I was working in the airline industry when this happened.
My girlfriend (now wife) and I had just started on the way into work, we signaled each other over to the side of the road, and talked for a few moments... and I headed in to work.
I was in shock for weeks. I was ontop of the towers but 2 months before that, and possibly one of the best pictures of the two of us was taken there.
... I've been there. I know that place. I have roots in that city.
But I wasn't surprised as many Americans were. I knew this was very possible, though most of the scenarios I'd heard were far more grizzly than what happened. (Involving nuclear material and small planes.)
I always thought the Iraq war was a pile of shit, as were most of the actions taken quickly after that day.
Taking off our shoes, and the TSA are an awful legacy of an awful day. The terrorists did win. They encouraged us to give away our freedoms for safety theater.
I'm retired from American Airlines, September 9th,2001 we were vacationing with our children in Florida. I tried to talk my wife into staying an extra day and fly home on the 11th. Thankfully she talked me into going home on the 10th as planned.
We got home late from the airport and everybody slept in on the 11th except me. I was messing around in the garage when my wife hollers at me to come look at the tv. At first we couldn't figure out if it was real, then it sunk in. I called a co-worker who was on shift, he said everyone was in shock.
I started feeding tapes into my VCR, about eight of them. I've never watched them.
Thank you for sharing your story! It is always interesting to hear different perspectives from these events.
Regarding your VCR tapes. I understand it may be difficult for you to watch, but I encourage you to get them digitalized soon, while you still can. Perhaps even upload them in full length online somewhere for other people to look at.
Thank you for this! Really interesting. I'm having a look at it now.
Although my initial thought was that it would be great if there was a way to watch the entire day (for one news station) in one clip, rather than have to click on multiple 30 seconds videos.
Here is a compilation of recordings of the moment the second tower was hit - by which time both news cameras and amateur cameras were focused on the towers.
So much of the world as we know it now can be traced back to this day, and perhaps this moment above any others - the moment we gained an innate knowledge that something sinister was going on, a deep feeling of fear, anger, and vulnerability awakening in the American populace with an immediacy that had perhaps never been felt in the country's history.
I vividly recall being a middle school student, seeing friends being pulled out of the classroom one by one, knowing that something horrifying was happening, not knowing details, not knowing whether I would be next, eventually understanding with dawning horror that some of my classmates had family members who would never come home. An entire generation felt this pain.
It's really important that projects and video archives like the OP exist so people understand not just the statistics, but the fundamental shift of people's worldviews that happened that day.
This stuff is so difficult for me to watch again, I was a senior in HS.
Reading IRC logs from back then is also really interesting. And Nanog had a really interesting slideshow/powerpoint deep dive on the infrastructure outages that occurred. And of course the SomethingAwful thread that's been posted before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990991
RE: this specific site.. interesting UX/UI choice. I was hoping I could click the times in Timeline of Events and be sent straight there but it seems like I have to put times specifically in the Controls section. Anyway, this is neat.
I always thought the leaked pages from 9/11 were an interesting way of viewing the timeline. Starts with a lot of business messages, some sexting, and some automated IT messages.[1]
The at 8:46 you see the first sign of something wrong, a smattering of errors about how the Cantor Fitzgerald API was down, and the butterfly effect the outage had on other systems. The computers were chatting about how something was wrong ahead of any people.
I was a sophomore in college, it was strange because people didn't have smart phones and many people didn't have cell phones. I remember class starting and a student said, very calmly after receiving a text message about, "oh, that's weird it says an airplane in the world trade center". We all assumed it was just a small private Cessna plane that must of accidentally bumped into the one of the towers, and then class began as usual.
My roommates and I spend the next week completely glued to the television. Which is why this interface is particularly great for capturing that feeling, but it is tough to rewatch.
I was in the Army on a training exercise in Louisiana preparing to go to Kosovo. We were in a flight unit (helicopters) and loading up a convoy to the airfield. We got the call over the radio about it and thought, at first, that is was part of the training exercise. We get to the airfield, setup comms, and get chatter about it not being an exercise. Since they grounded the birds pretty much all week we basically stayed glued to the tv in the hangar for the duration.
It was an odd time since we were technically in peace time and suddenly thrown into this situation. A year later (Mar. '03) we were watching jets fly over Iraq on tv while we preparing for a funeral detail for one of our Blackhawk pilots.
I was 6months from MEPS. My Major dad told me to GTFO. I'd planned on going Army my entire life. That threw a real wrench in my plans. Thankfully I was able to get out of it since I hadn't signed at MEPs yet.
I lived in Norfolk VA and IIRC we had 3-5 carriers moored. They all dispersed away from the shipyard when it happened. 20-25k Navy just vanished from town.
I've dug this up 2-3 times since 2001 and I always have a nightmare of a time finding it. I'm not finding it anywhere right now. I'm pretty sure it was a Nanog report but I could be wrong there, it was very thorough and a lot of slides.
I was a junior. I went to a boarding school and one of those weird memories that sticks with you is that I was unsure whether or not to go to my classes. No cell phones and pretty primitive email system, so it just wasn't clear. I went to one at like 9:30 (central time) and nobody was there, so that was when I realized "oh this is one of those nothing-is-normal-now things".
I was a senior. I grew up on the west coast, never been to New York, but my English teacher was from New York. She knew she'd lost friends that day, but not which ones. She held it together, but it really added a personal connection to what would have just been a horrifically impactful event on TV.
There's something so emotional and compelling about the spectacle of shared tragedy (even smaller ones like oceangate).
However there's always a reminder in the back of my mind that what makes our heart leap is very poorly correlated with what things ought to scare us.
I don't know if it's possible to "Reprogram" one's heart to worry less about very high-visibility low risk things (like air travel, or terrorism in the US) and care more about statistically probable ones that SHOULD scare us (heart disease and such), but I wish it were.
I remember parents picking their kids up for no explained reason, the fucking TV cart showing the news, and going outside and seeing the smoke plume and the air smelling like burnt shit.
Several kids in my class had parents who died on 9/11
That’s probably the memory for many (most?) grade schoolers, isn’t it?
Was in a gifted and talented class that morning, we had the budget for a dedicated TV in the corner that stayed on all day with a global map showing the time and the position of sunlight moving over the globe. The administrators had a master controller that switched all the TVs in all the classrooms over to the news at the same time. Have little memory of the actual news but do remember having an old, stern southern lady (the kind that would paddle you if she still could) suddenly crying quietly as we watched the news that day.
That and our similarly elderly main teacher setting time aside the day before the invasion of Iraq to talk about the seriousness of going to war and what it meant for families. How she remembers her town before Korea and Vietnam.
With hindsight I wonder why Afghanistan just didn’t get talked about in the same seriousness as the invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan just kind of quietly happened, but the build up to Iraq just held more weight.
>With hindsight I wonder why Afghanistan just didn’t get talked about in the same seriousness as the invasion of Iraq.
If you weren't for war you were violently shouted down as unamerican and undemocratic and unpatriotic. It's a simple as that. This applied to US senators just as much as it applied to average americans. "Our country is under attack and we are at war" was the hammer used to suppress any argument, especially the one talking about how Bush clearly wanted a war even before the attack.
I was in 4th grade when this happened. A relatively normal morning quickly turned into a bunch of kids sitting in class watching the news.
My memories of the day itself are hazy. I was too young to really understand, of course.
It's pretty harrowing to watch the footage up to the second impact. The sudden change in tone from somewhat detached coverage of something we were yet to understand is really something. The shock of the newscasters when that second plane hit. Crazy how easy it was to see that second impact with all the cameras turned on the building.
I didn't expect my heart to pound the way it is from watching this. Chilling stuff.
I think you need to "start it off" by pushing "Go" on the Controls window after you set a time. That seemed to then line everything up. Note that the Menu Bar time widget does not reflect the Timeline time tho!
I think some of the time stamps, but not all, are adapted to the local time zone. Very confusing user interface overall, it’s trying something very ambitious but not succeeding on the execution.
yeah, I have no idea what's going on with the time. There is a 2 hour delta between the time in the box where I hit "go" and the "current time" on the menu bar. I'm on the west coast so it would make sense if it was a 3 hour difference, or a 0 hour difference, but 2 makes no sense to me.
Unless it was a DST change? But the 2007 change only happened for the start in March.
Don't get it either. But setting a time and hitting "go" seems to adjust the streams to the right time. But it doesn't "tick" when playing for some reason.
I don't understand why there's static noise instead of broadcast all the time. Is it a buffering animation and does the server have troubles keeping up?
I was laid off at the time so I watched this happen live on TV. Later I delivered meals-on-wheels while listening on the radio and discussing with all the folks I was taking meals to that day. So surreal. I remember thinking it was a terrible accident until the other tower was hit, then total disbelief that they fell.
Then a month later I went to work in a quarter-scale (I think) replica of one of the twin towers (BOK Tower, Tulsa, OK) and one of our clients was almost completely wiped out on 9/11. The few remaining employees were trying to rebuild the company and we were trying to help them by hosting the little thing we had sold them. All of their backups were also in the tower. Really sad.
> The classic Macintosh desktop is also very well done
Two things, in my opinion: trying to be whimsical and "fun" for such a grave topic is disrespectful, and I don't understand what value appropriating Apple's logo and the "finder face" in the corner add to the 9/11 retrospective experience
So, fine, maybe I'm just not happy-go-lucky enough to appreciate why this needs to be a classic Macintosh theme, but I am 100% positive that this experience doesn't need those branding elements to reenact 9/11 anythings
IMO this doesn’t seem disrespectful, more like an attempt at authenticity. For those who used computers at that time, it will remind them of what it was like, and for younger people, it helps communicate the era (before you were born, but post-GUI) that 9/11 happened in.
>IMO this doesn’t seem disrespectful, more like an attempt at authenticity. For those who used computers at that time, it will remind them of what it was like, and for younger people, it helps communicate the era (before you were born, but post-GUI) that 9/11 happened in.
I mostly agree with you. However, I visited Las Vegas and stayed at the New York, New York casino hotel a few months after the towers came down and noted the "memorials" people put up on the outside of the casino. Which, as a native NYer who worked across the street from the WTC (and walked through it pretty much every work day for many years beyond that) for more than three years, really pissed me off even though I realized that people wanted to show their support -- I found it a disgusting display.
I still live in NYC and to this day I avoid the area around ground zero whenever I can. Not because I'm afraid, but because it's still painful to think about all those dead people in a place that was so familiar to me.
As such, I understand GP's feelings. The events of that day shouldn't be made light of given all the innocent people (and not just in NYC, but in Washington, DC and Shanksville, PA as well) who died needlessly. And each of us processes/deals with that differently.
So you’re judging other people’s reactions to the event? I don’t think we should do that. It doesn’t make you right. People are going to have diverse ways of responding and processing it. We should be tolerant and accepting of that.
What we should not be tolerant of is people who judge other people first, and try and make them wrong. I think you can express your own feelings on this, without imposing on others like that.
It’s important to have clarity about how you feel, including what you feel about other people’s reactions, and accept it. When you observe yourself reacting to someone else’s response, rather than making it about them being wrong and judging them, focus on how you feel, and ask yourself why you feel that way.
My first reaction was “wasn’t OS X out when 9/11 happened?”. But I understand that many people were running OS 9.x at the time, since it was only 6 months after the OS X launch date.
I appreciate the overall Mac look and feel, but I don't understand what's going on in this UI.
I'm clicking some video, but it won't start, something else starts playing, Picture in Picture starts up, I need to close it, clicking Play won't play the video, instead it starts automatically 10 seconds later, then it stops, snowy screen pops up, etc.
The US was so complacent in their idea that nobody would ever attack them that even commentators live on air speculated that some sort of navigation error might have caused it. Even after the second plane hit.
> The US was so complacent in their idea that nobody would ever attack them
I don't think that's true. There was an attempt to bring down the WTC in 1993 after all!
Authorities were taken by surprise by the method of attack. Hardly surprising since it hadn't been done before. Up until that point a hijacked flight almost always meant a ransom attempt, so you didn't shoot the plane down, you got them to land and began negotiations.
It's really easy to look back in hindsight and say authorities should have done X but there really was a great deal of uncertainty. It's not even clear what could have been done about the second plane.
None of that is even what I'm talking about. The people watching it, in real time, commenting on it, didn't even speculate that it could be an attack. Even after the second plane. That's complacency.
There was a video I saw once several years ago that claimed to sync up ATC audio and flight radar of commercial and military traffic, but I haven't been able to find it since despite a couple cursory searches here and there.
IIRC, it was a custom animation/overlay like they use in documentaries and newscasts, not a screenshot of FlightAware or anything.
Any chance anyone knows what I'm talking about and has a link?
I'd be interested in seeing that as well. The only thing I can think of that is similar is the interactive Apollo 11 in Real Time:
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/
I just love these real time real life retrospectives, yesterday I thought I'm not going to spend time watching these again but here I am.. Any other good ones around? I've watched the Estonia[0] a few times (easier as a Finn), I think I've seen one about the 2004 Tsunami one but can't seem to find it (or might remember wrong), and Apollo 13[1] as well.
edit: On second thought I don't think the tsunami one might make that much sense, probably was just a collection of videos and news captures.
It's a little shocking how different the pre-9/11 mindset was. At 9:07am on CNN, the reporter speculates that perhaps there was an issue with electronic navigation equipment that would have led two planes to hit the towers.
I was in elementary school on the West Coast at the time so by the time I was getting ready for school, one of the towers had already collapsed and I woke up to apocalyptic scenes on television that I first thought was a massive earthquake. In class, no one said a single thing about what had just happened which made me feel like I was going crazy.
It still makes me feel sick to this day what happened afterwards. I was too young to really understand the implications but even as a child, the march to war felt so very wrong.
I wouldn't say "even as a child", I would say "especially as a child". In my experience, this was a far more common experience among those of us who were not yet adults at the time, than among the adults. I have long felt that it is the greatest generational dividing line in the US. I was about half way through high school at the time, and the prevailing perspective of the march to war seems to be very different among even those just a few years older and in college at the time, than among myself and people near my same age and younger.
I do think I understand it better now that I have my own children. I can imagine my fear for them driving me to supporting things that struck me as mindless vengeful insanity at the time.
I hope I'll never have to find out how I would react now to a tragedy like this.
I was 25 then, but it seemed like mindless vengeful insanity all the same. The entire national character seemed to change, almost overnight, in a bleak and awful way; I felt like I was standing in the surf while a powerful wave receded, water and sand and gravel all rushing away around me, while I remained in place. I have felt like a foreigner here ever since, still a citizen but no longer an American.
Yeah. But would you say that your view was the prevailing one among people your age? Or, as I think you're implying, that you were more the odd one out, including amongst your peers?
Because unless I'm assuming wrong, I think your experience is in line with what I said.
My experience was different than yours though. It wasn't until I started mixing with more "grown ups" during college that I realized that actually the prevailing view among people even just a little older than me seemed to be in favor of the war, whereas the view I was familiar with from my own crowd of people my age was the opposite. And as I have talked to more and more people over time, I have continued to feel that this is basically correct about the prevailing view by age at that time.
Sure, I'm not trying to disagree, but to share the sympathetic experience I had on the other side of that generational divide.
My view certainly was not the prevailing one, as polls showed and Bush's re-election proved; but my peers at the time were a bunch of musicians, artists, activists, nerds, and weirdos, living in a big coastal city, so I was not alone in opposing the wars. Part of the horror of that experience was the dawning realization that we lived in a tiny, fragile bubble, and nothing we could do had any influence whatever on the mess being made outside it.
I just happened to be home a bit later than usual and was watching the morning news just like this that day, so this is pretty much how I experienced the towers being hit live. Eerie.
Does anyone else remember how the Internet died that day?
There was so much traffic from everyone trying to check the news that every major news site went practically offline.
The only way to find out what was happening was to find a TV. Lucky I was working with a friend to install a touch-screen PC in his car. We'd added a TV tuner to the system too. We raced to the underground car park and pulled the car out onto the street and sat there watching the news unfold on his 7" widescreen.
I had a fairly weird 9/11 realtime experience. I had pulled an all-nighter and ended up going to sleep right around the time this all started happening. So I went to sleep blissfully unaware, and then was woken up by my wife. Within 30 seconds of being woken up I learned: "4 planes were hijacked. They were flown into the World Trade Center. The WTC collapsed."
I kept waiting for the punchline, but then realized it wasn't coming...
Something similar from my side. Was in college, on the West Coast, and had no early classes so I was still asleep. It wasn't until the girlfriend's family called her and woke her up - that we found out something was wrong. They were on the East Coast and her father was flying that day (just ended up grounded and stuck for a few days). But I don't think we woke up until 8 or 9am PST, Noon East... so by the time we were awake it was "over". Totally surreal to wake up to something like that.
I don't think anyone at the entire College did anything but watch the News channels, even though there wasn't anything "new", for the next 2 days.
There was a piece of footage shown on British TV. Street scene, camera tilted slightly upwards, and something flashes across the screen from top-left to bottom-right. Fast, just a few frames. Never saw it again (admittedly I didn't look very hard).
Don't suppose anyone knows what I'm talking about, do they? Would be nice to know it's not a false memory.
For anyone in or near NYC, I can recommend a trip to the 9/11 museum. I expected it to be some flag wavey exercise in "patriotism" but there's a section inside where the events of the day progress as you walk through. Even as someone who knows all about the events it was absolutely chilling to walk through.
If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of collective fury before. That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population center in Afghanistan and the capitals of every nation that'd so much as looked at the United States funny in the previous ten years.
It seemed like overreactions to me at the time, and it seems like overreactions to me now.
I was 18 at the time and I was already old enough to know that you don't make big decisions when tired, angry, or stressed.
What's the point of checks and balances and the rule of law if they all go out of the window as soon as an adversary does something bad enough to make enough of us sufficiently angry? Those aren't laws and rules or balances (or values) if they get tossed aside simply because of a spike in anger or fear or both.
Call me crazy, but if our entire machinery of government can't function well enough to control itself internally to preserve human rights better than Mike Tyson, maybe we should toss the whole thing out and start over.
We literally wrote a document explaining what the government is not allowed to do, for that reason. Yet they still do those things anyways. Not enough people care, either.
I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right.
But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
The debate nowadays always seems to hinge on this question of whether they lied about the WMD thing or were "just" mistaken about it. But from my perspective living through that time as a young person, that WMD thing was not the problem, the problem was this mass fearful hysteria that our leaders (either cynically or because they were themselves in the grips of that hysteria) were able to use to get overwhelming popular support for an unrelated invasion, essentially just out of peoples feelings of righteous anger and spite.
It isn't just ugly in hindsight, it was ugly ugly ugly then, in the moment.
Yeah like, is everyone forgetting how fucking insanely racist that moment was in the US. Brutal nasty racism, it was utterly foul and EVERYWHERE just completely normalized in every venue.
Unreal everyone is pretending to have been taken in by the "war on terror" kayfabe at the time. I knew 15-year-olds who clocked the whole thing as an opportunistic political scam. The correct stance is contrition and repentance. All these stories about what kinds of cereal people were eating that day disgust me. We killed tens of thousands, destabilized and destroyed entire countries, created millions of refugees with these stories as the excuse.
I know next to nothing about geopolitics, but I always figured the the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had something Iran since it's sandwiched between them.
I encourage people to read about Project for the New American Century (PNAC). 9/11 gave PNAC and the neoconservatives the optimal opportunity to implement their stated objectives.
What makes you think I didn't know / read about it at the time?
All the comments here mentioning the neoconservative desire for regime change in Iraq predating 9/11 seem to imply that it was an obscure thing that people weren't very aware of at the time.
But that isn't true at all. It was broadly understood and frequently discussed. It's just that people were so generally scared, pissed off, and ready for vengeance against whoever, that nobody cared. (Not literally nobody, but I think I recall that the war had like 70% or 80% support, with strong majorities in both major parties.)
This is why I started out my adulthood libertarian-curious, because both parties and huge majorities of voters seemed insanely interventionist to me. But things have reordered a huge amount since then. (Basically everyone came around to my view of the war, in hindsight.)
Hi. I figured you did know / read about it at the time, actually. I think we have the same viewpoint. I was just using your insightful comment to encourage other folks to read about PNAC for historical context. I don't want anyone to pretend to forget, or younger folks not to know, what got us into the last 20 years of forever war.
I was a sophomore in high school at the time. Sometime in the late morning, after both towers had been hit and it was clear that it was a terrorist attack, all the classroom TVs were turned on and tuned to the news. I distinctly recall the palpable fear and fury. A fellow student said to me, in a fit of gallows humor, "Get your gun, son. We're going to war."
It did feel as though there was some legitimacy to Afghanistan (of course, even that ended up being folly), but Iraq, which didn't happen until the Spring of '03, always felt tenuous.
Of course, all of it turned out to be a catastrophe, most especially for Iraqis and Afghans.
My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.
> My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.
Interesting conspiracy theory! Especially considering that the resulting mess caused a massive refugee crisis and a spike of terrorism in Europe. Even if it didn't keep the terrorist mired in the Middle East, it redirected the violence towards our allies, thus maintaining the general casus beli.
You can't change the soul of a people by force or even by diplomacy. If you look at every nation whose culture reformed after, say, losing in WW2, their behavior during and leading up to that war was relatively different from their norms. Germany's genocidal imperialism was a result of the first world war and the terms of the treaty which ended it. Japan turned imperialist because European colonialism made them decide it was either become an imperial power or get swallowed up. Both nations could revert to relative normalcy after the war.
Afghanistan has been a tyrannical theocracy that uses religion to treat its citizens like dirt while being repeatedly invaded by outsiders for damn near eight hundred years. There is no fixing that, especially not in a couple of decades.
Intended by who? Are you saying the US government knew it meant war and had the foresight (and bandwidth) to arrange a coordinated propaganda campaign on the spot?
People just being naturally angry seems like a simpler and perfectly sufficient explanation. We humans are pretty much hardwired to respond like that: when we believe we've been wronged, a special brain mode kicks in that pushes us toward taking action (ideally a constructive one, but brain hardware doesn't enforce that).
Someone suggested that Americans got angry after 9/11 because of propaganda. I'm saying they got angry because that happens naturally when your country is attacked.
You can feed them hashish or whatever and turn people into berserkers. Also, in mercenaries people do it for other reasons.
Anyhow, when you look at the elated reaction from people in some areas of the world when it happened, one can see why people might react to that reaction with seething vengeance in mind.
You can see the ignorance of the people in this country from that anger. Those people celebrating were on the receiving end of American terrorism abroad.
Sometimes —but in many cases people in areas unaffected directly by American policy were celebrating as if they felt a tribalistic attachment perhaps to the aggrieved.
You're arguing that two wrongs make a right and in such argument the stronger party will win.
I’m not arguing that two wrongs make a right. I’m saying actions have consequences. And how could you possibly know those people celebrating we’re not affected by US policy and military exploits?
I don't have the time to dig around for examples but reading IRC logs (which I mention in another comment) is really ... interesting. I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s..
It never went away. The religious right in the US and others discovered a wellspring of motivational energy (for their regular causes) that they could get out of people by pointing fingers at Islam, and they have never really let it go.
It comes and go in waves, but it's pretty crazy what an appeal to an old bogeyman can get you; at the time, George Bush talking about a "clash of civilizations" and appealing to old Crusades era mythos of east vs west, orient vs "western civilization" etc. was incredibly "successful" at accomplishing the goals that Rumsfeld and Cheney and others had set out for their regime.
The Bush/Cheney regime inherited a largely liberal, tolerant, and centrist populous from the Clinton years. The general zeitgeist and political atmosphere from back then looks so civilized and calm compared to now. And they leverage 9/11 to stir up a whole different scenario afterwards that has never stopped accelerating. The xenophobic far right has been in steady ascendancy ever since.
To this day, if there's a shooting in a mall or whatever, you'll hear people immediately jump to the jihadist explanation, even when it's clear that the bulk of terrorist type violence in North America doesn't actually take this form -- it's usually far right / white supremacist in inspiration, just as it was before 9/11 (e.g Timothy McVeigh, etc.)
I'm an atheist and no lover of any organized religion, including Islam, but it was dark and depressing to watch at the time and it continues to be depressing to see people manipulated on these terms.
Many speculate that groups need a common enemy to maintain their identity. Obviously, communism and terrorism are recent examples. But what are our common enemies now? The New Atheists decried religion for years but frankly, I think the religious right is dead. Many consider new atheism movement to be dead as well. So we currently only have the other party to blame.
> I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s..
Not only has the vitriol not gone away, the targets have vastly expanded. Go read the worldnews subreddit coverage of the war in Ukraine, for example: lots of talk about "Russian scum" and other dehumanization of the enemy upvoted to the top.
I also see it from the other line -- lots of people who've taken the bus so far to the right that they talk about Putin as a hero fighting against our "degenerate" western leaders.
It's pretty dark out there in popular discourse right now.
It was obvious to me, a Brit, that there would be massive American retaliation against whichever country was linked to this - and I said so in the office where we had all broken off work to crowd round the TV or refresh news websites. Then a second plane hit.
(I incorrectly guessed it was the PLO responsible)
> That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population center in Afghanistan and the capitals of every nation that'd so much as looked at the United States funny in the previous ten years.
There was (and still is in some quarters) a huge desire for revenge against Iran. A side effect of Republicans going full Qanon is that they no longer care about the middle east at all, and the PNAC lot fade into history.
I remember talking about PNAC at a debate session of all things in high school. Our debate club was pretty big and well known in our school
The teachers that ran it shut me down, saying I was peddling conspiracy theories about PNAC influence and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was 2008/2009.
I'm still, based on research I've done since, convinced that PNAC had a huge influence on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in particular, and the white house at the time more generally. Ultimately I believe this is why they pursued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was due to the ideas espoused by this group
You were absolutely correct; it was as close as possible to publishing a manifesto saying "here's how we're going to launch a war in the middle east" and then doing it as you'll ever see. The same clearly identifiable people were involved all over the place.
Exactly. PNAC wasn't conspiracy theory at all. It wasn't even an "open secret": They had a website, the signatories were public, many of the signatories were in the Bush W. administration. PNAC was discussed often on all the talking head political shows. It became the plan after 9/11.
I think some people a decade or so later thought it was a conspiracy theory because they thought it implied 9/11 was done, or allowed to happen, on purpose in order to begin the regime changes outlined in the plan.
But with PNAC this was their world view and plan, and 9/11 allowed them to move forward. Wrong plan, right time.
In retrospect, what I think was happening was teachers were afraid of other parents (many, many of which would be classified as conservative republicans) getting upset at them. The debate club was a big deal in my school and parents were actively involved with many aspects.
I think they saw headache and shut me down the easiest way possible.
Its really unfortunate, however I do think this was the main driver
I still remember the short period of time when it wasn't clear someone had done it on purpose, or the slightly longer period of time when it wasn't clear who had done it.
Sadly, it would have been much better for the country and the world, if it had been a domestic group of some kind. Still really bad, but not as bad.
I was four when this happened, and what I remember is being in my grandparents house watching it unfold on the news while being on the other side of the world, not sure if it is a real memory or a figment of my imagination, but my parents did tell me the attack did profoundly disturb me.
It truly does feel weird that people a few years younger than me didn't watch it happen live and even I was one of those people who was too young to truly comprehend what the hell was going on, except for developing a massive feeling of anger against the perpetrators.
I haven't seen this site before, this is very well done. I was in middle school at the time at a camp away from school, so I never saw the broadcast until later in the afternoon. Extremely stressful to watch the time period between the coverage of the damage from the first plane and the second plane hitting the South Tower. It really captures that nearly extinct feeling of switching between channels frantically to keep up with the coverage.
I was there. Not in NYC but as I was eating my Honey Nut Cheerios before early morning (530-6ish am pacific time) JV basketball and watching the news (cuz I was a nerd in high school) I watched it all go down in real-time. It’s still a harrowing experience to this day.
very cool site, thank you. I didn't have TV that day, all I knew was from cnn and nytimes and fevered word-of-mouth, but years later I had a chance to dive into the various digital archives (including https://archive.org/details/911)—and what a remarkable time capsule they are. one result of that was this, a channel-browsing glimpse of America just before it happened
Ugh, once was enough for me. Remembering it is important, reliving it is too much.
This quote from Lincoln is pretty pertinent to some things that have happened since:
> At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Commonly reported as "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves"
I was on my way to my eighth grade civics class that day, in northern Virginia. I remember before class, a lot of people started talking about the Pentagon exploding (many kids had parents working there) and that's when it started to get out exactly what happened. People left school early, getting picked up by family members, etc.
I distinctly remember someone asking my civics teacher, "who could have done this?" and she said she would bet her life it was Osama Bin Laden. That was the first time any of us had ever heard that name or understood what terrorism actually meant. We were all too young to remember any other bad things happening in America, besides perhaps Columbine and had been pretty convinced America was invincible after finally "beating" communism in 90's and Desert Storm.
Over the next year or so, we talked about it so much and were inundated with so much coverage that I became almost completely numb to these sort of events, and eventually extremely depressed.
It's taken me becoming a parent to reconnect with the horror of what happened and now I have a hard time sitting through coverage of Ukraine as it relates to its impact on children.
My little brother woke me up that morning. Said that the Twin Towers were falling down. It was just the start of my sophomore year in high school in the SF Bay area. My first real indication that everything was going bad was that the T.V was on. Mom never allowed it on in the mornings before school.
I managed to get out of bed and get downstairs in my underwear and was just able to see the second plane hit. Mom's face went grey. Dad was in the kitchen. Mom said the magic word that told everyone in the family that things were officially bad:
"Oh ... fuck"
Mom never cursed. I remember looking at my siblings, we were more in shock that Mom even knew curse words. Then we all got pulled into the kitchen too.
It didn't help that Grandpa was dying in Tuscon. Lots of strokes from years of smoking. Mom and my aunt were planning on going that day to Arizona, but, very obviously, we knew that wasn't going to be by plane now. There were a lot of calls back and forth on the landline in trying to figure out how they were going to get down there.
The T.V. was reporting all kinds of crazy stuff too. The pentagon, something in Pennsylvania. We just watched and tried to eat breakfast.
Mom and Dad, bless them, had no idea what to do either. So they managed to get all the cash and valuables in the house and split it up five ways, a portion for each of us. It was a lot of money and jewellery. I remember getting a solid silver elephant, about three inches across, that Dad had gotten for Mom some year. I never did bring myself to actually counting it. Dad shoved all the cash into our backpacks. We figured that going to school wouldn't be a bad idea. My High school and my sibling's schools were all around the same place, right next to the police station.
Dad brought me into the garage, gave me his 1911 and a spare loaded magazine. It was so heavy and cold. He showed me how to turn the safety off. How to press the magazine release. How to slide it back to cock it and pull the bullet out. I remember thinking that those bullets were really big. Told me:
"You're a man now. Whatever happens, you are responsible for your siblings. Don't use this unless you have no other choice."
We put it in the bottom of my backpack with all the cash. I remember thinking that I was a real gangster now.
We all agreed that we'd meet up in Tuscon at my Uncle's place in exactly one year if everything went to hell. I had no idea what the address was, but I said I'd get my siblings there no matter what. We said goodbye to Mom. She went and pick up my aunt and and they drove to Tuscon. Managed to see Grandpa just before he died that day. They must have driven crazy fast to have made it in time.
School was a blur. Mostly just watching the TVs on carts or up in the corner of the room. Some teachers tried teaching, that was pointless, we all knew it. But we had no better ideas either.
Dad picked us up from school that day. Another strange event, it was always Mom that picked us up. He said we were going to have apple pie and hot dogs for dinner, because that was more American. We only had hot dogs because Dad can't bake. I don't remember giving Dad back the pistol, but must have.
Went to scouts that night with the whole family. A lot of people brought the whole family to scouts that night. I remember one of the kid's Dads talking about his friends in NYC. He started to well up, but fought it back. We all knew it was because he thought that us kiddos couldn't be seeing him cry too, needed to stay tough in the chaos. It was alright though, we all understood. Later on, one of his sons, a few years younger than me, joined the Marines. He died in Iraq. They said his head exploded like a Gallagher watermelon when the sniper's bullet hit. Another kid in the troop, about the same age, 'cleaned his gun wrong' on Paris Island because he couldn't handle the Marines. Lost a few people in my graduating class too. My best friend's cousin died in Afghanistan. The family have always blamed Bush for that.
I remember Grandpa's funeral. He was a colonel or somesuch in the Air Force. So we got to have the funeral on the Air Base there in Arizona really soon afterwards. I remember all the guns pointed at our heads as we drove on to the base. Having to weave through all the barricades. He manged to get a spot in Arlington, one of my uncles pulled some strings and got Grandpa a place. I didn't go to the internment, but there was a 14 gun salute, my Mom said. A real honor, I'm told.
One of my older cousins on my Mom's side decided to up and drive to Ground Zero to help out. He was helping dig through the debris for a while. He never talked about going out there and helping though.
My Uncle, the one that pulled the strings for Grandpa's internment, was near the Pentagon that day, had to walk through the smoke to get back home. He said it was really bad smelling because they used horse hair for insulation in the Pentagon.
I always put up the flag on 9/11, for Grandpa and for everyone else and for all my friends that died because of what it kicked off. It's not much, but it's something.
I don't know how to end this. I just wanted to share some of what happened to me that day and in the time afterwards. Thanks for reading.
Once upon a time on September 11, 2001, a dedicated journalist named NJ Burkett found himself at the heart of one of the most tragic events in modern history—the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
NJ Burkett, a seasoned reporter for ABC7 New York, was known for his expertise and compassion in delivering news to the public. On that fateful morning, he, along with his talented photographer, Marty Glembotzky, were assigned to cover the breaking news near the Twin Towers.
As they rushed towards the scene, little did they know that they would soon find themselves in the midst of chaos and devastation. With cameras rolling and a sense of urgency in their hearts, NJ and Marty began reporting from just below the burning towers.
The initial shock of the situation radiated through NJ as he absorbed the enormity of the unfolding events. However, his professionalism kicked in, and he focused on relaying accurate information to his viewers, fully aware of the immense responsibility he held.
But as fate would have it, just as NJ was delivering his report, the unthinkable happened—the first tower began to collapse. The once towering icon was now crumbling down before their eyes, spewing debris and smoke into the sky.
In an instant, the scene turned into a frenzy of panic and confusion. NJ and Marty, with their journalistic instincts, quickly grasped the severity of the situation. With bravery and determination, they managed to make split-second decisions that would save their lives.
In the midst of the chaos, they navigated through the smoke-filled streets, struggling to breathe, their hearts pounding with adrenaline. Embracing their training and experience, NJ and Marty found a way to safety, escaping the collapsing tower just in the nick of time.
Although physically unharmed, the emotional toll was immeasurable. NJ Burkett and Marty Glembotzky had witnessed firsthand the sheer devastation of the attacks and the tragedy that befell countless innocent lives.
In the years that followed, NJ Burkett continued to report on the aftermath of 9/11, covering the stories of resilience, healing, and unity that emerged from the rubble. His dedication to journalism and the compassion he showed towards the survivors and victims' families exemplified the spirit of hope in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
The events of 9/11 forever changed the lives of those who experienced it, including NJ Burkett and Marty Glembotzky. Their bravery, resilience, and commitment to delivering accurate news became a testament to the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
And so, their story remains a reflection of the countless individuals who demonstrated courage and humanity on that unforgettable day—reminding us of the importance of journalism in providing a voice and telling the stories that matter most.
There are so many incredible stories of heroism from this day, but, I will highlight that of Rick Rescorla. [1]
After 1993, before 9/11:
> Feeling that the authorities lost legitimacy after they failed to respond to his 1990 warnings, he concluded that employees of Morgan Stanley, which was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, could not rely on first responders in an emergency and needed to empower themselves through surprise fire drills, in which he trained employees to meet in the hallway between stairwells and go down the stairs two by two to the 44th floor. Rescorla's strict approach to these drills put him into conflict with some high-powered executives, who resented the interruption to their daily activities, but he nonetheless insisted that these rehearsals were necessary to train the employees in the event of an emergency. He timed employees with a stopwatch when they moved too slowly and lectured them on fire emergency basics.
On 9/11:
> When a Port Authority announcement came over the P.A. system urging people to stay at their desks, and before United Airlines Flight 175 would strike the South Tower at 9:03 A.M., Rescorla ignored the announcement, grabbed his bullhorn, walkie-talkie and cell phone, and began systematically to order the roughly 2,700 Morgan Stanley employees in the South Tower to evacuate, in addition to the employees in WTC 5, numbering around 1,000.
> After successfully evacuating almost all of Morgan Stanley's 2,700 employees, he went back into the building. When one of his colleagues told him he too had to evacuate the World Trade Center, Rescorla replied, "As soon as I make sure everyone else is out." He was last seen on the 10th floor of the South Tower, heading upward, shortly before its collapse at 9:59 A.M., 56 minutes after being struck by United Airlines Flight 175. A total of 13 Morgan Stanley employees died in the September 11 attacks, including Rescorla, his deputies Wesley Mercer and Jorge Valezquez, and security guard Godwin Forde, who had collectively stayed behind to help others.
Do you know of a book that covers the event from this angle? I'm totally tapped out on the usual treatment of the event focused on geopolitics before and after it, but I would like to read in long form about the actions of the actual people there and nearby that day.
I'm not immediately aware of a solid consolidated book on this regard, it's a bit scattered to my knowledge over many journalistic articles and oral histories. If anyone else has a recommendation I am interested as well.
Anyhow, a good place to start on researching this topic might be the 9/11 Tribute Memorial and Museum's YouTube channel where they have some clips from survivor accounts[1], many of these individuals you can google their names and find articles from the time period, for example Stanley Praimnath and Brian Clark. [2] The 9/11 Museum also holds many more oral histories, and transcripts. [3] One account that sticks with me is from a Reddit user that fled lower Manhattan on an abandoned bicycle. [4] There are similar stories in the comments of that post.
I do actually have a book recommendation I have read but it's more about what happened in the months after the events of 9/11: "American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center" [5]
My girlfriend (now wife) and I had just started on the way into work, we signaled each other over to the side of the road, and talked for a few moments... and I headed in to work.
I was in shock for weeks. I was ontop of the towers but 2 months before that, and possibly one of the best pictures of the two of us was taken there.
... I've been there. I know that place. I have roots in that city.
But I wasn't surprised as many Americans were. I knew this was very possible, though most of the scenarios I'd heard were far more grizzly than what happened. (Involving nuclear material and small planes.)
I always thought the Iraq war was a pile of shit, as were most of the actions taken quickly after that day.
Taking off our shoes, and the TSA are an awful legacy of an awful day. The terrorists did win. They encouraged us to give away our freedoms for safety theater.
So we did.
This site is proof... they won.