Hijacker IDs recovered at a higher rate than passenger IDs

[spooked911]

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread739888/pg1

IDs reportedly found @ Shanksville-- 3 of the 4 (75%) hijackers, only 5 of the 40 (12.5%) passengers

----

funny how that works.

[jberryhill]

1. funny how what works? Reporting?

[spooked911]

2. No, propaganda

duh.

[truebrit71]

3. Yup.

Also funny how the NYC hijackers carried their passports on them even though the flights were internal US and NOT international where a passport would be required...it's almost like they wanted to make it easy for the investigators or something...

[Behind the Aegis]

4. Generally, non-citizens carry their passports as it is a legal form of ID.

[truebrit71]

5. Generally this non-citizen doesn't as a drivers license is more than sufficient...

...for travelling internally in the US.

[Behind the Aegis]

6. You are but one. Did they have DLs?

So what if they were traveling internally? It is not uncommon to carry identification.

[truebrit71]

7. As far as I can recall they all had state issued ID's. There was no reason to be carrying a passport

...that is why the story stuck out in my head. The ONLY time I take my passport on a plane is when I actually NEED to produce it to enter a country, either my homeland, or here in the States. All other times I rely on state issued id. It is a far bigger pain in the ass to replace a lost passport than it is to get a new DL. THAT is why that aspect of this story sticks out to me as being highly unusual/suspicious.

[Behind the Aegis]

8. Interesting. All of my students always carried their passports during travel.

Even the ones with DLs or (in SC) state issued ID cards (they had pictures as well), carried their passports. Prior to 9-11, it actually wasn't a huge hassle to get passports or DLs when either were lost. I had one British student who lost his damn passport 4 times in the course of a semester. Things have changed greatly since 9-11-01. Personally, I think this entire "they found the passports" deal is silly, but I do find it amusing to see what "evidence" people hitch their wagons too.

[Ohio Joe]

10. Through the 90's I did Y2K work

I worked with a large number of people from other countries and they almost all carried their passports with them.

[LARED]

9. With such small sample sizes

the differences are not likely to be statistically meaningful.

But what the heck have fun anyway.

[SwissTony]

11. Fisher exact (one-sided) p=0.015 nt.

[William Seger]

12. What was the contingency table you used?

I'm getting 0.064 (not quite significant) from two different online calculators using the table:

40 5
4 3

[SwissTony]

13. You're using the marginal as the cell frequency.

Some Stata output...

. tabu hijacker found , exact

| found
hijacker | 1 2 | Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
1 | 3 1 | 4
2 | 5 35 | 40
-----------+----------------------+----------
Total | 8 36 | 44

Fisher's exact = 0.015
1-sided Fisher's exact = 0.015

Apologies if this appears twice. I sent it but it didn't show up.

[OnTheOtherHand]

14. yes, that math looks fine

I'm not so sure about the premise (which, to be clear, wasn't yours).

But searchers also gathered surprisingly intact mementos of lives lost.

Those items, such as a wedding ring and other jewelry, photos, credit cards, purses and their contents, shoes, a wallet and currency, are among seven boxes of identified personal effects salvaged from the site. They sit in an El Segundo, Calif., mortuary and will be returned to victims' families in February.

"We have some property for most passengers," said Craig Hendrix, a funeral coordinator and a personal effects administrator with Douglass Air Disaster Funeral Coordinators, a company often contacted by airlines after devastating crashes.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12/30/01

Even if it happens to be the case that only five passengers' "IDs" were found, I'm not sure what one could construe from that.

[SwissTony]

15. Agreed. I'd want to know a bit more about data definitions

and collection before I'd have confidence in the p-value. It's just a quick and dirty analysis and should be regarded as such until more is known.

[spooked911]

20. that's a fair point-- other items found

but I thought the bit about IDs was interesting. Conceivably, from a psyop point of view, the perps would highlight personal things like rings from victims, to make them seem more human, and the IDs help nail down those nasty muslim hijackers.

[William Seger]

16. Got it, thanks

Sorry, dumb mistake. 0.015 would be "significantly" non-random, but I'd say it isn't clear to me that the results should be expected to be random, given that the distribution of hijackers/passengers in the plane was non-random: All of the hijackers were in the cockpit area but only some of the passengers were.

[SwissTony]

17. As I said, the analysis is a Q & D one.

The distribution of passengers vs hijackers was most assuredly non-random and might make identification of passengers more difficult or less difficult than that of hijackers. Also, the hijackers may have carried some form of ID which may have made identification easier. I have no knowledge that this is what happened, I'm just suggesting possibilities. There are almost certainly other factors which should be included in an analysis - which you couldn't do because of sample size. So, the analysis comes with a raftload of caveats.

In this sort of situation, I like to refer to the p-value as a nominal p-value.

[spooked911]

21. cool-- thanks!

[jberryhill]

18. They are both missing the point

The OP assumes that all ID's recovered were reported by the press, and conflates "recovered" with "reported to be recovered".

There is no data on how many ID's were recovered. Period.

Whether a newspaper would think it noteworthy that "Joe Blow's driver's license was recovered" versus one of the hi-jackers is not something that occurs to the obsessively-minded.

[terrafirma]

19. Well...

... that's just plain logical thinking.