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.
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 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 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 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?
> 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'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.
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 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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadD-day Radio broadcasts in real time.
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.
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.
It's pretty dark out there in popular discourse right 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.
The events of that day were (coincidentally) the perfect motivation for the campaigns.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game
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.
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.
But I think after that, we let the military continue running the show there for way too long and never took the diplomatic mission seriously enough.
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.
War is strategic. But soldiers won't kill for strategic reasons. They will fight when given an ethical basis. The objective truth never provides this.
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're arguing that two wrongs make a right and in such argument the stronger party will win.
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).
(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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Best I can do right now is the Nanog mail list that day/week... https://archive.nanog.org/mailinglist/mailarchives/old_archi...
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.
Still hard to believe it's now so long ago.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://911.wikileaks.org/files/messages_2001_09_11-08_45_20...
Unless it was a DST change? But the 2007 change only happened for the start in March.
The classic Macintosh desktop is also very well done. Does anyone know the source code for the desktop used?
I found the projects in the "About" open source notices section of the desktop. It uses:
- https://github.com/robbiebyrd/platinum
- https://github.com/npjg/classic.css- https://github.com/ticky/classic-scrollbars
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
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.
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.
What's it got to do with other people's reactions?
He's expressing an interpretation, not a feeling.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla
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.
This is the greatest article written for an actual 9/11 hero.
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]
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqCjsbFgQNH7awCj8Q-PJa9Kb...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070827041945/http://archives.c...
[3] https://www.911memorial.org/learn/resources/oral-histories
[4] https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/zpxyv/i_submit_this_e...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Ground
https://vimeo.com/441396612
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YLm3pkAiJQ
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.
So shocking and heartbreaking...
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.
But your point is still valid!
Thus the MM wave machines where they can see your privates.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna38561251 is a good example.
The TSA is a bad idea done badly.
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.
Tom Hanks narrates the epic story of the 9/11 boatlift that evacuated half a million people from the stricken piers and seawalls of Lower Manhattan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18lsxFcDrjo
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5tbah19qo8 [1] https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/