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『亜空間通信』343号(2002/08/18)
【911ペンシルヴェニア墜落93便ハイジャック犯と格闘乗客の英雄譚は嘘八百？】
※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※※
転送、転載、引用、訳出、大歓迎！
いやはや、しばしの夏休みの夢が遙かに遠のくばかりか、江戸時代以来の幽霊の季
節とはいえ、こうまで「911怪奇談」が乱れ飛ぶと、いちいちつき合っていれば、英
文を流し読みするでけでも日が暮れてしまう。これではとうてい、仮題『911事件の
真相と背景』の脱稿が、事件一周年記念日にも間に合わない。
だから、以下、日本の阿修羅戦争14掲示板への投稿の冒頭部分と、その基のイギリス
の独立系情報の全文とを、そのまま横に流して、別に負う気も義理もない責任の一時
逃れとする。一応、下記の場所に原文が存在することだけは軽く叩いて確かめた。
最も簡潔に注釈すると、墜落現場発のジョン・カーリンの報告である。墜落場面の
目撃者、現場捜査の担当者などの証言を基にして、肝心要の「ヴォイスレコーダー」
の内容非公開などにより、ブッシュ大統領らが喧伝する「美談」の根拠はない、すべ
ては推測でしかない、とする報告であり、墜落原因の推理にも諸説あるが、ケネディ
大統領暗殺事件と同様のミステリーとして、長らく議論の種になるであろうとの結論
である。
http://www.asyura.com/2002/war14/msg/530.html
９・１１事変の英雄譚は嘘八百？――UA93便の墜落をめぐる謎と疑惑 投稿者 英文の
ままの記事紹介でゴメン 日時 2002 年 8 月 17 日 07:39:33:
【９・１１事変のときにペンシルヴェニアに墜落したユナイテド航空93便の感動的な
物語を知らない人はもはやいまい。勇気あふれる乗客たちがハイジャック犯と格闘し
て、乗っ取られた旅客機を墜落させて、カミカゼ攻撃を阻止して多くの市民の命を救っ
たという美談である。しかしこの美談には唯一の弱点があった。……これは真っ赤な
ウソかもしれないという疑惑が出てきたのだ。】 [後略]
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=323958
13 August 2002 12:53 BDST Home > News > World > Americas
Unanswered questions: The mystery of Flight 93
We all know the inspiring story of Flight 93, of the heroic passengers who
forced the hijacked plane to the ground, sacrificing themselves to save the
lives of others. The only trouble is: it may simply not be true.
John Carlin reports from Shanksville, Pennsylvania
13 August 2002
The fate of United Airlines Flight 93, the last of the four hijacked planes
to go down in the United States on 11 September, holds no mystery for Lee
Purbaugh. He saw what happened with his own eyes. He was the only person
present in the field where, at 10.06am, the aircraft hit the ground.
"There was an incredibly loud rumbling sound and there it was, right there,
right above my head -- maybe 50ft up," says Purbaugh, who works at a
scrapyard overlooking the crash site. "It was only a split second but it
looked like it was moving in slow motion, like it took forever. I saw it
rock from side to side then, suddenly, it dipped and dived, nose first, with
a huge explosion, into the ground. I knew immediately that no one could
possibly have survived."
Apart from, here and there, a finger, a toe or a tooth, all that remained of
the 44 souls aboard, churned into the soil or hanging from the branches of
nearby trees, were small pieces of tissue and bone. The plane was also
pulverised, reduced to tiny fragments of metal. Wally Miller, the local
coroner in what used to be a forgotten corner of rural Pennsylvania, was the
man charged by law with collecting the human remains and establishing the
causes of death. "I issued the death certificates," says Miller, who is also
the local undertaker. "I put down 'murdered' for the 40 passengers and crew;
'suicide' for the four terrorists."
But Miller, who worked closely with the FBI during the 13 days that they
investigated the crash site, admits that, in the end, he cannot prove what
happened; he can only infer it. Neither he nor anybody else knows what
exactly caused Flight 93 to go down and, as Miller puts it, "bring the
world's troubles crashing down on our doorstep". Or, if there are people who
do know, they are not telling.
The shortage of available facts did not prevent the creation of an instant
legend -- a legend that the US government and the US media were pleased to
propagate, and that the American public have been eager, for the most part,
to accept as fact. The legend goes like this: the passengers on the hijacked
United flight, alerted on their mobile phones to the news of the other three
hijacked planes, decide that if they are not going to save themselves at
least they will do the patriotic thing and spare the lives of those who are
the terrorists' intended targets; so they charge down the aisle, storm the
cockpit, where a terrorist is at the controls, and, in the ensuing struggle,
force the plane down.
President George Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the head of the FBI
Robert Mueller, and numerous other senior government officials who have
saluted the "heroes" of Flight 93, have consistently, and repeatedly,
advanced this version of events. So have the big national newspapers and all
the big national television stations. The New York Times, normally a model
of legalistic precision, published this extraordinarily woolly sentence on
22 September upon learning, from unnamed "official" sources, that the
plane's cockpit voice-recorder had registered "a desperate and wild
struggle" aboard. "And while it [the recorder] did not provide a clear or
complete picture," The New York Times read, "it seemed certain that there
was a chaotic confrontation that apparently led to the crash of the jet."
Vanity Fair magazine, going on little more information than was available to
The New York Times, went ahead and published a highly detailed story on
Flight 93, which, the magazine said, "may be remembered as one of the
greatest tales of heroism ever told". Vanity Fair did recognise, though,
that any suggestions as to what actually happened to force the plane down
had to be, by necessity, "pure conjecture".
Two months later, Newsweek got hold of what it was told was a partial
transcript of the voice-recorder and, upon that basis, narrated the story of
"the Heroes of Flight 93" in even more vivid, drum-rolling, Hollywoodesque
detail than Vanity Fair had done. The passengers were "citizen soldiers...
who rose up, like their forefathers, to defy tyranny", intoned Newsweek. "In
daring and dying, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 found victory for us
all."
The transcript that Newsweek obtained did indicate that fighting had taken
place aboard, curses had been uttered, prayers raised up both to the Muslim
and the Christian god. But for all the drama of the story, Newsweek did not
draw attention to the fact that, in truth, they were guessing as to how or
why the plane had crashed; that they did not know whether the passengers had
even made it into the cockpit; that they had no clue what happened during
Flight 93's decisive, desperate last eight minutes.
Which is not to assert that the "hero" story is untrue, or even implausible.
Maybe the legend does indeed correspond perfectly to the facts. And
certainly, based on the records of telephone calls made from the plane,
there is no disputing that a number of the passengers did indeed intend to
carry out actions of great courage. But what those actions actually turned
out to be is not known -- or known only to a small group of people with a
clear picture of what happened in the skies over Shanksville on the morning
of 11 September, people in the US military who tracked the plane's last
moments as well as people familiar with, but unwilling to reveal, the full
contents of the material gleaned from the cockpit voice- recorder, which was
retrieved in perfect working order after the crash.
The absence of official information has led to lively and often
well-informed debate in the unofficial medium of the internet (see
www.flight93crash.com.) But there are also a number of individuals in the
aviation industry convinced that there do exist other plausible
interpretations of what actually happened. Because there are, most
certainly, a number of important unanswered questions -- questions based on
evidence, as well as on a manifest absence of candour on the part of the
authorities -- which the national US media, typically so sceptical and
inquisitive, have shown a curious reluctance to ask.
The alternative theories, both of which have been denied by the US military
and the FBI, are a) that Flight 93 was brought down by a US government
plane; and b) that a bomb went off aboard (passengers had said in phone
calls that one of the hijackers had what appeared to be a bomb strapped to
him). If doubts remain despite the denials, if conspiracy theories flourish,
it is in large part because of the authorities' failure to address head-on
questions centring on the following four conundrums.
1. The wide displacement of the plane's debris, one explanation for which
might be an explosion of some sort aboard prior to the crash. Letters --
Flight 93 was carrying 7,500 pounds of mail to California -- and other
papers from the plane were found eight miles (13km) away from the scene of
the crash. A sector of one engine weighing one ton was found 2,000 yards
away. This was the single heaviest piece recovered from the crash, and the
biggest, apart from a piece of fuselage the size of a dining-room table. The
rest of the plane, consistent with an impact calculated to have occurred at
500mph, disintegrated into pieces no bigger than two inches long. Other
remains of the plane were found two miles away near a town called Indian
Lake. All of these facts, widely disseminated, were confirmed by the coroner
Wally Miller.
2. The location of US Air Force jets, which might or might not have been
close enough to fire a missile at the hijacked plane. Live news media
reports on the morning of 11 September conflict with a number of official
statements issued later. What the government acknowledges is that the first
fighters with the mission to intercept took off at 8.52am; that another set
of fighters took off from Andrews Air Force base near Washington at 9.35am
-- precisely the time that Flight 93 turned almost 180 degrees off course
towards Washington and the hijacker pilot was heard by air-traffic
controllers to say that there was "a bomb aboard". Flight 93, whose menacing
trajectory was made known by the broadcast media almost immediately, did not
go down for another 31 minutes. Apart from the logical conclusion that at
least one Air Force F-16 -- 125 miles away in Washington at 9.40am, meaning
10 minutes away from Flight 93 (or less if it flew at supersonic speed) --
should have reached the fourth of the "flying bombs" well before 10.06am,
there is this evidence from a federal flight controller published a few days
later in a newspaper in New Hampshire: that an F-16 had been "in hot
pursuit" of the hijacked United jet and "must have seen the whole thing".
Also, there was one brief report on CBS television before the crash that two
F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Vice-President Dick Cheney
acknowledged five days later that President Bush had authorised the Air
Force pilots to shoot down hijacked commercial aircraft.
3. One telephone call from the doomed plane whose contents do not entirely
tally with the hero legend and which is accordingly omitted in the
Independence Day-type dramas favoured by the US media. The Associated Press
news service reported on 11 September that eight minutes before the crash, a
frantic male passenger called the 911 emergency number. He told the
operator, named Glen Cramer, that he had locked himself inside one of the
plane's toilets. Cramer told the AP, in a report that was widely broadcast
on 11 September, that the passenger had spoken for one minute. "We're being
hijacked, we're being hijacked!" the man screamed down his mobile phone. "We
confirmed that with him several times," Cramer said, "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."
According to the information that has been made known, this was the last of
the various phone calls made from the aeroplane. No more calls were received
from the plane in the eight minutes that remained after the man in the
toilet said that he had heard an explosion.
4. Eyewitness accounts of a "mystery plane" that flew low over the Flight 93
crash site shortly after impact. Lee Purbaugh is one of at least half a
dozen named individuals who have reported seeing a second plane flying low
and in erratic patterns, not much above treetop level, over the crash site
within minutes of the United flight crashing. They describe the plane as a
small, white jet with rear engines and no discernible markings. Purbaugh,
who served three years in the US Navy, said he did not believe it was a
military plane. If it indeed was not, one suggestion made in the internet
discussion groups is that US Customs uses planes with these characteristics
to interdict aerial drug shipments. Either way, the presence of the mystery
jet remains a puzzle.
How has the US government and its various agencies responded to doubts
raised by the above questions? In the following ways:
1. The paper debris eight miles away, the FBI says, was wafted away by a
10mph wind; the jet-engine part flew 2,000 yards on account of the savage
force of the plane's impact with the ground. The FBI conclusion: "Nothing
was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground
intact." Aviation experts I have contacted are very doubtful about this. One
expert expresses astonishment at the notion that the letters and other
papers would have remained airborne for almost one hour before falling to
earth.
2. The Air Force jets were on their way but failed to make it on time,
according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
Fighters did finally approach Flight 93, he acknowledges, "moments" before
it crashed, but did not shoot it down. Which begs the question why they were
unable to arrive sooner to intercept an aircraft that clearly had terrorists
aboard and that was flying straight for Washington more than one hour after
another United Airlines plane had crashed into the second World Trade Centre
tower. The report in the New Hampshire newspaper, and the one on CBS, have
not been explained, and the air-traffic controllers in Cleveland who tracked
the last minutes of Flight 93 on radar have been forbidden by the
authorities to speak publicly about what they saw on their screens.
3. Neither the FBI nor anyone else in authority has explained the reported
911 phone call from the plane toilet, even though it appears to be the last
of the phone calls made from the plane and even though it conveys the far
from insignificant claim that there was an explosion on board. The FBI has
confiscated the tape of the conversation and the operator Glen Cramer has
received orders not to speak to the media any more.
4. The explanation furnished by the FBI for the mystery plane, whose
existence it initially denied, serves less to reassure than to reinforce
suspicions that a cover-up of sorts is under way, that the government is
manipulating the truth in a manner it considers to be palatable to the
broader US public. The FBI has said, on the record, that the plane was a
civilian business jet, a Falcon, that had been flying within 20 miles of
Flight 93 and was asked by the authorities to descend from 37,000ft to
5,000ft to survey and transmit the co-ordinates of the crash site "for
responding emergency crews". The reason, as numerous people have observed,
why this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.06am on 11 September,
all non-military aircraft in US airspace had received loud and clear orders
more than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport; second, such
was the density of 911 phone calls from people on the ground, in the
Shanksville area, as to the location of the crash site that aerial
co-ordinates would have been completely unnecessary; and, third, with F-16s
supposedly in the vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a
time of tremendous national uncertainty when no one knew for sure whether
there might be any more hijacked aircraft still in the sky, the military
would ask a civilian aircraft that just happened to be in the area for help.
Most suspicious of all, perhaps, has been the failure of the FBI or anybody
else to identify the pilot or the passengers of the purported Falcon, and
their own failure to come forward and identify themselves.
There was one other plane, a single-engine Piper, in the air as Flight 93
headed to its doom. The pilot, Bill Wright, said that he was three miles
away and so close he could see the United markings on the plane. Suddenly he
received orders to get away from the hijacked plane and to land immediately.
"That's one of the first things that went through my mind when they told us
to get as far away from it as fast as we could," Wright later told a
Pittsburgh TV station, "that either they were expecting it to blow up or
they were going to shoot it down -- but that's pure speculation."
Everything is speculation -- that is the problem with the story of Flight
93. And unless the US government reveals more of what it knows, provides a
detailed account of the last 10 minutes in the life of Flight 93 and the 44
people who were aboard, there will not only be scope but sound reasons for
the conspiracy theorists to continue to speculate as to what really happened
in those last few minutes before the plane plunged into the earth; to cast
doubts on the soft-focus legend that the traumatised American public has
seized upon so gratefully.
Some conspiracy theorists will say that the plane was shot down by a
missile, perhaps a heat-seeking missile that honed in on one of the plane's
engines -- a theory possibly substantiated by the 2,000yd flight of the
1,000lb engine part, but arguably refuted by consistent eye-witness
accounts, including Lee Purbaugh's, that when last sighted the plane was not
emitting smoke.
Others might say, as they have done about a TWA flight that fell to the sea
in 1996 after taking off from New York, that the plane was a victim of
electromagnetic interference. In the case of the TWA flight, the argument,
put forward in a series of exhaustive articles written in the New York
Review of Books by the Harvard academic Elaine Scarry, is that it happened
accidentally. However, as Scarry's articles relate, documentation abounds
showing that the Air Force and the Pentagon have conducted extensive
research on "electronic warfare applications" with the possible capacity
intentionally to disrupt the mechanisms of an aeroplane in such a way as to
provoke, for example, an uncontrollable dive. Scarry also reports that US
Customs aircraft are already equipped with such weaponry; as are some C-130
Air Force transport planes. The FBI has stated that, apart from the
enigmatic Falcon business jet, there was a C-130 military cargo plane within
25 miles of the passenger jet when it crashed. According to the Scarry
findings, in 1995 the Air Force installed "electronic suites" in at least 28
of its C-130s -- capable, among other things, of emitting lethal jamming
signals.
In decades to come, film-makers, future Oliver Stones, may come up with
theories of their own, and the story of Flight 93 may come to acquire the
morbid mystique of the Kennedy assassination.
None of which is to question the bravery of passengers such as Todd Beamer,
who left behind a pregnant widow and two children aged two and three; or Tom
Burnett, who had three small daughters and told his wife Deena over the
phone, in the face of her anguished protests, that he and his
fellow-passengers were "going to do something" because if not the terrorists
were "going to run this plane into the ground". Evidently, as the Newsweek
article relates, there was fighting of some kind, but as to whether the
terrorists held off the passengers or the passengers seized control of the
plane, and perhaps even made an attempt to fly it themselves (one passenger
aboard was a qualified pilot of small planes), nobody knows -- or is willing
to admit that they know.
If evidence does exist further substantiating the hero narrative, it would
be a surprise if the authorities had not released it. Bravery, though, there
undoubtedly was. This we do know. As Lee Purbaugh says, and it would be
churlish to disagree, "they were heroes on that plane". Such a consensus has
been built around this view that the crash site at Shanksville -- an
anonymous-looking field save for the American flags that flutter all around,
the crosses, the pictures of the dead passengers, the messages of goodwill
and of good cheer ("Don't mess with the US!") -- that it has become a place
of pilgrimage, much as has happened with ground zero in New York but on a
smaller scale, attracting some 150 visitors from all over the US every day.
"In truth," said Wally Miller, who as coroner remains legally in charge of
the site, "that field is a cemetery. It should be treated with due respect."
What does Miller think happened? Did he attach any credence to the stories
doing the rounds, to those -- including a number in Shanksville -- who
dissent from the official version of events? Miller, who has seen as much
evidence as anybody at the scene of the crash, does not dismiss the
dissidents out of hand. He keeps an open mind. "The order had been given to
bring the airplane down," he said. "I do not rule anything out."
以上。
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木村愛二：国際電網空間総合雑誌『憎まれ愚痴』編集長
ある時は自称"嘘発見"名探偵。ある時は年齢別世界記録を目指す生涯水泳選手。
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電網速報『亜空間通信』（2001.09.01.創刊 2002.08.18.現在343号発行済）
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