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People rhetorically ask where God was on 9/11 as though He wasn't anywhere. Or they ask it accusingly, the way a detective asks a suspect if he has an alibi. "Where were you on the morning of September the 11th?""Can anyone confirm your alibi?" God was there, at every point in time and space of significance in the events of that day. He was in the date; He was in our mouths; He was in an open Bible found at the crash site (more on that in a moment); a powerful distortion of Him was the motive force behind the...

Good evening fellow Freepers, I just want to send out this FYI as many of you have been amazingly kind in your thoughts and prayers after hearing the news about my father on Flight 93. For those of you who don't know the background of the "Walk With Joe" - here you go.... On 9/11 my father, Joe Driscoll – an avid walker/hiker, was on his way to Yosemite National Park to go on an annual hiking trip with some friends. The flight he was on, United #93, never made it to California . It was hijacked and crashed in...

News broke yesterday that construction on the Flight 93 memorial will begin in November. EC brings back guest and author Alec Rawls to talk about the frightening design they've settled on to honor the heroes who saved that plane from hitting Washington DC... and gave their lives to protect others.

The federal government will pay about $9.5 million to acquire land so the Flight 93 National Memorial can be built by the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday. With the National Park Service reaching agreements with eight landowners, construction is expected to start in November, Salazar said. Salazar called the site where the plane crashed, near Shanksville in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, hallowed ground and said the nation was "eternally grateful for the heroes of Flight 93." United Flight 93 was traveling from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco when it was diverted by hijackers...

Smoke Cloud from Flight 93 after impact We shall never forget. We will never forget. Our leaders have forgotten. History is doomed to repeat itself.

After denying for 4 years that the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 will contain 44 inscribed memorial panels (equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists) the Memorial Project has announced a new design that appears to collapse three of the panels into one: Artist's depiction of the slightly altered design for the Sacred Ground Plaza. [If you are a newcomer, the Plaza sits in the position of the star on architect Paul Murdoch's giant Islamic crescent and star flag. They call the giant crescent a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle--what symbolically...

Homeland Security: Despite overwhelming support in and out of Congress, legal protection for airline passengers who report suspicious behavior is being blocked by Democratic leaders. Wasn't one 9/11 enough for them? Were it not for the courage and sacrifice of the passengers of United Flight 93 who forced their plane into a Pennsylvania field, many in Congress might not be here today, with a gaping hole where the U.S. Capitol still stands. We wonder if this fact is appreciated by those trying to block final passage of the so-called "John Doe" provision protecting from legal action those who report suspicious...

BOSTON (AP) — A woman on a trans-Atlantic flight diverted to Boston for security concerns passed several notes to crew members, urinated on the cabin floor and made comments the crew believed were references to al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 attacks, according to an affidavit filed Thursday. Catherine C. Mayo, 59, of Braintree, Vt., was to appear in federal court later Thursday on a charge of interfering with a flight crew after disrupting United 923 as it flew from London to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. The flight, with 182 passengers and 12 crew members, landed safely with the escort of...

SOMERSET, Pa. -- Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says the U.S. government will not use eminent domain to seize people's land for a permanent Flight 93 memorial and instead will renew negotiations with landowners near the terrorist crash site in Somerset County. U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Salazar met with families of victims and landowners on Friday in Shanksville to discuss issues surrounding the planned national memorial for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, fatal hijacking. Specter's office said Friday's meeting also focused on what still needs to be done for the memorial to be complete in time for the...

Two Pennsylvanian’s quit the Flight 93 Memorial Commission last week, protesting Park Service plans to condemn five crash-site properties that it never negotiated for in good faith. Consider the case of the Lambert family, who have been on their land for three generations: "It's absolutely a surprise. I'm shocked by it. I'm disappointed by it," said Tim Lambert, who owns nearly 164 acres that his grandfather bought in the 1930s. The park service plans to condemn two parcels totaling about five acres — land, he said, he had always intended to donate for the memorial. "To the best of my...

Almost anyone who reads this remembers the brave passengers of flight 93, who, on 9/11, overpowered the hijackers on their flight and caused the airplane to crash in a Pennsylvania field instead of the White House or Capital. Certainly we would all agree that those brave souls should be memorialized. But do you imagine any of them would want their memorial for selfless sacrifice to come at the price of their fellow American’s property? Can anyone explain why a memorial to these brave Americans must be 2,200 acres in size and force property owners in the area where the airplane...

PITTSBURGH – The government will begin taking land from seven property owners so that the Flight 93 memorial can be built in time for the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, the National Park Service said.

As details of the Maersk Alabama episode emerge, one clear lesson surfaces: The Spirit of United Flight 93 lives on. The ending of the hostage story at sea will soon be followed by the requisite second guessing and questions. Not to mention the inevitable criticism of the killing (someone will call it execution without due process) of three pirates. Then, if the fourth pirate is brought to the U.S. for trial, that promises to become a legal mini-series. But all of that will pale in importance in the face of what happened this Easter Sunday at sea.

For two years, Tom Burnett Sr. has been speaking out against the crescent-shaped memorial to Flight 93. This week Beverly Burnett (mother of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Jr.) stepped into the public eye to support her husband, and to make her own appeal for a full investigation: Today, I am adding my voice for a full and transparent review of the National Park Service and Flight 93 design selection process that produced Crescent of Embrace. Does it have Islamic symbols or doesn’t it? Let's settle this once and for all. Why do you think Tom Sr. opposed this design?...

The "war on terror" went away with George W. Bush, but there's still a postscript here and there to be attended to. If you're one of the dwindling band of Americans interested in the Flight 93 memorial, this exchange with the presiding honchos of the "Circle of Embrace" (formerly the "Crescent of Embrace") makes for glum reading: “In your depiction, who is breaking the circle?”“The passengers and crew,” said [Memorial Project Manager] Reinbold.“But the circle is a symbol of peace,” Rawls continued. “Who broke the peace? It was the TERRORISTS who broke the peace on 9/11.”Reinbold countered that that the...

The official explanation for the Crescent of Embrace design is that the path of Flight 93 breaks the circle, turning it into the giant crescent. They call it the Circle of Embrace now, but the Memorial Project’s own website acknowledges that the circle is still broken: In summary, the memorial is shaped in a circular fashion, and the circle is symbolically "broken" or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site... The fact that the Circle of Embrace is really a broken circle means two things. First, it means that the giant...

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Posted By:Catherine MoyPermalink9/11 Victims Families: Obama Must Visit Gitmo and Reverse Dangerous Order Debra Burlingame’s brother, Charles “Chick” Burlingame, died as he piloted the plane that was hijacked by terrorists on 9/11. She opposes the closure of Gitmo. Families of those killed on 9/11, a Gold Star mother, and Sen. James Inhofe, sent a strong message today at Move America Forward’s press conference at the National Press conference in Washington DC: Keep Gitmo open for the sake of Americans who will be endangered by President Obama’s order to close the facility for terrorists. MAF has the...

Background For three years, the Flight 93 Memorial Project has been relentlessly dishonest, publicly denying damning facts like the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent while making excuses for these facts in private. Example: Before the 2007 Memorial Project meeting, Project Partner and Flight 93 family member Patrick White was asked by the press about claims that the giant Crescent of Embrace points to Mecca . He said that all of the claims about what is in the design had been thoroughly investigated and been found to be untrue and "preposterous." In private conversation at the meeting itself, White acknowledged...

It has been more than seven years since 20-year-old Deora Bodley and 39 other passengers and crew died in the fiery crash of United Airlines Flight 93, their hijacked plane disintegrating in a grove of hemlock trees outside Shanksville, Pa. Most of the remains from the tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, were never recovered, making the bowl-shaped crash site in the western Pennsylvania countryside an unofficial cemetery and, for surviving relatives, sacred ground. But efforts to buy property for a national Flight 93 memorial have bogged down in federal red tape and a protracted land dispute, angering family members and...

PHILADELPHIA – Relatives of those who died aboard United Airlines Flight 93 want the Bush Administration to seize the land needed for a memorial where the plane crashed in Shanksville, Pa., in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Families of Flight 93 sent a letter earlier this month asking President George W. Bush to empower the Secretary of the Interior to take the land in dispute from a homeowner who had been in negotiations with the National Parks Service, said Patrick White, vice president of the families' organization. The group says ground must be broken early next year in time for...