Much of the most recent discussion hinges on the veracity of Suqami's passport having been originally found on Vesey Street, which indeed runs north of the towers and which, if true, would indeed be doubly strange: Finding a passport unscathed is a little miracle in itself (though some of these kinds of "miracles" of unlikely things happening are expected with almost mathematical certainty when you have millions of individual objects undergoing plenty of events), but finding it upwind and against the moment vector of the plane is totally surprising.
So what evidence do we have it's true?
Basically, achimspok layed it out in
post 768:
CNN reported on TV on or after saturday, 9/15:
Another development on saturday [9/15/2001] New York officials revealed at a news conference here in this City that a hijacker's passport was found blocks from the World Trade Center crash site, can you believe that. No other details were given, but the discovery prompted the FBI and police to expand the search area.
No direction or street name given, the focus here is on it having been found "blocks" away.
The same info as text from the
CNN website on sunday, 9/16:
New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said Sunday a passport belonging to one of the hijackers was discovered a few days ago several blocks from the crash site by a passerby. Based on the new evidence, the FBI and police decided to widen the search area beyond the immediate crash site.
achimspok also links a screenshot, from
this CNN website article of tuesday, 9/18/2001 (although the URL hints at a day earlier):
This mentions Vesey Street:
Last week, a passport belonging to one of the hijackers was found in the vicinity of Vesey Street, near the World Trade Center
i.e. not
on Vesey Street, but more likely to the north
or south of it!
In
post 794, achimspok quotes more news sources (I'll leave away those I already quoted above):
ABCNEWS sources identify another hijacker as Satam Suqami, a Saudi national on American Airlines Flight 11, whose passport was recovered in the rubble.
http://www.abcnews.com/
...
Authorities investigating Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center found a passport belonging to one of the hijackers
three blocks from the demolished 110-story buildings, New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said. Officials declined to say to whom the passport was issued, but a government source said that it was a Saudi passport. (Washington Post, 17.09.2001)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...ode=&contentId=A41070-2001Sep16¬Found=true
...
We don't know the date of the ABC quote, there is no deep link, and a quick search on the ABC website turned up empty.
Taking all these reports together, the informnation we can gather from news sources around 9/17/2001 converges thus:
An passport belonging to a yet unidentified hijacker was found by a passerby to the north or south of Vesey street about three blocks away from the WTC.
According to achimspok, that story "changes" later to:
achimspok said:
This is not actually from the 9/11 Commission Report but from 9/11 Commission Staff Statements:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrTrav_Ch2.pdf
Added information is details about the passerby (male, about 30, business attire), identity of the NYPD Detective (Yuk H. Chin), and time (shortly before the first tower, WTC2, collapsed).
Subtracted information here is location: No mention of "several" or "three blocks", no mention of "Vesey".
I think quite important is the info that the passerby left before his identity was determined.
But is it possible that the passport was found three blocks away from the crash site in the vicinity of Vesey Street?
Let's look at a map of downtown Manhattan:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Vesey...rc=6&hnear=Vesey+St,+New+York,+10282&t=m&z=17
We see that Vesey Street ends
one block east of Church Street (and becomes Ann Street), which was the eastern perimeter of the crash site, WTC Plaza, and
one block west of West Street (where Vesey Green separates it from the riverfront).
So obviously, the press reports that mention Vesey Street were
imprecise.
Vesey Street doesn't run east-west parallel to the equator, it rather goes from WNW to ESE. A location arounf Fulton St. and West Broadway could reasonably described as "blocks from the crash site in the vicinity of Vesey". That location is west and slightly south of the North Tower.
The winds were not blowing from due north, as achimspok claimed. Here is a high resolution image taken from the ISS on the morning of 9/11, before the collapses:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-3/hires/iss003e5387.jpg
The smoke cloud passes just south of the Brooklyn bridge, almost parallel to the Streets on the lower Manhattan grid. A passport that made it just out of the tower and was then caught by the wind would have fluttered towards Fulton or John Street, just south of Vesey. No need to bounce north.
But was the passport found by the passerby in the vicinity of Vesey Street? Is that what he said? We don't know, unless we read the "FBI report, interview of Detective Chin, Sept. 12, 2001" mentioned in the footnote. Maybe Chin was near Vesey, maybe the passerby never stated comprehensively where he picked up the passport. Maybe he didn't remember correctly.
Conclusion:
The early and later reports about Suqami's passport are neither in contradiction of each other, nor do they contain any claims that are physically impossible.