The story...

Why aren't the supposed hijackers listed on the CNN passenger lists for each flight? Does that mean they weren't on the flights?

Our take...

One issue here is the idea that CNNs lists are the official passenger manifest. Thus you'll often see people arguing that "the hijackers names don't even appear on the manifests", as supposedly conclusive proof that they were never there.

This idea, as usual, doesn't stand up to scrutiny, because CNN actually tell us where their names came from. Visit the Memorial page ( http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/memorial/indexold.html ), click "About this Site", and you'll see the following qualifications:

"The list includes those listed as "confirmed dead" and "reported dead" by the Associated Press... Includes those whose deaths have been reported by family, employers, mortuaries, places of worship or by the airlines that listed them as aboard one of the four flights... Those identified by federal authorities as the hijackers are not included".

Hmm. So the hijackers are intentionally left out, no surprise there. And the reports themselves are constructed from many sources, including press reports -- they're not an official passenger manifest.

If you need any more proof, then take a look at their Flight 11 passenger list ( www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/victims/AA11.victims.html ). We're writing this in October 2005, more than 4 years after the event, so you'd expect it to be accurate. But then you'd be wrong.

Problem #1: James Roux. Visit the Wayback Machine for this page, open the earliest version and you'll see his name. Open the latest one, and it's gone. Why? Because he was on Flight 175. How did a United Airlines passenger end up on a American Airlines manifest? He didn't -- this isn't an official list.

Problem #2: Jude and Natalie Larson. They're still on the current list, although, oh dear, they were never on the plane at all.

Jude and Natalie Larson were not among the victims of American Airlines Flight 11...

The Larsons were reported as victims of the tragedy... after Maui artist Curtis Larson said last week his son and his daughter-in-law were victims.

Larson's real name is Jude Olsen, and he said in a telephone interview last night that both he and his wife Natalie are fine.

His father... told reporters Sept. 11 that he had gotten word that his son and daughter-in-law were aboard the doomed airliner.

The names of Jude and Natalie Larson ended up on the list of victims in newspapers and media Web sites from coast to coast.
the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2001/Sep/18/ln/ln15a.html

Another sign that these lists were assembled from press reports, not a manifest.

Problem #3: Waleed J. Iskandar, Pendyala Vamsikrishna and Kelly Booms are not included on the CNN list for Flight 11, although they were all passengers (Google their names for reference).

Problem #4: The CNN list for Flight 11 includes both Robin Caplin and Robin Kaplan, and some people suggest one is a mis-spelled duplicate of the other.

Is it annoying that these problems persist? Yes, it certainly is. We believe they show clearly that the CNN lists are not official passenger manifests, though. It's no surprise that they don't include the hijackers names, because CNN explicitly say they've been left out. And inaccuracies mean constructing conspiracies based on these flawed lists, relating to passenger names or passenger numbers, can never prove anything.