[denydenydeny]

are there any sightings of the hijackers meeting with known Al Qaeda operatives?

The closest that I know of can be derived from James Woods's recounting of his August 1, 2001 flight from Logan Airport to Los Angeles , the Flight 11 route. In what was clearly a dry run for the 9/11 hijackings, four Arabs acted suspiciously in first class, and there was a report filed with the FAA.

The really interesting thing was that Woods later positively identified two of the 9/11 hijackers on the plane that day--one who would be on flight 175, the other on Flight 77. This, I thought, was a vital bit of information, since it indicated that the hijackers from different flights worked closely together, and were not separated from each other in isolated cells.

In this thread, Freeper xm177e2 theorizes that

The terrorists probably put the men in different combinations on this test flight so they wouldn't raise any suspicions when they flew on the 11th. They wouldn't want to be seen travelling in the exact same groups, that's the kind of thing computers would be able to pick up on...

But to return to your question, I would note that Woods said something else very interesting in that same transcript linked above. He said that a "higher" government official confirmed to him that the two Arabs he didn't identify as 9/11 hijackers were definitely "terrorist-involved." Which means that it's a fair assumption that we're talking about al-Qaeda.

[Mitchell]

> are there any sightings of the hijackers meeting with known Al Qaeda operatives?

The closest that I know of can be derived from James Woods's recounting of his August 1, 2001 flight from Logan Airport to Los Angeles [foxnews.com] , the Flight 11 route. In what was clearly a dry run for the 9/11 hijackings, four Arabs acted suspiciously in first class, and there was a report filed with the FAA.

The really interesting thing was that Woods later positively identified two of the 9/11 hijackers on the plane that day--one who would be on flight 175, the other on Flight 77. This, I thought, was a vital bit of information, since it indicated that the hijackers from different flights worked closely together, and were not separated from each other in isolated cells.

But to return to your question, I would note that Woods said something else very interesting in that same transcript linked above. He said that a "higher" government official confirmed to him that the two Arabs he didn't identify as 9/11 hijackers were definitely "terrorist-involved." Which means that it's a fair assumption that we're talking about al-Qaeda.

I agree that Woods' statement is very interesting. (He came across well in his interview with O'Reilly.) But I don't think it tells us anything about whether the hijackers were with al-Qaeda or not.

It does show that they were part of one coherent group that worked closely together. It demonstrates that they planned the hijackings very carefully.

But I don't think it tells us whether "terrorist-involved" means al-Qaeda, or Iraqi, or Iranian, or something else. I interpreted the official's statement that the other two were "terrorist-involved" as meaning that they were, in fact, two of the other hijackers, but that that could not be confirmed officially since it was sensitive information. It's also possible that the other two were simply linked in their activities to Atta, et al. (someone like Moussaoui).

In any case, Woods' report doesn't reveal anything about the terrorists' origin.