Further, the 9-11 Commission says that Flight 93 was hijacked at 9:28. It’d be awfully hard for NORAD to be informed of that hijacking at 9:16, as the CNN site suggests.
Or, we could take this as mounting evidence of the existence of a time machine, in which case Bigfoot might be flown the F-16 that shot down the plane.
If I may offer an explanation of how this conspiracy theory was born:
I clearly recall the news reports coming in on Sept. 11 (I’m a bit of a breaking news junkie, I admit), and they went somewhat like this:
-An airplane has crashed into the WTC.
-2 airplanes have crashed into the WTC. One small commuter plane and one larger one.
-A third airplane has crashed into the Pentagon.
-A fourth plane has been hijacked and may be heading to Washington DC or Camp David (Bush spent a LOT of time up there his first few months in office).
-The fourth plane “is no longer a threat”.
-The fourth plane has crashed, but into a remote field, not a populated area.
Now, there were some other initial reports that came along the wires, but turned out to be false or unrelated (one was a report of several car bombs going off around the mall in Washington and another was the initial report that eluded to the fact one of the planes was a light Cessna or something. Then there was the report of a plane off the coast that would not respond to radio communications -this was quite a bit later, around noon I’d guess…but I digress).
But I think it was the initial rather cryptic report of the plane being “no longer a threat” that sparked the consipracy theory.
I believe what happened was as the reports started to prove false/flawed, the media generally shifted away from sounding firm about something, to being more open ended in their reports.
So the status of the 4th plane was announced as “no longer a threat”, because they didn’t have much else to say. Nobody saw it go down, nobody knew why it did, and that was probably the only official word given to the media at that time.
I remember a friend of mine and I turned to each other when we heard that line and gave each other a “did they shoot it down?” kind of look. We may have even mouthed the words. But that was our (at the time) logical guess based on the way the report was delivered.
It would seem that CNN mistakenly reported it as the time NORAD said they were informed rather than the time they believed (in retrospect?) the plane to be hijacked.
Why would you need a time machine to go from 9:28 to 10:03? That’s forward in time.
So did the 9/11 Commission explain why NORAD changed their story, and why they omitted the time they were notified of the Flight 93 hijacking in their original timeline?
If you read this timeline website, starting around 9:30, there were all kinds of clues that 93 had been hijacked. I’m not getting how it supposedly took until 10:07 for NORAD to know about it. Is that explained as well? Did the ATCs just panic and forget to tell them for about 30-35 minutes?
According the 9/11 Report at the time we are talking about NORAD command thought that Delta 1989 was the possible forth hijacking. There was a teleconference that was held that included NORAD and Flight 93 was never mentioned. The FAA had the information on Flight 93 but it did not transmit the information to NORAD. The FAA did not join the teleconference until 10:07, but this FAA official had no information on the hijackings. The problem is that the information of the hijacking never got from the FAA to NEADS.
No. At 9:36 the Cleveland Center tracking Flight 93 asked if military assistance had been requested and told FAA headquarters it was prepared to contact a nearby military base for assistence. The Cleveland Center was told not to do this and that people higher in the command needed to do this. The FAA did no contact the miltary until after Flight 93 crashed.
Not really. The problem was the system in place was not designed to deal with a situation like the one that occurred on September 11. The only plane that the military knew about before it crashed was Flight 11 and that is because the procedures in place were broken. Nobody really screwed up; there was a situation that came up that they were not trained for and there was a system is place that hurt their ability to react in a way that dealt with the situation in the best way.
Just a point here. Why, if the military had shot that plane down would they cover it up? That plane had been hijacked by terrorists on an apparent suicide mission. Shooting down that plane would have been an appropriate military response. Isn’t it widely believed that some passengers found out about the WTC crashes, and took over flight 93 and crashed it themselves to prevent the terrorists from crashing it into some large, occupied building? Or is it perhaps these passengers were hoping to take control of the plane themselves, and land it safely? If what happened was the former case, and the passengers decided to crash the plane where it wouldn’t do any damage, what would have been so wrong if the military had taken down the plane?
[And yes, I do realize that if some passengers decided to take over the plane and crash it in an unpopulated area, those who took over the plane from the terrorists obviously didn’t take a vote of all the passengers about what to do. However, if those who took over the plane were aware of the WTC crashes, under the circumstances I don’t see any reason to think it was morally wrong for those passengers who took over the plane to sacrifice not only themselves but also the other passengers to save the people who were in the building the terrorists had planned to crash the plane into. Basically this is a war scenario; how else can you look at a situation where passengers are on a plane taken over by terrorists intent on using the plane as a human guided missile? In war, it is reasonable to sacrifice some people (including yourself) if doing so means saving the lives of many more people. If flight 93 was intentionally destroyed by some passengers who believed that doing so would save some innocent lives, I’d donate if someone wanted to erect a monument in their honor.]
Yep. The FAA basically exists to direct civilian air traffic, and keep these planes from crashing into each other. The job of the FAA (at least at that time) wasn’t to deal with terrorists hijacking planes with the intent of using them as weapons of mass destruction. FAA controllers aren’t military officials. It isn’t like FAA controllers could pick up a phone and scramble military pilots and give them direct orders to down a plane.
Surely the FAA could have found some way to share the information it had with the military. The whole nation knew that planes were being used as weapons that day, and many knew or should have known that Flight93 was hijacked by 9:35 at the latest. If there was no system in place to allow the military to be privy to that information, there damn well should have been.
I don’t know that I’d take the report at face value. I’m not suggesting any kind of conspiracy, but I am suggesting that the government is going to put the best face on it they possibly can. Of course they’re not gonna admit anyone screwed up.