National Geographic’s 9/11 docuseries is a harrowing recreation of a terrible day
The six-part series uses rare footage and new interviews to immerse viewers in what firsthand witnesses experienced
TV Reviews World Trade Center
For those who lived through the events of September 11th, 2001—either seeing the terrorist attacks firsthand or watching the devastation unfold in real time on TV—it’s been difficult in the two decades since to figure out how best to process the images from that day. Is it better to watch the planes hit the World Trade Center towers over and over, to burn the pictures into our memories? Or should we avoid the footage altogether, moving past the trauma by keeping it at a distance?
The six-part, seven-hour National Geographic series 9/11: One Day In America (airing across four nights, beginning on Sunday, August 29) is aimed both at the people who’ve sought out and consumed everything 9/11-related over the past 20 years and the people who’ve been hesitant to re-experience any of it. Produced in collaboration with The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the documentary covers the story of the attacks and their immediate aftermath in microscopic detail, with the help of new interviews and some rarely seen audio and video. It’s intense and thorough, but it’s also reflective, bringing the horror back down to earth by filtering it through the eyes and ears of those who were there.
The hardest One Day In America episode to watch is also the best one: “First Response,” the series’ first and longest chapter. It begins on the morning of September 11th, using snippets from the news and images shot around New York City to convey how ordinary the day was before the world turned upside down. Some of the survivors talk about what they were doing before the first plane hit: a big meeting at the World Trade Center or a day shift at a nearby restaurant. Joseph Pfeifer, a battalion chief at the New York City Fire Department at the time, describes how hectic his morning had already been.
All the while, there’s dark foreshadowing of what’s to come. A recording taken from an air traffic control tower in Boston catches a moment of confusion when a flight veers off-course. A flight attendant calls into her airline’s main office to report, eerily calmly, “There’s somebody stabbed in business class.” (Her tone is so muted that the person who takes the call doesn’t seem to understand what she means.) Then, sixteen minutes into the episode, during some video taken of Pfeifer and his firefighters out on the street assessing a gas leak, composer David Schweitzer’s ominously droning score gives way to the sound of a jet engine, roaring way too loud. The camera tilts up and pivots, following the noise. The shot shifts quickly to the World Trade Center—14 blocks away but clearly visible amid the other skyscrapers—just in time to capture the first explosion.
This will likely be a make-or-break moment for people watching One Day In America. The series’ creative team, led by producers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin and director Daniel Bogado, have access to some angles and scenes that have rarely been seen in any of the years of 9/11 retrospectives, and they are unsparing in the way they use them. The intent is to recreate the confusion and terror of the day, and the methods are highly effective. The mounting panic, the escalating destruction—thanks to the fresh footage, it all shocks anew.
“First Response” is mostly about Pfeifer and his team, who got to the World Trade Center quickly and assessed the situation, noting the people who were already dead and the structural damage already done. But the filmmakers also cut frequently to what was happening out on the street, where New Yorkers were looking up at the billowing smoke, stunned. Forty minutes into the episode, we see footage captured by one of those bystanders, who was recording the hail of falling debris with a video camera, their lens pointed right at the second tower when the next plane crashed into it.
Give Bogado and company credit for not sensationalizing those two big moments of impact. Multiple angles exist of the airplanes hitting the towers, but in the first episode, One Day In America only shows each once, and each from the perspective of the people on the ground. Later episodes do show the explosions again, but only in the context of introducing other people’s stories. The purpose of “First Response”—and of the series as a whole—is to preserve the initial reactions of the citizens and the emergency responders. That said, the series doesn’t skimp on the grisly details. The images of desperate individuals leaping from the towers? That’s in this documentary. Burned, bloodied, mangled, and ash-covered victims? Also here. And there’s more damage to show, too, from the first two plane crashes and the two others that happened that morning.
The collapse of the south tower occurs at the end of episode two (titled “The South Tower”); it’s repeated in harrowing fashion in episode three, “Collapse,” caught live on air by a TV reporter. The fourth episode, “The Cloud,” shows the other tower’s fall (but just briefly, since most of the people shooting video from below had been cleared away before then). Not as much footage exists of the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon, but security-cam images of the initial hit are shown at the start of episode three. The end of “Collapse” also covers the crash of United Flight 93, not documented on video at all.
The main characters of One Day In America are the first responders, which in the second half of the series—“The Cloud,” “I’m Coming For You, Brother,” and “It’s All Gone, Kid”—allows for a few moments of hope and triumph, as people are rescued and get to reconnect with their loved ones. There are digressions throughout, too, covering the survivors who escaped, the media on the scene, the doctors tending to the wounded, the police trying to control the crowds, and more. Bogado’s team rarely circles back; they mostly keep moving forward chronologically, bringing in new voices as needed.
Because of this, the documentary becomes exhausting by the end, as the frenzied drama of the attacks gives way to the punishing grind of clearing debris and hauling out bodies. Also, because the scope of the project is narrow by design (and overwhelmingly focused on New York, by circumstance), it’s missing a lot of what some might consider necessary context: like what happened before September 11th, 2001, and what happened after. This is more of a straightforward historical record than a rich text, ripe for analysis.
Still, the filmmakers do skillfully reconstruct the raw emotions of the day, which should allow those who remember it all well to bring their own points-of-view to the series. Re-experiencing these moments now, it’s hard not to think about the tumult of the succeeding 20 years. Very little in American life in the decades just before 9/11 prepared us for a moment when something that looked bad in a breaking news report would actually be worse than we could’ve imagined. Reliving the day is a reminder of all that we’ve endured—and all we’ve lost.
164 Comments
Hard to believe its been 20 years. Even more so given the crisis in Afghanistan. Talk about coming full circle.
What’s painful is a lot of the same Taliban leaders who were deposed 20 years ago are now back in their seats of power. And for fun, here’s some of their fighters wearing captured American gear in a parody of the Iwo Jima photo.
At least we killed tens of thousands of Brown civilians who weren’t connected to the 9/11 tragedy to make up for it. USA USA USA!
I have some resentment now for my science teacher, who found out about it before most of the school did, as did we. When someone asked him (an army intelligence officer) *why* someone would do this, he responded that that he didn’t know, maybe they were jealous of us. While nothing justifies the atrocities of that day, there were reasons a bit deeper than that, and he knew it.
Regardless of why the act was committed, our country still used it as a convenient excuse to erode our civil liberties and declare war on a concept, effectively starting a forever war the military industrial complex can use to funnel money from taxpayers to greedy corporations.
“They hate us for our freedoms” was the default assumed rationale by the vast majority of Americans. God but it was a stupid time for that jingoistic bullshit.
Are all non-Europeans, non-East Asians and non-Africans “brown” now? Why don’t you just say Asians? I imagine lumping a huge number of ethnicities together is pretty insulting to those involved.
It was sarcasm, dumb fuck. God forbid we ‘offend’ the innocent people we callously murdered rallying around our flag.
How is that sarcasm? What are you being sarcastic about? Who talks about killing “brown” people?
The mother fuckers who drop the bombs? The people who benefit from the military contracts? I guarantee that most of them couldn’t care less about killing a few, “Dirty Arabs”, for profit. I was using the mindset of greedy military fucks ironically in order to emphasize just how straight up evil our government’s handling of the post 9/11 era was. I used this tactic to show my contempt for our policies since that time period. Using irony to show contempt is the definition of sarcasm.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_(racial_classification)You’re a very angry person. I suggest you maybe take a break from the internet for a little bit.
George Carlin
this really sounds like something that’s been done before. i don’t think i need to see it all again.
There’s no way I’m watching this. Traumatic and the beginning of a really dark period in American life. We’ve never recovered. It only got more dark.
Truly the darkest timeline. Goddamn you, Abed. You should’ve caught the die before it hit the table.
The die that was thrown 10 years after 9/11?
Same. I can watch docs about plane crashes, fires, all kinds of disasters, even very recent ones, but not this. And I think you’re right as to the reason, it hasn’t ended yet, and probably won’t in our lifetimes. Our lives are undeniably worse, even if we had no personal connection to the event.
I’m guessing a lot of the first episode’s footage will be drawn directly from the Naudet brothers’ film 9/11.
Yeah it’s going to be a big ol’ nope for me dawg.
There is a documentary where the first half shows you that French dude tightrope walking between the twin towers—it really freaks you out about how high up he is—and then it instantly shifts to footage of the people flinging themselves out the windows at 9/11. It’s one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen, it haunts me.
“…it’s missing a lot of what some might consider necessary context: like what happened before
September 11th, 2001, and what happened after. This is more of a
straightforward historical record than a rich text, ripe for analysis”Good. Whatever the history that led to al Quaeda and the 9/11 attacks, it had nothing to do with the people on these planes or in and around the WTC, or 99.999% of Americans in general. Even those in the Pentagon were more instruments of whatever military actions contributed to their rise than architects of those policies. Keeping the focus on how people in general processed and reacted to these events and what those on the ground tasked with responding could do from a practical perspective makes for a documentary that speaks to everyone, rather than make it part of a political thought piece.
Actually it’s a disservice to the victims not to place the attack in some kind of historical context. Because if it weren’t for the policies the US pursued in the Middle East over the previous 40 years, the attacks might not have happened and those people wouldn’t have died.
It had little to do with the US meddling in the Middle East – bin Laden wanted very much to ignite a war that would wipe out the corruption in Saudi Arabia so he could rule over a new Caliphate. It wasn’t what the West had done; it was that the House of Saud had embraced the corruption. His plan was the Pearl Harbor II plan – a massive attack on US soil to provoke a backlash. He chose Saudi Arabs for the attack to wave that flag in the face of the US. If the US invaded Saudi Arabia, it would put them on the same soil as Mecca, the center of Islam, and bin Laden would set the rallying cry for Muslims to unite from over the world to push them and all those of corruption out. As the initiator he expected to rule over it all.
I didnt think the hijackers were chosen like that per se, just that the majority of their best guys came from SA because, well, they had the biggest pool of the Muslim version of mass shooter archetype “dissociated and maladjusted upper-middle class dudes”.
And do you think he would have been able to recruit so many people to his cause if a lot of people hadn’t been royally pissed at the US already?
Hard to get to it, but recognitions responses are following the Taliban social influence playbook. Not bad for an eight year old.
My point exactly – if you want to go there you have to rope in Britain, the Soviets, U.S. need to purchase oil from Saudi and willingness to overlook its bad behavior (which is what pissed off bin Ladin)…I mean this could be a 100 hour doc if you really wanted to cover all those bases.Sounds like this one has a specific mission and accomplishes what it sets out to do.ETA: That was not a deliberate Bush joke.
I mean it really doesn’t take 100 hours to explain that the US had been meddling in the Middle East for decades and cost lots of innocent people their lives as a result
Those in power in the Middle East were slaughtering by the thousands without any meddling. It all went bad when British oil experts mentioned the vast wealth under the east side of Saudi Arabia to the essentially feral leadership. Saud took it from there. The main effect of meddling was nudging which group was doing the slaughtering and trading oil for weapons to repress the undesirable groups. Be assured, the Russians have been nudging just as much.
Oh boy, here we go. I know, I know, they’re all just a bunch of bloodthirsty savages, right?
They chopped a journalist to pieces because he annoyed them. I’d say that yes, the House of Saud is bloodthirsty savages. Savages with hundreds of billions of dollars and billions of dollars of weapons who regularly imprison and enslave people and literally work many of them to death. The Middle East Shiites have been at war with the Middle East Sunnis for centuries over which one had the more genuine follower of Mohammed as the founder of their branch. You probably are applying some racist concept that says that individual Arabs are that way – they aren’t. Many of their religious and government leaders (when there is a difference) certainly are and the loyalty of the people is to them. They want war to solidify power – hence the constant saber rattling between Iraq and Iran and between Iran and Israel. Neither has the money that Saudi has, so they sneak around, such as funding Yemen.
Uh huh. Boy it’s a good thing we don’t live in a country that bombs women and children on a regular basis. Talk about your username/comment synergy.
It’s been a problem, right. The people we go after surround themselves with women and children when they aren’t out chopping up women and children for not going to the right mosque or wearing the wrong thing or having any disagreement at all. You are certainly welcome to take them on, one-on-one, and convince them of the error of their ways and I’m sure nothing ill will happen to you. One might look at what happened to the comedian who told Taliban jokes right up to the instant, one-on-one, they murdered him. War is a problem, particularly when the warfare is asymmetric. If you have a pious answer for that please stand up and tell the rest of the class that answer besides, as is happening now, offering total capitulation to let the slaughter to continue away from the so sensitive eyes you have. FYI – drones have the smallest lethal footprint for going after enemy leadership. and active enemy combatants. ALL other methods involve killing thousands of innocent people to perform at a similar level. We make a big deal of it because they make a record. There’s no record of live carpet bombing, the previous method. There’s a way to count people in the identifiable twos and threes rather than the anonymous hundreds and thousands. They are also very effective, so the social media from the enemy wants to say they are unfair. Those hiding in the hills and among the villagers will claim that it’s not moral to kill someone any other way than face to face, before slowly lowering a cage of people into a fire and roasting them to death. Looking to that answer you have to how to end a conflict without simply walking away and letting murder continue – like we did when Saddam Hussein was in power.
Oh my God, did you seriously just trot out the “women and children are used as human shields” argument? Hi Benjamin Netanyahu, is that you?I love that your entire argument boils down to “it’s okay for us to kill innocent people because we’re the good guys.” Hey, maybe if we didn’t keep killing their children, they wouldn’t be half as motivated to find ways to hurt and kill us in revenge? Or are you going to give us some “they hate us for their freedoms” garbage? You’ve clearly bought into every other aspect of Islamophobic American imperialism.
I have mixed feelings, we need to be honest about how and why this happened, but there are a ton of pieces on that and some great shows like The Looming Tower that go into that. As a society we don’t really talk that much about how we all processed or didn’t process the trauma
I was in North Jersey, home from college, right after my freshman year, and out for a run when a car swerved off the road and nearly hit me. I was furious/scared and then confused when the car pulled over and I saw it was a kid I’d gone to grade school/high school with, a guy named Darryl*. I’d always got along with this guy, why was he trying to kill me? I trotted up to him cautiously and he jumped out of his car to tell me someone had flown a plane into the twin towers. A mutual friend of ours, Jack, worked on a high floor of one of the buildings, but Darryl had already talked to Jack. He was ok. Turns out the father of yet another mutual friend of ours had passed away days ago. Jack was at his friend’s father’s funeral. He was stuck in traffic when the plane hit the floor he worked on.I pressed Darryl for details. Was it an accident? What kind of plane? One of those small private planes, right? Dan didn’t know, but yea, probably one of those small planes, probably suicide.I sprinted home, 2 miles in ten minutes. I never ran so fast in my life. The same thought repeated itself over and over in my head with each foot step: “Please don’t let it be an Arab. Please don’t let it be an Arab. Please don’t let it be an Arab.” Being a Palestinian in the US was an exercise in being invisible until the very worst version of your story gets the spotlight treatment every couple years. If some crazy Arab terrorist did this, it was gonna be a PR nightmare for me and my extended family. As I tore up the front steps, my dad threw open the front door; he was already waiting for me. “A plane hit the the twin towers.”“I know. Was it an accident?”“I don’t think so. It was a commercial airliner.”“What?” “I’ve been watching replays over and over. Come, it’s on right now.”We got in front of the tv. I could see shaky footage of a plane headed towards, and striking, one of the twin towers. In the background, the other tower already looked damaged. “That’s weird. That must be different footage.”We then realized we’d just watched the second plane strike happen in real time. After hours glued to the television – watching the confusion, the panic, the collapse, people fleeing and trapped – I made my way to my backyard. On a clear day, you can just make out the tips of the buildings of the Manhattan skyline. On that day, I could see massive plumes of smoke that wouldn’t dissipate for days. The older brother of one of my younger brother’s best friends didn’t come home that day. Neither did one of our neighbors. The husband of a coworker. My mother’s cousin, who worked in one of the smaller WTC buildings (not one of the towers) was down there but got out ok. My friend Jack, the one who was late to work because of a funeral, was one of two people at his company that wasn’t in the office that day. He ultimately developed a pretty bad drinking problem, and it took him a good ten years to get his shit together, but I understand he’s doing ok today. It’s hard to describe the before/after mentality of 9/11. But I’ll try. Before 9/11 it felt like… we’d won. We’d essentially defeated history. The Soviet Union was no more. The Bosnia shit happened, but that wasn’t a real war, not one Americans had to worry about. Things like racial equality, gay rights, etc… it felt like, in the broader popular culture anyway, those things would eventually get solved so why worry about it? It was as good as solved. Same with poverty – there was plenty of money to go around, and you didn’t really see poor people too much on movies or tv, so they didn’t exist, everyone must be more or less middle class. Americans lived in a perfect, happy little bubble. If you were a certain kind of person in 90s/immediate post-90s America (white/white passing, heteronormative, preferably male), it was very easy to have blinders on and just kind of live in your own little world. Everyone I knew assumed they’d be living their own version of Friends in a few years. A lot of folks convinced themselves the difference between Bush and Gore was like picking Coke or Pepsi, that’s how low the political stakes felt. Not sure what I’m going on about anymore. Ignorance is bliss, until it isn’t, I guess.
*I changed all the names here.
I know what you’re saying about the before times. In retrospect, from a blinkered North American perspective at any rate, the 90s seem like such an innocent time – American political trauma revolved around blowjobs, for instance, and car chases happened in slow motion. That so much attention could be lavished on things like this was evidence that larger problems had been dealt with; but what was really happening was the first stirrings of the cultural hideousness we see today.
For me I think it was a reflection of post-Cold War arrogance, we felt that nobody could touch us, and even after 9/11 everyone thought we could just take out Iraq and Afghanistan and install democracies just like we did in Japan and Germany. Another huge blow to the 90’s optimism was Columbine. I think in many ways that was worse, because it was “one of us” killing random people for no real reason. And it happened again and again.
People thought Iraq/Afghanistan would be over in months.
Mini-wars like the Gulf War and Grenada definitely also lulled people into complacency too. There was a big reason HW didn’t go all the way to Baghdad
Columbine was the first one to get that much attention, but I think school shootings were already becoming a thing before then. Our Dumb Century, which came out before Columbine, had the line “Educators Praised as U.S. Kids Lead World in Schoolyard Shooting Accuracy.” Also, there was that line from a Buffy episode made before Columbine about school shootings being “bordering on trendy.”
Yeah, I do remember a couple of others, but “only” a few people died in comparison. And they seemed like outliers or revenge-motivated rather than indiscriminate terrorism
I agree re: Columbine feeling like a Rubicon we crossed as a culture. School shootings felt like true freak occurrences, like a plane crash, which is why 9/11 feels like a similar before/after in terms of our culture transforming. If you told someone pre-Columbine that school shooting drills would become a normal thing in schools across America, folks would think it was some kind of sick dystopian joke.
School shootings became a fad in 1997 – before that there had been constant shootings in schools, but, as you say, usually only with a few victims, and the worst (like Stockton in 1989, Lindhurst in 1992) were often perpetrated by adults, or at least happened for a reason (I remember hearing as a child about the case where a 12-year-old killed a classmate with a shotgun because she wouldn’t go out with him). But in late 1997 and through 1998 the classic “student or pair of students tried to murder lots of people for no reason” school shooting suddenly became a thing [again – there was a previous wave in the 60s and 70s, but fortunately guns were less dangerous back then], and escalated in intensity. Most famously Pearl (10 shot, 3 of them killed), Heath High (8 shot, 3 dead), Westside (15 shot, 5 dead – the killers were two boys, one 13 and one 11), and then most famously Thurston (29 shot, 4 dead, not including killing his parents beforehand – 15-year-old shooter), which is the one that seemed to shock everyone enough to put a stop to it for a year, before Columbine in 1999. Although there were school shootings after Columbine now and then, there wasn’t really an equivalent spate of ‘classic’ school shootings until 2018-19.
Here in the UK, the big incident in my childhood was Dunblane (16 primary school children shot by an adult) – we had to write poems about it in primary school. We were aware of school shootings as something American kids did, along with the existence of ‘jocks’ and ‘mean girls’ and ‘prom’ – I remember we heard about Thurston (although I think I only remember it because the killer had an unusual name). But it never seemed particularly ‘real’ to us, because it was so bizarre – how would a teenager ever get a gun? How would they know how to use it? It was completely alien to us, so we didn’t take it seriously (I remember my friends and I discussing how you’d do it in our school, in a strategic sense, but only in the sense you might talk about a Quake level – it was too unfathomable to seem real). And of course once Dunblane happened, the government just banned guns, so even if anyone had wanted to imitate Columbine, they wouldn’t have been able to.
Yeah, I specifically remembered the 12 year old who got rejected being the first school shooting I noticed. I didn’t realize there were other wannabe-NBK type of shootings before Columbine. Virginia Tech might be more appropriate as the “game changer” with shootings, I’m not sure if the drills were really that prevalent until after that. It was more installing metal detectors (in poorer schools) IIRC with Columbine, we weren’t teaching kindergarteners to duck under chairs. Sandy Hook was another huge precedent, in that people realized that there is no rock bottom to this to make any real change become urgent.
Does the UK not have jocks, mean girls and proms?
When I was at school, we did have a Sixth Form Ball, but it was a relatively new thing at that point (my sister, a few years older, I don’t think had one). It certainly wasn’t yet fossilised into an institution as it seems to be in the US. [I think it is now, though – like Trick or Treating]Obviously there are sporty people, and girls who are less nice than others, but there wasn’t the sort of organised, stereotyped, clique-ised version there seems to be in america, and I’m not sure there is even now.
We also didn’t (don’t?) have some of the things that seem to support that system: the would-be mean girls don’t get to be prom/homecoming queen, or cheerleaders, and the would-be jocks don’t have the promise of an athletic scholarship to college. [i’m not saying athletic scholarships flat-out don’t happen here, but not to even remotely the extent that they do in the US.]
What an impactful memory. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be Palestinian during those days. I live in Canada, but our world was shaken too; I remember at the train station the morning after, people were openly talking about “fucking Arabs” and “terrorist rag heads.” I’ve never seen such open racism before or since.
Oh I have stories. I’ll share one more. My uncle is Syrian. Born in Syria, moved to the States as a young teen. Joined the Army as a radioman in the infantry. Did a tour in Vietnam in ‘69. Never talks about it but “he was in the shit” so to speak. Fast forward to a couple days after 9/11. He goes down to the summer condo he has in Wildwood, New Jersey. Sees all his neighbors have American flags up on their porches. Asks the security guard at the condo building “where is everyone getting these American flags? I’d love to put one out.” Guard – who has known my uncle for over a decade but does not know he’s Syrian – tells him “they’re selling them at the grocery store on the other side of town, but don’t look for them at the convenience store across the street. They don’t have them. The owners must be a bunch of Arabs.”
Brutal… my project manager at my job was a turban-wearing Sikh, and he said he feared for his life every time he left the building.
ohhhhh boy, the flags…forgot all about that. 9/11 was a Thursday, so we went out to dinner the next day as part of the “if you don’t act normal then the terrorists win!” bullshit, and EVERYONE was wearing their flags, which at the time I understood, but it still made me uneasy, because I knew it was phony patriotism (because I am a cynical bastard), and I also had a feeling W was NOT the guy to lead us out of this.
Ugh the flags. It started this whole thing where if you were a politician and weren’t wearing a flag pin on your lapel it meant you hated America. Wearing a flag pin on your lapel, or anywhere on your suit really, wasn’t really a thing before that. I think it was seen as kind of garish before 9/11, now it’s a requirement. Re: Bush, I didn’t have the burning hatred for him yet that I cultivated in the years following the 9/11 attack. It took the invasion of Iraq for me to see him as a fundamentally evil force. And as badly as he fucked shit up in the end, I will give him credit — in his speech immediately following the attacks, he was crystal clear that the enemies of America were not Arabs or Muslims, and that it would require unity to overcome the challenges that lie ahead. I realize his actual actions ultimately suggested otherwise, but he at least didn’t seek out to deliberately stoke and normalize hatred or division — that was just an inconvenient byproduct that his handlers (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc) simply didn’t care about. Contrast that now with the modern GQP, where “the cruelty is the point”, and it’s like night-and-day. And yes, I realize in this scenario I’m describing the more palatable of the two versions of the Republican party were led by literal war criminals. Of course in the confusion people were looking for any sort of sign of stability, the notion that there was someone in charge who was going to process this nightmare and fix it. Laughable to imagine Giuliani dined out for years as “America’s Mayor” based on his ability to walk and talk at the same time, as well as the luck that no one knew he’d sent firefighters running into the burning towers with broken radios and no way to get warning that they needed to get out, or the foresight that decades later his inherent fascist tendencies would put him at the forefront of an attempted coup. I believe 9/11 was a Tuesday btw.
you are correct, 9/11 was Tuesday…couldn’t remember if it was Tuesday or Thursday. Guess there were a few days there where no one wanted to venture out in case another attack happened before W started all the “we HAVE to return to normal or the terrorists win”. I do remember driving around where we ate dinner and it was so subdued for a Friday, as one would expect under the circumstances.
9/11/01 was a Tuesday.
It’s important to remember that aside from his boorish personality, if it hadn’t been for his response (or whatever you call it) to the pandemic, Trump still wouldn’t technically have been as bad as Bush, since he didn’t start an unnecessary war. Trump could have ridden the pandemic straight into a second term just as W. did 9/11, but as it turns out, the man can’t even fake empathy.
yes that is a depressing and frightening reality that if the pandemic had not struck, or if he had a molecule of self-awareness to say “you know, I know zip about viruses or epidemics so I’m going to step back and let the eggheads handle this,” he would have been re-elected. It’s a good reminder for everyone who says so defensively “this is not who we (the US) are.” Uh yes it is absolutely who we are as a country; some of us believe in science and the democracy and stuff like that, and the rest are a bunch of whooping baboons who want a guy in orange makeup who doesn’t care about them to lead them, and if we get complacent or start to feel superior, remember those baboons can get their shit in lockstep fast.as for who was worse, W or T***p, I’d still have to choose T***p because at least W seemed to care about the country and a segment of its population in his own warped stupid way. (NOT excusing or mitigating the thousands of people he killed by ginning up evidence to initiate a 20 year occupation.) T***p has only ever cared about T***p, and his incompetent response to the pandemic shows what happens when he has to choose between his interests and the country’s.
Oh, I agree, that’s why I said technically.
I remember a co-worker saying something about how it was time for Arabs to admit that “they’re only here to destroy,” and some other really charming stuff. I was sort of too shocked to respond with anything stronger than, “I’m sure that’s not entirely true” or something along those lines. I like to think that an older, more confident version of me would have told her to fuck right off with that shit, or would at least have taken it to Human Resources.
WOW- what a post.Mine’s not nearly as dramatic: we were in OC Maryland with my then 3 year old – the only thing we watched was Disney. The folks had a tradition of going to this one place for breakfast when in OC. We piled in and went to a normally crowded but now, strangely empty, eatery. We took a table and sat while nervous waitstaff hovered and shuffled about. Finally, we asked if things were OK and the waiter said that planes had hit the Pentagon. I went to the front of the place with the bar and TV and saw what was going on…unbelievable. We hauled ass back to the hotel where I sat with a twelve pack shitting my pants the rest of the day. I called my parents (still alive then) and watched in disbelief.Coda: we decided to try normalcy and went to the boardwalk because the kids were expecting it and I saw a more-or-less normal boardwalk night – I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. I had my walkman-type set on to hear what the hell was going on but no one else seemed to be really aware or to care. It was packed. Still don’t get it.
I get it. A lot of times these days the only way to live without crushing depression and constant existential dread is to decouple yourself from reality and ignore as much of the world as possible.Of course, this can be used not only to relieve stress for a bit, but can also go the other way into willful ignorance and hatred, but I digress.I was working retail at the time in a small golf shop while I was in college. That would have put me at 21 years old at the time, born in ‘80. I could definitely feel a shift in the world and my view of it from that day forward. We just sat there watching the tv all day. I don’t recall perfectly, but I don’t think a single person came into the shop the rest of the day. People always have that feeling of “loss of innocence” at some point in there lives, and that may have been mine.
I was on the subway under the towers just after the first plane hit though all we knew while the train was held was that there was a fire. A woman on the train had a job interview and was trying to figure out if she should get out and go. I tried to convince her not to get off the train and that if there was a fire in the Towers, the interview was cancelled. She left and to this day, I hope she’s told that story many times. I got out of the train at South Ferry just as the second plane hit (it was the train that was in the South Ferry Terminal when it got destroyed). I was heading to a meeting in Staten Island and argued about skipping it and walking back home or getting on the ferry. Luckily I chose the ferry.
I lived in Jersey (Exit 9 area) at the time, maybe 20 miles from Manhattan, and the image that will be forever seared in my brain is more or less what you describe. That afternoon I took a walk just to try to clear my head a little, and when I went up the hill a couple blocks from the house I saw the plume of smoke in the sky taking up the entire lower third of the horizon out toward the Atlantic. I was far enough away that it was totally quiet, of course—but just haunting.
Brown person here (Indian, but a commonly Muslim first name). I definitely changed behavior post 9/11. I was in college and it was suggested to use “Sam” on my resume as well as mention I’m a natural born citizen. My mom was worried about me and suggested I should also shave my facial hair. Clean-shaven, I’ve often be mistaken for Mexican, so that was deemed safer.
Certainly tens of thousands of people were more significantly impacted by 9/11 than me, but I just want to echo the “it felt weird (not in a good way) to be brown immediately after 9/11″
Working at a radio and record industry trade mag in South Jersey that day. Watched #2 hit on the tv after hearing about #1 on the radio. On the way to work heard about the Pentagon. I have never been so terrified in my life. We didn’t publish that week for the first and only time.
This was the most engaging thing I’ve read in a while. Thank you for sharing.
I wish they’d put a limit on these
thanks for sharing this. I remember 9/11 like it was yesterday too but I was just sitting in a lab, doing my thing, when my coworker said she thought a plane had hit the Twin Towers but when we went to CNN.com it was locked up and no one could access it, or any other news sites for that matter. Eventually the horror of it all overtook us and we spent the morning watching the events unfold in our lunch room. I’ll never forget someone moaning or wailing as the first tower fell; after that we were told to go home. (Ironically our CEO was traveling to the FDA that day to have a meeting that would have a big impact on the company’s future; for a while after the plane hit the Pentagon we couldn’t track him down but ultimately we did; the meeting was postponed and when they finally met, the FDA made a decision that led to the company being sold, and me losing my job the following year.) as with Putin, I wonder if UBL ever thought that minimally funded operation would have such a profound impact on the country as it did. Maybe we aren’t as hot shit as we think we are, huh?
Very well-written post, and that is the closest to my feeling about the ‘90s that I’ve read. I too always had the sense that history was ‘over’; the good guys more or less won, and even the thought of things reversing course seemed dystopian and if anything, more entertaining fiction. Hell, Radiohead of all folks had the line “I wish that something would happen.” It’s tough at times to communicate to younger generations just how completely in the clear of things that decade felt like, even to the point of complete boredom and aimlessness.
This documentary sounds very well done, but I don’t think I can watch it. My wife and I were living in Virginia at the time of the attack. I had passed through the Pentagon metro station minutes before the plane hit on my way to DC for a law school class, and she worked close enough to the Pentagon that the crash rattled her office windows and she could see the smoke. The day was fear and chaos, phone communications were completely down as was most transportation in the main part of the city-I had to walk miles into Virginia to get home. I saw many instances of people being kind to others that day-people giving water and helping others walking out of the city etc., but everyone was also really scared and shocked by the attack on our country.Compared to many others, any trauma I experienced on that day and in the weeks that followed was general and marginal. I was scared, and sad, and worried about my wife who I could not contact during the hours long trek home. But in the end I found my way and our family was reunited to face it all together-everyone I cared for was safe, which was not true for a lot of our fellow Americans that day. The days that followed-seeing the plane wreckage at the Pentagon and going about our business in a recently attacked city were grim, but again, I was very fortunate to have my life intact.Still: To this day every time I consider 9/11 there is an ache in my belly. I am one of the ones who avoids consuming media related to that event since I left Virginia, and I don’t think I will change that policy now.
I’ve seen and heard more than enough footage I think. The worst of it is some of the phone calls as the towers are falling. And a few shots of the people post-jump. I think it makes me even more mad having seen that and having to talk to people who had zero connections whatsoever to the attacks scream the loudest about war and killing brown people from red states, chastising people who are from the affected areas for not agreeing, perhaps because we’ve seen the consequences of that mindset.
Yeah, I remember on the day of having to turn off the TV for a moment when they started showing a clip of someone jumping. That was a bridge too far for me. I think I’m interested in this documentary, but I don’t know.
I happened to have my TV on CNN and caught the whole thing from “must be a small plane” to the utter shock of the news anchors when the second plane hit. It was such a beautiful sunny day which made it seem so much worse. That night instead of choir practice our church stayed open for anyone who wanted to come around to pray. Sadly, I lost what little faith I had. My husband had passed away earlier that year and I was thankful that he didn’t live to see it because he loved Americans. Every September we went to Cape Cod and I had been debating whether or not to go on my own. After 9/11 the choice was made for me. For over a year I consumed everything I could find about it, now I won’t watch this as good as it may be.
I mostly avoid social media on 9/11. Every.single.year there are “where I was” stories by people who have ever been to NY, they don’t know anyone directly involved and they vote for people who vote against helping 1st responders and use words like “coastal elites”. Now I don’t think you had to be in NY to be traumatized; I was living in Denver and it was confusing and terrifying, not knowing if other cities would be hit, but I just can’t with the Most Patriotic circlejerk that happens every year. So much of it feels like performative flag waving.
Yeah, same. I work in finance and at the time was on an open desk in a high rise building in Atlanta. We dealt with NYC people daily and a bunch of my colleagues were from there, and were frantically trying to call friends (to no avail) who worked in the towers while 20 TVs mounted around our floor put the images everywhere you looked.
I remember all of this too well, and feel like watching this would just be misery porn. I can see it potentially being educational for someone younger who doesn’t get why so many people get queasy just thinking about this day.
I absolutely get the reaction of “I’ve seen enough of the footage/I remember seeing it on TV/I don’t want to see this” from some, but I think it’s also a stark reminder that 20 years out – there are generations of adults that don’t remember and weren’t alive. Sure, they’ve seen footage on the news, but as much as it can be hard to watch, capturing the actual panic and the shock is important as an historical document.About 10 years ago, I was on a plane with a mother and her son who was maybe 8. I remember him asking in the middle of the flight what 9/11 was. Did this nervous flyer need to hear that recounted while on a plane? No, she didn’t. But it was also the first time I remember going “Oh, right, not everyone on the planet lived through 9/11.”
It seems like some don’t realize how long it has been since this event. It’s not ancient history, but it is history. Doing this show today would be like doing a documentary on the Iran Hostage Crisis in 2001.
I also think about the show the Wonder Years, about the distant past of the 60’s and Vietnam, and how only 20 years had passed and today the first episode would be about 9/11
I’m definitely hoping Pen15 goes there
I don’t think that’s an appropriate place for a Pen15 to go at all.
I’ve been to the September 11 Museum in New York; it was kind of a horrific privilege, in that the place is as moving and tasteful and absolutely devastating as you could expect, and I’m grateful to have seen it and never want to go again. But my most vivid memory of the museum itself is of a section where footage of the first crash plays on a loop. There were scores of visitors, many of them teens who hadn’t lived through it, who would pause in front of that film. The plane would hit, the fireball burst, and the kids would physically recoil, jump back in genuine shock. Then that group would move on, and new visitors would assemble in front of that tape, and react the same way. Over and over. I stood in front of that watching other people, for a long time. I can’t say I’d wish the experience on anyone, of course, but the true shock of it did seem to reach even those who hadn’t previously understood.
the one that always gets me is the clip from I believe Fahrenheit 9/11 showing the plane hitting the tower from the ground perspective. It still makes me ill thinking of it.
The college kids I work with either don’t remember or weren’t born yet. That’s really sobering for me. I’m also sad they have no idea what things were like beforehand, but many of them seem pretty aware how much they’ve been screwed and are not complacent about anything, which is good.Also-does the museum have a gift shop, and is it…tasteful?
Yeah, I graduated college into a recession in ‘92, which seemed gloomy at the time…but I can only pity the Kids Today and hope they’ll at least feed me occasionally at the old retirement castle.
And there is a gift shop. I can’t say I partook, as my actual living memories are plentiful and can’t be represented in a tchotchke. I do remember there being some controversy when they opened, about ghastly items like a map-of-the-US cheese plate (wtf) marking the four crash sites. I think it’s more NYFD mugs and patches, maybe some history books now. I know that it’s all to fund the museum and their educational programs, and I’ve just donated money straight to those efforts, because yikes.
I did just now take a look, and they are hawking some specific 20th-anniversary stuff. Capitalism is what it is, I suppose.
I remember just how fast your average mall had low-quality USA stuff, probably leftovers from July 4th be for sale, along with jingoistic things related more to 9/11, and “kill em all” shirts with Osama on it. The cheese plate- wow. I’d expect that at a tacky shop down south but not at the actual WTC. At least there wasn’t any WTC silver coins like those infomercials. History books are appropriate, and things that help the museum/families. I think my all time favorite is the Bert is Evil pictures making it to the Middle East. People had pictures of Osama with Bert in the background.
My niblings were 1, 3, and 10 when this happened, so probably only the oldest has any memories from it and those are probably fuzzy. The only part that’s hard for me to watch is anyone jumping out of the building. I mean, the rest of it is devestating, but it doesn’t have the same effect on me.
A few years ago, my family came along on a work road trip to DC (we’re in the Midwest). My husband and I took a 30m detour to the Flight 93 Museum in Penn. Our kids, both born after 2001, knew about 9/11 but didn’t GET IT, you know? But as they looked out on the path of the plane and saw all the faces and names of the people who died there, they finally understood the gravity of the day’s events.
A few weeks before 9/11 there was an article in the Times about small, private planes that had to fly low along the Hudson and would be in radio contact with each other because they couldn’t always be tracked by the air traffic controllers (I don’t remember the specifics so forgive me for any inaccuracies on the description). One guy interviewed mentioned that there always was some idiot who thought it would be a good idea to buzz the World Trade Center. My initial thought was that it was one of those idiots.
A classmate walked into our second period Spanish session saying that he’d gotten to school late that morning, and as he was pulling into the parking lot he’d heard something about a plane hitting a building in New York on the radio. I insisted that it must have been a private plane because “A jet would’ve sheared the top of the building off.”
Yeah, never underestimate the strength of large steel I-beams in comparison to relatively thin aluminum and fiberglass composites, even at speed.
About five years later MLB pitcher Cory Lidle lost control of his plane and crashed it into an apartment building along that corridor. Doesn’t take much to push a small plane around.
Yes. I remember that one. Upper East Side not far from Gracie Mansion.
It was never determined whether he or his flying instructor was at the helm but your point stands.
I remember thinking “The fucking Seppoes are gonna drag us into something stupid, aren’t they?”And I was right.
I remember thinking something bad was going to happen next. It was like the entire world, or at least the U.S., got a cancer call from the doctor. Sinking feeling, uncertainty, denial, all that.
This was also when you had anthrax being mailed to the Capital, literally a week later. Buildings were erecting vehicle barriers out front…the entire mood was that anything, anywhere could be next.
People don’t remember it as much as 9/11 but I’ve always thought the anthrax was what really cemented the panic. 9/11 was of course awful and traumatic but the attacks themselves were over in a matter of hours. The anthrax went on for weeks and was just the stuff of nightmares. Every day or two a new letter, in locations all over the country. Crazy times.
Yep I remember John Howard, who happened to be in the US at the time, using to recast himself as a “strong” leader and setting himself up for another six years in power.He was such an absolute arsehole.
He really was the worst PM. Keating, as usual, said it best of the little coconut: “He’s a suburban white picket fence racist.” He was indeed a weak little man; if he hadn’t gone into politics, he’d have just been that bloke who does conveyancing out of his home office in Dulwich Hill. It’s a fucking shame most progressives outside AU know him simply as “the guy who introduced the sane gun laws” (which I think went a tad too far, but were better than what we had), and that’s it. But lemme see. Children Overboard™. “WE WILL DECIDE WHO COMES TO THIS COUNTRY AND THE MANNER IN WHICH THEY COME.”Howard’s Battlers – for the Americans, this was the Australian equivalent of the Southern Strategy. Howard was the father of the divisive politics we have today – compare that to Hawkie, a man who, among other things, got hippies and farmers working together. And like fuck could Howard go shot-for-shot with Frank Sinatra…Stealing racist policies from a fucking fish-flogging ranga. Moving the capital to Sydney. OK, this is sarcasm, but only mildly so.Sell off of Telstra – this one hurts. My old man was a Telstra worker for 35 years – back when it was run for the whole country, not just Sydney and Melbourne. Fun fact: Telecom Australia was working on an all-fibre network in 1994. Here’s the white paper presented to IEEE in 1994: http://www.telepower.com.au/INT94b.PDF – as soon as Howard got in, he ordered Telecom put all its energy into being pimped for sale.Afghanistan.Iraq.Sell-off of CSL – man, couldn’t that have come in handy now, eh? Eh? At least Dave Sharma’s profiting, I guess.Weakening of cross-media and foreign media ownership laws (welcome back, Uncle Rupert, you shitcunt). Flogging off our gold reserves for cheap just so he could post a surplus in 1997 for $306US/oz – equivalent to $502US/oz today. The price of gold right now is about $1800US/oz.The GST, which is a thoroughly regressive tax. Also, when he was in Washington like you said that’s when he signed us up for the F-35 clusterfuck after simply being bought lunch by some Lockheed Martin bribemasters, bypassing the the tender process for the next-gen fighter that was announced a year prior – Dassault had even set up an office in Australia and was fucking ropeable when they saw that the next jet had been selected without tender.
Fuck yes on all of those.Plus throw in:Bronwyn Bishop and the turpentine baths a those disgraceful Commonwealth-run nursing homes.WorkchoicesMore or less everything he did in his final term.And yet all was forgiven and he got deified within three years of leaving office.Fuckhead Tony Abbott propagating Howard Nostalgia was horrifying and pitching his opposition government as a return to the Howard era was horrifying.It’s absolutely fucked he kept lucking his way into election victories, either through timing and circumstance (the 2001 election), or a totally disastrous Labor leader (Latham) as well as using some of the worst politiking ever (All you’ve noted above).I know it’s unlikely but I’d love to see Rudd/Gillard get some historical reassessment given that so many of their achievements were basically lost or forgotten amid their civil war.
I accidentally blocked his toilet and elbowed him in the back once.
Seppo? Had to look that one up, a bit too convoluted if you ask this fat fuck Yank. (also to Yanks, Yanks are old-guard Northeasterners generally, like either weird rural New Englanders or country club assholes)
Eh, we know you guys won the Civil War. “Petrols”, as in “Petrol tanks”, as in “Yanks” is another, slightly more archaic version.
Strange, eh, that Australia picked up so much Cockney rhyming slang…
Imagine if today’s communications tech had been available to relay the attack on Pearl Harbor in real time. I hope at least one episode is just repeated segments of Buffoon George unable to think of what to do in a crisis, unable to think of a way to excuse himself from 6 year olds. The peak Republican.
Of all his stupidity that one didn’t bother me too much, what exactly could he do in that moment, panic in front of a bunch of kids? He certainly wasn’t qualified to start barking military orders at our various agencies.
How about “I’m sorry, I have to go. Something very important has come up that I must see to.” Instead he sat like a stunned fish, practically open-mouth drooling.
Perhaps, but he’d probably get in the way. Better off leaving everything to Cheney. He learned all the wrong lessons from Reagan on giving your team creative freedom to cause scandals and international incidents
Get in the way of preparing HIS OWN SPEECH TO THE AMERICANS? Get in the way of that?I’m sure he wasn’t going to put on a hard hat and pick up a shovel. Doing his job as the President of the USA is a minimum.
That photo that came out a few years ago of Cheney in his office on the morning of the 11th, feet up on his desk, watching the towers burn on TV: That did not strike me as the image of a man particularly concerned about what he was seeing…or even surprised.
He saw tanks and bombs and $$$, no doubt
Weird take
The images of desperate individuals leaping from the towers? That’s in this documentary.
This is, somehow, surprising to me. I recall video of jumpers and those telephoto shots of people hanging out the windows of floors above the impact vividly from the initial coverage on the morning of the 11th and subsequent broadcasts throughout the day, but it felt like they had all been memory-holed by the end of that week. The potent combination of sensitivity towards the families and viewer outrage had seemed to push those images out of circulation and our collective consciousness almost immediately (Outside of The Falling Man, which is too striking an image to let go.)
One of the best essays I’ve read on 9/11 is the Esquire piece on the Falling Man, which also details what you describe as the images quickly vanishing from the coverage. Just a devastating story.
Documentary was great too, and extremely sad seeing how families dealt with the possibility their loved one was the person who jumped. One family was very Catholic and mostly were in utter denial their father/husband would commit suicide and “leave them” like that. I wanted to be really mad but I just felt bad for them. And Catholic clerics made it clear that it technically wouldn’t be a suicide, as they were forced out by the heat/smoke.
I wrote above, before I saw your post, that there is a documentary that shows footage of the French guy tightrope walking between the twin towers, really plays up how unbelievable tall they were, and then segues instantly into footage of the 9/11 jumpers, absolutely sealing the deal on the horror they must have felt to jump from that height.I wish I’d never seen the doc, I can’t shake it.
I cautiously…recommend? that word isn’t really right…the book “Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs,” which grew out of a storefront exhibit in Manhattan in the days after 9/11, where people just hung up physical prints of their photos, professional or random snapshots, of the towers and the city before, during, and after. Some are beautiful, some are deeply moving, and some are abject horror. I know there’s one of jumpers in there, though I don’t think it’s The Falling Man. There’s another aftermath image in there that to me is worse, but searing and unforgettable. (Remains. I will leave it at that.)
I have seen some of the aftermath ones, and yeah. There’s one before the towers fell that’s far away but if it’s what I think it is (and the YouTube comments mostly agree for once) it’s unforgettable and traumatizing. Most of the images haven’t been of actual gore but those few were horrific enough.
I’m glad this chat hasn’t yet devolved into a debate over whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. I think Alex Jones ruined that discourse, for better or worse.
I feel like the 9/11 truthers have moved on to even crazier shit.
You must not have read this article from a couple weeks ago.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/twenty-years-gone-911-bobby-mcilvaine/619490/
I’m old enough to remember when the truthers were mostly on the left. Anti-vaxxers too.
Yeah, Alex Jones was once pretty popular on the left for that very reason.
The more limited scope of this docuseries is a good way to focus on the immediate impact of what happened in NYC. And, it is important the stories continue to be told. But, just like many of other commenters, I won’t be watching it. While I didn’t directly know anyone who worked in the Towers or were on any of the planes, 9/11 occurred during a particularly bad time for me otherwise—a parent in an eventually fatal coma and being in a relationship that shifted from fine to physically dangerous. Something has also changed for me in the last decade or so. Seeing actual events occur used to be what was traumatic…now what I find most distressing is that very specific mix of shock and incredulity on the faces of witnesses, survivors and victims as they react to particularly horrific events.
The intent is to recreate the confusion and terror of the day, and the methods are highly effective.That doesn’t sound like a ride I want to go on.
Makes me wonder when exactly there’ll be a 9/11 ride at a park somewhere. It’s happened for Pompeii. Maybe Titanic
just like the old saying, history + tragedy = amusement park ride
just like the old saying, history + tragedy = amusement park ride
Obligatory oldster “I was there…” post, beware…..A note on the weather that day. That summer was hot as balls and dry. I was a landscape contractor at JFK airport at the time. My last pre-9/11 comment was at the coffee truck at 147th and Cargo Plaza Rd. “What a beautiful morning!” And it was, cool and dry. The first fall-like day of 2001. First sip of regular coffee then somebody yelled to turn on the radio.Then it went to shit and fast…Saw the second impact while standing on my truck at Terminal 4 arrivals. Saw the first tower fall when I was stuck on the Whitestone bridge.
Not as much footage exists of the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon, but security-cam images of the initial hit are shown at the start of episode three. I suspect, after whatever declassification timeline it ends up being, we’ll realize there was plenty of non-public footage of the Pentagon hit. I know security cameras weren’t as ubiquitous 20 years ago, but there has to be plenty of material they don’t want to declassify because it would reveal structure/security details of the Pentagon itself.
So random kid logic – Growing up outside of the US, seeing the way the Pentagon was portrayed in movies and TV shows in the 80s and 90s, my friends and I were of the hilariously mistaken belief that the Pentagon was hidden away in a secret location.It was only later that we discovered that it’s one of the biggest buildings in the world and absolutely everyone knows where it is.
That’s the thing, we were always told “It’s the most impenetrable building in DC because of its shape and they have missiles pointing outwards from every location” when I was a kid, so I just assumed, “Oh, that makes perfect sense.” Then when a plane was able to fly down into it, I remembered thinking “well, not so secure after all.”
National Airport is right across the Potomac and shooting down an airliner just means that tons of wreckage still slam into the building unlike the same tons of not-wreckage. Andrews Air Force Base is close enough to deal with any foreign planes, but it’s a real puzzle to handle the shoot-down of an American commercial jet filled with passengers. There are few places to intentionally down a plane of that size in DC without significant and even larger loss of life than at the Pentagon.
Of all conspiracies out there the idea that they covered up shooting down 93 seems the most plausible, because they had to if the plane wasn’t rushed by the passengers. But they also were pretty open about intending on doing so if that meant saving the Capitol Building. The other likely coverup would be any connections to the Saudi government. We needed that oil!I subscribe to the South Park theory that the 9/11 Truth movement is itself a government conspiracy to make them look competent.
I kind of thought that too until I went to DC months before 9/11. I knew it was in the area but thought it was at least a bit secluded and remote like Camp David. But no, there’s a major highway and a mall right near it.
to say “Not as much footage exists of attack on the Pentagon” is a wild burying of the lede on that topic. ONE piece of postage-stamp resolution footage exists. that was always weird
It is but it isn’t, much fewer people around the building than NYC, and even then we only have 3 videos of the plane hitting the first tower, and zero for 93.
Utterly ridiculous. The impact was to the outer wall of the Pentagon that anyone and their brother can see from the parking lot of the mall next door. And there was DEFINITELY at least one gas station with a camera facing that way, but all the footage was seized and declared “off limits to peons.”
I cut the cord and I don’t know if Sling has natgeo, but I’m not sure if I’d watch even if I knew I had it. There’s too much sadness. I mean, the overall sadness of the world before and after September 11th. It breaks my heart to think about it too long. I suspect this may be the case for anybody who was a fully-fledged adult on that day. I (and if I may, we) existed in that before world. We took trains and planes and loved and cried and trusted that the systems in place would work (until they didn’t). There wasn’t this background drone of the past 20 years of our volunteer troops overseas fighting and dying, and the overall knowledge that we feel less safe now than 20 years ago on this day. But were we ever really that safe? I guess we weren’t. If it weren’t September 11th, it would have been something else. I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ll stop now.
There’s too much sadness
I hear you, between this and the upcoming American Crime Story about Clinton / Lewinsky it’s shaping up to be a fall of Things I Don’t Want to Experience Again. (Albeit for very, very different reasons.)
Yeah, the attacks were escalating already with Nairobi and the USS Cole. That’s why I can’t buy the motives conspiracy theorists have that we needed an excuse to go to Iraq. We were going to Iraq no matter what, and if they were to make a false flag attack I don’t think they’d have nearly all the hijackers be natives of our best friend Saudi Arabia.
I knew after we went into Afghanistan that we’d be going to Iraq next. It was clearly an “unfinished business” situation from 1991. I was not shocked in the least. George HW Bush was criticized by some for not toppling Saddam (whether we were there for “the right reasons” — in Bachelor parlance — is a whole other discussion), and look what happened after GWB took him out. It just solved everything…
Yeah even under Clinton it was heading in that direction. At least Gore opposed it, but I have little faith he would’ve done a whole lot different, though he understood the Al Qaeda risk far more than Bush
I figure if Gore won, we still would have gone into Afghanistan to get the bad guys. The big What If…? is would we have stayed for the next 20 years, and the whole Iraq thing. Would the generals and the Military Industrial Complex have been able to pressure Gore and convince him that the graveyard of empires should be a nation building project, or that Iraq totally has WMDs, and Saddam is still peeved about 1991 and then who knows what might happen next!
Yeah that’s what I wonder, if the hawks in Washington would’ve overruled him on that somehow. I think Clinton would’ve been swayed if he magically had a third term, but Gore seemed pretty adamant against it.
I think you have more faith in the counterfactual Gore than I do. I don’t mean this as an indictment of Gore, but of the other powers bearing down on him. Ahh, the pointless discussions about what might have been!
Gore would not have ordered a war. He would have used special forces to go after bin Laden and not attacked Iraq – a target of opportunity the Bush family did as a favor for the Saudis.
There was a bunch of back and forth with Iraq well before 9/11 under Clinton, so that’s what makes me wonder if he would’ve done something. Maybe more of the no fly zones and whatnot. Then the hawks would’ve pushed hard for whoever runs against him in ‘04
I keep coming back to this thread, and maybe it’s because this is an outlet to process the trauma, whether we can bear to watch the documentary coverage or not. I certainly won’t forget, but I can understand the need for the historical record, I guess, to impress it upon subsequent generations, and to trace the frequently miserable path of the last 20 years, alas.
I do thank you all, good AV Club people, for indulging this conversation.
no thanks
If you really want to know what that day felt like watch this:This was filmed looking over ground zero as the sun set.
Generational disasters seem to be the norm any more. I was 10 when my entire school saw the Challenger blow up after launch in 1986. I was in downtown Pittsburgh on 9/11 when we had to evacuate the entire city. I got back to my old roommate’s place just in time to see the south tower fall in real time. 2003 my upstairs neighbor comes down to tell me to turn on the TV. USS Columbia is breaking up in real time. We just watched the TV for a solid hour, and didn’t say a damn thing the entire time. It was heartbreaking. And then we watched Papillon, which at least brought our hopes up a bit.I get why we need and want to document these events. I just have no interest in reliving it again. I was still buying the NYT every Sunday a year later, and the photo on the cover the the mag that 9/11 issue still hurts.
We’ve been at war in the Middle East so long 9/11 was more of a normal wartime attack then a terrorist attack.
1) What happened the day BEFORE 9/11 was Rumsfeld declaring that the Pentagon couldn’t account for a trillion dollars. Oh, and Bush was “clearing some brush” at his fake ranch.2) The public has ever seen film of the impact at the Pentagon. Curious what NatGeo is supposedly going to “show.”3) I doubt NatGeo is going to show Christine Todd Whitman declare the air “safe” around Ground Zero, thus condemning thousands of first responders to a miserable death because it was a toxic soup of chemicals. Many of them would later be denied any kind of compensation for their injuries.4) I guess now we get to see New York go from a city attacked by terrorists to a city that terrorizes its own population in the name of fighting a virus.5) Don’t forget, kids, not a SINGLE PERSON was ever fired, demoted, or reprimanded for letting 9/11 happen. I’m guessing THAT won’t be shown in this propaganda doc 🙂
New York is terrorizing kids? You’ve come to the wrong place if you think anyone here is going to agree with that dumbassery. Go back to your fantasy land with all the others who are fine with people, including kids, dying so they don’t have to be mildly inconvenienced.
go extremely fuck yourself.
for the hundredth time–we’re still in a pandemic that has lasted over a year needlessly due to rampant stupidity and shows no signs of abating; where is my mindless funny entertainment, my Joe Exotic sequel? I am so NOT in the frame of mind to relive one of the most memorably awful days of my life.
I was at law school at Northwestern in Chicago, right downtown on the lake, and the morning of the attacks we were having on-campus interviews for summer jobs, attorneys from around the country coming to sit for 8-10 interviews each in a day. Given the logistics of getting everyone there, Northwestern didn’t cancel the interviews.My first interview was with a lawyer from New York, who quite literally spent our entire 30 minute time on the phone frantically calling friends and family to see if they were still alive. He was trying to get to me—he’d say, “I’m sorry, just one more and we’ll get to the interview”—but never did, and I left after 30 minutes almost as drained as him.In the hall I saw a sorta-friend with whom I always joked. Being emotionally immature and more than a little dazed by my “interview,” I jokingly said, “Dang Tim, why’d you have to fly that plane into a building this morning?!” and Tim said “We have friends who work at the top of that building!!!”And then I went home feeling like an absolute piece of shit and smoked weed and played GTA for 20 hours.
The image burned into my mind is of the people willingly jumping from the towers to their deaths. I will never forget that.I was 9 when the towers fell, getting ready for school, that morning will stay with me forever.
Flags.After this, fucking flags sprung up like crabgrass. And they’re still there. If you were too young to remember 9/11 you don’t remember what it was like to not see flags.
I know the context is the day when “dark foreshadowing of what’s to come” is mentioned, but right now I can’t help but think of the wars that followed, the politics that led there—and the politics that came before. For a six part series, does it give time to that?It’s a bit sharper because of, well, current events, but also I just read a review of “The Outsider” about the making of the 9/11 Museum that hints at the limits of our focus and thinking.My own experience about recalling and any commemoration is that I’ve avoided it. It was my first week working in NYC, and my dad—alive and well, thankfully—was in the north tower and it took—I don’t know how long, it’s still a shock—a day at least before we heard from him. I’ve visited the museum once and the exhibits seemed fine, though I left during the historical overview immersive kind of experience because, well, it brought back too much. I was visiting because family from outside the country wanted to see it. And there in a place meant to enshrine and educate—where a huge chunk of audience were foreign—there was no signage or attempt to communicate with them. It was important then, and it’s important now, that at least some of the time spent remembering goes beyond that it happened, but how and why, and what we do with that understanding.
Your sentence “during some video taken of Pfeifer and his firefighters out on the street assessing a gas leak” references the film “9/11″ which aired without commercials on CBS in 2002. Jules and Gédéon Naudet were the French filmmakers who shot that footage. The video camera used to capture the first plane’s crash is on display in the American Museum of American History.
(Kinja mangled my formatting!)
I experienced it firsthand. I climbed the ladder of the water tower on top of our building and saw the north tower burning about two miles away, with that gaping hole in it. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. It truly didn’t seem real, like I was looking at a tarp or something hanging on the side of the building. Then I went back into my apartment – my wife was down by the towers for jury duty that morning, and eventually made it home safely – and literally screamed when I saw the first tower come down on TV. Something fundamental changed inside of me from that moment onward. I know I’m not the only one. But it put a crack in me that will never really heal. I know it’s a word that shouldn’t be bandied about, but I felt like the entire population of this city was raped that day. An unspoken sense of security vanished in an instant. Jesus, what a fucking day it was. I don’t think there was a day that went by when I didn’t stop and really think about it for at least eighteen months afterward, and people would start talking about it at the drop the drop of a hat. It became a daily part of your existence, rehashing where you were and what you did when it happened. It was absolutely hellish, and you knew everyone around you experienced the same hell. The PTSD was very real. You carried your mourning with you, and it was heavy.
I watched the series and thought it was great. I think the man in the first episode who was caring for the woman who had been burned got me the most. It’s incredible how one person could seemingly personify both the best we saw in that day and the heartbreaking tragedy of it too. I thought the story of the paramedic in the last episode was also pretty great.The only thing I would have changed is to have given more attention to the Pentagon and United 93. United 93 in particular is such an incredible story, I would have liked to hear from more family members.
Binged the whole thing yesterday. I’ve watched a lot of 9/11 docs, but this still had footage I’ve never seen before. And the first-hand stories are incredible. I must have cried every single episode. The separated brothers, the Lawyer who got to dance at his daughter’s wedding, the disgraced paramedic who had no intention of saving anyone…Perseverance of the human spirit and all that.
I am of two minds. I think sometimes it is therapeutic to relive trauma and feel those emotions and let the flood come in. It shows that one has not become complacent or numb to it. However, forcing yourself to relive that awful day proves that it is still just as raw and present, even 20 years later.
I loved it. I mean, it’s called “One Day in America” so I wouldn’t expect much about foreshadowing or the aftermath. And I’m glad they left the politics out and just focused on the humanity. Another trick they do, is they hold back reveals. Manipulative, maybe, but its effective in making us feel how some of those interviewees were feeling when they thought they lost someone. For documentary storytelling, it’s kind of brilliant? As tragic as the events play out, they do well to highlight heroes, heroes, heroes. The best moments are the uplifting ones, made all the more powerful by the emphasis on the horror.
One survivor recounts that it was so hot, “my contact lenses melted onto my eyeballs.”
Goodnight everybody.