Synthetic Terror Chapter 5

At last, we get into some stuff that is actually 9-11 related. In this chapter, Tarpley focuses on the hijackers. Predictably, we get the discussion about Atta's fondness for alcohol, cocaine, strippers and pork, all unfortunately drawn from Hopsicker's notorious interview with Amanda Keller, and thus all debunked.

We get a lot of the "six degrees of separation" stuff. For example, Atta and Shehhi supposedly rented a plane from Kemper Aviation in August 2001. Kemper Aviation's chief pilot instructor until 1999 was Jean-Francois Buslik, who apparently was a criminal in Belgium involved in a series of murders. This claim comes from Hopsicker, but appears confirmed here.

Tarpley repeats the claim that some of the hijackers had trained at Pensacola. The website 9-11 Myths covers this well:

One oddity for these three is that none of them are suggested as being pilots, in the official 9/11 account. Why would the plotters bother training Jarrah for Flight 93, say, when he would be accompanied by two more experienced, military-trained pilots on 9/11?

We hear the usual glowing reports about Hani Hanjour's amazing 270 (officially now 330) degree turn, as if this kind of maneuver is not considered routine when a pilot realizes he's a little too high for his approach. We hear about his failure to successfully convince instructors at Freeway Airport that he was qualified enough to rent one of their Cessnas, without hearing that he later succeeded in renting a Cessna and flying it down to Maryland.

We get the warnings bit again from foreign countries, to which I always have to respond, warnings of what? That the US was about to stage a false-flag terrorist attack against itself, or that Al-Qaeda was determined to strike? Of course, I guess Tarpley's kind of in the middle, believing that some of the hijackers actually existed and planned an attack, even if they could not have done what they are claimed to have done. In other words, it appears he believes that at some point the US government took over the operation.

Tarpley gets the passport at the WTC wrong, attributing it to Atta (it was Suqami's passport that was found). We then get Tarpley's theory of remote control and Global Hawk, which has been discussed to death.