Twenty Years Ago
Twenty years ago today, I had a class at the Computer Senmon Gakkou school in Toyama. I recall coming into the front office for the school, out of the snow. The staff there was excited, and asked if I’d heard the news. What news? They pointed to the TV mounted from the ceiling, where the news was playing. Very soon, they showed the clips available at the time, of the space shuttle Challenger blowing up. It was a devastating blow for me, as I had always been a fan of the space program. They showed it over and over again. Then I had to go to class.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, usually. But I am not one to dismiss them out of hand, either. From the evidence out there, I believe that Flight 93 was shot down and a panicked Bush administration didn’t want to admit it. I don’t believe, however, that Bush or his people knowingly manufactured 9/11. If the evidence is strong enough or compelling enough, then I’ll give credence to a theory, and will not allow fear of ridicule or popular disbelief sway me.
The Challenger disaster has always been a matter of suspicion for me. Before the shuttle lifted off, engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that made the twin boosters on either side of the main fuel tank (the big orange tank the shuttle rides on), warned that the cold temperatures could lead to the erosion of the O-rings holding the booster segments together. If the O-rings went, the shuttle would explode. NASA officials dismissed the warnings and went ahead with the launch.
The question is, why did they do that? NASA has been famous for canceling launches at the drop of a hat. Now they were receiving warnings that the shuttle might explode (in fact, Rockwell engineers also warned about ice damage to the orbiter), and they dismissed them? Mainstream reports hold that NASA had been embarrassed by delays and cancellations in 1985, and that was what compelled them to override safety concerns and launch anyway. However, I don’t fully buy that; it’s out of character with NASA protocols and past actions. And there is an alternate explanation which makes much more sense.
Politics has always influenced the space program. Presidents and other politicians, though disdainful of the money spent and often ignorant of the commercial value of the space program, are always instantly ready to bask in its light and use it to their political advantage. The selection of Morton Thiokol and the segmented booster design, in fact, was influenced by Thiokol being based in Utah, the home state of the senator in charge of the committee which made the decision to buy.
But the major political influence of that day was the fact that President Reagan was set to make his State of the Union address just hours after the launch, and boast about how we had just sent a schoolteacher into space. That administration was famously known for its love of theater and backdrop, and was intensely committed to playing up such drama to the hilt. Education was to be featured in the address, a schoolteacher was on the flight, and already NASA had pushed back the launch by a week. The week-long space flight was originally scheduled to be ending just as Reagan gave his address. Another delay, and Reagan would not be able to use the majestic flight and historic teacher-in-space to his political advantage. The wording from the address that he was scripted to use was this:
Tonight while I am speaking to you, a young secondary school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, is taking us all on the ultimate field trip, as she orbits the earth as the first citizen-passenger on the space shuttle.Christa McAuliffe’s journey is a prelude to the journeys of other Americans and our friends around the world who will be living and working together in the permanently manned space station in the mid-1990s, bringing a rich return of scientific, technical, and economic benefits to mankind.
Mrs. McAuliffe’s week in space is just one of the achievements in space which we have planned for the coming year.
Adding to the legitimacy of administration pressure to lift off on Tuesday was the abortive flight cancellation the previous weekend. Challenger was schedule to take off on Sunday. Usually, because weather at the Cape is so volatile, the shuttle would be fueled up and the astronauts would board and the decision to launch would be made at the last minute. However, on Saturday night, bad weather was predicted for the next day, and NASA made an uncharacteristic decision to cancel the night before. The reason: if the launch was scrubbed on Sunday, then the unloading of fuel from the shuttle would mean they could not try again until Wednesday–which would be too late for Reagan’s address. The fact that NASA cancelled early is a persuasive indication that the State of the Union address was a strong factor in the decision to launch.
Tragically, Sunday’s weather was perfect, and had it lifted off then, Challenger would most likely have been safe. Instead, it was delayed until Tuesday. There was pressure from the engineers to scrub. There was pressure from the top to go. The question is, did the pressure from the top come from NASA, which was predisposed to safety? Or did it come from the White House, with Reagan chief of staff Donald Regan reportedly demanding, “Tell them to get that thing up!”
Unless someone makes a deathbed confession, we’ll probably never know. But I do know which is more likely, and certainly which is much more in character.
I don’t think that Flight 93 was shot down, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, we didn’t have lots of time. I know it astounds people who aren’t familiar with the system, but the fact is that our air defense network just wasn’t set up or run (in September of 2001, anyway) for that kind of threat.
I know, because I worked intimately with that system in my job at that time. I’m an air traffic controller, and on 9/11 I was in a two-year stint at the military liason desk at Seattle Center. My duties included planning and real-time coordination with “Bigfoot”, which is the call sign for the Western Air Defense Sector, a component of NORAD.
In that role, I coordinated many times for working the intercept fighters to go out and check out something that might be a threat.
And trust me when I say- we just weren’t set up for looking inward, and while we all knew that shooting down a hijacked civilian jetliner was a possibility, it was considered a VERY long shot. It would’ve probably required an order from the President.
So just on time alone, I don’t think we had enough to get any assets to Flight 93. Not when you add in that there were only two bases with fighters loaded up with active missiles- one in Massachusettes and the other in Virginia, and there were usually only two fighters at each base ready to go.
On top of that… I just haven’t heard any rumors about the plane being shot down intentionally. Something like that is hard to keep secret, especially when there’s not much in the way of national security to be threatened.
People keep secrets very effectively when the disclosure would harm national security. I’ve lived in Seattle all my life, but I didn’t know we had a stealth bomber until everyone else did- despite the fact that there were certainly at least a thousand, and probably multiple thousands, of people building large parts of the thing right here at the Boeing plant.
We (air traffic control) knew that the US had some kind of stealth fighter, but that secret was kept quite efficiently.
But to keep a shoot-down of Flight 93 secret wouldn’t really help national security; it’s purely a political question, and THOSE “secrets” get out pretty damn fast.
Even when it can be fairly argued that release of the program might set back security, if there’s a political component to it, it’ll come out. View, for example, Bush’s spying program via the NSA; what’s come out of that news, for those tech-heads paying attention, is that the USA has some kind of program that scans massive amounts of information and phone calls- probably more than we ever thought we had the capability for.
No, I don’t think 93 was shot down. The so-called mystery jet doesn’t compel me in any way; I think it was just the biz jet that was known to be in the region. The Customs jets that look similar don’t have missiles. The cockpit tapes show the hijackers were jerking the plane around violently, trying to repel the passengers who were rushing the cockpit.
The hijackers made a conscious decision to crash the plane. I think they probably broke it partially up in midflight, which explains bits and pieces of it being found some distance from the main crash location.
But the most compelling thing about this is that as you read through the 9/11 Commission’s report, what you realize is that there’s a hell of a lot of people who *should* have known what to do, who *should* have taken more comprehensive, complete action, and those people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
The guy who declared a complete shutdown of the US airspace? A guy who ordinarily would not be authorized to make that decision. He (Ben Sliney) is hailed as a hero, because it turned out to be right, but believe me- in the FAA, had it been wrong, he’d be completely blackballed. Probably not fired; it’s not the FAA’s way; but shunted off into a dead end somewhere.
The military? NEADS (the Northeast Air Defense Sector), aka “Huntress”? Those poor guys didn’t have a full, comprehensive clue of what was going on at all. Their first notification came from a guy in Boston Air Traffic Control Center doing the same job I had at the time, military liason- and he wasn’t supposed to be calling them, according to the SOP.
No, when you’re presented with a few options and one of them is lack of imagination and incompetance, go with it. That’s what was going on- nobody had enough imagination to put it all together and when they should have, nobody had the stones to step up and do what was needed.
Paul
Seattle, WA