• Claim: The passport of Satam al-Suqami couldn’t have survived the inferno and collapse. It was found in a grid search and it was in too good condition.

In Brief: Some reports have falsely claimed this was Atta’s passport. The passport never went through the inferno and collapse. A passerby in a suit picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective Yuk H. Chin shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. WTC 2 collapsed only shortly thereafter. Mr. Chin gave the passport further to the FBI on 9/11.

Lots of things from the planes ended up on the streets below before the collapses. Amongst them was a hijacker’s passport.
http://www.pbase.com/peteburke73/september_11&page=1

On September 18th a CNN report stated the following:

“Police and the FBI completed a grid search of area streets near the site of the World Trade Center looking for clues, said Barry Mawn, director of New York's FBI office. The searchers found several clues, he said, but would not elaborate. Last week, a passport belonging to one of the hijackers was found in the vicinity of Vesey Street, near the World Trade Center.”

The report first talked about a grid search, then in the next sentence it mentioned that the passport was found last week. This has lead to a false conclusion, that a grid search produced the passport finding.

• Claim: Several of the hijackers are reported to be alive.

In Brief: The story was first reported by the BBC and several other news agencies in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. BBC updated their story in 2006. The update clearly states:

“The story, written in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was about confusion at the time surrounding the names and identities of some of the hijackers. We later reported on the list of hijackers, thereby superseding the earlier report. The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names.”

The FBI and the 9/11 commission have confirmed, that the hijackers responsible for the attacks have been positively identified. There has been no issue of doubt raised by further reviews to the hijackers identities.

If the alive theories were true, it would be easy to just go and interview them. This has not been done, but the issue has been avoided giving many excuses. This claim is still alive, the hijackers are not.

• Claim: The hijackers outwitted the most highly sophisticated military defence in the world. It could not have been possible without help, NORAD stand down order and distracting war games.

In Brief: North America is surrounded by an area called the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is responsible for the intercept of aircraft inside the ADIZ. All preparations were made only concerning aircraft entering the USA from outside its borders.

Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and Transport Canada handle the ADIZ clearances, so a request for intercept from one of these agencies precedes any action by NORAD against civilian aircraft. NORAD do not directly monitor air traffic inside the ADIZ themselves.

None of the aircraft hijacked on September 11 entered the ADIZ zone surrounding North America. The hijackings took place inside continental USA. Prior to September 11, there was no formal system in place for military intercepts of civilian aircraft outside the ADIZ. From 1991 to 2001 only one military intercept occurred over continental USA airspace, the Payne Stewart flight. The intercept took 81 minutes and the aircraft transponder remained on at all times.

All four aircraft hijacked on September 11 had their transponders turned off. In order to identify the hijacked aircraft, Air Traffic Controllers had to first cross-reference all of the aircraft appearing on the secondary radar screen with their correlating reading on the primary screen. This is an enormous task.

Failure by NORAD to intercept the hijacked planes on 9/11 was not caused by any orders. It was a result of enormous workload, lack of preparation against attacks from inside continental USA, complicated operating procedures and lack of time.

The exercises occurring on September 11 that involved NORAD were “Vigilant Guardian” and “Global Guardian”.

These were command post exercises. This means that all the battle positions that are normally not filled were filled. It was a rapid transition from an exercise into a real world situation. When the first reports of a hijacking were given, a rapid clarification was made with the words “is this real-world or exercise?” Once this clarification had been made, the exercises posed no further hindrance to NORAD’s response. The exercises actually enhanced the response, since all staff positions were already filled.

Special thanks to Andrew Burfield for his extensive NORAD analysis.

• Claim: The names of the hijackers do not appear on the passenger manifests.

In Brief: The hijackers do not appear on the victim lists put together by CNN. Those were not the official passenger manifests. CNN specifically states that the hijackers are not included.

But Boston Globe obtained passenger manifests of the flights that departed from Boston only a few days after the attacks. The hijackers are included there. The official and complete passenger manifests of all flights were released as part of the Moussaoui trial. They do include every hijacker and their seat positions.

• Claim: The hijackers couldn’t have flown the planes into their targets.

In Brief: The manoeuvres required of the hijackers were within their capabilities, they were performed without any degree of finesse and resulted in damage to the targets only after desperate overmanoeuvring of the planes.

They were not expert pilots, but they had some extensive training with simulators and smaller planes. Landing a plane is difficult. Flying it into something is much easier. They had the skills to do that.

• Claim: The hijackers were from a cave. They couldn’t have pulled this through.

In Brief: Mohamed Atta, the pilot of flight 11, came from a middle-class household in Egypt. In Hamburg, Germany, he earned his master's degree in architecture.

Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of flight 175, was from the United Arab Emirates and had joined the UAE army. Later when in Germany, he enrolled in a university with a military scholarship.

Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the Pentagon plane, was a son of a businessman in Saudi Arabia. He first arrived to USA already in 1991.

Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, was a son of an industrious, wealthy family in Beirut. Jarrah moved to Germany and studied aerospace engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg.

15 other hijackers joined the pilots aboard the four airplanes. All but one were from Saudi Arabia, most were from families headed by tradesmen and civil servants, well-off, but not wealthy.

As for the planners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed completed a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. Osama Bin Laden earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979.

Caves do not describe these people.

• Claim: There were no hijackers involved.

In Brief: The hijackers and their identities have not been in any doubt since late 2001. The known identities have survived many reviews. And these people were really on board the planes.

In New York City, medical examiners used DNA that FBI had collected from tiny traces of skin on the steering wheels of vehicles hired by the hijackers and from hair samples recovered from their hotel rooms to match body parts with three of the 10 hijackers who crashed there. The enormous destruction of the towers has made further identifications impossible, only 58% of all WTC victims have been identified.

In the Pentagon and Pennsylvania cases, nine genetic profiles that matched no known victims were presumed to be hijacker remains. All the people on board the planes are known, all the people at the crash sites are known. There is no question that the 9 remaining people are the hijackers.

We have official manifests that include the hijackers. We have multiple telephone calls that confirm the existence of the hijackers. We have security camera images that show the hijackers. We have DNA identification of several of them. We have 9 extra people besides identified victims at two crash sites.

There were hijackers involved.

• Claim: The hijackers were not even devoted followers of Islam. They enjoyed drinking and lap dances.

In Brief: At first, it must be said that the reliability of these behaviour statements is in question. In some reports the identification of the actual hijackers is questionable, while in other reports the description of the very same event varies from source to source.

Nonetheless, while this kind of behaviour seems rather suspicious, a deeper look reveals that terrorists do not always act like one would expect.

Different sources report the following:

“Ziad Jarrah came from a secular Muslim family that was easygoing -- the men drank whiskey and the women wore short skirts about town and bikinis at the beach.”

“Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a frequent visitor to Manila's red light district, including its karaoke bars and mirrored go-go clubs, where he introduced himself to women as a wealthy businessman from Qatar.”

“They must have assumed that the purifying nature of their approaching martyrdom gave them some sort of cosmic dispensation.”

"Their sense of dispensation was derived directly from the idea that they were engaged in jihad (holy struggle). Now you know, in jihad there are certain liberties allowed. I believe they took the liberty of making their own interpretation of these dispensations or liberties granted to the one making jihad."

It would seem, that so-called errant western behaviour does not exclusively mean that you cannot be a terrorist at the same time. Their suicide mission might be interpreted as a purifying event, making their earlier behaviour less damaging. And you have to keep in mind, that Islamic Law condemns the killing of innocent civilians. They were not following the strict rules of their religion there either.

• Claim: Flight 93 landed in Cleveland

In Brief: Liz Foreman, whose name was attached to this story, tried to clear it up in February 2006: “The story in question, an Associated Press bulletin, was posted on WCPO.com during the morning of September 11, 2001. The story stated that Flight 93 landed in Cleveland. This was not true.
Once the AP issued a retraction a few minutes later, we removed the link. I only removed the link TO the story. We did not remove the story itself. This was my error probably due to the busy nature of the day.”

One plane landed in Cleveland, Delta Flight 1989, which was first misidentified as Flight 93. The other mystery plane, a KC-135, only returned to the hangar.

Vernon "Bill" Wessel, the director of safety and mission assurance at NASA Glenn reports the following:
“A KC-135 had to come back to the hangar," says Wessel, as if realizing for the first time that this aircraft may have caused some undue confusion. A team of scientists from the Johnson Space Center in Houston had flown to Cleveland on this KC-135 to conduct micro-gravity experiments. The visiting scientists could not return to Houston as scheduled on 9/11 once the FAA ordered all planes to land. "After the facility closed, we had to take those scientists to a hotel." The scientists, dressed as civilians, were boarded onto shuttle buses.

• Claim: Seismology reports indicated a crash time 10:06, 3 minutes later than the official time.

In Brief: The initial seismic report claiming the time 10:06 was from 2002. The Commission had this to say:

“The seismic data on which they based this estimate are far too weak in signal-to-noise ratio and far too speculative in terms of signal source to be used as a means of contradicting the impact time established by the very accurate combination of FDR, CVR, ATC, radar, and impact site data sets. These data sets constrain United 93's impact time to within 1 second, are airplane- and crash-site specific, and are based on time codes automatically recorded in the ATC audiotapes for the FAA centers and correlated with each data set in a process internationally accepted within the aviation accident investigation community. Furthermore, one of the study's principal authors now concedes that "seismic data is not definitive for the impact of UA 93.”

There are no reports of the authors of the original seismic report having disputed this conclusion.

• Claim: Flight 93 was shot down. Debris was found miles from the crash site.

In Brief: There was a white jet in the vicinity of Flight 93--a Dassault Falcon 20 business jet owned by the VF Corp. of Greensboro, N.C. The FAA asked them to investigate and they did. They got down within 1500 ft. of the ground when they circled. They saw a hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it. They pinpointed the location and then continued on. The only military plane in the vicinity of the crash site was an unarmed C-130 cargo plane. The cargo plane was returning to Minnesota before Flight 93 crashed and was flying at 24,000 feet about 17 miles from the crash site.

A fan from one of the engines was recovered in a catchment basin, just over 300 yards south of the crash site, which means the fan landed in the direction the jet was travelling. "It's not unusual for an engine to move or tumble across the ground" says Michael K. Hynes, an airline accident expert.

Human remains were confined to a 70-acre area directly surrounding the crash site. Paper and tiny scraps of sheet metal landed in Indian lake. Indian Lake is less than 1.5 miles southeast of the impact crater, easily within range of debris blasted skyward by the heat of the explosion from the crash.

If a missile had hit Flight 93, there would have been more evidence of it and a much larger heavy debris area.

• Claim: The phone calls from Flight 93 were fake, cell phones could not have worked.

In Brief: Ten passengers and two crew members were able to make calls that went through. All but two of them were airphone calls. Only two phone calls, one by Edward Felt and one by flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, came from cell phones — both at 9:58 a.m, shortly before the plane crashed. At this point, the aircraft was ~5,000 feet above sea level. They worked.

• Claim: There were no bodies.

In Brief: 102 DNA analysts took over the difficult chore of generating a DNA profile of the victims. Their work included not only the Pentagon crash victims, but the victims of the Somerset County crash as well.

Wallace Miller, Somerset County coroner, says human remains were confined to a 70-acre area directly surrounding the crash site.

He also states:
“There were pieces of people. Trust me. I cleaned it up. The plane hit the ground doing 575 miles per hour. The rest of the remains were vaporized on impact. But we did ID everyone onboard.

• Claim: The impact hole was way too small for an aircraft.

In Brief: Multiple eyewitnesses saw an airplane. Everyone onboard was identified by DNA. Lots of plane debris and both black boxes were found. Is there any question anymore?

Again, as in the case of Pentagon, the speed of the plane was very high. One shouldn’t expect to see an almost intact fuselage. Everything breaks into small pieces with huge impact forces.

• Claim: The Val McClatchey smoke plume photo is fake.

In Brief: That whole claim and analysis is made by one single person, who lives a conspiracy life and has no actual photo analysing skills or training. The claim has zero substance.

• Claim: Mark Bingham called his mom and used his full name. That must be fake.

In Brief: Mark’s mom says the following in a Discovery Channel “The Flight That Fought Back” documentary:
“Once in a while he would say that. He would call up, and he was, he was a young businessman, and used to, used to introduce himself on phone as Mark Bingham, and he was trying to be, uh, strong, and level-headed, and, and strictly business.”
http://www.911myths.com/Hoglan.avi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUb6IgKY2oQ

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