Xymphora blog>... This is eerily reminiscent of the stolen identities used in the 9-11 attack.
More BS, http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/hoax.html
http://mckinneysucks.blogspot.com/
Thursday, September 18, 2003 ::
Der Spiegel on Conspiracy Theories
>...The authors explain in great detail the anatomy of one of the more popular internet memes associated with 9/11 -- that many of the hijackers are still alive:
Take the BBC, for example, which did in fact report, on September 23, 2001, that some of the alleged terrorists were alive and healthy and had protested their being named as assassins.
But there is one wrinkle. The BBC journalist responsible for the story only recalls this supposed sensation after having been told the date on which the story aired. "No, we did not have any videotape or photographs of the individuals in question at that time," he says, and tells us that the report was based on articles in Arab newspapers, such as the Arab News, an English-language Saudi newspaper.
The operator at the call center has the number for the Arab News on speed dial. We make a call to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A few seconds later, Managing Editor John Bradley is on the line. When we tell Bradley our story, he snorts and says: "That's ridiculous! People here stopped talking about that a long time ago."
Bradley tells us that at the time his reporters did not speak directly with the so-called "survivors," but instead combined reports from other Arab papers. These reports, says Bradley, appeared at a time when the only public information about the attackers was a list of names that had been published by the FBI on September 14th. The FBI did not release photographs until four days after the cited reports, on September 27th.
The photographs quickly resolved the nonsense about surviving terrorists. According to Bradley, "all of this is attributable to the chaos that prevailed during the first few days following the attack. What we're dealing with are coincidentally identical names." In Saudi Arabia, says Bradley, the names of two of the allegedly surviving attackers, Said al-Ghamdi and Walid al-Shari, are "as common as John Smith in the United States or Great Britain."
The final explanation is provided by the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, one of the sources of Arab News, which in turn serves as a source to the BBC. Mohammed Samman is the name of the reporter who interviewed a man named Said al-Ghamdi in Tunis, only to find that al-Ghamdi was quite horrified to discover his name on the FBI list of assassins.
Samman remembers his big story well. "That was a wonderful story," he says. And that's all it was. It had nothing to do with the version made up of Br?ckers' and Bülow's combined fantasies.
"The problem," says Samman, "was that after the first FBI list had been published, CNN released a photo of the pilot Said al-Ghamdi that had been obtained from the files of those Saudi pilots who had at some point received official flight training in the United States."
After Samman's story was reported by the news agencies, he was contacted by CNN. "I gave them Ghamdi's telephone number. The CNN people talked to the pilot and apologized profusely. The whole thing was quite obviously a mix-up. The Ghamdi family is one of the largest families in Saudi Arabia, and there are thousands of men named Said al-Ghamdi."
When we ask Samman to take another look at the FBI's list of photographs, he is more than happy to oblige, and tells us: "The Ghamdi on the photo is not the pilot with whom I spoke."
The investigative journalists should have been able to figure out just how obvious the solution to this puzzle was. They all write that a man named Abd al-Asis al-Umari had been named as a perpetrator by the FBI, and that there are apparently many individuals with this name. Br?ckers and Hau? even noticed that the FBI had initially released an incorrect first name to the press. All of this certainly suggests that there was a mix-up, but it's also something that the conspiracy theorists apparently did not consider plausible.
In the case of the supposedly surviving terrorist Walid al-Shari, the truth is even more obvious. At least Bülow had the opportunity to avoid making this mistake. In his book, he writes that the alleged assassin Shari "lives in Casablanca and works as a pilot, according to information provided by the airline Royal Air Maroc."
If Bülow had inquired with the airline, he would have discovered that the name of the pilot who lives in Casablanca is Walid al-Shri and not, like that of the assassin, Walid al-Shari. This minor detail makes a big difference, namely the difference between a dead terrorist and a living innocent man. But to conspiracy theorists, discovering the truth is like solving a crossword puzzle for children: What's a four-letter word for a domesticated animal? Hrse.
While doing research for my conspiracy page last year, I had e-mailed several different desks at the BBC to inform them that their story was being used all over the internet as grist for these conspiracy theories, and asked if they had ever followed up on their apparent bombshell story. How, I asked, could they just do one story on such an accusation, and never make an attempt at closure one way or the other.
I never got an answer. I'm afraid that's all too common in journalism today. Headlines like "Initial Reports Proven Untrue" just don't sell newspapers, and I guess there just isn't a commensurate sense of accountability among reporters and their editors to clear up speculative nonsense for which they were responsible in the first place.
Later, the Philly Daily News ran an "unanswered questions" piece that included the same "hijackers still living" canard. I e-mailed the columnist, Will Bunch, primarily to inform him that one of those still-living hijackers was recently featured on an al-qaeda recruiting video -- reading his will, no less. I also asked him why he didn't try to solve any of these mysteries himself, rather than whining, "So why did this story line vanish into thin air?" A rather odd question for a reporter to be asking his readers, I thought.
Bunch's response: "I'm a good reporter, but if I tried to solve all 20 questions myself I'd be 96 years old by the time I was done!" With this level of laziness among professional journalists, it's no wonder the conspiracy loons are able to point to so many "inconsistencies" and "unanswered questions."
:: Bill Herbert 11:41 AM [+] ::
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:: Friday, September 12, 2003 ::
Is This Even Necessary?
Al-Jazeera has aired a recruiting video on which 9/11 hijacker Said al-Ghamdi reads his will.
This may be of interest to some of the loonier conspiracy theorists, who have been wailing that al-Ghamdi is still alive, as are six other of the hijackers.
:: Bill Herbert 8:41 PM [+] ::
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Michael Pugliese