One retired FBI agent says Donald Trump’s claims of seeing Muslim celebrations following the attacks on 9-11 are absolutely plausible.
Jim Burkett was an assistant special agent in charge with the FBI’s office in Boston during 9-11 and afterward. He says during that time the office received tons of phone calls from people who feared more attacks and others reporting suspicious activity.
Many of those calls, said Burkett, came from concerned and angry Americans reporting Muslim’s celebrating over the destruction of the twin towers and damage to the Pentagon. The calls were logged, reports were made and there were “stacks and stacks” of them, he said.
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Most of the calls he said were deemed unimportant and the agency didn’t see fit to initiate investigations.
But the retired agent says even though video of celebrations following 9-11 is hard to find, he says it means Trump’s claims are highly plausible.
WKRG
Donald Trump said this to supporters at an Alabama rally:
"Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering."
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George Stephanopoulus challenged Trump on this on ABC's This Week, noting that police said nothing like that happened.
TRUMP: It did happen. I saw it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You saw that…
TRUMP: It was on television. I saw it.
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[It's the media's fault.] The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.
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When you make the news into [...] consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they're doing, informing themselves, and what they're actually doing, shopping.
And who shops for products he or she doesn't want? That's why the consumer news business was always destined to hit this kind of impasse. You can get by for a long time by carefully selecting the facts you know your audiences will like, and calling that news. But eventually there will be a truth that displeases your customers. What do you do then?
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It was preposterous from the start to think that there could have been contemporaneous broadcasts of "thousands" of people in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks. Does nobody remember how people felt that day? If there had been such broadcasts, there would have been massacres – angry Americans would have stormed Jersey City.
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Beyond all of that: if footage of such a celebration existed, it would have skyrocketed around the country, and not popped off ineffectually on some local broadcast for just Donald Trump to see and remember. The whole thing is nuts.
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What this 9/11 celebrations story shows is that American news audiences have had their fantasies stroked for so long that they can't even remember stuff that happened not that long ago. It's like an organic version of 1984, with audiences constantly editing even their own memories to fit their current attitudes about things.
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This is a horrible thing to have to say about one's own country, but this story makes it official. America is now too dumb for TV news.
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To believe there was a mass demonstration of open, gloating defiance right across the river from Manhattan while the Towers smoldered, speaks to a powerfully crazy fantasy both about American impotence and about a brazen, homogenous evil in Muslim-American communities.
Maybe in the wake of Paris that's the way people feel, but it's not close to what happened. If we can't even remember things correctly even in the video age, things are going to get weird pretty fast in this country.
Matt Taibbi
Personally, I think they already have.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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