DoD Down

With the headline "Rumsfeld says 9-11 plane 'shot down' in Pennsylvania…" Drudge links to this World Net Daily story in which Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld says the unsayable about Flight 93:

I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten—indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.

"Was it a slip of the tongue?" asks WND. "Was it an error? Or was it the truth, finally being dropped on the public more than three years after the tragedy of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000?"

Well, all the flight 93 conspiracy theories I've heard concern suggestions from ground witnesses that the plane was shot down by a U.S. fighter plane (presumably to prevent an attack on D.C.). Unless things are even weirder than I think, nobody is suggesting that the Air Force is part of the group that bombed Mosul and Spain, etc. So I think Rumsfeld's statement is clearly both an error and a slip of the tongue. (Having more than once called the 9/11 hijackers "bombers" in conversation, I know how these slips sometimes carry no deeper meanings.) But it will be interesting to see if there's any more fallout from this comment—another disturbing reminder of how much of the accepted 9/11 narrative you (and I) believe not because there's a huge amount of evidence for it but because believing it is easier than not believing it.

Am I the only one who sees sinister implications in the fact that the 9/11 Commission Report lacks an index?

Update: Pentagon spokesman says the SoD misspoke.