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What hit? The parking lot security camera pictures released to the news media definitely show a jet aircraft going into the Pentagon. We have seen such images too often on TV news, showing everything from homeless people being beaten up by hooded thugs, to children being abducted out of a department store. Alas, if you have the computing power, the know-how, and the time, you can fake such pictures., and therein lies the second issue -- after a description of what was shown on TV on that horrendous day.

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What I saw on TV on 9/11: I was at home with the flu and watching the TV when I saw the video of the second jet crash in New York. My first impression was that I had stumbled onto an advertisement for a grainy, slightly out-of-focus advertisement for a horror movie. But something told me it was not. Someone was operating a camera on a building across the street, and rotated it to the left to frame the space between the two towers. I sat and watched in absolute disbelief as the plane did a quarter-roll to its right side just before it went into the second building. The merciless eye of the camera caught debris from the crash as it spurted out the side of the building above the street, opposite to where the plane "went in". The debris was definitely on fire.

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Could the images at the twin towers or the Pentagon have been faked? I don't think even the best technician with all the super computers used by animators even back then could have cobbled together an image as quickly as would be needed to simulate what was photographed by any of the cameras on that day. As I have stated before, I myself do a garden variety of photo faking on my Mac laptop, so I know what I'm looking at.

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Closing Thoughts: One image still haunts me from 9/11. In the foreground was a brown brick apartment building, with a small set of cement steps going up to the left side front door. Seated on the steps facing the street was an elderly man who I assume was blind or deaf or both, because he did not react to the sounds of people running by in the street, or the terrified screams of those who were further back, closer to the dust cloud that was following behind them and gaining on them. The old man was playing with a half-grown black dog that kept pawing at his feet. Then the cameraman probably had to run, because the dust cloud was almost on him (or her?) when the picture stopped. I would hope someone in those last critical seconds became aware of the old man and the dog on the steps...