4. Flight 93
I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten – indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.
- Donald Rumsfeld, Friday Dec. 24th, 2004
On Flight 93, the passengers stormed the cockpit and heroically caused the plane to crash prematurely, preventing the hijackers from completing their mission. According to news reports a passenger named Edward Felt, who phoned 911 from the aircraft toilet, described an explosion that he heard, and white smoke on the plane from an undetermined location. Then the line went dead. News reports stated that debris including human remains was discovered miles away from the primary impact crater. These reports of explosions and secondary debris fields were not noted in the 9/11 Commission Report however, and the official cause of the crash is believed to be the heroic actions of the passengers, led by Todd Beamer, whose last words, overheard by a telephone operator, were 'Are you guys ready? Let's Roll!'.
The 9/11 commission Report says the words actually recorded on the cockpit voice recorder were 'roll it!' (p.14). The Report also says (on the same page) that shortly before these words were shouted, Jarrah (the suicide pilot) rolled the airplane to the left and right, 'attempting to knock the passengers off balance.' It is odd that Todd Beamer would shout out 'roll it' just as the hijacker was in fact rolling the plane.
According to Jere Longman's "Among the Heroes", which is the most protracted version available for the official version of flight 93, when flight 93 crashed, the cockpit and the front third of the plane shattered on the ground, yet the ground was so soft that the rest of the plane was completely swallowed up leaving only a smoking crater with various pieces of debris scattered around. Officially, the cockpit broke into millions of tiny pieces, including the people in the cockpit, and it was only the people in the front of the plane (hijackers and the people attacking the hijackers) whose remains were found outside the crater. Officially, the rest of the passengers' remains were located in the crater.
