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Here's more from Epstein, it's undated.

Following the September 11th attack, government authorities declared that the weapons used to hijack the planes that crashed into World Trade Center were plastic knives and box cutters. The story about plastic knives and box cutters, implements which passengers then were not legally restricted from bring through security checkpoints at airports, was relentlessly drummed into the public's mind by two of the highest officials in the government. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense.

Ashcroft told ABC News on September 15th that "investigators believed that each of the commandeered planes had been hijacked by groups of three to six men armed with box cutters and plastic knives." Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News on September 16th, that the hijackers used weapons that are distinctively different - - plastic knives." On October 9th, he suggested to Dan Rather on CBS News "plastic knives and the use of a U.S. airliner filled with American people as a missile [were used] to destroy a World Trade Center." On November 7th, he described to Jim Lehrer on PBS " One of our planes is used as a missile to fly into our building and into the World Trade Center. It was beyond one's imagination that plastic knives and our own commercial aircraft filled with our own people would be used as the implement of war."

Actually, it was their imagination, not established facts, that informed the world that the hijackers had used plastic knives and box cutters to commandeer the two airliners that had destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Not a scintilla of evidence had been found then— or to date— that either plastic knives or box cutters were used by any of the ten hijackers who crashed United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center. No box cutters or plastic knives were found in the debris. Nor were the cockpit voice recorders ever found from Flight 11 and Flight 175. No witnesses, either passengers or crew members, on either flight 11 or flight 175 ever reported any hijacker having a box cutter or a plastic knife.
Both United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 had departed from Boston. Once both Boeing 767s had reached their cruising altitudes, the hijackers took control of them by unknown means without any of the four pilots warning the ground controllers, even though they had open radios. Both airliners then turned off their transponders and disappeared from the computerized radar screens.

No message was ever received from flight 175 that mentioned any weapons. So, for all anyone knows, the hijackers may have used guns, grenades, poison gas or any other weapon

An executive summary of an unpublished FAA memo stated:

"At approximately 9:18 am, it was reported that two crew members in the cockpit were stabbed. The flight then descended with no communications from the flight crew members. The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PFI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American airlines Corporate Headquarters that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operation Center and informed that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in 9B at 9:20 am. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin shot by Satam al-Suqama. One bullet was reported to have been fired."
The information came from two cell phone calls made by flight attendants, Betty Ong and Madeline Amy Sweeney, to Americal Airlines ground controllers. Ong, who was in the first class compartment— and the only witness to the assault on the cockpit. She reported that she had seen four hijackers come from first-class seats, kill a passenger seated behind them, and use a chemical weapon which she described as "some sort of spray" that made her eyes burn and made it difficult for her to breathe." Madeline Amy Sweeney, the flight attendant in the rear compartment, call was not recorded. According to the ground controller, she said that the pilots, another flight attendant and a passenger had been stabbed or killed.
The FAA subsequently said that the report of a gun shot was an error proceeding from a "miscommunication". The ground controller did not recall a gun shot or a bullet being mentioned.
In any case, there were no box cutters or plastics knives on flight 11 were used.

Two other flights were hijacked that morning, American Airlines flight 77, a Boeing 757 departing from Virginia, and United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 departing from Newark. On flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, one single passenger, Barbara Olsen, reported on weapons that some of the five hijackers had in the back of the plane. She told her husband, Theodore Olsen, on a cell phone that the hijackers who herded her and other the passengers into the back of the plane had two kind of weapons: knives and cardboard cutters (presumably box cutters). She did not say anything about the other hijackers in the cockpit and she apparently did not even know that they were piloting the plane. Nor did any other passenger or crew member on Flight 77 describe the hijackers' weapons. It cannot be assumed that all the hijackers on the plane had similar weapons. The hijackers assaulting the cockpit might have needed more sophisticated weaponry to rapidly stun or kill the pilots.
On flight 93, the Boeing 757 which crashed near Pittsburgh, the flight attendant reported over a cell phone that a hijacker in her plane had a "bomb strapped on." Some unidentified person also said over the loud speaker that there was a "bomb" aboard the plane. A passenger, Todd Beamer, talked over a cell phone about the "terrorist with a bomb." Another passenger, Tom Burnett, told his wife over a cell phone that he had heard that a pilot had been "knifed." No passenger or crew member described either box cutters or plastic knives as weapons and, as far as is known, no box cutters of plastic knives been recovered from the wreckage.

Similar weapons thus were not reported in the different flights. A paralytic chemical spray was described in the front compartment of flight 11, knives and card cutters was described in the rear compartment of Flight 77 and a bomb was described on flight 93. Nor is there any reason to assume that different hijackers on different planes leaving from different airports would use the same weaponry. Atta and Alomari, for example, having made a detour to Portland, might have obtained weapons unavailable to the hijackers in Virginia and New Jersey.)

In any case, the Ashcroft's story that the hijackers used box-cutters and plastic knives in the attack on the World Trade Center is a functional fictoid. In this case, the function was diversion. This fictoid serves to divert public attentions from the responsibility, and legal liability, of the government and airlines to prevent major weapons— such as guns, bombs, chemical sprays and hunting knives from being carried aboard airplanes. If such illegal devices had been smuggled aboard the planes, the liability could amount to billions of dollars. If, , on the other hand, it could be disseminated that the hijackers had only used plastic knives, such as those provided by the airlines for meals, or box cutters, which were allowed on planes, neither the airlines, the screeners at the airport, or the FAA, which regulates the safety of airports, could be held legally responsible. Paul Pillar, who had headed the CIA's counter-terrorism, could thus explain that"the attack that killed almost 4,000 people used box cutters." This press accepted it as established fact. The New York Times, for example, reported "the hijackers did not use firearms, which would probably have been detected, but apparently wielded box-cutter knives of the type that were then allowed on board but are now banned."

What made the box cutter and and plastic knives fictoid particularly welcome was that the FAA had found massive failures of airport screeners to find weapons prior to the attacks. Such tests were conducted by FAA undercover "Red Teams." In 1998, for example, one FAA Read team leader told the New York Times, "we were successful in getting major weapons— guns and bombs--aboard planes at least 85 percent the time." The failure rate was as high as 97 percent at some airports. Nor was this vulnerability corrected before September 11th. FAA Special Agent Bogdan Dzakovic, according to USA TODAY, said that FAA officials had ignored security problems before the terrorist attacks.
The fictoid successfully deflected from this gaping hole in security.

"No message was ever received from flight 175 that mentioned any weapons. So, for all anyone knows, the hijackers may have used guns, grenades, poison gas or any other weapon "

Ok, he seems to be saying that since there is no evidence that they used box cutters they must have used guns or granades. Does anyone else see the utter stupidity of his assumptions.

A hint, there also is no evidence that they used guns or granades or whatever.

Its clear to me that the weapon used was stinky cheese.</sarcasm

How is it possible for plastic knives to have survived that inferno? Most likely, the terrorists disabled people with some type of pepper spray amd then either used box cutters or took knives from the galley to use as weapons. If the black boxes from the planes that hit the Towers were never recovered, I doubt much else could have survived.

hijackers used weapons that are distinctively different - - plastic knives.

I'm in mind of a movie I just watched again last night.... "Grosse Pointe Blank" - in which the weapon of choice was a ball point pen. Ball point pen to the jugular is certainly as deadly a weapon as a plastic knife. I can't imagine that a plastic knife is capable of holding any edge, unless someone can correct me here... ceramic maybe. HOWEVER plastic knives could be used to kill someone just as a ball point pen could, by puncture. However wrestling someone into position and puncturing someone's jugular would be a heck of a lot harder than slashing with a long edge,especially if someone had interfered.

An executive summary of an unpublished FAA memo stated:

"At approximately 9:18 am, it was reported that two crew members in the cockpit were stabbed. The flight then descended with no communications from the flight crew members. The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PFI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American airlines Corporate Headquarters that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operation Center and informed that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in 9B at 9:20 am. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin shot by Satam al-Suqama. One bullet was reported to have been fired." The information came from two cell phone calls made by flight attendants, Betty Ong and Madeline Amy Sweeney, to Americal Airlines ground controllers. Ong, who was in the first class compartment— and the only witness to the assault on the cockpit. She reported that she had seen four hijackers come from first-class seats, kill a passenger seated behind them, and use a chemical weapon which she described as "some sort of spray" that made her eyes burn and made it difficult for her to breathe." Madeline Amy Sweeney, the flight attendant in the rear compartment, call was not recorded. According to the ground controller, she said that the pilots, another flight attendant and a passenger had been stabbed or killed.
The FAA subsequently said that the report of a gun shot was an error proceeding from a "miscommunication". The ground controller did not recall a gun shot or a bullet being mentioned.

By Paul Sperry
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – A Federal Aviation Administration official says a disputed high-level report detailing a shooting aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11 is not a mistaken first draft, as claimed by FAA management.

The official, a veteran security specialist, says he was at FAA headquarters here when the "executive summary" of the four hijacked flights was written late that tragic day for FAA Administrator Jane Garvey and other top managers.

"The document was reviewed for accuracy by a number of people in the room, including myself and a couple of managers of the operations center," he told WorldNetDaily.

"Nobody disputed it before I left work for the day," which was close to midnight, said the official, who asked to go unnamed.

His account is at odds with the FAA's.

According to FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown, the passage about hijacker Satam al-Suqami shooting and killing passenger Daniel Lewin with a single bullet on the flight out of Boston, was "corrected" that day in a "final summary" to Garvey. The alleged earlier draft was written at 5:31 p.m.

"That report was prepared for the evening. As soon as that piece of paper was prepared and people in security saw it, they said, 'No, no, no, no, we found out that wasn't true.' And it was corrected," Brown said in a Feb. 27 interview with WorldNetDaily. "So that was a draft of the final executive summary."

Brown told the Washington Post much the same thing in a March 2 article.

"By the end of the day, they knew that there had not been a gun on the aircraft," she was quoted as saying.

Asked again for a copy of the "final summary," Brown refused, reiterating that it is "protected information." She would not explain why a corrected version of a memo that has already been made public might still be sensitive.

Brown agreed to check the time that the alleged final draft was written, but has not followed up. A copy of the document obtained by WorldNetDaily is time-stamped "9/11/01 5:31 p.m."

The report is controversial because, up until now, there was every indication that the 19 hijackers used box cutters – a legal carry-on item at the time – and therefore did not breach airport security, which was managed by the airlines and regulated by the FAA. Guns, of course, are banned.

The official who was at the FAA Operation Center the day the report was prepared says he knows its author, and that the employee is not known to make mistakes.

"The person is extremely competent," he said, declining to reveal the author's name.

A former FAA special agent says he understands one of the authors to be Penny Anderson, an official in FAA's international operations division.

"She was involved in the writing, proofing and delivery of the report," said Steve Elson, an airport-security whistleblower who has maintained close ties to many FAA staffers since resigning from the agency in 1999. "She hand-delivered it to Garvey on the 10th floor."

Brown would not say when Garvey got a copy of the summary.

"Penny is bright and pays attention to detail," Elson said. "I'd be surprised if she'd let a mistake like that get by."

He added: "I don't think there is any second draft."

Anderson referred questions to FAA's press office. Brown declined comment when asked about Anderson's contribution to the Sept. 11 report.

If the report of a gunshot is a mistaken draft, two others things are curious – it's not labeled "draft," and it wasn't destroyed.

Brown says she can't explain it. But she maintains that there was no gun aboard Flight 11, and that the account resulted from a "miscommunication" between FAA headquarters and American Airlines dispatch centers.

What kind of "miscommunication"? She would not elaborate.

But Brown points out that, given the multiple jumbo-jet crashes and catastrophic attacks on the country that day, the information-gathering process at the operations center was unusually chaotic, leading to several errors – only one of which was the gun account.

Indeed, the same Flight 11 summary containing the gun incident said the jet crashed at 9:25 a.m, when in fact it hit the first World Trade Center tower at 8:48 a.m. In another error, United Airlines Flight 93 passenger Christian Adams' name is misspelled as "Christine."

Still, these errors are perfunctory by comparison. There's a big difference between confusing weapons and causes of death, and mixing up times and spellings of names, skeptics point out.

Sources familiar with what happened that day in FAA's emergency operations center say information was coming in at a frenetic pace. As new pieces of data arrived, they were written down on paper and posted on a "status board" for the four flights. At the end of the day, one or more staffers summarized all the information on the board in a report.

The gunshot account "was recorded factually from what was on the wall containing all the information we had at that point in time," the FAA source involved in the process said.

The shooting passage is the most specific in the report:

"The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PSI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American Airlines Corporate Headquarters that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operations Center and informed that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B at 9:20 a.m.

"The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al Suqami. One bullet was reported to have been fired."

Apart from the time, many of the details check out.

The passenger seating matches that of the airline's manifest. Clark in Fort Worth did contact FAA Principal Security Inspector Janet Riffe in Washington, though both deny discussing a gun.

"We do not know where that got its life in this summary written for Jane Garvey," said American Airlines spokesman John Hotard.

Also, an American flight attendant on the plane did call and report a passenger being killed by hijackers seated in rows 9 and 10 – although the passenger died of stab wounds, according to the FBI's account of what she said. And she called Logan International Airport in Boston, however, not American's system operations control center at Fort Worth. It was another American flight attendant who called Fort Worth, but she apparently did not mention a passenger being killed.

The FBI, which got the manifest from American within hours of the first crash, denies it was the FAA source for the gun story.

And officials at the bureau say they have come up with no evidence in their investigation of the hijackings to suggest any passengers were shot aboard the flights.

"There is no evidence that any shots were fired at any time on any of the flights," FBI spokesman Bill Carter told WorldNetDaily.

So how did a detailed account of a shooting on Flight 11 end up in a high-level government report?

"In any investigation, there is information that may be developed very early on that, after further scrutiny and further investigation, is determined to be no longer operative," Carter explained.

Previous stories:

Hijacker shot Flight 11 passenger: FAA memo

American Airlines denies giving gun info to FAA

Did FAA get Flight 11 gun info from FBI?

FAA covering up 9-11 gun, whistleblower agent claims

Israeli aboard Flight 11 'executed,' friends say

An executive summary of an unpublished FAA memo stated:

"At approximately 9:18 am, it was reported that two crew members in the cockpit were stabbed. The flight then descended with no communications from the flight crew members. The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PFI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American airlines Corporate Headquarters that an on board flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operation Center and informed that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in 9B at 9:20 am. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin shot by Satam al-Suqama. One bullet was reported to have been fired."

By Paul Sperry
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – He could bench-press 315 pounds and squat more than 450 pounds as a teen-ager. As an officer in an elite unit of the Israeli army, he was trained to kill terrorists with a pen or a credit card, or just his bare hands.

On Sept. 11, he may have gotten the chance.

As fate would have it, Daniel C. Lewin, a 31-year-old Israeli-American, was seated on American Airlines Flight 11 between hijackers Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari in the row in front of him, and hijacker Satam al-Suqami in the row behind him.

A secret Federal Aviation Administration executive summary, first uncovered by WorldNetDaily, says that al-Suqami, who would have been sitting directly behind Lewin in seat 10B, shot and killed Lewin with a single bullet.

Daniel C. Lewin

The FAA maintains the high-level report was a mistaken first draft and that Lewin was more than likely stabbed, not shot, along with American Airlines crew members on Flight 11. (Box cutters were allowed that day through airline security, which the FAA regulated, but not guns.)

But a childhood friend who served with Lewin in the Israel Defense Force says only a bullet would have stopped Lewin.

"He'd be more than a match for those skinny little (expletive)," said Brad Rephen, a New York lawyer who grew up with Lewin in Jerusalem. "With his training, he would have killed them with his bare hands."

"I can tell you, their knives would not have stopped him," he added. "He would have taken their knives or their box cutters away and used them against them."

Rephen recalls Lewin's injured hands after he returned from an Israeli anti-terrorist training course.

"They were pretty beaten up from the fighting he did," he said. "He knew how to fight with knives and take knives away from people."

He described Lewin, at about 5-11, 200 pounds, as "thick-boned." He says he witnessed him bench-press more than 300 pounds and squat close to 500 pounds.

"He was very, very strong and had a lot of meat on him," Rephen said. "They couldn't have subdued him by slashing him. The only way they could have stopped him was by shooting him."

Before returning to America, where he worked as an Internet company executive in Boston, the Denver-born Lewin was a captain in Sayeret Matkal, a top-secret reconnaissance unit of the Israeli army used for special anti-terror missions such as the raid on Entebbe. In 1976, Israeli commandos rescued 103 hostages from a gang of Arab terrorists at the airport in the Ugandan capital.

Lewin went on dozens of such missions, friends say. In the '80s, for example, he helped rescue thousands of Jews stranded in Ethiopia. His outfit – Unit 269 – secured the airport there during the airlift operation, friends say.

Rephen called Lewin "the best of the best."

"About 2,500 guys try out for the unit he was in," he said. "Twenty-five make it, and one gets chosen as an officer. It was him."

He was also extremely tough and determined, Rephen says.

He recalls an earlier time, during basic military training, when Lewin fell into a ravine and was knocked unconscious and rushed to the hospital.

"He was back the next day," Rephen said.

He guesses that Lewin, who understood Arabic, sensed something was wrong on Flight 11 the moment he took his seat next to the three terrorists, including Atta, the ringleader.

"He probably picked up that they were on a suicide mission by what they were saying or wearing," Rephen said.

"Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups put on headbands as badges of their death," he added. "If they put that stuff on, and he saw it, he would have known the ride was over."

And then he would have made his move.

"If I know Danny, when he realized what they were doing, he attacked them," Rephen said. "He probably cursed them in Arabic to scare them, and then he hurt them."

He speculates that during the struggle with Atta and the other hijacker sitting in front of Lewin in row 8, al-Suqami shot him from behind.

"I have no doubt they got a gun on the plane as a backup for a situation like that," Rephen said, speculating that they either brought it on board the plane, likely in pieces, or had it planted there earlier by ground services crew.

The FAA report, though very specific, does not indicate whether Lewin was killed during a struggle or while sitting in his seat. Whatever happened, it likely went down within 15 minutes or so of takeoff. Authorities say the pilots were overpowered by then.

Rephen, like other Lewin friends and associates contacted by WorldNetDaily, doubts the report of gunfire was written in error.

"If this were an error, they wouldn't have been so fact-specific," Rephen said.

The FBI says the Lewin incident is still under investigation.

"I don't think we know for sure right now if he was killed" on board the flight, said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. "All of this is something we're trying to figure out ourselves."

Attempts to reach Lewin's family were unsuccessful. His wife and children live in the Boston area, and his parents, both doctors, and two younger brothers live in Israel.

Previous stories:

Friends think Flight 11 Israeli was 'executed'

FAA official insists gun memo not draft

Hijacker shot passenger on Flight 11: FAA memo

Terrorists slit throats of 2 AA flight attendants

Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.