Walid Al-Shehri Video

The Osama video with the will of hijacker Walid Al-Shehri is out. You can download part of it here (Al-Shehri comes on for a short bit at the end). Walid is the muscle hijacker from flight 11that Kevin Barrett confused with a Saudi pilot living in Morocco (without noticing that their biography did not match at all) and whom he unsuccessfully tried to hunt for.

New Hijacker Video to Be Released

I question the timing!

"Coming soon, God willing, the testament of the attacks on New York and Washington, Abu Musab Waleed al-Shehri, presented by Sheik Osama bin Laden, God preserve him," the banner read. It showed an image of bin Laden wearing the same black beard and clothes as in the most recent video.

They Let the Bounty Hunter Back in the Country

Kevin Barrett is back from his bounty hunter stint in Morocco and talking about it on one of his nutjob radio shows.. To no surprise, he did not find 9/11 hijacker Waleed Mohammed Al-Shehri, who died 5 1/2 years ago when his hijacked plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Neither did he find Saudi pilot Waleed Ahmed Al-Shehri. He says his investigation revealed that Al-Shehri never worked for the Moroccon airline, but may have worked for the Saudi airline, and he got a local journalist to continue to investigate the situation.

Barrett also mentioned that he doesn't think the BBC, which started this whole story, actually investigated it directly. Duh, read the freaking BBC article (emphasis added).

He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.

He is still talking, but I don't think I will listen to the whole two hours. Barrett did add that he thought that all of the families of the hijackers had said that they don't believe that their sons were involved. Funny how he brought that up, because his family had this to say:

The Al-Shehri brothers, who studied at Abha Teacher Training College, seem to have come under similar influence.

"They were ordinary guys, then they changed," said one of their cousins. "It's not unusual here for a man to change overnight from being carefree to being religious. It was a kind of Islamic awakening. They heard sermons from people who came back from jihad in Afghanistan."

The brothers disappeared for two or three months in 1999, travelling to Medina. "When they came back they were different," said their cousin. "They had grown beards and were deeply religious. They had their own group of people and had become very secretive."

In December 2000 they disappeared again, this time to Afghanistan with Al-Nami and Al-Ghamdi. The next the family heard of them was reading their names among the hijackers.

"When we read their names we were very proud because the black hand of Americans are in everything," said their cousin. "I don't think my cousins were exploited. I think they did it out of their own convictions."

Kevin Barrett: Failed Bounty Hunter

Kevin Barrett reports in from Morocco that he is unable to find the Saudi Airline pilot who shares a similar name to a 9/11 hijacker college dropout (big surprise):

If I ran up against a brick wall in my inquiries to the airlines, the response from the official and semi-official embassy milieu has been equally frustrating. The Information Officer at the US Embassy in Rabat, a pleasant fellow named David, told me today that he and all the other current Embassy personnel know nothing about the al-Shehri story, because none of them were in Morocco in 2001, because diplomatic service employees always rotate around the world every few years. Promisingly, David added that he did see a news article taking a “conspiracy theory” angle on the al-Shehri story in one of the French-language Moroccan dailies just last week! “Moroccan newspapers sometimes keep rehashing these conspiracy theories long after they’ve been resolved to everyone else’s satisfaction,” David said.

After informing David that only 16% of the American people believe the government is telling us the truth about 9/11 (NY Times poll), meaning that the question of 9/11 has not quite been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, I decided my best bet might be with those conspiracy-theory loving Moroccan newspapers, vowed to track down last week’s news story on al-Shehri, and composed an epistle which I emailed to about forty journalists and news outlets (excusez mon francais imparfait, c’était un travail rapide):

Of course now we will have to listen to another 5 years of conspiracy theories about how the CIA got to him first.

Barrett also repeats the myth here that the Moroccan Waleed and the 9/11 Commission Walid shared the same biography.

A simple case of mistaken identity? Could there have been another guy named Waleed al-Shehri on Flight 11? That’s what apologists for the official story say. But then why did the 2004 9/11 Commission Report use the same photo and biography—the ones that the innocent guy had recognized as his own? Why didn’t the Report make any effort to investigate and resolve the issue of the hijackers’ true identities, which the FBI had previously admitted were in doubt?

Of course, 911 Myths has already explained the photo mistake, and they don't share the same biography. The Morrocan Waleed was an airline pilot, the 9/11 hijacker Waleed was a college dropout. They are both different ages, are from different regions of Saudi Arabia, were in the United States at different times, have different fathers, and even have different middle names. I can't for the life of me figure out how someone can call this the same biography.

More on Kevin "Bounty Hunter" Barrett

I have been shaking my head reading the comments over at 911 Blogger. My favorite was the guy who feared that Barrett might have his exit visa revoked by the US government. Huh? I have travelled abroad maybe a dozen times in my life, and I have never needed an exit visa. Where do you even apply for those?

Anyway, the conspiracy theorists of course fail to notice even a single problem with any of their theories, so I thought I would point everyone to this excellent series of articles done by 911 Myths on the subject, where they point out the fact that the photo where the airline pilot Walid Al-Shehri matches the photo used by CNN, but does not match the photo used by the FBI, in fact CNN manages to get the name wrong too.

The CNN broadcast which caused the confusion. They get the right Waleed, but the wrong Wail.

The airline pilot Waleed, who CNN misidentifies as Wail. This is the guy who Barrett is apparently going to interview.

The hijacker and Saudi citizen, Waleed, as identified by the FBI.

This guy is clearly not the airline pilot, although I suppose Barrett will probably overcome this difficulty by ignoring the FBI photograph and go with the incorrectly identified CNN one.

Now I have to commend a member of the 9/11 "truth" movement for finally doing something beyond watching blurry YouTube videos, but that still does not excuse bogus investigations. Barrett cannot even bother to get the most basic facts right. He says the Saudi Waleed that the FBI identified could not have been part of the plot because he didn't speak English well. But the real Waleed was not a pilot, the pilot for AA11 was Mohammed Atta. Waleed was just the "muscle". How much English do you have to speak to stab a flight attendent in the neck?