It took less than one minute from the time a second plane struck the World Trade Center on terror for Fox News anchor Jon Scott to utter the name of Usama bin Laden on air.
Scott’s chilling, eerie intuition before the towers collapsed seems remarkable two decades later – while the al Qaeda founder has been known as the terrorist who masterminded the attacks for years, many Americans didn’t even know who bin Laden was at the time.
“I still remember the events of that day so vividly. It seems like it happened, you know, a couple of weeks ago,” Scott told Fox News Digital.
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Usama bin Laden was mentioned on air by Fox News anchor Jon Scott seconds after the second plane struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Scott was preparing to hit the 9 a.m. hour of “Fox News Live” when producers told him to rush to the studio early, but he was already there. A producer indicated a plane flew into the World Trade Center and the “Fox & Friends” team would hand over to Scott early to cover the breaking news, which many thought was simply a small plane accidently hitting the building at the time.
“I was literally on the air with a former National Transportation Safety Board investigator who was telling me all the reasons that it could be an accident, that pilots have been blinded by the sun or distracted by workload or programed the wrong coordinates into their computers,” Scott said. “And then the second plane hit. And that’s when I said this has to be deliberate.”
Scott, live on air as the unthinkable occurred, emotionally told viewers, “We just saw another one. We just saw another one… another plane just flew into the second tower. This has to be deliberate, folks.”
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Less than one minute later the Fox News anchor evoked bin Laden’s name as a possible suspect.
“Given what has been going on around the world, some of the key suspects come to mind, Usama bin Laden, who knows what,” Scott told viewers before the towers crumbled down.
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There had not been any production meetings or memos to inform Fox News anchors of possible suspects if the tragic events ended up being deliberate. Scott, who is now a licensed pilot, was an avid student of aviation at the time and his education helped him immediately realize bin Laden must have played a role.
“I was reading everything I could get my hands on regarding aviation. Well, I read about something called the Bojinka plot, which was a plot that Ramzi Yousef had hatched with bin Laden… they wanted to kill the pope and they wanted to blow up 11 airliners as they flew across the Pacific toward the United States,” Scott said, noting that police ultimately foiled the plot in January 1995.
“That plot had been disrupted and the FBI was looking for bin Laden as a result of that plot, and I knew that just from my aviation pursuits,” Scott continued. “So, when a couple of airplanes flew into the World Trade Center, the first suspect that came to mind was Usama bin Laden.”
Fox News anchor Jon Scott was live on air when the second plane struck the World Trade Center.
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Scott said he’s since heard from military personnel who watched Fox News’ coverage of the attacks as they unfolded from United States Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa.
“They were fairly sure after the first plane hit that it was bin Laden,” Scott said. “When the second plane hit and I said bin Laden, in their room, they said, ‘How does he know that?’”
While Scott’s hunch turned out to be correct, he quickly moved on and brought in Fox News reporter Eric Shawn to discuss the second plane.
“I realized it’s way too soon to think about who could have planned this. So I turned away from it almost instantly after I uttered his name,” Scott said. “But his name was top of mind as soon as I figured out that it was a deliberate attack.”
In a taped message released in 2004, bin Laden admitted he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks in which 19 hijackers took over four American commercial planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon. The fourth jet crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. A 9/11 Commission report noted that the “9/11 attack was driven by Usama Bin Laden.”
Navy SEALs are credited with killing the terror leader in Pakistan in May 2011.
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Scott will be part of Fox News’ coverage from lower Manhattan on Saturday as the nation reflects on the horrific morning that occurred 20 years ago.
“It’s just sad that people can be so cruel to one another,” Scott said.
