, perhaps a heat-seeking missile that honed in on one of the plane's
engines – a theory possibly substantiated by the 2,000yd flight of the
1,000lb engine part, but arguably refuted by consistent eye-witness
accounts, including Lee Purbaugh's, that when last sighted the plane
was not emitting smoke.

Others might say, as they have done about a TWA flight that fell to the sea
in 1996 after taking off from New York, that the plane was a victim of
electromagnetic interference. In the case of the TWA flight, the argument,
put forward in a series of exhaustive articles written in the New York Review
of Books by the Harvard academic Elaine Scarry, is that it happened
accidentally. However, as Scarry's articles relate, documentation abounds
showing that the Air Force and the Pentagon have conducted extensive
research on "electronic warfare applications" with the possible capacity
intentionally to disrupt the mechanisms of an aeroplane in such a way as to
provoke, for example, an uncontrollable dive. Scarry also reports that US
Customs aircraft are already equipped with such weaponry; as are some
C-130 Air Force transport planes. The FBI has stated that, apart from the
enigmatic Falcon business jet, there was a C-130 military cargo plane within
25 miles of the passenger jet when it crashed. According to the Scarry
findings, in 1995 the Air Force installed "electronic suites" in at least 28 of
its C-130s – capable, among other things, of emitting lethal jamming signals.

In decades to come, film-makers, future Oliver Stones, may come
up with theories of their own, and the story of Flight 93 may come
to acquire the morbid mystique of the Kennedy assassination.

None of which is to question the bravery of passengers such as Todd
Beamer, who left behind a pregnant widow and two children aged two and
three; or Tom Burnett, who had three small daughters and told his wife
Deena over the phone, in the face of her anguished protests, that he and
his fellow-passengers were "going to do something" because if not the
terrorists were "going to run this plane into the ground". Evidently, as the
Newsweek article relates, there was fighting of some kind, but as to whether
the terrorists held off the passengers or the passengers seized control of
the plane, and perhaps even made an attempt to fly it themselves (one
passenger aboard was a qualified pilot of small planes), nobody knows
– or is willing to admit that they know.

If evidence does exist further substantiating the hero narrative, it would
be a surprise if the authorities had not released it. Bravery, though, there
undoubtedly was. This we do know. As Lee Purbaugh says, and it would be
churlish to disagree, "they were heroes on that plane". Such a consensus
has been built around this view that the crash site at Shanksville – an
anonymous-looking field save for the American flags that flutter all around,
the crosses, the pictures of the dead passengers, the messages of goodwill
and of good cheer ("Don't mess with the US!") – that it has become a place
of pilgrimage, much as has happened with ground zero in New York but on
a smaller scale, attracting some 150 visitors from all over the US every day.
"In truth," said Wally Miller, who as coroner remains legally in charge of the
site, "that field is a cemetery. It should be treated with due respect."

What does Miller think happened? Did he attach any credence to the
stories doing the rounds, to those – including a number in Shanksville –
who dissent from the official version of events? Miller, who has seen as
much evidence as anybody at the scene of the crash, does not dismiss the
dissidents out of hand. He keeps an open mind. "The order had been given
to bring the airplane down," he said. "I do not rule anything out."
 

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=323958

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