9/11 cover up?

The difference between someone with a healthy dose of skepticism and a conspiracy theorist is this: the former looks at the official version of events and when it doesn't add up, she says: "Hey, that doesn't add up." The latter looks at those same events and says: "Hey, that doesn't add up, but I'll tell you what really happened.

Count me a skeptic because, as far as I understand, some of those 19 hijackers are still alive -- a point all but buried in our media but reported by credible news organizations abroad.

Three days after the attack, the FBI released the names of those infamous 19 hijackers (photos here).But maybe not. The following was reported not on some fringe website, but by the BBC on September 23:

Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.[…]

Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.

His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.

Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. […]

He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.[…]

Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.

Abdelaziz Al Omari 'lost his passport in Denver' He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver.[…]

Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi.

Khalid Al-Midhar may also be alive

He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.

FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.

I tried to find something that debunked the BBC story directly, but couldn't. If you have contrary info, put it in the comments.

Besides the doubt around the identities of the hijackers, I also have a problem with the fact that two passports belonging to the hijackers were found, intact, near the World Trade Center. That was reported by AP (citing CBS News) and the Guardian. I'm not buying that anything made of paper survived that conflagration.

None of that suggests that a missile hit the Pentagon or the WTC was filled with explosive charges. I've perused some of the 9/11 conspiracy sites with as open a mind as I could muster and found them thoroughly unconvincing. The most likely scenario is that the security agencies were under enormous, unrelenting pressure to show Americans they were in control and they needed to show that they were on top of the investigation at all costs.

Who knows? The bottom line is that when governments aren't honest -- which is all too often the case -- people will always fill in the blanks for themselves.