Another insightful post from our dear friends at the Save Jersey Blog:

By The Staff | The Save Jersey Blog

You decide, Save Jerseyans…

What follows is a clip from the Sunday, September 16, 2001 report of WCBS-TV’s Pablo Guzman in which he and his team recount details of alleged “swarms” of individuals celebrating 9/11 on Jersey City roof tops.

It corroborates the believable recollections of many Americans that there were, in fact, a number of folks who were not just celebrating but waiting for the World Trade Center terror attacks on Jersey City roof tops. Donald Trump‘s exact and repeatedly defended claim, however, of thousands on the roof tops, remains unproven and contradicted by official accounts including that of the Republican attorney general of New Jersey at the time. Only eight individuals were ultimately brought into custody, and no tangible proof (photos or video) of thousands, or even hundreds, of celebrants has come to light.

The dictionary definition of a swarm is “a large number of people or things.”

So is the Trump claim simply a matter of semantics given this convincing of some roof top problems? Or still substantively false given the lack of evidence supporting what could be called, absent that evidence, a huge exaggeration?

The video (jump ahead to the 0:52 mark):

However, what no one outside the terrorist task force knows is that just a couple of blocks away from that Jersey City apartment the F.B.I. raided yesterday and had evidence removed there is another apartment building, one that investigators told me, quote, was swarming with suspects, suspects who I’m told were cheering on the roof when they saw the planes slam into the Trade Center. Police were called to the building by neighbors and found eight men celebrating, six of them tenants in the building.

The F.B.I. and other terrorist task force agencies arrived, and the older investigators on the task force recalled that they had been to this building before, eight years ago, when the first World Trade Center attack led them to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, whose Jersey City mosque lies between the two buildings getting attention today. And the older investigators remember that the suspects that eventually got convicted for the first Trade Center case…. lived in the building where these same eight men were celebrating the destruction that they saw from the roof. Calling this a hot address, the task force investigators ordered everyone detained.”