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Some of the hijackers were trained by the US government, at Pensacola Naval Air Station.
http://www.911myths.com/html/trained.html
Our article on this topic is supposedly debunked as follows:
My Response:
Why doesn't Mike mention the following:
THREE OF THE alleged hijackers 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.
Why would the hijackers put their home addresses as being the Naval Air Station if they didn't train there? Or did the Hijackers manage to steal the identifies of several Arabs who just coincidently were being trained by the US Military?
http://911physics.atspace.com/Pages/Debunking911Myths/Hijackers.htm
There are at least two issues here.
The first is that we we don't dispute there were a group of three individuals, with similar names to the hijackers, who "listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola". What we do dispute is that it's proven these were the hijackers: the article certainly doesn't do that.
Chris is also using an old version of our page. The current version points out that one of these individuals, Saeed Alghamdi, registered a car in March 1997. If that's the same person as the alleged hijacker, and his publicised birth date is correct, then that means he was registering a car and learning to fly at the age of 17. If he was in the same group for the 1996 date they mention, maybe 16. Another conspiracy site puts this group in Florida since 1992, which would make him 12, another of the individuals would have been around 13. Seems to us like another strong indication that the Newsweek group were not the same people as the hijackers.
Passport Recovered:
The passport of one of the hijackers was found at the WTC. It's clearly impossible for any personal effects to survive the impact and explosion, therefore it must have been planted.
http://www.911myths.com/html/passport_recovered.html
Chris debunks our page on the passport by telling the world that... it's irrelevant.
My Response:
Here it would appear 911Myths is attacking a straw man, no serious 9/11 researcher has ever sighted this a key piece of evidence. You can choose to believe that Mohamed Atta's passport did survive. However this story like many others was later retracted. If Mike had done some serious research he would know this. I think it's pretty sad he is trying to prove something which is now denied by the US Government.
http://911physics.atspace.com/Pages/Debunking911Myths/Hijackers.htm
Accurate? Ah, no. Let's itemise the issues.
"no serious 9/11 researcher has ever sighted this a key piece of evidence"
Really? Here's something from a David Ray Griffin address of March 2006:
Evidence was also apparently planted. The passport of one of the hijackers on Flight 11 was allegedly found in the rubble, having survived the fire caused by the crash into the north tower and also whatever caused everything else in this building except the steel to be pulverized.84 As a story in the Guardian said, "the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism."85
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2006/911-Myth-Reality-Griffin30mar06.htm
If Griffin isn't a significant example of a 9/11 Researcher, then who is? If the one example he gives of evidence being planted isn't "key", then what is?
"You can choose to believe that Mohamed Atta's passport did survive"
No you can't, actually -- it wasn't Atta's passport. Early reports said so, incorrectly, but it was actually Satam al-Suqami (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satam_al-Suqami ).
"However this story like many others was later retracted. If Mike had done some serious research he would know this. I think it's pretty sad he is trying to prove something which is now denied by the US Government."
Denied by the US Government? Far from it: the 9/11 Commission explain how the passport was recovered in a footnote to the Terrorist Travel staff statement:
109 The passport was recovered by NYPD Detective Yuk H. Chin from a male passerby in a business suit, about 30 years old. The passerby left before being identified, while debris was falling from WTC 2. The tower collapsed shortly thereafter. The detective then gave the passport to the FBI on 9/11. See FBI report, interview of Detective Chin, Sept. 12, 2001.
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrTrav_Ch2.pdf
Perhaps Chris needs to do a little more "serious research" of his own.
Still alive:
Many of the hijackers as named by America are still alive.
http://www.911myths.com/html/still_alive.html
We make lengthy, referenced claims in these pages to show why the "still alive" stories fall far short of real proof, but Chris thinks he can debunk them. In a single sentence.
My Response:
His response is not true, for the reason that the Hijackers saw there names and photos on television and actually went to the American embassy in Saudi Arabia and told the authorities that they wanted there names and photos taken off the FBI most wanted list.
http://911physics.atspace.com/Pages/Debunking911Myths/Hijackers.htm
Okay, let's look at the issues here.
"the Hijackers saw there names and photos on television..."
He's attempting to tell you that everyone saw their photos on the TV. We don't think that's the case, and Chris provides no evidence to show otherwise.
Chris also fails to tell you that every one of the "still alive" stories we address appeared before the FBI released their list of names and photos, on September 27th 2001. So where's the evidence that any photos that did appear on TV originated with the US Government?
And Chris also fails to tell you that CNN appear to have released at least one photo of the wrong man (Said al-Ghamdi), and possibly another (Waleed Al-Shehri). These represented errors by the media, not the FBI or the Government.
Chris also completely ignores issues we raise, like the interview with a brother of Wail and Waleed Al-Shehri, where clearly they're both missing, and presumed dead. Or the fact that Saudi Arabia have accepted that 15 Saudi citizens were indeed involved in the attacks.
So are we "debunked", then? You decide.
Flight school dropouts:
How could such precision attacks have been carried out by a bunch of flight school dropouts? It's just not possible.
http://www.911myths.com/html/flight_school_dropouts.html
My Response:
All he seems to be investigating is whether or not Hani Hanjour was a poor pilot. At best he was said to have below average to average piloting skills. Mike fails to discuss the difficulty of the maneuvers the alleged hijackers supposedly made.
Russ Wittenburg a former Vietnam Combat and Commercial Pilot says there is no way any commercial pilot yet alone an amateur like Hani Hanjour could of possibly flown "Flight 77" in the manner it was flown.
Former Vietnam Combat and Commercial Pilot Firm Believer 9/11 Was Inside Government Job; An Experienced Boeing 757/767 Pilot, He Says 'No Way' Could a Novice Fly the 'Big Birds' He Knew So Well
http://www.arcticbeacon.citymaker.com/articles/article/1518131/29392.htm
http://911physics.atspace.com/Pages/Debunking911Myths/Hijackers.htm
The issues here:
"All he seems to be investigating is whether or not Hani Hanjour was a poor pilot."
Seems like a relevant point to us? As it addressing the claim that they were all "flight school dropouts", which you do see made occasionally.
"At best he was said to have below average to average piloting skills"
No, his best reference is here, in a 9/11 Commission footnote to Chapter 7:
170. FBI report, "Summary of Penttbom Investigation," Feb. 29, 2004, pp. 5257. Hanjour successfully conducted a challenging certification flight supervised by an instructor at Congressional Air Charters of Gaithersburg, Maryland, landing at a small airport with a difficult approach.The instructor thought Hanjour may have had training from a military pilot because he used a terrain recognition system for navigation. Eddie Shalev interview (Apr.9, 2004).
"Mike fails to discuss the difficulty of the maneuvers the alleged hijackers supposedly made."
We were quite honest in what we said on the page:
"People will still say that the Pentagon attack was too difficult for Hanjour to have pulled off, and we don't know whether that is true or not (and don’t have any personal experience to add anything new to that debate)."
Further, Chris is commenting on an old version. The latest has quotes from pilots saying that the hijackers could have carried out the attacks, from articles like http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_1253.shtml and http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/05/19/askthepilot186/
Remote control:
There were no hijackers on the 9/11 planes. Instead they were flown by remote control.
http://www.911myths.com/html/remote_control.html
My Response:
Mike's response is basically that the planes could not of been remote controlled because they would of had to have had several cameras aboard them. This is not true at all, the planes could simply be programmed to fly exactly where they wanted to, how do you think autopilot works?
http://911physics.atspace.com/Pages/Debunking911Myths/Hijackers.htm
Chris might wish to brush away latency issues and pretend they don't exist, but it's not going to work. Autopilots do not guarantee to get you "exactly" to a particular point in space, especially when you're flying at low altitude and very high speed. Wind speed, direction, variations in the control response time, tiny errors in the planes attitude will all have an effect on your position.
To compensate for issues like this, you need a feedback loop, a means of finding out where you are and correcting your position if necessary. This means you will have some errors (GPS isn't perfect), and you'll also have a delay (it takes time to process the results). How significant are these issues? We don't know, but reports of the Flight 77 approach suggest it wouldn't have taken an error of very many metres for the plane to have crashed short of its target.
This response doesn't get close to debunking the latency issues, then, and that's just the start. There are still questions to be raised about whether it's plausible that any extra "remote control" unit could be added to the plane, how it would have worked, whether the pilots and maintenance engineers would have noticed, why the pilots failed to alert the authorities about what was going on (assuming Chris believes the actual flights were remotely controlled, and not other planes), and more.
Thomas Olmsted's autopsy list:
There are inconsistencies in the numbers of passengers listed for Flight 77, leading some to believe that there were no hijackers at all.
http://www.911myths.com/html/missing_arabs.html
My Response:
Since this information came from the US Government we cannot conclude that it is at all accurate or that it has any truth to it what so ever. It may just be a coincidence that none of the hijackers bodies were identified, but how many coincidences are you going to believe?
http://911physics.atspace.com/Pages/Debunking911Myths/Hijackers.htm
Breaking this down:
"Since this information came from the US Government we cannot conclude that it is at all accurate or that it has any truth to it what so ever"
Which information? Olmsted's autopsy list, or the news reports we quote, or...? Chris doesn't say.
"It may just be a coincidence that none of the hijackers bodies were identified, but how many coincidences are you going to believe?"
Here we see Chris engaging in the manufacture of coincidences. He hopes that if he can invent enough of them, you'll be swayed to see his point of view. The reality, of course, is that it's not a "coincidence" at all. As we point out, the identifications of Flight 77 passengers were by DNA, and there were no samples available from the hijackers relatives at the time. Hardly a coincidence when Saudi Arabia didn't even accept 15 of their citizens were involved until February of 2002.
The reality of Olmsted's "autopsy lists" is that they only list the people on Flight 77 who were identified by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. People who were not identified by the AFIP won’t be listed there, and so the lists cannot be used to show that the hijackers were not on the plane. That point is not debunked here.
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