This blogger points out a bizarre example of a New York Times reporter inventing a story out of whole cloth about the 9/11 Commission’s Report. According to a story in Friday’s New York Times by Matthew Wald, the 9/11 Commission Report debunks widely circulated claims that Todd Beamer, one of the passengers aboard Flight 93, said “Let’s roll!” as he and other passengers went off to try to re-take control of the cockpit. Wald writes,
The report from the 9/11 Commission on Thursday provided new, chilling details about what happened in the cockpit of Flight 93 in its last minutes. It provides a gripping account of the battle to gain control of the aircraft by passengers who knew that terrorists had seized the plane and were determined to prevent them from using it as a missile. It also discloses that the phrase “Let’s roll,” previously reported as a rallying cry for those passengers, may have been misinterpreted.
. . .
The voice recorder captured sounds of continued fighting, and Mr. Jarrah pitched the plane up and then down. A passenger is heard to say: “In the cockpit. If we don’t we’ll die!”
Then a passenger yelled, “Roll it!” While earlier accounts reported the phrase as “Let’s roll,” which was repeated in speeches by President Bush and became the title of a bestseller, some aviation experts have speculated that this was actually a reference to a food cart, being used as a battering ram.
This speculation apparently exists only in Wald’s mind. There is certainly nothing in the 9/11 Commission Report that calls into question the “Let’s roll” line and Wald’s unnamed aviation experts are probably unnamed for a good reason.
The basic problem is that Wald’s is conflating two separate incidents as one. The source of the “Let’s roll!” comment was never claimed to have come from cockpit recordings. Rather it was made by Beamer in a phone call to GTE supervisor Lisa Jefferson using the plane’s onboard phone system. Beamer in that call described the hijacking and that passengers were considering assaulting the cockpit to regain control of the plane. After the passengers have arrived at a plan, the supervisor hears Beamer say, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!”
The “roll it” comment from the cockpit recorder is a later statement as the passengers are busy assaulting the cockpit and appears to refer to using a food cart as a battering ram. This is confirmed by the Los Angeles Times’ account which notes that the “Roll it” comment comes at least after 10:00:08, which appears to be after Jefferson had hung up on Beamer and regardless is well after the assault on the cockpit has begun The odd thing is that the Times also screws the story up as well, claiming that,
Separately, a passenger, Todd Beamer, called his wife from the plane and she later reported hearing someone say “Let’s roll.”
Which is not true. Beamer’s wife didn’t learn about this until Friday, September 14, 2001, when the GTE supervisor called her to relay what her husband had said in his final conversation.
Perhaps this is what Alex Jones meant when he wrote in the LA Times on July 18,
Blogging is especially amenable to introducing negative information into the news stream and for circulating rumors as fact. Blogging’s fact-checking apparatus is just the built-in truth squad of those who read the blog and howl loudly if they wish to dispute some assertion. It is, in a sense, a place where everyone has his own truth.
If he would just change “blogging” to “Major newspapers” I think he might have had a point.
Source:
New Details in Battle of Hijackers and Passengers to Control Plane. Matthew Wald, The New York Times, July 23, 2004.
9/11 Report Reveals New Details of Fight for Flight 93. Richard Serrano, Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2004.