Author questions the origins of the Flight 93 rebellion

From the creation of the “Let’s roll” slogan to the heroic stories told to the media, the events surrounding Flight 93 provided needed inspiration for Americans. In the days following the crash, family members of the passengers appeared on news programs recounting the story of a revolt against the terrorists. Their sentiment and beliefs have recently been reenacted in numerous films and presented in nonfiction books.

The specifics of the flight, however, are confusing and questionable. Discrepancies exist between recorded phone calls from the Boeing 757 to family members. The now famous widow Lisa Beamer never actually spoke with her husband on 9/11; her husband Todd Beamer had instead called a Verizon representative who promised to forward his message of love to his wife. Rowland Morgan explores the mystery surrounding each of these calls. Both the media and the 9/11 Commission were left to trust accounts from grieving loved ones of the passengers as per the details of the conversations. Did the heroic upheaval occur or is this story questionable due to a lack of concrete evidence?

Morgan also explores whether three or four terrorists were a part of the thirty-seven passengers aboard the plane. Zihad Jarrah is reported by U.S. officials to have flown the plane and his visa was discovered surprisingly intact at the crash site near Shanksville, PA. None of the passengers mentioned Jarrah as a fourth hijacker in their phone calls and photographs of Jarrah do not match the photograph on the passport. What role did Jarrah play in the crash, if any?

Flight 93 Revealed covers every aspect of the flight, from the baggage-check before the boarding of the plane to the sole eyewitness’s account of the crash to the 9/11 Commissions findings. Morgan and Ian Henshell, who wrote the book’s introduction, also dismiss fictional representations of the flight such as the UK’s The Hamburg Cell, Discovery Channel’s The Flight that Fought Back, and director Paul Greengrass’s United 93 as being inaccurate and lacking substantial evidence. They aim to displace the prevalent inaccuracies about the crash with an in-depth reevaluation of the evidence.

Rowland Morgan is a Cambridge University-educated author of over 40 books. His last work (as co-author), 9-11 Revealed (Carroll & Graf, 2005), was immediately branded “misinformation” by the US State Department. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Flight 93:
What Really Happened on the 9/11 “Let’s Roll” Flight?
by Rowland Morgan
with an introduction by Ian Henshall
Carroll & Graf / October 31, 2006
ISBN 0-78671-873-0/ 216 pp. / $15.95