The Report’s Failure to Identify the Alleged Hijackers

The 9/11 Comm= ission Report’s Failure to Identify the Alleged Hijackers

It is not difficult to show that a number of key unres= olved issues, which should have been addressed by the 9/11 Commission, were in fa= ct ignored in their Final Report. A glaring example is the Report’s fail= ure to address the central question of who in fact were the supposed hijackers = of the planes.

The FBI had shared a list naming 18 of the 19 alleged hijackers by 10 AM on 9/11, even before the crash of Flight UAL 93.[1] Within two weeks the identities of at least six of the hijackers identified= by the FBI were unclear; as men in Arab countries with the same names and histories were protesting that they were alive and innocent. In response to these protests, FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on September 20, 2= 001, that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers was in doubt.[2] <= /p>

But there is no trace of this doubt, or discussion of = the problem, in the detailed discussion of the hijackers in the 9/11 Commission Report.[3] T= he Report simply assumes that the FBI was right in the beginning, much as the Warren Report worked from the FBI’s early assumption that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin.

The mainstream U.S. press, such as the New York Times, later attributed t= he confusion about the hijackers’ identity to the number of different Ar= abs sharing the same names. But at least five shared histories as well as names with the alleged hijackers. Waleed al-Shehri told the BBC

that he attended flight tra= ining school at Dayton Beach in the United States= , and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pi= lot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.[4] <= /p>

Saeed al-Ghamdi, alive and flying planes in Tunisia, also studied at Florida flight schools, as late as 200= 1. According to the London Telegraph, CNN used his photogr= aph in describing the hijacker with his name.[5] Abdulaziz al-Omari acknowledged the same date of birth as the accused hijac= ker al-Omari, but claimed his passport was stolen when he was living in Denver, Colorado.[6] <= /p>

According to Paul Thompson, there are similar reasons = to wonder about the identity of at least twelve out of the nineteen hijackers.= [7] Y= et the FBI, and the 9/11 Report, have stayed with the list which the FBI had established by 10 AM on September 11.[8] Meanwhile the passenger lists released by the airlines show no Arab names, = and requests by researchers for the final flight manifests have been refused.[9]

The Report also fails to deal with numerous unexplained details, such as the following from Newsweek, four days after 9/11:

U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday’s terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations i= n the 1990s. Three of the alleged hijackers [including Saeed al-Ghamdi, mentioned above, and his brother Ahmed] listed their address on drivers licenses and = car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla.—known as the “Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation,” according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source.Tunisia after 9/11. But to ad= mit this would even more drastically undercut the credibility of the FBI’s list of hijackers, which used the Tunisian pilot’s photograph in its identification.

If newspaper accounts are to be believed, the alleged hijackers left an implausible plethora of self-incriminating evidence in th= eir wake. Defying all common sense, Mohamed Atta is supposed to have left his w= ill in a rental car at Logan<= /st1:PlaceName> Airport, along with procedures manuals for Boeing 757s and 767s, airline uniforms, a Koran, and= his passport.[12] =

The New Yorker= quoted a high-level official as saying that “Whatever trail was left = was left deliberately – for the FBI to chase.”[13] = Even more cogent was Richard Clarke’s reaction: “I was stunned, not = that the attack was al Qaeda but that there were al Qaeda operatives on board us= ing names that FBI knew were al Qaeda.”[14] = For a well-planned operation on this scale to succeed, anyone would expect al Q= aeda operatives to use their usual modus operandi of false or stolen passports, of which they had a great number= .The Looming Tower, alleges that soon after 9/11 a Yemeni source on al-Qaeda identified seven of the nineteen hijackers by name from "a book of mug shots." Also a videotape of Osama bin Laden with the hijackers, released in September 2006 on al-Jazeera, shows frontal shots of at least two of the hijackers who were with him, and identifies one (Wail al-Shehri) as "One of the Martyrs of the Manhattan Raid." [Lawrence White, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 366; New York Times, 9/8/06, 3 (al-Jazeera).]

These new developments lend some credibility to the claim that the FBI's list was accurate. But strikingly there is no overlap at all between the names in Wright's book (Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khaled al-Mihdar, and four others), and on al-Jazeera (Wail al-Shehri, Hamza al-Ghamdi), with the unambiguous cases of self-identifying survivors in Paul Thompson's Terror Timeline (496-98). Thus the problems with the FBI list remain, and have not yet been properly investigated. EN-US;mso-bidi-language:TH'>[15]<= /p>

[1] Rich= ard Clarke heard that the FBI had the names at 9:59 AM, the time of the collaps= e of WTC Tower 2. See Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 13-14; Thompson, The Terror Timelin= e, 441. This investigative tour de for= ce is even more amazing when we consider that in the FBI, according to the 9/11 Report (77), “prior to 9/11 relatively few strategic analytic reports about counterterrorism had been completed. Indeed, the FBI had never comple= ted an assessment of the overall terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland.”

[2] BBC, 9/23/01; Newsday, 9/21/01; Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline: Year= by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute (NewYork: HarperCollins/Regan Books, 2004), 498.

[3] 9/11 Report, 1-14, 215-42. Discussion in David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Errors and Omissions (Northampton, MA<= /st1:place>: Olive Branch Press, 2005), 19-23.

[4] BBC, 9/23/01.

[5] London Telegraph, 9/23/01; Thompson, The Terror Timeline, 496.

[6] London Telegraph, 9/23/01; Thompson, The Terror Timeline, 497.

[7] Thom= pson, The Terror Timeline, 496-98.

[8] Rich= ard Clarke heard that the FBI had the names at 9:59 AM, the time of the collaps= e of WTC Tower 2. See Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 13-14; Thompson, The Terror Timelin= e, 441.

[9] Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report, 23. According to the Washington Post (9/16/01), Hami Hanjour’s name “was not on the American Airlines manifest for [Flight 77] because he may not have had a ticket. Yet the FBI released his name as a hijacker on September 14, 2001, one day after the eighteen other names (Thompson, The Terror Timeline, 493). The sequence of events suggests that the FBI had another source besides the manifests for their identifications.

[10] Newsweek, 9/15/01. Cf. New York Times, 9/15/01; = Washington Post, 9/16/01; all at http= ://www.wanttoknow.info/050407hijackersmilitarytraining911.

[11] B= oston Globe, 9/18/01; Thompson, The Terror Timeline, 490.

[12] ABC News, 9/12/01, 9/16/01; AP 9/16/01; CNN, 9/16/01; Thompson, The Terror Timeline, 492. Cf. Guardian. 3/19/02. Another extreme instance was the Arabic document said to have been recovered by the FBI from the wreckage of Flight 93 (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9/25/01).

[13] New Yorker, 10/1/01; Thompson, The Terror Timeline, 491.

[14] Cla= rke, Against All Enemies, 13.

[15] As = Newsweek reported (9/15/01), ̶= 0;One military source said it is possible that the hijackers may have stolen the identities of the foreign nationals who studied at the U.S. installations.”