‘We’re at September 10, 2001’: Retired colonel who was at the Pentagon on 9/11 warns the same threat is inside the country

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States that robbed 2,977 innocent people of their lives.

Col. Rob Maness was inside the Pentagon that horrific day. On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman sit down with the retired Air Force colonel to hear insider details of a day America will never forget.

“Colonel, it’s been 25 years since that day. What is your general reflection looking back after all these years?” Rufo asks.

America today, warns Maness, is in the same vulnerable position it was on September 10, 2001.

Between “importing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of [Islamists] over the last 25 years with a very poor vetting process” and corrupt “intelligence agencies,” Maness says he’s “very concerned” for the country, because "in many ways, we're at September 10, 2001."

“A lot of us were sort of younger when this happened. It's a kind of fuzzy memory. … Just kind of walk us through what it was like to be there on the ground directly, where this event happened, how people were thinking about it at the time, people's response to it, what those first 24, 48 hours were like,” says Keeperman.

In those days, Maness was a major — “the coffee guy,” he laughs.

“I walked by the day-care center every day up into corridor 8, into my office area, which was inside the National Military Command Center. And, you know, at the time I was getting there, the kids were being dropped off … and I always enjoyed watching them and the parents and all that stuff because I had little kids of my own,” he recounts.

“I just walked in and said, ‘Man, this is going to be a fantastic day,”’ he adds.

It wasn’t long before he discovered how wrong that prediction was.

That day, he explains, marked the start of America’s “global nuclear war game.” Maness’ real job, he explains, was in the Joint Staff’s nuclear operations division, which trained the aides with access to the “nuclear football book” and oversaw the doomsday plane.

“A lot of my leadership and teammates were out at different nodes around the world for command and control of nuclear forces because we were kicking that exercise off that day,” he tells Rufo and Keeperman, “and that was literally happening at the moment the airplanes hit the towers.”

After the first strikes, Maness’ on-site team “stayed on duty” to “help with the command and control decision-making.” They were “ordered out” of the Pentagon just after the third plane hit.

Once evacuated, Maness immediately turned his attention to helping the wounded.

“I just started helping do what I could for the first aid and those kind of things until we got asked to go back inside the courtyard because the fire trucks couldn't get inside and the building's roof was burning,” he recounts.

“I estimate probably between 100 and 200 people … split up into two teams and went to those inside corners, and we started helping continue to fight the fire [and] see if we could find anybody alive.”

To hear more of Maness’ story, watch the video above.

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