Amazing Fact: During Only Time in History Of U.S. NORAD taken over by Vice President

[candycorn]

Back so soon to fart again I see candyass.

Feel free to field the question if you like. Now pay attention guys, this is a teachable moment. You will note that Rimjob wants no part of the debate. He's been beaten senseless by me in every forum on the Internet and all he has left is his fixation on rectums.

If he had an argument to make explaining the phone calls and the CVR from 93 which clearly indicate no shoot down of the aircraft, he could make it.

But we all know he has nothing, is nothing, never was anything, and will never be anything. How sad.

 

[daws101]

Back so soon to fart again I see candyass.

Feel free to field the question if you like. Now pay attention guys, this is a teachable moment. You will note that Rimjob wants no part of the debate. He's been beaten senseless by me in every forum on the Internet and all he has left is his fixation on rectums.

If he had an argument to make explaining the phone calls and the CVR from 93 which clearly indicate no shoot down of the aircraft, he could make it.

But we all know he has nothing, is nothing, never was anything, and will never be anything. How sad.

retorical question,but he'll answer it anyway.

 

[Capstone]

[...] Cheney said that he gave the order for planes to be shot down. He NEVER said that flight 93 was shot down. [...]

Did you miss the in-video link?

It'll take you to this updated version of the Cheney vid ...complete with a humorous (but spot-on) analysis from the poster boy for NASCAR and some additional news reel of eye-witness testimony:

Flight 93 was shot down - YouTube

As far as this thread is concerned though, your point is irrelevant. You see, in the context of the discussion proposed in the OP, it doesn't matter whether flight 93 was shot down or not; what matters is that Dick Cheney is on record affirming his position as the air-defense shot-caller. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding; and in this case, the pudding was his "direct order" to shoot down the airplane over Pennsylvania.

More: following the impact of flight 11, the failure of the DOD (and Cheney) to immediately issue a general shoot-down order for any and all other planes identified as probable hijackings ...was tantamount to a 'stand down', especially in light of what were then recent changes in protocol that stripped NEADS /NORAD of the authority to act independently of the DOD's expressed approval.

 

[rightwinger]

Actually, it was Al Haig who was in charge of NORAD

 

[Capstone]

So please explain the phone calls from 93, the CVR from 93, the witnesses (several) who saw 93 intact as it neared the earth.

I don't need to explain any of those things. Even if I granted them some measure of legitimacy as a group, they'd still have no bearing on what I've been arguing in this thread: namely that Dick Cheney was at the head of US air defenses on the morning of 9/11 (at least following the impact of flight 11).

 

[candycorn]

So please explain the phone calls from 93, the CVR from 93, the witnesses (several) who saw 93 intact as it neared the earth.

I don't need to explain any of those things. Even if I granted them some measure of legitimacy as a group, they'd still have no bearing on what I've been arguing in this thread: namely that Dick Cheney was at the head of US air defenses on the morning of 9/11 (at least following the impact of flight 11).

Sure you do if you're going to pretend flight 93 was shot down.

You're move.

PS: The smart move would be to run away and hide like all of the other twoofers.

 

[Capstone]

So please explain the phone calls from 93, [...]

You mean, like Edward Felt's:

[...] At 9.58am a 911 call - the last mobile phone contact from Flight 93 - was made from one of the airliner's toilets by passenger Edward Felt.

Glenn Cramer, the emergency supervisor who answered it, said on the day: "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." Glenn Cramer has now been gagged by the FBI. [...]

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they "gagged" him in the literal sense, as well.

[...] the CVR from 93, [...]

You mean, this:

[...] according to sources, the last seconds of the cockpit voice recorder are the loud sounds of wind, hinting at a possible hole somewhere in the fuselage.[...]

Given the tell-tale signs of a coverup WRT the actual time of the crash...

Fudging the Timeline

There are several independent lines of evidence that establish that Flight 93 crashed at 10:06 in Shanksville, PA. These include the following:

Seismic signals recorded by seismic observatories at Soldier's Delight, MD, and Millersville, PA, which pegged the impact time at 10:06:05, with an error margin of 5 seconds.
A report from Cleveland Air Traffic Control that they had lost radar contact with Flight 93 at 10:06. 4
Reports by witnesses on the ground of the plane flying low and erratically around 10:05. 5
Various press reports that put the time at 10:06. 6 7 8
Radar records released by the FAA. The Post-Gazette noted, two days after the attack:
The Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday it turned over to the FBI a radar record of United Airlines Flight 93's route.

The data traced the Boeing 757-200 from its takeoff from Newark, N.J., to its violent end at 10:06 a.m., just outside Shanksville, about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. 9
Despite these extensive bodies of credible evidence establishing Flight 93's impact time at 10:06 AM, NORAD and the 9/11 Commission asserted that impact was at 10:03. NORAD provides no evidence to back up its claim, but the Commission provides a long footnote to justify its use of 10:03.

...the unavailability of the actual Black Box recordings (not merely the edited transcripts from the ZM trial) is ample cause for further suspicion here.

[...] the witnesses (several) who saw 93 intact as it neared the earth.

And by the same token:

[...] Why did other witnesses see smoke and flames trailing from Flight 93 as it fell from the sky, indicating a possible explosion aboard?[...]

Gagging/disregarding credible witnesses and revising history have clearly been major features of the Government's MO for 9/11 information gathering.

But one last time: as far as this thread is concerned (read the title again for yourself), it doesn't matter whether flight 93 was shot down or not. What matters here is that Dick Cheney has admitted to giving a direct order to shoot it down.

Your move?

 

[x0Maximilian0x]

So please explain the phone calls from 93, [...]

You mean, like Edward Felt's:

[...] At 9.58am a 911 call - the last mobile phone contact from Flight 93 - was made from one of the airliner's toilets by passenger Edward Felt.

Glenn Cramer, the emergency supervisor who answered it, said on the day: "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." Glenn Cramer has now been gagged by the FBI. [...]

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they "gagged" him in the literal sense, as well.



You mean, this:



Given the tell-tale signs of a coverup WRT the actual time of the crash...



...the unavailability of the actual Black Box recordings (not merely the edited transcripts from the ZM trial) is ample cause for further suspicion here.

[...] the witnesses (several) who saw 93 intact as it neared the earth.

And by the same token:

[...] Why did other witnesses see smoke and flames trailing from Flight 93 as it fell from the sky, indicating a possible explosion aboard?[...]

Gagging/disregarding credible witnesses and revising history have clearly been major features of the Government's MO for 9/11 information gathering.

But one last time: as far as this thread is concerned (read the title again for yourself), it doesn't matter whether flight 93 was shot down or not. What matters here is that Dick Cheney has admitted to giving a direct order to shoot it down.

Your move?

I listened to the events of 9/11 play out on the radio as it was happening.

I distinctly recall the news broadcast stating there were witnesses who saw a bright flash come from the plane before it went down.

 

[Capstone]

I listened to the events of 9/11 play out on the radio as it was happening.

It just so happens that 9/11 is my birthday, so I got the day off with pay ...and got to watch as the events unfolded on national television. Happy birthday to me.

What was seared into my brain was my daughter's reaction to the jumpers. She was only four at the time, and she wanted to know whether anyone was going to catch them.

 

[candycorn]

So please explain the phone calls from 93, [...]

You mean, like Edward Felt's:

[...] At 9.58am a 911 call - the last mobile phone contact from Flight 93 - was made from one of the airliner's toilets by passenger Edward Felt.

Glenn Cramer, the emergency supervisor who answered it, said on the day: "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." Glenn Cramer has now been gagged by the FBI. [...]

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they "gagged" him in the literal sense, as well.



You mean, this:



Given the tell-tale signs of a coverup WRT the actual time of the crash...



...the unavailability of the actual Black Box recordings (not merely the edited transcripts from the ZM trial) is ample cause for further suspicion here.

[...] the witnesses (several) who saw 93 intact as it neared the earth.

And by the same token:

[...] Why did other witnesses see smoke and flames trailing from Flight 93 as it fell from the sky, indicating a possible explosion aboard?[...]

Gagging/disregarding credible witnesses and revising history have clearly been major features of the Government's MO for 9/11 information gathering.

But one last time: as far as this thread is concerned (read the title again for yourself), it doesn't matter whether flight 93 was shot down or not. What matters here is that Dick Cheney has admitted to giving a direct order to shoot it down.

Your move?

Sources for your quotes, please.

 

[Capstone]

Sources for your quotes, please.

Well, with the exception of the excerpts from your previous post, the quotes came from the linked cache of the original Mirror article and from the 911 Research site.

But for some corroborating media coverage and info, see here:

Yesterday's rapid-fire blitz of terror began in the world's most glamorous city, continued in the nation's capital, and ended atop a rural hill in Somerset County.

It was there, just outside the tiny town of Shanksville, that a United Airlines jetliner crashed, killing all 45 people aboard in what appeared to be the fourth and final stroke of a choreographed wave of terrorism that was equated to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757-200 en route from New Jersey to San Francisco, fell from the sky near Shanksville at 10:06 a.m., about two hours after it took off, leaving a trail of debris five miles long.

The Washington Post reported that leaders of Congress -- including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo. -- were told at a briefing by the Capitol Police that the hijacked plane might have been bound for the Capitol or Camp David, the presidential retreat in Thurmont, Md., 85 miles southeast of the crash site, according to participants in the meeting.

The participants discussed a possible shoot down of the aircraft, said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.

"The question I heard asked was: 'Who has the authority to order a commercial jetliner shot down by the military?' " Pence said. However, the congressional leaders soon learned that the plane had already crashed.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) issued a statement denying that United Flight 93 had been shot down by U.S. military aircraft.

Some witnesses reported that the plane was flying upside down for a time before the crash; others said they heard up to three loud booms before the jetliner went down.

"All of a sudden, terrorism is here in my back yard," said retired coal miner Charles Rhoades, 80, of Shanksville, who was watching TV when he heard the large boom as the plane went down less than a quarter-mile from his home. "You live in the country to escape this kind of stuff."

Authorities weren't ready yesterday to pronounce the crash a result of terrorism. But a telling detail came minutes before the plane went down when dispatchers at the Westmoreland County Emergency Operations Center intercepted a frantic cell phone call made to 911 by a passenger aboard the doomed flight.

"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" the man told dispatchers in a quivering voice during a conversation that lasted about one minute.

"We got the call about 9:58 this morning from a male passenger stating that he was locked in the bathroom of United Flight 93 traveling from Newark to San Francisco, and they were being hijacked," said Glenn Cramer, a 911 supervisor.

"We confirmed that with him several times 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."

Investigators who swarmed to the scene were sparing no effort to uncover the truth.

Law enforcement agencies from Western Pennsylvania and across the state have made the crash their "primary investigation, if not their only one," said FBI Special Agent Bill Crowley, spokesman for the Pittsburgh FBI office.

The FBI is coordinating the investigation and relying on the services and expertise of dozens of other local, state and federal agencies, he said. One special evidence response team from Pittsburgh went to the crash scene yesterday, and three more teams are on their way to the site from other parts of the country.

Investigators will be in Somerset County around the clock collecting evidence and performing the gruesome task of body identification, Crowley said.

"We'll do whatever is needed to get the job done," he said. "It's going to require the skills of many different agencies."

Agents seized the 911 dispatch tape from Westmoreland County as part of their investigation.

Information from federal agencies was scant about Flight 93's flight path or final destination after departing from Newark at 8:01 a.m. with 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants aboard.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, said last night he could only guess that the plane's likely target was "a second shot at the Pentagon or the Capitol or the White House itself."

"The destination sure wasn't an open field," he said. "It's fortunate it didn't come down sooner, on Johnstown."

Murtha also said the Pentagon denied reports that the 757 was being shadowed by U.S. military aircraft. But he suggested that terrorists would have picked the 757 because it would have worked as a fuel-packed bomb. A 757-200 can carry up to 11,276 gallons of fuel.

"Since they couldn't have explosives on the plane, the next best thing is aviation fuel," he said.

Flight 93 may have gotten as far west as Ohio before turning around. The Cleveland mayor's office told The Associated Press that an airplane in distress had passed through Cleveland-area airspace before being handed off to Toledo, although it was not clear that the plane was Flight 93.

As the plane neared Pittsburgh, Mayor Tom Murphy stayed in contact with the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration.

"We were in communication with the FBI and the FAA about the jet as to where it was," Murphy said. "They had the jet coming out of Cleveland and losing it when it came into Pittsburgh airspace, and there was no communication with it, and we were concerned."

At the John P. Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport near Johnstown, a call from air traffic controllers in Cleveland set off 10 minutes of high tension before the plane crashed 14 miles southeast of the airport.

Dennis Fritz, the air traffic manager, got a call from controllers in Cleveland warning the Johnstown airport -- which has no radar of its own -- that a large aircraft was 20 miles south and had suddenly turned on a heading for Johnstown.

"It was an aircraft doing some unusual maneuvers at a low level, which is unusual for an aircraft that size," Fritz said last night. "It happened so quickly."

He said workers in his own tower scanned south, toward the horizon, with binoculars, but couldn't see any aircraft, leading Fritz to believe that the plane was flying somewhere in the 2,800 foot high ridges in that part of the Allegheny front.

Then, somewhere within the air zone, about 15 miles south of Johnstown, the plane turned again toward the south.

Shortly before it went down, another call was made to the Westmoreland County 911 center from a Mount Pleasant Township resident who said he could see a large plane flying low and banking from side to side.

The impact "sounded like dynamite," said Lucy Menear, 83, who lives less than a half-mile from the crash site. "It seems as though everything was falling apart."

Eric Peterson, 28, was working in his shop in the Somerset County village of Lambertsville yesterday morning when he heard a plane, looked up and saw one fly over unusually low.

The plane continued on beyond a nearby hill, then dropped out of sight behind a tree line. As it did so, Peterson said it seemed to be turning end-over-end.

Then Peterson said he saw a fireball, heard an explosion and saw a mushroom cloud of smoke rise into the sky.

Peterson rushed to the scene on an all-terrain vehicle and when he arrived he saw bits and pieces of an airliner spread over a large area of an abandoned strip-mine in Stonycreek Township.

"There was a crater in the ground that was really burning," Peterson said. Strewn about were pieces of clothing hanging from trees and parts of the Boeing 757, but nothing bigger than a couple of feet long, he said. Many of the items were burning.

Peterson said he saw no bodies, but there also was no sign of life.

Throughout the day, as a plume of smoke hung in the sky, a steady stream of firefighters, police cars, emergency management crews, national guard members and local volunteers swarmed over the crash site. Dotted with strip mines, woods and cornfields, the site is atop a gradual, 500-yard-long slope about one or two miles south of Route 30 near Stoystown.

Jeff Killeen, an FBI spokesman from Pittsburgh, said the main thrust of the agency's investigation will begin today when authorities divide the crash scene into grids and comb the area for evidence.

Yesterday, the priority of the FBI and state troopers was to protect the scene.

"The FBI will follow every lead to bring this case to a successful conclusion," Killeen said during a news conference held at the foot of the hill below the crash site under a hastily erected white tent.

Investigators did not locate the plane's flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder, the so-called black boxes that would give information about the plane's behavior as well as conversations in the cockpit.

There were 20 FBI agents on hand yesterday, and another 30 were expected last night. The contingent of 100 state troopers was expected to swell to 150. They planned to spend last night spaced out along the crash perimeter within each other's eyesight to ward off curiosity seekers and prevent anyone from tampering with evidence.

Two curiosity seekers were arrested for trying to get through the perimeter, one of them aboard an all-terrain vehicle.

Also on hand were officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration and United Airlines. A team from the National Transportation Safety Board was en route.

Gov. Tom Ridge arrived about 6:15 p.m., flying over the crash scene in a National Guard helicopter before being briefed on the ground by state police.

The FBI issued a plea for anyone who saw Flight 93 before it crashed to call 412-471-2000.

Killeen said agents were looking for facilities in the area to use as repositories for evidence and human remains, noting that no morgue had been established.

Joseph McKelvey, executive director of the Johnstown-area airport, said he didn't know whether it would be an operations headquarters or serve as a morgue.

But as he spoke, one of the few planes in the skies over America, a United Airlines 727 arrived carrying what McKelvey said was equipment for the recovery, and a half dozen rental trucks pulled into the airport to carry the equipment to the crash scene.

"This is the one airport [in the region] that can handle about any aircraft in the world," McKelvey said. Normally, the Johnstown airport handles five commercial passenger flights a day.

Last night police and National Guard sealed off the airport to regular traffic, at one point shutting down state Route 219 a four-lane highway that is only 500 yards from airport property. It was later reopened, but access roads to the airport remained sealed.

Throughout the day, beginning at 9:44 a.m., United Airlines updated its Web site with information about the crash of Flight 93 and Flight 175, a Boeing 767 that was crashed into the World Trade Center.

The airline stated it would send families of the victims aboard the two flights an initial sum of $25,000 each to help meet immediate needs.

And here:

11:30 p.m. September 11, 2001: FBI Uninterested in Flight 93 Witness’s Evidence
Susan Mcelwain, who lives two miles from the Flight 93 crash site, had seen a small jet plane flying very low overhead as she was driving home. She later recalls that it had been “heading right to the point where Flight 93 crashed and must have been there at the very moment it came down.” But it was only later in the afternoon, after returning home and turning on the TV, that she’d realized what she’d seen was connected to the attacks in New York and Washington. While she was confused that a Boeing 757—not a small jet plane—was being reported as having gone down near where she’d been, she’d then realized that the small plane was flying in a different direction to that being described for Flight 93. So she got her husband to tell the police about what she’d witnessed. Consequently, late in the evening, the FBI turns up to talk to her about it. Yet, as Mcelwain later recalls, “They did not want my story.” They keep asking her how big the plane she’d seen was. When she tells them it was small, not much bigger than her van, one of the agents tells her, “You don’t know what a 757 looks like.” She retorts, “Don’t be condescending towards me. If you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine, but I thought I should report what I saw. You ought to know there was something else in the air at the same time this was going on. We want to make sure it was ours and not somebody else’s.” After this, she will recall, the agent “did seem to get a little nicer. Told me that it was a white Learjet. Somebody was taking pictures. And I said, ‘Before the crash?’ and he says, ‘Well, we’ve got to go,’ and that was the end of it.” [BERGEN RECORD, 9/14/2001; MIRROR, 9/12/2002; LAPPE AND MARSHALL, 2004, PP. 38-40] Numerous other witnesses also saw a small jet plane flying above the crash site around the time Flight 93 reportedly went down (see (Before and After 10:06 a.m.) September 11, 2001).

Is there anything else I can do for you?

I'm here to serve.

 

[Capstone]

BTW, Candycorn, I hope the significance of Congressman Pence's statement in the Post-Gazette article didn't escape you.

Here it is again:

[...]"The question I heard asked was: 'Who has the authority to order a commercial jetliner shot down by the military?' " Pence said. [...]

And now we know the answer: Dick Cheney, by his own admission no less.

 

[candycorn]

Sources for your quotes, please.

Well, with the exception of the excerpts from your previous post, the quotes came from the linked cache of the original Mirror article and from the 911 Research site.

But for some corroborating media coverage and info, see here:

Yesterday's rapid-fire blitz of terror began in the world's most glamorous city, continued in the nation's capital, and ended atop a rural hill in Somerset County.

It was there, just outside the tiny town of Shanksville, that a United Airlines jetliner crashed, killing all 45 people aboard in what appeared to be the fourth and final stroke of a choreographed wave of terrorism that was equated to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757-200 en route from New Jersey to San Francisco, fell from the sky near Shanksville at 10:06 a.m., about two hours after it took off, leaving a trail of debris five miles long.

The Washington Post reported that leaders of Congress -- including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo. -- were told at a briefing by the Capitol Police that the hijacked plane might have been bound for the Capitol or Camp David, the presidential retreat in Thurmont, Md., 85 miles southeast of the crash site, according to participants in the meeting.

The participants discussed a possible shoot down of the aircraft, said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.

"The question I heard asked was: 'Who has the authority to order a commercial jetliner shot down by the military?' " Pence said. However, the congressional leaders soon learned that the plane had already crashed.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) issued a statement denying that United Flight 93 had been shot down by U.S. military aircraft.

Some witnesses reported that the plane was flying upside down for a time before the crash; others said they heard up to three loud booms before the jetliner went down.

"All of a sudden, terrorism is here in my back yard," said retired coal miner Charles Rhoades, 80, of Shanksville, who was watching TV when he heard the large boom as the plane went down less than a quarter-mile from his home. "You live in the country to escape this kind of stuff."

Authorities weren't ready yesterday to pronounce the crash a result of terrorism. But a telling detail came minutes before the plane went down when dispatchers at the Westmoreland County Emergency Operations Center intercepted a frantic cell phone call made to 911 by a passenger aboard the doomed flight.

"We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked!" the man told dispatchers in a quivering voice during a conversation that lasted about one minute.

"We got the call about 9:58 this morning from a male passenger stating that he was locked in the bathroom of United Flight 93 traveling from Newark to San Francisco, and they were being hijacked," said Glenn Cramer, a 911 supervisor.

"We confirmed that with him several times 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."

Investigators who swarmed to the scene were sparing no effort to uncover the truth.

Law enforcement agencies from Western Pennsylvania and across the state have made the crash their "primary investigation, if not their only one," said FBI Special Agent Bill Crowley, spokesman for the Pittsburgh FBI office.

The FBI is coordinating the investigation and relying on the services and expertise of dozens of other local, state and federal agencies, he said. One special evidence response team from Pittsburgh went to the crash scene yesterday, and three more teams are on their way to the site from other parts of the country.

Investigators will be in Somerset County around the clock collecting evidence and performing the gruesome task of body identification, Crowley said.

"We'll do whatever is needed to get the job done," he said. "It's going to require the skills of many different agencies."

Agents seized the 911 dispatch tape from Westmoreland County as part of their investigation.

Information from federal agencies was scant about Flight 93's flight path or final destination after departing from Newark at 8:01 a.m. with 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants aboard.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Johnstown, said last night he could only guess that the plane's likely target was "a second shot at the Pentagon or the Capitol or the White House itself."

"The destination sure wasn't an open field," he said. "It's fortunate it didn't come down sooner, on Johnstown."

Murtha also said the Pentagon denied reports that the 757 was being shadowed by U.S. military aircraft. But he suggested that terrorists would have picked the 757 because it would have worked as a fuel-packed bomb. A 757-200 can carry up to 11,276 gallons of fuel.

"Since they couldn't have explosives on the plane, the next best thing is aviation fuel," he said.

Flight 93 may have gotten as far west as Ohio before turning around. The Cleveland mayor's office told The Associated Press that an airplane in distress had passed through Cleveland-area airspace before being handed off to Toledo, although it was not clear that the plane was Flight 93.

As the plane neared Pittsburgh, Mayor Tom Murphy stayed in contact with the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration.

"We were in communication with the FBI and the FAA about the jet as to where it was," Murphy said. "They had the jet coming out of Cleveland and losing it when it came into Pittsburgh airspace, and there was no communication with it, and we were concerned."

At the John P. Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport near Johnstown, a call from air traffic controllers in Cleveland set off 10 minutes of high tension before the plane crashed 14 miles southeast of the airport.

Dennis Fritz, the air traffic manager, got a call from controllers in Cleveland warning the Johnstown airport -- which has no radar of its own -- that a large aircraft was 20 miles south and had suddenly turned on a heading for Johnstown.

"It was an aircraft doing some unusual maneuvers at a low level, which is unusual for an aircraft that size," Fritz said last night. "It happened so quickly."

He said workers in his own tower scanned south, toward the horizon, with binoculars, but couldn't see any aircraft, leading Fritz to believe that the plane was flying somewhere in the 2,800 foot high ridges in that part of the Allegheny front.

Then, somewhere within the air zone, about 15 miles south of Johnstown, the plane turned again toward the south.

Shortly before it went down, another call was made to the Westmoreland County 911 center from a Mount Pleasant Township resident who said he could see a large plane flying low and banking from side to side.

The impact "sounded like dynamite," said Lucy Menear, 83, who lives less than a half-mile from the crash site. "It seems as though everything was falling apart."

Eric Peterson, 28, was working in his shop in the Somerset County village of Lambertsville yesterday morning when he heard a plane, looked up and saw one fly over unusually low.

The plane continued on beyond a nearby hill, then dropped out of sight behind a tree line. As it did so, Peterson said it seemed to be turning end-over-end.

Then Peterson said he saw a fireball, heard an explosion and saw a mushroom cloud of smoke rise into the sky.

Peterson rushed to the scene on an all-terrain vehicle and when he arrived he saw bits and pieces of an airliner spread over a large area of an abandoned strip-mine in Stonycreek Township.

"There was a crater in the ground that was really burning," Peterson said. Strewn about were pieces of clothing hanging from trees and parts of the Boeing 757, but nothing bigger than a couple of feet long, he said. Many of the items were burning.

Peterson said he saw no bodies, but there also was no sign of life.

Throughout the day, as a plume of smoke hung in the sky, a steady stream of firefighters, police cars, emergency management crews, national guard members and local volunteers swarmed over the crash site. Dotted with strip mines, woods and cornfields, the site is atop a gradual, 500-yard-long slope about one or two miles south of Route 30 near Stoystown.

Jeff Killeen, an FBI spokesman from Pittsburgh, said the main thrust of the agency's investigation will begin today when authorities divide the crash scene into grids and comb the area for evidence.

Yesterday, the priority of the FBI and state troopers was to protect the scene.

"The FBI will follow every lead to bring this case to a successful conclusion," Killeen said during a news conference held at the foot of the hill below the crash site under a hastily erected white tent.

Investigators did not locate the plane's flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder, the so-called black boxes that would give information about the plane's behavior as well as conversations in the cockpit.

There were 20 FBI agents on hand yesterday, and another 30 were expected last night. The contingent of 100 state troopers was expected to swell to 150. They planned to spend last night spaced out along the crash perimeter within each other's eyesight to ward off curiosity seekers and prevent anyone from tampering with evidence.

Two curiosity seekers were arrested for trying to get through the perimeter, one of them aboard an all-terrain vehicle.

Also on hand were officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration and United Airlines. A team from the National Transportation Safety Board was en route.

Gov. Tom Ridge arrived about 6:15 p.m., flying over the crash scene in a National Guard helicopter before being briefed on the ground by state police.

The FBI issued a plea for anyone who saw Flight 93 before it crashed to call 412-471-2000.

Killeen said agents were looking for facilities in the area to use as repositories for evidence and human remains, noting that no morgue had been established.

Joseph McKelvey, executive director of the Johnstown-area airport, said he didn't know whether it would be an operations headquarters or serve as a morgue.

But as he spoke, one of the few planes in the skies over America, a United Airlines 727 arrived carrying what McKelvey said was equipment for the recovery, and a half dozen rental trucks pulled into the airport to carry the equipment to the crash scene.

"This is the one airport [in the region] that can handle about any aircraft in the world," McKelvey said. Normally, the Johnstown airport handles five commercial passenger flights a day.

Last night police and National Guard sealed off the airport to regular traffic, at one point shutting down state Route 219 a four-lane highway that is only 500 yards from airport property. It was later reopened, but access roads to the airport remained sealed.

Throughout the day, beginning at 9:44 a.m., United Airlines updated its Web site with information about the crash of Flight 93 and Flight 175, a Boeing 767 that was crashed into the World Trade Center.

The airline stated it would send families of the victims aboard the two flights an initial sum of $25,000 each to help meet immediate needs.

And here:

11:30 p.m. September 11, 2001: FBI Uninterested in Flight 93 Witness’s Evidence
Susan Mcelwain, who lives two miles from the Flight 93 crash site, had seen a small jet plane flying very low overhead as she was driving home. She later recalls that it had been “heading right to the point where Flight 93 crashed and must have been there at the very moment it came down.” But it was only later in the afternoon, after returning home and turning on the TV, that she’d realized what she’d seen was connected to the attacks in New York and Washington. While she was confused that a Boeing 757—not a small jet plane—was being reported as having gone down near where she’d been, she’d then realized that the small plane was flying in a different direction to that being described for Flight 93. So she got her husband to tell the police about what she’d witnessed. Consequently, late in the evening, the FBI turns up to talk to her about it. Yet, as Mcelwain later recalls, “They did not want my story.” They keep asking her how big the plane she’d seen was. When she tells them it was small, not much bigger than her van, one of the agents tells her, “You don’t know what a 757 looks like.” She retorts, “Don’t be condescending towards me. If you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine, but I thought I should report what I saw. You ought to know there was something else in the air at the same time this was going on. We want to make sure it was ours and not somebody else’s.” After this, she will recall, the agent “did seem to get a little nicer. Told me that it was a white Learjet. Somebody was taking pictures. And I said, ‘Before the crash?’ and he says, ‘Well, we’ve got to go,’ and that was the end of it.” [BERGEN RECORD, 9/14/2001; MIRROR, 9/12/2002; LAPPE AND MARSHALL, 2004, PP. 38-40] Numerous other witnesses also saw a small jet plane flying above the crash site around the time Flight 93 reportedly went down (see (Before and After 10:06 a.m.) September 11, 2001).

Is there anything else I can do for you?

I'm here to serve.

Nobody is reporting a shoot down there. In fact, YOUR sources say that the plane was flying at a low level; not floating down in several pieces as any shoot down scenario would produce.

Epic fail. We all saw it coming.

Try again.

Check please.

 

[candycorn]

BTW, Candycorn, I hope the significance of Congressman Pence's statement in the Post-Gazette article didn't escape you.

Here it is again:

[...]"The question I heard asked was: 'Who has the authority to order a commercial jetliner shot down by the military?' " Pence said. [...]

And now we know the answer: Dick Cheney, by his own admission no less.

Yes, the Executive has the authority to protect the general welfare of the Country. Would you prefer that non-elected and therefore non accountable personnel assume the authority to kill Americans without the approval of the highest levels of the Executive?

PS: The Executive Branch still has that authority today; as it did on 9/10/01, 9/11/01, and 3/23/12.

 

[Capstone]

LMAO

Ahh ...thank you, CC, I needed that.

You're right. The "three loud booms" and Felt's 911 call were simply inconvenient anomalies, not potential evidence of a shoot-down.

 

[Capstone]

[...] the Executive has the authority to protect the general welfare of the Country. [...]

Which raises the question as to why its actions in the months leading up 9/11 resulted in the apparent inability of our national air defenses to react appropriately on that fateful day.

[...] Would you prefer that non-elected and therefore non accountable personnel assume the authority to kill Americans without the approval of the highest levels of the Executive?

First of all, since when has "non-elected" equated to "non-accountable"?

Secondly, yes, if and when the quick response of US Air Defense Commanders could save the lives of thousands of Americans by taking the lives of a relative few aboard a hijacked airplane, I'm all for allowing them some discretionary wiggle room!

PS: The Executive Branch still has that authority today; as it did on 9/10/01, 9/11/01, and 3/23/12.

Well, PS, back at you: it's not quite the same as the level of authority that preceded the changes in protocol adopted in June of '01 -- you know: the changes that essentially crippled NEADS on the morning of 9/11/01.

 

[candycorn]

[...] the Executive has the authority to protect the general welfare of the Country. [...]

Which raises the question as to why its actions in the months leading up 9/11 resulted in the apparent inability of our national air defenses to react appropriately on that fateful day.

The national air defenses are set to protect from outside threats; always have been. Additional facts are that the last time a domestic plane was hijacked, most of the fighter pilots and most of the planners were either pre-pubescent or not even born yet. No amount of training or simulations would get them ready for an attack on that day or any other day.

[...] Would you prefer that non-elected and therefore non accountable personnel assume the authority to kill Americans without the approval of the highest levels of the Executive?

First of all, since when has "non-elected" equated to "non-accountable"?

Secondly, yes, if and when the quick response of US Air Defense Commanders could save the lives of thousands of Americans by taking the lives of a relative few aboard a hijacked airplane, I'm all for allowing them some discretionary wiggle room!

Non elected=non accountable for the most part if you look at the history of the military in this country.

Secondly...wow; so you're sponsoring a General somewhere to play hunches....with the lives of unenlisted Americans. I think you may have just defined "non-accountable" silly.

PS: The Executive Branch still has that authority today; as it did on 9/10/01, 9/11/01, and 3/23/12.

Well, PS, back at you: it's not quite the same as the level of authority that preceded the changes in protocol adopted in June of '01 -- you know: the changes that essentially crippled NEADS on the morning of 9/11/01.

What changes in protocol would that be?

The Executive has always been in control of the national defenses.

This is where every twoofer goes off of the rails and delves into minutia that may be a distinction but isn't in any universe a difference. Always happens about this time. You're about 3 posts away from claiming thermite was planted, that light poles were planted, and the phone calls were faked or, and I love this one, voice morphed.

 

[LA RAM FAN]

Capstone shame on you,your giving him the attention he seeks.Your obviously not aware of the fact that this is not the only site he goes to,that he goes to SEVERAL message boards and posts night and day all hours on end.Nobody has THAT much time on their hands unless they are a paid shill.Thats the only reason he doesnt spend much more time here than he does.

Like the old saying goes. ESPECIALLY him.you might take heed of the ones I have listed in my ignore list as well,by all means reply to any of the other posters but thats very unwise to reply to paid shills who KNOW just as well as we do,that it was an inside job.they know it was.

 

[daws101]

Capstone shame on you,your giving him the attention he seeks.Your obviously not aware of the fact that this is not the only site he goes to,that he goes to SEVERAL message boards and posts night and day all hours on end.Nobody has THAT much time on their hands unless they are a paid shill.Thats the only reason he doesnt spend much more time here than he does.

Like the old saying goes. ESPECIALLY him.you might take heed of the ones I have listed in my ignore list as well,by all means reply to any of the other posters but thats very unwise to reply to paid shills who KNOW just as well as we do,that it was an inside job.they know it was.

blah...blah....

 

[eots]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXC1aTZhxhM&feature=autoplay&list=PLCF9D4F40AB2321F0&lf=results_video&playnext=4]Pentagon Employee Says Plane Did Not Crash into Building - 911 Inside Job - YouTube[/ame]