September 12, 2001: FBI and NTSB Limit Evidence Recovery Efforts at Pentagon

FBI Special Agent John Adams, who is now in charge of evidence recovery at the Pentagon during the daytime, addresses how the FBI should deal with the physical evidence at the crash site. [Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 347 and 351] As the Pentagon is a crime scene, the FBI is responsible for collecting and documenting evidence there. [Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 177] Agents are still carefully gathering together wreckage, but there is an overwhelming amount of it to deal with. Several FBI supervisors convene and discuss what the bureau should be recovering. One of them says every airplane part is significant and needs to be treated as valuable evidence. But Adams counters: “That can’t be. We know what happened here. Do we really need to collect every piece of the airplane?” Adams goes over to some National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) crash experts at the site, who are responsible for determining what happened to Flight 77. When he asks them, “Do you guys want pieces of the plane?” an NTSB official responds: “No, it’s clear what happened here. We don’t need pieces of the wings and stuff like that. But we do need the black boxes.” [Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 351-352]