Claim: FEMA workers were dispatched to New York City on the evening of 10 September 2001, which proves the federal government had advance knowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
Examples:
[Collected on the Internet, 2001]
FEMA sent the Urban Search and Rescue Team to New York City THE NIGHT BEFORE the attacks occurred! One FEMA official, Mr. Tom Kennedy, told Dan Rather on Tuesday, Sept. 11, "We're currently one of the first teams that was deployed to support the city of New York in this disaster. We arrived late Monday night and went right into action on Tuesday morning."
[www.whatreallyhappened.com]
FEMA IN NEW YORK THE NIGHT BEFORE?
Click HERE for a RealAudio recording of a statement made by FEMA spokesman Tom Kenney to Dan Rather, reportedly on Wednesday, September 12th.
In this interview, Tom states that Fema was deployed to New York on Monday night, September 10th, to be ready to go into action on Tuesday morning, September 11th.
Needless to say, this recording has caused quite a stir. The official reaction is that Kenney was simply confused about the dates. However, Kenney is complaining on the recording about not getting full access to the site until "today". Kenney talks about a Monday, a Tuesday, and "today". That's three days. If indeed the above recording was made on Wednesday, September 12th as claimed, then the explanation that Kenney was simply confused about the days doesn't work, because there is one more day than can be accounted for.
Mr. Kenney has since been ordered not to discuss this incident.
Origins: Mighty conspiracy theories from little slips of the tongue grow.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is an agency of the federal government tasked
with responding to, planning for, recovering from, and mitigating against disasters. As part of that effort, FEMA sometimes calls upon local urban search and rescue task forces, highly specialized groups of firefighters, paramedics, and civilian specialists who have trained to handle many difficult specialized rescue situations; when dealing with larger disasters, FEMA may mobilizes these local task forces and send them parts of the country where their assistance is most needed.
After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the first such task force to be mobilized and dispatched to New York City was the Massachusetts Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, an all-volunteer group that arrived at Ground Zero on the evening of September 11. The 62 members of this Massachusetts group spent a week working 12-hour shifts, digging through rubble in an effort to locate and rescue trapped survivors.
The conspiracy-promoting slip occurred when Tom Kenney, an officer with the Massachusetts task force, was interviewed by Dan Rather (who initially misidentified him as "Tom Kennedy") on the CBS Evening News. As a recording of the interview demonstrates, Mr. Kenney told Dan Rather:
We're currently uh, one of the first teams that was deployed to support the city of New York for this disaster. We arrived on, uh, late Monday night and went into action on Tuesday morning. And not until today did we get a full opportunity to work, uh, the entire site . . .
Since 11 September 2001 was a Tuesday, if the Massachusetts task force had really arrived on a Monday night, as Mr. Kenney said, they would have been deployed in New York City the evening before the attacks, a rather curious coincidence seized upon by many conspiracy buffs as "proof" that the federal government had foreknowledge of the terrorists' plans.
The real explanation is, as usual, much simpler and more mundane:
Tom Kenney simply mixed up his days of the week, saying "Monday" when he meant "Tuesday" and "Tuesday" when he meant "Wednesday." As someone who muddled through quite a few television interviews in the aftermath of September 11, I know how easy it is to become disoriented and confused during live interviews, attempting to hear questions coming to you through an earpiece and respond to the disembodied voice of an interviewer whom you can't see while bright lights are shined in your eyes. A person unused to the experience does well if he manages to get through a three-minute interview without making a whole host of mistakes. That someone who had been working around-the-clock in a crisis situation for two days straight might lose track of the day of the week is quite an understandable human error.
Moreover, a reporter from the Boston Herald tracked down Tom Kenney to verify that he was not in New York City on September 10:
To confirm, the Herald called the Kenney home on Cape Cod and spoke to Kenney's wife, who said that her husband did go to New York on Sept. 11, not Sept. 10. She explained that he was under extreme stress when Rather interviewed him, and added wryly that it was typical of her husband to confuse dates.
There is nothing unusual in Mr. Kenney's mention of three different days (i.e., the evening the task force arrived, "yesterday," and "today") during the interview. Contrary to the supposition offered in the second example quoted above, Dan Rather interviewed Mr. Kenney on the evening of Thursday, September 13, not Wednesday, September 12.Mr. Kenney thus informed Dan Rather that the task force arrived late in the evening of September 11 (a day he mistakenly identified as Monday rather than Tuesday), that they went into action on the morning of September 12 (a day he mistakenly identified as Tuesday rather than Wednesday), and that they did not have an opportunity to first work the entire WTC site until September 13 (i.e., "today," the day of the interview).
Sinister conspiracy rumors involving FEMA also sprang up after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Last updated: 8 March 2008
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/rumors/fema.asp
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