September 11 expert on the “accidents of history” aboard Flight 93 that saved countless lives

Had it not been for a series of coincidences surrounding Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, the United States Capitol could easily have been decimated and countless more lives would have been lost on that fateful day, the U.S. said. author and global member of the Woodrow Wilson Center, James Reston, Jr.

In the years following September 11, the hijacking of Flight 93 was eclipsed by other hijacked flights that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But Reston, author of the book “The 19th Hijacker”, a novel about 9/11, believes this is precisely because the heroic passengers of Flight 93 risked their lives to revolt against the hijackers. , and that the plane never hit its target, widely regarded as the United States Capitol.

The “extraordinary act” by which the passengers revolted against the four hijackers is well known, Reston said. But it was a confluence of factors, he believes, that ultimately derailed the terrorists’ mission and saved lives.

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“Here is the possibility of total decimation, of the destruction of the US Capitol, and it’s only 20 minutes away,” Reston told Fox News in an interview. “And the point is, there was a series of coincidences, accidents in history, whatever you want to call it, that made the event unfold the way it did. If one of those coincidences hadn’t happened, I think the attack on Capitol Hill would have been a success. ”

The terrorists intended the four hijacked planes to strike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the US Capitol within minutes of each other. But Flight 93, which was bound for San Francisco from Newark, New Jersey, was delayed for about 25 minutes before finally taking off. The hijackers also waited much longer (the plane was over Ohio at the time) to take control of the plane.

“Those two things alone led to the absolutely critical point in the story, which was that the passengers had about 25 minutes to decide what they were going to do after the hijacking,” Reston said.

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Flight 93 was also different from other hijacked flights in that passengers could use their cell phones and call relatives – who informed them of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Reston believes that if the plane had left on time, there wouldn’t have been the possibility of a ‘Democratic vote’ in the back of the plane to storm the cockpit and overwhelm the guards – hijackers tasked with keeping passengers under control.

There was also the fact that the other three hijacked planes had five hijackers, while Flight 93 had only four. The fifth terrorist, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was originally part of the plan but was apprehended in August 2001 while attempting to enter the United States from Dubai.

The Flight 93 hijackers, who were “skinny and tiny,” were no match for the passengers on board, who were “dotted with athletes,” Reston said.

Among the passengers, “there was a quarterback, there was a bungee jumper. There were two 200 pounds. There was a weightlifter. There was a star field hockey player… It’s a total accident of history, ”said Reston. “So they got together in the back of the plane and chatted [revolting]. They know they only have a few minutes to do it. And in a Democratic vote, they decide to storm the cockpit. ”

In the final moments, Ziad Jarrah, who was piloting the plane, crashed into a muddy field in Shanksville, Pa., Killing all 44 people on board.

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Reston said he was inspired to write a novel about the Flight 93 hijacking from a conversation he had 10 years ago with Lee Hamilton, who was the co-chair of the 9/11 commission . Their conversation, Reston said, was about Jarrah, who is from Lebanon, unlike the hijackers who were mostly from Saudi Arabia and had been raised in a middle-class family.

Reston, who is a senior researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC and has written numerous books, said he was interested in how a man like Jarrah, given his background, could be “persuaded to do part of such a horrible operation. ”

“People kept asking me two questions: the first, ‘Why did I write it like a novel rather than a factual book? And that’s an easy answer, that the facts just weren’t there about the perpetrators. They were all dead. So how could you ever find out concretely what their motivations were? Unless you imagined it? said Reston. “And the second [question] was “Is your novel a sympathetic portrayal of one of the terrorists?” And the answer to that is absolutely and absolutely not, in any form or form, it’s a sympathetic portrait.

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“But the trajectory of this life of a very beautiful family in Beirut, Lebanon, through Hamburg, Germany, to training in Florida in New York to the mud of Shanksville is an incredible trajectory of ‘a lifetime. And I wanted to try and see if I could figure out how that could have happened. ”