: 08/19/06 The heart-thumping moment came when when passengers on board one of the hijacked 9/11 jets fought back against the ruthless fanatics hellbent on crashing the plane into the heart of America.
Jumping out of their seats to a rallying cry of ‘Let’s roll!’, they charged towards the front of the Boeing 757 and began smashing down the cockpit door to reach the hijackers at the controls.
Amid the desperate commotion, the plane rolled violently from right to left and pitched up and down as the rogue pilots tried to throw the passengers beyond the door off balance. As the struggle continued, the cockpit voice recorder captured the hijackers urgently discussing whether to ditch the plane. ‘Is that it?
Shall we finish it off?’ asked one of the fanatics.
‘No, not yet.
When they all come, we finish it off,’ was the reply. Minutes later, at10.03am, with the same voices shouting in Arabic, ‘Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest,’ the plane headed down, banked hard right and rolled on to its back.
It smashed into an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at its top speed of 580mph and exploded into a massive fireball.
The flames set nearby woods on fire as the impact sprayed body parts and other debris into the trees and up into the sky, to float to earth as far as eight miles away.
This, then, is the legend of United Airways Flight 93, one that has been vigorously promoted in a stream of books and films, most recently in the £9.
6 million Hollywood movie United 93. It is the story of how 33 innocent passengers and seven crew gave their lives to save countless others as their plane flew kamikaze-style towards the White House or the Capitol in Washington.
To a nation still reeling from the attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon that same September morning, these were men and women every bit as heroic as those who had fought at the Alamo.
Yet my own exhaustive investigations have led me to conclude that the story of Flight 93 is far from being the straightforward account of supreme courage that the authorities would have us believe.
Instead, the real story is mired in cynical manipulation and warmongering propaganda. I am convinced there is evidence to suggest a wholly sinister twist to the tale that already holds pride of place in American folklore.
For I believe that Flight 93 may well have been deliberately shot down as a means of stopping it from reaching its ultimate target — even at the expense of the 40 blameless people on board. It is a suspicion that was held even by the FBI, but was swept aside as a shaken America clung on to the official version of selfless sacrifice and raw patriotism.
Today, with the approach of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, some will still say that such speculation only serves to lend comfort to terrorists and does a disservice to the dead.
Others, however, will feel there are too many disquieting circumstances and unanswered questions to simply ignore.
But let us examine the evidence — so that you can come to your own conclusion. The massive impact caused the entire plane to disappear 30ft deep into the earth, telescoping down on itself and crushing everyone and everything inside the fuselage beyond recognition.
However, the absence of any significant debris — including tailplane and wings — bewildered witnesses, relatives and, more importantly, some crash experts.
They found it hard to believe that an airliner up to 155ft long, with two engines each weighing more than six tons, could have penetrated the ground so completely as to utterly disappear. Had it, in reality, been blown to pieces in mid-air?
CERTAINLY, it is unclear how a single piece of fuselage the size of a dining room table could have been recovered from a marina in Indian Lake, a couple of miles away from the crash site — unless it fell from the sky during an aerial break-up.
But a bigger mystery is why the engines went missing.
Considering their weight, they should have plunged deep into the earth along with the rest of the airliner.
Yet they weren’t in the crater and only a one-ton segment of an engine was ever recovered, again more than a mile from the crash site. The FBI said, unconvincingly, that it had ‘bounced’ there.
The FBI also claimed metal fragments found up to eight miles away could have been carried there by the wind, even though the breeze was very light.
Witnesses said nothing was left at the crash site, yet the FBI belatedly claimed to have made two sensational discoveries — a red bandana and a passport allegedly belonging to the hijackers.
Very conveniently, these turned up as prosecution evidence earlier this year at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the socalled 20th hijacker and only terrorist to be convicted over the 9/11 atrocities.
IF FLIGHT 93 was shot down, there must have been a fighter jet in the skies to unleash a guided missile.
The U.S. government has admitted that two F-15s were flying above New York City before 9am on September 11 and three F-16s were patrolling over Washington by 9.
40am. They could have reached Shanksville in minutes.
According to investigative writer David Ray Griffin, several witnesses saw two F-16s tailing Flight 93 minutes before it went down.
They claim they saw an F-16 move closer in and fire what were probably two Sidewinder missiles, one of them catching at least one of the Boeing’s huge engines, after which the ‘plane dropped like a stone’.
Someone else ‘heard a loud bang’ and saw the airliner plummet. A Vietnam War veteran said he ‘heard a missile’, a sound he knew well.
It is debatable how seriously we should take these reports. But there are numerous and highly credible witness accounts of a mysterious white jet being seen after Flight 93 went down.
Jim Brant, owner of the Indian Lake marina where debris was found, said he heard the roar of jet engines overhead, then saw a fireball rise into the air.
He looked up and noticed a white plane circling the wreckage. ‘It reminded me of a fighter jet,’ he said.
Another resident, Tom Spinelli, said: ‘I saw the white plane.
It was flying around all over the place like it was looking for something. I saw it before and after the crash.’
He said it had high tail wings and no markings on it.
John Feegle, another witness, said: ‘It didn’t look like a commercial plane. It had a real goofy tail on it, like a high tail. It circled around, and it was gone.
’
Dennis Decker and his friend Rick Chaney were also close to the impact site. ‘As soon as we looked up we saw a mid-sized jet flying low and fast,’ said Decker.
‘It appeared to make a loop or part of a circle, and then it turned fast and headed out.
’ Decker and Chaney described the jet as white with no markings. Decker added: ‘It was a jet plane, and it had to be flying real close when that 757 went down. If I was the FBI, I’d find out who was driving that plane.
’
A total of 12 eyewitnesses are on record as having seen the white jet. One witness, Susan McElwain, complained that the FBI told her there was no plane and did not note down her account.
However, amid the growing furore over the sightings, the FBI was forced to offer an explanation, which again many found unconvincing.
It claimed the jet was a passing civilian Fairchild Falcon 20 that was asked to descend to 5,000ft some minutes after the crash to give co-ordinates for the site. The plane and pilot have never been produced or identified.
One commentator pointed out: ‘The reason why this seems so implausible is that, first, by 10.
06am on September 11, all non-military aircraft in U.S. airspace had received orders more than half an hour earlier to land at the nearest airport.
‘Second, such was the density of emergency 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.
‘Third, with F-16s supposedly in the vicinity, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that, at a time 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.’
THE military’s role in 9/11 is shrouded in confusion, ambiguity and inconsistency.
A news report on September 20, 2001, said: ‘America’s defence establishment has disclosed that it ordered its fighter jets to intercept all the passenger aircraft hijacked in last week’s attacks on New York and Washington.’
The report also stated that military intelligence was aware of the hijackings before any of the aircraft had hit their targets.
Three years later, however, the military said it hadn’t heard about Flight 93 until after the plane had crashed — a line accepted by the official 9/11 Commission, which published its findings in July 2004.
The official inquiry said the Federal Aviation Authority — responsible for the security and safety of U.S. civilian aviation — had been incompetent in failing to alert the U.
S. Air Force.
But the FAA had already acted quickly in ordering more than 4,000 aircraft to land at the nearest airstrip to avoid any more hijacks.
And the military would have learned of Flight 93’s hijack via teleconferences set up by the FAA, the White House and the U.S. Defence Department as events began to unfold on September 11.
Richard Clarke, who ran the White House video conference, stated that at 9.27am, the FAA informed both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Chief of Defence Staff, of a number of ‘potential hijacks’ including ‘United 93 over Pennsylvania’. Therefore, more than 25 minutes before Flight 93 went down, both Rumsfeld and Myers knew all about it.
No wonder the military’s claim to have learned about Flight 93 only after it crashed is dismissed by many as a bare-faced lie. IN OTHER air crashes, information from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder — the black box recorders — were dealt with in an open manner, with crash investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board discussing the progress of their inquiries with reporters. But in the case of Flight 93, the Transportation Safety Board was not in charge of the investigation — the FBI was.
The black box recorders were reportedly found buried 25ft deep inside the crater. But a threeminute discrepancy in the crash time led to suspicions of foul play.
Seismic records, consolidated from four seismology stations in the region, originally pegged the impact time at 10.
06am. It was only later that the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission decreed that the correct impact time to have been at 10.03am.
But Terry Wallace, who heads the Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory and is considered the leading expert on the seismology of man-made events, was puzzled.
He complained: ‘The seismic signals are consistent with impact at 10.06am and five seconds plus or minus two seconds.
I don’t know where the 10.03 time comes from.’ So there were two crash times.
Sceptics note that a lot could happen in three minutes — minutes that could be removed from the end of a flight-deck recording to delete evidence of an attack by U.S. jets.
The FBI kept the contents of the voice recorder secret until it was forced by bereaved relatives to play the tape under heavy security at a hotel in April 2002.
The family members later reported they heard sounds of an on-board struggle beginning at 9.58am, with a final ‘rushing sound’ at 10.
03am, when the tape fell silent. Could the ‘rushing sound’ have been made by the plane being holed? And what of the moment when the plane hit the ground?
‘There is no sound of the impact,’ said Kenneth Nacke, whose brother Lou had been on Flight 93. There is a further twist. In 2006, when the judge at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui ordered a transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, it ended with the sound of the hijackers shouting praises to Allah.
Just where had those praises been in 2002 when the tape was first played to relatives? For many, their sudden appearance confirmed suspicions of tape tampering.
AT FIRST, the FBI was keen to show it was keeping an open mind over the fate of Flight 93.
Within days of the crash, Reuters reported from Shanksville: ‘Federal investigators said they could not rule out the possibility that the United Airlines jetliner that crashed in rural western Pennsylvania during this week’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon was shot down.’ ‘We have not ruled out that,’ FBI agent Bill Crowley told a news conference when asked about reports that a U.S.
fighter jet may have fired on the hijacked Boeing 757. ‘We haven’t ruled out anything yet.’
Why did Crowley later retract his statement — and on the same day as the U.
S. Air Force issued its official denial of any involvement?
AT THE crux of the legend of Flight 93 are the phones calls passengers are said to have made to their loved ones after the hijackers took control.
These are said to have alerted the passengers to the fact that they were victims of no ordinary hijacking, but a co-ordinated mission by fanatics to strike at the heart of America in New York and Washington. At the same time, a number of passengers allegedly told relatives of their resolve to fight back. Interestingly, phone contact from passengers on the two hijacked planes that hit the Twin Towers and a third jet which crashed into the Pentagon that same morning was scarce to non-existent.
Yet officially there were 35 calls made among the 40 passengers and crew on Flight 93, with callers using either mobile phones or GTE Airfones fitted into the backs of the aircraft seats.The use of mobile phones is suspect anyway because telecommunications experts say that — given the technology of 2001 — calls at an altitude of six miles could have only occurred by fluke at best. Just as baffling, the FBI insisted there were 13 mobile phone calls — of which there were no billing records — yet reduced this number to just two at the trial this year of Zacarias Moussaoui when the evidence risked being exposed to the harsh light of law.
Why had the FBI failed to put the record straight over the previous four-and-a-half years?
One answer is that it suited the heroism legend to keep silent as the Pentagon banged the drum for war in Iraq.
The 9/11 Commission claimed that five of the calls described the intent of the passengers and crew to revolt against the hijackers.
One caller, the Commission said, ended her message with the words: ‘Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.
’ But all this begs the question: why did the hijackers allow such a free-for-all of phone calls as they attempted to terrify their hostages?
After all, the hijackers would have realised that experts would have been able to locate the lost aircraft if people were using their mobles.
THE most intriguing of the calls is the one said to have been made by Flight 93’s most famous passenger Todd Beamer, whose ‘Let’s roll!
’ phrase became a byword for the victims’ heroism and patriotism.
Beamer’s call was said to have been taken by a telephone supervisor working for the Verizon Corporation, owners of GTE Airfones, the gadgets on the airplane seats.
At the time, Verizon had a contract worth £750million for installing a high-security telecoms package across U.
S. government departments, including the Pentagon.
One of its supervisors, Lisa Jefferson, an evangelical Christian like Beamer himself, retains a vivid recollection of her 15-minute conversation with him.
After discovering that she shared her first name with Beamer’s wife, they apparently talked about his two little boys and the new baby on the way, Beamer’s fear that he might not make it home, and his faith.
Faced with the awful prospect of dying on board Flight 93, Beamer supposedly recited the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 with Mrs Jefferson. He also asked her to promise to call his wife.
MRS JEFFERSON received a Verizon Excellence Award from her bosses for her handling of the call. To some this may have seemed inappropriate.
She had not taken a recording of it, contrary to convention.
She had not gone through the routine questions in her distress-call manual. She had not connected this agitated man to his wife waiting anxiously at home. Nor had she informed his wife subsequently of the call as promised.
Mrs Beamer only learned of her husband’s final call four days later, when a representative of United Airlines got in touch.
She says the United Airlines representative told her: ‘The FBI had been keeping the information private until they’ve had the opportunity to review the material. But now they’ve released it, I have a written summary of the call.
’
But later Mrs Beamer learned that the FBI had not kept the call so secret after all. Her husband’s boss at his computer company had already spun the story of Beamer the hero aboard Flight 93 before anyone else knew of his phone call.
As for Lisa Jefferson’s evidence, it was single-sourced, unsubstantiated hearsay of which there was no record.
For spooks inside a sprawling empire of wires like Verizon, rigging up a phone call to Lisa Jefferson’s headset would have been simple.
She had no idea what Beamer’s voice sounded like, and she would never hear it again to judge whether he had actually been speaking to her. This year, Lisa Jefferson published a book entitled Called — the story of seeing ‘her life transformed, simply by answering Todd Beamer’s call’.
The blurb added: ‘Jefferson sends a stirring challenge to all of us whether it comes during quiet obscurity or international adversity, we must be prepared to answer God’s call.’
Evangelical Christians throughout America rallied to that call. But one puzzle remains: Todd Beamer’s wife later said she had never before heard of his reciting the Lord’s Prayer in pressure situations.
Nor, she added, was Psalm 23 something he often recited.
TODD BEAMER’S ‘Let’s roll!’ phrase became the war on terror’s recruitment slogan.
President Bush had launched the legend in a speech on September 20, 2001 as he declared his unprecedented ‘war on terror’. Beamer’s story of selfless patriotism, according to the President, was a ‘defining moment’ in American history. Alongside President Bush on this occasion was Todd Beamer’s wife Lisa.
Nobody, of course, would begrudge Mrs Beamer her celebrity, given her tragic circumstances. But her presence undoubtedly helped President Bush’s cause.
The President again invoked her evangelical Christian husband’s courage in another speech a month later.
‘We will no doubt face new challenges,’ said the man widely regarded as having taken office fully intending to attack Iraq. ‘But we have our marching orders. My fellow Americans… let’s roll!
’
Such a phrase couldn’t fail to chime with the President’s gung-ho admirers — nor with the 40 million evangelical Christians in the so-called ‘red’ states where the Bush regime had its most fervent support Later U.S. Navy personnel would spell out the words 9/11 LET’S ROLL by forming themselves on the deck of a warship bound for Iraq.
Lisa Beamer, always a staunch ally of the White House and its war on terror, had herself photographed unveiling a ‘Let’s Roll’ logo on the side of a U.S. Air Force F-16.
She even sought to have ‘Let’s Roll’ trademarked and signed a six-figure book deal which, along with her seven-figure compensation cheque, made her a rich woman. And in August 2002, just in time for the first 9/11 anniversary, she published her memoir entitled — predictably — Let’s Roll!
The front cover showed the author with the Stars and Stripes and the publisher issued a staggering one million copies in hardback.
Truly, the Let’s Roll slogan had become a call to arms — just at a time the White House needed it most.
Bush administration not admit its guilt? It could surely have argued that the poor souls lost in the airliner were a tragic but necessary sacrifice in order to prevent horror and destruction on a larger scale in at the Capitol Washington.
Air Force scrambles had been frequent enough in the past. One report said there had been 129 within the U.S.
during 2000.
But secrecy is the first instinct of any war department, especially amid reports flooding in of a passenger revolt on the plane.
Any admission of a shooting down must have been ruled out politically because those brave passengers just might have retrieved the controls from fanatical hijackers.
For the U.S. military to have snatched victory from their grasp was unthinkable.
There are countless theories and areas of evidence to examine. There is even a theory that the plane could have blown up because of a bomb on board.
Air traffic controllers on the ground reportedly heard an anonymous voice in the cockpit announce: ‘Ladies and gentleman.
Here is the captain. Please sit down and keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board.
So sit.’
But if Flight 93 had been blown up by a bomb at cruising altitude, its debris area would have covered at least 20 miles, as in the Lockerbie crash.
The 9/11 Commission speculated that the rogue pilot jolted the plane violently in the minutes before the impact to disrupt a passenger revolt.
This in turn led to claims that he might have succeeded in tearing a wing off, or otherwise wrecking the aircraft in mid-air, causing it to crash.
Boeing has refused to discuss this possibility. Such movements, however, could easily have been caused by the pilot attempting to avoid an approaching heatseeking missile homing in on its engines.
EYEWITNESS reports differed from the official story. Along the plane’s route, people confirmed that the Boeing came in from the north-west, but they said it was not nose-diving. Instead it was flying low.
Bob Blair and Linda Shepley saw the plane when it dropped to 2,500ft. Rodney Peterson and Brandon Leventry noticed it at 2,000ft. Terry Butler saw it at about 500ft.
Eric Peterson saw the plane at ‘maybe 300ft’.
Lee Purbaugh, a scrap metal worker, was the closest. He told reporters: ‘I heard this real loud noise coming over my head.
I looked up and it was Flight 93, barely 50ft above me.
‘It was coming down at 45 degrees and rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed into the ground.
There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.’
Purbaugh’s account was perhaps the nearest of all the witness testimony to the official version of the story. Except for one important element.
Not once did Purbaugh mention the plane being upside down, as the 9/11 Commission, the FBI and the Pentagon all maintained it was.
With such a huge airplane roaring over his head, he could hardly have failed to notice which way up it was.
To some, this cast doubt on the credibility of his reported evidence.
To others, it was merely another piece of the Flight 93 jigsaw that failed to fit.
It was an apocalyptic scenario challenged at the time by journalists, who forced an admission that what was meant by these words was "on a scale never before witnessed in Britain", reducing the potential death toll from tens of thousands to hundreds. Today 23 suspects, two of them women, are being held on suspicion of plotting to commit terrorist offences. While police interrogate them, there are many unanswered questions.
Was there any plot at all?
The laws on contempt of court, designed to ensure defendants have a fair trial, make it difficult for counter-terrorism officials to answer this question openly, but security sources have endorsed information coming out of the US as accurate. It is clear that the security services have collected a vast amount of surveillance material over the past year, which they claim points to a plot in the making.
The original tipoff came from a Muslim informant, thought to be close to one of those arrested. In a long surveillance operation, the security services watched suspects at their homes and offices, in meetings they attended and at their mosques and gyms. The operation involved tracing the money that went in and out of their bank accounts and involved the Pakistani security services.
What physical evidence has been gathered?
Officially police will not confirm that any material has been recovered. Sources have told the BBC a suitcase containing bomb components was recovered from woodland being searched in High Wycombe.
The BBC also reported last night that police had found martyr videos on laptops in the course of searches. Reports that a gun was discovered in the same woods remain unconfirmed.
The home secretary, John Reid, said this week that "material of a substantial" nature had emerged in the searches of 49 properties in High Wycombe, east London and Birmingham.
The Guardian has established that scientists at the government's forensic explosives laboratory at Fort Halstead, Kent, are examining substances which have been seized during the searches.
What were the explosives at the centre of the alleged plot?
Police sources have confirmed that the alleged plot involved the use of TATP, triacetone triperoxide, which was to be made up from liquids.
This has led to speculation that peroxide, acetone and sulphuric acid might have been disguised as bottles of drink to get through hand baggage checks. Forensic explosives experts say if this was the case the liquids would have had to be mixed on the plane to attain the crystallised TATP explosive.
Gerry Murray, of the Forensic Science Agency in Northern Ireland, believes this would be very difficult, particularly if carried out in the toilet of a passenger jet.
The liquids have to be kept at freezing point when they are mixed and the TATP crystals must be dried before being ignited, a process which could take several hours.
Some 250g (9oz) of solid TATP would be needed for a substantial explosion, but Mr Murray said if the individual had never made the explosive before he would need a great deal of luck to manufacture it on a plane. Another theory is that pre-made explosives would have been hidden in the false bottom of plastic drinks bottles to foil hand luggage checks.
What can we read into the fact that no one has been charged yet?
Very little. The police and the home secretary have indicated that they believe they have arrested about 19 of the main suspects.
Under anti-terrorism legislation, officers are allowed to question suspects for 28 days if approved by a judge, and it is likely the police will want to use the full period before charging anyone. They are unlikely to bring charges against anyone until they have completed thorough searches, which have been going on at 49 separate locations. Anti-terrorism officers will be liaising with the Crown Prosecution Service.
It is likely also that a handful, about five or six, of the suspects will be released without charge.
Was it really necessary to impose such strict security measures at British airports?
It seems unlikely.
The threat level in the UK was raised to critical, which means an attack is imminent, after the arrest of what Mr Reid said were all the "main suspects".
Given that, it seems the measures forced upon British airports for several days were unnecessary. Police sources and the government indicated that if they were looking for anyone else those individuals were peripheral to the inquiry.
The argument that the disruption of such a plot might spark others to bring forward terrorist actions is debatable.
The security services allege that this was a very specific, well-planned plot, which took nearly a year to put together. It seems unfeasible that others were planning to do the same thing in the same way.
Officers from 43 forces in England, Wales, Scotland and the North, many of whom specialise in search and evidence recovery techniques are to investigate the plane bombing plot and possibly other such terrorist threats.
However, airlines are demanding that airports be brought back to normal within a week or the British Airports Authority will face legal action for loss of profits.
It is argued that if airport security and air travel are not brought back to normal the airports authority will have handed terrorists and extremists an unbelieveable and undeserved public relations victory.
However, travellers were warned there would be no early end to airport delays in Britain as police disclosed the huge scale of their investigation into the alleged transatlantic airline terror plot.
The Department for Transport (DfT) has ruled out any imminent return to “normal” airport security measures, despite an ultimatum from budget airline Ryanair.
The Irish no-frills carrier said it would sue the British government for compensation for delays unless usual security arrangements resumed within a week.
But the department said it had “no intention of compromising security” and did not anticipate changes in the next week.
Meanwhile, a group of British tourists endured a terrifying diversion of their holiday flight after the captain told them a note had been found saying there was a bomb on the plane.
The Boeing 767 operated by Sussex-based charter carrier Excel Airways landed safely at Brindisi airport in southern Italy.
The aircraft was escorted by an Italian air force F16 fighter aircraft and landed at Brindisi at 2.
45pm Irish time.
An Excel Airways spokes- man said tonight: “A note on a sickbag was found which said, ‘There is a bomb on this aircraft’. This note was passed among passengers before being handed to a cabin crew member who handed it to the cockpit crew.
”
Meanwhile, it was reported that police investigating the alleged plot had found a suitcase containing components needed to make an explosive device.
The discovery is thought to have been made in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where specialist officers are combing King’s Wood for traces of explosives or evidence of explosive tests, the BBC reported.
Scotland Yard has refused to comment on the reports.
Intelligence officials in Pakistan claimed Rashid Rauf, a key suspect in the alleged plot, had links with an outlawed Pakistani militant group and met al-Qaida figures inside Pakistan in the lead-up to his arrest.
Rauf, a British national and the brother of one of those detained in Britain, was held in Pakistan last week and is widely believed to have triggered the police operation to smash the alleged plot.
"If these bombs were detonated, this very likely would have caused deaths and injured," German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said.
"Therefore we have to take this event very seriously.
And we have to expect that the danger of a repeat attempt still exists. And therefore the public manhunt for these persons is necessary."
Authorities displayed the two suitcases plus gas canisters and bottles containing liquid.
Joerg Ziercke, head of the Federal Criminal Police, told the news conference, "We have found pieces of paper with Arabic letters and telephone numbers from Lebanon in the clothes which were in the suitcases to insulate or fix the gas bottles.
"Thus, it is imaginable, and I stress 'imaginable,' that the offenders wanted to set a signal with regard to the Mideast conflict and accepted a massive threat with destruction and possible human casualties in doing so."
The suitcases containing the bombs were found on trains in Dortmund and Koblenz.
The authorities said they were offering a 50,000-euro reward for information about the failed bombings.
They also showed surveillance video of possible suspects at the two train stations.
The suitcases were identical black cases with a gas canister, alarm clock, wires, batteries and soft drink bottles filled with flammable liquid.
Well, the last 7 months and all of the discussion has done nothing to change the view of the program held by CBS. There were two separate comments in a 30-second news snippet from Tracy Smith that were either inaccurate or incomplete, and, of course, they were inaccurate or incomplete in a manner that made the program sound worse than it is.
The first was the continued mis-labeling.
The program is not, despite the mainstream press' continued insistence, a "domestic" surveillance program. The NSA is not monitoring American's domestic calls without warrants, or at least, if they are, that has not been made public. That's not what the program being talked about covers.
The NSA is monitoring overseas communications of suspected terrorists and terrorism supporters. If some of those communications are into the United States, they're continuing to monitor. That doesn't make the conversations "domestic.
"
But according to Tracy Smith on The Early Show today, "President Bush says that he expects a Federal Appeals Court to uphold a key part of his domestic surveillance program." The drumbeat continues.
And then, to top it off, after mis-representing what the program is, she mis-states what the program does.
"[The terrorist surveillance program] allows the monitoring of e-mails and phone calls from Americans suspected of having tied to terrorism."
Again, that's such an incomplete description as to be a virtual lie. The program that has been talked about and discussed is not about surveilling Americans.
The surveillance is of terrorism suspects overseas. If they were surveilling Americans as a policy, there would surely be cases of entirely domestic conversations having been monitored. There have been no allegations that that has taken place.
None. And it's just plain wrong to suggest, as CBS continues to do, that the program under discussion does that.
(The entire clip runs about 30 seconds, and can be seen )
"I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines," Lt. Col. Jeffrey R.
Chessani, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, said in a sworn statement given to military investigators in March.
"I did not have any reason to believe that this was anything other than combat action," he said in the statement, which was cited by the Post.
The newspaper said it was provided with the statement by a person sympathetic to the enlisted Marines involved in the case.
It said it helps explain why there was no investigation of the incident at the time and why the U.S. military chain of command took several months to react to the event.
Chessani said he had concluded that insurgents had staged a "complex attack" that began with a roadside bomb, followed by a small-arms ambush intended to provoke the Marines to fire into houses where civilians were hiding.
Because of that conclusion, he said, he saw no reason to investigate, or ask how many women and children had been killed.
U.
S. Marines have been accused of killing 24 unarmed Iraqis in Haditha in November 2005, one of a series of incidents in which U.S.
troops are suspected of killing Iraqi civilians. Two investigations were initiated into the Haditha case - a murder inquiry and a probe into the Marines' procedures following the killings.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the Pentagon investigation into the deaths in Haditha had found possible concealment or destruction of evidence by U.
S. Marines.
The MoD put the best gloss possible on its latest recruitment figures, indicating that numbers joining had increased. But the figures also showed that the Army shrank last year by 1,500 soldiers.
The campaign group Military Families Against the War said the haemorrhage of troops - coupled with increasing numbers going "absent without leave" - was caused by the stress of service after the "illegal war" in Iraq. Sally Keys, mother of Tom, a redcap who was killed in an uprising because his platoon had no working phones to call for back-up, revealed her second son, Richard, 21, was one of those leaving the Army. "He's leaving because of parental pressure," she said.
"We asked him to leave because we have lost one son and we don't want to lose another. We get people ringing us anonymously to say they have done three or four tours and they don't want to go back to Iraq."
The MoD stressed that the figures showed a rise in recruitment of 9.
2 per cent last year, making a total of 11,460 extra joining the Army. The armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, said: "I'm pleased to say that this year we have seen a significant increase in those expressing an interest in joining the Army."
But the rise in recruits still fell short of the Army's overall target figure by more than 1,000 soldiers
Mark Harper, the Conservative defence spokesman, said: "Retention is still poor, with more than 14,000 leaving the Army in the past year outstripping the recruitment.
With ever increasing commitments and a shrinking Army, the effects of overstretch are just going to get worse."
The figures show that 13,740 soldiers left the Army last year. An MoD spokesman said that 740 troops were currently "on the run" but had not been dismissed from the service.
This week it emerged that at least seven of the 23 suspects under arrest on suspicion of involvement in the plot to blow up transatlantic airliners may have participated in Tablighi events.
The organisation - influenced by a branch of Saudi Arabian Islam known as Wahhabism - has already been linked to two of the July 7 suicide bombers who attended a Tablighi mosque at the organisation's headquarters in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. The jailed shoe bomber Richard Reid is also known to have attended Tablighi meetings.
Until now, the leaders of Tablighi Jamaat - which means "group of preachers" - have refused to open their doors to outsiders, shrouding the organisation in mystery.
Tablighi enthusiasts say that the organisation, founded by a scholar in India in the 1920s, has no involvement with terrorism and simply encourages Muslims to follow the example of the prophet and proselytise the teachings of the Qur'an. As one sympathetic imam put it, they were the "Jehovah's Witnesses of Islam".
On Thursday evening, the Guardian witnessed around 3,000 men from as far afield as Great Yarmouth and the Isle of Wight stream through the backstreets of Stratford to the meeting. There, at the gates of a seemingly derelict industrial site, men in fluorescent jackets waved those who are known to the Tablighi Jamaat hierarchy under a security barrier, and into one of three fields that surround a cluster of prefabricated buildings which form a temporary mosque.
As the Guardian entered the complex one person spoke admiringly about the "main man" for the south-east division of Tablighi Jamaat.
"We can't call him a prophet," he said. "No one can be a prophet. But when you meet him you'll realise.
He's helped a lot of people in Walthamstow to follow the right path, the path of the prophet. He'll talk to you openly this evening and everything will make sense."
Seconds later, the main man stood next to his red van in Islamic dress and a smart blue waistcoat as hundreds of men, many carrying suitcases and sleeping bags, filed past him into a network of six rooms cobbled together with planks of wood and corrugated plastic windows.
He later said he was from Walthamstow.
The largest room was reserved for the main speaker, an elder from Preston who spoke in Urdu. His sermon was relayed through a microphone to five other rooms in which interpreters provided simultaneous translation into English, Arabic, Sinhala, Turkish and Somali.
The English-speaking room heaved as a sea of faces, white, black and Asian, spilled into the hallway. Most were teenagers and men in their 20s and 30s dressed in Islamic dress, caps and beards. Some came in suits and ties, others in jeans and hoodies.
There were old men too, who weaved slowly through to the front of the room, and a few young boys.
The Walthamstow man took a seat in the middle of the room to interpret proceedings. The murmur of hundreds of whispering voices stopped as he put on his headphones.
"We come to submit our will to Allah," he began. "We have to live the life that Allah has prescribed for us. We have been invited into Allah's house.
"
He continued to translate the preacher's message. "If a person is drowning, the man who saves him needs to take him out of the water. If he has swallowed too much water, that water must come out.
At the moment we are in a worldly ocean and we are all drowning. For us to become successful, we must come out of this world for a short period of time."
Although not a scholar, the interpreter is deeply respected.
Quietly, some in the congregation whisper that he has seen miracles - the sign of a truly committed Tablighi.
After an hour the preacher concluded with a call for followers to join the effort and commit to a trip away. "We must leave our houses, our businesses, our families, for a short period of time, and follow the path of Allah and practise the ways of the prophet, going from mosque to mosque," said the interpreter.
"Then [the behaviour] will become second nature to us. We shall go to India and Pakistan for four months to follow these ways."
What Tablighi followers call "the effort" - travelling around the country for three days or 10 days, depending on their level of commitment - is key to the organisation.
Once they have completed the first stage, they may undertake a 40-day trip, which is likely to entail travel around Europe.
Finally, a Tablighi member will be given the opportunity to take a four-month journey to Pakistan or India. During their "efforts" members are encouraged to emulate the life of the prophet and show others "the path".
On domestic trips, members are sent to communities where they will have most leverage. In September, for example, students will be sent to universities throughout the country.
Later in the evening, the rooms are transformed into dining halls.
A small group of men who know several of the Walthamstow suspects gathered round to share out plastic plates of chickpeas, lamb and naan bread, washed down with cans of peach juice and Coke.
"It will shock you but we all used to be deep into drugs and crime and all that," said one man, in his 20s, who went on a three-day trip to Woking with one of the suspects arrested in last week's raids. "Walthamstow used to be a dodgy area.
Tablighi changed all that."
A former body builder showed pictures on his mobile of the "pumped-up gym fanatic" he used to be. After spells in prison, he said, he went on a life-changing four-month trip to Pakistan.
"I went to places you wouldn't believe," he said. "There are people in Pakistan and India who know less about the prophet than people in east London."
The Urdu interpreter from Walthamstow acknowledged that Tablighi Jamaat had roused suspicions.
"I know three or four people who come here regularly who are informants," he said. "After September 11 the security services met with our elders at our headquarters and told them that they keep the flight records of every Tablighi member who travels abroad. But we are not worried.
They can close us down and it will not matter because the effort will continue. We have no fear."
He said he was not worried about the Walthamstow suspect he knows best, a young man he recently took on a 40-day trip to Scotland.
"Anyone who suffers for Islam will be rewarded," he said.
Asked about the association between Tablighi Jamaat and terrorist groups, he replied: "Tablighi is like Oxford University. We have intelligent people - doctors, solicitors, businessmen - but one or two will become drug dealers, fraudsters.
But you won't blame Oxford University for that. You see, it does not matter if someone speaks in favour or against this effort. Everything happens with the will of God.
"
Another follower added: "Sometimes the youngsters say that if they saw President Bush they would chop his head off, and things like that. But we're discouraged from talking about politics. If elders say these things it is out of anger.
They're not dangerous, they can't actually do anything."
By the early hours, 300 followers had volunteered for a three-day trip. One man who knows six of the suspects arrested last week leaned against the wall, the City of London glowing behind his shoulders, and adjusted his cap.
"Do you see now?" he said.
"Tablighi is not the problem.
It is the solution. It is another world in here, completely different from the world outside."
The blind rural lawyer who exposed forced abortions and sterilizations in eastern China last year stood trial Friday without his lawyers, while supporters said the case made a mockery of any effort in China to impose the rule of law. Chen Guangcheng, 34, appeared pale and thin when he showed up at a county courthouse in eastern Shandong province wearing a black T-shirt, gray pants and slippers, said his brother, Chen Guangfu, 49.
Outside, a heavy police presence prevented supporters from attending the trial, although another two of Chen's brothers were allowed inside.
Chen's three-member defense team, including the nation's top human rights advocates, had been detained by police the previous night, one of them said. Lawyer Xu Zhiyong remained detained until well after Chen's trial had ended.
By noon Friday, the two defense lawyers released from detention appealed to the judge to delay the trial.
"Due to the violation of the defendant's rights and the lawyers' rights," they refused to attend the trial and asked for a deferment, said Teng Biao, another lawyer who was assisting the defense team. "We didn't get any reply," he said.
Judge Wang Jun of Yinan county announced that Chen's lawyers could not appear "due to some unexpected reason," and appointed two local lawyers to represent Chen instead.
A furious Chen yelled, "I refuse to attend the court trial if the lawyers designated by me don't show up," his brother said.
"Void," Wang said, as two assistant judges watched.
"Hooligans!
" Chen yelled.
"Uncivilized language!" Wang said.
No witnesses were called.
"The so-called defendant lawyers didn't defend my brother at all, but just repeated two words, 'No objection, no objection,' until the very end," Chen's brother said. "They concluded at the end, that this is, one, a case without any confession, and two, that Chen Guangcheng should be shown leniency because he is a blind man.
"
Chen Guangcheng was so angry he then threw up three times during the two-hour trial, lawyers said.
The three lawyers who were supposed to have defended Chen had been about to leave their hotel for dinner Thursday night when they were suddenly surrounded by six men who accused the attorneys of stealing one of their wallets. The men called the police, who then detained the lawyers at a local police station.
"This is a sham trial. These two lawyers had never met Chen Guangcheng before the trial. How can anyone expect them to effectively defend Chen?
" said Li Fangping, one of the three attorneys who was detained.
"Chen himself protested in the court room this afternoon about the unauthorized designation of lawyers, but the judge turned a deaf ear to it," he said.
"It's ridiculous, absurd and illegitimate," said Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, who was barred from the trial.
"Even if Guangcheng did make a crime, the authority should at least have an open trial."
Chen, who has been under house arrest or in police detention for nearly a year, faces charges of destroying public property and disrupting traffic in his home village. Supporters say those charges were trumped up after Chen filed a rare class-action lawsuit last year, revealing abuses in enforcing China's one-child-only policy in Linyi, a city of 10 million people about 400 miles southeast of Beijing.
Rights groups condemned the disregard for Chen's legal rights.
"Progress toward rule of law at minimum requires the authorities to comply with legal protections and procedures on the books," said Sharon Hom, executive director of New York-based Human Rights in China. In this case, "court-appointed lawyers who remain silent throughout the proceedings and speak only to ask for mercy on the basis of the defendant's blindness make a mockery of the right to legal counsel.
The final decision in this case will speak volumes about China's commitment to respecting the rights of its citizens."
The judge was expected to issue a verdict at end of this month or at the beginning of September, said Li, the defense attorney.
Also Friday, a well-known human rights lawyer who has lobbied for Chen's release was detained in Shandong province for questioning in unspecified "criminal activities," the official New China News Agency reported.
Gao Zhisheng, 42, has been under surveillance for taking on sensitive causes from labor unrest to Falun Gong, the suppressed religious group.
From this essay by Moseley, we read:
At a national conference broadcast nationwide on C-SPAN, key conspiracy leader Alex Jones announced that the American government has already collapsed and a shadow government is now running our country. This radio talk-show host next announced – on tape – that Osama bin Laden is now a paid agent of the CIA.
Professor Steven Jones of Brigham-Young University accused George Bush of being a dictator, mimicking the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.
When asked if violent revolution was necessary, this scientist declared – in front of national TV cameras – that there is no peaceful way to achieve the group's goals. In the context of the question, professor Jones was calling for the violent overthrow of the government.
Those publishing this essay should check my actual comments on the C-SPAN broadcast and compare them with Mr.
Moseley's statements above that he attributes to me. I made no such statement that "there is no peaceful way to achieve the group's goals," nor did I accuse George Bush of being a dictator, nor did I mimick in any way the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.
I do not in any way, shape or form advocate "violent revolution" nor a "violent overthrow of the government.
" These statements in WND are untrue, totally unfounded and probably libelous. I love our country, and I love our Constitution. I advocate only constitutional means for seeking redress of grievances.
I most strongly protest these untrue statements by Jon Moseley you have published. Anyone can listen to C-SPAN and determine that I did not make the alleged comments and that he has falsified the facts of the matter. How would you like to have these false and inflammatory statements attributed to you?
Journalistic responsibility and integrity now require that you correct the egregious errors on WND.
I ask that you remove or annotate these false statements attributed to me immediately, with a public apology. My research on 9/11 is scholarly research regarding the molten metal pools observed at Ground Zero and our testing of solidified metal samples.
The reader can read what I actually do say here.
You may publish this response and I ask you to do so, immediately. I seek the truth and a return to our glorious constitutional principles, which are our heritage in the United States of America.
I am an American who seeks and loves the truth and my country. I seek to find out what really happened on 9/11.
CHICAGO – According to Kevin Barrett, the US government planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, the World Trade Center imploded due to explosives set up ahead of time in the buildings, Minnesota Sen.
Paul Wellstone's plane crash was no accident, and Osama bin Laden has probably been dead since 2001.
Mr. Barrett is not a radical anarchist or a teenager peddling conspiracy theories; he's a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison - a fact that has outraged some state politicians.
The case has drawn national attention and provided grist for conservative talk-show hosts, while the university has been deluged with e-mails against Barrett. Yet it has stuck by the decision to have him teach a planned course on Islam this fall.
Beyond the emotional reactions, the case raises questions about academic freedom: Are there limits to what can be taught, and if so, who decides them?
Are certain views indicative of incompetence, as some Wisconsin legislators have said, or does such criticism lead to censorship?
"There should be no limits at all as to what subjects can be subjected to academic analysis," says Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University in Miami. "But you should be performing as an academic and not as a partisan or preacher or moral judge.
"
That's the view the administration took as well, when they investigated. They found that however outlandish his personal opinions, Barrett - who was given an $8,427 contract to teach this course - was given good reviews for his past teaching. He plans to look at 9/11, including his own views, during one week of the course, but through a range of lenses.
"He does a good job teaching that course, no matter what his views are," says John Wiley, the university's chancellor. Interference from legislators or the public sets a dangerous precedent, Chancellor Wiley adds. "If there's one place controversy should be welcomed, it's universities.
"
Such controversies are not new or rare. Taboo subjects have included sex, politics, and even butter - in the 1940s when dairy industry grew angry over research into alternatives. More recently, the University of Colorado faced criticism over its defense of Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor who called some 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns" in a 2001 essay.
The university ultimately voted to fire Professor Churchill for professional misconduct, including plagiarism and fabrication of information - a decision he is contesting.
Earlier this year, an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern, Arthur Butz, raised the ire of some for denying the Holocaust. His critics said such views - even if not discussed in the classroom - showed an incompetence that shouldn't be tolerated.
That argument may be appropriate occasionally, says Jonathan Knight, of the department of academic freedom and governance at the American Association of University Professors. "The faculty member who devotes part of his course on physics to the proposition that the moon is made of cheese could rightly be accused of professional behavior that amounts to incompetence. But short of that, colleges and universities are places where ideas of the most unusual sort ought to be tested before students and peers.
"
Those sort of defenses seem like a cop-out to Steve Nass, the Wisconsin state representative who has led the charge against Barrett and gained 61 signatures from other legislators for a resolution calling for his dismissal.
"I have no problem with discussion on unpopular ideas in the classroom, but substantiate what you're talking about," Representative Nass says. "This isn't academic freedom.
This person can't substantiate his views."
The legislature is on recess until January, but if Barrett is rehired, Nass says he'll introduce a proposal to cut funding to the administration.
Barrett says he's surprised at the uproar, which began when he aired some of his views on a popular state radio show.
He understands that they are divisive - although he points to a recent Zogby poll showing that 42 percent of Americans believe they were not told the whole truth about 9/11 as evidence of growing acceptance. He disagrees that they're unsubstantiated, citing experts who have looked into Mr. Wellstone's plane crash, Bin Laden and what could have caused the Twin Towers to fall.
Raising doubt over who caused the plane crashes on 9/11 is critical to understanding the Muslim world, he says. "I don't inflict my views on students, but it's important they understand that the vast majority of the world's Muslims believe that 9/11 was an inside job, and important to understand why they hold those beliefs."
He tends toward a Sophist technique, he says, in which he presents a wide variety of viewpoints and encourages debate on them.
So long as he sticks to that, Professor Fish says, Barrett should be fine.
But Fish says that professors do push their own politics or beliefs. "That doesn't mean you can't bring current political questions into the classroom," he says.
"But they have to be academicized."
A plane flying from London to Egypt has been diverted to the Italian airport of Brindisi because of a bomb scare.
The 767 plane, operated by charter airline Excel, was flying from Gatwick to Hurghada, Egypt.
Excel said that flight XLA5984 was diverted after a note saying there was a bomb on board was found.
The plane was escorted by an Italian fighter jet and landed safely in Brindisi, to be met by emergency services and anti-terrorist officers.
"The note was written on the back of a sick bag, which stated 'there's a bomb on this aircraft' and was passed among passengers before being handed to a member of cabin crew," said Excel.
"The captain was advised and, as a precautionary measure, made the decision to divert into Brindisi."
The pilot had landed at the Italian airport after contacting air traffic control in Zagreb, Croatia.
The plane - with 269 passengers and nine crew - is currently being searched, but officials stood down the emergency.
Excel said the passengers are in the terminal building and are expected to re-board the aircraft shortly to continue their journey.
Richard Howson, a London attorney on the flight, said the pilot announced over the tannoy there may be a bomb on board but that it was probably a hoax.
"He handled it pretty well as he suggested it was most probably not a real scare," said Mr Howson. "I think that helped people stay calm."
He said after leaving the plane, passengers were checked with metal detectors before being allowed into the airport terminal, where they were now being given pizza and bottled water.
Matthew Masters, another passenger on the plane, said the pilot had made the announcement about two hours into the flight.
Speaking to BBC News 24 from the terminal, Mr Masters said the reaction among passengers was "silence, a bit of uneasiness, just a bit of shock".
The pilot then told passengers that they would be landing within 15 minutes.
Mr Masters said there were fire engines around the plane.
"Me and my girlfriend are very anxious. At least we're off the plane but we don't really feel like getting back on it.
"
Fellow passenger Silvestro Auriemma said he translated between plane crew and Italian authorities.
He was sitting near where the note - which said "there is a bomb on board" - was found.
Generally he said it was calm on the plane, but "there were some children crying, and people were shaken up".
"At that altitude, to hear that there's a bomb on board - it's not good," Mr Auriemma told News 24.
Excel Airways is a UK charter passenger airline and provides mainly short-haul services to European and Middle Eastern leisure destinations.
It operates out of London Gatwick, Manchester and Glasgow, and the company is based in Crawley, West Sussex.
British police said on August 10 they had foiled a major plot to carry out suicide bombings on aircraft bound for the United States and are questioning 23 suspects.
Pakistan said last week it had arrested seven people, including two British Muslims of Pakistani descent, in connection with the plot.
One of the arrested Britons was identified as Rashid Rauf and Pakistan said he was an al Qaeda operative with links in Afghanistan and was central to the plot.
Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, citing what it described as credible sources, said a son-in-law of the fugitive Zawahri was the mastermind and was being hunted.
The newspaper did not identify the suspected mastermind but said Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, was known to have several sons-in-law.
Pakistani officials have said they believed the mastermind was an al Qaeda member based in Afghanistan.
But top officials, including Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, said they could not confirm the mastermind was Zawahri's son-in-law.
Pakistan was exchanging information with the U.S. military in Afghanistan on the hunt for the mastermind, Pakistani security and government officials said.
Zawahri is believed to be hiding out along the Afghan-Pakistani border, in the area of the eastern Afghan province of Kunar and the Bajaur region in Pakistan.
A missile from a CIA drone aircraft hit a meeting of al Qaeda leaders in Bajaur in January. U.
S. intelligence officials believed Zawahri might have been attending the gathering.
The airliner bomb mastermind was believed to have met one or more of the plotters in Bajaur or across the border in Kunar, Dawn said.
It did not say when the meeting was believed to have taken place.
The mastermind had made some initial payments to the plotters, Dawn said, citing its unidentified sources.
Separately, the U.
S. network ABC reported on Friday that Pakistani officials had arrested a top al Qaeda commander, Matiur Rehman, in the course of their investigation into the London bomb plot. Pakistani security officials have denied that Rehman, one of the country's most-wanted militants, had been arrested.
The 43 forces in England and Wales, eight in Scotland and the Police Service of Northern Ireland have sent, or are sending, officers to assist.
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