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Pan_Yans Wife: quoting: This is false. Nobody saw the jetliner crash into the first tower on television until a videotape surfaced a day later.
Is this true?

There was no live video coverage of the first plane hitting the tower at 8:48 a.m.. There couldn't be. French filmmaking brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet were filming a documentary about a rookie fireman from Manhattan's Engine 7, Ladder 1 company. One of them heard a roar, turned with his camera, and filmed the airplane hitting the first tower. Sometime after noon one of the brothers was able to get back to the firehouse and he released his film to a local media crew.

However, for some reason, nearly three months later, President Bush made a strange claim at his news conference: Dec. 4 press conference

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."

No one has been able to explain why the president told such a falsehood. He was standing outside the classroom when the first plane hit. But he did not see any such videotape. And Ari Fleischer and others remember that he was first informed by Andy Card, while he was reading to the schoolchildren, as we all saw on TV. His story on Dec. 4 was not an accidental slip, however. He repeated the same story in a press conference a month later. The White House has never responded to inquiries about the president's statement. I wish some day they would. It's strange.
--Raoul