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Mark Wahlberg: With Me Aboard, 9/11 Hijackers Would Have Been Stopped

Update at 9:45 p.m. ET. Wahlberg apologizes:

Saying his comments were "ridiculous ... irresponsible ... [and] insensitive," actor Mark Wahlberg has now apologized for saying he would have stopped 9/11 hijackers if he had been on one of the planes, Reuters reports.

Read what he's apologizing for in our original post:

Actor Mark Wahlberg, in a new interview with Men's Journal, talks about what he thinks would have happened if he had been on one of the planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001:

"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we're going to land somewhere safely, don't worry.' "

As Huffington Post points out, Wahlberg has spoken before about the 9/11 flights because he had been scheduled to take one of them out of Boston, but changed his travel plans before that fateful day.

Wahberg's latest movie, Contraband, was No. 1 at the box office last weekend.

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Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
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