According to the WP this morning, some of the hijackers may have been using fake names.


"FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said Friday that the bureau had "a fairly high level of confidence" that the hijacker names released by the FBI were not aliases. But one senior official said that "there may be some question with regard to the identity of at least some of them."

The uncertainty highlights how difficult it may be to ever identify some of the hijackers who participated in the deadliest act of violence on American soil. Most of the hijackers' bodies were obliterated in the fiery crashes."

I am amazed at two things: one is the ability of an apparently widely dispersed, cover group to actually carry through on its mission; this is still the puzzle at the center of the atrocity; two is the the relative incuriosity of the media about the disparity between the FBI's manifest incapacity to uncover the conspiracy before it hit its targets, and the speed with which the FBI is apparently rolling up the conspiracy in the aftermath. I don't get this asymmetry. Some of what is being reported seems to be simply bigotry turned into a police raid -- if you have an arabic name and you work in an airport, be prepared to talk to the Man, because he is going to be at your door. But some of it seems, in hindsight, so obvious. There is a Federal program named CIPRIS - Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students. Does this program, which is run by the Immigration department and the FBI (supposedly -- that's what the Coordination is about) extend to airplane pilot schools?

On another note: We never read about 'liberal' schools of Islam. In fact, I have a very poor picture of Islam in my head. I have skimmed bits of the Qu'ran, and I have read some groovy Sufi stuff, but I don't know much about the mechanics of the religion. Anyway, for those of you out there who are curious about the breadth of disagreement in Islam, here's an article about Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish religious leader who does not believe that shari'a should be the law of the state. This article comes from an interesting journal, the Middle Eastern Review of International Affairs.