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Misidentification of hijackers

Summary

The best account of the hijacker problem is Jay Kolar's afterword in "The Hidden History of 9-11," which starts with the statement: "FBI Directory Mueller has admitted his case against 19 FBI-named hijackers would never stand up in a court of law...And only one month after the FBI began to investigate the alleged hijackers, President Bush himself called off their investigation on the pretext that manpower was needed to fight the anthrax threat. After that threat dissipated, the hijacking investigation itself had been hijacked: the FBI never returned to complete it."

Biggest problem: Ten of the FBI-named hijackers have turned up alive, "documented as such by authorities and interviews with those named." This is not a case of people with the same name. There were photographs and biographical details to go with the names.

The original list of 19, as reported by CNN on September 12, was quickly changed, on September 13. The names included Adnan and Ameer Bukhari. Adnan walked into an FBI office on September 12 and said hey, not me man. And his brother had died a year earlier. The other two -- Abdulrahman al-Omari and Amer Kamfar -- also showed up alive. So, instantly, those four were removed and Waleed al-Shehri, Wail al-Shehri, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, and Satam al-Suqami. Unfortunately for the FBI, three of those new four also turned up alive. Only Satam al-Suqami failed to appear to clear his name. His passport is the one that miraculously survived the inferno without a scratch and was recovered on the streets of lower Manhattan.

Saeed al-Ghamdi, reported as a hijacker of Flight 93, reported in alive and well and working as a pilot in Saudi Arabia. Khalid al-Midhar, Mohand al-Shehri, Salem al-Hazmi, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ahmed al-Nami have also turned up alive. Ziad Jarrah is in fact missing and presumed dead, however, his participation in the plot is also suspect, for reasons too complicated to go into here. Check the Ziad Jarrah entry for those details.

In any case, there are clearly some reasonable grounds upon which to question the integrity of the FBI's suspect-naming process.

Despite all this, these names have not been removed from the official list, and they appear in the final Commission Report. The report even goes into considerable detail about the "supposed sinister activities of these men, apparently oblivious that numerous mainstream media sources such as the Associated Press and the BBC had long ago established that they were not on the flights."

Source: Marrs, p. 20-22. Kolar, Hidden History of 9/11.

Analysis

This strikes me on the one hand as pretty good evidence that the official story is very shoddy. On the other hand, you'd think this would be one area where the official story wouldn't be quite so shoddy if it was all planned out in advance by the US. It's a little hard to picture these guys in black suits sitting around going "OK, it's all worked out. We'll use missiles and robots and say it was hijackers." "But who will we say the hijackers were?" "I know! Let's use names of people who are still alive and obviously not involved!" "Perfect! What's next on our agenda then?"

It seems more plausible to me that the FBI, under great pressure to identify the hijackers, released names of people on some watch list or whatever. Because if the government could plan something like this, it doesn't quite make sense that they'd blow this part of it so badly. But who knows? I suppose it's all somewhat suspicious.

Bottom line, me, I give it:

somewhat suspicioussomewhat suspicious

Discussion

Currently showing comments 1 through 5 of 5 total comments.

1. cybrarian 21 Dec 2007 12:23:18 PM

I think it's highly plausible that whoever was on the planes used stolen passports. Whether the people using those stolen passports were hijackers, Muslim, or anything else is up for grabs. However, even *if* we allow for government involvement of any kind, that doesn't mean the pencil pusher at the FBI knows about it. He sees passports, he has manifests, he has tickets, he releases the names. If you posit government involvement, it follows that the government would use other parts of the government unwittingly.

2. john 21 Dec 2007 05:00:19 PM

Excellent points. One thing I neglected to mention with reference to this item (I think it's mentioned elsewhere, if not, here it is) is that apparently none of the names of any of the alleged hijackers *was* on any of the passenger manifests. That was one of the fishy things about the quick identification of the hijackers. How'd they come up with the names so fast if their names weren't on the passenger lists?

3. tnt 11 Jan 2008 05:08:11 PM

Doesn't each person with a Middle Eastern name have at least 5 other people with the exact same name?

4. john 11 Jan 2008 09:16:07 PM

Yeah, that's what I thought first as well -- and it's true -- but in this case they also posted photographs of the people. So they were like, hey, that's me! Hang on!

5. sunny 11 Jan 2008 09:29:35 PM

Sounds like they were hoping we wouldn't check this out.

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