Alleged Hijackers

According to the official story, teams of four and five hijackers armed only with primitive weapons (boxcutters) overcame the flight crews of four out of four flights and then proceeded to fly three of the four planes into The World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

The alleged hijackers supposedly belonged to semi-autonomous cells, having been in the United States for months and years. The cells were directed by the terrorist organization Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden.

The hijacker story had a great deal of appeal to the American audience. The hijackers were all Muslim extremists, far removed from mainstream American culture. Their fanaticism made their success against overwhelming odds seem more plausible.

Despite its attractive features, the hijacker story is challenged by many facts, especially relating to the implausability that they could have performed all of the tasks attributed to them by the official story. However, a mantra of "no Muslum hijackers" has become a staple of some skeptics of the official story based primarily on the following arguments:

1. There is a lack of credible evidence that the alleged hijackers were on any of the four planes.
2. Passenger manifests for each of the four flights lacked any Arab names.
3. Several alleged hijackers reported themselves alive following the attack.
4. The behavior of several of the alleged hijackers prior to the attack was inconsistent with Muslum beliefs and practices. ¹  

Each of these four arguments has been challenged and discredited to some degree. Argument 1 requires dismissing the many reported phone calls from the planes as evidence of hijackers. Implausible theories of phone-call fakery have been advanced to discount the numerous reported calls from Flight 93 in particular. Argument 2 has been exposed as based on mischaracterizing victims lists, published in the media shortly after the attack, as passenger manifests. Around the time of the Moussaoui trial, a list of alleged passenger manifests was released to a reporter by the FBI, and those lists contain Arab names. Argument 3 has been eviscerated somewhat by the BBC essentially repudiating its original reports in 2006. Argument 4 has been challenged by questioning the credibility of news reports describing carousing behavior.

These arguments have tended to eclipse analysis of the official hijacking scenario that show it to be highly implausible operationally. The following arguments go to the implausibility of the official account without excluding the possibility that there were Arab-looking men on the planes, perhaps in the role of patsies.

• None of the alleged hijackers were good pilots, and none had flown jet airplanes, let alone large jetliners. Yet they are supposed to have piloted jetliners into their targets with apparent "surgical strike" precision.
• The staggered flight times and long flight paths of the targeted jetliners exposed the plan to certain defeat, had the air defense system been allowed to function normally.
• According to the official account, four flight crews were defeated, and the pilots removed from their seats by bands of four or five hijackers using only "boxcutters", despite several of the airline pilots being Vietnam combat veterans.
• Not one of the flight crews radioed distress or punched in the four-digit hijack code. ²  
• The silent takeovers of each of the jetliners proceeded despite alerts raised by the hijacking of Flight 11 being communicated to pilots of the remaining flights.

Not a "Single Piece of Paper" Links Alleged Hijackers to Plot

Most of the above facts are never acknowledged by government agencies or mainstream media. However, FBI director Robert Mueller did admit that his agency failed to find "a single piece of paper" linking the alleged hijackers to the 9/11/01 plot.

With such a lack of evidence it is no wonder that there has not been a single prosecution leading to conviction anywhere in the world of the alleged perpetrators, with the single exception of Zaccarias Moussaoui, who was only convicted because he admitted to involvement in the alleged plot.

'But I'm Not Dead'

In the weeks following the attack, several individuals whose identities matched suspects in the FBI's list of 19 hijackers protested their lack of involvement in the attack.

These pages each cite a number of mainstream press accounts that document the efforts by the suspects to proclaim their innocence. Yet despite this, the 9/11 Commission Report repeated the FBI's original list of 19 hijackers without so much as admitting that there was a problem in the identifications.