The 4th Airliner Shot Down?

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Wed Sep 12 00:47:45 PDT 2001


The airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania was the one where one of
the passengers called his family on the cellphone and said (after other things)
they were going to try to rush the hijackers.
I'm not sure if that's the same plane where the cellphone caller
said the hijackers claimed to have a bomb or not,
but even if they *said* that it doesn't mean they really had one.
So it could have been a bomb, or it could have been a fight in the cockpit.

At 11:29 PM 09/11/2001 -0700, John Young wrote:
>Why, for example, would jet-qualified pilots become involved in
>terrorist actions? Bin Laden had a jet pilot, trained in the US,
>who ferried bin Laden's jet from the US to Sudan. After
>a while he tried to quit the job but a Bin Laden aide
>threatened the pilot's family. The pilot pondered that
>then went to the US Embassy to cut a deal to confess what
>he knew in exchange for getting a new life in the US.
>
>We know from the Egypt air crash that some pilots are
>cooperatively suicidal when their families are at risk.

Some of the pilots may also have had family killed by Israel
or by US bombings in Iraq or the ten years of blockade --
today's (pre-bombing) Marin County CA paper had an opinion-page column
by somebody who just had permits rejected by the US export bureaucrats
for water chlorination systems they were trying to export to Iraq;
they smuggled them there anyway because unsafe water is *still* the
leading cause of death in Iraq.  Soldiers who are really angry
are sometimes willing to do suicidal attacks.





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