9/11 Hijackers: The Passport Scam

As the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks races toward a May 27 deadline — a deadline it wants to extend — new details are emerging about some of its findings thus far. A commission staff report issued last week said that at least two — and possibly six more — of the 9/11 hijackers carried passports that had been "manipulated in a fraudulent manner." The commission declined to elaborate, but senior counterterrorism officials tell TIME the fraud was an example of al-Qaeda's clever tradecraft and attention to detail. The Saudi passports the hijackers carried were genuine, and so were the visas to the U.S. But investigators believe the hijackers obtained fresh passports after telling Saudi authorities they had "lost" their old ones, presumably to cover up trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Then, knowing that spanking-new passports would raise questions, the hijackers artificially aged them and forged entry and exit stamps — probably with old-fashioned rubber stamps and ink pads — to innocuous countries in the Middle East.

The commission staff report cited the passport tampering as evidence that prior to 9/11, U.S. officials were not sufficiently diligent in discovering such forgeries. But a veteran counterterrorism hand contends that "without a microscopic forensic examination, a routine inspector wouldn't have ascertained that the stamps weren't valid."