Buzzflash Editor Buys Flight 93 Shoot Down

We've given credit to the major lefty blogs for (mostly) not engaging in the 9-11 kookery, but Buzzflash Editor Mark Karlin bites on the Flight 93 shootdown theory:

But the Tribune editorial reminded us that the likelihood that Flight 93 was shot down, given the first reports and the account of Cheney ordering it shot down, is quite high. Any U.S. government, whether Democratic or Republican, would probably not want to admit that it was responsible for blowing a commercial airliner with U.S. citizens aboard out of the sky.

So a heroic narrative was, it appears, crafted to cover up the reality of what happened. At the time, we speculated that Flight 93 may have been headed for the infamous Three-Mile Island nuclear plant, just a short air distance away from where it went down. Or it may have indeed been flying back with terrorist plans to crash the plane into Congress or the White House.

We'll never know.

But on a scale of 1 to 10, BuzzFlash would put it at an 8 likelihood that Flight 93 was indeed downed by an American missile.

As I have said in the past, this is probably really the most commonly held conspiracy theory on 9-11. But that doesn't make it any less stupid. Remember that the Lockerbie bombing shows us what happens to a plane when it is blown out of the sky; the wreckage of Flight 93 looks nothing like this:



But common or not, Buzzflash takes it into real kook territory with "So a heroic narrative was, it appears, crafted to cover up the reality of what happened." That's every bit as offensive as Korey Rowe's comments about "Let's Roll". Screw you, Buzzflash!

Mark Karlin gets the old Nutbar-O-Meter Treatment:

A Different Perspective on the Mineta Claims

Is offered by Stephen Hayes, who's writing a book on Vice President Cheney.

A little more than an hour later, Mr. Cheney was seated below the presidential seal at a long conference table in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, better known as the bunker. When an aide told Mr. Cheney that another passenger airplane was rapidly approaching the White House, the vice president gave the order to shoot it down. The young man was so surprised at Mr. Cheney's immediate response that he asked again. Mr. Cheney reiterated the order. Thinking that Mr. Cheney must have misunderstood the question, the military aide asked him a third time.

The vice president responded evenly. "I said yes."

Obviously this clashes a bit with Norman Mineta's testimony, not on substance, but on style. Mineta and Hayes agree that the question was asked three times, and that the order was a shoot-down order (although Mineta was not aware of that fact at the time. But Cheney's "even" response clashes a bit with Mineta remembering him having "whipped his neck around" and saying "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"

Maybe it's because we're so familiar with the Mineta testimony, and maybe because the scene as described by him is more dramatic, but I confess that I find Mineta's version more likely, even given that we know his timeframe is off.

Update: I want to explain my thoughts a little better. Mineta's testimony is more believable on the emotions and the discussion than on the time for the obvious reason that Mineta's times are the only ones off. I can absolutely believe that a young military man would want to confirm as often as is feasible the astonishing orders he was receiving: to shoot down an America civilian passenger plane. And I can absolutely believe that Cheney, suddenly in a crisis situation and forced to make split-second decisions would get furious if those decisions were not immediately acted upon. It's hard enough to make those decisions without wondering if they're being relayed no questions asked, especially by what is by all accounts a junior military man.