James R. Cissell, an eyewitness to the object that struck the Pentagon on September 2001, is furious with a Cincinnati newspaper for falsely attributing quotes to him that he never made.

The Cincinnati Post reported Cissell’s comments in a September 12 story headlined, ‘I saw the faces of some of the passengers.’

Here is how the Post quoted Cissell in full.

‘’Out of my peripheral vision,’’ Cissell said, ‘’I saw this plane coming in and it was low - and getting lower.”

‘’If you couldn’t touch it from standing on the highway, you could by standing on your car.”

‘’I thought, ‘This isn’t really happening. That is a big plane.’ Then I saw the faces of some of the passengers on board,’’ Cissell said.

(snip)

We concluded the analysis by commenting,"The video and any degree of common sense suggests that Cissell could not possibly have seen the faces of the passengers on board. Even when the video is reduced to normal speed, four times slower than the reported speed of Flight 77, you can’t see passengers in the windows.”

That conclusion has now been proven accurate in a development that will cast more suspicion on embellished accounts of what eyewitnesses saw crossing the Pentagon highway before it ploughed into the building.

James R. Cissell contacted us to express his anger at the newspaper for taking his comments completely out of context.

“The Cincinnati Post article, which you refer, angered me greatly after reading it. It is almost completely fiction based loosely on an interview I did with a Cincinnati Post reporter Kimball Perry who called me in response to an on air phone report that I did for Channel 12 in Cincinnati.”

Cissell relates what he actually told the reporter.

“The reporter took extreme creative license not only with the title but also with the story as a whole. Why he felt the need to sensationalize anything that happened on September 11 is beyond me. My words to the reporter were, “I was about four cars back from where the plane crossed over the highway. That it happened so quickly I didn’t even see what airline it was from. However, I was so close to the plane when it went past that had it been sitting on a runway, I could have seen the faces of passengers peering out.”

(snip)

Cissell’s comments were taken so far out of context that this seems to be a deliberate attempt at sensationalism or even an effort at lending bias towards the assumption that the plane was a large commercial airliner with passengers on board.

Cissell has himself worked in media and expressed his incredulity at the sloppy journalism betrayed in the article.

His numerous calls, e mails and letters to the Post went unanswered and though he was promised the online version of the article would be removed, as of June 30th it is still online without retraction.