What did President Bush see at 9 a.m. on September 11?

December 10, 2001

THE following is from the transcript of a "Town Hall Meeting" held by President George W Bush and aired on Cable News Network (CNN) on December 4, 2001.

On September 11, 2001, at about 9:00 A.M., EDT, Mr. Bush was sitting in the hallway outside a Florida classroom, waiting to go in to talk to the students. In the following clip from the Town Hall transcript, Mr. Bush tells us that, while he was waiting in the hallway, he watched -- on television -- the first airliner crash into the WTC towers. Remember, this was at 9:00 A.M., just a few minutes after the first crash had occurred!

CNN transcript:

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?

 

President George W 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 used 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."

 

End of transcript.

WE are indebted to the Biblebelievers Newsletter #202, for the text of the above transcript. The writer of this Newsletter, Anthony Grigor-Scott, comments: "There was no live TV coverage of the first attack. A video allegedly taken by someone who just happened to be filming the Trade Center that morning did air a couple of hours after the initial incident but video of that first plane hitting the tower taken by security cameras did not air publicly until days afterwards. . . . Mr. Bush was definitely watching a "different" channel than most everyone else in the world [. . . ]"

David Irving comments: We do not share the conspiracy theories that this discrepancy might appear to support, we merely use this incident as an example of the notorious fallibility of human memory in recording times, dates, places, visual episodes in a factual matrix, and reproducing them later, in this case some three months after the event.

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