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Jere Longman
Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Among the Heroes
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Comment on the way our government responded to the initial news of the hijacking. Should there be an independent investigation of what did and did not happen that day?
A: Jack Grandcolas said what was missing was something that any third-grader would know about: a plan. What would happen in case of a hijacking? You'd ground every plane. Obviously, we were unprepared. I assumed that within the FBI there's some sort of central clearinghouse or repository of information, so when something happened in one bureau, they automatically sent the information to the other bureaus. It clearly didn't happen. In Phoenix, one agent said that we have to start investigating this proliferation of Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons at American flight schools. Agents in Minneapolis had become suspicious of Zacarias Moussaoui, who wanted to fly 747s. The agents in Minneapolis asked the agency in Washington if they could investigate Moussaoui, and were turned down. It's become a very risk-averse agency.
Q: Why are you certain our own military did not shoot down Flight 93? Why have we never seen video footage of the crash?
A: There are a lot of things we don't know about this crash. I believe it wasn't shot down. Many people who believe it was are clinging to an alleged conversation between a passenger in a bathroom on the plane and a 911 operator in western Pennsylvania, in which the passenger said, "I heard an explosion, saw a puff of smoke, and we're going down." It's clear that this was something reported incorrectly.
There were no parts of the plane found before the crash site. When Pan Am Flight 103 blew up in the air, the whole front of the plane came down in a field outside of Lockerbie. No parts of Flight 93 were found before the crash site, which you would expect from a plane that was either exploded or hit by a missile. Light paper and materials were found as far as eight miles from the crash site, but all in the direction of the prevailing wind that day.
Three F-16 pilots were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to fly a defensive canopy over Washington, and presumably they would have been the ones to shoot this plane down. I talked to two of the three pilots. They said there was a lot of confusion in the air that day, that no one ordered them to shoot a plane down. They never heard of Flight 93 until they returned back to Langley. Also, there was a plane that some eyewitnesses saw flying over the crash site, which some thought might have been a military jet, but it's been identified as a Falcon 20 corporate jet that landed at Johnstown shortly after the crash. A number of witnesses saw the plane intact shortly before it hit the ground. Aerial photographs show the crater where the fuselage went into the ground. The FBI said that with infrared photography - because the plane was upside down - they also saw a gouge where the tail hit. Despite the suspicion, there's no evidence to suggest the plane was shot down.
Q: Two months ago, an Air France flight bound for Paris was kept back for hours. A man asked a flight attendant what was wrong. She said there were four more people on the flight than the head count had identified. Police and FBI showed up. There were four Arabs in the back of the plane. Is this racial profiling?
A: I was unaware of this incident, but still the method we have of random screening of passengers in ineffective. As you've seen from Richard Reid's shoe-bomber flight, you're never going to see again a plane taken over the way Flight 93 was, because passivity is no longer an option for the people on the plane. I don't think flying is any safer. As Alice Hoglan points out - she's a flight attendant, she knows this - there's no x-raying of checked baggage. We're supposed to begin that at the end of the year, but airports are very far behind in getting the proper equipment. I like to fly, but I guess I lie to myself every time I get on a plane, because it's not any safer.
Racial profiling has become a taboo word, but there has to be some system by which we know who we're looking for when we check people. Sandy Dahl and Melodie Homer, the wives of the pilots on Flight 93, are checked almost all the time. They're not terrorists. Someone in Atlanta told me they check all attractive women. This random system is incompetent. You're not going to catch anyone that way.
Q: How has United Airlines treated family members of those who went down on Flight 93?
Alice Hoglan: I'm a flight attendant for United and also lost my son on United. As an employer, United has gone out of its way to be gracious to me and my family, and at the same time, I'm very aware that they are making an effort to circle the wagons when it comes to any discussion about increases in aviation security. Only 5 to 10 percent of the bags that go in the belly of the aircraft are checked properly for explosives. Cockpit doors have undergone a modicum of strengthening. There is a diagonal bar in place and new procedures for cockpit insulation. United has made an effort to train its crew. They are one of the first in cabin defense training, and I have been invited to become part of the idea-producing group for the second phase of cabin defense training. But overall I'm quite disappointed in their response to specific measures to improve and enhance security. United, like the other airlines, has been instrumental in hampering the efforts of the TSA, slowing down implementation of X-ray machines, and doing all that it can to delay deadlines. In other words, it's very much business as usual.
Q: You've found connections between passengers who, though strangers, were linked in different ways.
A: There were connections, unbeknownst to people at the time. Mark Bingham and Todd Beamer both graduated from Los Gatos High School a year apart, and didn't know each other. Cathy Stefani was a high school classmate of Jason Dahl at Andrew Hill High School in San Jose. Jeremy Glick and Linda Gronlund lived along the same lake, Greenwood Lake, which straddles the border between New York and New Jersey. It's also interesting that at least 15 of the 40 people got on that plane at the last second, either because they decided to fly at the last second or they changed their flights at the last minute. You can draw your own conclusions about whether it was providence that drew people together or just statistical randomness that put them on that plane.
Q: Did the hijackers use English to communicate? If not, do you know if any passengers understood what was said?
A: The hijacker pilot, who's been identified as Ziad Jarrah - 15 of the 19 hijackers that day were from Saudi Arabia, and he was from Lebanon - spoke English fairly well, or at least it was understandable. On this Cleveland air traffic control tape that's been made public, you can hear him speaking, trying to impersonate the captain. He says something very chilling: "Ladies and gentlemen," as if he were speaking to someone in a theater, not a hijacked airplane. "We're going back to the airport. They're going to meet our demands." He was lying. It was a ruse. It was a way to control the passengers.
Q: What did you learn about the characteristics of heroes?
A: I'm from a small town in Louisiana and I've been around ordinary, hard-working people all my life. There is a belief that people live their lives in quiet dignity, that there is nobility in the ordinary. Don't ever dismiss someone that is next to you on a plane or a train, or someone you see walking down the street. Understand that people have within them extraordinary moments. People rise to the occasion. Look at what happened just weeks ago, ten miles from where Flight 93 crashed. Nine miners were trapped, and some of the same people came together: a one-in-a-million rescue.
Q: Were all family members willing to meet and talk to you?
A: All but one family member agreed to talk to me. I won't identify the person who didn't, because no one is under any obligation to talk to me. The reason this person gave was that he didn't want anybody cashing in on September 11. It is something that gnaws at me, because I guess the most uncharitable description of what I've done is cashed in. Yes, I'm a writer; I was paid to write a book about Flight 93. I tried to explain to this person that I thought it was a fair exchange. I wanted to write about everyone. You had to write about how they died, but I wanted to write about how they lived.
Q: What did family members say they would have done, or that they wished their loved ones could or would have done?
Derrill Bodley: One thought came to me: I would take my daughter's place if I could.
Longman: I should also say that Derrill went to Afghanistan in December and tried to make some sense of what happened.
Bodley: I belong to the group of people in the Flight 93 family; a group of people that has a common feeling, some common goals, including the establishment of a national memorial at Shanksville, and a general recognition for all 40 people of their role in preventing a terrorist attack using that plane in Washington. I would never presume to speak for the rest of the group on other issues of how people grieve and how people reconcile. For me, I went to Afghanistan to try to find out why this might have happened, and in the course of doing that I found out that there was an opportunity for us to help people who had been accidentally hurt by things, including the Afghanistan war that went on for 23 years, the last chapter of that being the U.S. bombing. Our mission was to try to identify people who were innocent victims and try to be as compassionate to them as the American people were compassionate to us. It's called Peaceful Tomorrows, named after a speech by Martin Luther King, who said "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."
Q: How will writing this book change your role as journalist?
A: As a journalist, you do have some professional distance. I can't pretend to know what the families are feeling, and for many of them, it's not getting any easier. The numbness they felt has been replaced by longing and anger, in some cases. Jack Grandcolas said that he has come to associate himself with the flag that was flying over the World Trade Center: "I'm tattered, but I'm still flying. On the other hand, no matter how you stitch that flag back together again, it's never going to be whole again." When somebody dies, generally there's a funeral after a few days, and then family members grieve and try to get on with their lives. In this case, family members didn't receive the remains of their loved ones for months. The grieving is public; the whole world is grieving with them. Everyday, September 11 is mentioned. This idea of closure - it's a media word, almost taunting in its inadequacy. Alice Hoglan has told me she doesn't want closure. She wants to go to her grave with this raw feeling, to make sure that this never happens again.
When people ask how it affected me, I always used to give the pat answer: "I'm more appreciative of the small things." Yet, if I'm honest with myself, I haven't changed. There was a wonderful essay about Flight 93 in Time magazine a couple weeks ago. The thesis of it was that people on Flight 93 gave virtue to the life we were living before September 11, that it's okay not to change, that it's okay to live the treadmill life and not be introspective and not live every day as if it's your last, to just go on with your life.
Q: What message do you have for all of us who survived September 11, in terms of moving forward?
Tom O'Hare: I'm the husband of Carole O'Hare, who lost her mother on Flight 93. Hopefully we can all reflect on the tragedy of that particular day and all of the lives that were lost and also the lives that might have been lost. Imagine if we had also lost the symbol of the White House or the Capitol building, and the chaos that would have followed. These 40 people just came together, and whether it was Todd Beamer or Tom Burnett or Hilda Marcin or Richard Guadagno, or any of the wonderful, wonderful people who were on that plane, we as a family have two major goals. First, that an appropriate memorial be established in Shanksville for these brave, brave people. Second, that they be recognized as true heroes of this war on terrorism. They were not volunteers in this program, but they became active participants because they realized that although their lives were probably lost, they were going to sacrifice their lives so that hundreds and hundreds of people would not suffer the fate of the people in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
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