Black boxes found at the World Trade Center

Claim

At least three black boxes were found in the ruins of the World Trade Center⁰.

Background

Two rescue workers in the so-called TRAC team (Trauma Response Assistance for Children), Nicholas DeMasi and Mike Bellone claim that they helped FBI agents find and salvage three of the four black boxes from the planes that hit the World Trade Center 1 and 2. It is claimed that the FBI later left with the boxes. The boxes were supposedly found on October 3, 2001.

Facts

No official sources either reject or deny the two witness accounts directly. On the other hand, there are no official sources that strengthen or confirm the accounts. Thus, the witness accounts raise more questions than they answer.

Logic

• How likely is it to find three black boxes on the same day in the gigantic ruins at Ground Zero?
• Why wait to start looking for the black boxes until October 3, all of 22 days after the terror attack, if the boxes were important to find for the alleged conspirators? Waiting that long, dramatically increases the risk of someone else finding them.
• If there was a conspiracy, why not just announce that the boxes had been found and then claim that they were unusable or manipulate the content?
• An unnamed source at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is the authority in charge of investigating data from located black boxes, claims that the NTSB has been working on the black boxes from Ground Zero¹. But if there was a conspiracy, why would the FBI hand over the black boxes to the NTSB, when they themselves could easily hide or even destroy them? Or, even better, plant information in the boxes that would support the conspiracy, and then publicize the planted information?

If the unnamed source at the NTSB was someone who wanted to expose something, it is a conspicuous pity that the source does not get better evidence than his own claim and approach the big media with his story but instead chooses to go to the somewhat more narrow online political magazine, Counterpunch. If there was a conspiracy, and it is at the same time true that the three black boxes have been found, it is in direct conflict with the strategy the alleged conspiracy chooses, because the data from the black boxes from Flight 93 and Flight 77, which crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon, Washington D.C., were made public and even used in the trial against Zacharias Moussaoui, while the black boxes from the World Trade Center is apparently kept secret. That paints the conspirators as clumsy, illogical, and thus not very likely.

Conclusion

The claim is, therefore:

• Undocumented
• Illogical
• Self-contradicting
• Unlikely

Sources

0. 9/11 “black box” cover-up at Ground Zero?, PNI Online
1. 9/11: Missing Black Boxes in World Trade Center Attacks Found by Firefighters, Analyzed by NTSB, Concealed by FBI, Dave Lindorff

Q & A