Talk:Abdulaziz al-Omari

Rmherman,

Thanks for all the additional info! But I disagree about something you state as a fact. I thought we could hash it out here.

Based on the info in the 9/11 report, you claim that Abdulaziz al-Omari actually did all these things, and you removed the caveats that it might have been someone using that name. It seems possible to me, but far from certain, that there were two Saudis named Abdulaziz al-Omari with the same birthdate, when the "real" one had had his passport stolen years earlier. It seems more likely to me that the hijacker who called himself Abdulaziz al-Omari had a different birth name, and began using that identity after he received al-Omari's passport (possibly to erase suspicious information about his past, although that's just speculation.)

Anyway, I don't think it's accurate to say that al-Omari did these things, when it seems reasonable that someone using the name al-Omari did it. (I know this is bordering a philosophical debate -- if someone calls himself "Joe Blow", and has no other known name, is that really his name now?) But I think we should at least include the fact that that may not be the hijackers real name.

Now none of what I'm saying is valid if your statement is correct: "This individual was also not the same as the hijacker whose identity was later confirmed by Saudi government interviews with his family." But you don't provide a source, and I hadn't heard that before.

This is similar to the changes you made on Waleed al-Shehri, but that's a different case, and I'll look into that tomorrow.

Quadell (talk) 20:49, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)

Well in a big world almost anything is possible. But why should we think that scenario is reasonable (more so than the Jews did it one, the U.S. did it to themselves, etc.) The facts presented are based on the 9/11 commission report which claims to be based on Saudi interviews with the families of hijackers. I haven't read the whole report yet but I have yet seen anywhere where it dicusses possible misidentification of the hijackers. It would have been the sort of mistake they would have loved to roast the FBI for making. All of the misidentification stuff I have read through dates back to days or weeks after the attack when we knew little and several mistakes in identification really were made which were subsequently corrected. Rmhermen 18:46, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)

I would suspect that the 1972 birthdate is actually that of the other al-Omari and was one of those initial mistakes. However the 9/11 report doesn't give ages except to say all the muscle hijackers were between 20 - 28 years old - meaning either date could be correct. Travelling under their own actual names seem to be a signature of this plot with at least two people having to be replaced when they couldn't get into the country (bin alshibh and al Khatani) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has, according to the report, said that the hijackers were chosen because of the lack of criminal records or experience in forgeign jihad. (Although that might have been a quote from Tawfiq bin Attash). Rmhermen 18:56, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)

This article (http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml) says that the information the FBI released – including name, date of birth, country of origin, and occupation – matched an innocent person (whose passport was previously stolen), but the picture was of someone else (presumably the actual hijacker). For a thorough (if conspiratorial) summary of the evidence of mistaken identities, see here (http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayjarrah.html). Obviously, the 9/11 Commission has seen things we haven't, and they report that all the hijackers used their own identities. But that doesn't necessarily make it true. There's still room for a reasonable doubt, in my opinion. Quadell (talk) 19:04, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

"Only two photographs are known to exist of him in the U.S." I like how the article says this, yet it shows three different pictures of him.

He's not in the U.S. in the first picture. The two photos of him in the U.S. are shown. But I see how it's confusing. (It's not the two photographs that are in the U.S.; it's the settings.) – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 18:07, May 10, 2005 (UTC)