Video from a September 16, 2001 news broadcast by New York City CBS affiliate WCBS-TV features long-term reporter Pablo Guzman talking about the federal government investigating a Jersey City apartment building over reports residents held a pre-planned rooftop celebration of the 9/11 attacks with binoculars and a model of the Twin Towers targeted by al Qaeda that day. The video was posted to YouTube on Monday by “Citizen Video”.
(Note: the date of the broadcast is confirmed by the report of President Bush speaking to the nation after returning from Camp David, as also reported by CNN.)
World Trade Center view from Jersey City,New Jersey, September 11, 2001.
The 3:04 video of the newscast was filmed by a hand-held recorder pointed at a television screen showing the broadcast and is therefore a little shaky at times.
Leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has come under relentless attack for his claim that he saw “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attacks. The media has taken extraordinary steps to deny that any celebrations at all took place, even though contemporaneous reports like this exist.
Numerous people who lived and worked in northern New Jersey on September 11, 2001 have spoken out to state that they too witnessed Muslims publicly celebrating the attack. However in that era cellphone videos did not exist hence no videos of the celebrations have surface as of now.
This report by WCBS mentions only a small number were reported seen celebrating. However the apartment building in Jersey City was notorious for being the home of the Muslims who tried to take down the World Trade Center towers in 1993 with a truck bomb.
The report begins with Guzman talking about two Muslim men from Jersey City having been arrested on an Amtrak train in Texas after 9/11 and about investigators searching their apartment building in Jersey City on September 15. Guzman follows with the information about the ‘celebration’ at a nearby apartment building.
(Transcribed by Kristinn Taylor.)
“…There’s another apartment building (in Jersey City), one that an investigator told me, quote “is swarming with suspects.” Suspects whom I’m told were cheering on the roof when they saw the planes slam into the Trade Center.
“Now police were called to the building by other neighbors and found eight men celebrating–six of them tenants in the building. The FBI and other terrorist task force agencies that arrived and the older investigators on the task force recall that they had been to this building before–eight years ago when the first World Trade Center attack led them to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, whose Jersey City mosques lies between the two buildings getting attention today.
“And the older investigators remembered that suspects who allegedly got convicted for the first Trade Center case– followers of Sheikh Rahman –lived in the building where the same eight men were celebrating the destruction that they saw from the roof.
“Calling this a ‘hot address’ the task force investigators ordered everyone detained. They saw something else: a model of the Trade Center on the roof along with sets of binoculars. The kind of model used by an architect or engineer for a presentation an investigator told me. “They knew,” he said, “that the planes were going to hit and they wanted a ringside seat.”
“Remember part of what motivates Osama bin Laden against the United States and his cult followers is that the United States put Sheikh Rahman in jail. Bin Laden has said that for that the U.S. must pay.”
(Anchor interjection not transcribed.)
…”The first investigators on the scene, the first police, and even the first FBI agents didn’t realize the scope of what happened. They thought maybe these guys put up a cheering fireworks display. When the other investigators saw the model, saw the binoculars and remembered that address and what it really meant to the first Trade Center bombing that’s when that’s when they said, ‘we’ve got to grab everybody.'”
The WCBS report is similar to a report by The Washington Post from September 18, 2001.
…”In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.”
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