Of course, if no such flight existed, then the passenger lists can’t possibly be real. But lets put that aside and hypothetically concede that the flight existed. If so, then many media outlets published lists purporting to be official passenger lists when in fact they were not. The reason we know this, is because there can only be one official passenger list for a flight, and the media collectively gave us many different and conflicting lists, with differences too great to be transcription errors. Someone was just making the lists up.

How many of the people named on these collective lists were real people who are genuinely missing, and how they actually went missing is not the issue of research here. The issue is that the media lied about the information that it was publishing.

For whatever reason, the media could not obtain a genuine official passenger list for AA 11. Instead of admitting this and reporting on the lack of availability of a such list as a story in itself, media outlets published fabricated lists and fraudulently presented them as official lists given to them by the airline.

It wasn’t only the mainstream media which was involved. Wikipedia engaged in the same fraud. It published a list described with the grandiose term “Flight manifest” for AA11, which was so shoddily fabricated that the summary total of the numbers alleged to be aboard didn’t match with the accepted official story and didn’t even tally with the number of names actually on its list. And it plucked seemingly from nowhere, a name not used on any of the other many conflicting lists fabricated by other media outlets. It provided no source for this piece of fiction which it tried to sell to us with the official sounding title “flight manifest.”

But that was only the first of Wikipedia’s lies in relation to this matter. After the publication of my article exposing the deception, Wikipedia, presumably embarrassed by being caught out in this manner, dumped its old passenger list and replaced it with CNN’s list—which has significant differences from Wikipedia’s original “flight manifest”—without ever acknowledging any previous error.

Where did Wikipedia’s previously published “flight manifest” come from ? Did Wikipedia make it up ? Or if Wikipedia was genuinely misled by someone else, supplying it with false information, what does that say about the quality of the processes Wikipedia uses to verify the information it considers for publication ? And what does it say about Wikipedia’s honesty in now attempting to destroy the public record that it ever published such rubbish ?

Let’s take a closer look at Wikipedia’s original lie. It’s first “flight manifest”.

Here is the section of my May 16 2004 article which deals with Wikipedia’s “flight manifest”. At this point in the article, I had been working my way through all of the other conflicting lists pointing out the differences, and had shown that the lists - so far examined - collectively contained the names of 92 alleged innocent victims, even though only 87 were supposed to have been aboard the flight.

[[At  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_flight_11
which describes itself as an encyclopaedia about Sept 11, is a link to what is confidently described as a “flight manifest “ for A11, although it gives no source for this information. Clicking on this link takes one to  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11%2C_2001_Terrorist_Attack/Plane_casualties
which introduces AA 11 as having 93 aboard, including 5 hijackers. The list does contain the names of 5 suspected hijackers (all Arabic names) , so there should be 88 innocents. It specifies this directly by stating “93 people: 82 passengers (including 5 hijackers), 9 flight attendants, 2 pilots “ This makes 11 crew and 77 innocent passengers. 88 innocents in total.

But if you count the names, there’s only 92 , 5 hijackers and 87 innocents, contradicting the summation of 93. This makes a mockery of the rather official sounding title of “flight manifest.” The missing names are Caplin, Jude Larson, Natalie Larson, Roux , Jalbert and Iskander. The reason why six names have been dumped from the collective list of 92 to make 87 is that this list has a new name - Lana Tu. So we now have - collectively - 93 innocents and five hijackers for a total of 92 or 93 aboard. ]]

My allusion to “missing names” refers to which of the 92 names gathered collectively from the other lists did not make Wikipedia’s list. Each list published a different selection of the collectively named 92. Wikipedia’s list extended that total to 93 with the addition of Lana Tu. By the end of the article I had found 95. Wikipedia’s claim of 93 aboard also contradicted the figure of 92 accepted by all other lists (except for one which claimed 95). Like several of the other lists, its summary total did not match the total number of names actually listed.

Wikipedia was the only list which included Lana Tu, something which I directly pointed out at the end of my article.

In briefly summing up each list, I wrote in relation to Wikipedia:

[[Wikipedia claims a summation of 93 aboard, but lists only 92 names (including hijackers). It is the only site to list Lana Tu. Those missing are Iskander, Vamsikrishna, Caplin, the two Larsons, Jalbert, Weems, Ward and Roux. This makes it the same as the USAT list with the addition of Tu, or put another way - the Same as the NBC and PBS lists except that Tu is in for Iskander. ]]

So if Wikipedia became aware of my article, then it knew exactly what it had to do to make its list compatible with that of somebody else’s. And it appears that Wikipedia did become aware of it. If you go to Wikipedia’s flight manifest as it appears now and examine the details, you could be forgiven for thinking that I libelled Wikipedia by misrepresenting what it published. Because now what you’ll see is a very different list.

The faux pas in the summary total has been corrected, four names have been deleted and three added. Out go Lana Tu, Kelly Booms, Waleed Iskander and Pendyala Vamsikrishna, and in come Robin Caplin, Jude Larson ,Natalie Larson .

Wikipedia has changed its list by simply dumping the old list and replacing it with CNN’s list which is acknowledged as the source. Unfortunately for Wikipedia, here is a Google Cache of its original page, providing a record of its “flight manifest”, as it was before my article exposed what was wrong with it.

The whole point of the May 16 2004 article was that virtually all of the passenger lists published by various sources contradict each other. Which means that there is a lot of fibbing going on. These cannot possibly be from an official list provided by American Airlines because if that was the source, everyone would have the same list.

Wikipedia’s “flight manifest” was particularly embarrassing in that it contained no source, published a name not published by anyone else, was the only list to claim 93 aboard - and can’t pass this off as a typo because it also itemised the figures by crew ,passengers, and hijackers –and then published a different number of names from its summary total.

And then, after the publication of my article which embarrassed this “flight manifest”, Wikipedia tried to cover up the fraud by deleting it’s old “flight manifest” and replacing it with CNN’s - without offering any acknowledgment that the previous list ever existed. Had I not pointed out the cached page which proves the existence of its previous “flight manifest”, Wikipedia could claim that it had always used CNN’s list and that I lied about the contents of their “flight manifest” and that people only had to check the list for themselves to see that I was lying. Apart from the obvious attempt to protect their own reputation through the dishonest manipulation of information, one can also interpret this as a continuation of the attempt to present the AA11 passenger lists as reliable and consistent information, when Wikipedia knows very well that this is not the case.

On closer examination, it appears that CNN may have also slightly changed its list from how it was when I first published the fake passenger lists article, because there is now a discrepancy, in that the first Wikipedia list had the same number of names as CNN’s, but in the second version Wikipedia had dumped four names but only added three, and claims to be using CNN’s list. I will update this article again, when I work out exactly which discrepancy I haven't picked up yet.

If legal processes counted for anything, Wikipedia would be brought for trial on charges of obstructing justice. It published demonstrably false information in relation to the murder of thousands of people. Whether it was directly responsible for this fabrication itself or whether it was misled to it by someone else behind the scenes, we don’t know. And Wikipedia doesn't want anyone to find that out. Its false list is part of a larger case of widespread fabrication of information in relation to the crime. And once Wikipedia’s part in that falsehood was exposed, it actively tried to destroy the public record that any such fabrication on its part had occurred, and actively continued the pretence that correct and reliable information was being published even though it knew this to not be the case.