“Disturbingly, the story [President] George W. Bush often tells of his learning of the [9/11] attacks cannot possibly be true. ‘I was sitting outside of the classroom [on September 11, 2001], waiting to go in,’ he told an audience in Florida on December 4, 2001, ‘and I saw an airplane hit the tower–the TV was obviously on.’ …and I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’ He repeated the story a month later, on January 5, 2002, to another audience in California. …The problem with the account is there was no video of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center until later that day. The only video was of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center at 9:02:54. …He reportedly did not enter the class until 9:04, more than a minute after the United Flight 175 smashed into Tower Two. Thus, he may have learned of the second plane even before he went in to address the seven-year-olds. …How could a president ignore what to millions of people was an obvious terrorist attack and just go about a political photo op as if nothing had happened?”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Pages 36-37