![]() In the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly - the magazine where his account first appeared - Mr. ''These people cannot, because of the political climate over this issue, go on the record. ''The people who told this to me were extremely reliable and had shown themselves to be people without any agenda,'' Mr. He is arguing about something that I am not arguing about.'' It is like two objects sailing past each other. ''I was writing about an incident that occurred on the pile. ''I was not writing about any particular company,'' he said in the interview. Langewiesche acknowledges now, as he has since the uproar began, that he did not himself witness the scene, and instead relied on the testimony of others who said they had been present. Black's critique because, he said, it indicts him for assertions he believes he did not make. Black notes that all of the firefighters who went to the trade center on Ladder 4 died. Langewiesche ''passed off demonstrably unfounded rumor as plain fact, with a reckless disregard for both elementary procedures of verification and the likely harm his reporting would cause.'' Langewiesche's publisher, included a letter in which he asserted that Mr. Ladder 4, he points out, arrived roughly 30 minutes before the collapse of the south tower and its members were seen by many eyewitnesses engaged in rescuing people from the building's elevators.Īnd he asserts, on the basis of the layout of the trade center complex, that the truck had been parked virtually underneath two retail stores stocked with scores of pairs of jeans, and that any pants found near the truck had most likely ended up there as a consequence of the tower's collapse. He then raises the question whether, based on interviews and Fire Department records he was provided with, Ladder 4's firefighters would have even had the opportunity to steal the jeans from a Gap store that was located 200 yards away from their truck and on a lower concourse level of the trade center complex. Langewiesche's account, but a subject of rumor elsewhere - was Ladder Company 4, based in Midtown Manhattan. Black argues that the truck in question - unidentified in Mr. ![]() In a 50-page document replete with footnotes, maps, satellite data and aerial photographs, Mr. He began his research after his wife, Anne Nelson, wrote a play, ''The Guys,'' about a fire chief's efforts to write obituaries for members of his company. Black's analysis undertakes only the question of whether the incident with the jeans took place, and leaves unaddressed some of the author's unflattering depictions of the work of city firefighters at the recovery site - portrayals that have led to a fierce campaign of protests by a wide range of Fire Department officials and supporters.īut on the question of the jeans, Mr. Now George Black, a journalist and author with significant experience in historical reconstruction, has come forward to argue, after weeks of research, that the incident could not have happened as Mr. Langewiesche wrote, ''It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the looting had begun even before the first tower fell, and that while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely, without the slightest suspicion that the south tower was about to hammer down.''įor months bitter accusations from firefighters and their supporters have been met with energetic defenses by Mr. Writing without attribution, and in the omniscient voice he used throughout the book, Mr. Construction workers, who were tired of the firefighters' lionization by the media, jeered when the discovery was made, according to Mr. Langewiesche writes that on an ''autumn afternoon'' in 2001, a fire truck was unearthed at the base of the south tower ruins, and that it contained blue jeans - ''tagged, folded, stacked by size'' - that he implies were looted from a Gap store. The claim, which angered firefighters and was seized on by reviewers, is near the end of William Langewiesche's critically acclaimed ''American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center.'' Mr. It is the World Trade Center fire that will not go out - the startling assertion in a book about ground zero that some firefighters not only looted stores there, but did so before the towers fell, even as severely burned people fled the buildings and other firefighters climbed unknowingly to their deaths.
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