An examination of the documentary record reveals a clear pattern of willful deception on the part of the 9/11 Commission with regard to alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour in an apparent effort to manipulate the facts to suit the official theory.
Hani Hanjour is the hijacker who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001, according to the official account of terrorist attacks. “The lengthy and extensive flight training obtained by Hani Hanjour throughout his years in the United States makes it reasonable to believe that he was the pilot of Flight 77 on September 11”, concluded FBI Director Robert S. Mueller.[1] The story is that while Hanjour had difficulties learning to fly at first, he persevered, overcame his obstacles, and became an extraordinary enough pilot to be able to precisely hit his target after performing a difficult flight maneuver.
The New York Times, for instance, asserted that “Mr. Hanjour overcame the mediocrity of his talents as a pilot and gained enough expertise to fly a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.”[2] The Washington Post similarly suggested Hanjour had the requisite skills, reporting that “Federal records show that a Hani Hanjoor obtained a commercial pilot’s license in April 1999 with a rating to fly commercial jets.”[3]
The 9/11 Commission expanded upon this narrative in its final report. It noted that Hanjour first came to the United States in 1991 to study English, then again in 1996 “to pursue flight training, after being rejected by a Saudi flight school. He checked out flight schools in Florida, California, and Arizona; and he briefly started at a couple of them before returning to Saudi Arabia.” In 1997, after returning to Arizona, he “began his flight training there in earnest. After about three months, Hanjour was able to obtain his private pilot’s license. Several more months of training yielded him a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 1999.”[4]
Subsequently, “Hanjour reportedly applied to the civil aviation school in Jeddah after returning home, but was rejected.” By the end of 2000, Hanjour was back in the U.S. and “began refresher training at his old school, Arizona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties because his English was not good enough. The instructor advised him to discontinue but Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa. An instructor there found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing. Again, Hanjour persevered; he completed the initial training by the end of March 2001.”[5] A footnote in the report asserts that Hanjour was chosen specifically for targeting the Pentagon because he was “the operation’s most experienced pilot.”[6]
John Ashcroft told reporters early in the investigation, “It is our belief and the evidence indicates that flight training was received in the United States and that their capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial. It’s very clear that these orchestrated coordinated assaults on our country were well-conducted and conducted in a technically proficient way. It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case.”[7]
A pilot with a major carrier for over 30 years told CNN that “the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators”.[8] An air traffic controller from Dulles International Airport told ABC News, “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.”[9]
CBS News suggested that according to its sources, Flight 77, “flying at more than 400 mph, was too fast and too high when it neared the Pentagon at 9:35. The hijacker-pilots were then forced to execute a difficult high-speed descending turn. Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it’s clear there was no fight for control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed. The jetliner disappeared from radar at 9:37 and less than a minute later it clipped the tops of street lights and plowed into the Pentagon at 460 mph.”[10]
The Washington Post similarly noted that the plane “was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm”. Hanjour was so skilled, in fact, that “just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot” – later identified as Hanjour – “executed a pivot so tight it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver.”[11] The Post reported in another article that “After the attacks … aviation experts concluded that the final maneuvers of American Airlines Flight 77 – a tight turn followed by a steep, accurate descent into the Pentagon – was the work of ‘a great talent … virtually a textbook turn and landing,’”.[12]
According to the report of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) cited by the 9/11 Commission, information from the flight data recorder recovered from the Pentagon crash site and radar data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) show that the autopilot was disengaged “as the aircraft leveled near 7000 feet. Slight course changes were initiated, during which variations in altitude between 6800 and 8000 feet were noted. At 9:34 AM, the aircraft was positioned about 3.5 miles west-southwest of the Pentagon, and started a right 330-degree descending turn to the right. At the end of the turn, the aircraft was at about 2000 feet altitude and 4 miles southwest of the Pentagon. Over the next 30 seconds, power was increased to near maximum and the nose was pitched down in response to control column movements. The airplane accelerated to approximately 460 knots (530 miles per hour) at impact with the Pentagon. The time of impact was 9:37:45 AM.”[13]
The NTSB created a computer simulation of the flight from the flight data recorder information showing that the plane was actually at more than 8,100 feet and doing about 330 mph when it began its banking turn at 9:34 am.[14] At that point, the alleged pilot Hanjour could have simply decreased thrust, nosed down, and guided the plane into what would have been 29 acres, or 1,263,240 square feet of target area – the equivalent of about 22 football fields.[15] From this angle, proverbially speaking, it would have been like trying to hit the side of a barn. Hanjour could have guided the plane into the enormous roof of the building, including the side of the building where the office of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was located, and where he happened to be that morning.[16]
Instead, the plane began a steep banking descent, circling downward in a 330-degree turn while dropping more than 5,600 feet in three minutes before re-aligning with the Pentagon and increasing to maximum thrust towards the building. The nose was kept down despite the increased lift from the acceleration, while flying so close to the ground that it clipped lamp posts along the interstate highway before plowing into the building at more than 530 mph, precisely hitting a target only 71 feet high, or just 26.5 feet taller than the Boeing 757 itself.[17]
In other words, by performing this maneuver, Hanjour reduced his vertical target area from a size comparable to the height of the Empire State Building to an area just 5 stories high. Instead of descending at an angle and plowing through the roof and floors of the building to cause the greatest possible number of casualties, including possibly taking out the Secretary of Defense, Hanjour hit wedge 1 of the Pentagon, opposite to Rumsfeld’s office, which happened to be under construction, and where the plane, travelling horizontally, had to penetrate through the steel- and kevlar-reinforced outer wall of the building’s southwest E-ring in addition to the numerous additional walls of the inner rings of the building.[18]
But even more problematic than the question of why Hanjour would perform this maneuver is the question of how he performed it. Perhaps the most incredible thing about this, the official account of what happened to Flight 77, is that Hani Hanjour was in reality such a horrible pilot that he had trouble handling a light single-engine aircraft and even just one month before the attacks was rejected at two different schools because he was judged too incompetent to rent a plane and fly solo.
As the Los Angeles Times ironically put it, “For someone suspected of steering a jetliner into the Pentagon, the 29-year-old man who used the name Hani Hanjour sure convinced a lot of people he barely knew how to fly.”[19]
to view a partial list of crimes committed by FBI agents over 1500 pages long see
forums.signonsandiego. com/showthread.php?t=59139
to view a partial list of FBI agents arrested for pedophilia see
campusactivism. org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=29
also see
ctka. net/pr500-king.html
Jeremy, excellent research and writing. Saw you also wrote recently re: 9/11 hijackers on manifests–which was good. I appreciate your cautious/sober, objective, and well-sourced investigations.
Have you investigated other aspects of 9/11?
Anything re: how the 3 towers (incl. WTC7) in NYC collapsed?
Hope you will if you haven’t yet. It’s most curious how the FEMA report & NIST report each based the Twin Tower collapses on opposite judgments re: the strength of the floor-truss connections to the exterior columns.
FEMA essentially claimed the floor truss connections were so weak that they failed easily, leading to a progressive pancake collapse–while NIST claims the floor-truss connections were so incredibly strong they actually bowed in (& even broke) the much, much larger exterior columns.. columns everyone agrees were designed to provide All the horizontal load support (from high winds, etc) and a portion (perhaps 30~40%) of the vertical (gravitational) load.
NIST is widely considered to be the ‘gold standard’ and yet when you look at their own illustrations/explanations, it’s painfully clear those relatively light truss connections (a couple of bolts, & possibly small welds) could never have exerted enough force (without breaking) to bend in or break the much more massive exterior columns. It would be like bending/breaking a tree by tugging on a twig.
Don’t mean to suggest the FEMA report is more accurate because it’s obvious there was no actual ‘pancaking’ but rather it’s curious how the 2 official reports rely on opposite assessments of those floor-truss connections.
If you’re interested, please see PBS / NOVA’s slideshow narrated by NIST’s lead investigator Sunder–and notice the relative size of the truss connections vs. size of the exterior columns. It all hinges on these magical connections.
NOVA link:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc
To their slideshow detailing NIST’s version of collapse:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/sunder.html
Thanks for your superb work.
Yeah, I’ve followed it pretty closely. The bolt-breaking theory was officially scrapped.
Funny how the “conspiracy theorists” are ridiculed for saying the official story makes no sense, only to have the official story keep changing and acknowledgments made that, yeah, the official explanation was wrong after all. This has happened repeatedly. First they claimed fuel lines fed the WTC7 fire. Then they admitted that wasn’t true. Then they claimed damage to the building from the tower 1 and 2 collapses significantly weakened the structure. Now NIST acknowledges that that damage had no significant impact on the collapse. On point after point, first they offer some claim to support the official theory, only to be refuted and later have to admit that they were wrong.
The most telling thing about the NIST report on WTC 7 are its computer models of the collapse. They look NOTHING like the real collapse. The computer models are of a progressive collapse — which they claim it was. They do not in any way resemble the actual collapse, in which it is clear from all videos available that all major load-bearing columns gave out nearly simultaneously. Fire just can’t explain that. That’s the bottom line.
I also find the suggestion that the buildings could have been brought down in a controlled demolition to be incredible. And yet, I also have to trust what I can see with my own eyes happening before me, and have faith that the laws of physics still apply here on planet Earth.
Great points, Jeremy. Glad to hear you’re more than up on the plethora of details–and how contradictory so many are. How much of this is F.U.D. by design vs. FUD by…organic/natural processes? (like asking to what extent the Tea Party is a genuine grass-roots org) Of course, a few highly intelligent power-players can leverage organic processes by understanding human psychology & sociology.. just knowing how power tends to work and how major/corporate media is likely to portray events. Fear-mongering seems to help by simplifying the control efforts.
More specifically, my guess is that folks at NIST are not knowingly part of any inside-job conspiracy, but rather they were given a mandate to focus on explaining how the towers fell–and not to waste time/resources by investigating any ‘wild’ claims, so Sunder & others likely just did their jobs as best they could.. perhaps half-realizing along the way that their own analysis doesn’t really hold up well, but now their reps (& jobs) are staked to it so they must stand by it. Whistle-blowing doesn’t exactly pay the bills or endear you to your bosses, co-workers and neighbors.
Perhaps easy to understand why NIST doesn’t want to release their computer models (including exact inputs, etc) for public scrutiny.
To your points re: WTC7.. yeah, if NIST continued to claim that damage (from collapsing WTC1 &/or 2) played a significant role, then surely WTC7 would have fallen Over–in the direction of the damage. -which happens to be on the ‘short’ + thin side of the trapezoid-shaped building, thus easiest by far for the building to have toppled in that direction–and all the more with damage especially to the lower portion. And yet, it comes straight down most of the way, and only begins to slowly ‘topple’ (in direction of lower damage) near the end of collapse, so the debris field is pretty well (nearly) contained in the building’s footprint. Can’t explain that with any so-called progressive collapse sequence based on fire–as you said–or anything else other than some form of controlled demolition. All the more considering WTC7 had some asymmetrical structural elements, and yet came mostly straight down at near free-fall velocity.
And yeah, for various reasons, it’s not easy to accept controlled demolition and its implications. But so far, the C.D. theory seems to have the most merit in terms of the raw evidence & analysis. And NIST can’t really argue against it because they simply ruled it out summarily for all 3 towers–though with a token nod for WTC7. And they refuse to test their own dust samples for any evidence of incendiaries/explosives, so they can’t really refute the Harrit?, Jones, Ryan, et al paper showing evidence of super/nano-thermite in multiple dust samples.
But the larger question is this: how do we get mainstream, corporate-owned media to find it in Their self-interest to report what could be the biggest ‘scoop’ in recent history? Who do we approach..and how? -reporters? editors? publishers? owners? advertisers?
How do We leverage the massive corporate media?
There is so much verbal which clouds the fundamentals of true journalism. Is there one solid detailed offical commission report on any of the incident s of 9-11 which is the basic official government report. and for all to see.
Authority fails to see the implications and repercussions of this diabolic official investigation. A list naming all those responsible for the enquiries and subsequent decisions must be promulgated for future generations to pursue!.
Mr. Hammond’s point about the ever-changing nature of the official story is especially relevant to the question of why there were no interceptions. On that issue we’ve been handed three different stories.
The first story was that the military failed to intercept the airliners because the military failed to scramble any fighters–no scrambles until after the Pentagon had been hit. That was the account given during the week of 9/11, although it started to unravel in a few days.
The second story, made official on 9/18/2001, was that the military DID issue scramble orders in response to all four airliners. But the FAA had been so late in notifying NORAD (among other complications) that the fighters just couldn’t get to their targets in time to intercept them, in the case of the first three flights. They claimed they were finally in position to shoot down the fourth plane, Flight 93, but the passengers took matters into their own hands.
This version of the story collapsed by virtue of simple arithmetic. David Ray Griffin and other researchers (who know to add and subtract) were easily able to show that NORAD–assuming the reported notification times were correct–could certainly have intercepted these first three planes, especially Flight 77. This is now a non-controversial point, acknowledged even by the 9/11 Commission.
So, inevitably, the Commission gave us story #3. The gist of this third and current version is that military actually didn’t know the last three flights had even been hijacked until after each had crashed. Griffin has marshaled an impressive amount of evidence to show that this is an outright LIE. In fact, based on the evidence we now have, we can conclude that the military knew about these airliners being in trouble even earlier than they had claimed in story #2.
So that puts us back to square 1–nay, even further back than that. We have the 9/11 Commission’s admission that planes should have been intercepted if NORAD had known about them at least as early as originally claimed. Story #3 represents a last-ditch effort to refute the charge of a stand-down order. With the collapse of this story, that’s about all there is left to explain why these planes weren’t stopped.
Nice summary of the non-interceptions, Joel.
One of the first aspects that got me rethinking the official version(s) was wondering how on earth a commercial plane could just fly right into the Pentagon–presumably one of the most heavily protected areas on the planet as The nerve center of all U.S. military operations. Not to mention the Pentagon houses around 25,000 people.
Since 2 other planes had already smashed into the Twin Towers, you might assume our military/Pentagon would be on extremely high alert. And indeed, Mineta’s testimony clearly indicates the military was closely following Flight 77.. and yet it was allowed? to just fly right into the Pentagon… with all the military bases around the D.C. area, and you’d think the Pentagon would have some sort of defensive capabilities–anti-aircraft guns or something. Even multiple lines of defense.
All the more considering there were numerous documents re: the potential use of airplanes as weapons. And on 9/11, Gen. Schwarzkopf mentioned a famous Tom Clancy novel wherein a plane was used as a weapon–so not exactly a novel idea, though Bush & Rice & others later claimed, “uh, no one could have imagined using a plane as a weapon.”
Didn’t Michael Moore make a ref to the Pentagon having anti-aircraft weapons? -possibly in an interview.
Keep hoping he’ll do a follow-up doc to Fahrenheit 9/11.. there’s a bit more evidence & analysis since then.
Jeremy, not sure the flight ability of the pilot is as relvant as your effort and research implies. As even with little training I’m 100% sure anyone at the controls is going to hit some point very accurately. The pentagone has numerous sides, each very large. I appluade you on questioning the integrity of the reports and high lighting the possible conflicts. But your yield for truth maybe more rewarding if looking into the 5th flight that never took off or the crash in queens a month after 911. If a tail fell off a plane due to turbulence I think there would have been structural safety changes to that model plane or more crashes after 8 years. The 5th plane on 911 just dropped of into investigation with out conclusion. Were the four arabic men ever id from the luggae they left behind, all the other hijackers left Korans and final statements what happened to the luggage of those four unknown passanger that day? I find these questions very intriguing yet the goverment has been silent on the conclusion of these investigations.
I don’t know how it is you think a person with as poor piloting skills as Hanjour could have controlled Flight 77 in the manner it was. It’s a logical improbability, if not impossibility. The guy could barely handle a Cessna 172. I don’t know what “5th flight” you’re referring to.
Your assessment of the poor piloting skills of Hani Hanjour is based on the assumption that he was not flying the plane that hit the Pentagon. If he was flying the plane that hit the Pentagon then he was capable of flying the plane that hit the Pentagon. The 911 Commission looked at the facts and tried to come to a logical and reasonable conclusions about what happened, about who was flying the plane and assessed his background and the evidence of his piloting skills, both positive and negative. They then tried to arrive at logical conclusions based on those facts. That is what the process of investigation is about. Fortunately for those who try to denigrate and libel them by accusing them of deliberate deception and manipulation of the facts, because they reached conclusions, there is no such obligation. They don’t have to suggest any alternative reasonable or logical conclusions themselves. They have the same evidence. Tell us what your conclusions are. Those conclusions though have to be more logical and reasonable than those that are pejoratively labelled the ‘official narrative’.
What you mean to say is that my conclusion Hani Hanjour was likely not piloting the plane is based on his documented poor piloting skills.
Your conclusion that Hani Hanjour was likely not piloting the plane is based on his documented poor piloting skills , the distortion and exaggeration of the flying skills involved, and ignoring the evidence that he was likely the person flying the plane. Your failure to even try and suggest a more likely candidate for who was flying the plane is not a great basis for accusing people in the 911 Commission of trying to deceive people and distort evidence for reaching a conclusion about who was most likely flying the plane. Do you think the two AA pilots flew the plane into the Pentagon? If the conclusion about who was flying the plane that hit the Pentagon is to be reached based on the question of flying skills then the two pilots on the plane would be the conclusion. If you don’t know who was flying the plane then you can’t say Hani Hanjour wasn’t and therefore can’t say Hani Hanjour couldn’t. Either he did it, and was therefore able to,or he never tried, and his ability was never tested.
What a puzzling argument, given that the entirety of the lengthy article addresses the evidence cited to support the claim that he was piloting the plane.
The article is about the poor piloting skills of Hani Hanjour and and your conclusion is based on it.
quote “What you mean to say is that my conclusion Hani Hanjour was likely not piloting the plane is based on his documented poor piloting skills.”
That is only one part of the evidence. The lengthy article address the evidence cited to support the claim that he had the skills to fly the plane not all the evidence that he was likely the one flying it. It provides not more likely suspect. If the question was just who had the skills to fly the plane then the two AA pilots would be the conclusion. Do you think they were flying the plane? – I don’t.
You aren’t making any sense. I defer to my previous comments.