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9/11 Black Box Cover-Up At Ground Zero?
(Will Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News, October 28, 2004)
Two men who worked extensively in the wreckage of the World Trade Center claim they helped federal agents find three of the four "black boxes" from the jetliners that struck the towers on 9/11 - contradicting the official account. . . . Both the independent 9/11 Commission and federal authorities continue to insist that none of the four devices - a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) from the two planes - were ever found in the wreckage. . . . But New York City firefighter Nicholas DeMasi has written in a recent book -- self-published by several Ground Zero workers -- that he escorted federal agents on an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and helped them locate three of the four. . . . His account is supported by a volunteer, Mike Bellone , whose efforts at Ground Zero have been chronicled in the New York Times and elsewhere . Bellone said assisted DeMasi and the agents and that saw a device that resembling a "black box" in the back of the firefighter's ATV. . . . Their story raises the question of whether there was a some type of cover-up at Ground Zero. Federal aviation officials - blaming the massive devastation - have said the World Trade Center attacks seem to be the only major jetliner crashes in which the critical devices were never located. . . . [COMMENT: And yet we are supposed to believe that one of the alleged hijackers' passports was found unharmed at ground zero!?! How stupid do they think we are?] . . . The "black boxes" - actually orange - could have provided valuable new information about the worst terror attack to ever take place on American soil. . . . The cockpit voice recorder uses two microphones to capture the sounds of the cockpit for the last 30 minutes of a doomed flight on a tape loop. In the case of the hijacked 9/11 jetliners, the devices should have captured any conversations or actions involving the hijackers, as well as radio transmissions. . . . The flight data recorder records things like airspeed, heading, and altitude. Both devices - located in the tail of the airplane - emit loud "pings" so they can be located even in ocean jetliner crashes, like the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island. . . . They are built to survive an impact of enormous force - 3400 Gs - and a fire of 1100 degrees Celsius for one hour, somewhat higher than official estimates of the World Trade Center blaze. . . . "It's extremely rare that we don't get the recorders back. I can't recall another domestic case in which we did not recover the recorders," Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, told CBS News in 2002. . . . DeMasi, an all-terrain vehicles hobbyist - said he donated 4 ATVs to the clean-up and became known as "the ATV Guy." . . . "At one point, I was asked to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes," he wrote. "We were getting ready to go out. My ATV was parked at the top of the stairs at the Brooks Brothers entrance area. We loaded up about a million dollars worth of equipment and strapped it into the ATV..." . . . "There were a total of four black boxes. We found three." . . . If the account by DeMasi and Bellone is true, it's not clear what motive federal authorities would have for claiming they weren't found. . . . By the same token, however, it's not clear what incentive either man would have to lie.

posted by Lorenzo 2:55 PM