Everyone knows by now: Germanwings Flight 4U9525, en route to Düsseldorf, Germany from Barcelona, Spain, crashed into a mountainside in the French Alps. The copilot of that flight, one Andreas Lubitz, locked his captain out of the cockpit. He then set the autopilot to fly at 100 feet. The captain tried knocking on the door, then banging on it, and finally chopping it down with an ax. Or so one may infer from the cockpit voice recorder. Which, in the last seconds, plays back a cacophony of screams before the sound of impact.

The mainstream media, including the Fox News Channel, now have settled on a theory for what Lubitz did. Andreas Lubitz, the theory says, suffered from depression, took anti-depressant drugs, and broke up with his fiancée shortly before the flight. A psychiatrist wrote a note telling his employers not to let him fly. He tore it to shreds. Police found those shreds in his apartment.

Or did they find a torn-up sick note? Or something else?

A Germanwings 9/11?

“The Germanwings Jihadist: Andreas Günter Lubitz, the Germanwings copilot, intentionally flew the aircraft into the mountain. He earlier converted to Islam.” Taken from Michael Mannheimer’s blog apparently before its deletion. Host: Speisa.com.

Michael Mannheimer writes for Pi-News and keeps his own blog. Two days ago (Thursday, March 26), Mannheimer wrote: “Germany now has its own 9/11.” In detail he alleged: Lubitz went to a mosque in Bremen. And, either under orders, or taking a cue from the “book of terror” (likely the Koran), or acting on his own, he decided to take down a planeload of innocent people. Mannheimer went further: he demanded Germany invoke Section 129a of its Criminal Code to ban Islam and investigate all its followers.

Or so says the alternative site Speisa. Speisa even gave a link to a specific post. The problem: that link resolves to the Not Found page. And even the Wayback Machine has no archive of it.

Michael Mannheimer regularly writes against leftist or Muslim persons or agendas. English machine translation often fails. The programs often choose the wrong English words (“link” or “links”) for the German words Links or Linke or Linken, which mean “left.” So either Michael Mannheimer wrote that post, or someone who knew his site and work product well, forged it. In any case, Mannheimer, or his Web host, took that blog post down. And did it too fast for the Wayback Machine to capture it.

Pam Geller captured something else. Someone briefly built an “Andreas Lubitz fans” page on Facebook.com. Facebook took it down. (According to Gateway Pundit, that page really came from the Islamic State.) But before they did, Geller took a screencap of it. Several posts on that page praised what Lubitz did as a good Muslim thing to do.

This entry at Pi-News carries comments also speaking to whether the Germanwings copilot converted to Islam before the flight.

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Another blog, Israel Matzav, also asks: what did the German police discover in Lubitz’ apartment? The International Business Times said questions about whether the Germanwings pilot converted to Islam, or had any faith, exasperated mainstream media reporters and government officials. Brice Rubin, the French prosecutor based in Marseilles, didn’t want to talk about it. A college professor at Northwestern University seemed to call such questions stupid, insensitive, and politically incorrect.

And from Fox News Channel and other mainstream outlets? Not a peep. They keep pushing the narrative: the Germanwings copilot suffered from mental illness. They quote his ex-girlfriend as describing his “torment” and wanting a “spectacular” end. No one mentions a Facebook page. No one mentions a German writer wanting to ban Islam and investigate its adherents as terrorists.

Cover-up?

True enough, a history of depression, and especially being on anti-depressants, could explain the Germanwings crash. Alternative-medical advisers routinely rail against anti-depressants. They claim they don’t treat the real problem. And sometimes they make a patient move from merely thinking of killing himself (or others) to really doing it.

But too many people have found evidence for a Muslim connection. German authorities have known about the Bremen mosque for years. (They raided it in December of 2014.) Why did authorities take so long to talk about finding the shreds of a sick-leave note in an apartment? Why didn’t Lubitz burn it, or feed it to a cross-cut shredder? Why did Michael Mannheimer delete his post as if it never had been? Who managed to “fix” the Wayback Machine?

That last begins to look like the cover-up in A Few Good Men. (Directed by Rob Reiner. Written by Aaron Sorkin. With Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Michael DeLorenzo, et al. Columbia Pictures/Castle Rock Entertainment, 1992.) A Marine barracks commander expunges all trace of a transport flight from official records. He does this to hide the negligence of his command in a hazing death on post. Do we now see that? Did the Bundeskriminalamt decide to hide Lubitz role as a “Germanwings Jihadist” (Mannheimer’s words)? Even to saying, Halt die Klapp! to an on-line writer and scrubbing his content?

The Wayback Machine does not say how soon they archive any content. They say they last crawled Michael Mannheimer’s blog on March 15. That seems typical.

Cockpit doors one could lock from the inside became standard equipment after 9/11. In that incident, nineteen dangerous men took over four cockpits. They flew three planes into buildings and crashed the fourth in an open field. Have Muslims now discovered a new way to take over a plane? By compromising the flight officer corps?

Maybe authorities don’t want to admit that. But such compromises has happened before. Recall EgyptAir 990. The copilot ditched that flight into the Atlantic Ocean, heedless of the shouted orders of his captain.

National-flag airlines in Europe have finally put in place the Two-person Rule: never leave one person alone in the cockpit. But international aviation safety needs more than this. Those investigating the Germanwings crash, and those reporting on it, must not lend even the appearance of cover-up. To see that happening, should disturb the flying public more than the crash itself. If:

1. A flight officer compromised himself with a political religion,
2. That religion advocates mass murder and strategic lying to advance itself,
3. That flight officer crashed a plane full of people as that religion dictated, and
4. No one in authority wants to talk about it or let anyone else talk about it,

then those authorities have disgraced themselves worse than any disgrace to the Germanwings or international flight officer corps.
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