In the short run such assurances may please, and fob-off, a namby-pamby politician like Tony Blair and his touchy-feely wife Cherie.

Tuesday, November 20, 2001
(Key West, Florida, USA)

I HAVE been receiving many messages over the last weeks from friends and correspondents urging me to forego my curiosity about the crash of United Airlines flight 93. Becoming a conspiracy theorist, they say, will damage my integrity as a historian. Possibly so, and possibly not.

Inspired by the files posted on the website www.flight93crash.com which we have partly mirrored on our own website, American heavyweight journalists have seemingly at last begun to do their duty and investigate what really happened to United Flight 93. -- the "fourth airliner" which crashed into the field in Pennsylvanbika on Sept. 11, 2001.

It is proper to comment on what, to me, makes this story important in the wider scheme of things. In my view, in a warlike situation -- because this is still not legally a war -- a government has a right to take certain hard decisions; but it should think long and hard before deceiving its own people about them. The truth will always out.

The United States people, and with it the world, have been invited to accept the justification offered by Washington and the Pentagon for their attacks on the people of Afghanistan, who have done no demonstrable harm to the United States, because of the occasional verbal assurances offered by the President, George W Bush, that he has proof that the Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, whom the Afghanistan people are (or were) housing, was the mastermind behind both the criminal attacks on the World Trade Center and the pre-emptive strike, delivered by equally criminal means, against the Pentagon. The only evidence we have seen however suggests that none of the perpetrators (the alleged hijackers) was an Afghan citizen or associated with Bin Laden.

Despite the flabby and diminishing protests of America's allies, the Bush regime has offered no proof other than to hint that they have it from secretly intercepted conversations of Bin Laden associates.

Why are they still secret, those intercepts? It is by now no secret that the United States government regularly eavesdrops and records, world-wide, the conversations of criminals and others who are so foolish as to conduct them by cellphones, or indeed by any telephone communication partially transmitted by microwave links.

In the short run such assurances may please, and fob-off, a namby-pamby politician like Tony Blair and his touchy-feely wife Cherie. But in the long run they will not satisfied current, or for that matter future, historians with a harder-nosed attitude towards proof and the rules of evidence.

Blair's own colleagues are scathing about his gullibility. His own government, posting the current Bin Laden dossier on its No. 10 Downing-street website, is careful to put at its head a formal and shameful disclaimer, reading:

This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a court of law. Intelligence often cannot be used evidentially, due both to the strict rules of admissibility and to the need to protect the safety of sources. But on the basis of all the information available HMG [Her Majesty's Government] is confident of its conclusions as expressed in this document.

It thus appears that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of citizens of Afghanistan, a country upon whom the United States and Britain have not formally declared war, are being killed by the most brutal means including cluster-bombs and the giant "daisy-cutter" vacuum-blast bombs, although we have only the President's word for any involvement of their country in the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.

YES, the president's word: That is why, until they produce better evidence, the word of the present Washington government matters.

And that brings us back to the ill-fated fourth plane that day, United Airlines 93, which crashed for no good reason outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We have argued ever since that same ugly morning

• that in all likelihood the plane was shot down on Bush's orders, in the belief it was heading for the White House;
• that almost at once it became clear that the hijackers had already been overwhelmed by a handful of brave passengers, so the plane's destruction had been a terrible mistake;
• that his staff at once put out the story that it was known to have been on a collision course with the White House, or even with his own plane Air Force One;
• that he ordered the fighter pilot and the man's superior officers to meet him at Offutt airforce base, Omaha, where they were sworn to secrecy; and
• that the FBI, which under J Edgar Hoover was an agency famed for its puritanical probity, is involved in the resulting cover-up

As an Englishman, I feel bound to add a piece of mischief: I would not personally sorrow if the already empty, evacuated White House had been hit. We have after all burned it down before, which is how it acquired its name. The multi-millionaire Mr Bush could then have experienced, albeit briefly, the plight of homelessness which is familiar to so many of his citizens.

I feel however that it was more likely that the plane was targeted on one of the nuclear power plants, to unleash a Chernobyl disaster; or on the Capitol building, one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture on earth. The television cameras also seem to have anticipated the latter, as they focused the glare of their telephoto lenses on its glistening sunlit dome throughout much of that awful morning, with all the morbid curiosity of the crowds flocking around the gallows on Tyburn Hill.

The government had however at once denied that the Pennsylvania plane had been shot down. George Bush appears to have snared himself inextricably in the tangled web he first wove that morning. Fortunately for him, the press seemed for weeks to be either playing along in the spirit of patriotic belief, or too lazy to investigate.

All the greater is the pleasure with which this website now reproduces and preserves the first article to show that the press has begun to wake up. Written by William Bunch for the Philadelphia Daily News it is entitled

We know it crashed, but not why

[click for article]

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