Morons saved by even bigger Morons?
Amazing! Terror Morons saved WatchGuard Morons from big disaster!
Please read this light entertainment story. The illogical tenacity to cling to the official 19 arabs conspiracy theory is bringing about involuntary contortions. In the 911=inside job REAL world things don't rely on amazing aerial stunts. CIA planted stories make no sense when read carefully.EWMAN/CREED: Catastrophe contained
Rick Newman and Patrick Creed
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Remains of the Pentagon after a terrorist attack on Tues. September 11, 2001. (Gerald Herbert/ The Washington Times)
COMMENTARY:
As the Pentagon Memorial opens today, Americans will recall that Sept. 11, 2001, wasn't just a New York phenomenon. For most of us, images of the Twin Towers burning, collapsing and smoldering form the mental slide show that defines our memory of that awful day. But events along the Potomac that Sept. 11 could have rivaled the unthinkable horror along the Hudson. Hundreds more could have been killed by the Boeing757 that slammed into the Pentagon - including much of the military leadership. And the nation's military headquarters could easily have been knocked out of commission, without a backup facility firmly in place.
As it turned out, the death toll at the Pentagon - 184 - stunned people who worked there, but it was a fraction of the 2,750 killed in New York. In stark contrast to the collapsed Towers, the Pentagon opened for business on Sept. 12 (though just barely). And within 14 months, the Pentagon was entirely rebuilt, while Ground Zero in New York was still a vast, dismal crater yielding remains.
But chance developments - or better planning by the hijackers - could have inflicted much more damage on the Pentagon and the U.S. military. Hani Hanjour, a Saudi believed to be at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 after it was hijacked, was a marginal pilot who had never flown a commercial jet. His approach to the Pentagon was wobbly and erratic. Yet at roughly 9:37 a.m., he managed to fly the 757 smack into the first floor of the Pentagon's western wall, at 530 miles per hour. The force of the impact and the fire that followed consumed 800,000 square feet of office space - an area bigger than the Mall of America. On a normal workday, more than 5,000 people would have been working in that area.
Yet that part of the Pentagon was under renovation at the time, with many of the offices vacant. The hijackers could have known that: Plenty of newspaper reports and even Defense Department press releases detailed the renovation plans, with diagrams showing which parts of the building would be under construction, and when.
Had the terrorists flown Flight 77 into a fully occupied wing of the building, there's little doubt the death toll would have been much higher. Hitting the third floor instead of the first would have sent explosive force both upward and downward, leaving little or no time for people on the Pentagon's upper floors to escape. It was probably beyond Hanjour's capabilities, but if he had managed to nose-dive the plane into an internal part of the building, instead of smashing into one of the sides, the fire and smoke could have circumnavigated the structure instead of stopping on one side. That would have been a nightmare scenario for firefighters; as it was, they had great difficulty getting fire equipment into the building's center courtyard and pressing in on the fire from a mere two sides.
The terrorists also could have known enough about the Pentagon's leaders to target some of them directly. The Defense Department itself had published the location of the defense secretary's office in an easy-to-find history of the Pentagon. Anybody who took one of the public tours of the Pentagon - which back then required only a photo ID - would have been able to discern where many of the Joint Staff offices were located.
Had Flight 77 struck that side of the building, the attack could have paralyzed the Defense Department. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in his office that day. So was his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and many other top officials who line the corridors around the secretary's office.
Instead, when Flight 77 flew through the wall on the opposite side of the Pentagon, people on the defense secretary's side merely felt a shudder, like a freight elevator coming to a hard landing.
Yet even with the fire on the other side of the building, it was touch-and-go inside the Pentagon's vital areas. In the National Military Command Center - the Joint Staff's "war room" - haze built as smoke drifting over the Pentagon wafted in through ventilation fans on the roof. Fire chiefs wondered why the Pentagon brass didn't bug out and move to a backup facility. But there was no backup facility, not initially, anyway. Early in the day, the Pentagon began to activate Site R, the secret backup command center in the Maryland woods, near Camp David.
But it took several hours to augment the skeleton crews manning the site, fly senior leaders there by helicopter, and fully establish secure communications. Until that happened, the NMCC and the ESC represented a single point of failure in the military chain of command. Had the terrorists taken out that part of the Pentagon, Sept. 11 could have represented the biggest disruption ever to America's military leadership.
There are a lot of what-if scenarios relating to Sept. 11, of course. What if United 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa., killing 40, had made it all the way to Washington? What would it have struck? What if more planes had been hijacked? What if fighter jets had been in place to shoot down the doomed planes? What if the hijackers had missed their targets altogether?
They're not just academic questions. At the Pentagon, the what-if scenarios have served as a vulnerability assessment, helping make backup facilities and emergency procedures now more robust. Key offices now reside in more secure locations. Vulnerabilities exposed on Sept. 11 (including those discussed in this article) have been rectified.
Understanding the flaws in the hijacking plan also helps dispel some of the mystique of al Qaeda. The Sept. 11 attacks were a one-time masterstroke that exploited weaknesses we didn't even know existed. But al Qaeda also failed to learn basic facts sitting in plain view.
Then there are the Pentagon victims. Hundreds of their survivors are gathering today on the Pentagon's western lawn , for the dedication of the first national Sept. 11 memorial, a two-acre park aligned with the path Flight 77 took in its final second. For each victim there is a bench, inscribed with his or her name, and a small reflecting pool underneath. It's a subtle, understated place that would be easy to overlook if you didn't know it was there. The 184 people it honors died just as tragically as the victims in Manhattan - but then they became a sidebar to the even more harrowing narrative that emerged from New York. Today, for a moment, they command America's attention.
Rick Newman and Patrick Creed are co-authors of "Firefight: The Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11," published by Ballantine in May.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/11/catastrophe-contained/
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For air controller, terror still vivid 7 years later
Cleveland Center air-traffic controller John Werth had never heard anything like it — the sounds of an animalistic struggle crackling over his radio. He heard screaming, hollering and two guttural groans coming from the cockpit.
The horror of one of the four 9/11 suicide hijackings was playing out, Werth tells USA TODAY in his first public recounting of the day that forever changed America.
"I lost 40 people that day," Werth says of the desperate efforts he and his colleagues made to communicate with Flight 93 and keep other planes away from it until the jet crashed in a rural Pennsylvania field.
Today, the story of that flight is well known — in books, movies and tales of heroism about the passengers who tried to retake the jet from four al-Qaeda terrorists, and probably prevented an attack on the White House or U.S. Capitol. For Werth, it's been a vivid — if largely private — reality. He was there. He heard it all.
Werth's account provides new details about what happened as the hijacking unfolded and how the chaos in the skies caused alarm and confusion for controllers and national security forces.
For seven years, Werth, 61, hasn't told his story publicly, initially because he was not allowed to because of a government subpoena related to the prosecution of al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, and later because Werth didn't want the attention. Now, Werth's ready to discuss it and set the record straight.
It was Werth who heard the transmission from Flight 93 that suggested a bomb was aboard. The transmission, in a thick accent and broken English, likely was from hijacker pilot Ziad Jarrah, the 9/11 Commission determined later.
The bomb was apparently a bluff, a threat the hijackers used to try to control the passengers.
At the time, Werth says, it created a new level of alarm among the controllers clearing other planes out of the wayward path of Flight 93, which had departed from Newark, N.J., that morning and flown into Ohio before making a U-turn toward Washington.
What if, Werth wondered, the hijackers had a bomb — maybe even a nuclear device? How far would Werth have to keep other jets from a nuclear bomb's shock wave? Twenty miles? Thirty?
Every time Werth turned other planes away from Flight 93, the hijacked jet seemed to surge toward them, he recalls, raising questions about what the hijackers were trying to do. At the time, he knew that some passenger jets were missing and that one had hit a World Trade Center tower in New York.
"I'm saying, 'What is he doing?' " Werth recalls. " 'Is this about a midair collision,' " an attempt to ram another passenger jet with Flight 93?
All the while, uncertainty gripped the nation — and Cleveland Center, which oversees a wide swath of the nation's skies between Chicago and New York.
'Something was really off'
That morning began routinely for Werth as he sat in front of his radar screen and radio, surrounded by maps and computers. Soon, the news began trickling down to him.
Two jets were "lost" over New York. Someone said a small plane (actually a jet, it turned out) had hit the World Trade Center in New York. A supervisor told him to try to contact American Airlines Flight 77, which had gone missing over Kentucky.
"That's when I knew something was really off," he says.
He was also told to keep an eye on Delta Air Lines Flight 1989, which had taken off from Boston. Amid the confusion, controllers in Boston worried it was connected to the jets missing in New York. Those jets, American Airlines Flight 11 and United 175, also had departed from Boston.
Finally came word that a second plane, a large jet, had hit New York's twin towers.
The pilots of Flight 93, headed west to San Francisco from Newark, arrived at 9:24 a.m. in Werth's control sector, a roughly 100-by-100-mile patch in the Cleveland area that handles only high-altitude traffic. The Boeing 757 carried seven crewmembers and 37 passengers, including the four hijackers. Within four minutes of arriving in Werth's sector, according to The 9/11 Commission Report and other government documents, the hijackers had launched a violent takeover of the jet.
During the struggle, one of the pilots tried to make a distress call or inadvertently switched on the radio's microphone, allowing Werth and other planes in the area to overhear what was happening aboard Flight 93.
Werth says most of the sounds of the struggle were unintelligible. There were screams and groans. Werth recalls turning to another controller. "I looked at him and said, 'Dave, did that sound the same to you as it did to me?' He just kind of looked at me wide-eyed and nodded."
He knew another flight was probably under attack, but which one? "Somebody call Cleveland?" he radioed. No one replied.
Thirty-three seconds later came a second broadcast from the cockpit. It also had the sounds of a struggle, but this time Werth made out a few words: "Get out of here. Get out of here."
About that time, Flight 93 descended about 700 feet. By then, Werth was pretty sure the flight had been hijacked. What were the hijackers up to? "Why do they want to be over Cleveland? Why are they this far west? I thought at first, well, you've got the Sears Tower (in Chicago) straight west," he says.
There were no procedures or training exercises for such an emergency, Werth says, so he made it up as he went along. He asked other crews whether they had heard the scuffle over the radio. When they replied, he knew they were still OK.
The hijacked jet became erratic. It sped up and started gaining on another United flight. Werth commanded the second jet to turn right. Seconds later, Flight 93 turned to the right, too.
Minutes later, as Flight 93 climbed from 35,000 to 41,000 feet, Werth told Delta Flight 1989 to turn right to clear it away from the hijacked jet. Then Flight 93 made a 180-degree turn back toward the east, forcing Werth to move the Delta flight back out of the way. "Delta '89, we're gonna go the other way," he radioed.
As Flight 93 passed over Akron, headed by that time in the direction of Washington, Werth heard a supervisor call out that a jet had just struck the Pentagon.
'It's the Delta!'
Before United 93 had even checked in with Werth, a supervisor had asked him to watch Delta 1989, a westbound flight from Boston to Los Angeles. It was 60 miles east of his sector, flying behind the United jet.
Werth has never been sure who called the facility to warn about the flight or why, and other accounts have been murky. The flight was a Boeing 767 like two other hijacked flights out of Boston. It would have been logical to suspect that it, too, might have been a target.
As Werth struggled to keep other jets away from United 93, he had to turn the Delta flight several times. The pilots responded normally. He couldn't be sure of anything that day, but it seemed a safe bet that the Delta flight hadn't been hijacked.
However, someone in the military seemed to have mixed up the Delta flight with the hijacked jet. A supervisor rushed up to Werth and said, "It's the Delta, it's the Delta!" Werth recalls. She told him that a military liaison on the phone had confirmed that the Delta jet was hijacked.
Werth told her he was pretty sure United 93 had been hijacked, not the Delta one. A few moments later, she came back.
"He's fine — at least for now," Werth told her.
After consulting again on the phone, she returned again. "They said it's a confirmed hijack and a bomb threat," she told him. It was United 93 that had made the bomb threats, Werth thought. That convinced him they had to be confusing the two flights.
"Tell them they're full of it!" Werth says he replied. "I thought, 'God, don't (have military jets that were being scrambled) go after the wrong plane.' "
At 9:44 a.m., the Delta pilots requested a change of course from Werth. The same concerns about their safety had been passed on to the company, and dispatchers had ordered it to land as soon as possible in Cleveland.
As it turned out, the military was in no position to shoot down Delta 1989, but Werth didn't know that. He followed the flight on radar until it landed safely.
Flight 93 didn't make another radio transmission after 9:39 a.m. Werth watched on radar as the jet crashed near Shanksville, Pa., at 10:03.
A bond with Flight 93
Werth retired in 2003 without ever having made an air-traffic error during his 32-year tenure, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, a remarkable record in an era when computers automatically track when planes get too close together.
He says he has focused his life on his wife, Mary Kay, and his passion, golf. He says he has watched with occasional outrage as he has been portrayed in movies and books about 9/11 by people who had never spoken to him.
Today, he will attend a memorial service in Shanksville for the crew and passengers of Flight 93. He's not sentimental or emotional about that day, but he feels a bond with the victims.
"It's hard, when you're a controller, to lose an aircraft," he says. "When there is absolutely nothing you can do and you're not in control, it's doubly hard."
| RELATED |
FORT LEE - They remember the smell.
The day seven years ago is alive in the memories of three Army officials at Fort Lee.
They remember the shock, the chaos, the pain, the sacrifice, the heroism of that day. And then they remember the smell of burn ing jet fuel and of death.
"Sometimes the smell just hits me," said Chaplain James E. Walker, 52, now a colonel and Fort Lee's installation chaplain. "You can't get over it -- it's still there."
The Pentagon Memorial, in remembrance of the lives lost during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, will open to the public today from 7 to 9 p.m. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will attend a 9:30 a.m. dedication of the memorial.
At 9:37 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, five terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon -- the headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department -- in Arlington County.
The airliner's impact killed 184 people: 59 passengers and crew members on the plane and 125 people in the building.
The Boeing 757 penetrated three of the Pentagon's five concentric rings of offices. The plane's thousands of gallons of pungent fuel fed a savage fire.
. . .
Lee Ramsey was on the job as an Army civilian analyst in the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
"I could smell the jet fuel and ashes already in the air -- and you could feel the heat, even that far away," he said.
"I lost six friends" that day, said Ramsey, 55, a Chester resident who is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War and Fort Lee's director of resource management.
Col. Gregory Johansen, who is retiring as the assistant commandant of the Quartermaster Center and School at Fort Lee, was an Army logistics staff officer at the Pentagon.
"If you've ever been around death -- I've been around death -- if you've ever been around burnt flesh, that's a smell you'll never forget," the combat veteran said.
That's what comes back to Johansen when he thinks of Sept. 11: "the smell."
The plane hit with a "ka-whoom" that shook the building, he said. "We had stuff flying all over the building."
Johansen went back into the burning, wrecked Pentagon to try to help others escape, though he was injured, disoriented and blinded by the smoke, dust and sprinkler fog.
"You could stick your arm out and you couldn't see 3 feet," said the Army ranger, who is 53 and lives in Colonial Heights. "Women were crying, people were yelling."
Johansen took hold of a man by the arm. "He yelled, 'That hurts.' I felt something funny. . . . It was burned skin."
. . .
That morning, Walker had intended to go to the Army's personnel command office, but he was in a Pentagon dentist's chair, getting a filling and having his teeth cleaned when Flight 77 hit the building -- in the personnel command offices.
"If I'd gone to Human Resources Command, I would have been a victim of 9/11 myself," he said.
Walker joined with other chaplains working with the emergency medical teams and the injured and the dying. "There were chaplains praying, touching shoulders, assuring them that God was there with them," he said.
"There was such emotion," said Walker, who now lives in Colonial Heights. "I said, 'Lord, this is really, really bad.'"
Immediately after the attack, no one really knew exactly what had happened, Johansen said, but sometimes, at great risk to themselves, men and women stepped up to take the lead to help others.
"You had great Army people, all the services, really, coming together," he said, "people volunteering to go back into the building."
. . .
In the days after the attack, the Baptist chaplain stayed on duty at the Pentagon to minister to the round-the-clock responders -- and the dead.
"We had to be there to pray for the [responders] shift," he said, "and the remains, the body parts, . . . to bring human dignity and care to those people we'd lost."
"It will be forever in my mind," Johansen said of the Sept. 11 attack.
"It's something that will be with me for the rest of my life," he said, "because I was there."
Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or pbacque@timesdispatch.com.
Sept. 11: Former pilot recalls the day that "Everything had changed"
Seven years ago, North American Airlines pilot Frank "Pete" Abbott began his day the way he began every other working day -- with an hour commute from his Connecticut home to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Abbott, now retired and a Sun City Hilton Head resident, was scheduled to fly 202 passengers to Trinidad on a Boeing 757 just after 9 a.m. But that flight, like hundreds of others, never got off the ground that day.
As he crossed the Whitestone Bridge over the East River, the late-summer sun was rising on a picture-perfect Manhattan skyline.
During that drive, Abbott said, he noticed the prominence of the World Trade Center towers. As a young man in New York in the 1960s and '70s, he remembered when the towers were being built.
Abbottpiloted thousands of flights during his career. But it was that flight -- the one that never left the runway on Sept. 11, 2001 -- that remains fixed in his mind six years after his retirement.
Abbott, two other pilots, seven crew members and 202 passengers left their gate around 8:45 a.m. for the flight to Trinidad. The plane was 11th in line for takeoff.
That's when Abbott and his two co-pilots began to hear radio chatter between New York Police Department helicopters and the JFK control tower: A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center.
The three thought it might have been a small private airplane that had tried to fly between the towers.
Every one of the 10 flights ahead of them took off as scheduled.
The crew then turned the corner onto runway 31-L, where they would align directly with the World Trade Center.
That's when they saw the smoke and flames boiling from one tower.
"This was not a small plane," Abbott said.
It was 8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the north tower with 92 people on board.
The control tower told Abbott and his co-pilots to taxi into position and hold for departure clearance.
They got the clearance.
Moments later, the crew witnessed what until that day was the unthinkable.
At 9:03 a.m., a Boeing 757 slammed into the south tower and exploded into flames. United Airlines Flight 175, which had departed from Boston en route to Los Angeles, was carrying 65 people.
"We were shocked. We didn't know what to think," Abbott said Tuesday at his Sun City home. "We didn't know what was going on. Control didn't know what was going on."
That's when the control tower canceled takeoff clearance for Abbott's flight.
Minutes later, the control tower told the crew to make its own way back to the departing gate.
"We're evacuating the tower," a controller said over the radio.
"Good luck and good-bye."
In his 38-year career as a pilot, Abbott had never seen or heard of a control tower evacuation. Despite his growing confusion and worry, he and his crew had to maintain a professional demeanorto avoid panicking the passengers.
The crew explained to the passengers that they didn't know what had happened, but that the plane must return to the gate.
"As soon as we got back to the gate, security took us out of the cockpit and rushed us away from the aircraft," he said.
By 9:17 a.m., the Federal Aviation Administration had shut down all New York City area airports.
Four minutes later, the FAA halted all flights at U.S. airports -- the first time in history air traffic has been halted nationwide.
All roads and bridges in the area were closed.
Still unsure exactly what had happened, Abbott headed to an airport restaurant to watch television news coverage.
The news grew worse.
American Airlines Flight 77 from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., had crashed into the Pentagon with 64 people on board.
The Twin Towers had collapsed.
United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark had crashed in Somerset County, Pa., carrying 44 people.
After talking to his daughter in Connecticut, the stunned pilot made his way back home.
The commute that lasted an hour that morning took Abbott more than eight hours that evening. The glittering skyline he remembered from hours earlier was shrouded in clouds of smoke.
It was four days before Abbott returned to JFK to pilot his next flight.
Abbott, who is reserved about talking about what happened that day, has this to say about that September day seven years ago.
"A prominent part of the skyline was not there anymore. Everything had changed."
http://www.islandpacket.com/news/local/story/607285.html
TN EDITORIAL: May we stand as one again
Last Modified: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 8:48 p.m.
It helps to go back to the archives for details.
Passenger jetliners, both Boeing 767s, crashed into the twin towers in New York City at 8:48 and 9:03 a.m. American flight 77, a Boeing 757, crashed into the Pentagon at 9:45 a.m. Twenty-five minutes later United flight 93 plummeted to the ground in Somerset County, Pa. Thanks to the passengers’ uprising, it crashed into an isolated field instead of the Capitol or the White House.
It was the most devastating attack on Americans since Pearl Harbor and the largest death toll of civilians on American soil from a terror attack. When terrorism struck home, we were all Americans. We shed tears for the tragic loss of life of those everyday office workers. We mourned the loss of the 350 firefighters and 70 police officers who ran into the burning towers to help victims. We raged against an enemy most of us hardly knew we had. We wondered how a safe and secure world defined by the dotcom bubble, stem cell research and the disappearance of Gary Condit’s intern could turn upside down so quickly.
The one good thing about Sept. 11 was a shared feeling: We had been attacked as one, and we would respond as one. The terrorists had not attacked Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, country folk or city dwellers. The terrorists attacked us for being Americans, and as Americans we would respond.
President Bush could have capitalized on that moment in history to command us to conserve energy so we would be less dependent on the oil-rich region of the world that bred the terrorist culture. He could have resisted his political strategists’ decision to use Sept. 11 as a wedge to defeat those who favored a less hard-fisted response. Yet George W. Bush gets too little credit for the fact that another Sept. 11 has not taken place on U.S. soil since that day. Too few are willing to give Bush credit for his single-minded determination to keep the country safe.
We squandered the chance to sustain the one positive residue of that terrible day — a unity of national spirit. No one bottled it for future years.
Today John McCain and Barack Obama will set aside politics and stand together at Ground Zero and renew that spirit of America as one country, indivisible. The gesture rings a little hollow, given the rancor since the party conventions. But we give them the benefit the doubt because observing and remembering Sept. 11 is that important.
“In smoke-filled corridors and on the steps of the Capitol; at blood banks and at vigils — we were united as one American family,” McCain and Obama said in a joint statement. Today, they said, they will “put aside politics and come together to renew that unity, to honor the memory of each and every American who died, and to grieve with the families and friends who lost loved ones.”
We all should join them to remember that dark day in our history and renew the unity.
http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20080911/OPINION/809100249/1016/opinion02&title=TN_EDITORIAL__May_we_stand_as_one_again
A memorial service honoring the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks will be held today at the Riverside County Administrative Center in what will be the county’s first formal 9/11 remembrance ceremony.
“Riverside County Remembers” will begin at 7 a.m. and include a slide show, video presentation and review of what steps the county has taken since 9/11 to prepare for man-made and natural disasters, according to county Economic Development Agency spokesman Tom Freeman.
He said the EDA-arranged service is expected to last about a half-hour.
“The program consists of very moving still photographs and video, along with recorded music provided courtesy of the U.S. Army Band,” Freeman said yesterday. “There will be 11 people reading the names of all 54 Californians killed on September 11th either on (United) Flight 93 or in the (World Trade Center) towers in New York.”
Riverside County Supervisor Bob Buster will reflect on where he was at the time and what he remembers about the attacks, as well as discuss “what the county has done since that time to prepare itself for terror attacks and natural or man-made disasters,” Freeman said.
Roughly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks when al-Qaida terrorists hijacked commercial airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Forty-four passengers and crew aboard United Flight 93 died when the Boeing 757 plowed into a field in Shanksville, Pa., as passengers stormed the cockpit in an attempt to retake the jet from hijackers.
Freeman said Thursday’s service is the first board-sponsored 9/11 memorial service.
He expected a “good turn-out” of county employees and residents. Hand- held American flags will be offered to the first 175 guests to arrive, he said.
At 10 a.m., the city of Riverside will hold a dedication ceremony outside a fire station in recognition of the Riverside firefighters who aided in rescue and recovery operations at the World Trade Center and Pentagon shortly after the 9/11 attacks.
A “Tripod” sculpture by renowned artist James Rosati that previously sat outside City Hall will be rededicated in front of Fire Station No. 5, located at 5883 Arlington Ave., as part of the Sept. 11, 2001, remembrance service, according to city spokesman Austin Carter.
He said another piece created by Rosati in 1969 and placed at the WTC was destroyed when the towers collapsed.
http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080911/NEWS01/80911004
OBERLIN, Ohio -- He spent most of his life controlling airplanes. But on this day seven years ago, United Flight 93 was beyond control.
Cleveland Center air traffic controller John Werth had never heard anything like it -- the sounds of an animalistic struggle crackling over his radio. He heard screaming, hollering and two guttural groans coming from the cockpit. The horror of one of the four 9/11 suicide hijackings was playing out, Werth told USA Today in his first public recounting of the day that forever changed America.
"I lost 40 people that day," Werth said of the desperate efforts he and his colleagues made to communicate with Flight 93 and keep other planes away from it until the jet went down in a rural Pennsylvania field.
Today, the story of that flight is well known. For Werth, who retired in 2003, it has been a vivid -- if largely suppressed -- reality.
Werth's account provides new details about what happened as the hijacking unfolded.
For seven years, Werth, 61, hasn't told his story publicly, initially because he was not allowed to because of a government subpoena and later because he didn't want the attention. Now, Werth's ready to discuss it and wants to set the record straight.
It was Werth who heard the transmission from Flight 93 that suggested a bomb was aboard. The transmission, in a thick accent and broken English, was from hijacker pilot Ziad Jarrah, the 9/11 Commission determined later.
The bomb was a bluff, a threat the hijackers used to try to control the passengers.
At the time, Werth said, it created a new level of alarm among the few controllers clearing other planes out of the wayward path of Flight 93, which had departed Newark, N.J., that morning and flown into Ohio before making a U-turn toward Washington.
What if, Werth and the other controllers wondered, the hijackers had some sort of a bomb -- maybe even a nuclear device? How far would Werth have to keep other jets away?
Every time Werth turned other planes away from Flight 93, the hijacked jet seemed to surge toward them, he recalled, raising questions among controllers about what the hijackers were trying to do. At the time, he knew that some passenger jets were missing, and that one had hit a World Trade Center tower in New York.
"I'm saying, 'What is he doing?' " Werth recalled.
All the while, uncertainty gripped the nation -- and Cleveland Center, which oversees a wide swath of the nation's skies between Chicago and New York.
'Something was really off'
That morning began routinely for Werth as he sat in front of his radar screen and radio. Soon, the news began trickling down to him.
Two jets were lost over New York. Someone mentioned that a small plane hit the World Trade Center in New York. A supervisor told him to try to contact American Airlines Flight 77, which had gone missing over Kentucky.
"That's when I knew something was really off," he said.
He was also told to keep an eye on Delta Air Lines Flight 1989, which had taken off from Boston. In the confusion, controllers in Boston worried it was connected to the jets missing in New York. Those jets, American Airlines Flight 11 and United 175, also had departed from Boston.
Finally word came that a second plane, a large jet, had hit New York's twin towers.
The pilots of Flight 93, headed west to San Francisco from Newark, arrived at 9:24 a.m. in Werth's control sector, a roughly 100-mile-by-100-mile patch in the Cleveland area that handles only traffic at 33,000 feet and above. The Boeing 757 carried seven crew members and 37 passengers, including the four hijackers. Within four minutes after the jet arrived in Werth's sector, according to the 9/11 Commission Report and other government documents, the hijackers had launched a violent takeover of the jet.
During the struggle, one of the pilots tried to make a distress call or inadvertently switched on the radio's microphone.
Werth said most of the sounds of the struggle were unintelligible. There were screams and groans. He knew another flight was probably under attack, but which one?
Thirty-three seconds later a second broadcast came from the cockpit. It, too, had the sounds of a struggle, but this time Werth made out a few words: "Get out of here. Get out of here." About that time, Flight 93 descended about 700 feet. Werth said that by then he was pretty sure the United flight had been hijacked.
There were no procedures or training exercises for such an emergency, Werth said, so he made it up as he went along.
The hijacked jet became erratic. It sped up and started gaining on another United flight. Werth commanded the second jet to turn right. Seconds later, Flight 93 turned to the right, too.
Minutes later, as Flight 93 climbed from 35,000 to 41,000 feet, Werth told Delta Flight 1989 to turn right to clear it away from the hijacked jet. Then Flight 93 made a 180-degree turn back toward the east, forcing Werth to move the Delta flight back out of the way.
As Flight 93 passed over Akron, headed by that time in the direction of Washington, Werth heard a supervisor yell out that a jet had just struck the Pentagon.
'It's the Delta!'
Before United 93 had even checked in with Werth, a supervisor had asked him to watch Delta 1989, a westbound flight from Boston to Los Angeles. It was 60 miles east of his sector, flying behind the United jet.
Werth has never been sure who called the facility to warn about the flight or why, and other accounts have been murky.
As Werth struggled to keep other jets away from United 93, he had to turn the Delta flight several times. The pilots responded normally. He couldn't be sure of anything that day, but it seemed a safe bet that the Delta flight hadn't been hijacked.
However, Werth recalls, someone in the military seemed to have mixed up the Delta flight with the hijacked United jet. A supervisor rushed up to Werth and said, "It's the Delta!" Werth recalled. She told him that a military liaison on the phone had confirmed that the Delta jet was hijacked.
Werth told her he was pretty sure United 93 had been hijacked, not the Delta one. A few moments later, she came back.
"He's fine -- at least for now," Werth told her.
At 9:44 a.m., the Delta pilots requested a change of course from Werth.
Flight 93 didn't make another radio transmission after 9:39 a.m. Werth watched on radar as the jet went down near Shanksville, Pa., at 10:06.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080911/NEWS07/809110406
Seven years later: Remembering the heroes of Flight 93
Flowers are placed on the Flight 93 Crew Monument in front of Flight Attendant, Lorraine Grace Bay's memorial. The Flight 93 Crew Monument is located in the Flight 93 Chapel Heroes Garden in Stutzmantown Pa. ">
By Elaine Blaisdell
Flowers are placed on the Flight 93 Crew Monument in front of Flight Attendant, Lorraine Grace Bay's memorial. The Flight 93 Crew Monument is located in the Flight 93 Chapel Heroes Garden in Stutzmantown Pa.
Flight 93 flag">
Photo by Elaine BlaisdellA cross with various trinkets and mementos stands in memorial of the heroes of Flight 93.">
Photo by Elaine BlaisdellA Fire fighter's jacket from the Shanksville Fire Department is left on the memorial wall at the temporary Flight 93 National Memorial. ">
Photo by NoneThese Flags are displayed at the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel in Stutzmantown Pa. in honor of the 40 heroes who risked and lost their lives.">
It’s been seven years. Although the grass has covered the crater where United Flight 93 crashed, the scars still run deep.
From all over the world they come. Over 150,000 visitors a year journey to the temporary Flight 93 National Memorial. To visit the place where family, friends, and fellow Americans have their final resting place.
They visit for a breadth of reasons, from paying respects, to seeing the crash site. Whatever the reason, most leave the memorial with a personal emotional experience.
The day before the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks on America, many had tears in their eyes as they touched the cold stone memorials erected in memory of the heroes of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa.
For Sara Jackson, of Cullowhee, N.C., this was a spiritual journey. Jackson — who has been wanting to visit the memorial for seven years — finally decided to make the ten-hour trip to Pennsylvania. She was so adamant to visit the memorial that she slept in her car along the way.
“I just want to observe as much as I can,” she said. “For me, coming here is a spiritual renewal to help me put away my negative thoughts about the way things were handled by President Bush. I felt the need to be in the presence of heros.”
For Kellie Mendenhall, the journey was about visiting the site. Mendenhall, of Taneytown, Md., took a side trip to the memorial as she traveled to South Dakota. She’s a disaster responder for the American Red Cross and responded to the Pentagon the day of the attack. She spent three weeks at the Pentagon feeding meals to military personnel, FBI agents, and other officials processing the crime scene at the Pentagon. She also fed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and workers who were on lockdown.
“Working with the Red Cross is wonderful,” she said. “I always come home feeling like I made a positive influence in someone’s life. I always come home appreciative of what I have.”
For others, the memorial has become a part of their everyday life. Forty-five volunteer ambassadors take turns manning two hour shifts to give the public a detailed, up-to-date account of the events that shaped America’s young century.
One of these ambassadors is Sally Ware of Shanksville.
“We usually see about 500 people a day, and we’re busy year round,” she said. We’ve seen people from all over the world — from Japan to Australia.”
Ware added that she was interviewed by a Russian reporter.
Ware and the volunteers meet a couple times a year to compile the the latest information from the 9/11 Commission.
On March 7, 2002, federal legislators introduced legislation [H.B. 3917] “To authorize a national memorial to commemorate the passengers and crew who gave their lives to advert the path of Flight 93, that was headed towards the Nation’s Capital.”
The Boeing 757-200 airplane had a capacity of 182 passengers, but was only carrying a total of 44 people. There were two pilots and five flight attendants, 33 passengers. And four terrorist.
Ware said that of those 40 people on Flight 93, ages ranged from age 20 to age 79.
“The plane came northwest from Pittsburgh at a 45-degree angle, crashing upside-down creating a crater 15 feet dee and 30 feet wide,” Ware said. “That (crater) was later backfilled and planted with grass.”
A new permanent memorial is being built on 15,000 acres of land near the crash site, with hopes of $58 million completion on September 11, 2011. A year-long international design competition was started to generate designs for the memorial. The winning design was announced on September 7, 2005 and was created by Paul Murdoch Architects of Los Angeles and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects.
“The new design will consist of a tower of voices, containing 40 large wind chimes, and will represent the last voices of the 40 heroes,” said Ware.
There will be an entry portal with concrete walls marking the flight path, with walls that are the exact height as the plane’s before it crashed, added Ware. Additonally, there will be ponds, a field of honor, and 40 memorial groves of red and sugar maple trees, a sacred ground site, and a western overlook.
Many fellow Americans, including Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain will gather at the Flight 93 today. He’s also attending a service at Ground Zero in New York City with presidential rival Sen. Barack Obama, both putting politics aside in unity.
The aftermath of September 11, 2001 still resounds in the heart of many Americans — it’s as if that terrible moment is frozen in time for many.
“It’s like the Kennedy assassination,” Jackson said. “You remember exactly where you were and what you were doing.”
And we always will.
http://www.newstribune.info/news/x55301392/
MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday likened the Georgian military assault on South Ossetia that led to last month's war to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
"Almost immediately after these events it occurred to me that for Russia, August 8, 2008 was almost like September 11, 2001 in the United States," Medvedev told Western foreign policy experts in Moscow.
Meanwhile in the USA
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“CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES, COME ON!” ROCKS GOP
911 protests are censored. You can see them on Russian TV only
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