Ted Rall: The Legend of Flight 93

[reprehensor]

The Legend of United Flight 93

by Ted Rall

...The legend of Flight 93 had everything a nation caught with its pants down needed to feel better about itself: guts, heroism, self-sacrifice. Best of all, it was marketable--by Hollywood and by a president willing to surf on a kind of heroism notably absent from his own life. (Theatrical release of the second "United 93" movie is scheduled to open April 28.) Lisa Beamer, widow of the passenger credited with the call-to-arms "let's roll," wrote a bestselling book by the same name, applied for a trademark on the expression, and is now working the Christianist lecture circuit.

Actually, the 9/11 Commission found, the evidence indicates that what Todd Beamer (or someone else) said was not "let's roll," but "roll it"--possibly referring to an airplane service cart the passengers may have wanted to use to break down the door into the cockpit. Too bad-. "Roll it" sounds less cinematic, and more like a book about cinematography.

The first indication that government officials were covering up the truth about United 93 came with their refusal to make public the cockpit voice recording (CVR). Releasing CVRs after a crash has long been standard practice; pilots' last, usually profane, utterances have become a cliché. Yet the FBI stonewalled victims' relatives for months after 9/11...

...Finally, after seven months of political pressure, the FBI allowed United 93 relatives to listen to the CVR. The feds told the families not to reveal what they'd heard. "They said the information on the tapes could be possibly used in the prosecution of Moussaoui, and anything that we say could affect the case in a negative way," said the brother of one of the victims...

continued at link

[Kire]

1. why do you hate America?

Neil Young has a song called "Let's Roll" - It has to be true.

[cdb]

2. I dislike that Neil Young song

it seems out of character for him...

[vi5]

5. Not really...

Remember in the 80's when he was all on the pro-Reagan tip?

I don't think he's that way about Bush, but it's not exactly out of character for him to react to things in a non-liberal or non-lefty way.

[reprehensor]

8. I love Neil Young.

I have almost every recording he has done except for the exceedingly rare Mynah Birds single.

He never played "Let's Roll" last time I saw him, and was testing the water about ClearChannel and corporate media.

It would be nice to hear him say, "I wish I had never recorded that song."

Neil is signed to Reprise, which is owned by TIME Warner, so he's got his own corporate media issues. But Reprise lets him record whatever the hell he wants to, country, grunge, whatever...

Trivia: Booker T plays organ on Let's Roll.

[Cascadian]

3. I like Ted Rall.

His cartoons are great and not only that, he is very articulate and intelligent. I loved the way he handled himself on "Hannity & punching bag Colmes" on F--k News.

I saw a lot of his stuff in the Seattle Press (Stranger, sometimes the Saturday P-I) but no media agency here in Spokane will touch his stuff. Too lefty or controversial. He has more balls than the whole news staff at CNN.



John

[BuyingThyme]

4. kcik

[dchill]

6. "Now that Zacarias Moussauoi has been convicted,..."

"Now that Zacarias Moussauoi has been convicted, where's that tape?"

Exactly.

[mirandapriestly]

7. cell phones

I thought just the height was the issue, but the speed is the issue too? God, can we just have someone tell us the truth for once....

"Ever forgotten to turn off your cellphone during a flight? I have. Try it yourself: Cellular telephone calls tend to drop when you're driving at 60 miles per hour; passenger jets travel up to ten times that speed. Moreover, there's zero signal, and thus no ability to place a call, above 8,000 feet. Flight 93, en route from Newark to San Francisco at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, dropped 700 feet when it was hijacked at 9:28 am. Cell calls? Not likely. "

[Kevin Fenton]

9. Nobody will ever tell us the truth

Except maybe Winfield - I get the impression he feels bad about it.

Anyway, the distance from the ground (35,000 feet or whatever) is not the problem, because it's only, what, five and a half miles, which a cell phone can bridge easily (although many urban BTS are designed to send and receive signals only over shorter distances). The question is the orientation of the antenna which received the signals (it is claimed that they are generally angled down, which means that they shouldn't be able to recieve signals from planes). Seeing as we don't even know which BTS the calls were received by, we can't know what angle the antennae were, which is a big problem.

I'm not so sure about speed - I've made plenty of calls at 60 mph and never had any problems, but I use a different frequency and different technology - maybe the US is technically backward and has worse coverage than here in the second world - it wouldn't surprise me that much. In any case, the plane was doing about 400-500, not 600 mph.

The other thing is attenuation, i.e. mobile phone signals have trouble going through metal. So maybe a phone will work better on a plane if you are sitting by a window than if you have an aisle seat.

How charged a battery is apparently makes no difference (a phone knows how far it is from a BTS and transmits with the appropriate power), but older phones tend to be more powerful, so if the people on United 93 all had analogue phones, then it's really not surprising they got through.

Finally, Rall seems to think that the calls are faked and it was shot down. This is a fairly unique position, because just about everybody who things that the calls were faked thinks it was a false-flag operation, whereas the people in favour of a shoot down (myself included) think they were real (give or take the odd detail poorly remembered/enhanced by a grieving relative).

[greyl]

10. I think it was probably shot down too.

Also, that the calls - at least some of them - were real. I thought the possibility of using cell phones in flight had been proven sufficiently.
Considering the speed at which radio signals travel, I can't imagine how several hundred miles an hour would affect a digital phone other than the issue of switching between towers.
Don't forget that GTE airphones are mentioned by Rall, but he inexplicably lets that point go.

[petgoat]

17. several hundred miles an hour would affect a digital phone

The problem is that from high altitude, the signals reach more than one antenna at once,
and this can cause "cascading" and total disruption of the system.

[greyl]

18. What about analog

as Fenton brought up?
What about the possibility that some of the calls weren't from cell phones, but were from the built-in air phones? That point alone negates the hell out of the "It's impossible that the calls happened" argument.

Also, there is no argument that cell phones are guaranteed to work at altitude and speed, only the evidence that they can work.

"several hundred miles an hour would affect a digital phone
The problem is that from high altitude, the signals reach more than one antenna at once,
and this can cause "cascading" and total disruption of the system."

I don't see an explanation anywhere yet that explains how cruising speeds make calls from personal analog, digital, or air phones impossible. There's this explanation that agrees with the second part of your statement that can disrupt calls on the ground (the system):

An FCC study in 2000 found that cell-phone use aboard aircraft increases the number of blocked or dropped calls on the ground. That's because at high altitude, cellular signals are spread across several base stations, preventing other callers within range of those base stations from using the same frequencies.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14290-2003Jun19?language=printer

If it's possible for them to work, this particular facet of the conspiracy theory should be totally abandoned.

[Kevin Fenton]

19. I remember...

... somebody once posted about there being some sort of disruption in Indian Lake(?) possibly caused by cascading.

I thought it was on JD2's "Cell phones and airphones" thread, which you can find here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=125x48029
However, although it contains some discussion of cascading, the discussion and link doesn't appear to be there.

Which thread was it on? Can you remember? It was by somebody who doesn't post very often (Borg maybe) and it was, like, post 6 on the thread.

I also thought that cell phone calls might get disconnected when the plane turned, but on second thoughts it probably depends what side of the plane people were sitting. CeeCee Lyles and Felt get disconnected at about the same time, but there are some other calls that appear to be still ongoing then. The times are only approximate anyway.

On edit: found this:
"Mobile telephones and satellite televisions in the Indian Lake area did not work at the time of the crash, he said."
On website banned by DU, so no link. Just google part of the quote in inverted commas to find where I got it from.

I'm sure there was another quote from a "reputable" source.

[petgoat]

20. The disruption I remember was reported in "True Lies"

http://gnn.tv/articles/717/True_Lies


A guy first became aware of flight 93's approach when the lights dimmed in his building.

Later he attended some kind of conference out of state and was talking about his experience,
and someone who claimed to be ex-Air Force said the light dimming was due to some kind of
electromagnetic target fixing or avionics disruption that would precede a missile attack.

[mirandapriestly]

12. I guess speed matters because

the phones goes in and out of frequencies, and, yeah, the antenna aren't pointed "up".
I never thought of the contradiction of beliefs on 93, it is the strangest seeming because of our familiarity with the passengers (or so we think) and events, even though it's probably not true.

[savemefromdumbya]

11. when Mossaoui has been tried etc are they going to release tapes

[mirandapriestly]

13. Speaking of Moussaoui...

I heard his defense was going to be that the FBI knew more than he did, (so how can he be tried for not preventing it?) He is such an obvious scapegoat , It makes me sick. The defense tried to get Curt Weldon to talk (because of his Able Danger knowledge), but he doesn't want to help a "thug" like Moussaoui, and is trying to get out of it.
It sure would be nice if the defense got some good information out there, but I'm programmed to expect constant disappointment in terms of justice in this country.

[greyl]

15. He's already plead guilty, right? nt

[mirandapriestly]

22. The judge told him to "think about it for a week"nt

[MrSammo1]

14. I hope the new movie

is as good as the A&E movie was!

the more attention the lie gets........the better!

[petgoat]

16. We need to respond to the movie, hit the exiting audiences

with leaflets a DVDs.

We need to get ready for this.

[MrSammo1]

21. That's a great idea.

It started wearing T-shirts on the subject of 911 about six months ago. You'd be amazed at the number of people that have come up to we and said, "You know about it?"