Well we'll know for sure just as soon as Carl gets the Press Release from the 'eww' that he has filed an FOIA to get the tape of the phone conversation. You know rooting out the corruption.......
Which party is using 9-11 for political gain? The sad thing is that the Democratic Party seems to encourage this hideous hate-speech Web site in order to keep their Beserker Wing motivated. Good work shining the light NewsMax!
Oh, him her it again.
About Bob FertikBob Fertik is one of Americas leading Internet political strategists - and also a leading feminist.
Fertik is the co-founder of several feminist groups, including: Women Leaders Online, the first and largest feminist group on the Internet Women Leaders Online Fund, which created the Womens Voting Guide, the first interactive tool for researching Congressional candidates Prochoice Resource Center, which trains feminist activists in grassroots politics Eleanors List, a fund for pro-choice Democratic women candidates in New York State
Fertik is also a writer and lecturer, including: Co-author of Pro-choice Power, the first guide to mobilizing the pro-choice majority Editor and publisher of Political Woman Newsletter, the first newsletter on women and politics Speaker at numerous conferences on the Internet, politics, and feminism
Fertik is also a consultant, including: Founder of I-Progress, the first Internet consulting firm for progressive non-profits Consultant to political campaigns, including Geraldine Ferraros 1998 race for the United States Senate
Fertik went to New York public schools, and has a B.A. in Economics from Yale, where he edited the Yale Graduate-Professional newspaper.
He is married to his college sweetheart Antonia Stolper, a law partner at Shearman & Sterling. He has been the at-home parent of their son Ted, a straight-A student and starting quarterback at Stuyvesant High School. He lives in New York City.
The only line worth a reply. If, as in the other 9/11 aircraft, the terrorists had firewalled the throttles. Some very nasty control movements( to knock folks storming the cockpit off their feet ) probably resulted in parts of the aircraft departing. Which would account for the nose dive into the field.
And we on FR have proven in the past, beyond even the tiniest shadow of a doubt, that Democrats.com is directly run by the Democratic National Committee. They try to paper over that fact and claim it's just a grass-roots site like FR, but (surprise) they're lying.
Maybe Lloyd Grove at the Washington Post would run with these stories. Gossip is gossip, and it would sure embarass the hell out of the RATS to have all of Washington discover just how low they've sunk.
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I've just about had it with these demented conspiracy types. They were mildly amusing during good times, but they are downright dangerous to this country now.
If this is actually true, which I don't think it is, I would applaud Bush for making this kind of tough decision. The jet had to come down...one way or another. There was simply no option.
And Bush wouldn't have suffered, in the view of the citizenry, at all if he had given the order for 93 to be downed. Only a complete and truly uncaring idiot would have held that action against him.
What's confusing about it? A 757 or 767 in a full-throttle dive can break the sound barrier. Doing so, however, will put stresses on the airframe well beyond rated limits. Any structural failure on the plane will substantially increase drag in and around the failed area, causing forces that will very effectively tear the plane completely apart.
So why is it 'confusing' that the debris was scattered over an 8 mile area?
Having gone to this site, www.Democrats.com and scoped out the referenced (?) article(?), I can report the following:
1.) After each "eyewitness" account, there immediately follows a qualifying statement ("...or so I heard.."; "...I was told by others...").
Conclusion: This easily makes a Nat'l Enquirer, Star or Globe article look like a well-research and footnoted effort.
2.) Every accusation starts out speculatively, with one overriding concluding statement that has obviously ignored any other evidence presented in the accusation.
Conclusion: The author of this scree wanted very much to sound objective, but threw the objectivity out the window in broad daylight so as to make his conclusion the focus of paragraph. Cheap propagandist trick.
If you want to sniff out the truth, send in woofer.
What is more egregious than a president giving an order to shoot down a domestic flight with passengers (if at all true, an unfortunate but necessary call), is the charge by Mr. Fertik that the hijackers were not at all responsible for the deaths of passengers and crew aboard Flight 93.
Typical Democrat, never blame the perpetrator of the crime.
Technically, this is an accurate statement. Control implies the hijackers were completely expelled from the cockpit, which isn't known. There's massive evidence they removed control from the hijackers.
Mark Bingham uses an Airfone to call his mother, Alice Hoglan, who is still asleep at her brothers home in Saratoga, Calif., having been up late the night before caring for triplets. Mom, this is Mark Bingham, he tells her, so rattled he uses his last name. Bingham describes the situation for his mother, a United Airlines flight attendant. The call lasts about three minutes. Twice during the call, says Alice, Mark was distracted. There was a five-second pause. I heard people speaking. There was murmuring, nothing loud. She theorizes that Mark was talking to the other men, and planning to fight back. Were going to do something. I know Im not going to get out of this.
TODD BEAMER
At around the same time, Todd Beamer is telling the operator that the men plan to jump the hijacker in the back, claiming to have a bomb. Were going to do something, Beamer tells operator Lisa Jefferson. I know Im not going to get out of this. He asks Jefferson to recite the Lords Prayer with him. The last words Jefferson hears are Are you ready guys? Lets roll.
Its unclear when, in all of the telephony, Glick, Beamer, Bingham, Burnett and Nacke hatched their plot. It is also unclear if they attacked just once, or twice, first taking out the hijacker claiming to have the bomb, then storming the cockpit. Crucial evidence, NEWSWEEK has learned, may come from yet another phone call made by a passenger. Elizabeth Wainio, 27, was speaking to her stepmother in Maryland. Another passenger, she explains, had loaned her a cell phone and told her to call her family. I have to go, Wainio says, cutting the call short. Theyre about to storm the cockpit referring to her fellow passengers.
Calls from Glick, Burnett, Beamer and Bingham offer the most compelling evidence of an onboard rebellion. FBI investigators say they've found nothing to contradict such a scenario. And others could have been involved.
There was Andrew Garcia, 62, of Portola Valley, Calif., returning from a meeting. His family got a call, they think from him, but only one word, "Dorothy," his wife's name, was heard before the line went dead. The Garcias think he would have joined any insurrection.
There was also Richard Guadagno, 38, a refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from Eureka, Calif., who had federal law-enforcement training. His colleagues believe he would have been involved.
Glick called a little more than an hour into the flight. The Internet company executive, 31, had been scheduled to leave home in West Milford, N.J., the day before. At 7:30, before boarding, he called his wife, Lyz, who was staying with her parents in New York's Catskill Mountains. His father-in-law said she was still asleep.
His second call was far more urgent: "There's bad men on the plane, let me talk to Lyz," Glick told his father-in-law, Richard Makely.
For 20 minutes, as the jet streaked across western Pennsylvania, Lyz and Jeremy, former high school sweethearts with a 12-week-old daughter, talked for the last time.
She stayed calm. He wanted to know if what he'd heard from another passenger who was calling home, that the Trade Center towers had been hit, was true. She reluctantly told him it was.
"He knew something very bad was going to happen," Lyz told NBC's Dateline. "What he needed to know was what was going to happen. Were they going to blow the plane up, or was it going to crash into something, because that made all the difference."
Glick, a 6-foot-1, 220-pound judo champion, said he and others were formulating a plan, hashing over whether passengers should rush the hijackers. He asked Lyz what he should do. "I finally just decided: 'Honey, you need to go for it.' "
The hijackers had already stabbed one person to death. Jeremy told Lyz to stay on the line. The jet was no more than 30 minutes from Washington.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Beamer, 32, an Oracle executive from Hightstown, N.J., learned from the GTE supervisor, Lisa Jefferson, about the other hijackings. He told her that two hijackers had locked themselves into the cockpit.
Beamer told Jefferson he and others were going to "jump on" the hijacker with the bomb, who was guarding the passengers in the rear. He mentioned Glick by name.
Jefferson heard shouts and commotion, and then Beamer asked her to pray with him. They recited the 23rd Psalm. He made Jefferson promise to call his wife, Lisa, due with their third child in January, then dropped the phone. Jefferson heard Beamer say, "Let's roll." Silence followed.
Burnett was on the phone to his wife, Deena, four times. The first time he assured her he was OK but asked her to call authorities. She dialed 911, and a dispatcher put her through to the FBI.
An executive at a Pleasanton, Calif., medical products company, Burnett, 38, was by all accounts a man capable of taking matters into his own hands. "He is absolutely the kind of person you not only would think might be involved but you would expect to be involved," says his boss, Keith Grossman. "And be shocked if he wasn't."
When Burnett called back, his wife told him about the World Trade Center attacks. On his third call, they discussed whether a bomb was aboard. Burnett thought the hijackers were bluffing.
In his last call, the 6-foot-2 former high school quarterback, said, "We're getting ready to do something."
"Who?" Deena asked.
"A group of us," he said. "We're going to do something."
The first terrestrial phone to ring was answered by Deena Burnett, wife of the man sitting next to Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett. 'Are you okay?' she asked. 'No,' replied Tom, 'we've been hijacked. They've knifed a guy; there's a bomb on board; tell the authorities, Deena.'
Bingham's call was to his mother was strangely formal: 'This is Mark Bingham,' her son said. Then only: 'I love you,' and he hung up.
Such behaviour may seem strange, but not to Bingham's friend and former employer Holland Carney, who sees in his economy of language the first indications of revolt aboard UA 93. 'If I know Mark, he would not have said anything about what he intended to do. I remember him coming to work one day with a huge black eye. I asked what had happened, and he said two guys had jumped him and he had fought them off. I said that was dangerous - better to give them the money - but he would have none of it. That would have been him on the plane. He was not someone afraid to act.'
Burnett made a second call, by which time Deena was watching the World Trade Centre collapse on television. Burnett fired a fusillade of questions: 'Are they commercial places?'
Jeremy Glick learnt the same news from his wife, Lyz, in upstate New York. 'Is that where we're going too?' he asked her. 'Unlikely,' said Lyz, 'there's nothing left to crash into.'
Todd Beamer's call to airphone operator Lisa Jefferson was, she says, a turning point in her life. 'I will play it over and over in my mind,' she says.
The FBI was on the other line, offering guidance. 'I asked his name and he told me. And at that point his voice went up a little bit because he said: "We're going down, we're turning round. Oh I don't know, Jesus, please help us."'
The two chatted about Beamer's family; his sons Drew and David. 'Then he said: "My wife is expecting," so we talked.' They discovered Jefferson and his wife shared the same Christian name. The conversation went from the sublime to the practical: 'He wanted me to recite the Lord's Prayer with him.' Then came the Psalm, with - according to Jefferson -- a number of other passengers now joining in, as though for a last rite.
'Lisa! Lisa!' shouted Beamer. 'I'm still here, Todd,' Jefferson said, 'I'll be here as long as you are.'
'From that point,' she says now, 'he said he was going to have to go out on faith because they were talking about jumping the guy with the bomb. He was still holding the phone, but he was not talking to me, he was talking to someone else and I could tell he had turned away. And he said: "You ready. Okay, let's roll."'
'We're all running to first class,' said flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw, implying the rebellion had begun in Bingham's compartment.
Between rows 30 and 34, the revolt had brewed along with a pot of boiling water, which Bradshaw was planning to splash into a hijacker's face.
The hijackers had chosen their flight badly: Glick was a 6'1" judo champion; Bingham was a rugby player; Burnett had been a college quarterback. Among the other passengers, Louis Nacke was a weightlifter and William Cashman a former paratrooper. The manual advising pilots to be careful and appease hijackers was about to be ripped up, along with the history of hijacking.
No one will ever know how the plan to attack the terrorists was hatched, except for an indication to The Observer from an analyst of the recorder that the scuffle began not at the back of the plane but at the front - where Bingham was sitting. 'He was one of those who would have said: "This is ridiculous, let's kick their asses,"' Carney says
There was talk of 'rushing the hijackers' - Glick, in a third call, asked Lyz if she thought it a good idea. She said she did. Deena Burnett disagreed. 'Tom, sit down,' she said. 'Don't draw attention to yourself.' 'If they're going to run this plane into the ground,' retorted her husband, 'we're going to do something.'
From 9.57, the cockpit recorder picks up the sounds of fighting in an aircraft losing control at 30,000 feet - the crash of trolleys, dishes being hurled and smashed. The terrorists scream at each other to hold the door against what is obviously a siege from the cabin. A passenger cries: 'Let's get them!' and there is more screaming, then an apparent breach. 'Give it to me!' shouts a passenger, apparently about to seize the controls.
EXCERPTED FROM THREE NEWSPAPER ARTICLES