Did Bush see the FIRST plane hit the World Trade Center on television?

Read Bush's response to a question at a town hall meeting on December 4, 2001. This response was aired and the transcript is available at a number of sources. Here is the transcript from CNN's website (the quoted section is appoximately 85% down from the top of the page at the link below).

Quote :

"QUESTION: One thing, Mr. President, is that you have no idea how much you've done for this country, and another thing is that how did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack? BUSH: Well... (APPLAUSE) Thank you, Jordan (ph). Well, Jordan (ph), you're not going to believe what state I was in when I heard about the terrorist attack. I was in Florida. And my chief of staff, Andy Card -- actually I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself, and I said, "There's one terrible pilot." And I said, "It must have been a horrible accident." But I was whisked off there -- I didn't have much time to think about it, and I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my chief who was sitting over here walked in and said, "A second plane has hit the tower. America's under attack." http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0112/04/se.04.html"

The transcript is also available at the following source:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/20011204-17.html

Bush's comments are confirmed here as well:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,612354,00.html


[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 6:01 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 5:45:58 PM

i read about that in Michael Moore's Dude where's my country

12/30/2003 6:03:28 PM

ditto

12/30/2003 6:19:09 PM

bush doesn't know what happened to him yesterday, much less two months earlier

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 6:33 PM. Reason : oo]

12/30/2003 6:31:12 PM

I am confused what he is trying to insinuate from this statement . . . but no doubt it is probably retarded.

12/30/2003 6:39:39 PM

Isn't he blaming the Catholics?

12/30/2003 6:57:30 PM

Quote :

"I am confused what he is trying to insinuate from this statement "

ditto. anybody know?

12/30/2003 7:00:19 PM

yea, whats the point.

12/30/2003 7:43:23 PM

ill probably vote dem and even ill say that this is really stupid

12/30/2003 8:05:37 PM

Quote :

"-- the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself"

I thought CNN might be able to spell better but oh well.

If anything, the fact that Bush saw the effects of the first hit (because I thought it took a while to get the footage of the 1st plane hitting) indicates that he might not have had forewarning of the event and chalked it up to an accident (which is what many people thought at first too)

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 8:12 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 8:11:51 PM

the point, i think, is supposed to be that there was no footage of the first plane hitting the towers until a couple of days later.. so.. if he saw the first plane hit, it must have been on closed circuit tv or something like that...

i believe bush probably let 9/11 happen, but i think in this case, he was probably just talking without thinking.. as usual

12/30/2003 8:33:08 PM

Quote :

"i believe bush probably let 9/11 happen"

as in, he knew without a doubt that it was being plotted and he was like, "oh yeah man, that's cool, we can take advantage of the situation, right? wr0d" cmon, i think bush is a tard too, but i give him more credit than that

12/30/2003 8:37:43 PM

Well, he was either dumb enough to do one of the following;

B. Expose a massive goverment conspiracey by revealing that there were live or semi-live cameras being observed by president of the towers that morning.

A. Trying to speak on a topic which involved making something up the fly without thinking.


Both requie a fair amout of stupidity, but I think the the amount that B would require would be too large IMO.

12/30/2003 8:39:05 PM

lol i just realized, insert the word 'had'

" And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- "

becomes

Quote :

" "And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hadhit the tower -- t" "

we all know how good with words he is and im fairly cetain that certain news agency were reporting early on about eye witness acounts of the plane hitting, but im sure that i remember people thinking a bomb went off.

12/30/2003 8:43:01 PM

Did a 757 really hit the Pentagon?



http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/pages-en/im-1stlev.html
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/jpdesm/pentagon/pages-en/cctv.html

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 9:46 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 9:43:50 PM

enough for fucks sake

12/30/2003 9:47:56 PM

This site examines whether a 757 hit the Pentagon. It concludes flight 77 could not have been the plane that hit the Pentagon because of the transponder and radar evidence.

Quote :

"--Flight 77 leaves Dulles International Airport at 8:20 am. --Flight 77's transponder is turned off at 8:56 am. The fact that flight 77's transponder was turned off means only that the aircraft stopped transmitting its name and altitude, etc, but it was still very visible to radar. --Flight 77 disappears from all radar screens a couple of minutes later, somewhere near the Ohio border. --An aircraft appears on radar south of Washington DC, close to the city. This aircraft eventually crashes into the Pentagon. So the aircraft that crashed into the Pentagon could not possibly have been flight 77. This is simply because, if it had flown from the Ohio border back to Washington DC it would have been visible to radar for the entire trip. And, we are told that it was not. So given this, why do most people believe that flight 77 hit the Pentagon? Because the media told them so (and this is the one and only reason that most believe flight 77 hit the Pentagon). But the evidence (without even examining the Pentagon scene itself) already says that this is impossible. http://members.fortunecity.com/911/pentagon/what-hit-it.htm"

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 10:24 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 10:09:48 PM

two lines on a fucking picture show nothing, i have no clue what kind of physics you would need to understand to know what happends to the wings in a high speed collision at high temperatures

12/30/2003 10:24:23 PM

"This is simply because, if it had flown from the Ohio border back to Washington DC it would have been visible to radar for the entire trip. And, we are told that it was not"

Coulda been malfunction, coulda been flying too low, the times could have been misreported.

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 10:26 PM. Reason : yt]

12/30/2003 10:26:11 PM

Contradictions in the official story of what happened at the Pentagon?:

Quote :

"The official version is complex and contradicts itself, so read on carefully. To justify the absence of Boeing debris, the authorities explained that the aircraft was pulverized when it impacted with such a highly reinforced building as the Pentagon. To explain the disappearance of the aircraft's more resistant components, like the engines or brakes, we were told that the aircraft melted (with the exception of one landing light and its black boxes). To justify the absence of 100 tons of melted metal, experts attempted to show that the fire exceeded 2500 °C, leading to the evaporation of parts of the aircraft (but not of the building itself or, clearly, of the landing light or black boxes). To justify the presence of the hole, officials now state that it was caused by the nose of the aircraft, which, despite the rigors of the crash, continued careering through the three buildings. The aircraft thus disintegrated on contact with the Pentagon, melted inside the building, evaporated at 2500° C and still penetrated two other buildings via a hole 2 ½ yards in diameter. Questions need to be asked of Pentagon experts here. The official version has its own holes that need filling. http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero14/missile/missile_en.htm"

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 10:30 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 10:28:29 PM

There is almost no real empirical evidence to go by here, all we know is that these kind of explosions burn hot enough to take buildings down. ^that all makes sense to me, but we need the right kind of physcicist for a worthwhile opinion.

12/30/2003 10:31:58 PM

as I recall, there were no pieces of the plane found in the WTC rubble.

12/30/2003 10:36:02 PM

As I recall Jennifer Lopez' booty crashed into the pentagon.

12/30/2003 10:54:56 PM

exactly the kind of response this thread deserves

12/30/2003 10:55:57 PM

Site containing many Pentagon and Flight 77 links: http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/flight77/links.html

Quote :

"The French are pointing out: No photo shows airplane pieces, body parts of passengers, luggage, etc, nor do news reports mention such parts. The initial damage was along the ground floor, which implies the plane hit the ground floor, but there is no airplane-shaped hole in the building. Most importantly, the body of the plane was taller than one floor of the building. Therefore, the body of the plane should have punched a hole through at least two floors. The section that collapsed did so quite a while after the plane crash, just as the WTC buildings collapsed for no apparent reason long after the plane crashes (in the case of building 7, the collapse was many hours later). http://members.fortunecity.com/911/hufschmid/PentagonPlaneCrash.html"

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 11:06 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 11:03:41 PM

Salisburyboy, i know people who were in the building when the plane hit, it hit infront of the biulding and almost cartwheeled into it, hitting at a angle, hence it didnt slam into the walls,

12/30/2003 11:05:05 PM

fuck well now would be a good time to listen to the french


jesus the fire from the explosion can melt steel, of fucking course it will eat every person and thing that is combustable

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 11:08 PM. Reason : fsd]

12/30/2003 11:07:53 PM

My personal favorite part about alll the sites about a 9/11 conspiracy is they go on and on about the ammount of skill nessesary to have flown these planes into a building and right on target and how it would be impossible for such skill to be posessed by some terrorists, but they then turn arround and flip out because the damage on the pentagon isn't consistant with a plane flying in AT GROUND LEVEL to the building.

12/30/2003 11:08:07 PM

lol, i didnt think of that.

12/30/2003 11:12:59 PM

In response to the first bit of ludicrousness Salisbury put up, yes, I seem to recall hearing that the President did in fact see/know about the first crash into the WTC. But after the first one most people chalked it up as an accident -- which even your source concedes the president did. And yes, he went in to talk to the kids, which I think is a better response than freaking everybody out and ruining the kids' day.

But when he got word that there was an attack, he left and started to do his job.

So what exactly are you trying to suggest with all this? What, Salisburyboy, do you think really happened?

12/30/2003 11:15:57 PM

yea, what is the going conspiracy theory?

12/30/2003 11:17:23 PM

The eyewitness reports vary. Some saw a what they thought was a airliner, others described something different.

Here is something interesting that Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with Parade magazine:

Quote :

"Rumsfeld:..."Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filed with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center. " http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Nov2001/t11182001_t1012pm.html"

Here's what one eyewitness said:

Quote :

" "It was like a cruise missile with wings, went right there and slammed into the Pentagon," Mike Walter, an eyewitness, told CNN.—CNN.COM, "Up to 800 possibly dead at Pentagon", September 12, 2001 http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/Missile-Not-Flight-77.html"

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 11:23 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 11:21:32 PM

Quote :

"In response to the first bit of ludicrousness Salisbury put up, yes, I seem to recall hearing that the President did in fact see/know about the first crash into the WTC. But after the first one most people chalked it up as an accident -- which even your source concedes the president did. And yes, he went in to talk to the kids, which I think is a better response than freaking everybody out and ruining the kids' day. "

last time i checked they don't have T.V's in the hallway of an elementry school. and how could he have seen the first plane hit the trade towers when it first happened??? why would the news stations be randomly video-taping the WTC when all of a sudden a plane crashed into them. i could understand them broad casting the first plane crashing into the WTC later on when they get the video from other sources , but bush's cr0nies would have told him of the situation b4 the news stations would have been able to get video of the first crash onto the news. i think bush either had a brain fart and what he really saw was the second plane crashing into the WTC or he just made it up .

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 11:23 PM. Reason : :]

12/30/2003 11:22:27 PM

The government claims that it identified almost all of the "passengers aboard Flight 77" from DNA evidence in the Pentagon rubble. The author raises a serious question about that claim.

Quote :

"DNA is an organic molecule that is very fragile, easily destroyed by high temperatures. Not finding the large metallic pieces that would indicate a Boeing 757, the government explained that they were burned up in the intense blaze that consumed the aircraft. Then how does human tissue survive when 600 lb metal engines cannot? Can't have it both ways. So how trustworthy can the government evidence be? http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/Missile-Not-Flight-77.html"

12/30/2003 11:29:33 PM

lol, there is no way they would ever say that you moron. maybe a limb was blown really far away and there was some bone marrow, but god dude, you better check your source becuase there is no way the gov. would say that.

12/30/2003 11:35:23 PM

Wait, actually, I don't really think he could've seen the first plane hit the tower, because there was only one camera on it when it happened and the film would not have been distributed to news networks until after the second one had also impacted. So there's not much of a chance that Bush "saw an airplane hit the tower." He must've heard about it.

So either Salisbury's source is bullshit (that gets my vote!) or Bush misspoke.

12/30/2003 11:36:38 PM

the source is BS, he doesnt know how to research

Quote :

" "DNA identified the bodies of all but one victim...the government said" "

thats the souce lol! the gov 'said'


[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 11:39 PM. Reason : nbg]

12/30/2003 11:37:59 PM

Quote :

"The government claims that it identified almost all of the "passengers aboard Flight 77" from DNA evidence in the Pentagon rubble. The author raises a serious question about that claim"

why would they need to find DNA to identify the passengers. couldn't they tell who was on the plane from when the checked in b4 their flight departed.

Quote :

"Wait, actually, I don't really think he could've seen the first plane hit the tower, because there was only one camera on it when it happened and the film would not have been distributed to news networks until after the second one had also impacted. So there's not much of a chance that Bush "saw an airplane hit the tower." He must've heard about it. "

that was my point. their is no way bush could have seen the first plane hit the tower. and i don't think he saw the second one either b/c as i said "last time i checked they don't have T.V in the middle of the hall in an elementry school" and he was too busy reading to little kids anyway.

Quote :

"thats the souce lol! the gov 'said' "

if the gov't said it , it must be true .

the gov't never lies

[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 11:49 PM. Reason : :]

12/30/2003 11:46:44 PM

It is clear that no video of the first plane hitting the WTC was available on the major news channels (or any tv channel available to the public) on September 11th.

Bush could have seen the first plane that hit the WTC if the government had set up a camera specifically to capture the event and had set up a feed via closed-circuit televion so that Bush could watch it.


[Edited on December 30, 2003 at 11:54 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2003 11:51:06 PM

i had hope my sarcasm was implicit btw

12/30/2003 11:52:24 PM

Quote :

"Here we're talking about plastic knives and using an American Airlines flight filled with our citizens, and the missile to damage this building and similar (inaudible) that damaged the World Trade Center."

And by missle, why the fuck can the plane not be the missle! I thought I heard bush say on 911 that the terrists turned our planes into guided missiles or some talk like that. There is always an explanation for this stuff, the writer of the article is just plugging a book.

12/30/2003 11:54:49 PM

Quote :

"Bush could have seen the first plane that hit the WTC if the government had set up a camera specifically to capture the event and had set up a feed via closed-circuit televion so that Bush could watch it. "

9/11 rly was a gov't conspiracy

12/30/2003 11:55:05 PM

Quote :

" Bush could have seen the first plane that hit the WTC if the government had set up a camera specifically to capture the event and had set up a feed via closed-circuit televion so that Bush could watch it. "

Yes becuase every time there is a threat they sit the president down so he watch live to see if something happends

12/30/2003 11:56:22 PM

thread over

12/30/2003 11:56:51 PM

I said "if". People above seemed to be saying it was flat-out IMPOSSIBLE that Bush saw the first plane hit the WTC on tv. I did not say that is what happened.

I merely provided that as a possible way that Bush could have seen the first plane hit the WTC.

12/30/2003 11:57:45 PM

Just tell me the 'why'? Bush knows about the attacks, lets them happen and then fire a missle at the pentagon? just tell me why.

12/30/2003 11:59:12 PM

IF (notice I said "if") Bush was complicit in the 9-11 attacks, there could be a number of motives....to get us involved in war (in Afghanistan, Iraq)....to curtail civil liberties (and increase government power)....etc.

12/31/2003 12:02:39 AM

Quote :

"Bush could have seen the first plane that hit the WTC if the government had set up a camera specifically to capture the event and had set up a feed via closed-circuit televion so that Bush could watch it."

What. The. Fuck.

Quote :

"I merely provided that as a possible way that Bush could have seen the first plane hit the WTC."

I would have taken you more seriously if you told me that maybe Bush had a psychic vision of it, or that magical terrorist nymphs had set up an enchanted television. Don't "provide possibilities," because that list is infinite and almost exclusively made-up ridiculous bullshit. Provide us some damn probabilities, such as...

...Bush didn't see the first plane hit.

12/31/2003 12:04:36 AM

there is NO evidence here. just things people have 'said' and other things easily explaned.

12/31/2003 12:07:58 AM

Quote :

"I merely provided that as a possible way that Bush could have seen the first plane hit the WTC."

Yes, just like we are saying that you could be a complete dumbass who doesn't know what in the hell he is talking about. However, I feel that in both situations, we are just kidding ourselves and truly believe this.

12/31/2003 12:10:51 AM