http://link.nationalreview.com/view/54ecd6443b35d0b02a8ba7263cuv2.2zlp/8ac98a67No, You Didn’t Really Watch Footage of New Jersey Muslims CelebratingJim Geraghty
December 1, 2015
Here we go again.
Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy defended Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s claim that thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on 9/11, saying that he knew people who saw it in person and that he saw it on television.
“I actually remember things like that,” Doocy insisted. “I remember, because I live one town away from one of the towns where, according to my neighbors, they saw it with their own two eyes, there were people celebrating.”
“I also remember there was video on television,” he said. “I don’t remember if it was from that town or from New Jersey. Nonetheless, Donald Trump says there are a lot of people out there who have verified the idea of his story.”
No matter how strongly Trump or Doocy insist they remember watching it -- perhaps you insist you remember watching it on television as well! -- we have good reason to be skeptical.
When people are describing memories from many years ago, and cannot provide supporting evidence or corroborating details, be wary. Think of former representative Curt Weldon’s impassioned, shocking claims about the Able Danger program and 9/11.
On October 19, 2005, Representative Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican, announced on the floor of the House:
. . . that secret program called Able Danger actually identified the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda in January and February of 2000, over one year before 9/11 every happened. In addition, I learned that not only did we identify the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda, but we identified Mohamed Atta as one of the members of that Brooklyn cell along with three other terrorists who were the leadership of the 9/11 attack.
Shortly thereafter, Weldon insisted he had seen Mohammed Atta’s face and name on a chart from the intelligence group, identifying him as part of a Brooklyn cell.
In a particularly dramatic scene in Weldon’s book, Countdown to Terror, the Pennsylvania Republican described personally handing to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, just after Sept. 11, an Able Danger chart produced in 1999 identifying Atta. But Weldon told TIME he’s no longer certain Atta’s name was on that original document. The congressman says he handed Hadley his only copy. Still, last week he referred reporters to a recently reconstructed version of the chart in his office where, among dozens of names and photos of terrorists from around the world, there was a color mug shot of Mohammad Atta, circled in black marker.
No one could ever produce the original chart Weldon claimed he saw; the Pentagon’s Inspector General concluded Able Danger did not identify Atta or any other hijacker before the September 11 attacks and there was no evidence of the chart Weldon described ever existed.
Apparently after 9/11, the FBI received thousands of calls from people reporting seeing Atta in places they knew he could not have been; people “remembered” seeing him everywhere. Memories play tricks on people. They remember things that didn’t happen -- things like dodging sniper fire in Bosnia. Or any of Brian Williams’s tales. Or Neil deGrasse Tyson’s completely erroneous description of a George W. Bush speech.
President George W. Bush once described a memory that all of us know couldn’t have happened the way he described:
I was sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower of a TV -- the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself and I said, “that’s one terrible pilot” and said it must have been a horrible accident.’
Except we all saw President Bush being informed about the attacks by Andrew Card in the classroom. (Cue the Truther conspiracy theories.) The only footage of the plane hitting the first tower was by those French documentarians, and was shown to the public months later.
No, it is not hard to get people to remember things that didn’t happen, even about 9/11:
In one, for example, the investigators spoke with the subjects about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and mentioned in passing the footage that had been captured of United Flight 93 crashing in Pennsylvania -- footage, of course, that does not exist. In both groups -- HSAM subjects and those with normal memories -- about 1 in 5 people “remembered” seeing this footage when asked about it later.
“It just seemed like something was falling out of the sky,” said one of the HSAM participants. “I was just, you know, kind of stunned by watching it, you know, go down.”
A lot of things we “remember” didn’t actually happen. In the original television series Dragnet, Joe Friday never actually said, “Just the facts, ma’am”; his wording was, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” and, “All we know are the facts, ma’am.” Sherlock Holmes never said 'Elementary, my dear Watson” in any of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Humphrey Bogart never actually says, “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca.
