T8 B15 Hijacked Airplanes 3 Of 3 Fdr- Email From Lorie Van Auken To Commission Re Ua 93 Tape Manipulation By Fbi

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Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 09:57:32 -0400 To: "" <[email protected]>^

Subject: 93 (liles-i Right after the families that lost loved ones on Flight 13 were allowed to hear the flight tape-, we were told by some of them that the tape ended suddenly-i and no crash sounds were heard - just a whooshing sound- The families that we spoke to thought-, at the time-, that this was quite odd. I wondered back then-i what whomever altered the tape thought they would accomplish by cutting the tape off by three minutes and telling the people not to discuss what they'd heard. I think things might be getting a little clearer nowThis article confirms that story. Here it says that the seismologists agree that the flight crashed at lO'-Ob-. NOT at 10:03-. as NORAD saysCan you get the Seismic records from 1/11/01 to establish the actual crash time of flight 13? Lorie

.. — Post ed on Mon-t Sep. lt>i 2003 Three-minute discrepancy in tape Cockpit voice recording ends before Flight 13's official time of impact By WILLIAM BUNCH bunchwSphillyneus-com THE FINAL three minutes of hijacked United Flight 13 are still a mystery more than a year after it crashed in western Pennsylvania - even to grieving relatives who sought comfort in listening to its cockpit tapes in AprilA Daily News investigation has found a roughly three-minute gap between the time the tape goes silent - according to government-prepared transcripts and the time that top scientists have pinpointed for the crash. Several leading seismologists agree that Flight 13 crashed last Sept. 11 at lQ:Ob:Q5 a-m.-. give or take a couple of seconds- Family members allowed to hear the cockpit voice recorder in Princeton-, N - J - 1 last spring were told it stopped just after 10:03. The FBI and other agencies refused repeated requests to explain the discrepancyThe cockpit voice recorder a roughly 30-minute tape loop-, is supposed to record the sounds inside the cockpit right up until the moment of impact and usually does* Aviation experts said there could be several explanations for the gapThey said it could mean that the FBI and other government agencies either

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\: INBOX: 93 failed to properly synchronize the timesi or there were other problems in the retrieving or handling of the tape from the so-called "black box" recovered from the wreckage at Shanksville-i PaOri experts speculated-! it could mean there was a major on-board electrical failure on the plane three minutes before Flight 13 crashed-! causing the recorder to quit working. What's not told The broader significance is that the three-minute gap points to how little is really known about how and why Flight 13 crashed - even as the saga of the doomed jetliner and cell-phone calls from some of the ID passengers and crew continue to captivate the nation. "That's part of the whole war aspect - we don't want to tell about what we did and didn't do-i" said Vernon Grose-, a former National Transportation Safety Board member who says he still has questions about the Flight 13 crash- He said he doubts there will ever be "a nice-i open public hearing with eyewitnesses telling what they saw." However-i in recent weeksi two books about Flight 13 have topped the best-seller lists-i while President Bush and other top government officials continue to invoke the story - based largely on the cell-phone calls - of fighting between the passengers and the hijackers as a "Let's roll" rallying cry to continue the war against global terrorismBut the FBI has clamped a tight lid of secrecy on the flight data recorder which could best show how Flight 13 actually crashed - and on the cockpit voice recorder"tile have no comment at all on the tape issue-i" said Sam Dibbleyi spokeswoman for the U - S - Attorney's office in northern Virginia that presented the tape to familiesAn FBI spokesman-. Steven Berry-i said the bureau continues to officially list the time of the Flight 13 crash as 10:03 a - m - The NTSB referred all questions to the FBIBut the relatives of Flight 13 passengers who heard the cockpit tape April 16 at a Princeton hotel said government officials laid out a timetable for the crash in a briefing and in a transcript that accompanied the recording. Relatives later reported they heard sounds of an on-board struggle beginning at 1:5fl a - m - i but there was a final "rushing sound" at lQ:03i and the tape fell silent. Uhat can be heard

"There is no sound of the impact-i" said Kenneth Nackei whose brother-! Lou Nacke Jr.-. is one of the passengers believed to have fought with the hijackers- Nacke confirmed that the government said the tape ended at 10:03 a-mHe added: "The quality of the sound is really poor-" Vaughn Hoglan-i the uncle of passenger Mark Bingham-i said by phone from California that near the end there are shouts of "pull up-i pull up-i" but the end of the tape "is inferred - there's no impact-" New York Times reporter Jere Longman-i who spoke with relatives of all but one of the 4D Flight 13 victims-, writes in the epilogue to bestseller "Among the Heroes" that "at about three minutes after ten-i the tape went silent-" Lisa Beameri the wife of passenger Todd Beamer-i who heard the tape while working on her No- 1 best-seller "Let's Rolli" also gives 1Q:03 as the end

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of the flight. Seismologists - experts in the earth's vibrations - have almost exactly pinpointed the time of the crash of Flight 13 at 10:0b:05"The seismic signals are consistent with impact at lQ:Qb:OS-," plus or minus two seconds-i said Terry Wallace-, who heads the Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory and is considered the leading expert on the seismology of man-made events- "I don't know where the 10:03 time comes from." Likewise-, a written study commissioned by the Department of Defense carried out by seismologists from Columbia University and the Maryland Geological Survey - also determined impact was at lQ:Ob:Q5Normally-, such a large discrepancy might be cleared up when the National Transportation Safety Board releases a written transcript of the voice recorder - edited for sounds of suffering or profanity - right before holding public hearings on an air disaster- But because the Flight 13 crash was part of a criminal act-, no NTSB hearings are expectedThe Justice Department has also insisted that the cockpit tape can't be released because it will be played to the jury at the trial of admitted al <3aeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaouii now set for January. Although floussaoui is often referred there's been no evidence that he was three other planes hijacked on Sept* sought last week to block the use of

to in the media as "the 20th hijacker-," slated to be on board Flight 13 or the 11- Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers the recording-

blhat could've happened Last fall-, as the saga of the Flight 13 passenger uprising became widely known-, several relatives of the crash victims made an unusual request: They wanted to hear the actual tape. The FBI initially issued a cold refusal"While we empathize with the grieving families-, we do not believe that the horror captured on the cockpit ;voice recording will console them in any way-." FBI Assistant Director John Collingwood said last December- But under continuing pressure-, the bureau changed its mind and agreed to the unusual April gathering at a Princeton Harriott hotelNone of the family members interviewed for this story recalls any explanation of a discrepancy between the times on the tape recording and the actual crash at 10:QbThey were-, according to the relatives and published accounts-, given a talk by one of floussaoui's prosecutors-, who speculated that the passengers may have used a food cart to break into the cockpitBut with government officials refusing to be interviewed-! leading aviation experts interviewed for this story could only speculate about the tape discrepancy. Possibilities they suggested: D The FBI could have bungled this part of the investigation by failing to synchronize the time stamp of clocks onboard Flight 13 - which could have been set wrong - with air traffic control tapes and other tones that make it possible to determine the exact-, correct times- Such a mistake would mean that the tape really did run until the impacti but that all the times given to the relatives on the transcript were off by three minutes. Investigators typically nail down the correct times very early in a probe-, experts said- Todd Curtis-, who runs the Web site AirSaf e-com-, said the three-minute gap "does not make sense-"

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"From what I have heard about the flight's CVR Ccockpit voice recorder!-, there was at least one transmission from the cockpit to air traffic control that would have been captured by the ATC tapes-," Curtis said- "Those tapes should also have some kind of time reference." D At 10*03-1 the hijackers - or possibly passengers and crew who were fighting to regain control of the plane - flipped a circuit breaker or switch that cut off power to the cockpit voice recorderExperts said this would explain why the tape ends abruptly-, but they had no idea why the terrorists would do such a thing-, especially so far along into their hijacking. And they noted that the location of cockpit circuit breakers makes it unlikely it was struck accidentally during a struggle* "That would be a much tougher task than turning off the transponder-i" said R. John Hansmani an aviation professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "You would have to know exactly which circuit breaker to pull-" D There was a major on-board electrical failure before the crash - although it's not clear what could have triggered this- It has happened before. On Swissair Flight 111-, which crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia in September 1118^ the cockpit fire that caused the crash also killed power to the plane's two black boxes six full minutes before the crash. New evidence that came out last week may support the electrical-failure theory. A federal air traffic controller from Cleveland-. Stacey Taylor-i told "Dateline NBC" that Flight 13's transponder•> initially shut off by the hijackers-, came back on briefly only to give out - at 10:03 a - m D There was some unknown problem either in retrieving the cockpit tape from the black box-, or in its handling by government officials and contractors since last September-! or in the presentation that was given in PrincetonNo one has stepped forward with any evidence of that* But the three-minute gap is certain to fuel ongoing debates on the Internet over how Flight 13 really crashed-i and whether the plane could have been shot down by military jet fighters that were sent aloft as the Sept. 11 hijackings unfolded* The government insists there was no shootdown* Numerous witnesses in the Shanksville area have told the Daily News and other publications since last September that a mysterious-i low-flying unmarked white jet-, military in nature-, circled the area at the time of the crash. The FBI has claimed this was a business jet that had been asked by air-traffic controllers to inspect the Flight 13 crater. The debate has also been driven by the wide debris field from Flight 13 including papers found eight miles away - and by conflicting accounts over whether a 111 caller reported an explosion and white smoke on board* Grose-, the former NTSB member-, said he doubts the entire story of Flight 13 will ever be told* "I don't think so-," he said* "It's like David Crockett at the Alamo* Ue need heroes*" email this I print this

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