ACT IV: PART V

Of course, in 2001, Internet conspiracy theories are hardy shocking. What is surprising is this: Go to Shanksville and the surrounding farm fields where people actually saw or heard the jetliner go down at roughly 10:06 that morning and there are a number of people – including witnesses – who also think that Flight 93 was shot down, or at least aren’t ruling it out.  William Bunch “We Know It Crashed, But Not Why,” Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001

So what really did happen to United Airlines Flight 93 on the morning of September 11, 2001? The all-too-obvious answer is that it was shot down. We have already reviewed an abundance of evidence that supports that conclusion, including the size of the debris field, the undeniable presence of an unmarked, military-type aircraft at the scene, reports of pre-‘crash’ explosions, a report from a passenger of an explosion and smoke on board the aircraft, the lack of identifiable wreckage at the supposed crash site, reports of the distinctive sound of a missile, and reports of, as one media outlet put it, “burning debris falling from the sky.” (“FBI Does Not Rule Out Shootdown of Pennsylvania Plane,” Reuters, September 13, 2001)

The only other plausible explanation for the known body of evidence is a midair explosion caused by a bomb aboard the plane, and that possibility has been ruled out by FBI investigators. According to bureau mouthpiece Bill Crowley, “The conclusion of the investigation is that no explosives were used on board the plane.” (Bill Gibb “FBI Ends Site Work, Says No Bomb Used,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 25, 2001) Of course, the FBI could have been lying, as is their custom, but it seems far more likely that the explosions that brought down Flight 93 were delivered via air-to-air missiles.

That possibility, not surprisingly, has also supposedly been ruled out. According to Matthew Rothschild – who penned one of many conspiracy-bashing articles that magically appeared on ‘progressive’ websites on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, as though every fake lefty commentator had received the same ‘talking points’ memo – a gent by the name of Matthew McCormick, who was identified as “a thirty-three-year veteran at the National Transportation Safety Board … who headed up the crash site investigation,” concluded quite authoritatively that “there was no pre-impact stress to the airplane.” (Matthew Rothschild “Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already,” The Progressive, September 11, 2006)

Taking into consideration, first of all, that the investigation wasn’t actually led by the NTSB, but rather by the FBI, which means that McCormick couldn’t possibly have “headed up” much of anything, and further taking into consideration that even if he had led the investigation, he would have necessarily had to base his supposedly definitive findings on an examination of two jagged pieces of fuselage, a portion of one engine, and tons of burnt shrapnel disbursed over fifteen square miles of terrain, it is probably safe to conclude that both Matthews, Rothschild and McCormick, are spinning yarns.

In the earliest days just after the ‘terrorist’ attacks, there were indications that the government was unsure of how to spin the events in Shanksville. At first, officials seem to have toyed with the idea of admitting to having shot down Flight 93, though they were not yet firmly committed to that tactic. Thus we had the government initially taking the ludicrous position of claiming that it didn’t know if the plane had been shot down: “Federal investigators said on Thursday they could not rule out the possibility that a United Airlines jetliner that crashed in rural Pennsylvania during this week’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon was shot down. ‘We have not ruled out that,’ FBI agent Bill Crowley told a news conference when asked about reports that a U.S. fighter jet may have fired on the hijacked Boeing 757. ‘We haven’t ruled out anything yet.’” (“FBI Does Not Rule Out Shootdown of Pennsylvania Plane,” Reuters, September 13, 2001)

After asking around for two full days, the federal government was apparently still unable to determine whether any of its own interceptors had blown Flight 93 out of the sky! Tragically, that information was simply unavailable, even though, as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz candidly admitted on television a day or two later, “we were already tracking that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.” Shanksville Mayor Ernie Stuhl has added that, “based on what he knows about that morning, military F-16 fighter jets were ‘very, very close.’” (William Bunch “We Know It Crashed, But Not Why,” Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001)

Jeff Pillets of the Bergen Record reported that an “official at the Cleveland Air Traffic Control Center in Overland, Ohio, which tracked Flight 93 as it turned in the sky and tracked eastward from the Cleveland area, said ‘no comment’ when asked if there was any record of a second plane over the crash site.” (Jeff Pillets “In Rural Hamlet, Mystery Mounts; 5 Report Second Plane at PA Crash Site,” The Record, September 14, 2001) The Independent’s John Carlin added that those same “air-traffic controllers in Cleveland who tracked the last minutes of Flight 93 on radar have been forbidden by the authorities to speak publicly about what they saw on their screens.” (John Carlin “Unanswered Questions: The Mystery of Flight 93,” The Independent, August 13, 2002) Similarly, Capt. Adriane Craig, a spokeswoman for NORAD, “declined comment [when] asked if there were any military aircraft flying in the vicinity of Flight 93 or activated in response to the hijacking of the plane.” (Jonathan D. Silver “NORAD Denies Military Shot Down Flight 93,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 14, 2001)

As was previously noted, according to the official narrative there was indeed a second plane over the ‘crash’ site, supposedly a civilian plane that was called in sometime after the crash/explosion of Flight 93. Why then are air traffic controllers not allowed to talk about the publicly acknowledged second plane? The only reason to muzzle them, it would seem, is if they saw a much different scenario play out on their computer screens – which we already know to be the case based on at least a dozen consistent eyewitness accounts.

What we know with certainty is that no less an authority than Paul Wolfowitz publicly acknowledged that Flight 93 was being tracked at the time of its demise. We also know, with a reasonably high level of certainty, that Flight 93 was not only being tracked, but also shadowed by at least one curiously unmarked jet. And we know – because Dick Cheney told us that it was so, just days after the attacks – that by the time of the ‘crash’ of Flight 93, orders had been issued authorizing the downing of any suspect aircraft “if the plane would not divert … as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out.” (“Meet the Press,” September 16, 2001) Finally, we know that a local pilot named Bill Wright, who claims to have been flying in the Shanksville area shortly before the ‘crash,’ and who further claims to have seen the errant United Airlines flight, has reported that he was ordered “to get as far away from it as fast as we could,” leading him to believe “that either they were expecting it to blow up or they were going to shoot it down, but that’s pure speculation.” (“Pilot Witnesses Flight 93’s Final Moments,” ThePittsburghChannel.com, September 19, 2001)

And yet despite all that, no government official was able to say, a full 48 hours after the fact, what had become of that closely monitored aircraft! No one, we are to believe, knew if it had been shot down. That all changed, however, just a few hours after Crowley’s announcement when both NORAD and the FBI issued statements vehemently denying that United Flight 93 had been shot down: “Responding to persistent rumors that have circulated around the nation, the North American Aerospace Defense Command disputed accounts yesterday that U.S. military aircraft shot down United Airlines Flight 93 in Somerset County.” Concurrently, the FBI’s Crowley informed reporters that “There was no military involvement here. I hope that ends that speculation.” (Jonathan D. Silver “NORAD Denies Military Shot Down Flight 93,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 14, 2001) In a nicely Orwellian manner, Crowley then claimed that he had never meant to suggest that there was a possibility that it had been shot down, even though he had done exactly that just hours earlier.

At that very same time, on the afternoon of September 13, 2001, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp. and ‘former’ CIA operative, was busily circulating an e-mail to Oracle employees praising the late Todd Beamer’s heroic struggle with the hijackers, even though that information would not even be released to Beamer’s own wife for another 24 hours. (Lisa Beamer and Ken Abraham “Let’s Roll: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage,” Tyndale House, 2002, pages 184-5)

In retrospect, this is what appears to have happened: the official narrative of the attacks was initially going to contain an acknowledgement that Flight 93 had been shot down, an admission likely prompted by the fact that the evidence for a shoot-down was overwhelming. A problem emerged almost immediately, however, as reports of the phone calls placed by passengers – phone calls that suggested that there had been a passenger revolt – began appearing in the press within hours of the attacks, and if the passenger revolt story could not be contained, then acknowledging a shoot-down was obviously out of the question.

By Wednesday morning, less than 24 hours after the demise of Flight 93, the San Francisco Chronicle had reported on the calls placed by Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham and Lauren Grandcolas (Jaxon Van Derbeken “Bay Area Man’s Last Seconds of Bravery,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 2001, and Peter Hartlaub and Peter Fimrite “Victims Showed Valor Until the End,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 2001), and the PittsburghChannel had referenced the calls placed by CeeCee Lyles. (“Flight 93 Passenger Said He Planned Action,” ThePittsburghChannel.com, September 12, 2001) The next day, Jeremy Glick’s phone calls were revealed by both the Chronicle and the Washington Post. (Stacy Finz, Jaxon Van Derbeken and Sam McManis “Passengers on S.F. Flight Died Heroes,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 2001, and Charles Lane and John Mintz “Bid to Thwart Hijackers May Have Led to Pa. Crash,” Washington Post, September 13, 2001)

It appears as though by that Thursday, September 13, 2001, a decision had been made to scrap the shoot-down story and to instead go with a much better story that had been handed to the conspirators on a silver platter – the heroic story of ‘the flight that fought back.’ Instead of casting U.S. fighter pilots as heroes, ordinary Americans would become the heroes. All that was necessary was ensuring that the real ending of the story remain hidden from view. But there was one small problem: the powers-that-be did not have control over the passenger revolt story, which was being told independently by various surviving relatives, oftentimes with details that the conspirators found unpleasant. The solution? Gain control of the story by creating their own hero and insuring that he would thereafter take center stage, quickly eclipsing all those who were initially identified as probable heroes.

And so was born the legend of Todd “Let’s Roll” Beamer. As a few reporters have gently pointed out, Beamer was not the most likely candidate, physically or otherwise, to lead a passenger revolt. Not as likely as, say, Jeremy Glick, reportedly a 220-pound, 6’1” former national judo champion. Or Mark Bingham, a 6’5” former champion rugby player. Or Tom Burnett, a natural leader and former college football quarterback. Or Louis Nacke, a powerfully built, 200-pound weightlifter. Or CeeCee Lyles, a street-smart former police detective. Or Richard Guadagno, an enforcement officer who had received training in hand-to-hand combat. Or Alan Beaven, a 6’3” rock climber. Or William Cashman, a former paratrooper with the fabled 101^st Airborne.

Why then Todd Beamer? The most likely answer is that Beamer had something that none of the other passengers had: a personnel file at the Oracle Corporation – as did his wife, Lisa, since, as one reporter noted, “both [Lisa and Todd] took jobs at Oracle before starting a family.” (Jim McKinnon “The Phone Line from Flight 93 Was Still Open When a GTE Operator Heard Todd Beamer Say: Are You Guys Ready? Let’s Roll,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001) How difficult would it have been, one wonders, for members of the intelligence community to gain access to those files, given that Oracle is little more than a thinly disguised CIA front led by a ‘former’ company man? And how difficult would it have been to use that information to create the basic outlines of a plausible phone call placed by Todd Beamer, complete with references to immediate family members? There would not be enough information, of course, to create a believable transcript, but certainly enough to create a reasonably convincing “summary.” And that, as it turns out, was all that was needed.

The answer then to the question posed by Lisa Beamer (in her book, “Let’s Roll”) – “How did Larry know that?” – is likely that Mr. Ellison was tipped off when someone contacted him sometime between September 11 and September 13, 2001 seeking information on Todd Beamer’s background and family history. Having acquired that information, a phone call supposedly placed by a doomed Todd Beamer was then fabricated. The alleged details of that purported call were revealed to the world over the weekend of September 15-16. Just four days later, on September 20, 2001, Lisa Beamer stood proudly in attendance as George W. Bush, after singling out Todd Beamer for praise, proclaimed the necessity of embarking on a campaign of endless war. At a later date, the same Lisa Beamer would be photographed unveiling a decal of the “Let’s Roll” catchphrase on the side of an F-16 fighter jet, an airplane not unlike the one that almost certainly blew her husband’s plane out of the sky.

The details of that most famous of Flight 93 calls, as reported by the alleged recipient, Lisa Jefferson, have proven to be wildly inconsistent. One particularly notable example of this is that one of her first accounts of the call was missing a certain key phrase: “She heard Beamer saying, ‘God help me. Jesus help me.’ He addressed his cohorts, still calm, saying, ‘Are you ready? OK,’ Jefferson said … ‘That’s the last I heard from Todd Beamer.’” (Jim McKinnon “13-Minute Call Bonds Her Forever With Hero,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 22, 2001) Later accounts, of course, invariably contained the two additional final words that all Americans remember from that alleged call: “Let’s roll.”

One ‘fact’ that has been consistently included in accounts of the call is that “Beamer made [Jefferson] promise to call his wife and their two boys, David, 3, and Andrew, 1.” (Jim McKinnon “The Phone Line from Flight 93 Was Still Open When a GTE Operator Heard Todd Beamer Say: Are You Guys Ready? Let’s Roll,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001) Also widely reported was that “Jefferson kept her promise Friday [September 14, 2001],” and would have done so sooner had she not had to wait for FBI clearance. (“’Let’s Roll,’ Flight 93 Victim Heard to Say Before Crash,” ThePittsburghChannel.com, September 16, 2001) The reality, however, is that Jefferson did not keep her supposed promise. What really happened was that Jefferson’s “office sent [Lisa Beamer] a letter on Friday when the FBI gave us the okay to talk and it said she could call me or I could call her when she was ready to talk. She ended up calling me at home on Saturday morning. I was caught off guard, … At first she was upset but later she thanked me for comforting [Todd].” (Wes Smith “Operator Can’t Forget Haunting Cries From Flight 93,” Orlando Sentinel, September 10, 2002)

In an interview with BeliefNet conducted circa September 11, 2006, Jefferson confirmed that underreported version of events: “on that Friday, when I went in to work, the FBI didn’t want me to mention anything to his wife until they got back in touch with me. And then Friday, they got in touch with me and told me it was okay to let her know the message that I had for her. [Lisa] called me that Saturday morning and that’s when we talked about it.” (“I Promised I Wouldn’t Hang Up,” Interview of Lisa Jefferson by Wendy Schuman for BeliefNet, circa 9-11-06) Left unanswered, of course, is the question of why, if Jefferson did in fact make a solemn promise to a dying man, she made no effort to keep that promise even after allegedly receiving clearance to do so. Also unanswered (and unasked) is the question of exactly what it was that the FBI was supposedly reviewing for some 3½ days, considering that, according to the official narrative, the phone call was not recorded, so there was no tape to listen to or transcript to read. (Some early reports erroneously assumed that normal procedures had been followed and that the alleged call had been recorded. See, for example, Jim McKinnon “GTE Operator Connects With, Uplifts Widow of Hero in Hijacking,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 19, 2006: “Nor has GTE released a transcript of the Beamer call, which, because it was to an operator, was tape-recorded.” That, of course, would have required that the call was real.)

According to the official story, Todd Beamer set the phone down at 9:58 AM, just as the passenger revolt was to begin. Lisa Jefferson purportedly remained on the line, awaiting his return. But for how long? According to early reports, based on interviews with Jefferson, she “hung up at 10 a.m. EST, realizing that the plane had gone down.” (Jim McKinnon “The Phone Line from Flight 93 Was Still Open When a GTE Operator Heard Todd Beamer Say: Are You Guys Ready? Let’s Roll,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001) Considering that Flight 93 was still officially aloft at 10 AM, that was probably not the best answer that Jefferson could have provided, so a week later it was changed: “For the next 15 minutes, Jefferson stayed on the line.” (Jim McKinnon “13-Minute Call Bonds Her Forever With Hero,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 22, 2001) That would have meant that she stayed on the line until approximately 10:13 AM, thirteen minutes longer than her initial claim. But then, curiously enough, on the one-year anniversary the story changed once again, as we learned that “Jefferson’s supervisors instructed her to hang up the phone when there were no other sounds audible.” (Wes Smith “Operator Can’t Forget Haunting Cries From Flight 93,” Orlando Sentinel, September 10, 2002) According to the official story and the alleged ‘black box’ recordings, there were no sounds audible after 10:03 AM, which would mean that Jefferson remained on the line only about five minutes. But as of the fifth anniversary, Jefferson had reverted back to her earlier version of events: “I held on until after the plane crashed – probably about 15 minutes longer and I never heard a crash – it just went silent … I kept calling his name and calling his name, hoping that he – just praying that anyone would come and pick up the phone. But they never did.” (“I Promised I Wouldn’t Hang Up,” Interview of Lisa Jefferson by Wendy Schuman for BeliefNet, circa 9-11-06)

The key question raised by Beamer’s alleged call, of course, is the lingering question of why he chose to spend his final minutes speaking with an anonymous operator rather than with his beloved wife. In November 2001, a trio of Newsweek reporters set out to tell the definitive tale of the final minutes of Flight 93. In a lengthy intro, the authors acknowledged that “there was that one nagging question. Why had her husband … not called her from the plane? Other passengers had called home from Flight 93 to say goodbye to their loved ones. Why not Todd?” (Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift and Evan Thomas “The Real Story of Flight 93,” Newsweek, November 26, 2001)

“Then on Friday night, September 14, [Lisa Beamer] got a call from her crisis counselor at United Airlines. Todd Beamer, it turned out, had made a call; it had been routed to an Airphone operator in Chicago.” (Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift and Evan Thomas “The Real Story of Flight 93,” Newsweek, November 26, 2001) The answer then was that Todd had made a call, just to someone other than his wife. But that, of course, didn’t really answer the question raised in the intro – why had he “not called her from the plane?” The best answer that the authors could come up with, after spending two months conducting interviews, was that “Beamer may have been having trouble with his credit card, or he may just have punched 0 into the airphone.” (Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift and Evan Thomas “The Real Story of Flight 93,” Newsweek, November 26, 2001)

A year later, Lisa Jefferson was telling reporters that Beamer “told me that he had dialed zero to report his plane was being hijacked and he wanted someone to talk to.” (Wes Smith “Operator Can’t Forget Haunting Cries from Flight 93,” Orlando Sentinel, September 10, 2002) It would appear then that Jefferson somehow belatedly remembered that Beamer had deliberately called an operator. And she also remembered that she had “asked if he wanted to be connected to his wife and he said no, that he did not want to upset her as they were expecting their third child in January,’ she recalled. Instead, he asked her to call his family and let them know he loved them ‘if I don’t make it out of this.’ Jefferson promised that she would.” (Wes Smith “Operator Can’t Forget Haunting Cries From Flight 93,” Orlando Sentinel, September 10, 2002)

So in the revised version, served up a year after the fact, we suddenly had a Todd Beamer concerned with upsetting his wife in her presumably vulnerable condition – although it should be noted that her condition did not prevent Ms. Beamer from converting herself, almost immediately, into a truly world-class media whore. And also in the revised version, we suddenly had a Todd Beamer who seemed hopeful that he would make it home alive, instructing Jefferson to call his wife only if he didn’t “make it out of this.” A year earlier, however, Jefferson had presented a slightly different scenario: “’Oh, my God,’ said Beamer, ‘I don’t think we’re going to get out of this thing. I’m going to have to go out on faith.’” (Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift and Evan Thomas “The Real Story of Flight 93,” Newsweek, November 26, 2001)

In addition to the inconsistencies in Jefferson’s various accounts of the alleged phone call, there are a number of improbabilities as well, casting further doubt on the validity of the fabled Todd Beamer phone call. One notable example appears in an early account in which Jefferson claimed that “Beamer said he could account for 37 of the plane’s 38 passengers. The hijackers had forced 27 of them into the first-class compartment near the front. Beamer, nine other passengers and five flight attendants were ordered to sit on the floor in the rear of the plane.” (Jim McKinnon “The Phone Line from Flight 93 Was Still Open When a GTE Operator Heard Todd Beamer Say: Are You Guys Ready? Let’s Roll,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001)

The all-too-obvious question here is how Beamer could have possibly gotten an accurate headcount on the group in first class when they were in the very front of the aircraft and he was purportedly huddled in the very back. And why, while we’re on this topic, was such a curious little factoid included in the story at all? Probably because, as it turns out, Beamer’s improbable headcount just happens to bolster an obscure but possibly crucially important aspect of the official story (as will be discussed later, probably in Part 6 … had I mentioned, by the way, that there is going to be a Part 6 to this odyssey?).

In that same early account, it was claimed that “Beamer mentioned Glick by his first name in the call to Jefferson.” (Jim McKinnon “The Phone Line from Flight 93 Was Still Open When a GTE Operator Heard Todd Beamer Say: Are You Guys Ready? Let’s Roll,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001) There is, alas, a bit of a problem with this aspect of the tale: Jeremy Glick, you see, was a business-class passenger, so he presumably would have been huddled with the group in the front of the plane (according to the scenario presented by Todd Beamer/Lisa Jefferson), while Todd Beamer, a lowly coach-class passenger, was huddled in the back. In fact, most of the men initially identified as probable heroes – including Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and Louis Nacke – were sitting in either first-class or business-class seats (Karen Breslau “The Final Moments of United Flight 93,” Newsweek Web Exclusive, September 22, 2001), so we can assume that they would have all been in the group in the front of the aircraft. How then did Todd Beamer lead them on a revolt from his position at the rear of the plane? How, for that matter, did he have any interaction with them at all, either before or after the plane was commandeered? And when he supposedly uttered his infamous words, “Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll,” who exactly were the “guys” he was speaking to? Was it the guys who were separated from him by about 100 feet of airplane?

Speaking of the passenger revolt, Jefferson’s initial account seemed to portray Beamer as more of a bystander and then belated participant than a leader: “Beamer then told Jefferson that he and the others had decided to ‘jump on’ the hijacker wearing the bomb. Jefferson could hear shouts and commotion and then Beamer asked her to pray with him. They recited the 23^rd Psalm. He got Jefferson to promise that she would call his family, then dropped the phone, leaving the line open.” (Jim McKinnon “The Phone Line from Flight 93 Was Still Open When a GTE Operator Heard Todd Beamer Say: Are You Guys Ready? Let’s Roll,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 16, 2001) Apparently Beamer’s leadership style involved praying into a telephone receiver while others engaged in some type of struggle.

Yet another curious fact about the alleged phone call is that, though it is never mentioned in news reports, emergency protocols call for Airphone operators to attempt, whenever possible, to speak with a crew member, for the obvious reason that a crew member would be far more knowledgeable about the status of the aircraft and its crew and passengers than a random passenger would be. In this case, there would have been no problem locating a crew member, since according to Beamer’s alleged account, he was huddled in the rear of the plane with no less than five flight attendants. In fact, one was sitting right next to him the entire time that he chatted with Jefferson: “With the help of a flight attendant seated next to him, Beamer gave Jefferson a report on how many passengers and crew were aboard.” (Wes Smith “Operator Can’t Forget Haunting Cries From Flight 93,” Orlando Sentinel, September 10, 2002) Jefferson later confirmed that scenario: “There was a flight attendant that sat next to Todd that gave us all the information that we needed … She was sitting right next to him, and I could hear everything she was saying because she was speaking loud enough for me to hear her through the phone.” (“I Promised I Wouldn’t Hang Up,” Interview of Lisa Jefferson by Wendy Schuman for BeliefNet, circa 9-11-06)

This, like other aspects of this ever-shifting story, appears to be an element that was belatedly added, on the first anniversary of the attacks, to ward off criticism of various flaws in the original telling of the story. This added element, however, does not answer the question of why standard procedures were not followed. In the real world, both Jefferson and the flight attendant – who has, of course, never been named, although Jefferson would surely have gotten this person’s name – would have insisted that Beamer hand off the phone so that Jefferson could have obtained the most accurate available information (including information that crew members may not have wanted passengers to know), thus freeing Todd to do what everyone else was trying to do: get in touch with loved ones.

Given the inconsistencies and improbabilities in this story, coupled with the complete lack of documentation, foreknowledge by a well-connected ‘former’ intelligence operative, the seemingly deliberate insertion of certain elements designed to bolster aspects of the official story, and, finally, Todd Beamer’s still inadequately explained failure to talk to his wife (or any other family member who could have verified the call), it is nearly impossible not to conclude that the legendary “Let’s roll” phone call was a complete fraud. But if that is true, and if the call was manufactured after the fact, as postulated here, then that means that Lisa Jefferson is an active participant in perpetrating this fraud. But why?

There is, alas, an answer to that question, but it is not one that will likely be palatable to some readers, so I’ll just drop a few of the puzzle pieces on the table and let each of you assemble them as you see fit.

In the interview with BeliefNet, Jefferson noted that she belongs “to Greater St. John’s Bible Church … on the west [side] of Chicago.” (“I Promised I Wouldn’t Hang Up,” Interview of Lisa Jefferson by Wendy Schuman for BeliefNet, circa 9-11-06) She also mentioned that since the events of 9-11, she has become much more involved. Greater St. John’s Bible Church, in turn, is affiliated with – and this may be my favorite part of this story – World Vision.(http://www.worldvision.org/about_us.nsf/child/enews_chicago_20060919?Open&lpos=mainnav&lid=chicago20060919)

World Vision, which pretends to be a Christian group involved in worldwide humanitarian missions, has in reality been involved in conducting covert operations in conjunction with the CIA since at least the 1960s, when it was active in a little place known as Southeast Asia. Since then, the group has been directly connected to various other covert operations – including the operations of those legendary ‘freedom fighters,’ the Contras – as well as to such notable Americans as Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley, Jr. The organization has a keen interest in African-American churches dating back at least to the days of its association with the notorious Reverend Jim Jones, whose People’s Temple was composed primarily of African-American women.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but when I scratch a little bit below the surface of a story and find the tentacles of both the Oracle Corp. and World Vision, I get a sense that there is some serious skullduggery afoot. And no, as a matter of fact, I do not know exactly what “skullduggery afoot” means, but it sounded good so I went with it. The real question here, I guess, is what are the odds that it is merely coincidence that both the alleged caller and the alleged recipient were linked to entities widely recognized as intelligence fronts?

One final note on Lisa Jefferson: she has said that after she allegedly took the call on Tuesday morning, she “went back to work on that Wednesday, Thursday, just like as if nothing had ever happened.” She did the same on Friday, acting for all the world as if, by her own account, “nothing had ever happened.” Why would she do that? The most likely answer is the obvious one: because nothing involving her had yet happened. But then, after the Todd Beamer story broke over the weekend, she “couldn’t go into work for two days after that.” Following that, she “was in therapy for a while.” (“I Promised I Wouldn’t Hang Up,” Interview of Lisa Jefferson by Wendy Schuman for BeliefNet, circa 9-11-06)

Inquiring minds, needless to say, are still awaiting word on who the therapist was. Drs. West, Cameron, Orne, Gottlieb and other notables on the CIA honor roll are no longer with us, of course, but surely there is no shortage of replacements.

Thus far, we have established, by my reckoning at least, that Flight 93 was shot down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania (after all, newly-departed Defense chief Donald Rumsfeld said so himself, in one of his infamous Freudian slips). We have also established that the legendary phone calls, with one notable exception, appear to have been real phone calls made to real people. Finally, we have established that the Todd Beamer phone call was a fraud – a fraud perpetrated so that the powers-that-be could gain control over a cover story that was too good to pass up, although they did need to change the ending of the story.

We are still left with, however, a number of unanswered questions, such as: what happened to the rest of the plane? And what caused that supposed crash crater? And what time exactly did the shoot-down occur? And, perhaps most importantly, how was this hijacking pulled off? More specifically, how was the cockpit breached? In Part 6, we will seek answers to those questions.