Category: 9-11

I was in my office, doing something or another business-like.

The phone rang. It was Venus, the Business Continuity specialist down in Houston who worked for me at the time. “Did you hear? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.”

Jeez. I conjured images of a little Piper Cub slamming into some offices. God, if it happened in my old office downtown, dozens could have been hurt or killed. “Huh. That’ll drum up some support for BC efforts for sure. Thanks.”

I got off the phone, tried to pull up CNN.com. No dice. ABCnews.com. Nope. Finally hunted down the BBC, which remained the most reliable site all day.

Someone suggested we call 11 September “Holy Fucking Shit Day.” They’re right, because those were the words I thought to myself as I saw the headlines that (a) it was an actual passenger jet, like I’ve flown on a hundred times, (b) there were now two impacts, and thus concluded (c) it was intentional.

Somebody had intentionally attacked the WTC via hijacking. How incredibly fucked up a mind would it take to do that?

Not much work got done the rest of the day.

I’d just started this blog a few weeks earlier. It gave me an outlet, someplace to put down what I was thinking, but looking back at those posts (which I may or may not quote from tomorrow, on Der Tag), I was already frantically emotionally distancing myself from the whole horror.

Did the world change? Was everything different? Yes and no.

No, since life goes on. While there will be moments of silence and observances and considerations and religious hoohah for me tomorrow, I also have work assignments to deal with, the CIO and my former supervisor (one of his direct reports) are coming to town, and ob-la-di-ob-la-da life goes on.

But in a fundamental way, things are different. In this country we are addressing profound questions of where we want to go as a nation. Internally, we are struggling with those who wish to impose order and (they say) security, and those who cling to our cherished freedoms. Externally, we’re dealing with deciding whether we use “harsh language” or Army Rangers and Stealth Bombers to deal with those who we consider a threat, either present or future.

Life goes on. But the events of 11 September, and what came after it, will be seen as a major turning point in American society, and in its foreign affairs, for decades to come.

And for me?

I’m glad I’m home with Margie, and Katherine, and both are safe, and I’m a lot more willing to do what I have to in order to keep them that way.

Life goes on, but differently in some ways. And maybe that’s just how life goes on all the time.

John M. Ford has put together a poem — or is it 110 one-line stories — about being in New York on 9/11. Good stuff

This is not real. We’ve seen it all before.
Slow down, you’re screaming. What exploded? When?
I guess this means we’ve got ourselves a war.
And look at — Lord have mercy, not again.
I heard that they went after Air Force One.
Call FAA at once if you can’t land.
They say the bastards got the Pentagon.
The Capitol. The White House. Disneyland.
I was across the river, saw it all.
Down Fifth, the buildings put it in a frame.
Aboard the ferry — we felt awful small.
I didn’t look until I felt the flame.

(via BoingBoing)

… Fear our lawyers.

In a civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, relatives of hundreds killed in the attacks and some Sept. 11 survivors accused seven international banks operating mainly in the Middle East, eight Islamic foundations and charities, the government of Sudan and a number of individuals of helping fund terrorist activities.
The lawsuit, filed by individuals from across the United States and at least six other countries, asked for damages exceeding one hundred trillion dollars. The lawyers said they were seeking “hundreds of billions” of dollars in damages.

Remember, they didn’t nail Capone for murder … they nailed him for tax evasion. Go for the purse strings.

An FBI informant wearing a wire, and seated at a WTC restaurant, provided the only uninterrupted audio record of the WTC attack. The recording has just surfaced and, having heard excerpts from it on the radio last night, it is pretty amazing.

In a context which I will not go into here, my friend Doyce wrote, “No one ever talks about the Pentagon attack anymore. I wonder why that is. I wonder if it’s on purpose.”

I wonder why that is, too.

Do people feel that, somehow, the Pentagon was a legitimate target, and so it doesn’t have the horror of the WTC?

Is it that the death toll, and the visual drama of the destruction is so much less?

Is it that there were not so many rescue worker lives lost at the Pentagon?

Is it that there’s already reconstruction work underway at the Pentagon, but they’re still working on clearing the WTC site?

Is it that military lives somehow count for less?

I have to wonder … had only the Pentagon been hit, would the US (let alone its allies) have risen up in the way the did?

No answers, just uncomfortable suspicions on my part. I can only just keep referring to it as “9-11,” rather than “The WTC Attack” (which I hear people doing) or “All those dead people in New York” (which I also hear about).

The Telegraph reports on the contents of the cockpit voice recorder on American Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on 9-11.

At 9.57am, the cockpit voice recorder picked up sounds of a struggle with one passenger shouting: “Let’s get them.” The struggle appeared to prompt the terrorists to squabble among themselves, with one calling on his henchmen to keep the passengers out, while another suggests cutting off oxygen to the cabin. “Take it easy,” says another, while the fourth suggests using a fire axe kept in the cockpit to scare the passengers into submission. The sound of dishes and trays being thrown can be heard in the background as the terrorists yell at each other and appear to fight over the controls, with one saying: “Give it to me.”
The man at the controls then apparently decided to try to knock the passengers off their feet as a last line of defence by putting the plane into a dive.
In the last seconds of the flight, one hijacker yells to another to let “the guys in”, which investigators think is a reference to two of the four hijackers who were standing outside the cockpit door. Then they can be heard talking about “finishing off” the plane, before crying “Allah akbar” – “God is great” – just before the plane crashed.

The saga of Flight 93 was the subject of almost instant myth-making, with the reports of cell phone conversations in which some of the passengers said they were going to try to retake the plane gaining quick play in a media looking for heroes. It seems, from the cockpit record, that the myths turn out to be more or less true — a concerted effort to retake the plane, leading to the terrorists crashing it intentionally rather than being taken prisoner themselves.

Cockpit voice recorder transcripts always give me an eerie feeling, usually because we only read them when something tragic has happened. In this case, it’s also a spine-tingling tale of, yes, heroism, that should serve as an object lesson to the next folks who try to hijack a plane.

(Via OpinionJournal)

The Monitor reports on American hate groups exploiting 9-11 to their own ends.

“As the bombs rain down upon Afghanistan, let us remember that it is the Jewish Occupational Government in Washington, D.C., that is gaining most by this event and that any victory in this campaign accrues to the benefit of the enemies of our White Racial Loyalist idea,” writes Matt Hale, head of the World Church of the Creator in East Peoria, Ill., on the group’s website. “As was the case with his father, George W. Bush is determined to spread his so-called ‘New World Order’ around the world making the world ‘safe’ for Jewish supremacy and corporate profits.”

As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a bunch of maroons.”

The Guardian reports that among the paperwork left behind by fleeing Taliban and al-Qa’eda leadership is more hard evidence of their plans, their activities, and their involvement in 9-11 (in case anyone was still doubting):

The scraps of half-burnt paper, meticulously kept notebooks and pages torn from magazines and technical manuals reveal the vast and terrifying scale of the terrorists’ ambitions to launch a jihad against the West. They reveal plans to assassinate world leaders in their cars; to bomb the power stations of America, Europe and Asia; and to make weapons of mass destruction from chemicals and smuggled nuclear material.
[…] The most satisfying finds for President Bush’s administration are likely to have been a page torn out of Flying magazine listing flight schools in Florida – including Walkwitz Aviation in Titusville and Phoenix East Aviation in Daytona Beach, two schools linked to the hijackers of 11 September – and a form that comes with a Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 computer program. The program, which simulates the experience of flying a commercial jet, is often used by pilots and is similar to one found in the luggage of Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers.

This article is fascinating (if chilling) reading, and there’s lots, lots more than what I’ve quoted above.

(Via OpinionJournal)

The Brits update the case against bin Laden and al Qa’eda.

(Via InstaPundit)

Final frames

The cameras of a news photographer who was caught in the collapse of the WTC were recovered, and his photos are now on-line at Newsweek‘s site. This was a very powerful article in the actual magazine, and I’m glad it’s now available via the Net.

(Via Boing Boing)

In case you still had doubts whether bin Laden really was responsible for the 9-11 attacks … he’s basically confessed to doing so in an “internal” al Quaeda video tape, according to the UK Telegraph. Some highlights:

The Twin Towers were legitimate targets, they were supporting US economic power. These events were great by all measurement. What was destroyed were not only the towers, but the towers of morale in that country.
If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents and this is legal religiously and logically.
The towers were supposed to be filled with supporters of the economical powers of the United States who are abusing the world. Those who talk about civilians should change their stand and reconsider their position. We are treating them like they treated us.
There are two types of terror, good and bad. What we are practising is good terror. We will not stop killing them and whoever supports them.
It is the duty of every Muslim to fight. Killing Jews is top priority.

Now, can we put the conspiracy theories aside and move on?

(Via Matt Welch)

Jacob Weisburg in Slate takes on what he considers to be the “cultural cliché” of the 1990s as carefree, trivial and self-absorbed, and 9-11 marking a sea change in the national culture.

Like most bits of conventional wisdom, the view of the 1990s as a decade of excess has some truth to it. Wealth exploded as never before since … the 1980s. The decade’s media extravaganzas were ridiculous in themselves as well as distractions from duller things that should have mattered more to more people. But hey, I was there too, and it didn’t feel quite so superficial to me. I would argue that the Zeitgeist of the 1990s wasn’t purely frivolity and selfishness. To the contrary, the decade that just ended was one of remarkable economic, technological, cultural, social, and even moral advancement. Some puritanical instinct tells us that doing well, personally or collectively, must have a dark side. But to paraphrase Elvis Costello, what’s so awful about peace, love, and prosperity?

I don’t know — I think it’s too close to be making those sorts of historical judgments. On the other hand, I’ve mouthed the myth, too, so perhaps I don’t have room to talk.

(Via Talking Points Memo)