According to a staff statement of the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, the "working hypothesis is that a number of the hijackers were carrying permissible utility knives or pocket knives."There's nothing to this. You can't apply a 2004 mindset to 9/10/2001 thinking. This tape serves no purpose to the general public except to get them all emotional.It added: "According to the guidelines on 9/11, if such a knife were discovered in the possession of an individual who alarmed either the walk-through metal detector or the hand wand, the item would be returned to the owner and permitted to be carried on the aircraft."
Two of the Flight 77 hijackers, Nawaz Alhazmi and Almihdhar, were on a terror-watch list. At the time, such lists were not compared against manifests for domestic flights.
and still to this day - the ACLU, and many freepers, do not believe that the airlines should be forced to submit their passenger manifests to the government to screen them against the terror watch lists before boarding. we've had arguments on related threads all the time about that issue.
another point - if we could see this whole tape, you'd see Barbara Olson walking past. very sad.