I'd have beaten 9/11 terrorists says actor - before apologising

ACTOR Mark Wahlberg has apologised for his extraordinary claim that he would have single-handedly taken on terrorists and flown one of the 9/11 flights to safety.
 
In next month's Men's Journal magazine, Wahlberg tells an interviewer: "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.'"
 
Wahlberg was actually scheduled to take the ill-fated Flight 93 from Boston to Los Angeles on 11 September 2001. But at the last moment he and his friends decided to hire a charter flight to a film festival in Toronto.
 
His comments were deemed "silly and disrespectful" by Deena Burnett-Bailey, the wife of a real-life hero who died in an attempt to retake Flight 93 from terrorists. Tom Burnett-Bailey was one of a group of passengers who stormed the cockpit to tackle the hijackers, causing the plane to crash in a Pennsylvania field.
 
"Does Mark Wahlberg have a pilot's license? Then I think hindsight is 20/20 and it's insignificant to say what you would have done if you weren't there," Mrs Burnett-Bailey told the website TMZ yesterday. "Sounds like someone is grandstanding."
 
Wahlberg subsequently issued an apology to the families of 9/11 victims, saying it was not his intention to come off as insensitive. But the man who started as a pop singer calling himself Marky Mark before starring in Boogie Nights and The Departed was unable to escape online scepticism about his superhuman capabilities.
 
"Marky Mark is one of those people who thinks if they were alive during World War II, they would have killed Hitler with their own two hands," says blogger Jeremy Feist.

Wahlberg was lucky Wikipedia went offline for the day - otherwise bloggers might have seen where all this latent aggression came from. As a teenager he spent time in jail for attempted murder after attacking two hapless Vietnamese men in the street, knocking one unconscious and leaving the other permanently blind in one eye. ·