Was it a conscious decision to suppress evidence? Or just a choice made by a filmmaker or editor who didn’t realize the significance of what their footage showed?
In 2002, before the 9/11 Truth Movement had begun to take shape, a documentary called In Memoriam: New York City was aired on HBO. It showed the chaos occurring in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In one sequence, a firefighter appears to be calling a family member from a payphone on Chambers Street to assure them that he is okay. He passes the phone to another man to confirm this.
“I’m right underneath the damn thing. Here’s one of the guys who can tell you I’m okay, all right? Here, hold on.” Then one of the men says, “You want to call your mother?”
Before anything else happens, the film cuts to people running down West Street.
Nothing seems odd about this until you see what was cut out. In the original footage, the phone conversation involving the second firefighter is interrupted by a massive explosion. He whirls around to see where the booming sound came from. The camera pans to three others firefighters, who are right next to the two, and they also react to the explosions with shock and apparent confusion.
AE911Truth operations manager Andy Steele recently attempted to reach someone involved in the film, particularly someone involved in editing it, to get to the bottom of why the explosions were cut out. Only one of the people contacted by Steele – first assistant editor Amy Rockefeller – responded. In his message to her, Steele wrote:
“My question is, regarding the clip in which the firefighters are around the payphone, there is an explosion that goes off which they all react to, (as you’ll see in the pre-edit version.) However, in your film In Memoriam: New York City the clip is cut right before the explosion happens and the film moves on to the next scene. Considering that the full clip captures the chaos of the morning and the pressure that first responders were under at the scene, and is therefore interesting content, I would like to know to the best of your recollection why the full clip wasn’t included in the film, and rather cut before the explosion happens.”
In her response, Rockefeller explained that there was no formal edict that explosions were to be removed. She offered this “educated guess” about the reason it was done in this instance:
“I don't recall why this editorial/creative choice was made at the time. However I re-watched a few minutes before and after this footage in the completed documentary and I can tell that the theme of this section is people helping each other, hence the omission of the loud explosion. I think it was a deliberate choice to limit how many times the audience sees/hears explosions throughout the film.”
…I think it was a deliberate choice to limit how many times the audience sees/hears explosions…
There is a mountain of evidence that explosions took place in the Twin Towers and Building 7 before the buildings came down. Some of this can be seen in video clips (including in TV news reports) and some in audio clips. We also have the accounts of at least 118 first responders and dozens of others who reported hearing explosions at the World Trade Center that day. The FDNY oral histories were exposed by researcher Graeme MacQueen in an article he published in the Journal of 9/11 Studies in 2006. This was based on an earlier article by David Ray Griffin.
I interviewed MacQueen about these accounts for an article I published on Truth and Shadows in 2016.
Here are some examples of what firefighters reported:
Richard Banaciski – South Tower: “We were there I don’t know, maybe 10, 15 minutes and then I just remember there was just an explosion. It seemed like on television they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.”
Gregg Brady – North Tower: “We were standing underneath and Captain Stone was speaking again. We heard — I heard 3 loud explosions. I look up and the north tower is coming down now…”
Edward Cachia – South Tower: As my officer and I were looking at the south tower, it just gave. It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit, because we originally had thought there was like an internal detonation explosives because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down.
Frank Campagna – North Tower: That’s when it went. I looked back. You see three explosions and then the whole thing coming down. I turned my head and everybody was scattering.
Craig Carlsen – South Tower: I guess about three minutes later you just heard explosions coming from building two, the south tower. It seemed like it took forever, but there were about ten explosions.
John Coyle – South Tower: The tower was – I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards, that it had exploded or the plane or there had been some device on the plane that had exploded, because the debris from the tower had shot out far over our head…
Frank Cruthers – And while I was still in that immediate area, the South Tower, 2 World Trade Center, there was what appeared to be at first an explosion. It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.
Kevin Darnowski – South Tower: At that time I started walking back up towards Vesey Street. I heard three explosions, and then we heard like groaning and grinding, and tower two started to come down.
Here are some links on AE911truth.org that provide overwhelming proof that there were major explosions witnessed and recorded before and during the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers.
Despite this overwhelming evidence – reported by many witnesses and recorded on video and audio – the makers of In Memoriam: New York City did not think that a massive explosion, captured on film, should be included in their film. In fact, they made a conscious decision to remove it. And given that the film came out in 2002, and there was not yet an organized movement to expose the lies in the 9/11 official story, the filmmakers should not have been fearful of being called “conspiracy theorists.”
Did they consciously consider that the explosion in the footage didn’t match with the official story? Did they think that leaving it in would require the anomaly to be addressed? Or did they actually not realize the implications of such of an explosion?
You decide.
Craig McKee is a writer for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the creator of the blogs Truth and Shadows and Thought Crimes and Misdemeanors. He also hosts the Truth and Shadows podcast on YouTube and Rumble.
