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The Mystery of the Hijackers 18:02 Jackson: One of the strangest and most frequently ignored parts of the 9/11 story is the identity of the hijackers themselves. The 9/11 Commission Report gives us a very specific list of names and photos, but that list has some serious holes.
18:17 Lena: This is one of those facts that sounds like fiction but is actually documented. Shortly after 9/11, several of the people named as hijackers turned up alive and well in the Middle East. For example, Waleed al-Shehri, who was supposedly on Flight 11, was interviewed in Casablanca. He was a pilot for Royal Air Maroc.
18:35 Jackson: And he wasn't the only one. Salem al-Hazmi, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami—they all turned up alive. Al-Ghamdi was in Tunisia learning to fly an Airbus. He told reporters he was shocked to hear he had "died" in Pennsylvania. How does the "definitive" investigation of the century get the names of the perpetrators wrong and then just refuse to correct the record?
18:59 Lena: It raises the question of identity theft. Were these hijackers using stolen or fake identities? And if so, who provided them? The 9/11 Commission never bothered to investigate why these men were still alive or how their names ended up on the flight manifests—manifests that, by the way, the government has refused to release to independent researchers.
19:18 Jackson: Then you have the "ringleader," Mohamed Atta. The official story says he was a devout, fundamentalist Muslim. But the accounts from people who actually saw him in Florida tell a very different story. Atta was seen drinking heavily, using cocaine, gambling, and paying for lap dances.
19:36 Lena: One reporter, Daniel Hopsicker, found that Atta actually lived with a prostitute for a while. He ate pork chops. These are not the actions of someone about to go on a holy suicide mission for a fundamentalist cause. It sounds more like an intelligence asset living a double life.
19:52 Jackson: And then there is the "lucky" discovery of Atta's bags. Two of his bags allegedly didn't make it onto Flight 11. Inside, the FBI found a Koran, flight manuals, a religious cassette, and—of all things—his personal will. Who brings their will on a plane they are about to fly into a building? It feels like a "terrorist starter kit" left behind to make sure investigators found exactly what they were looking for.
20:19 Lena: It is too perfect. It is like the passport of one of the hijackers that was supposedly found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. The buildings were pulverized into dust, the black boxes were never found, but a paper passport survived the fireball and the collapse to be found by an investigator?
20:35 Jackson: When you look at these anomalies, the "puppet strings" start to look like they were used to craft a specific narrative. If the hijackers weren't who we were told they were, or if they were living lives that contradicted their supposed motives, then the entire "official" version of why this happened falls apart.