A further element suggests that the Dulles video was made before 9/11. Dulles airport security manager Ed Nelson told authors Susan and Joseph Trento that shortly after arriving at Dulles airport on the morning of 9/11, FBI agents confiscated a security tape from a checkpoint through which they said the alleged hijackers had passed on the way to their boarding. He then described the scene and expressed his surprise that the FBI agents could so fast pick out “the hijackers” from hundreds of other passengers on the footage:
They pulled the tape right away… They brought me to look at it. They went right to the first hijacker on the tape and identified him. They knew who the hijackers were out of hundreds of people going through the checkpoints. They would go “roll and stop it” and showed me each of the hijackers… It boggles my mind that they had already had the hijackers identified… Both metal detectors were open at that time, and lots of traffic was moving through. So picking people out is hard… I wanted to know how they had that kind of information. So fast. It didn’t make sense to me.”{157}
Aside from the dubious source of the Dulles footage, it does not show who boarded an aircraft but provides only blurred images of individuals whose identities cannot be verified. Such an artifact would be inadmissible in a court of law as evidence of the participation of the depicted individuals in mass murder.
(5) “Hijackers” without bodies
According to the official account, the 19 alleged hijackers died in aircraft crashes at the WTC, the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The Pittsburgh Tribune of 13 September 2001 – two days after the events – reported that the
remains from the main crash site [of flight UA93] have been taken a makeshift morgue at the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory near the Somerset County Airport. State police escorted a tractor-trailer truck into the back of the armory late yesterday evening, according to a resident who lives nearby. The lights were turned off briefly as the truck was directed to the rear of the armory. A short time later, the lights were turned on as the police cars and the truck left, said the man who declined to be identified.{158}
Unidentified officials spoken to by The Times (U.K.) in October 2001 said they expected that the bodies of the 9/11 suspects would be identified “by a process of elimination.”{159} They did not explain why they did not expect the bodies to be positively identified, one by one.
Chris Kelly, spokesman of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), where the identification of victims’ remains from flights AA77 and UA93 took place, said that the authorities were reluctant to consider releasing the hijackers’ bodies: “We are not quite sure what will happen to them, we doubt very much we are going to be making an effort to reach family members over there.”{160} He did not explain why no efforts would be made to locate the families of the alleged hijackers.
The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was at the time subject to the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of Defense.
According to Llonald Mixell, Vero Beach, Florida, landlord of ‘Alomari’, one of the alleged hijackers, the FBI “searched the Omari home [and] agents left a list of materials seized, including hair samples and air conditioning filters.”{161} There were more such samples available from the alleged hijackers’ hotel rooms and cars. Yet, according to Dr. Jerry Spencer, a former chief medical examiner for AFIP, cited by CBS News, “the terrorists are usually not in our possession in the United States like this”{162} — whatever that means. According to Jeff Killeen, spokesman for the FBI field office in Pittsburgh, “there haven’t been any friends or family members trying to claim the remains of [the hijackers].”{163} The family of Ziad Jarrah in Lebanon was reported as early as 16 September 2001 as “ready to cooperate with the authorities.”{164} The U.S. authorities did not respond to this offer.
In mid-August 2002, a news report on the victims’ remains noted that the DNA of the alleged hijackers still had not been checked, because “little attention has been paid to the terrorists’ remains.”{165}
When the AFIP announced it had positively identified the human remains of all “innocent” passengers and crew members from the flights, the agency had not yet identified the remains of any of the alleged hijackers. Kelly said later: “The remains that didn’t match any of the samples were ruled [by default] to be the terrorist,”{166} confirming the prescient statement published earlier by The Times. Tom Gibb, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that the “air pirates [for flight UA93] have been identified as Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed Al-Haznawi, Saeed Al-Ghamdi and Ahmed Alnami — but not so positively identified that officials will list the names in official records.” Coroner Wallace Miller said that the “death certificates [for the suspected hijackers] will list each as ’John Doe’.”{167} Under a ruling issued on 11 October 2001 by a Somerset County judge and cited by Tom Gibb of the Post-Gazette, everyone who died aboard flight UA93 “except the terrorists” will get death certificates. Gibb wrote that at the “insistence of the FBI, the terrorists won’t be getting them because investigators aren’t sure of their identities.”{168}
According to the AFIP, bodily remains from virtually all passengers of flight AA77 which allegedly crashed at the Pentagon could be identified by their DNA which miraculously survived the inferno (except the “hijackers”). At the same time, representatives of the Department of Justice and the FBI told the staff of the 9/11 Commission that the contents of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) for that flight “were destroyed by the intense heat it had been subjected to.”{169} Such devices are, however, constructed to resist far greater impact and temperatures than human DNA.
Among documents transmitted to the 9/11 Commission and released in 2009, one document contains the claim by the FBI that DNA profiles of Ziad Jarrah provided by the German Federal Police (BKA) to the FBI “matched the sample of one of the sets of unknown human remains.”{170} The aforementioned FBI document is not signed, dated or otherwise authenticated. The U.S. authorities have not, in any case, relied on this document to claim that Ziad Jarrah’s remains had been positively identified.
As will be shown in a later chapter, no bodies or blood, nor aircraft debris were sighted by eyewitnesses at the reported crash site of flight UA93.
As for the remains of the suspects who allegedly hijacked flights AA11 and UA175, a spokeswoman for the New York Medical Examiner’s Office, where the identification of the victims from the WTC took place, said she had received from the FBI in February 2003 profiles of all ten hijackers who allegedly died at the WTC, so “their remains could be separated from those of victims.” She added, however: “No names were attached to these profiles. We matched them, and we have matched two of those profiles to remains that we have.”{171} In 2005, the number of matched samples from New York increased to three.{172}
In an essay entitled “Who They Were,” Robert Shaler of the forensic unit in New York City, set down his inside account of the identification effort: “No names, just a K code, which is how the FBI designates ‘knowns,’ or specimens it knows the origins of,” he wrote, adding, “we had no direct knowledge of how the FBI obtained the terrorists’ DNA.”{173} His statement was echoed in 2009 by his deputy, Howard Baum, in a Newsweek interview: “We had no idea where the profiles came from or how they were developed.”{174}
The lack of positive identification of the alleged hijackers’ bodily remains, compounded by the glaring absence of chain-of-custody reports regarding these remains, means that the U.S. authorities have failed to produce concrete evidence that the alleged hijackers died on 11 September 2001, let alone at the reported crash sites.
Conclusions to Chapter 3
The FBI confiscated immediately after the attacks of 9/11 all available documentation regarding the boarding of the aircraft that were allegedly hijacked. Dozens of witnesses from the airlines and the respective airports were interviewed by the FBI on the very day of the attacks and thereafter. All existing evidence regarding the boarding of the four