Tim Timmerman

On edit: May 7, 2008 It's time for a total redo of the Mr. Tim Timmerman blog from August 14th 2007. Much has changed since then and it was not very good to begin with. And since "Tim Timmerman" is a big name in Pentagon-eyewitness Google searches, and since, I must say, Google loves me, here is a chance perhaps to make an impact on visitor's thinking.



Because by combining his story with that of Dawn Vignola's, in whose apartment the two co-eyewitnessed the attack, Timmerman, who we now know, was the anonymous male voice--"the airplane person"--talking excitedly in the background during Ms. Vignola's telephone call into the local CBS news affiliate, whose newscasters, Andrea Roane and Mike Buchanan, hosted the local morning news show, and played the call live on air, and then made the announcement that a 757 American Airlines passenger jet had crashed into the Pentagon, after mentioning only a single supporting report, four minutes earlier, from an unnamed Associated Press reporter, who said he saw, "the tail of a large jetliner crash into the Pentagon," although only two minutes prior, Roane and Buchanan had taken a contradictory report live, on-air from Don Chauncey, who said that "he saw a white Gulf-Stream-type commuter jet strike the Pentagon," you then will have the story of a sequence that lasted only 14 minutes and went a long way toward the sanctioning of an official truth.

Lets begin with the term "co-eyewitness," for it perfectly describes what two unrelated people, not living together, do when they simultaneously stand looking out the same 16th-floor window in a domestic apartment at 9:38am on a weekday morning, while seeing and comprehending without disagreement a shocking event occurring at over 500 miles per hour.

However in his live CNN interview at 1:46pm Timmerman says "I" ten times:

I was looking out the window; I live on the 16th floor, overlooking the Pentagon, in a corner apartment, so I have quite a panorama. And being next to National Airport, I hear jets all the time, but this jet engine was way too loud. I looked out to the southwest, and it came right down 395, right over Colombia Pike, and as is went by the Sheraton Hotel, the pilot added power to the engines. I heard it pull up a little bit more, and then I lost it behind a building.

And then it came out, and I saw it hit right in front of -- it didn't appear to crash into the building; most of the energy was dissipated in hitting the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I saw the wings fly forward, and then the conflagration engulfed everything in flames. It was horrible.

Of course, what destroys his credibility--and CNN's too, I might add--is his referring to his vantage point as being "his" apartment, from which he hears jet noise "all the time." How could the network not verify the contact information of such a news source? Franken begins the interview by saying, "You are a pilot. Tell us what you saw." Did CNN vouchsafe that credential?

It doesn't help that he misrepresented his distance from the Pentagon, saying "I am up about a quarter a mile -- it may be a little bit closer," when Dawn Vignola's apartment at 1600 S. Joyce, is three-quarters of a mile away. To Mr. Timmerman, something can be both, "It was so close to me it was like looking out my window and looking at a helicopter. It was just right there," and, "That might have happened behind the apartments that occluded my view."

Now look carefully at this statement: "the building didn't look very damaged initially."

Compare it with this statement: "I felt it didn't look as damaged as it could be."

What does Timmerman think comes subsequent to a plane crash? Did he have a preconceived idea about what the damage was going to look like? OK, lets look at these two statements again, but in their contexts.

"the building didn't look very damaged initially, but I do see now, looking out my window, there's quite a chunk in it."

Ignoring for the moment that it is not his window to begin with, what happened between "initially...but I do see now?"

Then Bob Franken makes a statement: "This is a five-sided building." To which Timmerman responds

"As you know, the rings are A, B, C, D, E. It is just across the E ring on the outside, and that's why I felt it didn't look as damaged as it could be. It looked like on the helipad, which is on that side."

Why isn't Timmerman simply reporting that he saw a plane crash wherever it crashed, without placing a value judgments on the result? When he says,

"I saw it hit right in front of -- it didn't appear to crash into the building; most of the energy was dissipated in hitting the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I saw the wings fly forward."

We can respond that it didn't hit the heliport, it didn't hit the ground, there is no physical evidence for either of those things; the nose didn't break up and the wings didn't fly forward--that kind of plane debris was not found outside of the Pentagon. Such a thing wasn't seen in the five video frames.

Although his co-eyewitness does say she saw something similar. Mr. Timmerman's motivations and dominations as he prompted Dawn Vignola in her phone conversation with Andrea Roane can be clearly judged for what it is, but I just want to direct your attention to the last word out of Timmerman's mouth as the call ended. After Ms. Vignola says

"This was right, aimed right at it. But unfortunately, I think it hit the heliport, and it didn’t look like it damaged too much of the Pentagon."

Mr. Timmerman corrects her softly with, "fortunately."

You do see whose side they're on, don't you?

Map

Pentagon eyewitness Tim Timmerman

Google overview of the area.

Tim Timmerman is a navy photographer, and served as committee co-chair of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF NAVAL PHOTOGRAPHY,

I love these two photographs. Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis must have been given them out of a Virginia Department of Transportation file somewhere.