Rumors about the September 11 attacks

Misinformation and rumors about the September 11, 2001 attacks began circulating almost immediately after the attacks occurred. The dramatic events of the day filled many people with a sense of uncertainty, and what had previously seemed unimaginable to many had become a reality. In this environment, many wild rumors began to spread. In addition, many people hungered to find meaning in the apparently meaningless violent attacks. For all these reasons, dozens of rumors began to spread.

Some rumors, such as the involvement of al-Qaeda, turned out to be true. Others have been confirmed as false.

Misinformation: rumors later shown to be false
The following rumors gained wide circulation after the attacks, but have been later revealed as untrue.

Claims that passengers intentionally crashed United Airlines Flight 93
On 2001 September 11, United Airlines Flight 93 en route from Newark to San Francisco was one of the four planes hijacked in the attack. It was the only one of the four planes that did not reach its intended target. Passengers, alerted through phone calls, attempted to subdue the hijackers. The passengers are popularly believed to have crashed the plane to keep it from reaching its target.

George W. Bush, on September 20, 2001 stated:


 * In the normal course of events, Presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people.''


 * We have seen it in the courage of passengers, who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground – passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer.

However, the so-called 'black box' recordings, recovered on the afternoon of September 13, have yielded additional information about the final half hour of the flight. Although its full contents have not been made public, media reports of the tape indicate that the charge by the passengers and crew did indeed take place. Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission found from the recordings that, the passengers did not succeed in reaching the cockpit before the plane crashed.

Claims that terrorists entered the United States through Canada
On September 12, 2001, Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counter-intelligence told the press that five of the terrorists had entered Maine from Canada via a ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and/or a remote border point in Saint-Théophile, Quebec near Jackman, Maine. The myth was revived again in April 2009 when Janet Napolitano, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, informed a Canadian television interviewer that some of the terrorist-hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks entered the United States from Canada. In the same month, senator John McCain also told Fox News that some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada.

Claims of World Trade Center survivors after September 13
The search for survivors from the wreckage of the World Trade Center continued for weeks, but the search was fruitless. Several reported rescues on September 13 proved to be false. The only persons rescued were some firefighters who became trapped earlier that day in the search and rescue operation. An office worker named Carla Guzman was, however, rescued from the remains of the South Tower on September 12.

Claim that over 130 Israelis died in the September 11 attacks
Early estimates of Israeli deaths, as of the total death toll, proved substantially exaggerated. George W. Bush cited the figure of 130 in his address of September 20. In reality, there were a total of five Israeli deaths in the attack: Alona Avraham, Leon Lebor, Shay Levinhar, Daniel M. Lewin, and Haggai Sheffi.

Claim that "hundreds" of British citizens died in the September 11 attacks
Early estimates of British deaths, as of the total death toll, proved somewhat exaggerated. George W. Bush cited the figure of "hundreds" in his address of September 20. In reality, there were a total of 67 British deaths in the attack.

Claim of an alleged Nostradamus prediction
The following text (and variants) began to spread through the Internet within days of the attack:


 * In the city of god there will be a great thunder,
 * two brothers torn apart by chaos,
 * while the fortress endures,
 * the great leader will succumb.
 * The third big war will begin when the big city is burning
 * NOSTRADAMUS 1654

This is not an authentic Nostradamus quatrain. It appears nowhere in his works, and Nostradamus died long before 1654.

It has since been revealed that this passage made famous in email was originally written by a Canadian student as part of an essay on the open, general and often misleading nature of predictions both by Nostradamus and others. Following the September 11 attacks, the original work appeared and then rocketed around the world in email but was the victim of many well intentioned, but misleading revisions by people who received and then forwarded on the passage.

Claim that CNN faked Palestinian cheers
Shortly after the attacks, CNN showed footage of a group of Palestinians appearing to be cheering in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Some reported that this was old footage taken out of context, although this was not the case. This rumour was proven false shortly afterwards, and CNN issued a statement to that effect.

The demonstration did happen and was condemned by Arafat; the footage was current.

Annette Krüger Spitta of the ARD's (German public broadcasting) TV magazine Panorama states that footage not aired shows that the street surrounding the celebration in Jerusalem is quiet. Furthermore, she states that a man in a white T-shirt incited the children and gathered people together for the shot. The Panorama report, dated September 20, 2001, quotes Communications Professor Martin Löffelholz explaining that in the images one sees jubilant Palestinian children and several adults but there is no indication that their pleasure is related to the attack. The woman seen cheering (Nawal Abdel Fatah) stated afterwards that she was offered cake if she celebrated on camera, and was frightened when she saw the pictures on television afterward.

Claim that a tourist had a photograph taken of himself on top of the north tower seconds before plane struck
An email was circulated which showed a photograph of a tourist on top of the north tower just seconds before American Airlines flight 11 struck it. The view of the northern side of the city, and the American Airlines markings on the plane, are both unmistakable. However, this photograph is beyond any reasonable doubt a hoax. (The picture is shown, and its story discussed, on the snopes.com website.)

There were many initial clues that the photograph was inauthentic. Flight 11 was moving at hundreds of kilometers per hour just before it struck the World Trade Center. At that speed, it ought to have been a blur. Yet the shot of the plane in the photograph is very clear – it almost seems to be stationary in the air. The aircraft pictured is a Boeing 757, while Flight 11 was a Boeing 767. The World Trade Center did not open its observation tower facilities until 09:30 hrs; the plane struck at 08:46 hrs. September 11 was a warm and sunny day in New York City, yet the man is shown wearing a heavy coat and thermal cap, both designed for cold weather. Finally, there was no observation deck on the north tower.

The original picture was taken when a Hungarian named Peter (who wished that his last name be withheld) visited the Towers on November 28, 1997. The original picture without plane and other pictures of Peter can be found on Wired's website. Since then the 'Accidental Tourist' has become an internet phenomenon.

Warnings to avoid malls on October 31
A number of people across the country received an e-mail chain letter making this warning. It said that an Afghan left a letter to his girlfriend on September 10, 2001, asking her not to take any flights on September 11 and not to go to any shopping mall on Halloween. It was said that the letter is now in the FBI's hands. The letter implied that there is a second phase of the terrorist attacks and the targets will be trick-or-treaters.

The email was traced back to a person named Laura Katsi, who apparently has no first-hand knowledge of the event and regrets passing the note along. The FBI has investigated the matter and took the unusual step of issuing a statement on the hoax, declaring the claim to be unsubstantiated. A few variations on this message are also circulating. All of these have been shown to be false.

Claims that Mohamed Atta was a known terrorist
There were persistent rumors that Mohamed Atta, the suspected leader of the September 11 attacks, was a known terrorist who had bombed an Israeli bus in 1986 but was freed by Israel at the insistence by the United States as a result of the Oslo Accords.

These rumors were incorrect. The bus bomber was the Palestinian Mahmoud Mahmoud Atta, a naturalized U.S. citizen extradited to Israel from the United States in 1990. He was freed after that extradition was held to be invalid by the Supreme Court of Israel. His whereabouts are unknown. He was 47 years old at the time of the September 11 attack, while Mohamed Atta was 33.

Claims that Oliver North warned about Osama bin Laden
There have been claims that former Iran-Contra figure Oliver North issued a warning about Osama bin Laden during testimony in the 1980s to the U.S. Senate. This claim has been circulating via email since shortly after September 11.

North did mention a terrorist during his testimony to the Iran-Contra Committee, but the individual he mentioned was Abu Nidal, who has no connection to bin Laden. U.S. News & World Report looked into this urban legend and interviewed North himself, whose aides confirmed the fake: "North, in fact, suggests that at the time of the Reagan-era Senate hearings into the scandal, rebels like bin Laden were U.S. friends lined up against Soviet invaders."

Rumors of celebrating Arab-Americans
Claims that certain groups of Arab-Americans celebrated the attacks circulated through e-mail shortly after 9/11. These e-mails included calls to boycott certain businesses, such as Dunkin Donuts, which supposedly had a franchise owned by Arabs. Another rumor is that American football Hall of Famer, Terry Bradshaw, attacked five Arabs whom he saw celebrating that day. Yet another rumor was that the Lebanese owners of the Middle Eastern restaurant La Shish, in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield, were celebrating the attacks on 9/11. These claims are false. More information can be found on a snopes.com page.

Claim that 4,000 Israeli or Jewish employees skipped work at the World Trade Center on September 11
Various claims that Israelis or Jews skipped work at the World Trade Center on September 11 (implying that they had been informed of the attack earlier or that Israelis or Jews were responsible) were made by Al-Manar and repeated in the Arab press and by individuals such as Amiri Baraka

The 4,000 figure was probably taken by Al-Manar from a Jerusalem Post article of September 12, which said "The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack." This number, obviously, was not (as Al-Manar claimed) restricted to employees; in fact, Tsviya Shimon, minister of administrative affairs for the Israeli consulate and mission in New York, said on September 14 "that there might have been up to 100 Israeli citizens working in the World Trade Center."

There were a total of five Israeli deaths (Alona Avraham, Leon Lebor, Shay Levinhar, Daniel M. Lewin, Haggai Sheffi) in the attack, three in the World Trade Center and two were on the planes. (Four are listed as American on most lists, presumably having dual citizenship.)

However, since September 11 was an election day in New York that year, it is quite possible that many people did not necessarily skip work, but rather many may have gone to the polls to vote, intending to go in to work later in the day. This fact may account in part for the magnitude of the number suggested, if indeed the occupancy figures at the time of the impacts were significantly lower than would otherwise be expected.

Although only four Israelis died in the disaster, a great many Jews were killed. The State Department reports that "A total of 2,071 occupants of the World Trade Center died on September 11, among the 2,749 victims of the WTC attacks. According to an article in the October 11, 2001 Wall Street Journal, roughly 1,700 people had listed the religion of a person missing in the WTC attacks; approximately 10% were Jewish. A later article, in the September 5, 2002 Jewish Week, states, "based on the list of names, biographical information compiled by The New York Times, and information from records at the Medical Examiner's Office, there were at least 400 victims either confirmed or strongly believed to be Jewish." This would be approximately 15% of the total victims of the World Trade Center attacks. A partial list of 390 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died (out of 658 in the company) lists 49 Jewish memorial services, about 13 percent.

This 10–15 percent estimate of Jewish fatalities tracks closely with the percentage of Jews living in the New York area"

Claims that Iraq was involved with the September 11 attacks
Despite initial statements by the Bush administration to the contrary, no evidence has been seen publicly linking Iraq under Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The two captured planners of the attacks, Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, have reportedly denied Iraqi involvement. Other assertions, such as one claim that Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague (a claim initially made by the Czech government and which has not been retracted), are still in dispute. In 2004, the Wall Street Journal editorial page reported that Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi who was present at the summit where the attacks were planned and was later arrested in Qatar and Jordan, apparently was listed as a lieutenant colonel on three Fedayeen rosters captured by American soldiers in Iraq. .

The 9/11 Commission Report states on page 335 that Paul Wolfowitz had pressed the administration to invade Iraq just days after the attacks: "Secretary Colin Powell recalled that Wolfowitz—not Rumsfeld – argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked. [...] He argued that if there was even a 10% chance that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat. Wolfowitz contended that the odds were far more than 1 in 10, citing Saddam's praise for the attack, his long record of involvement in terrorism, and theories that Ramzi Yousef was an Iraqi agent and that Iraq was behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center."

The Report also observes that "Condoleezza Rice's chief staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its [a September 18 memo by Richard Clarke] conclusion that only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al Qaeda."

On page 61, the Report notes that "Bin Laden was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq, even though Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, had never had an Islamist agenda—save for his opportunistic pose as a defender of the faithful against "Crusaders" during the Gulf War of 1991. Moreover, Bin Laden had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army."

In Chapter 5, we find that "To Mohamed Atta, Saddam Hussein was an American stooge set up to give Washington an excuse to intervene in the Middle East."

Brent Scowcroft, retired United States Air Force general and National Security Advisor under George H. W. Bush, wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal in August 2002 in which he wrote, "Saddam's strategic objective appears to be to dominate the Persian Gulf, to control oil from the region, or both. That clearly poses a real threat to key U.S. interests. But there is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them. [...] There is little evidence to indicate that the United States itself is an object of his aggression. Rather, Saddam's problem with the U.S. appears to be that we stand in the way of his ambitions. He seeks weapons of mass destruction not to arm terrorists, but to deter us from intervening to block his aggressive designs."

Claims which turned out to be true
Some rumors turned out to be correct, although many are merely strange coincidences.

Osama and "Evil Bert"
Claim that a "Bert is Evil" website was removed because of an image showing Osama bin Laden and the popular muppet.

A photograph of a pro-bin Laden rally in Bangladesh showed a poster of Osama bin Laden with a small but clearly identifiable image of Bert, a muppet from the children's television show Sesame Street, over his right shoulder. (Another smaller image of bin Laden is immediately to the right of Bert's image.) The photo is from Reuters, and was not doctored. In fact, the image of Osama and Bert had been created (using an image editing tool) by a humorist earlier and placed on a website, and the person who made the poster must have copied it from the World Wide Web, leaving in the image of Evil Bert.

As a response to this, the creator of the "Bert is Evil" website has taken down the site and posted a note explaining the decision. "I am doing this because I feel this has gotten too close to reality," he says, "and I choose to be responsible enough to stop it right here." For full message text, see. For a detailed account of the use of the image, in South Asia as well as by Western news agencies, see. (The latter also argues against the notion that inclusion of the Bert image of the photo is some kind of coded communication.)

Although the creator of Bert is Evil requested that all mirror versions of his site be taken down, versions of the site remain widely accessible online.

Smoke demon
Several photographs were circulated throughout the Internet in the days following the tragedy that depicted smoke rising from the Twin Towers that resembled demonic heads. It has been confirmed by AP that at least one of these photos is authentic.

The pictures certainly seem to be genuine, but most people see this as an example of pareidolia.