Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were the first hijackers to enter the United States, arriving on Jan . 15 , 2000
The assumption of government bungling was predicated on the assumption that Moussaoui was indeed the twentieth hijacker.
Ali Atwa By his own admission to Greek authorities, Mr. Atwa intended to be the third hijacker to board the plane.
The third hijacker, whom I will call S., was struck by a bullet in the head; he lay comatose for two months in Israeli hospitals.
In this view, he wasn't just a candidate for the twentieth hijacker: he was one of the actual hijackers in all but the final execution, and was prevented from acting on his intentions only by his arrest.
Americans wondered if the F.B.I. and other government agencies, with the "twentieth hijacker" in custody, had bungled the chance to put the pieces together and possibly stop the attacks.
Indeed, at the same time Carter was puzzling about where these people could possibly go, Zacarias Moussaoui, also known as the "twentieth hijacker," was back in the news, reminding anyone who has forgotten that he was tried and convicted in a civilian court and has spent the past decade in the very Florence super-max that Cotton mentioned.
He had sought four times before September 11th to get a visa to the United States, and, in a broadcast on Al-Jazeera on the day after the anniversary of the attacks, he claimed that he was meant to be the twentieth hijacker.
Sure enough the Greeks put the third hijacker onboard a plane for Algiers.
Every single one of these cases, whether it's the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, whether it's the Boston marathon, whether it's the nineteenth hijacker in San Diego of the 9/11, who was living at an FBI informant's home and was clearly on the radar of both the FBI and the CIA.
